No one ever got rich betting on the demise of Hugo Chvez. As a leftist Venezuelan paratrooper officer, he led a failed coup in 1992, but he was let out of prison just two years later and started campaigning for the presidency, which he won in 1998. In 2002 Chvez himself was the target of a coup; it threw him out of power for a few days, but he survived it. Ditto a 2004 recall referendum. He ...

Keith Richards has been the subject of many lurid rumors; most of them turn out to be understatements. But a few days ago the website Worst Previews ran the oddest bit of gossip: that the Disney Company was considering axing the Rolling Stones guitarist from playing Captain Teague in the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film — because Richards, in his new autobiography Life, reveals that he has used drugs. He what? Somebody call the cops and arrest this man! ...

Kevin Clash is an Emmy-award-winning performer and producer with dozens of TV and film credits to his name, but he's far better known as a furry red monster. Clash is the puppeteer and the voice behind Elmo, one of the most popular characters on the seminal children's television show Sesame Street, which this week marks its 40th anniversary with a series of special episodes and a two-disc DVD set, Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days. Clash ...

Anyone hoping to see Pakistan's civilian government hold the country's powerful military establishment to account over Osama bin-Laden will have been disappointed by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's speech Monday. Eight days after the raid that killed bin-Laden in Abbottabad, Gilani addressed his people for the first time. Speaking in parliament, he hailed bin-Laden's demise as "justice done," but fiercely defended the Pakistan Army and its premier intelligence agency, the ISI, and warned Washington against any further ...

After seven days of fighting, the German High Command was convinced its armies had defeated Russia's. The German High Command has, to most of the world's misfortune, not yet been wrong. The first seven days were days of mystery. Citizens of the outside world could only ponder the oddities of totalitarian propaganda; look at German pictures of happy byplay in captured villages; muse on Russian geography—Dvinsk here, Pinsk there, Minsk in between; and take their pick between diametric optimism. "A ...

Stocky, cheerful W. O. Hodges, 45, was sheriff of Denton County , Texas for only four years, but he died last week a famous man. Before taking office, Hodges was just an ordinary sort of fellow; he grew up in a little cow town named Aubrey, spent a year at Texas Christian University, got a Depression job as a cop in the county seat, went to war as a coast guardsman, came home and started running for sheriff. He made it the second time out.Seven days ...

It took just a couple of days for Admiral Thad Allen to realize how disastrous the well blowout at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig would prove to be. On April 20 last year, the well being drilled by the BP-owned rig suddenly kicked back, spurting oil and gas up the drilling pipe and setting the Deepwater Horizon aflame in the Gulf of Mexico. Crew ran for the lifeboats and even leaped into the fiery waters of the ...

Nuclear-powered cars! airplanes! Fridges and freezers! In the heady days of the early 1950s — at the dawn of the civilian nuclear power age and President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program — nuclear optimists imagined a world powered by tiny nuclear reactors. Today, in an era of climate change and energy insecurity, the nuclear industry is dusting off some of those old dreams. That includes the nuclear battery. Designed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory spin-off Hyperion Power Generation ...

For eight days the agony imposed on one of the nation's wealthiest families was intense. The Edgar M. Bronfmans of New York, whose Seagram liquor fortune and other assets exceed $1 billion, feared that 21-year-old Samuel Bronfman II was buried in a box with a meager ten-day supply of air and water steadily running out. He had been kidnaped, and the kidnapers had demanded a ransom of $4.6 million, the highest ever asked in the U.S. Frantically the family tried ...

Kevin Clash is an Emmy-award-winning performer and producer with dozens of TV and film credits to his name, but he's far better known as a furry red monster. Clash is the puppeteer and the voice behind Elmo, one of the most popular characters on the seminal children's television show Sesame Street, which this week marks its 40th anniversary with a series of special episodes and a two-disc DVD set, Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days. Clash spoke to ...