Monte' Ray Talbert was slumped over his car's steering wheel with two bullet wounds in his head when police pulled up to Airport Liquors in Inglewood, California on the night of Sunday, May 15. A member of the hip-hop group Cali Swag District, known for its platinum-selling song "Teach Me How to Dougie," Talbert had stopped there on his way to a nearby recording studio when a gunman pulled up next to him and fired. Six weeks ...

In the province of Szechwan in China lived until last week Li Ching-yun. In China where Age means something he was a great man. By his own story he was born in 1736, had lived 197 years. By the time he was ten years old he had traveled in Kansu, Shansi, Tibet, Annam, Siam and Manchuria gathering herbs. He continued to gather herbs for the rest of his first 100 years. He lived on herbs and plenty of rice wine. ...

More than a quarter-century after the glaring headlines, former State Department Official Alger Hiss finally found the answer last week to a much disputed mystery in one of the most celebrated spy cases of the cold war era. On being denounced in 1948 as a Communist, Hiss filed a libel suit against his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, who thereupon dug out some evidence that a relative had hidden for him in an abandoned dumbwaiter in New York City. As he later told it in his book Witness, ...

When I was a medical student, I worked with a doctor who lied. One day, she lied by ordering a kidney stone CT scan on a patient whom she thought had appendicitis. Let me explain. I was working in the emergency department with this physician Here was the rub: the type of CT scan used for possible appendicitis cases — a CT scan with contrast — is a time consuming process. The patient has to drink a container ...

April Rivera, a four-year-old from Miami, is singing the theme song to Barney with her mother. "I love you. You love me," she chirps. "We're a happy family." Even a purple dinosaur, however, can tell this isn't quite true. April's mom Regla Sanchez, 26, is inmate No. 162850 at the Hernando Correctional Institution, 320 miles away in Brooksville, Fla., and April is looking at an image of her mother on a computer screen. This virtual family visit is part of ...

After months of political wrangling, the U.S. Department of Education finalized on Thursday its highly contentious "gainful employment" rule, a crucial element of the Obama Administration's crackdown on the rapidly growing for-profit career-college industry. The rule will strip federal financial aid dollars from vocational programs that load students with more debt than they can realistically repay. When it goes into effect in July 2012, it will join a batch of other previously announced regulations set to begin ...

A day after President Barack Obama publicly endorsed India's claim to a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley poured cold water on any expectation of New Delhi's elevation anytime soon. "It is inconceivable that you could contemplate U.N. Security Council reform without considering a country like India," Crowley said Tuesday. "But we have to recognize ... this is a process that has been going on for some time, and it ...

Last week, the Medical Insider column explained why doctors have so much trouble managing patients with abdominal pain in the emergency department . Not least among the challenges: the multiplicity of causes of belly pain, the lack of clarity on which tests and treatments are best for which patients, and high cost. This week we sought solutions — both to these issues and to the questions that readers submitted on TIME.com's Facebook page over the past week. We ...

Really it's a sad story. The Kissels are rich, or used to be, so it's tempting to savor the elaborate murders and betrayals the family has endured as a long lost episode of Knots Landing. But five young kids have lost their fathers, and paterfamilias William Kissel, 78, has lived through the killings of two of his three children. Hong Kong financier Robert Kissel, 40, was drugged and then bludgeoned to death by his wife Nancy in 2003, and now ...

Three weeks ago, headlines announced that the U.S. had detected a mysterious "dark" satellite wheeling overhead on a regular orbit. There was nervous speculation that it might be a surveillance satellite launched by the Russians, and it brought the uneasy sensation that the U.S. did not know what was going on over its own head. But last week the Department of Defense proudly announced that the satellite had been identified. It was a space derelict, the remains of an Air ...