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 ...

In New York City, where they never roll up the sidewalks, illegal social clubs are a long tradition. There are more than 1,000 such clubs strewn across the city's five boroughs, dispensing cheap booze, loud music and a touch of the home country to immigrants. Many of them have something in common: the lack of a liquor license. All too many also offer their patrons something besides the prospect of a hot time on the town: the high risk of ...

Alycia Williamson-Smith and her family didn't have anywhere else to turn. It had been days since a devastating tornado ravaged Joplin, Mo., home to her second cousin James Williamson. With cell-phone service largely unavailable and a distance of several thousand miles between her house in Amsterdam, N.Y., and Joplin, Williamson-Smith posted photos of James on several Facebook pages that were created in the aftermath of the tornado. Less than 24 hours later, she saw a comment on ...

The spectacular success of Indians in the U.S. smashes old stereotypes and adds a dash of spice to the American melting pot By ANTHONY SPAETH When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, his parents--both immigrants from India, both physicians--didn't hesitate to pile on the pressure. There was simply an assumption that I'd come in first in my class, he recalls. He was also expected to follow them into medicine. When he ...

First, Terry Bigley watched the tornado overtake his television screen as it ripped through eastern Kansas toward Joplin, Mo., where he lived on the east side in an apartment with his wife. "They had a big picture of it," he says of the local news station. "And I mean this was a humungous tornado. They told everybody to take cover. Then it was right on us." The Joplin tornado and a less powerful one that wreaked havoc in ...

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 ...

The killing of President Park raises questions and tensions It was one of the most bizarre killings of a head of state in history. Late last week President Park Chung Hee, 61, strongman ruler of the Republic of South Korea since 1961, was shot at a dinner party by the chief of his own intelligence service in what was first described by a government spokesman as an "accident." Later, officials revealed that it was a well-planned assassination. Within hours of ...

Having tucked into his first bottle of vodka earlier than usual, Anatoly Zhbanov goes on an afternoon stroll to buy another one along the dirt road through Lopotova, a dying village on Russia's western edge, in the region of Pskov. It is mid-April, and clumps of snow are still melting at the roadside where Zhbanov, a local artist, stops to peer inside a lopsided cabin, the home of a local bootlegger. In the window stands a plastic ...

The sentence in the courtroom that day in June 1964 was life in prison. The verdict of history will hardly judge Nelson Mandela a common criminal. Despite the government's determination to lock him away for good and crush his liberation movement, the unrelenting crusade to abolish apartheid that he waged from a prison cell over the decades made him the supreme symbol of the black struggle in South Africa. At 4:15 p.m. local time on Sunday, Feb. 11, Nelson Mandela ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in the leading French daily Le Monde. Despite the end of the 48-year state of emergency, signed this week by President Bashar al-Assad, protests were continuing Friday. It is just one more outward sign of the sinking faith in the regime's durability. Decrees are signed, but "security forces don't obey ...