At first it sounded like a macabre coincidence. Within three days in March 1983, two California cousins learned from their doctors that they had non- Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. One month earlier, a sister-in-law of one of them, living in Washington, had received the same diagnosis. The family was stunned. What could be causing their unbelievable misfortune? In Georgia, a few months later, when the married daughter of one of the victims discovered that she too ...

The Polos are a typical Spanish family — unfortunately for them and for the European economy. Jess, 59, has worked as an accountant at an electrical-parts supplier for 20 years. His job is protected by the extensive rights awarded to the Spanish permanent employee. By his estimate, his employer would have to shell out as much as $120,000 in mandated severance payments to lay him off, a prohibitive expense that likely gives him a job for life. Jess' daughter Mara, ...

Here's an old bit from a stand-up comic's act: "Some say the glass is half empty. Some say it is half full. I say it's twice as big as it needs to be." This is a story of glasses, not nearly empty, not quite full. Except that the glasses are the children of divorce--a million new ones each year in the U.S.--and what's being measured is their misery. For decades, since a pioneering study by Judith S. Wallerstein in ...

Days after Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir accepted the referendum results granting southern Sudan its independence, more than 100 people have died in clashes between the south's army and a renegade general. The fighting is the latest in a wave of violence that has all but extinguished the party atmosphere in the south, while raising serious questions over the future of the world's newest nation. South Sudan was already set to be one of the poorest countries in the world, with little in the ...

Thomas Bausman, 2, and his brother Jake, 10 months, are typical American babies. Every day, Thomas settles down to watch two hours of television, while Jake sits in front of the set for an hour, the national average for their respective ages. Their favorite thing to watch, by far? Baby Einstein. Anita Bausman could not be more pleased with her children's preference. Jake, she reports, learned colors, numbers and his love of robots from the popular videos, which are filled ...

As a 19-year-old philosophy student in Paris, Jens Martin Skibsted had a watershed moment when the bicycle protest against cars he was riding in came to a sudden halt. The roadblock? A motorcycle demonstration. "I realized the absurdity of it," says the Danish entrepreneur, who turns 40 this year. "People are not going to change because an activist goes around shouting." So Skibsted took a different route. Instead of telling people they should get out of their cars, why not make ...

All happy families are alike, wrote Tolstoy, but unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way. Perhaps none was unhappier last Thursday than the family of Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, who took the stand in municipal court in Redwood City, Calif., to accuse her father, George Franklin Sr., of sexually molesting and then beating to death her best friend, Susan Nason, in her presence more than 20 years ago. When Franklin-Lipsker, now 29, first made that stunning disclosure last November, it broke ...

LIECHTENSTEIN They reign over a mere sliver of a state, but their fortune is decidedly big league. The Liechtenstein familys wealth, which predates their purchase of the principality that bears their name, was once concentrated in vast land holdings in the Holy Roman Empire. The family still has estates in Austria, but today their estimated $4.6 billion fortune derives mostly from a priceless art collection and the family-owned finance company, LGT Group, with recent profits of more ...

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 ...

The seventh annual TIME 100 gala celebrated revolutionaries in many fields. Wael Ghonim, who helped ignite the Egyptian uprising, offered a moment of silence to fallen comrades. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, toasted a Democratic influence, John F. Kennedy. Via video, astronaut Mark Kelly saluted his wife Gabrielle Giffords. Musician and activist Sting dedicated a song to the people who inspire him most, his family. And Amy Poehler thanked the unsung caretakers who look after ...