There is a slight knocking noise on the phone line, not nearly the worst interference I've heard on a phone call to Mexico, but Kevin Huckabee apologizes anyway. "Sorry about the noise in here," he says in the same low Texan half-mumble I remember from our first meeting in Jurez two months ago. "Some guy is banging on his cell wall, I don't know why." Huckabee, 47, is talking to me from a phone inside Cereso prison on ...

NOTHING was beyond his desire. He wanted to be unifier and savior, uplifter of the poor at home and father of democracy in Asia. He yearned to be a latter-day Lincoln to the blacks, to outshine F.D.R.'s memory among reformers, to surpass Truman's humane but hardheaded foreign-policy record, to evoke the affection accorded Eisenhower. Above all, Lyndon Johnson ached for the trust of today's voters and the respect of tomorrow's scholars. Now, with so many of his glittering hopes broken, ...

The giant Three Gorges Dam across China's Yangtze River has been mired in controversy ever since it was first proposed 88 years ago by Sun Yat Sen, the founding father of Modern China. In 1992, when Chinese Premier Li Peng submitted a proposal for the dam to China's normally pliant parliament, the National People's Congress, it ran into serious opposition and ultimately passed with the smallest margin in the legislature's history. Still, it is a sign of just how grave the problems are ...

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 ...

Four days before Christmas in 1994, John David Edington, 22, the adopted son of a Presbyterian minister named Howard Edington, was driving home through an Orlando, Fla., downpour when he lost control of his car and ran into a tree. He died instantly. The tragedy was mourned deeply in lofty reaches of the evangelical world because the Rev. Edington is an extremely respected minister and at the time was the personal pastor to Bill Bright, founder of the megaministry Campus Crusade ...

From the epochal to the mundane, the decisions of Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew have steered the history of his island nation for more than half a century. But as the political party Lee founded in 1954 seeks to shore up its sliding fortunes with a younger and more politically outspoken electorate, the 87-year-old man regarded as modern Singapore's founding father has withdrawn from day-to-day governance by quitting his Cabinet post along with Senior Minister Goh ...

The home of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh, sits down a tree-lined street in an affluent corner of the capital, Dhaka. Tourists and locals file into the compound daily to view its insides and his personal belongings — a dressing gown, old books, his favorite pipe. But they also come to see signs of his death. On Aug. 15, 1975, soldiers rushed into the house at dawn, shooting indiscriminately, killing Mujib — as he is known — and 19 others. Traces of ...

The Vatican said Tuesday it has worked out a way for groups of Anglicans who are dissatisfied with their faith to join the Catholic Church. The process will allow groups of Anglicans, including bishops and married priests, to join the Catholic Church some 450 years after King Henry VIII broke from Rome and created the Church of England. The number of Anglicans wishing to join the Catholic Church has increased in recent years as the Anglican church has welcomed the ...

Loretta Chaisson Lewis, 28, was the first to die. She was reported missing on May 17, 2005. Three days later, fishermen found her body floating in a canal off Highway 26 in Jennings, Louisiana. Her father, Thomas Lewis, recently posted a plea on a Web site established in September by the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff's Office to draw attention to the killing of his daughter and the deaths of seven other women in the area. Police say the slayings may ...

Varsha Vinod's exceptional abilities are hard to spot at first. She's an adorably cute five-year-old girl from southern India, small, pretty with big brown eyes. When we meet for our interview, her hair is tied up in two pig tails, with bright hair clips and a glittering head band. She is as shy as most kids her age would be when confronted by a strange man and a television crew. Some child stars can be precocious but Varsha doesn't act ...