Is the federal government reading your email? That may sound outrageous, but it may well be perfectly legal. The Constitution protects your home, your car, and your body from unreasonable searches. But the courts have been much less clear about whether it protects your Gmail or Yahoo Mail account. So while the courts continue to deliberate, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont is now trying to give email new protections by upgrading the main federal Internet ...

"Beans??" The girl said. She was sitting near the end of a long table in the cafeteria at Lionel Wilson College Preparatory Academy, a charter school in Oakland, Calif. There were about a dozen middle schoolers in all, taste testing new school-lunch ideas. The girl was a tough customer, by far the toughest at the table. The offending item? A salad with fresh greens, roasted pumpkin seeds, corn, shredded cheese and black beans, tossed in organic ranch dressing. Amy ...

After giving his wife Patti a quick peck on the cheek, Rod Blagojevich walked over to the witness stand at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth before the jury. Then he quickly introduced himself to those who would decide his fate. "I'm Rod Blagojevich. I used to be the governor ... I've waited two and a half years to be here to get ...

David Headley is not on trial in Chicago's Everett McKinley Dirksen federal courthouse. But he is the star of the proceedings, the chief witness against a man who was once his friend. There is nothing ordinary about the case: it kicks off from Headley's confessed and key role as a perpetrator of one horrific terrorist attack — the three-day November 2008 assault on Mumbai — and details his part in planning another incident in Denmark, all in ...

To hear federal officials tell it, one of the best solutions to America's foster-care crisis often boils down to one word: adoption. New figures released by the Department of Health and Human Services show that 46,000 foster-care children were legally adopted in 1999, a 28% increase from the previous year's total. Money is part of the picture. For every child adopted beyond the number of adoptions in the previous year, the feds pay the states a bonus of $4,000, to ...

"What do you think about before you go on a raid?" the slim, beautiful wife asks the handsome Mexican federal police officer after he's just busted 23 tons of cocaine. "That they don't kill me," the dashing federal replies as emotional music kicks in. "That I don't kill someone who doesn't deserve to die. And lately, that nothing happens to you." The couple embraces and stare love-locked into each other's eyes. Such is the noble if stilted dialogue ...

Socrates, the famed Greek philosopher, made a rare public appearance on May 12, in the Ceremonial Courtroom of Manhattan's Federal Courthouse. In fact, he took the corporeal form of famed defense attorney Benjamin Brafman, currently representing embattled IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was highly animated in his defense against the millennia-old impiety and corruption charges levied against the Athenian. Fortunately, there was not a toga to be seen in the audience. The court was in session on a ...

Mark Twain, the bard of the Mississippi River, was always skeptical of human efforts to control it. "Ten thousand river commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, 'Go here,' or 'Go there,' and make it obey," he wrote in 1883. Twain genuinely admired "the West Point engineers" who dreamed of caging the beast. He truly wanted to believe their ...

The largest government bailout in U.S. history was born before dawn on Sept. 17, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke woke up at 6 a.m., checked his BlackBerry and saw the very thing he had dreaded: the futures market in free fall. Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner had spent the past year staving off one disaster after another, for the most part working behind the scenes. Earlier in the month, they had let ...

Stepping up the attackSometimes it seems that success fathers its own problems. In its campaign to hook smuggled drugs, the Reagan Administration has claimed some impressive catches: since establishing a regional interdiction center in South Florida in March 1982, it says that cocaine and marijuana seizures there are up 54% and 23% respectively, drug arrests have risen by 27%, and the street value of intercepted dope amounts to around $5 billion. Smugglers, however, have risen to the challenge by trafficking in smaller, harder-to-detect loads and by moving ...