What exactly does a normal child look like? We've long since passed the time when childhood was an ungraded test--take your time, build your forts, play your games, the clock does not start until high school, maybe college. We give homework in first grade now. We're very busy people. And your parents will do anything, just anything, to help you get ahead. "We lived with it," says Tim, of his daughter's behavior--the tantrums, the hitting, covering herself in Vaseline head to ...

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 ...

In the first Cars film, the biggest rube in Radiator Springs hitched himself to famous race car Lightning McQueen and never let go. The rusty tow truck Mater was desperate to be friends in a semistalkery way. I always assumed that, on his return to civilization, McQueen would gently detach from needy, dopey Mater. Just because the former braggart learned humility on Route 66 didn't mean he had to be a martyr. Somehow, that's what Pixar's ...

Eleven-year-old Shawn Walsh paid a poignant tribute to the brother, just two years older, he had lost. Gripping a microphone as he stood at the altar of the First Baptist Church in Tehachapi, Calif., Shawn joshed that his brother could be "a pain in the butt" at times but that Seth was "the best big brother in the world — no, the galaxy." Wearing a yellow

Do students have a First Amendment right to make fun of their principals and teachers on Facebook and other social-media sites? Or can schools discipline them for talking out of school? In a pair of free-speech rulings, a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania last week came down on the side of the students. In both cases, the court said that schools were wrong to suspend students for posting parodies of ...

The raw figures say that X-Men: First Class, Marvel's latest extension of its mutant-superhero franchise, won the weekend with $56 million at the North American box office, according to early studio estimates. The film-long flashback — in which young Charles Xavier opens his school for the gift-abled and first locks wills with his turbulent future rival Magneto — launches what Marvel hopes will be a series as profitable as the first three X-Men films, from ...

Defiant and unrepentant, former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic made his first appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Friday, in a preliminary hearing during which he refused to enter a plea to the 11 counts against him — including genocide, extermination, and murder. The once formidable general, stripped of his military uniform and wearing a dark grey suit, had to be supported by two United Nations guards and lowered into the ...

We've lived in the age of Internet-enabled information and entertainment for more than a decade and a half now. But you sure can't tell that from the state of car electronics: Even now, the devices built into many dashboards remind me as much of the push-button cassette deck on my first car — an extremely used 1982 Jetta — as they do an iPhone or any other 21st-century gizmo. Why have automobiles been such underachievers, digitally speaking? It's ...

Corrections and Clarification Appended: February 19, 2008Lawrence King, an eighth grader who identified as gay and wore makeup and nail polish, was 15 when he was declared brain dead on Feb. 13. The day before, he had been shot in the head in an Oxnard, Calif., classroom full of students. Police have charged a sweet-faced boy called Brandon McInerney, 14, with first-degree murder and with a hate crime. According to the Los Angeles Times and KTLA, ...

Targeting Corruption, Egypt Goes After Mubarak's Wife Suzanne Mubarak suffers what may be a heart attack as Egyptian prosecutors prepare to level corruption charges against her By Vivienne Walt / Cairo Egypt's former First Lady Suzanne Mubarak — who just three months ago was feted internationally for her charity work — suffered what may have been a heart attack on Friday after being detained in an investigation into possible corruption during the 30 years when her husband Hosni ...