IT WAS ON A COLD DAY in 1934 that James Houck hit bottom. Newly wedded and living in Frederick, Md., he was getting drunk every weekend--and sometimes even during the week--on home brew. He had recently been in a drunken-driving accident in his employer's car, and his drinking had estranged him from his wife Betty. "We were not married a month," Houck says, "before I told her I was sorry I ever saw her." Houck had begun drinking early, at ...

Monte' Ray Talbert was slumped over his car's steering wheel with two bullet wounds in his head when police pulled up to Airport Liquors in Inglewood, California on the night of Sunday, May 15. A member of the hip-hop group Cali Swag District, known for its platinum-selling song "Teach Me How to Dougie," Talbert had stopped there on his way to a nearby recording studio when a gunman pulled up next to him and fired. Six weeks ...

Spring is coming, and a young man's thoughts turn to ... you know. Apparently, old men's thoughts turn to the same subject. According to an article to be published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal, 67% of men ages 65 to 74 said they had been sexually active in the past year, compared with just 40% of women in that age group. Everyone knows young men think constantly about sex, but many guys remain interested in sex ...

Less than two weeks before the far-reaching mechanisms of Minnesota's government might come to a halt, Jessica Lund's mind is filled with thoughts of snikerdoodles. Lund, 38, has Down syndrome and was helping to bake the cinnamon-sugar cookies with a care worker in a group home on a recent afternoon. Five other adults with developmental disabilities live with Lund in this 2,000 square-foot rambler that looks like any other on a suburban block of Golden Valley ...

The Supreme Court's decision to throw out a sex-discrimination suit by a large group of female Wal-Mart employees may look like a mere procedural decision about the rules for class-action lawsuits. But it is in fact a much bigger deal: it significantly shifts power from workers to big employers. The ruling on Monday in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes puts a halt to a class-action lawsuit that could ultimately have included as many as 1.5 million current and former ...

With banks reluctant to loosen purse strings and credit-card companies aggressively slashing credit lines, a growing number of consumers are turning to the once murky world of pawnshops for quick cash. "Loans are up 20% to 25%," estimates David Crume, president of the National Pawnbrokers Association. The trade group's executive director, Dana Meineke, says the weak economy and turmoil in the credit markets are expanding the customer base. "We're seeing some new faces," says Daniel ...

Somehow, it fell to the United States to censure an Israeli shipping company for doing business with Iran. Last month the State Department sanctioned the Ofer Brothers Group, a private company based in the tony beach city of Herzliya, for selling an $8.6 million tanker to Iran through a known Iranian front company based in Monaco. The May 24 order barred the Israeli firm, along with a subsidiary based in Singapore, from obtaining export licenses, private loans ...

Last week, after the Egyptian opposition called for a march after prayers, TIME's Abigail Hauslohner, based in Cairo, and TIME's Rania Abouzeid, who had just returned from covering the Tunisian uprising, walked among the protesters and felt the blunt and brutal response of the regime's antiriot police. To escape club-bearing cops, Hauslohner ran through narrow streets and found refuge in a small courtyard, only to have a tear-gas canister land near where she stood with a small ...

His captors put out cigarettes on Haitham Amro's body. His thighs were a carpet of bruises, green, yellow and blue, and his back striped by lashes. The angle of the wounds on his wrists indicated he had been suspended above the ground by handcuffs for some time before his corpse was brought, on his fourth day in custody, to the hospital where they recognized it immediately, Amro having worked there for years as a nurse. But to the ...

In early March, Elizabeth Heil, an arts-administration graduate student at Columbia University, was watching previews in a movie theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side when she cracked up inappropriately. The trailer was for the movie The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and scheduled to open May 19, and it featured a grim-faced fellow uttering Christ's name repeatedly and then--wham!--whaling away at his already bloodied back with an Inquisition-issue cat-o'-nine-tails. It was not an intentionally funny scene. But Heil, ...