I was a 37-year-old senior vice president in charge of the consumer-products-and-publishing division at Nickelodeon, the children's cable channel, in my office celebrating with a few colleagues the announcement of a huge, groundbreaking deal with Sony to create and market home videos of our hit shows, such as Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy. The phone rang. My assistant shouted, "Oh, man — it's Sumner! On Line 1!" Sumner Redstone, that is, then as now the chairman and majority owner ...

Trevor Douglas, 54, may soon lose his Orlando house. Sure, Douglas hasn't paid his mortgage in more than two years, which is what a Bank of America spokesperson tells me "is important to remember." It is. Still, if it happens, I will feel partially responsible. I helped push Douglas closer to eviction. Like many other home loans, Douglas' IOU was bought and sold numerous times and finally packed into a bond. So when his foreclosure notice finally arrived, the ...

I sat in our suburban home in Shanghai and read online the excerpt from Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. My reaction to it was straightforward: Maybe a little over the top, but, yeah, that's about right. My wife's reaction: "I guess I'm not the toughest Chinese mother after all." Our daughter, age 6, is in first grade. She's bilingual . She takes violin and ballet lessons. And she ...

When Crystal Byrd's second child was born, the doctors urged her to place her baby to her breast. Byrd declined. She had already decided, months earlier, that she would not breast-feed. It was a lifestyle choice, says Byrd, 33, a stay-at-home mom in Cedar Creek Lake, Texas. "I'm a huge fan of breast milk, just not of nursing," she says. Byrd says she tried breast-feeding her first child, who is now 12, and lasted nine weeks before ...

Another housing crisis may be looming even as the mortgage meltdown continues and as Americans who once dreamed of home ownership see their properties foreclosed. The Housing Act of 1937, imposed in the wake of the Great Depression, and amended a number of times in the 1970s, is reaching a crossroads — and close to five million Americans who depend on subsidized public housing may soon have to figure out where and how they are going to ...

When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet's first websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people's personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users' frenetic early forays online. Now a ragtag effort by several groups of budding computer historians is feverishly — and angrily — trying to bring as much as they ...

Former champions France have been handed a tough task against Ireland in the European playoffs to qualify for next year's World Cup finals in South Africa. France, who won the World Cup on home soil in 1998, finished a distant second to Serbia after a lackluster campaign in Group 7, while the Irish pushed Italy hard in their group. France coach Raymond Domenech is under pressure going into the two-legged affair on November 14 and 18, but told the official ...

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Joy Santiago, a real estate agent, stood atop the front steps of a vacant eight-bedroom Colonial-style mansion, bullhorn in hand. "All right, 10 minutes," she declared, ushering in the 50 or so people on the Lonely Homes Tour, an aggressive effort to sell foreclosed properties in Indian Village, one of Detroit's last solidly middle-class neighborhoods. Even with an abundance of home bargains — the redbrick, 97-year-old Colonial's asking price was $29,000 ...

Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo has been ruled out of Portugal's crucial final World Cup qualifier against Malta on Wednesday with an ankle injury. Ronaldo played with the injury in Portugal's 3-0 home victory over Hungary on Saturday but lasted just 27 minutes before limping off. Portugal, who have made a late charge in World Cup qualifying after looking set to make an ignominious exit, need to beat Malta in the home game to be sure of a place in ...

A small, rural town in the hills of New Hampshire was jolted by a home invasion over the weekend that left a mother dead and her young daughter severely injured.