Abner Stoltzfus began taking on work as a roofer in his late teens, often traveling outside his home in Lancaster County, Penn., to rustle up some spare cash. Before long he ran into a member of the Pagans motorcycle gang who offered him some cocaine on the job. Soon Stoltzfus was hooked, money was running low, and he began pushing drugs to feed his habit. "I don't think there was much analysis behind his actions," his lawyer, John Pyfer Jr., ...

The hardscrabble town of Marianna, Ark. , near the Mississippi River, has no movie theater but plenty of boarded-up storefronts. Summer work for teenagers can mean wrenching labor in the rice and soybean fields. Young black men know that if they want something better, they have to go elsewhere. Enter the four Chambers brothers -- Larry, Billy Joe, Willie Lee and Otis -- who blew into their old hometown driving gleaming BMWs and Camaros, sporting gold chains and fancy clothes. ...

Every morning at 8, Maulawi Zahir heads into Waygal district center, a remote mountain village of stone houses stacked almost vertically up granite slopes. As the undeniable man in charge of the Afghan village, the Taliban leader is there to hear and settle disputes. But despite his group's ascendancy, he struggles to burnish his credentials among his constituents, even in an area where loathing for NATO and the Afghan government runs deep. "People aren't happy, but they ...

Yemen's revolution has been a slow-burning one. Three months after an 18-day whirlwind of protests tossed Egypt's Hosni Mubarak from power, Yemen's youthful protesters are still in the thick of their own Arab uprising. However, though hounded and abandoned by senior members of his party, army and tribe, President Ali Abdullah Saleh somehow continues to cling to power. Time and again, Saleh has reneged on apparent agreements to step down. But time may now be running out as ...

If one place on earth has vanquished nature and stopped the clocks, it is Las Vegas. Built on land without water or any reliable resource apart from the blazing sun, the resort entombs visitors in the permanent, cool, jangling dusk of hotel casinos. Its skyscape positions ancient Egypt near Renaissance Venice and fin de sicle Paris. I had come to this confected city to find out if the Cenegenics Medical Institute, "the world's largest age-management practice," could subvert the laws ...

Flying to Niigata, a northern Japanese city not far from the earthquake zone I was covering, I opened the All Nippon Airways in-flight magazine and read an article in Japanese. It was a multipage ode to the rakkyo, a Japanese shallot that is usually eaten pickled. The story detailed the laborious planting, harvesting, cleaning and pickling that the little onions go through. My grandmother used to pickle her own rakkyo, and reading the article made me ...

The great transition was taking place without violence. Across the land, veterans of World War II tried to make the best of this best of all civilian worlds. In The Bronx, ex-Pfc. Peter Boucouvales, paralyzed from the waist down by the bullet which had lodged in his neck, lay between clean sheets in the Veterans Administration Hospital. The corridors were cheerless, the windows dirty. His lunch of filet of sole, peas, rice, cole slaw and lemon pie was cold by ...

The kid who's wimpy whupped the teen girls whose couture is skimpy. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, second in the film adaptations of Jeff Kinney's stick-drawn book characters, earned $24.1 million, according to early studio estimates. That made it a winner over Zack Snyder's comix-style adventure Sucker Punch, with $19 million, at the shrimpy, limpy, anything-but-blimpy North American box office. For the 17th time in the past 18 weeks, theatrical revenue was down from the ...

Cars, trucks, and vans stacked with families and their personal belongings had poured out of Benghazi on for most of Saturday, heading toward the eastern city of Beida, about 125 miles away. Many of the Libyans said they would continue on to Tobruk and even Egypt. "We are fleeing Benghazi, and we are going to Egypt," said one man driving a large van with his and his neighbor's family packed into it. Like many others reaching ...

Days after a court allowed him entry into Britain, controversial Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders said his arrival Friday marked "a victory for the freedom of speech." "I hope, once again, that the UK government will never, never turn back somebody for political reasons because they don't like what they are saying," Wilders said at a news conference at the Houses of Parliament. Wilders, known for his much-criticized film about Islam, was denied entry into Britain in February when he flew ...