The new arrivals at the drug rehab center in Chichevo, a tiny village two hours' drive east of Moscow, are usually given two weeks without chores to recover from the nausea, pain and sleeplessness of withdrawal. After that, between Bible study and prayer they have to start chopping firewood, hauling water from the village well or otherwise helping around the old wooden house. But a lot more leeway was allowed in the case of Irina Pavlova, ...

Even the most stable brain operates just a millimeter from madness. In such a finely tuned cognitive engine, only a small part must start to sputter before the whole machine comes crashing down. When that happens, reason and function come undone, rarely as dramatically as in the neurochemical storm that is obsessive-compulsive disorder. Say you leave work at 6 p.m. for what should be a 12-minute drive home. Say just as you're pulling onto the street, a child on a ...

By the time the trumpets sound, the candles have been lit and the salmon platters garnished. Harald V, King of Norway, enters the room, and 200 guests stand to greet him. Then a chorus of 30 men and women, each wearing a blue police uniform, launches into a spirited rendition of "We Are the World." This isn't cabaret night at Oslo's Royal Palace. It's a gala to inaugurate Halden Fengsel, Norway's newest prison. Ten years and 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner ...

On Sept. 16, 2010, a team of U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigators arrived at a Shanghai purveyor of dough, macaroni and baby cereal. Federal authorities had long suspected that Shanghai Chuangi Food Co.'s plants were unsanitary. Many of its products, like soup base, had been shipped to the port of New York and ultimately placed in an unknown number of goods that ended up on kitchen tables in the U.S. That's why federal authorities assigned to one of the ...

While authorities in Japan work desperately to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, on the other side of the world in Germany, Angela Merkel is facing the political fallout. With an important election in the southern state of Baden-Wrttemberg being held on March 27, Merkel's future as Chancellor could be decided at kitchen tables like the one in the modest Stuttgart home of Hanna and Volker Schwerteck. The young middle-class couple has plenty of reasons to back Merkel's Christian ...

Charlie Lamb was barely 2 years old when he was diagnosed with autism. His mother Susan had been convinced for months that "something was not right" with her second child. He wouldn't stand in line like the other kids in gymnastics class, she recalls, and he spoke fewer words. He was more captivated by spinning wheels than Teletubbies. His father Tom noticed that his blond, blue-eyed son would always walk in circles around the kitchen table and that he ...

Picking up trash and pulling weeds may not sound terribly posh, but at a growing number of high-end resorts, where rooms often cost $400 or $500 a night, these activities are becoming yet another hotel amenity. One morning you can sleep in and order room service, and the next you can serve breakfast at a soup kitchen. The trend is part of a larger movement toward voluntourism, i.e., trips with a heavy focus on volunteering. But unlike programs ...

"Mao is very great and famous, and he saved the whole of China," exclaims an 18-year-old woman from Wuhan in Hubei province. "Both young people and old people love Mao very much!" The woman is accompanying her 75-year-old grandfather to Mao Zedong's birth town of Shaoshan in Hunan province, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the capital Changsha -- and the juxtaposition is as intriguing as it is telling: A woman born after the Tiananmen Square crackdown and a grandfather ...

It's a crisp New England day and Paul Monti is sitting in the backyard garden he built to honor the memory of his son, sipping coffee from his favorite Boston Red Sox mug, and nursing what he calls a "morning cigar". These are daily rituals that help him deal with his son's death three years ago, while serving the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. "I come out here and sit on the bench and sit in the flowers," says Monti, a ...

Thursday is "Chinese night" at the Hotel Silk Road in Afghanistan's Bamiyan province. (CNN) -- Thursday is "Chinese night" at the Hotel Silk Road in Afghanistan's Bamiyan province. Hungry guests sip cans of Coke and nonalcoholic beer and pick at a buffet that includes General Tsao's chicken, egg drop soup and slices of sweet green melon grown in nearby fields. When a vegetarian diner arrives, the hotel's Japanese owner, Hiromi Yasui, runs back to the kitchen to whip up a ...