Downplaying the old IQ numbers racket Though Actress Judy Holliday specialized in playing dumb blondes, legend has it that she possessed a towering 172 IQ. Spiro Agnew says his is 135, which puts him well into the ranks of the intellectually superior. South Korea's Kim Ung-Yong, a 14-year-old prodigy who was speaking four languages and solving integral calculus problems at age four, is said to tip the mental scales at 210, worth a mention in the Guinness Book of World ...

While devastating for severely afflicted children and their families, autism has long been assumed to be relatively uncommon, appearing in perhaps 1% of all kids. But that figure was a rough estimate at best, based largely on the population of children who have already received a diagnosis of the disorder. Discovering the true prevalence of autism would require a large-scale study of an entire population--not just those who showed up at a doctor's office. That's exactly what a team of ...

As a child, Dong Young-bae used to hide from his parents to dance to cassettes of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. He says he was too shy to tell anyone he wanted to become a famous singer and dancer. Not anymore. Today the 22-year-old South Korean singer and dancer known as Taeyang is in the spotlight as an international pop star. Thanks in no small part to a long-standing trend in Asia that renders all things Korean ...

Back home in Mansfield, La., Courtney L. Stanley liked to go to church and liked to go hunting. When he was drafted eight months ago, he says, he could light a match at 25 yards with his .22 rifle. Arriving in Korea in January, he wrote home to his mother for a Bible. At night, in the gloom of his bunker, 19-year-old Private Stanley read his Bible by the light of a Coleman lantern; during the day he cleaned the Browning automatic rifle the Army had issued ...

The killing of President Park raises questions and tensions It was one of the most bizarre killings of a head of state in history. Late last week President Park Chung Hee, 61, strongman ruler of the Republic of South Korea since 1961, was shot at a dinner party by the chief of his own intelligence service in what was first described by a government spokesman as an "accident." Later, officials revealed that it was a well-planned assassination. Within hours of ...

In 1965, U.S. Army Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins deserted his post in South Korea and fled to the communist Northa move he now calls "the stupidest thing I have ever done." He spent nearly four decades inside the Hermit Kingdom, as a lingering mystery of the cold war. In July, Pyongyang finally let Jenkins leave. He turned himself in to the U.S. Army in Japan and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. He left prison two weeks ago. In ...

For many of South Korea's poor, stealing from the U.S. Army is a trade and a livelihood. They steal from PXs and officers' homes, raid railroad yards, pilfer from trucks on the move, and diligently bleed oil pipelines . But after U.S. soldiers on guard duty, potshotting at intruders, killed several innocent bystanders, General George H. Decker ordered: "No more shooting." The thieving went on, the 40,000 men of South Korea's police force seemed unable or unwilling to catch a single thief, and the U.S. Army chafed ...

Every child is a gift, as the saying goes. But in a case that has stoked outrage on two continents, a Dutch diplomat posted in Hong Kong has been accused of returning his eight-year-old adopted daughter like an unwanted Christmas necktie. The story, which first appeared in the South China Morning Post on Dec. 9, began seven years ago, when Dutch vice consul Raymond Poeteray and his wife, Meta, adopted then-four-months-old Jade in South Korea. The ...

The phone rang at 4:43 a.m. on March 27, 2007. Patty Michaels, a dispatcher at a 911 call center in Belleville, Ill., picked up. On the other end, a woman screamed for help. She said her husband had attacked her. Michaels heard a baby crying in the background. The caller's address appeared on Michaels' screen: it was in O'Fallon, Ill., less than 10 miles away. Michaels asked the woman to confirm it. "That's when it got really tricky," she says. ...

China has invited reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to visit at his convenience, state media in both countries reported.