It was one of the stranger news stories in a long time — and one of the most polarizing. Firefighters in rural Tennessee looked on as a house burned because the family who lived in it had not paid the $75 annual fire-protection fee. Their home was destroyed — along with three puppies that were inside.What is more striking than the story itself is the debate it has set off, which has been raging now ...

Trapped on a swarming sector of Long Island where the backwash of Suburbia blurs into the edge of New York City, the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills is a green refuge from the crowded reality about it. Outside its high fences, the Long Island Rail Road rattles on its rounds and ordinary citizens endure the twice-daily war of commuting. Inside the club, the polite plunk of tennis balls, the whisper of sneakers on trim grass courts, the ...

Think you have a head for heights? The Capilano Cliffwalk will make you think again. Opening on June 2, it's suspended 70 m over a rushing river with some sections projecting 9 m away from a mossy, fern-covered granite cliff. Located in the forested hills just minutes from downtown Vancouver, the Capilano Suspension Bridge park already boasts the eponymous 137-m-long bridge. But after rappelling down the canyon one day, John Stibbard, third-generation park manager, found inspiration for a ...

For the estimated 1% of the population with celiac disease, gluten is a kryptonite that can trigger digestive distress and cause long-term health problems.

A year after the poisonings, public confidence is restoredOne year ago last week, James Burke made a decision that will probably be studied in business schools for a long time to come. Going against the advice of Government agents and some of his own colleagues, the chairman of Johnson & Johnson decided to spend whatever millions it would cost to recall 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from store shelves across the U.S. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration feared that the recall would increase ...

A long time ago—I think it was at an annual meeting of the Christian Coalition in the mid-1990s—the Republican stalwart William Bennett introduced a parade of his party's candidates for President by warning the audience to be wary of pandering politicians. "And if a candidate tells you only things you want to hear," he said, "if he asks nothing of you, then give him nothing in return, certainly not your vote, because he is not telling you ...

Muscular, bronzed Indonesian men with big smiles and long, wavy hair have been seducing foreign women along the white-sand beaches of Bali for more than three decades now. Known as "Kuta cowboys," after Bali's popular Kuta Beach, these men often hold low-paying beach jobs renting snorkeling gear or selling sodas, but what they are really peddling is romance. Many call them gigolos — a term they reject — but for years, they've been flirting with foreigners without ...

Perhaps because it seems intuitively true, the notion persists that running, especially when done long-term and over long distances, is bad for the joints. Indeed, it would be hard to think otherwise when with each foot strike, a runner's knee withstands a force equal to eight times his or her body weight — for a 150-lb. person, that's about 1,200 lb. of impact, step after step. The common wisdom is that regular running or vigorous sport-playing during a ...

Google wants new friends. After signing a series of new partners, CEO Eric Schmidt says the Web giant's spate of recent deals is just a start. Schmidt talked to TIME about changing the company's philosophy and planning its next steps. TIME: You've done a series of recent partnerships with eBay, MySpace, MTV and others. What's driving these deals? Schmidt: Toward the beginning of the year, we recognized that we needed to get good at partnerships. I'm just ...

The wedding of the 20th century, in 1981, celebrated a marriage that turned out to be a huge bust. It ended as badly as a relationship can: scandal, divorce and, ultimately, death and worldwide weeping. So when the firstborn son of that union, Britain's Prince William, set in motion the wedding of this century by getting engaged to Catherine Middleton, he did things a little differently. He picked someone older than he is , who went to ...