When you hear the word intern, you probably don't think of people like Kristina Shands. For starters, she's 38. And she had notched 10 years of experience as a fundraiser at a nonprofit in Tennessee before she was laid off last year. But now that Shands is considering moving into sports management, she's interning with the Knoxville Ice Bears hockey team, writing game summaries and handing out stats on game day. She devotes about 10 hours a week to the ...

Tis the season to be selfish. Right after the global financial crisis exploded in 2008, many economists fretted that countries looking to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie would become more self-interested and protectionist, plunging the planet into an even sharper downturn, just as happened in the 1930s after the Great Depression. Thanks to panic-fueled crisis management by policymakers, it didn't happen. But after three years of pain and very little economic gain, it may be happening ...

Alycia Williamson-Smith and her family didn't have anywhere else to turn. It had been days since a devastating tornado ravaged Joplin, Mo., home to her second cousin James Williamson. With cell-phone service largely unavailable and a distance of several thousand miles between her house in Amsterdam, N.Y., and Joplin, Williamson-Smith posted photos of James on several Facebook pages that were created in the aftermath of the tornado. Less than 24 hours later, she saw a comment on ...

LIECHTENSTEIN They reign over a mere sliver of a state, but their fortune is decidedly big league. The Liechtenstein familys wealth, which predates their purchase of the principality that bears their name, was once concentrated in vast land holdings in the Holy Roman Empire. The family still has estates in Austria, but today their estimated $4.6 billion fortune derives mostly from a priceless art collection and the family-owned finance company, LGT Group, with recent profits of more ...

"It looks like this recession is finally over," declared Scott Davis, CEO of UPS, earlier this month while announcing 2009 earnings that were better than expected for the world's largest package carrier. Speaking to analysts on Feb. 2, Davis added, "Believe it or not, that makes 21 that UPS has successfully managed through." No doubt UPS shareholders are relieved after two of the hardest years in the 102-year-old firm's history. Indeed, only four months ago, the $45 billion company disclosed ...

Katherine Knapp Carney can barely contain her enthusiasm about her new job. A talkative, attractive 20-something dressed in a just-long-enough navy blue skirt and matching jacket, she would not be out of place in a management-consultancy firm or the account side of an ad agency. Instead, Knapp Carney is into heavy metal, a mechanical engineer at Pratt & Whitney. She designs jet engines. Pratt & Whitney, which had sales last year of $12.9?billion, is the biggest division ...

Deep in the Chiquitana tropical dry forest in southeast Bolivia, Noine Picanerai stands on a dirt road that cuts through lush woods. The 50,000-acre plot looks like a protected reserve. But, notes Picanerai, a woodsman in his 70s, "My people live off selling these trees." Indeed, despite the forest's pristine appearance, it's a logging concession run by an indigenous Ayoreo community. The project, along with dozens of similar forest management programs across the Amazon region north of ...

The reporter intended the anecdote that opened part four of the Boston Globe's profile of Mitt Romney to illustrate, as the story said, "emotion-free crisis management": Father deals with minor — but gross — incident during a 1983 family vacation, and saves the day. But the details of the event are more than unseemly — they may, in fact, be illegal. The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it ...

Who wouldn't love an easy explanation for autism, the heartbreaking brain disorder whose rates have been rising sharply and mysteriously over the past 30 years? History has served up many possibilities, beginning with a now discredited theory put forward by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who famously attributed the condition to uncaring "refrigerator moms." Today autism is thought to involve a genetic vulnerability that's triggered by an unknown X factor, or factors, in the environment. Recent speculation has focused on pesticides, childhood vaccines ...

On Oct. 3, Fareed Zakaria spoke to Premier Wen Jiabao on his CNN program Fareed Zakaria GPS. Excerpts: Do you feel that the global economy is stable and strong? Or do you worry that the U.S. could go back into a recession? I think the world economy is recovering, although the process of recovery is a slow and torturous one. I hope that there will be a quick recovery of the U.S. economy, because, after all, the U.S. economy ...