IF the galleries at last week's British Open learned anything, it was: Don't mess with Supermex, otherwise known as Lee Trevino. Teamed with Britain's own Tony Jacklin in the third round, the gritty little Texan reacted to the crowd's partisan booing with typical machismo: "That only makes me fight harder." Fight he did. Scrambling as he had been doing all week, he started off the final round with four birdies on the first nine holes to take a seemingly insurmountable ...

Shark humor has its time and place, but not when I'm snorkeling somewhere called Shark Bay. At the Heron Island Research Station, a laboratory on the teardrop-shaped atoll 45 miles off Australia's east coast, the suntanned, chirpy station manager gives a parting wave to the three students who are taking me out for my first look at the legendary corals of the Great Barrier Reef. "Just don't get eaten, will you?" she says. Ha-ha. Happily, there are no sharks ...

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. ...

She was always a writer, and she always knew that. Like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, Millay and E.B. White, 10-year-old Rachel Louise Carson, born in 1907 in the Allegheny Valley town of Springdale, Pa., was first published in the St. Nicholas literary magazine for children. A reader and loner and devotee of birds, and indeed all nature, the slim, shy girl of plain face and dark curly hair continued writing throughout adolescence, chose an English major at Pennsylvania College for ...

The talk of New Orleans has centered on whether the most severe Mississippi River flood in more than a quarter-century will cause catastrophic damage to a city still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. And for good reason: the flood has carved a destructive path from from Cairo, Illinois, to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and prompted Louisiana's Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, to ask the federal government for emergency assistance. But there just might be a silver lining: the flood could ...

TIME Correspondent Don Sider spent several days at Khe Sanh last week ducking incoming shells and observing the unique quality of life in the besieged Marine base. His report: A chill, grey mist hangs over the jungled hills around Khe Sanh and drifts down onto the base's metal run way. The morning mist often lasts into the afternoon, the bright sun of recent weeks is lost in monsoonal overcast, and the air is raw and wet with winter. The camp ...

In March, on a small reef off the coast of Honduras, a group of pioneering conservationists started teaching sharks how to hunt. A half-dead lionfish, speared earlier by a diver, was released into the midst of a swirling mass of grey reef sharks. Sensing the lionfish's final twitches, the sharks descended on the weakened prey. Unsuspectingly, a second lionfish wandered into the frenzy. Within seconds, it, too, was gone. All that remained was a trail of mush ...

Shiloh Morrison spent two months as a truck gunner in Iraq before transferring to Kuwait in 2007 to work at the mortuary that takes in every U.S. military casualty killed in theater. There were 423 on her watch. During her four months in the morgue, the Marine corporal went only one 24-hour period without helping prepare a body for autopsy. It was her job to give the commands to play taps and to salute those heading home ...

A search was on Thursday night for nine people left missing after a Coast Guard plane collided with a Marine helicopter over the Pacific Ocean near Southern California, officials said.

The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries has tagged two great white sharks off Cape Cod in an area where shark sightings have been reported, state officials said Sunday. The first tagging Saturday marked the first time a great white shark had been successfully tagged in the Atlantic Ocean, the division said in a statement. A second shark was tagged Saturday afternoon, officials said. The taggings took place in the waters near Chatham, Massachusetts, two days after Greg Skomal, shark expert ...