At 4:30, when most of Wall Street is winding down, Walter Zimmermann begins a high-stakes, high-wire act conducted live before a paying audience. About 200 institutional investors—including airlines and oil companies—shell out up to $3,000 a month to catch his daily webcast on the volatile energy markets, a performance that can move hundreds of millions of dollars. "I'm not paid to be wrong—I can tell you that," Zimmermann says. But as he clicks through dozens of screens and graphics on ...

Our marriages often provoke us to throw the china and utter the unforgivables. The context is usually personal, not political, but either way, passions run high. In May, barring some unforeseen procedural hindrance, gay couples will wed for the first time ever in the U.S. They will have that opportunity by order of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled last week that it is unconstitutional to deny them marriage licenses. Gays and lesbians across the country celebrated. Hundreds of ...

In Toledo, 150 women and children invaded welfare-department headquarters last month, tumbling workers from their chairs and tossing mounds of paper work onto the floor. In Boston, 50 others staged a raucous sit in at the Massachusetts Statehouse, refusing to budge until police carted them away. Forty-four more were arrested last week in Cleveland when they took over the big welfare offices on St. Clair Avenue. Such demonstrations by the welfare poor have become commonplace. Even as politicians and taxpayers ...

The U.S. forces that had taken over the South Seas island were in a hurry. An airfield had to be built and there was a lot of work to do. Native labor on the island was short. So Captain Martin Teem sent a sergeant of Massachusetts infantry to a nearby island to round up help. When the sergeant landed, the natives, attired in loincloths and belts of coconut husks, were in the midst of a happy community feast. Main dish: ...

Cases before the House ethics committee are stacking up like planes at Washington's National Airport, and so are the embarrassments for Congress. After the committee investigates Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich for a questionable book deal, it must consider Ohio Republican Donald Lukens, convicted in May of having sex with a 16-year-old girl. Then it will weigh the case of Illinois Democrat Gus Savage, accused of fondling an unwilling Peace Corps volunteer during a March trip to Zaire. Last week the ...

When critics challenge Barack Obama's patriotism, his supporters have a ready reply: True patriotism has nothing to do with little flags on politicians' lapels. It's not about symbols; it's about actions. It's not about odes to American greatness; it's about taking on your government when it goes astray. But there Obama is, in his first TV advertisement of the general-election campaign, talking about his "deep and abiding faith in the country I love." And there, perched below his left shoulder, ...

Roe v. Wade. Sometimes those seem like the most contentious words in American law. Short and unassuming though they are, they connote other, more explosive terms: abortion and murder, morality and privacy, the right to life and the right to choose. Attached to those words are some of the most intractable passions in American life. Writing about medical advances that improve the chances for a fetus to survive outside the womb, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor once declared ...

Prescription pads, clipboards and patient charts are so 20th century. In the era of CT scans, gene-splicing and stem-cell breakthroughs, handwritten record-keeping feels about as outmoded as the fluoroscope. It's more than just strangely retro; it's fantastically expensive. Health care in the U.S. costs a jaw-dropping $2 trillion annually, or more than $6,600 for every man, woman and child in the country. Streamlining the industry by eliminating medical errors, labor costs and general clunkiness caused by paperwork alone ...

That's what the latest analysis of national health data on adolescents shows. Between 1988-94 and 2005-06, the percentage of teens with hearing loss jumped by about a third, from 15% of 12-to-19-year-olds to 19.5%. And the reason may not be the ubiquitous earphones that snake from nearly every teen's ears during most hours of the day. A team headed by Dr. Josef Shargorodsky, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Channing Laboratory at Brigham and Women's ...

Is pornography essentially an outlet for sexual fantasy, rightly protected by the First Amendment's free speech provisions? Or is it an instruction manual for violent men that shatters women's civil rights by contributing to their harassment, humiliation and subordination? Those questions are at the heart of an often acrimonious debate that has divided feminists and civil libertarians across the U.S. The argument is currently raging on three fronts: -- In Massachusetts, feminist groups can be found on both sides of ...