*Harbert, Mich., is a crossroads town about 60 miles east of Chicago across the lake. To get there you have to drive through the gritty desolation of South Chicago, through Gary, where in autumn the blast furnaces at night make a glowering sheet lightning, through the smoke of Michigan City and into clean air again, along Lake Michigan behind some of the biggest sand dunes in the world. Carl Sandburg's place is on top of a dune a mile or ...

There are illegal immigrants on the loose in the Midwest. Originally hailing from Asia, they're about 3 ft. long and weigh up to 100 lb. , and are known to resist capture. Once they establish residency, they can eat you out of house and home. They're called Asian carp, and they emigrated to the lower reaches of the Mississippi River in the 1970s. Now they're knocking on the door of the Great Lakes, threatening to destroy ...

Death abides with all fanatics, not least because they are so often willing to risk it for their cause. It presses close around Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who has made death his specialty, closer still last week as he returned to the practice that so often had seemed destined to land him in jail. "To go to jail is the ultimate slavery," he told TIME. "If I have lost my freedom, I have lost something more valuable than life. Therefore, ...

To walk down a street in a town such as Midland, Michigan these days is to witness mass carnage — ash trees, long a favorite of city arborists for their tall silhouettes and abundant foliage, have been cut to the quick, leaving nothing but row upon row of stumps and a scattering of sawdust behind. A voracious beetle known as the Emerald Ash Borer, first discovered in Detroit in 2002, has been gradually spreading, leaving a trail ...

It was the lawyers of ancient Rome who came up with the modern definition of fatherhood: Mater semper certa est; pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant . The Romans, however, didn't have access to genetic testing. Dylan Davis did. A few months after his divorce in 2000, Davis, 36, a software engineer in Denver, took a DNA test to confirm a nagging suspicion that he was not the biological father of his 6-year-old twins. The negative test results led him to give ...

Three runners died Sunday during the Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon in Detroit, Michigan, police told CNN. All three deaths occurred between 9 and 9:20 a.m. ET, Second Deputy Chief John Roach said. A man in his 60s fell and hit his head, Roach said. The cause of the fall was unknown. The man was transported to Detroit Receiving Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Two other men, ages 36 and 26, also collapsed during the race and were pronounced dead ...

Kim Gallagher has a plan for America's "blue highways," the thousands of miles of dusty, old single-lane heritage routes that wend desolately through the countryside: turn them green. Superseded by high-speed interstates, many of these narrow byways have been long forgotten, along with the faded small towns they connect, says Gallagher, a project manager for the Southwest Michigan Planning Commission. But off-the-beaten-path America can be revived, she says, by transforming little-used roadways into "green highways" that cater specifically to ...

Americans appear to actually thrive on adversity, according to a study published this week that reached the conclusion after researching the nation's biggest economic downturn. Life expectancy during the peak years of the Great Depression increased 6.2 years -- from 57.1 years in 1929 to 63.3 years in 1933 -- according to University of Michigan researchers Jose A. Tapia Granados and Ana Diez Roux. The increase applied to men and women, whites and non-whites. The team crunched data from the ...

Confident that they have proven intent to kill, Michigan prosecutors rested their case in the murder trial of Dr. Jack Kevorkian after playing the videotape of Thomas Youk's death and calling the medical examiner and investigators in the case.

Iggy Pop invented punk rock. That's how cool he is. His songs have been covered by the likes of Guns N' Roses, REM, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Sex Pistols. He is the wildest wild man of rock and his four-decade career has been marked by drug addiction, self mutilation and onstage nudity -- and at 61 years old he is showing no signs of growing old gracefully. Born on April 21, 1947, in Muskegon, Michigan, James ...