On the night of March 8 Yasser Makram was on his way home from work, his pick-up truck full of garbage as he turned up the winding dirt road on the edge of Egypt's capital, to approach his home in the crowded Cairo slum known popularly as Garbage City. As he inched around a curve, he saw a swarm of people running towards the truck in his rearview mirror. "I didn't know what was happening," he says. ...

Even the most stable brain operates just a millimeter from madness. In such a finely tuned cognitive engine, only a small part must start to sputter before the whole machine comes crashing down. When that happens, reason and function come undone, rarely as dramatically as in the neurochemical storm that is obsessive-compulsive disorder. Say you leave work at 6 p.m. for what should be a 12-minute drive home. Say just as you're pulling onto the street, a child on a ...

I checked my disguise in the mirror: a ski hat and sunglasses did a good job of concealing my identity, even if I did look absurd. Normally I would have shared a laugh with my staff about this, but what we were doing that day was hardly funny. A few blocks away, at a tobacco shop, I spent $80 to buy several packages of drugs that when snorted have a similar effect as ecstasy but are much more toxic. There ...

Michael Jackson's music sales keep soaring as fans purchased more than 800,000 of his albums last week, Billboard magazine said. Jackson's albums hold all 10 top positions on Billboard's top pop catalog albums chart, according Nielsen SoundScan sales data released Wednesday. That feat broke a record Jackson set last week when he had eight albums on that chart. Jackson's albums are not eligible for the Billboard 200 chart, which is for newer albums. Jackson's "Number Ones" ...