Anne Adriance thought her architect was kidding. She couldn't fathom the idea of building a 3,000-sq.-ft. coastal retreat in Maine out of cargo containers. Yes, the same rectangular shipping containers that you see piled high in ports worldwide are being recycled as homes, office buildings and even traveling museum exhibits. Architectural use of the containers doubled in 2010 compared with the previous year, according to Barry Naef, founder of the Intermodal Steel Building Units Association. And ...

The post office is gone. The school is gone. City Hall is gone. Most of the churches are gone. Nearly every building in Smithville, Mississippi is gone — or so heavily damaged they will have to be demolished. The devastation from last week's F5 tornado is so widespread, so absolute, that it's easier to tally what remains: The telephone company. Coker's Han-D-Mart. And an unshakeable sense of faith. Sunday morning, amid the droning of chainsaws, an estimated 500 ...

What did it take to wake up the Rip Van Winkle box office, asleep for the past 20 or more weeks? Just some fast cars, faster women, a bank vault dragged through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, more wasting of fuel than in the BP oil spill and two bald giants — Vin Diesel and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson — kicking the crap out of each other. Fast Five, fifth in the Fast and the Furious ...

Men can join the ministry, but how can Protestant women give their lives to serving God? One way is to join a sisterhood. Today, although few laymen are aware of it, more than 60,000 women, mostly in Europe, have taken up the religious life within Protestantism, in organizations that range from convents of veiled nuns to mother houses of deaconesses devoted to public service. Like Roman Catholic sisters and nuns, Protestant women seeking the religious life have a wide range ...

When the main office of Lebanon's Intra Bank reopened last month to pay off holders of small savings accounts, hopes rose that the country's biggest bank might soon be out of the crisis that had shuttered it and slowed much of the country's business since October. Last week Intra received a new setback, this time from the courts. Hoping to stave off liquidation and gain time to arrange new financing, Intra had asked Lebanon's Commercial Court for a three-year grace ...

Once there was a house-organ named System. The Shaw-Walker Furniture Co. of Chicago handed it around to the employes. Outsiders liked it so well that Arch Wilkinson Shaw found it would make money. He changed its name to System, The Magazine of Business, broadened its appeal, became Publisher Shaw. Circulalation increased still more. So Publisher Shaw made two magazines of it, called one System, the other The Magazine of Business. Both were monthlies. The first concerned itself with Office Management, ...

Birds of a feather flock to Rio, and so do audiences everywhere. Fox's 3-D animated carnival, the high flyer at last week's box office, saw nothing but blue skies its second time around; it earned $26.8 million, according to early studio estimates, to win the Easter weekend at North American movie theaters. The colorful love story of two blue macaws also keeps charming the rest of the world: it has amassed $204.7 million in foreign climes ...

When Lyndon Johnson launched his War On Poverty in 1964, he gave the Office of Economic Opportunity command of ten campaigns* to rescue the nation from want. Almost from the start, however, the antipoverty warriors have been fighting a losing battle on Capitol Hill. By now, a large segment of the Congress seems determined to divest the OEO of its generalship.Whatever praise OEO receives, its defeats—admittedly not infrequent—reap salvos of abuse. Stung by growing senatorial criticism, the agency last week issued an upbeat report claiming that nearly 3,000,000 ...

The cartoon birds soared; the slashers got diced and sliced. Rio, the 3-D animated feature about two macaws that fall in love during a Brazilian carnival, flew tantalizingly close to an elusive box-office ceiling with an announced first weekend of $40 million, according to early estimates by the movie's producers, 20th Century-Fox and Blue Sky Studios. That number was more than double the take of Rio's nearest competitor Scre4m, The Weinstein Company's reboot of its '90s horror ...

On a bright February morning in Harlem, Jean Sanders shook Bill Clinton's hand. Just one week out of prison, Sanders had risen early and put on a suit to come uptown from Brooklyn and apply for low-income housing--one of the first stops after scratch for former felons starting over. Clinton happened to be looking for office space in the same building that day. Plunging into the frenzy of cameras and adoring well-wishers, Sanders jostled and sweet-talked his way to the ...