Will Smith plots his strategy for world domination from the head of the kingly wooden dining table in his sweeping Calabasas, Calif., home. "We call it Global Willing," says Smith of his travel itinerary to warm up the globe for his next film, I Am Legend, in which he plays the only survivor of a man-made plague that has wiped out humanity. "We're going to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Korea ..." It's the morning after Thanksgiving, and Smith, 39, is sleepy-eyed ...

"Ba-Boom!" Leroy Hayes describes sitting in his seventh-grade English class at Philadelphia's Shoemaker Middle School when he heard the explosion. It was startling but not necessarily surprising, he says. Crazy stuff happened all the time at Shoemaker. Once, he recalls, a student urinated into a soda bottle during class and threw it in a math instructor's face. Crazy stuff. After hearing the big explosion, Hayes and his friends rushed out of the room and discovered that someone had set off ...

The spectacular success of Indians in the U.S. smashes old stereotypes and adds a dash of spice to the American melting pot By ANTHONY SPAETH When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, his parents--both immigrants from India, both physicians--didn't hesitate to pile on the pressure. There was simply an assumption that I'd come in first in my class, he recalls. He was also expected to follow them into medicine. When he ...

A sweeping study released Wednesday covering 60 years of sexual abuse allegations against the U.S. Roman Catholic church identified no definitive cause for the crisis and proposed changes that would require radical reforms to its hierarchy. The 300-page report is the product of five years of work by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. It comes at a time when the Catholic church continues to be rocked by the trauma of clergy ...

Six years ago, Luz Cuevas heard an explosion upstairs in her house and ran into her 10-day-old daughter's bedroom. The baby had vanished. Cuevas looked up and noticed the window was open, which struck her as odd on a cold winter night. Before she could make sense of the empty crib, she noticed a small fire that quickly engulfed the whole bedroom. Investigators determined that it swallowed the remains of the infant as well. Cuevas never believed it had. ...

One of the best Roman Catholic priests I've ever known, Father Berns, was a widower. He had a mind as broad as his faith was deep; he served a dry martini but never a dry homily. And I've always wondered how large a role the gloriously messy life experience of a wife and children played in making him such an unusually engaging, and engaged, Catholic cleric. The answer, of course, is that there is no real answer, especially ...

The Vietnam War has claimed its victims in various dreadful ways, but the death last week of Lewis B. Puller Jr. seemed particularly haunting. Puller, the son of the most decorated member of the Marine Corps in its history, served in Vietnam as a Marine combat leader. Both his legs and part of his hands were blown off when he stepped on a booby trap. He lived, and he became an attorney at the Pentagon and a respected veterans activist. ...

Jennifer Valdivia scooped up the baseball after it sailed into the right-field stands. The 12-year-old smiled and giggled over the keepsake from her first Major League ballgame. She'd have to sue to get the ball back. This is the story of a baseball and the big leagues, of a young girl, a slugger and a lawsuit. It's about another stain on America's pastime -- commercialism colliding with a kid's innocent joy. Jennifer's big catch was the 200th home run for ...

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission issued a finding of probable cause Tuesday that racism was involved in the decision last June by a suburban Philadelphia swim club to revoke privileges of a largely minority day care center. The commission ordered monetary damages for humiliation and embarrassment and a civil penalty of not more than $50,000. The decision noted that none of the club's 155 paid members this year was African-American. Last year, according to the decision, there were "179 paid ...

Actor Patrick Swayze's achievements include several feature films such as "Dirty Dancing" and "Ghost," as well as living with advanced pancreatic cancer for longer than most patients. That Swayze, who died Monday at age 57, survived nearly two years with the condition is "quite an accomplishment," Dr. George Fisher, an oncologist who treated the star at Stanford Hospitals and Clinics, told CNN's Larry King on Tuesday. Fisher revealed in early March 2008 that the actor was fighting pancreatic ...