The slopes of the Rockies beckoned for spring skiing. The airfare seemed reasonable enough on short notice: New York City to Denver for $386 round-trip. But United wasn't finished trying to pry money out of me. At the self-service check-in kiosk, I was offered a chance to upgrade to Economy Plus for $40. Did I have bags to check? The first was $25, the second $45. Did I want to shortcut the security line and board early with the swells, ...

The "all-American drug" has hit like a blizzard, with casualties rising. C17H21NO4. A derivative of Erythroxylon coca. Otherwise known as cocaine, coke, C, snow, blow, toot, leaf, flake, freeze, happy dust, nose candy, Peruvian, lady, white girl. A vegetable alkaloid derived from leaves of the coca plant. Origin: eastern slopes of the Andes mountains. Availability: Anywhere, U.S.A. Cost: $2,200 per oz., five times the price of gold. Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug. No ...

In a valley high in the Wakhan Mountains of Afghanistan, a hunter several weeks ago waded through snowdrifts to check his traps and found that he had snared one of the rarest creatures alive: a snow leopard. If a naturalist had seen the leopard, he or she would have focused on its snowy fur with black, half-moon markings and its white goatee. A naturalist would have known that it is a solitary, elusive creature, a night hunter that ...

On July 19, 2007, Google reported earnings that were lower than what analysts had expected, and the tech company's stock price dropped 5% — but Raj Rajaratnam made $9 million. Allegedly, the New York hedge-fund manager had gotten a tip that Google's earnings would be below expectations, so he was prepared with short positions and put options that would become more valuable as the stock price fell. The alleged source of the tip: an employee at an investor-relations ...

Keith Felch is admittedly a big guy, but more than a few super-fit cyclists in Southern California have been left wondering how that dude just went flying by. And then his wife, Mary, comes motoring past. "They stare, like how can a girl go past me," she says, laughing. It takes the other riders a few seconds but then they figure it out. They have electric motors. The Felches, who live in Aliso Viejo, California, used to drive everywhere, except ...

There I was, trying to wedge a microphone under my arm while simultaneously pressing colored buttons on a plastic guitar with my left hand, strumming it with my right hand and crooning, "I want to hold your hand ..." So while it's theoretically possible, "The Beatles: Rock Band" -- whose 9/9/09 release coincides with the debut of remastered versions of the Beatles catalog -- should not be played alone. Besides the impracticality of multiple-instrument play without the right equipment, there ...

Facing a recent erosion of public support for health-care overhaul, President Obama lashed out at his opponents Saturday for spreading "outrageous myths" on the Internet, television, and at town hall forums. Republican leaders, in turn, said it was Obama who is guilty of playing "fast and loose with the facts." They repeated their assertion that the president's proposed government-funded public health insurance option would destroy the current private insurance-based system. "I'm glad that so many are engaged," Obama said in ...

The following five sites have proven the most consistently useful for the editors of Budget Travel, who do thousands of searches a year. Dohop.com Strictly for booking plane trips entirely outside of the U.S., such as a flight between Paris and Rome. The site runs simultaneous searches of multiple airports serving the same city -- five airports in London, for instance -- and it retrieves fares from no-frills independent carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair, which many better-known travel sites overlook. ...

Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009 Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring ...

German prosecutors are investigating Porsche's former chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking and other people close to the sports carmaker, alleging market manipulation and passing on inside information in their failed takeover attempt of Volkswagen. Prosecutors in Stuttgart on Thursday raided the headquarters of Porsche, which recently agreed to merge with VW after an attempt to acquire the much bigger rival had pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy. A Porsche spokesman rebuffed the prosecutor's allegations. He confirmed that Mr Wiedeking and ...