Google makes one of the world's leading mobile operating systems. It does e-mail and an office suite and photo sharing and Internet phone service, and does them all well. It's even getting into solar power and is trying to invent the self-driving car. But for all its far-flung ambition, the company isn't synonymous with many things. It's synonymous with one thing: its namesake search engine, the business that started it all. At a press conference in San ...

AS the law now stands, a U.S. citizen who has a substantial amount of cash that he wants to hide from the Internal Revenue Service has no real problem. He can take it out of the country, entirely legally, deposit it in a secret Swiss bank account, then arrange to have the bank return it as a foreign "loan"—and defy the IRS to say it is not. That is only one of the milder variants of a sophisticated array of ...

First, Terry Bigley watched the tornado overtake his television screen as it ripped through eastern Kansas toward Joplin, Mo., where he lived on the east side in an apartment with his wife. "They had a big picture of it," he says of the local news station. "And I mean this was a humungous tornado. They told everybody to take cover. Then it was right on us." The Joplin tornado and a less powerful one that wreaked havoc in ...

What a fascinating time to be a gay man in the U.S. military. This time last year, I was sure the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was here to stay for the next 2 to 3 years. I never thought by now I'd be in a unit where almost everyone has received post-repeal training. While not entirely satisfied with the training process, I believe the overall message has started to stick: lesbian and gay troops are ...

Before China's dairy industry imploded in a swirl of tainted products, milk was a cash cow. Investors flocked to buy stock from leading dairies Mengniu, Yili and Bright as a way to tap into the growing purchasing power of Chinese consumers and the country's rising dairy exports, which totaled $232 million last year. In rural China, poor farmers scrimped to buy cattle to boost their incomes, becoming part of the food chain serving the Chinese middle class's ...

The war he had helped launch and justify raged on, the enemy's army had swept through his state capital only hours before and his successor as Virginia's Governor still hadn't been selected by the legislature, but Thomas Jefferson was going home, convinced that his work for America was done. It was the summer of 1781, five years since the July in Philadelphia when the author of the Declaration of Independence had, in two inspired weeks of writing energized by years ...

The killing of President Park raises questions and tensions It was one of the most bizarre killings of a head of state in history. Late last week President Park Chung Hee, 61, strongman ruler of the Republic of South Korea since 1961, was shot at a dinner party by the chief of his own intelligence service in what was first described by a government spokesman as an "accident." Later, officials revealed that it was a well-planned assassination. Within hours of ...

Last Monday, the Navy was the hero across America, for the exploits of its SEALs in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. This Monday, the sea service was zero in certain quarters for saying it will permit same-sex marriages within its hallowed chapels. It marks the first of what is likely to be many thunderclaps associated with the lifting of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on openly gay men and women serving in the U.S. military. Navy ...

General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, walked into the celebration of Saudi Arabia's national day in Washington D.C. and was immediately posed with the question of the day. "Is it true?" Hayden was asked by a Time reporter. "Nope," Hayden said, immediately adding to the accumulating statements on the paucity of evidence that Osama bin Laden was dead. About an hour before, the Saudi government itself declared that it "has no evidence to support recent media ...

Affirmative action is rooted in an uncomfortable reality: that to remedy the effects of past discrimination against blacks and women it is sometimes necessary to discriminate against white men. The Government shied from stating the proposition so boldly, but beginning with the Nixon Administration it put the principle into practice. Throughout the '70s Washington pressed employers to set explicit goals and timetables for the hiring of minorities, even if that meant tacitly accepting "reverse discrimination." Ronald Reagan has tried to ...