An attractive American student on trial for murder can count on support 6,000 miles away in her native Seattle. There, one of Amanda Knox's most vocal backers is attorney Anne Bremner, who has offered her counsel pro bono to the accused's family and who is a spokesperson for Friends of Amanda. On Friday, she sat down with TIME to over the case against Knox, who took the witness stand on Friday in her murder trial. Video footage ...

Henry Joseph Madden was a good student and track team member in high school, but he had a secret: He sometimes wore his mother's pantyhose and underwear under his clothes. "I really wanted to be a girl so bad, and that was one way for me to satisfy those feelings," Madden said. "I always felt like someone was looking over my shoulder." The desire to be female never went away. At age 48, Madden confessed these feelings to a doctor, ...

He was black and white, the perfect gift for the 6-year-old daughter of Donna and Ronald Gleason. His name was Tommy. The black and white tuxedo cat was one of a dozen pets that have been killed and mutilated recently by someone in the Miami area, police said. The Gleasons do not want their daughter's name to be revealed. Donna Gleason asked the child to leave the room before telling CNN the gruesome details of what happened to their ...

Stem-cell science is a fast-moving field. Just three years since a Japanese researcher first reprogrammed ordinary skin cells into stem cells without the use of embryos, scientists at a Massachusetts biotech company have repeated the feat, only this time with a new method that creates the first stem cells safe enough for human use. The achievement brings the potentially lifesaving technology one step closer to real treatments for disease. Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell ...

Mad cow disease, SARS and now swine flu: some diseases grab the headlines. But thousands of people worldwide suffer from very rare conditions, many of which few people have ever heard of. From the Alice in Wonderland syndrome that might have inspired Lewis Carroll, to the disease that may have sent an English King mad, we take a look at some of these obscure illnesses. Morgellons According to the Morgellons Research Foundation, crawling, biting and stinging ...

A Singapore man undergoing treatment for cancer was detained for four hours by U.S. immigration officials after the drug he was taking caused his fingerprints to disappear. Now, the unidentified man's oncologist is asking patients taking the commonly used drug, capecitabine, to carry a doctor's note when they travel to the United States. The oncologist, Eng-Huat Tan of the National Cancer Center in Singapore, described the encounter in a letter published in the current issue of the cancer journal Annals ...

Although you probably use it every day, here's some interesting trivia you may not know about deodorant. 1. Be thankful for your foul body odor. According to anthropologist Louis Leakey, it might be responsible for early man's survival. Leakey's theory claims that most predators avoided feasting on humans because our body odor was "too repugnant." 2. Not only did the ancient Egyptians give us pyramids and flush toilets, they also pioneered the field of deodorants. Egyptians were the first to ...

Nearly 6.2 million students in the United States between the ages of 16 and 24 in 2007 dropped out of high school, fueling what a report released Tuesday called "a persistent high school dropout crisis." The total represents 16 percent of all people in the United States in that age range in 2007. Most of the dropouts were Latino or black, according to a report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and ...

In its opening weekend, "The Haunting in Connecticut" scared and thrilled millions of moviegoers across the country. The film, which earned $23 million to finish No. 2 at the box office, emphasizes psychological horror over slasher film blood 'n' gore, which its audience apparently appreciated. But Virginia Madsen, who plays Sara Campbell in the film, confessed that, while filming, fear was not just reserved for the screen. "We all stayed in this big, old hotel which was kind of ...

The Israeli military's firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas during the Gaza offensive "was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes," Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report on Wednesday. "In Gaza, the Israeli military didn't just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops," said Fred Abrahams, a HRW senior emergencies researcher. "It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren't in the area and ...