From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, ...

If the Three Mile Island atomic reactor near Harrisburg hadn't melted down 30 years ago this Saturday...well, there probably would have been an accident somewhere else. The entire U.S. nuclear industry was melting down in the 1970s, irradiated by spectacular cost overruns, interminable delays and public outrage. Forbes later called its collapse "the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale." The TMI fiasco was a scary cultural moment, coming just two weeks after ...

The news raced through Silicon Valley like a burst of electrons. Steven Jobs, 33, co-founder of Apple Computer and one of the world's most famous entrepreneurs, was set to unveil the machine he had been laboring on since he stormed out of Apple nearly three years ago. The computer press, having first trumpeted the device's imminent debut last October, then again in February, then March, then May, was crackling anew with anticipation. This time it was certain. On June 15, ...

First, a disclaimer: unlike some of my tech-pundit peers, I don't claim to be uncannily prescient. Actually, I revel in the industry's glorious unpredictability. One of 2010's biggest stories involved a tech blog buying the top-secret, next-generation iPhone after an Apple engineer left it behind at a bar. In another, Microsoft canceled a much publicized line of phones two months after it introduced it. If you'd predicted either of these fascinating sagas a year ago, I would ...

New York -- U.S. law enforcement officials have found a manual on the operation of cropdusting equipment while searching suspected terrorist hideouts, government sources tell TIME magazine in an issue out on Monday, Sept. 24th. The discovery has added to concerns among government counterterrorism experts that the bin Laden conspirators may have been planning — or may still be planning —to disperse biological or chemical agents from a cropdusting plane normally used for agricultural purposes. Among the belongings ...

Water, not oil, is the most precious fluid in our lives, the substance from which all life on the earth has sprung and continues to depend. If we run short of oil and other fossil fuels, we can use alternative energy sources. If we have no clean, drinkable water, we are doomed. As the 6 billion passengers aboard Spaceship Earth enter a complex new century, few issues are as fundamental as water. We are falling far short of the most ...

As the news of Osama bin Laden's death moves from exhilarating novelty to accepted reality, one group in the U.S. government will emerge as key to the win: the Central Intelligence Agency. From the earliest identification of a Bin Laden courier, the pursuit of leads, the assessment of evidence and the execution of the raid in Abottabad, Pakistan, the CIA can rightly claim the most credit for finding and killing the world's most wanted terrorist. Taking credit for ...

France: In Search of Bin Laden's Urologist Osama Bin Laden may be in less danger from smart bombs than from kidney stones, according to a report in the French daily Le Figaro. In a report picked up throughout Europe the Paris paper and Radio France International claimed the Saudi terrorist checked himself into Dubai's American Hospital in July, where he spent 10 days undergoing urgent treatment to his ailing renal system. "Intelligence sources believe that bin Laden ...

The Taliban executed a daring prison break in Kandahar early Monday morning, when at least 476 political prisoners and another 125 other inmates escaped through a 1,050 ft. long tunnel, U.S. Army sources based in the Arghandab River Valley, just north of the restive city, told TIME. The escape threatens security gains made over the winter, coming just weeks before the start of the traditional spring fighting season. Indeed, 60 of the escapees are believed to be ...

Since his election, President Barack Obama has emphasized the importance of developing new sources of energy and cultivating the jobs that will come with them. "I am convinced that whoever builds a clean energy economy, whoever is at the forefront of that, is going to own the 21st-century global economy," Obama told a bipartisan meeting of governors at the White House on Wednesday. But, increasingly, the President's new clean economy seems to rely on old sources of ...