*Harbert, Mich., is a crossroads town about 60 miles east of Chicago across the lake. To get there you have to drive through the gritty desolation of South Chicago, through Gary, where in autumn the blast furnaces at night make a glowering sheet lightning, through the smoke of Michigan City and into clean air again, along Lake Michigan behind some of the biggest sand dunes in the world. Carl Sandburg's place is on top of a dune a mile or ...

In 1960 chocolate-skinned Robert Sobukwe, 38, head of the black nationalist Pan-African Congress, was sentenced to three years in jail for "incitement to riot." As his release date drew near last week, Sobukwe, a slim onetime university lecturer, was hustled from the maximum-security prison in Pretoria to a bleak detention camp on Robben Island in Table Bay, six miles from Cape Town. There he learned, just the day before he was to receive freedom, that South Africa's Parliament had rammed through a ...

The face Macau shows to the world today may be its 29 sparkling casinos, but one of the last links with the city's gambling past can still be found two miles away from the main strip, in a plastic reproduction of Rome's Coliseum that stands out amid the dowdy surroundings of its working-class neighborhood. Inside, six sinewy greyhounds stand shivering on an oval race track, waiting for a mud-stained mechanical rabbit to give them something to chase. ...

Downplaying the old IQ numbers racket Though Actress Judy Holliday specialized in playing dumb blondes, legend has it that she possessed a towering 172 IQ. Spiro Agnew says his is 135, which puts him well into the ranks of the intellectually superior. South Korea's Kim Ung-Yong, a 14-year-old prodigy who was speaking four languages and solving integral calculus problems at age four, is said to tip the mental scales at 210, worth a mention in the Guinness Book of World ...

The use of rubber bullets by South African police against striking public-sector workers in Soweto — erstwhile cauldron of antiapartheid protest — carries a symbolic significance that will send shockwaves through the country. But it also marks a milestone in the slow transition by the ruling African National Congress from being a rebel movement that reflexively backed striking workers to being a government that can't afford to heed their demands. Police opened fire with ...

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has never shied away from talking about his religious faith. So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that he invoked "God's law" throughout his long, rambling press conference on June 24 — after going missing in Buenos Aires for six days — to confess his yearlong extramarital affair with an Argentine woman. But in acknowledging his infidelity, Sanford was actually admitting that he had broken a state law: adultery is ...

Ever since Yoon Hyuk-joo, a 16-year-old in Seoul, started playing the popular computer game StarCraft eight years ago, studying has taken the backseat. For six hours every day in dim, smoky Internet cafs known in the South Korean capital as "PC Bangs," Yoon leads a squad of soldiers in Battlefield Online and then maims the undead in Counter-Strike: Zombies. His idols aren't your usual baseball players or pop-music stars: the high school student looks to inspiration from ...

Much attention has been spent on the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori to be president of Peru. After all, she is the daughter of a controversial former president who now sits in prison. However, according to polls, she is running neck-and-neck with Ollanta Humala, a political figure who evokes as much controversy and, at times, hatred as the Fujimori family does. Humala, 48, is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Peruvian Army. The military was his life for 20 ...

It was a quiet evening in the sleepy little town of Bien Hoa 20 miles north of Saigon, base camp for the South Vietnamese crack 7th Infantry Division and its eight-man U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group. The presence of the Americans symbolized one of the main reasons why South Viet Nam, five years ago a new nation with little life expectancy, is still independent and free and getting stronger all the time—to the growing chagrin of Communists in neighboring North Viet Nam. Since the beginning of 1959,Communist infiltrators ...

While devastating for severely afflicted children and their families, autism has long been assumed to be relatively uncommon, appearing in perhaps 1% of all kids. But that figure was a rough estimate at best, based largely on the population of children who have already received a diagnosis of the disorder. Discovering the true prevalence of autism would require a large-scale study of an entire population--not just those who showed up at a doctor's office. That's exactly what a team of ...