On paper, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for United Nations ambassador has much in common with another boundary-breaking, African-American, Stanford-affiliated, female foreign policy expert with the same surname. But the similarities with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice end there. Susan Rice brings to the U.N. job a career devotion to African affairs and eight years of experience in the Clinton administration. Fast Facts: • Age 44, Rice is married to Canadian journalist Ian Cameron, executive producer of ABC's This Week ...

No qualms vexed John Kaplan eight years ago when, as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco, he put drug pushers behind bars. A nonsmoking teetotaler, he had little sympathy for drug users of any kind. Later he became a law professor at Stanford University, and the California legislature hired him to help revise the state's drug laws. Then a surprising thing happened: the legislature fired Kaplan and four other professors working on the project because, after three years of ...

Fadi Quran is the face of the new Middle East. He is 23, a graduate of Stanford University, with a double major in physics and international relations. He is a Palestinian who has returned home to start an alternative-energy company and see what he can do to help create a Palestinian state. He identifies with neither of the two preeminent Palestinian political factions, Hamas and Fatah. His allegiance is to the Facebook multitudes who orchestrated the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and who ...

Throughout the U.S., students are getting out their No. 2 pencils, ready to endure a stress-packed four hours of bubbling in answers in the Dec. 12 administration of the ACT. Some 1.5 million students are expected to take the test this school year. Standardized tests have been a scourge of student life in America for more than 50 years, but it's fair to say they're more pressure-packed and ubiquitous than ever before. The ACT and its counterpart, ...

Though the ranks of the Whiz Kids in the Defense Department are proliferating, five stand out for the scope and strength of their influence:Alain C. Enthoven, 31, intense and dark-suited, looks more like a young college professor than a weapons analyst. Yet, as deputy comptroller for systems analysis, this young economist must lay bare the calculations on which many defense decisions are made. After graduating from Stanford with honors in economics, spending two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and getting his Ph.D. from ...

It was 1969 and a busy year for making history: Woodstock, the Miracle Mets, men on the moon -- and something less celebrated but arguably more significant, the birth of the Internet.

You know that fat in your body you wish you didn't have? It turns out those cells could be used to create stem cells that one day may be able to cure disease. Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the millions of fat cells removed during liposuction can be easily and quickly turned into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, more easily than the skin cells that researchers used when the first iPS cells were ...

Maria Sharapova continued her rehabilitation from injury with a comfortable victory at the L.A. Women's Tennis Championships on an opening day that saw early exits for three of the four seeded players in action. The unseeded former world No. 1 improved her record since returning from nine months out with shoulder problems to 14-5 as she crushed Australia's Jarmila Groth 6-0 6-4 on Monday night. The Russian, who was blown away by Venus Williams in the quarterfinals at Stanford on ...

Michael Jackson suffered from severe bouts of insomnia and pleaded for a powerful sedative despite knowing its harmful effects, a nutritionist who worked with the singer said Tuesday. Cherilyn Lee, a registered nurse who first met Jackson in January to treat his children for a common cold, said she rejected his requests for Diprivan and informed him of the side effects. "I told him this medication is not safe," Lee said. "He said, 'I just want to get some sleep. ...

Texas billionaire Allen Stanford was taken into custody Thursday night on a fraud-related charge in Stafford, Virginia, the FBI said. FBI Supervisory Special Agent M.A. Myers would not provide further details on Stanford's arrest, but his attorney, Dick DeGuerin, told CNN that Stanford had surrendered to agents. Stanford, accused of a $9.2 billion fraud by U.S. regulators, denied all wrongdoing in a tearful interview in April during which he threatened to punch his questioner in the mouth. "I would die ...