James Phung saw Phone Booth before you did. What's more, he saw it for free, in the comfort of his private home-screening room. Phung isn't a movie star or a Hollywood insider; he's a junior at the University of Texas who makes $8 an hour at the campus computer lab. But many big-budget Hollywood movies have their North American premieres in his humble off-campus apartment. Like millions of other people, Phung downloads movies for ...

This week hundreds of Roma in Italy watched as their long-established homes in Milan were bulldozed to the ground. The act of racism came just weeks after France evicted Roma from their camps and forced them to board flights bound for Romania and Bulgaria, where they experience seemingly inescapable poverty and hate. Europe's largest and most widespread minority continues to experience school segregation in Slovakia, and targeted acts of violence, including murder, in Hungary. Yet their life ...

By legend Texans are a grandiose breed with more than the natural share of megalomaniacs. But University of Texas Biochemist Earl B. Dawson thinks that he detects an uncommon pocket of psychological adjustment around El Paso. The reason, says Dawson, lies in the deep wells from which the city draws its water supply.According to Dawson's studies of urine samples from 3,000 Texans, El Paso's water is heavily laced with lithium, a tranquilizing chemical widely used in the treatment of manic depression and other psychiatric disorders. He notes ...

It was exactly ten minutes after seven on Thursday evening, June 12, that Mrs. Lela Bass, 73, stood combing her long gray hair in the backyard of her white frame house in Port Neches, Texas. Casually she turned and saw for the first time an eerie outline etched in the plastic of her backdoor screen: a bearded, long-haired man with a halo, looking east toward a fig tree in the yard. It was, she was certain, Jesus Christ. Neighbors spread ...

Jodie Hannaman grew up in Houston, a city as fond of formal weddings as of barbecues and rodeos. So it was saying something at Duschene Academy, her Roman Catholic girls' school, that Hannaman was chosen as Most Likely to Be Married First. But her teenage fantasies of buttercream frosting and silky bridesmaids dresses first began to crack with her high school sweetheart. He dated her for more than a decade before she finally got tired of waiting for a marriage ...

In tiny San Diego , seat of Duval County in the heart of the south Texas triangle, a team of sheriffs, marshals, and Texas Rangers was closing in on its man. Then it spied the fugitive's 1969 Chrysler Imperial at the edge of a quiet pasture, and the search was over. Slumped over the steering wheel, a bullet in his brain, was George B. Parr, 74, the "Duke of Duval," an affable, unimposing man who for decades reigned as one ...

Until he saw the light, Jon Taggart--6 ft. 5 in., jeans, white cowboy hat, Texas twang--was a rancher like any other in the southern Great Plains. He crowded his cattle onto pasture sprayed with weed killers and fertilizers. When they were half grown, he shipped them in diesel-fueled trucks to huge feedlots. There they were stuffed with corn and soy--pesticide treated, of course--and implanted with synthetic hormones to make them grow faster. To prevent disease, they were given antibiotics. They ...

When Crystal Byrd's second child was born, the doctors urged her to place her baby to her breast. Byrd declined. She had already decided, months earlier, that she would not breast-feed. It was a lifestyle choice, says Byrd, 33, a stay-at-home mom in Cedar Creek Lake, Texas. "I'm a huge fan of breast milk, just not of nursing," she says. Byrd says she tried breast-feeding her first child, who is now 12, and lasted nine weeks before ...

FORT HOOD, Texas — Military officials were starting Friday to piece together what may have pushed an Army psychiatrist trained to help soldiers in distress to turn on his comrades in a shooting rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 30 in Texas. The suspected shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was on a ventilator and unconscious in a hospital after being shot four times during the shootings at the Army's sprawling Fort Hood, post ...

A year after beating breast cancer, Peter Criss, a founding member of the rock band KISS, calls himself "the luckiest man in the planet." While some men feel embarrassed because of "this macho crap," Criss said surviving breast cancer -- yes, men get it, too -- was actually a blessing. He was treated before the tumor could spread and said he's speaking about male breast cancer now -- during National Breast Cancer Awareness month -- to raise the profile of ...