Is CIA morale going to suffer from the Justice Department's opening of an investigation into the agency's use of harsh interrogation methods under the Bush Administration? To a degree, yes. But there's a stronger case that the CIA was damaged the moment the White House picked it to conduct the interrogation of "high value" al-Qaeda prisoners. What everyone seems to forget is that the CIA is a civilian intelligence organization never designed, trained, or staffed to interrogate prisoners ...

College students used to complain about dining-hall mystery meat. Their new gripe? Puny e-mail inboxes. Students have been howling that school e-mail accounts are too small to handle their daily deluge of mail and attachments. To address that problem, a growing number of colleges and universities are outsourcing their e-mail. The companies swooping in to manage student accounts for free Google and Microsoft. Like search, software and operating systems, campuses are a burgeoning battleground for the tech titans. Google now manages e-mail for more than ...

For a while there, it looked like the doomsayers would be proved right. On July 29, the Shanghai Composite Index lost as much as 7.7% of its value before ending the day down 5% on record-breaking trading volume of $43.3 billion. The sell-off was the largest one-day decline in Chinese stocks in eight months, and set off panic purging in Hong Kong, where the Hang Seng Index lost 2.4%. Even the U.S. got dinged, with the Dow Jones Industrial ...

Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada, made a startling prediction in the pages of Science in 2006: if overfishing continued at then-current rates, he said, the world would essentially run out of seafood by 2048. Worm's bold analysis whipped up controversy in the usually pacific world of marine science — one colleague, Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, called the Science study "mindbogglingly stupid." But Worm held fast to his predictions: that the oceans ...

In the last 50 years, people with mental problems have spent untold millions of hours in therapists' offices, and millions more reading self-help books, trying to turn negative thoughts like "I never do anything right" into positive ones: "I can succeed." For many people — including well-educated, highly trained therapists, for whom "cognitive restructuring" is a central goal — the very definition of psychotherapy is the process of changing self-defeating attitudes into constructive ones. But was Norman Vincent Peale ...

The "good" news in the housing market is that more homes are selling. The number of existing homes sold in May was 2.4% higher than the number sold in April, which itself was higher than the number sold in March. Yes, prices are still falling, thanks largely to foreclosures and short sales, but at least the market is starting to show signs of life. Just don't pull out the noisemakers quite yet. The segment of the market that's ...

Voters in Nashville, Tennessee -- a city that has seen a dramatic increase in its immigrant population -- rejected a measure Thursday that would have made English the only language used for government business in its metropolitan area. With all 173 precincts reporting, 41,752 voters, or nearly 57 percent, voted against the proposed amendment, with 32,144 voters supporting it, according to unofficial results posted on the Nashville city government Web site. "No person shall have a right to government ...

At every stop during his recent trips abroad, President Obama went out of his way to assure observers that he is the un-Bush: a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, with both his feet firmly planted in the reality-based world. (CNN) -- At every stop during his recent trips abroad, President Obama went out of his way to assure observers that he is the un-Bush: a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, with both his feet firmly planted in the reality-based ...

U.S. and European officials insist they don't pay ransoms to pirates. And why would they? Shipping and insurance companies now routinely pay ransoms of millions of dollars, dropping sack-loads of cash from airplanes into the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden, despite assertions from politicians back home that the money is fueling the rampant piracy. Here is how the system works, according to kidnap-and-ransom experts who agreed to talk to TIME: Within minutes of a vessel being seized by ...

Indolent cows languidly chewing their cud while befuddled motorists honk and maneuver their vehicles around them are images as stereotypically Indian as saffron-clad holy men and the Taj Mahal. Now, however, India's ubiquitous cows — of which there are 283 million, more than anywhere else in the world — have assumed a more menacing role as they become part of the climate change debate. By burping, belching and excreting copious amounts of methane — a greenhouse gas that traps 20 ...