On Sept. 16, 2010, a team of U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigators arrived at a Shanghai purveyor of dough, macaroni and baby cereal. Federal authorities had long suspected that Shanghai Chuangi Food Co.'s plants were unsanitary. Many of its products, like soup base, had been shipped to the port of New York and ultimately placed in an unknown number of goods that ended up on kitchen tables in the U.S. That's why federal authorities assigned to one of the ...

Every year around this time, millions of American kids graduate from high school, throw massive parties and get drunk. Police end up arresting a lot of these kids, causing them legal trouble for months or even years. So, every year around this time, there's a new debate about whether we should lower or even abolish the legal drinking age. What's different this time is that an entire organization — a conspicuously sober group led by a ...

It started out as an average April day, but as Dermot Tatlow drove home, he received a call that would lead to a global campaign to save his son's life. When he heard the bad news, he knew immediately what his family was up against. "I pulled over and took a deep breath," Tatlow says. "We thought we were out of the woods." Tatlow's 4-year-old son, Devan, had relapsed. After 17 months without needing any treatment, a ...

I won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a photograph of one man shooting another. Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and GENERAL NGUYEN NGOC LOAN. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you ...

The young Eritrean woman was exhausted, famished and dehydrated after spending four days in March lost in the Mediterranean Sea. She had been on a fishing boat with nearly 300 African migrants, crammed so tightly that she couldn't move. But when Helen saw her rescuers, she couldn't help but feel a little worried. The last time she had seen an Italian military ship, things had not gone well. Twenty years old and six months pregnant, Helen is one ...

The phone rang at 4:43 a.m. on March 27, 2007. Patty Michaels, a dispatcher at a 911 call center in Belleville, Ill., picked up. On the other end, a woman screamed for help. She said her husband had attacked her. Michaels heard a baby crying in the background. The caller's address appeared on Michaels' screen: it was in O'Fallon, Ill., less than 10 miles away. Michaels asked the woman to confirm it. "That's when it got really tricky," she says. ...

NUCLEAR PHYSICS The nuclear age dawned in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In 1938, outside Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Nazis paraded in the streets. Inside, German Chemist Otto Hahn patiently probed the secrets of the atom. He repeated an experiment that had been tried by half a dozen researchers, including Enrico Fermi in Rome and Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris. With his primitive equipment, he repeatedly bombarded the element uranium with neutrons in an effort to create ...

When Lee Byeon Chun looks back four years to when he helped clone the world's first dog, he confesses it was a stressful time. All of his colleagues, he says, were obsessed with the puppy — an Afghan hound named "Snuppy," overanalyzing its every move and whimper in the lab. "I would sleep there sometimes," says Lee, who now heads a team of scientists and researchers at Seoul National University. Today, Lee does not devote all his waking hours ...

Noel Lee's career is as colorful as his many sports cars: he quit a job in nuclear research to play folk rock before deciding in 1979 to make quality speaker wire. The CEO of Monster Cable spoke with TIME's AMANDA BOWER about how he built a company on a product that stores used to give away, as well as the wireless revolution and the NFL. TIME Your business card says "The Head Monster." Do other CEOs take you seriously? LEE ...

As a child, Stefaan Engels was diagnosed with asthma and told not to exert himself. Instead, the now 49-year-old Belgian started to run. A lot. But Engels needed a new challenge. So he decided to run 365 consecutive marathons over the course of a year, a new world record. TIME talked to Engels as he recuperated in Belgium. How are you feeling? Special. It's been four days and I've had to do interviews for the whole world. A new ...