Be careful of strangers and hurry home, says a mother to her daughter, knowing that the world is a frightful place but not wishing to swaddle a child in fear. Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends. Most women who get raped are raped by people they ...

Down the steep cobbled streets of La Paz, coca-chewing Indians trotted under huge packs of bundled alpaca hides. In the market sun, Indian women in outlandish derby hats and bright-colored skirts haggled over little piles of shelled corn. It was winter, the good time in the Andes. The Indians were not even aware that political storms threatened the peace of La Paz. But among Bolivia's propertied rulers, the one-in-ten who have a vote, there was crisis. The uneasy coalition ...

Everybody, it seemed, had heard the stories, and could relay the same horrific details about Syrian soldiers allegedly raping women and girls with cruel impunity. There were ugly accounts, told by many refugees from the northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour, some of whom had crossed into nearby Turkey, and by others who remained in a strip of Syrian territory hugging the Turkish border. Soldiers had abducted several beautiful young women from the town, they said, enslaved them ...

Women now dominate the ranks of university graduates across most fields. They also, at least before they're 30, often earn more than men their age. Yet they still rarely make it to the thickly carpeted executive suites of most companies. Only 13 of the Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs. So what gives? One new study may have sorted out one part of the mystery. Turns out women executives are twice as likely to leave jobs as ...

One year ago on Tuesday, at least 57 men and women, including 31 journalists, were slaughtered on a grassy clearing in the southern Philippines. They were on their way to a political event, driving caravan-style through Maguindanao province's rugged, green hills when their convoy was stopped by armed men — allegedly members of a private army controlled by Andal Ampatuan Jr., the scion of the clan that rules the area. They were forced out of their vehicles, ...

Sex forges unlikely alliances and Hugh Hefner, who has been the world's most prominent personification of the unchained heterosexual male libido since his 1953 launch of Playboy magazine, forges unlikelier alliances than most. It's not only that the 85-year-old is looking forward to marriage later this month to Crystal Harris, a psychology major-turned-Playboy Playmate and aspiring pop singer 60 years his junior. For more than half a century, Hefner has succeeded in uniting social conservatives of the ...

This is the tale of the enmity of three women: the first is perhaps the richest in Argentina; the second is the President of the country; the third, a grandmother in search of the children of desaparecidos, the 30,000 or so mostly young people who disappeared in the military junta's death camps from 1976 to 1983. The objects of their contention are two adopted children, a brother and sister, who stand to inherit an immense fortune — ...

Widow Shah Jan sits in an icy room with mud walls in a snowfield on the edge of Kabul. She wipes her tears with the edge of her grimy sweater as she recalls the day in August 1999 when the Taliban set fire to her home in the vineyards of the Shomali Plain and kidnapped her best friend, Nafiza. "The Taliban burst in with their guns and torches," says Shah Jan. "None of us even had time to put on ...

Mothers who outsource the care of their sons to other women may be inadvertently raising adulterers. Or so claims Dr. Dennis Friedman in a book that has kicked up a bit of a ruckus in Britain. A Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the doctor argues that men become womanizers because their mothers left them with nannies. According to Friedman, having two women care for a baby boy may cause his little brain to internalize the ...

Why do men and women become doctors? Out of love for their fellow humans? For the fascination of medical science? To turn a respectable fast buck? Most doctors are hard put to diagnose their own professional motives. In a collection of essays and excerpts, Dr. Noah D. Fabricant, himself a noted Chicago ear, nose and throat specialist, lets 50 of the world's best-known doctors and ex-doctors explain Why We Became Doctors . The medical men who are most articulate about their choice generally have achieved equal or ...