CHAPTER 1: The Kidnapping Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped by Sunni Muslim insurgents in Baghdad on Jan. 7, 2006. Over the next 82 days, she was shuttled blindfolded among at least six safe houses and had closer contact with Sunni insurgents than any American who has lived to [...]
They’ll interview you, take your pictures, and craft your story into a lovely memoir–by you Jutta van der Kuijp had been asking her 82-year-old father, Jan, to write his life story for years. She’d always found it fascinating. Born in what is today Jakarta, he’d spent most of the Second World War in POW camps [...]
A venerable cold-case squad probes a convicted murderer’s claim to 48 victims. Former FBI and CIA agent Charlie Hess hadn’t expected to spend his golden years chasing killers. He was happily retired from crime fighting, living his dream of “a Robinson Crusoe existence” with his wife in a thatch-roof home in Baja, Mexico. But that [...]
Mysteries of History/ Who Was First? Stars & Stripes In June 1776, George Washington and a secret committee, assembled to create the first American flag, visited the Philadelphia upholstery business of Betsy Ross. The recently widowed seamstress was eager for any kind of work, but Ross wasn’t thrilled with one detail of the original design. [...]
Using an X-ray-scanning technique, scientists have taken a high-resolution peek inside fossilized embryos of some of the earliest multicellular organisms. The procedure offers paleontologists a nondestructive way to see what’s preserved inside ancient rarities smaller than a pinhead and provides fresh insights into the evolution of life on Earth, the scientists say. Bones and shells [...]
When writing dramas for children’s theater, you have to create material that’s just right for the age group TO THE UNINITIATED, it’s easy to dismiss the notion that tangible benefits of playwriting for young people go well beyond the printed page or the school auditorium. Not only does this mediumr performers with self-confidence and teamwork [...]
When it comes to software, I like living dangerously. So for many months now, I’ve been spending my workdays laboring in multiple prerelease versions of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista and Office 2007, starting with early iterations that were crashy first drafts at best. At first, I felt like a crazed loner. Now I have plenty [...]
By Nataliae J Patrick If anyone ever told you life was a rollercoaster or that it was full of unexpected “wonderful” surprises, they lied. I bet if you you found those people and looked them in the eyes you could see deep within them what they really meant and why they said these false statements. [...]
By Karen Lynn Vidra , The Texas Tornado Keserian Chege Moore is my name, and I am 28 years of age. I was born in Eldoret, near Nairobi, in the month of April (what day, I really cannot recollect; we Maasai really don’t keep track of dates or time), and I am the oldest of [...]
By Robert M Wilson It seems like every semester certain female college students enjoy sitting in the front row of classrooms displaying very exposed cleavages. Professors handle them in different ways. One day, in Astrophysics 201, busty Miss Anderson had already gotten Dr. Geschlecht’s attention by bending down low for her notebook, leaving little to [...]