Andrew Murr

Corraled in a federal holding pen at Palomino Valley, Nev., a buckskin mare with the number 9598 cold-branded in code on its neck suddenly faces an uncertain future.

Rescue workers searching for survivors in the deadly mudslide at La Conchita, Calif., got help from a prototype ground-radar device that can detect a living person trapped under 20 feet of debris and rubble.

U.S. Affairs: 'Salvador Option'The U.S. Army may have closed the books on Spc. Charles Graner, the alleged chief torturer at Abu Ghraib who was convicted last Friday.

Everyone knows ethnic hatred between Hutus and Tutsis was the main reason for Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Everyone but Jared Diamond, that is. In his new book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," the UCLA geography professor and Pulitzer-winning author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" acknowledges the ethnic strife but insists that a more elementary factor was ecological.

In the notorious case of three civil-rights workers who were killed in 1964 by alleged Ku Klux Klan members in Philadelphia, Miss., justice has been infuriatingly slow.

Eleven years ago, Marcya Owens's life seemed blessed. She was in college, studying psychology, running track and working as a volunteer at her Seventh-day Adventist church.

Could a little-understood mental disorder called Asperger's syndrome clear Billy Cottrell of ecoterrorism charges? Cottrell, 24, is a brilliant but quirky physics grad student at the California Institute of Technology who faces trial in Los Angeles on federal arson counts that may send him to prison for life.

As If Alcoholism And Unemployment Were Not Enough, Crystal Meth Is The Latest Scourge Bedeviling Native Americans

The carefully crafted apology from Kobe Bryant, issued after a dramatic hearing in Eagle, Colo., last week, was key to ending the criminal rape case against him.

Q&A: RuPaulDrag supermodel, '90s dance-pop star, actress and actor, cult favorite RuPaul has just released his first new album in seven years. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Devon Thomas.NEWSWEEK: Where have you been the last few years?RuPaul:Just being a regular human being, spending time with myself, being a good friend to my friends, and a good uncle--getting to know myself again.Why did you call your album "RuPaul Red Hot"?Well, many years ago--I'm not gonna say how many--I became famous in Atlanta...

It's hard for white separatists to get a date. And not just for the reasons that you think. Part of the problem is that there are no whites-only dating services, says William Regnery, publisher of The Occidental Quarterly, a magazine that espouses white nationalism and whose statement of principles calls for limiting immigration to "selected people of European ancestry." Regnery's now preparing to enter the market--he recently announced the idea of a racially exclusive dating Web site in a...

Sybil Furman says she would feel "insulted" if one of her students hired a private college counselor. It would be a sign that the lead counselor at Galena High School in Reno, Nev., couldn't help families through the college maze by herself.

Los Alamos sure has a hard time keeping track of its secrets. On July 6, officials at the New Mexico weapons lab learned that two portable drives full of classified data were missing from a safe in the hypersensitive Weapons Physics lab; a frantic search revealed that an employee had moved them to another building without logging them out.

Army Special Operations soldiers may soon get a high-tech computer game to teach them Arabic. Now being designed at the University of Southern California, the Tactical Language Training System helps students learn "situational Arabic" by inserting them into a realistic videogame as Special Forces operator Maj.

The Scott Peterson murder trial, which began last week, promises to contain long lessons in forensics. Defense attorney Mark Geragos has pledged to show jurors that Peterson's wife, Laci, and her unborn son, Conner, survived weeks after cops believe Peterson killed them.

He's been home for more than a week now, back with his wife and kids and grateful to be putting his life back together. But Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Ore., lawyer who was wrongly jailed for 14 days as a "material witness" in the deadly Madrid bombings, is still mad as hell.

"I had nothing to do with the bombings in Madrid," a visibly relieved Brandon Mayfield announced outside the Portland, Ore., courthouse last Thursday. Earlier this month, federal agents arrested Mayfield, a lawyer and Muslim convert, as a material witness in the investigation of the March 11 attacks in Madrid.

Handsome, blond and fairy-tale charming, Craig Pritchert, a onetime Arizona baseball star, strolled into a bank in the Colorado Rockies. His girlfriend, Nova Guthrie, a former sorority president and a pre-med student, waited in the car outside.

When nobody was around, Arizona State University football star Pat Tillman would climb the 10-story light tower at Sun Devil Stadium, certainly without permission, just to gaze at the buttes, the desert, the glow of Phoenix--and ponder the state of the world.

The AIDS scare tearing through the adult- film industry would be even worse, except for former porn actress Sharon Mitchell, 46. She's cofounder of the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, where 1,200 performers are tested monthly for diseases from gonorrhea to AIDS.

It started as a simple child-custody call. Police in Fresno, Calif., arrived Friday afternoon at the small one-story home on West Hammond Avenue when two women said they needed help getting their children back from the father, Marcus Wesson.

With his toolbox and an ice chest, Ernest Nelson was a familiar face at UCLA's medical school. For six years, Nelson would take his gear up to the seventh floor, where the school maintained a large refrigeration chamber filled with cadavers neatly hung by their ears on metal rods.

The sun was dropping quickly through the frozen air when Eric LeMarque realized he was lost. An hour earlier, the 34-year-old snowboarder had ducked out of bounds on 11,000-foot Mammoth Mountain in California's Sierra Nevadas, looking for a "fresh line"--virgin powder.

Lu Ann Kingston was 15 when she married her first cousin Jeremy Kingston in a hush-hush 1995 wedding in Bountiful, Utah. As members of a secretive society of "fundamentalist Mormons" whose leaders practiced polygamy, Lu Ann's family thought nothing of the fact that Jeremy, then 24, was such a close relative--or that he had three other wives.

He's the legal profession's equivalent of a pop star on a breakneck tour. Consider last week. On Sunday, Mark Geragos jetted to Modesto, Calif., to consult with his second most famous client, accused murderer Scott Peterson, before traveling to "an undisclosed location" (that is, Las Vegas) to meet with No. 1, Michael Jackson.

Just two weeks after giving birth to a daughter last November, Michelle Larwood suffered a major stroke. One moment, the Los Angeles woman, 38, sat calmly in a doctor's waiting room.

Just two weeks after giving birth to a daughter last November, Michelle Larwood suffered a major stroke. One moment, the Los Angeles woman, 38, sat calmly in a doctor's waiting room.

The young boy lay in bed in a Hollywood hospital with a tumor in his belly and a death sentence on his head. "The doctors gave him two weeks to live," says Jamie Masada, a comedy-club owner who had befriended the boy and his family when a social worker referred them to a summer camp Masada runs for underprivileged kids.

For nearly two decades, the keys to the identity of the Green River Killer sat in an evidence locker at the King County Sheriff's Office in Seattle: three tiny swabs of semen, recovered from the decomposing bodies of prostitutes who'd been early victims of the serial killer.

Even before he'd learned that his own San Diego County home had turned to ash, Rep. Duncan Hunter was growing frustrated with the way the biggest wildfire outbreak in California history was being fought.