Immigration and Crime: A Tragedy in Tampa
Did the feds bungle an immigration matter and let a suspected felon go free?
Georgia's Drought Crisis
The severe drought has Georgians praying for rain—and battling with their neighbors
Anna Nicole Smith and Human Growth Hormone
The dead starlet's autopsy revealed that she was injecting human growth hormone to counter the effects of aging and promote weight loss. Does that work? Inside the HGH boom—and the backlash.
Fla. Official May Be Fired Over Sex Change
A city manager planning a sex-change operation may lose his job, reviving a debate about basic rights.
Q&A: Fla. Transsexual Talks About Firing
Last week, Largo, Fla., city manager Steven Stanton jolted townspeople with the admission that he was a transsexual who was planning to undergo sex-reassignment surgery.
Execution: What Happens After?
The families of Danny Rolling's murder victims filed into the execution viewing room in Starke, Fla., last week. The curtains were pulled back, and there he lay on a gurney, a leather strap across his forehead and tubes protruding from his body. "I squeezed my dad and my brother's hands," Laurie Lahey, the sister of victim Tracy Paules, said afterward. "I just kept repeating over and over, 'Die, die, die'." Instead of a last statement, Rolling, who killed five college students in 1990 (and...
68 Bullets
It all began with a simple traffic stop. Polk County Sheriff's Deputy Doug Speirs pulled over Angilo Freeland just before noon on Sept. 28 for speeding along an avenue in Lakeland, Fla.
This Week Online
Coauthor, 'Gorgeous Disaster': I can understand that it kind of looks like that, but you have to walk in my shoes. It drives me crazy when people say, "I wish I had had a teacher like that." It makes me very angry.
Iris Scans: Keeping an Eye on Sex Offenders
Authorities have gained a new high-tech tool to keep track of sex offenders: the Sex Offender Registry and Identification System (SORIS), a biometric database that stores images of sex offenders' irises.
Shopping: Give Them a Hand
Need to buy milk but forgot your wallet? No worries if you are one of the 2.5 million subscribers who've signed up to use biometric technology by Pay By Touch that links a photocopylike scan of your finger to a bank or credit-card account.
DATABASE: CHILD CARE
Missing-children posters usually list age, weight, height and eye color. But the Children's Identification and Location Database (CHILD) Project is concerned with just one identifier: the iris.
POLITICS: JEB BUSH'S SURPRISE MOVE
Jeb Bush's request (that a state attorney investigate alleged discrepancies in Michael Schiavo's statements about how long he took to call 911 after Terri's collapse) startled even his closest confidants.
Teen Driving: I'm Gonna Go Tell Mom!
And you thought your mom was bad. Tampa, Fla., resident Donna Graf was so concerned with her 17-year-old son Michael's driving that she launched a national campaign to get irresponsible teen drivers off the streets.
NUDISTS: MUST THEY PLAY VOLLEYBALL, TOO?
Confirming that things never get any weirder than in Florida, now there's Natura, believed to be the nation's first officially Christian nudist resort. The planned 240-acre site--in the country's naturist capital, Pasco County, near Tampa--will eventually include 500 homes, a hotel, an RV lot and a water-slide park.
High-Time, High Tech
Fresh from overwhelming the enemy in Iraq with high-tech gadgetry, U.S. commandos got a glimpse last week of the next generation of gizmos. During Special Operations Forces Week, 400 vendors peddled their wares in Tampa, Fla.
Pope John Paul Named In Lawsuits
The scandal over abusive priests and the Roman Catholic Church took a new turn today, with alleged victims in Florida and Oregon filing two separate lawsuits naming Pope John Paul II and the Vatican with conspiring to hide the priests they say molested them.The lawsuits were filed by Minnesota-based attorney Jeffrey Anderson, of the firm Reinhardt and Anderson.
Teen Suicide Pilot Wanted 'Publicity'
Charles Bishop was no Osama bin Laden supporter, but a young man striving for fame, says the teenage suicide pilot's best friend. Emerson Favreau, a 10th-grader at the East Lake High School, told NEWSWEEK that two days before Bishop flew a stolen plane into a Tampa high-rise, he e-mailed his friend to tell him to watch for him on the news. "I don't think he supported bin Laden at all," says Favreau. "He wrote a journalism paper about how he felt sorry for all the people who were killed [on...