Sarah Childress

Battered spouses take aim at a controversial custody strategy.

The number of soldiers deserting the U.S. Army is rising. A defense lawyer discusses what they're saying about leaving their posts-and whether they're likely to find sanctuary in Canada.

The military has rewritten the book on wartime surgery to combat the wave of injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latest strategies for helping fallen warriors.

This third-generation Ninth Ward resident started battling to save her neighborhood while it was still underwater. Now Harris is head organizer for ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in New Orleans.

Ingrid Mattson can tell that nobody likes to sit next to her on airplanes anymore. Ever since she converted to Islam two decades ago, Mattson, a 43-year-old white Canadian, has been learning what it means to be part of a mistrusted minority.

Ramadi's chief of police gazed at his latest graduating class of officers. Three months ago they had been recruited for the force by the leaders of their desert tribes--and now, the chief declared, the newly minted cops were no longer tribal members: they were his men.

You don't need an interpreter to understand the poster taped to the front wall of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the nation's leading school for the deaf.

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It took six years for Genia Shockome to gather the courage to leave her husband, Tim. He pushed her, kicked her and insulted her almost from the moment they married in 1994, she says.

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A year after the hurricane, many Katrina evacuees are still adrift--unemployed, homeless and suffering from mental-health problems caused or exacerbated by the storm, according to a study to be released this week.

Even before he went to Iraq, Steven Green scared people. Growing up in oil-rich Midland, Texas, a small community full of pumping jacks, pickup trucks and fast-food restaurants, Green was known as a petulant loner and a hard-drinking druggie.

Even before he went to Iraq, Steven Green scared people. Growing up in oil-rich Midland, Texas, a small community full of pumping jacks, pickup trucks and fast-food restaurants, Green was known as a petulant loner and a hard-drinking druggie.

Tahsin ahmed couldn't believe his son Omar, 14, wanted to change his name. A Shiite married to a Sunni, Ahmed had raised his children not to believe in sectarian differences.

Since she was a little girl in Sulemaniya, Shahla always wanted to be a soldier in the Iraqi Army. But women weren't allowed to fight under Saddam. So as soon as Hussein was gone in 2003, the attractive young mother put her name on the list.

As a young Kurdish child growing up in northern Iraq, Berkew Babakir, now 21, watched his people suffer countless atrocities under the harsh rule of Saddam Hussein and his army—and nonetheless dreamed of becoming a soldier.

Tahsin Ahmed couldn't believe his son Omar, 14, wanted to change his name. A Shiite married to a Sunni, Ahmed had raised his children not to believe in sectarian differences.

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U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has been pushing the Iraqi government to rein in militias and to open up dialogue with Sunnis—a stance that has not always endeared him to the Shia-dominated government the United States supports.  Khalilzad, who will have logged a year in his post on June 21, is the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush Administration, and heads America's largest foreign mission.  After Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was killed last week, he sat down to talk with NEWSWEEK in...

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Fresh from a bruising federal court fight over the teaching of evolution, Georgia marched back into the culture wars last week when Gov. Sonny Perdue signed a bill allowing Bible classes in public high schools.

WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN JR., 81 Coffin, who was appointed chaplain at Yale in 1958, fought the Vietnam War with civil disobedience: he offered the school's chapel as a sanctuary for draft dodgers and, in a move that would have him convicted on a conspiracy charge, returned a stack of draft cards to the Justice Department. (The verdict was overturned.) Coffin never gave up the fight.

The moment you bought that $300 metallic handbag it was already on its way out of style. Fashion can be like that—unpredictable and unforgiving. When it comes to owning your own fashion label, it's even more of a rollercoaster—and much less glamorous. "There are many start-up designers that you and I have heard of that six months to a year from now will go bankrupt," says Deborah Goodwin, director of fashion sourcing at New York's nonprofit Garment Industry Development Corporation.Aspiring...

This image isn't an award-winning shot by a trained photojournalist. It's part of a new book, "This Is Our War," a cache of casual snapshots taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

In November 2004, New York Police Det. Patricia O'Brien went to the Daniel George and Son Funeral Home in Brooklyn to check out what she thought was a routine business dispute.

Barry Byron Mills is a bank robber who will spend the rest of his life in prison. An alleged leader of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, Mills stabbed a fellow inmate to death with a handmade knife 27 years ago, adding two life sentences to his time.

Law-enforcement officials in Tennessee have a new approach to fighting meth: naming names. Now the public can search an online database for the name, alias and birth date of anyone convicted of manufacturing the drug since last March.

As Katrina evacuees scrambled to find homes, whites were given incentives to rent in some places, while blacks were charged extra or politely turned away 66 percent of the time, according to a five-state report by the National Fair Housing Alliance.

In the end, Kenneth Boyd, the 1,000th convict to be executed in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, had some unusual advocates: two jurors who sentenced him to death in North Carolina nearly two decades ago.

Sheela Murthy, who moved to the United States from India in 1986, had worked only a few years at a New York law firm when she glimpsed her own glass ceiling. "It just felt like, 'Why am I here at 2 in the morning, photocopying documents?' " she says.