Quality Of Life

After she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer that had spread to her left lung, Gloria Bailey's doctors recommended she have a mastectomy followed by hormone therapy to fight the tumors that remained. She followed their advice, but had a nagging feeling about the regimen. "The Lord was just telling me, 'They're not being aggressive enough,' " Bailey recalled.

Raheem's cellphone rang as we walked through a crowded market, stepping over piles of trash and weaving around slow-moving donkey carts. He spoke to the caller in his usual low murmur, then hung up. It was a U.S. immigration official, he told me. His application for refugee status in America had been approved. The flight was nine days away. "What do you think?" he asked, as calmly as if inviting my opinion on a new shirt.

In an abandoned warehouse, the image was shocking: two denim-clad, lifeless legs poking up through trash-choked ice. Investigators who took three 911 calls over two days before finally going out to retrieve the body will try to figure out what killed the man. But this much is clear: It has become another symbol of Detroit's decay and indifference. "Most of us grew up with this," said Mike Corbin, 34, pointing toward the old warehouse and the dilapidated Michigan Central train depot nearby.

"It's safe! You can go out, even at night!" I've been hearing this over and over for the last three months, since violence started to drop in Baghdad. So last week, I told three of my Iraqi colleagues at the Los Angeles Times, "Let's go out and have dinner!" It had been almost two years since we had ventured out after dark. So we decided to play it safe and chose a restaurant about 10 minutes from our compound. It was so nice to get out.

PHOENIX -- Eight o'clock on a desert morning, the rising sun casts an unsettling glow on the two deep, disparate shades of the NFL. In one corner of town are the stars. In the other corner are the scars. Outside a flowery suburban resort, the New England Patriots are walking into tents with hundreds of reporters to talk about the Super Bowl. Inside a sterile downtown convention center, four dozen NFL stars are limping into a half-empty ballroom to talk about what happens next.

Larry Gibson first spotted Dennis Golay outside West Hollywood's French Market Place. By the time he was halfway across Santa Monica Boulevard, he'd fallen in love. It was Nov. 14, 1981 -- Golay's 34th birthday. Seven years later, both men tested positive for the AIDS virus, an almost certain death sentence in the days before antiretroviral drugs. Having dreamed of growing old together, they were devastated. "We had something so special," said Gibson, 63, looking back at that dark time.

Pushed to the fringes by a money-driven social divide, Rosa is what Cubans call a "marginal" person. She's lived all of her 72 years in a shabby enclave of Marianao, a neighborhood where crude wooden cottages, their rotting boards held together with coats of paint, descend into a gully strewn with refuse and sewage.

Abu Hassan took deep breaths of joy as he crossed the double-decker bridge spanning the Tigris River. The water below may have stunk of sewage. The air may have been choked with traffic fumes. It didn't matter to Abu Hassan. He was free after nearly a year hidden inside his house, the only place he had felt safe from the gunmen and killers who had taken over his neighborhood in south Baghdad.

They left the Nile Delta before dawn, piling into a van and driving across the green flatlands toward the coast, plopping on the sand and diving into the surf, watching the sun rise over the jetties and trawlers churn the horizon. There are 11 of them -- cousins, mothers, friends and kids.

I was born in a Beijing that has vanished. The way my mother tells it, I forced my way into the world a month early so my birthday would forever be associated with the biggest political festival of the year. It was the early autumn of 1968, and as revelers shouted "Long live Chairman Mao," my parents raced to a hospital during a massive parade commemorating the birth of communist China. As my mother screamed in pain, fireworks lighted the sky over Tiananmen Square.