Robert and Julie Davidson fell hard for the gleaming new house at the Valencia Golf and Country Club in Naples, Florida. They loved the way the palm-fringed, Spanish-style home backed up to the fifth-hole fairway. And they were taken with the three-bedroom's high ceilings and open plan. Plus the neighborhood - with its power-washed driveways, blooming hibiscus and guarded gatehouse - seemed all "dressed up."
But when the Davidsons paid $255,385 in 2011 for the house on Birdie Drive, they didn't know that they had, in essence, bought only from the ground up, and that their homebuilder, D.R. Horton, had kept everything underneath.
U.S. builders hoard mineral rights under new homes
Panama hopes U.S. will clean up chemical weapons it left on islandy
Even as the United States presses for the rapid destruction of chemical weapons in Syria, a dispute lingers over unexploded chemical munitions that U.S. soldiers left on a Panamanian island more than 60 years ago.
Panama has pressed the United States for decades to remove them, and now it’s optimistic that the Obama administration has agreed.
Did Obama swap 'black' detention sites for ships?
Instead of sending suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay or secret CIA "black" sites for interrogation, the Obama administration is questioning terrorists for as long as it takes aboard U.S. naval vessels.
And it's doing it in a way that preserves the government's ability to ultimately prosecute the suspects in civilian courts.
That's the pattern emerging with the recent capture of Abu Anas al-Libi, one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists, long-sought for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. He was captured in a raid Saturday and is being held aboard the USS San Antonio, an amphibious warship mainly used to transport troops.
Alex Baer: Meditations on Our Daily Horror
October: This is the traditional month for frost on the pumpkin, a jump-started sweet tooth, and a handful of artificial horrors.
Except every day is a day of all-too-real horror with Republicans. Forget Elm Street -- every day is Nightmare on Capitol Hill these days, and each day comes with at least one twisted plot twist and adrenalin rush. It's not unlike the ultimately depressing, empty-calorie gore-banquet of a slasher flick.
You know the feeling: The highly-charged, hyper-energized sensation stemming from emptying half of your Trick-or-Treat stash in one sitting. As usual, that sugar-rushing rocket ride can be exhilarating, but the plummet back to Earth is always queasy and dizzy-making.
Pharmaceutical firms paid to attend meetings of panel that advises FDA
The e-mails show that the companies paid as much as $25,000 to attend any given meeting of the panel, which had been set up by two academics to provide advice to the FDA on how to weigh the evidence from clinical trials. A leading FDA official later called the group “an essential collaborative effort.”
The Cuban Five were fighting terrorism. Why did we put them in jail?
Consider for a moment what would happen if American intelligence agents on the ground in a foreign country uncovered a major terrorist plot, with enough time to prevent it. And then consider how Americans would react if authorities in that country, rather than cooperate with us, arrested and imprisoned the U.S. agents for operating on their soil.
Those agents would be American heroes. The U.S. government would move heaven and Earth to get them back.
This sort of scenario has occurred, except that, in the real-life version, which unfolded 15 years ago last month, the Americans play the role of the foreign government, and Cuba — yes, Fidel Castro’s Cuba — plays the role of the aggrieved United States.
Energy efficiency: How the Internet can lower your electric bill
Gary Raymond had had enough of the lights in Warehouse No. 5. The old metal-halide fixtures cast a sour yellow hue on the stacks of cardboard boxes inside the storage facility. They hummed incessantly and burned out well before their due.
So Mr. Raymond, the landlord, replaced them with a brighter, smarter Web-enabled lighting system. He hoped it would help attract and retain tenants in the increasingly competitive warehouse market on Chicago's Southwest Side. But when the next utility bill arrived, something looked very wrong.
4 US soldiers killed in south Afghanistan
The US-led international military coalition says four of its service members have been killed in southern Afghanistan and a military official confirms all were Americans killed by an improvised explosive device.
Nato said in a statement that the four were killed on Sunday during a partnered operation in the south, but did not provide any further details or their nationalities.
New shape-shifting metals discovered
A new shape-changing metal crystal is reported in the journal Nature, by scientists at University of Minnesota. It is the prototype of a new family of smart materials that could be used in applications ranging from space vehicles to electronics to jet engines.
Called a "martensite", the crystal has two different arrangements of atoms, switching seamlessly between them. It can change shape tens of thousands of times when heated and cooled without degrading, unlike existing technology.
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