Eric Hagerman

I am not normal. Not even close, I am told. Apparently, my height, which at 6'4" has always seemed to me to be just this side of freakish, puts me in the 99th percentile of American adults. That is, statistically too tall to fly comfortably in coach.

The YouTube promo for Zhen de Shou weight-loss capsules is farcical: The camera slowly pans across photos of depressed overweight girls becoming euphorically thin and warns, "Beware of cheap imitations." But the ad hides a real danger. According to recent tests by the Food and Drug Administration, Zhen de Shou and 68 other weight-loss supplements manufactured in the U.S. and abroad contain undeclared pharmaceuticals. That means millions of Americans popping over-the-counter diet pills might also be unwittingly ingesting medication at potentially deadly doses.

The warm autumn sun has burned a hole in the morning haze and opened up the sky above the South Foreland Lighthouse, a historic beacon along the White Cliffs of Dover, England. It marks the narrowest point of the English Channel. You can't quite make out where the sea meets the coast of France, a tantalizing 22 miles distant, but a little surface gauze won't interfere with what's coming across the Channel today.

August 15, 2008— The first time Army Specialist Frederick Hussey “got blown up in Iraq,” as he says, was on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006. Hussey was five months into his yearlong deployment as an infantry medic when a cluster of anti-tank explosives jolted his Humvee off the road some 50 miles south of Baghdad. The blast filled the cabin with acrid black smoke, but Hussey was able to jerk the wheel back and steer the truck to safety. “Everybody ended up being OK with that one,” Hussey says. “You know—shook up and all, but there was no loss of life.