Only a few hours north of Cairo, El Tod sits off a road that shifts from dust and sand to lush patches of vegetation. Camels stand tied to posts near produce carts and butcher shops where suspended animal carcasses hang outside like potted plants. News in this village is still passed from neighbor to neighbor -- and the people in each story are usually known to all.

"Are you looking for the El Sayeed family?" asks a man walking beside my car, which has slowed to a crawl. He leads me down a garbage-strewn alleyway, past kids playing, to the El Sayeeds' modest apartment. A steady wail signals sundown -- a time to pray.

On this particular evening, most of the El Sayeed family is crowded into one room waiting for me. Hamdy, the father, is present only in a framed picture on the wall. The 50-year-old man lies in a hospital bed on the outskirts of Cairo. His neighbors know why he isn't at home. They also know why Hamdy's cousin doesn't show up at his clothing store on some days -- probably feeling too weak -- and why yet another cousin, Hamed Zayed, stayed in El Tod instead of moving to Saudi Arabia as he had planned. The reason? Zayed did not pass the blood test required to work in Saudi Arabia. Like those of many others in town, his came back positive.

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But the move was a big hit with conservatives and energy industry supporters, who had declared war against efforts to restrict the emissions, which are believed to contribute to global warming.

"The reversal seems to suggest that the uproar that this policy caused on the right was greater than Bush had anticipated," says Jerry Taylor, director of natural resources and environmental studies at the conservative Cato Institute. "But there's not likely to be much of a political cost. The average American probably didn't even know that Bush had made the promise to unilaterally reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Bush's decision was widely described as the work of energy industry partisans in his administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. It represented a setback for more moderate officials, including Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, who backed the emissions limit.

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The first blow came when long-awaited results from the Parkinson's study hit the media. The study involved 40 patients between the ages of 34 and 75 with Parkinson's. Half of them received "sham" surgery, and the other half, the transplant of cells from the "substantia nigra." After following the patients for one year, researchers found that there were devastating side effects in 15 percent of those who received the transplant.

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"The economic impact of this is going to be horrendous," says Dean Cliver, professor of food safety at the University of California at Davis and a member of the FDA's transmissible spongiform encephalopathies advisory committee. "Especially superimposed on the problems they had to face in the aftermath of the mad cow thing, this is going to be a big, big blow to the economy in England." Already, 37,000 animals are being killed, and that number could rise to 67,000. But so far only 40 animals have been documented as actually having the disease.

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And she didn't. The Dedham, Mass., resident passed away quietly in her sleep one June night last year, just a few weeks after her operation.

At the time of her death, Baez had a personal injury lawsuit pending against the manufacturer of the valves, St. Jude Medical Inc., for all the pain and suffering she said she had endured due to having defective valves implanted in her not once, but twice. The whole reason she had the surgery in the first place was to correct her mitral valve prolapse, a heart condition she had had since she was a teenager. Her valve had deteriorated to the point where it was leaking blood back to the chamber from which it was just pumped. But her family believes all she received were more leaky valves. In fact, St. Jude had issued a recall of its product, the Silzone heart valve, in January 2000 because it had a higher incidence of leaking around the sewing cuff fabric (which is used to attach the device to the heart tissue) than its predecessor. Approximately 36,000 patients worldwide had received the product, 12,000 of them in the United States.

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And the cause? They say temperature changes.

According to a report issued last week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the strange things going on at the Leopold Reserve are not isolated. Researchers found that more than 80 percent of the 500 species studied -- including birds, amphibians, mammals, reptiles, plants, mollusks, insects and other invertebrates -- are changing in response to rising temperatures. Some birds are migrating up to three weeks earlier now; other animals are migrating outside their natural habitat, edging closer to the poles and living at higher altitudes.

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But the days of "Just say no" may just be over. Leaders of the nation's largest drug prevention program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, announced on Thursday that they were changing DARE's approach, admitting that the vastly expensive program appears to be ineffective. Indeed, research has indicated that DARE may actually have contributed to greater drug use by high school students.

DARE administrators announced that the program will adopt a new strategy for school-based drug prevention, and begin testing it in 80 high schools and 176 middle schools in the fall. Around 50,000 students will be involved.

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"I am very gratified," says Morrison by phone from L.A. "I think it's better than a diet, the way it is swirling around. I must say my pro-choice Republican mother is very proud of me."

Ever since the e-mail started circulating, phone lines at Planned Parenthood chapters around the country have been ringing off the hook; mail has been coming in by the boxload, and interest has been so high that the organization has set up a Web site to make it easier to donate.

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Columbia is one of four teaching stints Gore will do over the next year, along with the University of California at Los Angeles, Middle Tennessee State University and Fisk University.

Exactly what the former vice president said during his 90-minute class, called "Covering National Affairs in the Information Age," is unknown, since the media were not allowed into his seminar and students were forbidden to divulge the content of his lecture. When some reporters loudly complained to Gore about the lack of access as he entered and exited the class, he responded, "It's the school's policy," before walking past the secret service agents guarding the entrance to the J-school.

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The Florida boy's attorney believes the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) is responsible for the girl's death; the father of burn victim Jason Lind blames MTV. And while Lind was in the hospital, his dad appealed for support to Washington's most vociferous critic of Hollywood, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and the war on violence in the media was declared once again.

"There are some things that are so potentially dangerous and inciting, particularly to vulnerable children, that they simply should not be put on TV, and this is clearly one that crosses that line," said Lieberman in a press release that placed blame on purveyors of rough-and-tumble programming.

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The study predicts that the Earth's temperature could increase up to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. In fact, it says we just exited the warmest decade in the last 140 years.

While there's been little doubt that the climate is indeed warming -- glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, precipitation is changing -- there have been some high-profile skeptics, Bush included. They question the science linking this general warming trend to things that humans do, such as burning fossil fuel, which releases carbon dioxide. The increase of carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas, is believed to enhance the "greenhouse effect" that traps heat in Earth's atmosphere that otherwise would be released.

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So far, the toll has been limited: One pelican is dead and four sea lions injured, their prognosis uncertain. But environmentalists say we may never know just what species perished or became extinct because of the accident, since the archipelago is home to so many animals, many of which haven't even been documented yet.

The accident occurred when the Ecuadorean-registered ship ran aground on Jan. 16. By late Friday, diesel and bunker fuel began to leak from the Jessica, polluting the sea with an estimated 170,000 gallons.

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Decades after one of the largest food contamination incidents in American history, the health effects are still not known. But according to a new study, one of the scariest ramifications of the poisoning has been for girls who were exposed in utero and through breastfeeding. They started menstruating at an average of 11.6 years old -- a full year earlier than others who were not as highly exposed.

This finding, the first in an ongoing study at Emory University that looks at the possible reproductive effects of the chemical exposure on women, provides one of the first clues about what happens when humans come into contact with hormone-disrupting compounds. More specifically, the study has bolstered -- with rare research on human subjects -- the belief of many researchers that environmental estrogens, including PBBs like this one, may be the culprit for what is believed to be an alarming trend of early sexual maturity.

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The Missouri twins' case is under investigation by the FBI, which is looking into whether fraud was committed by the adoption facilitator, Tina Johnson, who ran the Caring Heart adoption agency out of her San Diego home. Johnson reportedly brokered the twins' adoption to two couples, accepting $6,000 from Richard and Vickie Allen of California, and about $12,000 from Alan and Judith Kilshaw, a couple from Wales. (The couples found out about Johnson's services through her Web site, which has reportedly been since taken down.)

The babies lived with the Allens for two months, then returned to the birth mother, ostensibly for a few days to say goodbye. They were then handed over to the Kilshaws. And now the children's birth mother, Tranda Wecker, says she wants her babies back.

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Here are a couple of examples of statements Ashcroft has made about drug policy: