Backpack

Rahnesha White has a joyous smile on her face as she moves purposefully among the displays at the Gap Kids store in Sherman Oaks Fashion Square. Personally, I would rather be in labor than 11 again and shopping for school clothes. But Rahnesha, who starts sixth grade at Millikan Middle School in a couple of weeks, seems to be having a wonderful time. Her mother, Elizabeth White, has burdened the youngster with a minimum of taboos in choosing a back-to-school wardrobe.

An 8-year-old girl who was shot in her elementary school classroom in Bremerton, Wash., is “out of the woods,” her doctor says, though she remains in critical condition on a ventilator. Meanwhile, there are shattered lives all around her: The teacher who couldn't believe a gun had just fired, apparently accidentally, in her third-grade classroom. The frightened 9-year-old boy who had the weapon in his backpack, clad in an orange jail jumpsuit and breaking into tears at his court hearing.

Amsterdam Girard, Electra cruiser bike designed by midcentury artist Alexander Girard Electra Bicycle Co., based in San Diego, introduces the Amsterdam Girard featuring midcentury graphics by Alexander Girard adorning a modernized Dutch city bike. Fenders and an enclosed chain case make it easier to run errands in an Alexander Wang dress. The Tree of Life retails for $749.99 and the Quatrefoil for $799 ($25 rebate for bikes priced over $399.99 if purchased before the end of the year)

Two years ago, Robert Beals of San Clemente realized that it was time to get serious about his health. Since then, he has quit smoking, developed a regular exercise habit and started using supplemental oxygen. "They gave me a choice," he says. "I could extend and improve the quality of my life, or I could just keep going the way I was. "So it really wasn't hard to choose." Beals, 74, has had lung problems since he was a child.

Eagle Creek has fine-tuned its new Afar Backpack (EC-60263) to be all business and a pleasure. It weighs a pound and 11 ounces and is 12 1/2 - by-20 1/2-by-8 1/2 inches. It has well-padded contoured shoulder straps, a tuck-away padded hip belt, adjustable sternum straps, external compression straps and a sturdy top grab handle. A padded breathable mesh back panel makes for comfy cushioning. The back panel incorporates a zippered padded compartment for a laptop (up to 17 inches)

Students filed into Chris Cox's dim classroom at Daniel Webster Middle School in Los Angeles' Sawtelle neighborhood, took their seats and immediately began working on a language arts warmup exercise. While Cox took roll, the eighth-graders silently worked. When they went over the answers, students raised their hands and waited to be called on. Down the corridor, seventh-graders streamed into Brent Walmsley's classroom and took over. Some sat on table tops; others wandered around the room, pausing to grab foamy handfuls of hand sanitizer that sloshed on the floor.

He was a onetime utopian socialist who became an assertive right-winger, a libertarian nudist with a military-hardware fetish, a cold warrior who penned an Age of Aquarius sensation with a hero who preached free love. He won admiration from Ronald Reagan, who enlisted his ideas in his "Star Wars" missile shield, and Charles Manson, who was captured with the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" in his backpack. He predicted the European Union and invented the water bed. But Robert A.

Seven of us are riding in a white Suburban. The road into Yosemite is narrow, a twisting black sliver leading us deeper into a wilderness. It is night, a few minutes after 9. We have a date with Half Dome in the morning. We bump and roll beneath branches of Jeffrey pine and Douglas fir. Huge gray rocks stare down where the road curves. Just as we break out of the trees into a meadow, there is a voice from the back of the van: "Oh my God, look at that."

In the summer of 2003, an Air Force pilot named Greg Harbin was doing desk duty at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Day in and day out, Harbin sat in front of five computer screens, scanning photographs and video sent by unmanned planes flying 1,200 miles away, over Iraq and Afghanistan. His job was to take that information, along with reports from ground troops, and identify fresh targets -- Taliban fighters or Iraqi insurgents. But one thing puzzled him.

It was supposed to be a brief stop at the Primadonna casino, 43 miles south of Las Vegas, but one poker game led to another. By 3 a.m. May 25, 1997, Jeremy Strohmeyer and David Cash were tired of hanging around the arcade, waiting for David's dad. Bored, the two 18-year-olds decided to urinate on two coin-operated games. David chose Big Bertha, whose polka-dot dress flared when players hurled balls into her gaping red mouth. Jeremy selected a helicopter game. Then a wall socket.