Column One

Most people can tell you exactly where they were when the bus and all those children disappeared. In the way of small towns, the connections to that dark moment are personal. Lois Rambo, who runs the lunch counter at Pioneer Market Cafe in Chowchilla, says her daughter would have been on that bus if she hadn't stayed home sick from school that day. Jodi Heffington Medrano, who owns a salon on the square, was one of the children who disappeared. Photos: Chowchilla kidnappings Even those who weren't born yet can't remember a time when they didn't know the story of the Chowchilla kidnappings.

Deep in the bush of Kenya's Masai Mara, the tribe had begun to wonder whether Jackson Njapit had lost his mind. For years, he had spent his mornings at the one-room clinic, treating people for malaria, botched female circumcisions, the occasional lion and buffalo attack. Now he roamed the savanna, chasing hot-air balloons filled with tourists, and he had begun to sell his cows, his goats and his sheep. He spoke grandly of traveling to America and coming back with something precious, a skill that would help keep the clinic going.

Bum, bum, bum, bum … As the Choctaw drummer settles into his cadence, nearly 100 men in blood-red shirts, shorts and bandannas huddle around their leader in a darkening high school parking lot beneath the golden glow of a floodlight. "Big night!" James Denson, the team's star player, shouts three times. At 6-foot-3, he's taller than most, a muscular 208 pounds and square-jaw handsome. His team, Beaver Dam, is just minutes away from playing in the championship game of an ancient and violent sport known as stickball, a cousin of lacrosse that is defiantly true to its American Indian roots.

Three sanitation workers found it along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day march: a nest of wires in a backpack. The homemade bomb was equipped with an unusual remote-controlled trigger and stuffed with more than 100 heavy fishing weights coated in rat poison. The Spokane County bomb squad disarmed it hours before the route would have been flooded with marchers last year. If the device had detonated and the weights had torn into the intended victims, the poison would have prevented their blood from coagulating, all but ensuring their deaths, lab analysts concluded.

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name. She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed. "The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive. " Photos: A wartime sacrifice and a father's quest He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter.

Francois Driard enters a cave dug into the steep Himalayan hillside, scares off a mouse and, in a twice-weekly ritual, wipes mold from several plate-sized wheels of cheese sitting on crude shelves against the wall. Voila ! High-end French cheese has reached a new level, literally, with Driard's farm an hour from Katmandu, where the 32-year-old has become what he believes is the only French cheese maker in the Himalayas. He acknowledges that it's not the by-the-book operation you'd find under Europe's rigorous hygiene and certification requirements.

If the music to the Season 9, Episode 5 installment of Fox's animated sitcom "Family Guy" had a relaxed feel, maybe it was because of the 104-degree mineral water. Glenn Morrissette helped orchestrate the score after a leisurely soak last October in the natural hot springs in the tiny northwestern Wyoming town of Thermopolis. Morrissette did his work from his recording studio on wheels ? a recreational vehicle he calls home as he meanders around the U.S. Using a laptop computer and a WiFi connection, he composes, performs and records music and beams it back to Hollywood sound stages and theaters.

The Zen master would not stop talking. Several times he began to draw his teachings to a close, explaining to his students that he was tired and in poor health. Then he would burst down another path. He discussed the difficulties of raising children. He lingered on the subject of death. Eventually, he raised a small fist in the air. "Everybody is together at one point," he said. "We cry together, we love together. There is no moment in which we are not together. " He is 105 years old and not even 5 feet tall, with paper-white skin and a blocky, bald head.

Reporting from Madera, Calif. -- 'Don't leave me," Stephanie Hernandez implored, as she fumbled with her cellphone to dial 911. "I need you. I need you. " Hernandez had just changed her great-aunt's diaper and was coaxing her to take a sip of water when Maria "Concha" Lopez, 91, stopped breathing. CPR was out of the question, Hernandez told the emergency dispatcher: "She's too fragile. We could break her, her bones. " The dispatcher talked the distraught 26-year-old through the basics of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

They remember the fog, so thick the twin-engine C-46 charter was invisible until they almost bumped into it on the tarmac. They remember their coach, Roy Hughes, telling the pilot, "Let's give it the old college try," which ended a discussion of whether the plane should take off at 11 p.m. from Toledo. The Cal Poly Mustangs had traveled to Ohio, as far east as the team had ever gone, to play Bowling Green. It was Oct. 29, 1960. They lost 50-6, enduring cold that made them shiver, these kids from California.