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washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

Kenneth Price, a prolific Los Angeles artist whose work with glazed and painted clay transformed traditional ceramics while also expanding orthodox definitions of American and European sculpture, died early Friday at his home and studio in Taos, N.M. He was 77. Price had struggled with tongue and throat cancer for several years, his food intake restricted to liquids supplied through a feeding tube. Despite his infirmity, he continued to produce challenging new work and to mount critically acclaimed exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.

Clayton Olivier once bumped his forehead in a doorway with such force he knocked himself out. Guy Earl used to shave on his knees to avoid back strain from bending over the bathroom sink. Both are well over six feet tall, and they are among many who live rather uncomfortably in a world structured for people of average size who must strain their necks to establish eye contact with the likes of Olivier and Earl.

Jon Huntsman Jr. arrived here from Beijing on Friday to mull a White House bid against the man who made him ambassador to China, a matchup that would offer no shortage of personal drama. But before taking on President Obama, Huntsman would face another loaded showdown -- against Mitt Romney, a persistent foil with whom he has long competed for influence and stature. Their race would match a popular former Utah governor (Huntsman) against the state's beloved adopted son (Romney)

The way Esperanza senior Dahrin Footman sees it, Emmitt Smith and Barry Sanders opened the holes. Now all he has to do is run through them. * Before Smith and Sanders exploded into the NFL, undersized running backs didn't have much to look up to. But now Footman, who stands 5 feet 8 and weighs 185 pounds, has someone to follow every Sunday. "Sometimes I'll watch Barry Sanders on television and then go out and try some of his moves in my back yard," Footman said.

Receivers don't normally lead the county in interceptions in their first year of playing defense. And 5-foot-10 receivers don't normally catch balls intended for players half a foot taller than them. But Canyon quarterback Adam Hoover has been watching Greg Jacobs do the unexpected since their Pop Warner days. And Hoover has come to understand that nothing Jacobs does on the football field is normal. "He has something you can't coach--something that makes up for his size," Hoover said.

CONVENTIONAL wisdom has it that taller men make more money, get more dates and are more likely to win a presidential election. Shorter women aren't taken seriously, and boys and girls both suffer psychologically well into adulthood if they've grown up the shortest in their class. Right? Well, maybe ... or maybe not. What people thought they knew about the height advantage doesn't always hold up to the cold eye of psychological and sociological research.

It doesn't matter that racing jockey Kent Desormeaux won both this year's Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, coming within a horse's nose of capturing the Triple Crown--he's an invisible man in the eyes of the fashion industry. Most clothing stores carry few fashions for short guys such as Desormeaux, who is 5 feet 3. "Any time I go into a store and try on a shirt, the tail will go down to my knees. I have to have everything tailored," Desormeaux says. "It's difficult to find clothes that fit."

She's an acting student. She sits in a wheelchair. He's a business major. He relies on crutches to get around. Each of them willingly had a doctor break their legs and insert steel pins into the bones just below their knees and above their ankles. The pins are attached to a bulky contraption that looks like a metal cage. For six months or so, they will wear this stretching device even though it delivers excruciating pain eased only by medication.

Using growth hormone to make short kids taller isn't the first time medicine has sought to manipulate the height of healthy children. Estrogen treatment to halt female growth -- recently in the news because of a report about a Seattle family using medical interventions to stop the growth of their severely disabled daughter -- was used for decades beginning in the 1950s to slow the growth of healthy girls.

Season 10 and "American Idol" finally brought in a couple of pros. Whether new judges Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez will find and foster an actual pop star or create the ratings-generating buzz of their predecessors remains to be seen. (Wednesday night's opener was the lowest-rated premiere since its first season and was down 13% compared with last year's, but with an audience of 26.2 million, it easily trounced the competition.) But as soon as they took their seats, it was as if the elephant in the room had finally ambled out of view ?

In the early weeks of the Obama administration, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner seemed like the ultimate short-timer. There was the rocky confirmation stemming from his failure to pay some personal income taxes. Then after taking office, Geithner's first major speech on the financial crisis was an unmitigated disaster. The markets shuddered at the dearth of details about his plans to stabilize the financial system, and the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 382 points.

A single mother of three, survivor of prison torture and exile. A pediatrician, linguist and practiced buster of gender barriers as the first female president of Chile. This is the resume that makes Michelle Bachelet an excellent choice to lead the newly created United Nations agency to promote gender equality around the globe, to be called U.N. Women. With her appointment this week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has brought some badly needed star power to the world organization in general and to women's issues in particular.

Woe no more for the Galapagos tortoises at the San Diego Zoo. Although they are the oldest creatures at the zoo, the jumbo-sized reptiles have long been overshadowed by the charismatic vertebrates: pandas, koalas, pachyderms, big cats and even bigger polar bears. But now the tortoises — some of whom have been at the zoo since the 1930s — have a new $1-million upgrade to their enclosure on the zoo's Reptile Mesa. The refurbished digs are meant to be more comfy for the animals, more eye-catching for zoo visitors.

Dr. James M. Tanner, a British pediatrician who was among the first to study the growth of adolescents, developing charts that are still used by many physicians to define normal growth, died of a stroke Aug. 11 in Wellington in southwestern England. He was 90 and had also been suffering from prostate cancer. Virtually unknown to the lay public, Tanner studied 90 children in an orphanage in Harpenden, north of London, from 1948 to 1971, carefully photographing each child and measuring his or her physical stature and other characteristics every three months to create the first modern growth charts.

Don Williamson, an architect who helped build the stature of Laguna Beach's annual mixture of theater and art, the Pageant of the Masters, has died. He was 96. Williamson, who directed the pageant from 1964 to 1978, died of natural causes July 23 at his home in Laguna Beach, said his daughter, Jennie Riker. The Pageant of the Masters presents life-size versions of paintings, sculptures and other artwork on stage each summer in Laguna Beach. People dress as the characters in the artwork, and the pieces are elaborately staged as part of the city's annual Festival of the Arts.

At 16, Myung Bok is old enough to join the North Korean army. But you wouldn't believe it from his appearance. The teenager stands 4 feet 7, about the size of an American sixth-grader. Myung Bok escaped the communist North last summer to join his mother and younger sisters, who had fled to China earlier. When he arrived, 14-year-old sister Eun Hang didn't recognize the scrawny little kid walking up the dirt path to their cottage in a village near the North Korean border.

They could put up with constantly straining to see over people's heads in crowds and dangling their legs uncomfortably from too-high bus seats. But after listening to a barrage of jokes about Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis' height during a debate last year, Diane Keaton and Belle Adler of San Francisco decided it was time to take action. The two television producers, both 5 feet 1 1/2 inches, founded the National Assn.

Most of the storefronts on Jean Jaures Avenue in this small mining town are boarded up and appear abandoned. But in the brightly lighted window of Franck Fresson's pastry shop, tropical flowers intertwine with wild beasts made of sugar. Inside, chocolate figurines and an array of cakes sit like colorful, edible jewels. Behind the counter, Fresson's mother serves the customers who travel across the countryside to this shop, which belonged to Fresson's grandfather before him. Today, Fresson oversees every detail, arranging the glistening cakes in "harmonious," color-sensitive order.