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A seemingly clear path to significant playing time might have been enough for veteran swingman Aaron McKie, but the Lakers offered much more. The challenge of trying to help restore the franchise's luster, the chance to work under Coach Phil Jackson and the opportunity to operate in Jackson's big-guard oriented triangle offense sealed the deal for the former free agent, whom the Lakers introduced Friday at their El Segundo offices.

Twenty years ago, Liz Torbert noticed she was shrinking. Diagnosed with scoliosis in her mid-20s, the Washington, D.C., woman experienced no visible effects until after menopause, when her bone density decreased. Then her spine began to collapse. Throughout her adult life she had been 5 feet, 5 1/2 inches tall; by 2000, she'd shrunk to 4 feet, 11 1/2 inches. "My ribs were touching my pelvis," Torbert said. "I was leaning that far over."

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.

Re "Digging Into Seymour Hersh," Commentary, Jan. 27: Max Boot may not like the stories Hersh digs up or how he writes them. But here's a question: Boot is a well-connected fellow, at ease in the halls of power and among those in the know; what stunning, paradigm-shifting stories has he brought to the public square lately? Boot can fact-check Hersh and attack him all he wants -- the fact remains that while there are dozens of Max Boots beating the drums of war and frantically spinning rationalizations in defense of the powers that be, Hersh is a virtually peerless gadfly.

Moreno Valley Rancho Verde is the latest boys' basketball team in the fast-growing Inland Empire to prove it belongs among the top teams in the Southland. The Mustangs have won 13 consecutive games, including a 63-61 Southwestern League victory Friday over Lake Elsinore Temescal Canyon. The Mustangs also knocked off Nevada's top team, Las Vegas Bishop Gorman, last week.

Alma Escobar still feels the stares when she strides away from the starting line, almost as though she's the lone participant in a race. But eyes no longer train on Escobar solely for her diminutive frame. Escobar, a junior cross-country runner at Corona, is gaining more attention for the way she dwarfs the competition. "She has a Cadillac engine in a Volkswagen body," said Don Chadez, the athletic director at Corona and a former track and cross-country coach for 26 years.

Children who are short are no less likely to be popular or have friends than their taller peers, researchers have found, suggesting that some parental fears may be unfounded. A study of children in grades six through 12 in a public school in western New York found that kids were as likely to choose shorter-than-average students as their friends or to cast them in good roles for a class play.

Militant cleric Muqtada Sadr's refusal Tuesday to meet with a delegation of Iraqi religious and political leaders is the clearest indicator yet that recent fighting in Najaf has strengthened the anti-American leader, some analysts say. The snub, which followed last week's breakdown of talks with envoys of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, made it clear that Sadr expected any resolution to the two-week confrontation to proceed on his terms and timetable.

Great scientists are by definition bold, introducing ideas that challenge conventional wisdom. The best of them are also humble, able to see the importance of hammering their hypotheses with real-world tests, then being the first to admit when they're wrong. Galileo Galilei, for instance, boldly wrote "I have observed" (rather than the more typically cautious "I conjecture" or "I hypothesize") that Saturn is not one but three objects.

Light and dark sit side by side in Africa. Zimbabwe, home of Africa's worst tyranny, and Botswana, the continent's most advanced and persistent democracy, share a border. The two countries have overlapping ethnic groups, equal levels of linguistic and communal homogeneity and similar traditional and colonial cultures. Yet they have taken starkly different turns. What explains such contrasting outcomes?