Survival

The abduction and eight-year captivity of Natascha Kampusch is the story of a nightmare that finally ended -- and a willpower that continues. In interviews Wednesday on Austrian television and in newspapers and a magazine, her first since the 18-year-old escaped two weeks ago, Kampusch offered a narrative of her life as a kidnap victim that gave a glimpse of the psychological world created by her abductor and her struggle to survive.

Re "Can stereotypes survive 'Survivor'?" Opinion, Sept. 19 With respect to CBS' decision to allow "Survivor" to set up teams according to race, I agree with Joel Stein that it is a good thing to bring this taboo subject into conversations. However, Stein is wrong to suggest that race is a biological reality such as gender and age. Race is a social construction. In his final sentence, Stein meant to be funny: "If we're going to survive, we really need to band together against the yellow people."

With pink ribbons, pink gift cards and pink Playtex gloves, who could miss Breast Cancer Awareness month? But pink isn't the only thing present in abundance this month. Statistics are too: 1 woman in 8 will get breast cancer; more women are diagnosed with breast cancer now than 25 years ago; and early detection saves lives. There is more to those numbers than meets the eye -- and some debate among scientists about what the numbers mean.

FOR PEOPLE with Parkinson's disease, the rest of your life begins on the day of your diagnosis. It's your own Sept. 11 or, if you're old enough, Nov. 22, Kennedy's assassination. It's unforgettable. For me, that day was Feb. 5, 1990. It was like a death sentence with no chance of a pardon. I was told control of my body would slip away. I feared the same would happen to my mind.

AS the desert sun slides behind the mountains and the temperature dips, members of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribal Band assemble in a parking lot to rehearse. Mothers with clarinets to their lips. Young men lugging drums. Children carrying flags and streamers. A 76-year-old trumpeter in a wheelchair. A pair of stray dogs take seats in the street, ready for the evening's parade. "Quickly, we're losing daylight!" someone shouts.

For five days, the three friends walked across a 95-mile wasteland of death and destruction. Living on coconuts, cassava and unopened noodle packets they found along the way, they hiked along the west coast of Sumatra through 150 villages that had been reduced to rubble by Sunday's massive earthquake and tsunami. They swam across 15 rivers where bridges had been washed away.

A teenager who became the first person known to survive rabies without a vaccination went home after nearly 11 weeks in the hospital, officials said. Jeanna Giese, 15, was infected when a bat bit her at church in September, but she did not immediately seek treatment. She began showing symptoms of rabies in mid-October. A team of physicians at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa induced a coma as part of efforts to stave off the usually fatal infection.

Watching her friend climb a rock tower on Krabi, a well-known beach and rock-climbing area in southern Thailand, Mary McAllister suddenly heard a climber yell. "Big wave!" McAllister, of San Francisco, reported the story in an e-mail to family and friends. A wave the length of the horizon sculpted itself out of the water, she wrote. "We saw a kayaker ride the first wave. It was about 2 to 3 meters high.... A man behind me yelled, 'Now it's time to go!'

Nine tribespeople who survived the Dec. 26 tsunami spent 38 days wandering through flattened villages on a remote Indian island, eating boar and coconuts, before police found them Wednesday. Five men, two women and two girls were discovered in a forest on Campbell Bay by police searching for people still missing after the disaster, which killed more than 150,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

Nine days after giant waves struck Little Andaman island, a child was born in a soccer stadium and the Onge tribe of hunters and gatherers took a step away from extinction. The rain forest that surrounds the tribe, along with traditional Onge wisdom, saved it in a catastrophe that killed more than 150,000 people across southern Asia. Now some experts fear that the tsunami's aftermath will prove more dangerous than the waves.