Gerontologist and commentator Mark Lachs says research in aging shows that once people reach a certain age, rates of disease, disability, and death start to decline.

I have a 98-year-old patient who's not only independent but rather dashing. He recently asked a series of questions that reminded me of one of the most intriguing scientific papers in gerontology.

Is it okay if he has a little cheese and butter from time to time? In modest amounts, he assured me.

In Russian culture, one iconic image is the elderly woman — in Russian, you call her a "babushka" — sitting on a roadside, selling vegetables from her garden.

One group of babushkas from the village of Buranovo, 600 miles east of Moscow, is blowing up that stereotype.

When Egyptian protesters clamored for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February, State TV journalist Shahira Amin took a bold move: She quit her job, joined the demonstrators and denounced her network's coverage.

Mubarak fled his presidential compound in Cairo on Feb. 11, and Amin and many others believed it would usher in a new era of media freedom.

She soon rejoined Nile TV, the English-language division of State TV, and said she hoped to help reform the agency.

People with chronic medical problems like Parkinson's disease can have a hard time finding a specialist who can help them manage the disease. Some patients are turning to doctors hundreds of miles away to get the care they need. But they're not driving to get to the doctor. They're doing the medical version of telecommuting, despite the fact that many insurers won't pay for it.

New York's annual Gay Pride Parade became a rolling victory party Sunday, two days after the state became the second largest in the country to legalize same-sex marriage.

One of those celebrating, Lindsey Katt, said she felt "a great sense of joy," although she added with a laugh, "there is a resounding feeling of 'we've won the battle, and now need to keep working to win the war.'"

In New York and around the country, activists on both sides are still fighting the war.

At a hospital in northern Japan, two high school girls drag a muddy bed outside, puffing with exertion, before throwing it onto a huge trash heap. Other kids push wheelbarrows brimming with a brown sludge made of mud and seawater.

The whole high school class is cleaning up the waterlogged Minami-hama Chuo Hospital, near the northeastern city of Iwanuma. The tsunami three months ago left 10-foot-high brown tidemarks on the hospital's walls. Nearby, cars have been thrown into a newly created lake.

Maggie Speak and Robert James are a Jeopardy contestant's best friends: They're the show's main contestant coordinators.

Jeopardy is pretty vigilant about keeping contestants separate from production staff — there's no mingling with host Alex Trebek in the green room. So, the contestant coordinators are really your only friends.

"On the tape day, my biggest responsibility is getting them ready for their stories," James says.

Actor Tobey Maguire is one of a handful of celebrities being sued for allegedly winning cash that was stolen from investors in a Ponzi scheme.

Former hedge fund manager Bradley Ruderman reportedly confessed to losing $5.2 million of investors' money in a weekly poker game. Now, those investors want their money back.

When European Union leaders met in Brussels last week, they faced some difficult decisions. For the past year, the EU has continually bailed out its debt-ridden member countries to keep the bloc and its currency afloat. Despite this assistance, Greece may yet default on its obligations, plunging Europe and much of the world into another financial crisis.

This is just the latest challenge for the euro zone, the group of 17 countries that banded their financial destinies together since 1999.

For the past decade, local schools have been judged based on federal requirements that some say are unfair and ineffective. Now, Gov. Steve Beshear has requested a waiver from those requirements under No Child Left Behind. His proposal would allow Kentucky schools to be tested under the state’s new system instead of the current federal system. It’s a move that local educators applaud.