What began as a short visit to Hungary finished seven years later with a prize-winning book documenting the lives of the Roma people, from India to Eastern Europe. The photos are now on display in Germany. And with Berlin planning to repatriate up to 10,000 Roma, they are more than just pretty pictures.

It was nine years ago that Danish photographer Joakim Eskildsen and his wife, Swedish writer Cia Rinne, first decided to travel to Hevesaranyos in Hungary to document the life of the Roma people living there. Having just been to South Africa and seen the effects of apartheid firsthand, the couple became interested in what they saw as a form of apartheid in Europe: the way that the Roma -- commonly referred to as Gypsies -- were being treated.

And then somehow, that first trip to stay with the friend of a friend's Roma mother in Hungary for four months turned into a seven-year-long project. It wasn't planned that way but as, Eskildsen writes on his Web site, "once we had started we were unable to simply stop. The more we found out about the Roma and got to know them, the more our interest in, and liking for them, grew."

For seven years Eskildsen and Rinna saved up and traveled intermittently through seven countries -- Hungary, India, Greece, Romania, France, Russia and Finland -- sometimes living with Sinti and Roma people for months at a time. The couple would often move in with the Gypsies they met and at times, Eskildsen has said in various interviews, the lack of privacy almost drove them crazy. Eskildsen took pictures and Rinna wrote while they lived in Roma villages, on the edges of cities, in streets, forests and rubbish dumps, and in huts, tents, and shacks.

A young Holocaust victim has been brought back to life on the Internet. As a virtual figure, a young Jewish boy from Poland writes about his life during the Second World War - and he's looking for friends on Facebook. 

A young boy in shorts and a white T-shirt, with black hair, dark eyes, and a mischievous grin - that is how Henio looks to his friends on his Facebook page.

"My name is Henio Zytomirski. I am seven-years-old. I live on 3 Szewska Street in Lublin," he writes on his profile. His birthday is March 25, 1933. He is no more than seven or eight years old. As a young Jewish boy, he was killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp.

Virtual witness to history

Henio has been signed up to Facebook since August 18, 2009. "On that day, I wrote my first entry," said Piotr Buzek. The 22-year-old works in the Brama Grodzka Cultural Center in Lublin, and he is responsible for bringing Henio back to life in the virtual world. He imagines how Henio felt during his life and writes as though he were him.

"Here at the center we have collected a lot of information about Henio's life, and then I tried to imagine how this young boy experienced the world around him," said Buzek.

WASHINGTON -- A failure early Thursday morning of a system that feeds flight plans to air traffic controllers snarled thousands of flights in the eastern United States. By midmorning the system was working again, but the backlog caused widespread airport delays.

The system, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, located in Atlanta with a backup in Salt Lake City, was a casualty of another failure in the tightly linked air traffic data system, a Federal Aviation Administration official said Thursday. The same system failed in August 2008, but it was not clear if the cause was the same this time. The result, however, was clear.

Flight plans typically consist of hundreds of alpha-numeric characters, giving the flight number, type of equipment, takeoff location and various intermediate points, with altitudes. On Thursday airlines were faxing flight plans to controllers, who were typing that data on keyboards, not quite hunt-and-peck but not nearly as fast as a computer would transfer the information.

When the system failed, it took another with it, the one that sorts through "notices to airmen," or F.A.A. alerts about short-lived problems, like equipment failures or runway closings, and delivers them to pilots.

THE competitors stood nervously on stage, awaiting the judges' decisions. As each name was called the crowd cheered, and the winner stepped forward to claim a prize, bowing his or her head to accept a medal.

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The ultimate goal of the Choudhurys, who emigrated from India to Los Angeles, is to have yoga qualify as an Olympic sport. "It's far away," Mrs. Choudhury said in an interview. "A lot of work needs to be done before we really get into it, but this is our dream."

One big obstacle may be the yoga community itself. To many people, the idea of competition goes against the philosophy of yoga, which emphasizes self-acceptance and inner growth. Although yoga does tend to attract people who are limber, the physical poses, or asanas, are only one aspect of the practice; others include chanting, meditation and reading Sanskrit.

"The initial reaction from most people is always the same thing: competition yoga? Those things don't belong in the same sentence," said John Philp, a filmmaker in New York who directed a documentary film, "Yoga, Inc.," about the commercialization of Western yoga, and wrote a book with the same title.

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Mr. [Richard Rosen, director of the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, Calif.] said that yoga contests could spread the perception that people with the most flexible limbs were the best yogis. "Unfortunately, yoga has been conflated with asana, which is a huge misapprehension," he said. "If the people who are winning asana competitions are suddenly being seen as more yogic than others, that's a really bad comparison to make." ...

Prevention could begin with lifestyle in younger years, one researcher says during the American Public Health Association meeting.

Philadelphia -- In Peter Whitehouse's view, all people fall into one of two groups: those with Alzheimer's disease and those who are afraid of getting it.

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"There's this sense that if we invest enough money in research, fame and fortune will be ours if we find a biological fix, a magic bullet," he said during a packed session November 9. But Alzheimer's disease is a moving, multifaceted target.

Several hundred genes play a role in the condition, which causes different symptoms in different patients. And while Alzheimer's researchers often talk about the brain plaques and tangles that characterize the disease, the reality is that not all Alzheimer's patients show these deposits and some patients with other forms of dementia do show them, said Whitehouse, who recently published The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told about Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis.

Whitehouse says that, instead of thinking of Alzheimer's as a strict dichotomy -- you have it or you don't -- he and a growing number of researchers are beginning to think of brain aging and dementia as more of a continuum. We're all a little demented, the thinking goes. Some of us are just more demented than others.

This thinking implies different responsibilities for society, he said. First, it means greater acceptance for those who do have more advanced dementia, rather than stigmatizing or fearing those individuals. Second, it means recognizing that aging takes place throughout a person's lifespan and that lifestyles during the younger years can affect people's health later in life. "We need to focus on the elders but not forget the young people," he said.