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As the air becomes crisp and multihued leaves tumble to the ground, the annual exodus of outside exercisers begins, filling gyms to the brim and leaving the streets and trails longing for the bustle of springtime.

The usual tips for winter exercise are to flock indoors, but there is enjoyment in trooping through cold conditions. My fondest running memories are of frolicking through a fresh blanket of snow, creating the first footprints into my imaginary wilderness. 

Imagine a garden peach that is about 2 inches in diameter — yellow, with a red blush and fuzzy. It sounds like a normal peach, but this “garden peach” is actually a tomato, and it tastes like a tomato would be expected to taste.

Scott Rice backed his black Dodge Ram into a field between a group of trees so he was hidden from view. Boone County’s newest conservation agent waited only an hour before he caught someone in the illegal act of spotlighting deer.

“I was pumped,” Rice said. “You sit for hours — sometimes days — to catch someone.”

Although doctors at MU’s School of Medicine are not packing their bags, Rep. Chuck Graham, D-Columbia, wants to discuss the medical school’s future in Columbia in a public forum.

In a letter Monday to UM Board of Curators President Connie Silverstein of St. Louis, Graham asked for a forum in the next month that would involve the curators, representatives from the UM system, MU and the School of Medicine, legislators and students.

Settling more billing disputes in favor of customers could earn University of Missouri Health Care a free Web domain name.

Pam Holley of Jefferson City, who claimed the domain name muhealthcare.com on Oct. 11 for her less-than-complimentary Web site, said she designed it earlier this year when she was unable to resolve a billing dispute with MU Health Care.

Owners of run-down rental properties in parts of Columbia now face an alternative to watching their homes slowly decline and eventually be demolished.

City officials, believing that property owners who invest in their units are making an overall investment in neighborhood quality, are making federal money available to owners through a low-interest loan rental rehabilitation program.

Columbia is prepared to spend less than 1 percent of a $28.3 million bond issue on the Nov. 4 ballot on bargain technology to stash 31 million gallons of treated water deep in an underground well.

The process, Aquifer Storage and Recovery, works sort of like an underground water tower. City officials say they love it. For one, they said, it’s clean, safe and environmentally sound. For another, installing an ASR system can be less expensive than painting a water tower, let alone building one.

Tom Thomas of MU’s exercise physiology program said it needs help — not elimination or consolidation.

Exercise physiology is one of six degree programs and two departments at MU targeted for a viability audit. The audit is looking for ways to merge, close or leave alone programs that cost more than similar programs do at other universities, generate a low number of credit hours or graduated fewer than 10 students last year.

Even though most high school students can’t vote, about 200 Hickman high school students found a way to participate in the democratic process Wednesday.

They questioned four panelists, with differing viewpoints, about post-war Iraq during the “Speak Your Mind Forum” at Hickman High School.

When MU biochemistry instructor Shari Freyermuth signed up her 100-plus students for discussion groups, a few juniors and seniors with jobs just never could attend.

So Freyermuth used WebCT, one of two market-leading, Web-based learning systems used at MU, to move the discussion groups to her class Web site. Now, students can share information in a virtual space. “They don’t all have to be together,” Freyermuth said. “People can do it on their own time.”

The University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska have put their differences aside to represent the Midwest on a mission to Japan.

Tom Sharpe, executive director of UM’s Office of Technology and Special Projects, is representing the UM system on a weeklong tour of Japan’s Kansai region. He is one of more than 70 delegates from 11 Midwest states visiting the country.

Hinton is a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t kind of town.

  Main Street is a hilly, winding, stone’s throw stretch of Route VV that on the east side boasts a Texaco gas station and a few aging homes built on narrow lots. The west side of the street is home to unassuming, mustard-yellow Hinton Radio and TV — a dilapidated, wooden building once used as a feed-and-grain store; the white, house-like Rocky Fork Primitive Baptist Church; and a crowded antebellum cemetery.

Developer Robert Smith wants to talk.

Smith on Tuesday asked that the Boone County Commission table a proposed rezoning of 200 acres off Route WW east of Columbia until Dec. 2 so he can meet with neighbors and county sewer officials.

If you’re hunting for the University of Missouri Health Care Web site, you won’t find it at www.muhealthcare.com.

What comes up instead is MU Healthcare Victims, a collection of billing and health care horror stories, audit reports and links aimed at “private citizens who have one thing in common — frustration with MU Hospital and Clinics,” the home page says.

Norma and Ernie Falloon have only one daughter, but the kindness and generosity they’ve spread all over Boone County makes them seem part of a larger family.

The Falloons have been married 53 years and, since retiring, have become a volunteering team.

Eleven years after silicone-gel breast implants were tightly restricted by the federal government, the Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to allow them back on the market.

Since 1992, when the FDA banned the use of silicone implants except for breast reconstruction in cancer patients, two Columbia residents have been at the center of the debate over the safety of the devices.

As the conceal-and-carry law awaits judgment from a St. Louis Circuit Court, the question of whether the law was the will of the people still hangs in the balance.

In 1999, Missouri voters struck down, by a margin of 4 percent, a referendum that would have allowed most citizens to carry concealed guns. The issue remained dormant until this year, when the Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly passed a new conceal-and-carry law.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday voted to ban the practice that critics call partial birth abortion, sending President Bush a measure that supporters and foes alike said could alter the future of U.S. abortion rights. A court challenge is certain.

Years in the making, the bill imposes the most far-reaching limits on abortion since the Supreme Court in 1973 confirmed a woman’s right to end a pregnancy.

As cook for the Child Learning and Development Center, Kelly Thompson is all too familiar with rising milk prices.

“Buying 35 to 40 gallons per week for the day care allows me to notice a significant amount more that we do spend on milk,” she said. “But even just my having a 3-year-old and buying milk, personally, for my family is enough to notice the price raise.”

The heavy door at the entrance causes only a moment’s pause as a flood of breathless children, fresh off the bus from school, race to sign in and begin an afternoon at The Intersection.

First stop: snack time.