It was only a few feet away

The captain said -- using an explicit four-letter word -- he said, 'There's something there,'

better estimate the way the debris fell.

The unidentified sounds and unusual climb rate are the focus,

I do not know what the sound is.

[Thursday is the 18th annual World AIDS Day, a time for countless statements of concern and commitment from world leaders, thousands of commemorations and remembrances, and reams of statistics. One important article has already appeared on this page, by Jim Yong Kim, the highly respected director of the HIV-AIDS Department of the World Health Organization [Nov. 23]. After recounting the grim statistics -- 3 million deaths in the past year alone, 5 million new infections this year, rising infection rates in nearly every part of the world and an admission that] good news is hard to find in the new U.N. report ... optimistic that the epidemic can be stopped.