Other storms afflicted other places.

In France, frustrated youths of North African descent rioted outside their grim suburban apartment complexes.

The North Koreans admitted what the rest of us dreaded — that they have a nuclear bomb. The Iranians seemed to be doing their damnedest to get one, too. Negotiations on both fronts drifted in circles.

In Pakistan and across the border in a bit of India, an earthquake in October killed close to 90,000 people. That's half the toll of the Pacific tsunami of late 2004 — but the quake left millions without shelter as winter moved in.

Although the Syrians left Lebanon and the Israelis pulled out of the Gaza Strip, ugliness stayed behind in both places.

Syrian state intelligence is thought to have had a bloody hand in some high-profile assassinations in Beirut. And despite hopes for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the cycle of violence and retribution continued to spin.

Like lightning bolts, terror bombings struck indiscriminately, and without warning — in Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, India and, most notably, beneath London, in that city's subway trains.

On the flip side of the terrorism coin, The Washington Post threw its own lightning bolt — a story asserting that the CIA had interrogated terrorism suspects in secret prisons in Europe. At year's end, the European Union was demanding an explanation.

On the fringes of Europe, bird flu leaped across the border from Asia. So far, the virus has yet to leap across species to humans. But many scientists think it's just a matter of time. The result could be a global pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu of 1918.

Headlines rumbled and thundered with debates over matters of science and medicine. For instance:

Is global warming real, or it is trumped-up hysteria? The booming gained volume in the face of Katrina and her siblings in a record-setting string of tropical storms.

Was Charles Darwin wrong about evolution? The Kansas Board of Education suggested as much by offering equal time to the notion of intelligent design. But in Dover, Pa., voters ousted a school board that thought along the Kansans' lines; then, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design can not be taught in that York County, Pa., school district.

Who decides when life on life-support is no longer worth living? The case of Terry Schiavo went all the way to Congress before she died 13 days after the removal of a feeding tube.

Did French surgeons stray across ethical lines in transplanting a face onto a woman mauled by her dog?