A strong earthquake caused tall buildings to sway in Indonesia's capital.

There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

Hundreds of troops, engineers and social workers have converged on the desert town of Ghardaia to help with relief operations after a flash flood there killed 33, Algeria's Interior Ministry said Friday.

A new study adds to arsenic's notoriety as a cause of cancer and favored murder mystery poison by suggesting it also plays a role in diabetes.

Scotland's smoking ban appears to have prevented hundreds of heart attacks in its first year, a study shows.
The number of people admitted to the hospital for heart attacks fell by 17% in the year after Scotland's smoking ban took effect in March 2006, according to a study in today's New England Journal of Medicine.

The study's author, Jill Pell of the University of Glasgow, says the size of the decline strongly suggests it was the smoke-free law and not some other trend or lifestyle change that prevented the heart attacks.

The U.S. Green Building Council has recognized nearly 100 schools as eco-friendly under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

For the LEED program, schools are rated on a point system and given a designation reflecting the environmental elements they incorporate. The highest score is 79
Certified = 29-36 points
Silver = 37-43 points
Gold = 44-57 points
Platinum = 58-79 points.
Only one school, Sidwell Friends in Washington, has achieved platinum certification status.

The scoring system is divided into six categories:

At Hope Community Charter School, pre-kindergarten students are taught to recycle and fill out math worksheets with an environmental theme. Across town at private Sidwell Friends School, sixth-graders in science class race solar-powered cars and record their fastest times.
Learning green means different things in different classrooms, whether it's in a public charter school housed in a former warehouse alongside railroad tracks or in an exclusive academy former first daughter Chelsea Clinton attended.

BUILDING: Schols going green for energy costs, health

Amid a host of problems for the world's oceans, last week brought a reminder that coral reefs, the sentinel species for measuring the health of the seas, are taking a beating. One-third of all coral reef species face extinction worldwide, reports the latest study, released by Science magazine, with more species looking threatened.

A flurry of imported measles cases has kindled outbreaks in 15 states and two cities that together have given the USA its largest case toll in a decade, health officials said Monday. Since January, doctors have reported 132 measles cases, just shy of the 138 reached in 1997, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. So far, no child has died. Most cases have occurred in children whose parents decided against having them vaccinated. Twenty children less than a year old were too young to be vaccinated.

Getting a lot of exercise may help slow brain shrinkage in people with early Alzheimer's disease, a preliminary study suggests. Analysis found that participants who were more physically fit had less brain shrinkage than less-fit participants. However, they didn't do significantly better on tests for mental performance. That was a surprise, but maybe the study had too few patients to make an effect show up in the statistical analysis, said Dr. Jeffrey Burns, one of the study's authors.

A 5-year-old was killed when strong winds blew over a row of tents at an Alabama air show during storms that stretched across the South on Sunday while severe weather caused airport delays in the East, officials said. The winds that toppled the tents and canceled the air show in Huntsville came during an isolated strong thunderstorm that developed just west of the airport with gusts of 48 mph, said Tim Troutman of the National Weather Service. Witnesses told The Huntsville Times that a generator fell on the child Sunday. The death was confirmed by the Madison County coroner's office.