This summer, adult amateur kickball leagues are being founded around Seattle at a surprising rate. Thanks to the efforts of the Underdog Sports League, kickball teams have grown from 70 teams in 2005 to 200 this year. Let's face it: the Supersonics are gone, the Mariners are horrible and the Seahawks won't be starting until the kids are back in school. At this point. . . Seattle sports fans just want to kick something.

An Olympics more to some men's tastes is brewing this weekend in this small Finnish town. The winner receives his wife's weight in beer. More than 50 couples from countries around Europe are registered for Saturday's 16th annual Wife Carrying World Championships. The rules are simple, even if the contest isn't necessarily easy. The wife-even a borrowed one- is carried by the man-piggyback, on his shoulders, or however he can manage-around a quarter-kilometer (. 15 miles) course made up of sand, asphalt and grass over logs and through three feet of water.

A local wildlife guide has taught an orphaned heron how to fly by flapping his arms and squawking. Gary Zammit, a 42-year old wildlife expert at the Gwel an Mor complex in Portreath, Cornwall, said that he managed to teach Dude, a heron he raised from a chick to an adult, how to take to the skies by first running across the field with food in his pockets. The food led the bird to follow Zammit, who then spread his arms and flapped them.

The U. S. military and a consortium of biotechnology research organizations are embarking on a program to regenerate damaged tissues and body parts of American soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq. InCytu Inc. , which develops tissue healing and regeneration devices, and Rutgers/Cleveland Clinic will constitute the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM).

Pope Benedict XVI publicly baptized on Monday an Egyptian-born Muslim journalist, known for his renunciation of Islamic beliefs. The traditional Easter vigil service held on Monday at St. Peter's Basilica, marked the beginning of 55-year-old Magdi Allam's life as a Roman Catholic, after he admitted that he has been a non-practicing Muslim all his adult life. Taking "Christian" for his middle name, Allam, a deputy director for the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, wrote in an article, "I had to do this. Beyond extremists and Islamist terrorism at the global level, the root of evil is inherent in a physiologically violent and historically conflictual Islam. "