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The first Mexican Gray wolves put paws back on Southwestern soil in 1998 under a program headed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Today, around 40 of them roam throughout a roughly 5,000-square-mile area of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, and that number is expected to reach 100 in seven years. Public support for the program has always been high, especially for those viewing it from a distance. But for many who actually live with the wolves, their view of the animals ranges from public nuisances on up to four-legged terrorists. Leo W. Banks examines problems in the wolf reintroduction program.

Nine years ago a high-school dropout and daily pot smoker attended his first Hempfest. That teenager, Dominic Holden, got involved and helped turn a backwater hippie smoke-out into the largest marijuana-law reform rally in the world; last year's crowd swelled to 175,000. Holden doesn't smoke pot anymore, but putting down the bong didn't quell his interest in drug-law reform in the slightest. Hannah Levin talks to the 26-year-old activist as he and his fellow organizers prepare for this weekend's Hempfest.

Shelby Sheffield is a corporate attorney, but her real passion is the triathlon, a grueling athletic endurance event that consists of three basic elements -- a swim, a bike ride and a run. In 2002, the 29-year-old Sheffield went from being a much respected triathlete on a regional level to a world-class competitor who qualified to compete this October in the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon, the most prestigious triathlon in the world. Bruce Dobie talks to Sheffield as she prepares for Hawaii, where competitors will test the limits of human endurance with a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run in temperatures that can reach 110 degrees.

In the winter of 1956, Bill Potts and his trio made musical history in a D.C. nightclub when they played for six nights with jazz legend Lester Young. "We knew on the first tune," Potts says. "It was heaven." When the tapes were released more than two decades later, they helped rehabilitate the reputation of Young's later years. Eddie Dean writes about that magical week and the years leading up to Potts 1959 classic, "The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess."

The Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, a special police unit established in Central Florida to concentrate on vice and drugs, is supposed to keep Orange County clean and family friendly. And they don't care how dirty they have to get to do it. Its agents and prosecutors have harassed and intimidated witnesses, lied about investigations, trumped up charges against old ladies and spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to coax a handful of people into committing petty crimes. "It's true the MBI has been successful, but only by degrees," writes Orlando Weekly's William Dean Hinton. "It is, after all, up against a powerful, unbeatable foe: the human sex drive."

By the time she turned 18 in July, Sinika had survived abandonment, sexual molestation, and a long stint on the streets. She had been in Baltimore's foster care system since she was 12 years old. Baltimore City Paper's Afefe Tyehimba looks at what's next for the young woman undergoing the transition from unforgiving control of the foster system to the chaos of making her own way. "Like her tumultuous past, Sinika's future has no blueprint, but her basic life goals are the same as everyone else's: to live a peaceful, stable, prosperous life filled with people to love who love you back," she writes.