By BARTHOLOMEW SULLIVAN, Scripps Howard News Service

It all began with a mother's call to the Haywood County Sheriff's Department in Brownsville, Tenn., last Wednesday night.

CINCINNATI -- The Delta Queen stern-wheeler is on what is likely its last trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers as a passenger-carrying steamboat.

On Friday, it loses its exemption to carry overnight passengers, and will travel from Memphis, Tenn. down the river to New Orleans with just its crew. The American Queen, full of passengers, will accompany her south.

Health care reform, the issue that many say defined the 1992 choice between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is back at center stage again this year, and the candidates have sharply divergent plans for it.

WASHINGTON -- A massive e-mail and Internet campaign is under way aimed at derailing the nomination of Barack Obama and making Hillary Clinton the party's standard bearer next week in at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

WASHINGTON -- Pope Benedict XVI, at an open-air mass on Thursday, urged Catholics "to continue to be the leaven of evangelical hope in American society" and acknowledged the "pain" the U.S. church has suffered in the clergy abuse scandal.

WASHINGTON -- Pope Benedict XII, at an open-air mass on Thursday, urged Catholics "to continue to be the leaven of evangelical hope in American society" and acknowledged the "pain" the U.S. church has suffered in the clergy abuse scandal.

WASHINGTON -- They brought the blues to Baghdad, Memphis harmonica player Billy Gibson said Wednesday.

"Bluzapalooza," the first blues concert tour for the troops in Iraq and Kuwait, wrapped up and headed for home this week after what Gibson and tour manager Steve Simon said was a marvelous, if occasionally harrowing, time in the war zone.

WASHINGTON -- Thirty years after the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded its exhaustive review of the shooting of Martin Luther King, its chairman, Louis Stokes, stands by its findings.

WASHINGTON -- Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator, ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday with a three-sentence announcement to supporters.

The decision was inevitable after his distant third-place finish in Saturday's South Carolina primary, which he had deemed a must-win contest.