Risk

EACH SPRING, farmers plant their crops and hope for the best. But they are at the mercy of the weather; those vagaries can wipe them out.This summer, as the drought deepens, many Maryland farmers are watching their crops and profits wither. Consumers may pay a few cents more per pound for food after a bad harvest, but the brunt of the loss falls on those who put the most sweat into the land.Not so for Brian Hughes and Jenny Siebenhaar, young farmers who have a built-in hedge against the weather.

No pain, no gain. That's how some athletes talk themselves into running another mile, lifting a few more pounds or swimming a couple of extra laps.People selling investments would say: No risk, no reward. Yes, stocks do provide more growth and inflation protection over the long run. But do stockbrokers, financial advisers and other people pushing financial products do a good enough job explaining the potential risks, as well as the possible rewards?That's a valid question as mutual funds, brokerages and other firms keep turning out "alternatives" to low-yielding bank certificates of deposit.

These days, you don't necessarily need a 20 percent down payment to buy a home. But you will have to pony up some cash before you're handed the keys. The median price of existing homes was $218,000 in November, the latest data available from the National Association of Realtors, so putting a mere 3 percent down could run more than $6,500, in addition to closing costs. As you save for a down payment, one issue is balancing risk with return. Generally, the higher an investment's return, the higher the risk and the chance you could lose money.

A glass of milk a day may keep the heart doctor away, says a new British study.A 10-year study of 5,000 British men between the ages of 45 and 59 found that only 1 percent of men who drank at least a pint of whole milk a day suffered heart attacks.In contrast, 10 percent of the non-milk drinkers in the study had heart attacks, said lead researcher Dr. Peter Elwood of the Medical Research Council's epidemiology unit at Llandough Hospital in Penarth, South Glamorgan, Wales.The results of the study are scheduled to be published in the the March issue of the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.

Use of antidepressants by pregnant women doesn't significantly increase the risk of birth defects, with rare exceptions, two studies found. The overall risk of having a child with a defect increased by less than 1 percent in women on the drugs, including Pfizer Inc.'s Zoloft, GlaxoSmithKline PLC's Paxil and Forest Laboratories Inc.'s Celexa, according to research published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. As many as one in five pregnant women has symptoms of depression, according to the American Pregnancy Association, a Texas-based nonprofit organization.

After more than a decade of urgent warnings about the effects of toxic chemicals on everything from the foods people eat to the towns they live in, scientists are taking a contentious second look at the way they decide the health risk of hundreds of chemicals.There is by no means agreement among experts that it is time for an across-the-board lowering of official concern about the safety of chemicals. Depending on who you talk to, dioxin, which caused a whole Missouri town to be evacuated a decade ago, could either be as deadly as the plague or in low doses as non-threatening as the common cold.

The question is legitimate. You don't have to line up with the yahoos when asking it. This doesn't have to be a political-correctness litmus test.The question is simply this: Should Magic Johnson be back on a basketball court?He's going to be there Sunday, in Orlando, for all to see. When Johnson steps onto the court to play in the NBA All-Star Game, there won't be a dry eye in the house.What a phenomenal story. It was an act of love as much as anything else that prompted fans to vote Johnson to the All-Star team even though he had retired.

Conservative investors are becoming tangled in the lifeline the Federal Reserve threw to the economy last week. To try to prevent a serious recession, Fed policymakers have been cutting interest rates. The goal is to make it easier for businesses and consumers to borrow money so they will spend and help businesses profit, keeping employees in their jobs. But investors - especially retirees - who count on safe U.S. government bonds for income are not finding the cuts comforting. Interest on the safest bonds has been shrinking since the Fed started lowering rates in the fall.

Robert Johnson, the president and founder of Black Entertainment Television, can be described as a risk-taker with a vision.He took a risk in 1979 when he left his job as a lobbyist for the National Cable Television Association to follow his dream of starting the nation's first black-controlled cable network the following year.He took a risk again in 1991 when he took BET public, hoping that investors would buy into his dream as well.Today the stakes are even higher as Mr. Johnson embarks on an aggressive strategy to build his multimedia empire.

Children who attended a day care center for at least three months before the age of 2 were found to have a lower risk of developing childhood leukemia than children who were not placed in such an environment, a study to be reported tomorrow in the British Medical Journal says.In the study of 136 children with childhood leukemia and a slightly larger number of healthy children, conducted in Greece, children who attended a day care center before the age of 2 had a 70 percent lower risk for childhood leukemia than children who had never been in day care.