ATLANTA

Study: Smoking drops among high schoolers

Smoking among U.S. high school students has declined by nearly one-fifth since 2000 but has not budged among middle-schoolers, according to a study released Thursday.

Nearly one out of four high school students, 23 percent, said they had smoked tobacco in the preceding month — a drop from 28 percent the last time the survey was conducted, two years earlier.

About 13 percent of middle school students said they had smoked, about the same as in the previous survey.

The spring 2002 survey questioned 26,119 students at 246 schools. The survey is conducted every two years by the Washington-based American Legacy Foundation.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Congress allows step toward Nixon library

House-Senate bargainers agreed Wednesday to let the government take the first steps toward establishing a formal Richard Nixon presidential library.

Until now, the late President Nixon has been the only president without his own federal library since the National Archives presidential library system began with President Hoover’s library in Iowa.

The Nixon library currently operating in Yorba Linda, Calif., is a private one.

Nixon’s presidential papers and tapes were seized by the government when he left office in 1974 after the Watergate scandal, and have been kept by the National Archives in College Park, Md. At the time, Congress mandated that the papers and tapes remain in the Washington, D.C., area.

SAN ANTONIO

Seized tigers arrive at Texas sanctuary

Two dozen tigers rescued from squalid conditions in New Jersey arrived Thursday at their new Texas home — a shady stand of oak trees at a sanctuary in the hills outside San Antonio.

The nonprofit Wild Animal Orphanage took in the tigers after a five-year custody battle between the state of New Jersey and a private owner.

The tigers roared as their wheeled cages were unloaded from horse trailers that hauled them to Texas.

Some of the cats are aggressive, others are fat and at least one is emaciated, said Ian Robinson, a veterinarian with the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

NEW YORK City

Solar-paneled canopy planned for subway

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is building a solar-paneled roof above a swath of Brooklyn subway track longer than a football field. When finished, it will the largest sun-powered canopy of subway station in the United States, transit officials said Thursday.

The cover for the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island, slated for 2005 completion, will shield eight train tracks and power about 15 percent of the train station, generating about the same amount of energy in one year as 65 New York City private homes would consume.

It costs about $4 million more to build the roof than if it had been made of regular glass, but transit officials believe the project will save the money in reduced energy costs over the expected 40-year life of the panels.

NEW YORK City

Former New York Times executive to write book

Former New York Times executive Gerald Boyd, who resigned last June in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, is writing his memoirs.

Currently untitled, the book will be published in 2005 by Amistad, an imprint of News Corp.’s HarperCollins.

“The Jayson Blair scandal will be covered, but it will be just a small part of the story,” Boyd’s representative, Robert Barnett, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, said Wednesday.