A horse rider passes through a flourishing rape field in western Germany. The 45-year-old pop star reportedly gave the elder boy wine to drink and on at least two occasions the child passed out. He reportedly touched the boy inappropriately after he had passed out. He reportedly surfed the internet on a laptop computer with the boy to find images of naked women. Facades were torn off buildings, revealing rooms still ablaze. Cars parked nearby were smashed by debris. Clouds of dust and black smoke rose from the seven-story building and settled over the neighborhood. A third of those polled feel strongly this is the case; another third say they have at least some worries. "I think we're twitching on the edge of Armageddon; a lot of people I work with feel the same way," He rejected the idea that terrorists are winning the fight, but he added, "They're not losing it, either." Two vans passing the station were destroyed - one carrying kindergartners, the other taking girls to middle school. Dead children, burned beyond recognition, were taken to hospital morgues. Poppy cultivation has been increasing in the remote tribal regions along the border. The government has little control over the region and opium poppies fetch much higher prices than other crops, like corn, grown by the region's impoverished farmers. Bulldozers began demolishing a partially built building, witnesses said, while gunmen exchanged fire with troops. Four gunmen and three civilians, including a 15-year-old boy, were killed, hospital officials said. Twenty-seven others were wounded. Rescue workers used heavy equipment and shovels Wednesday to dig for possible victims trapped in the basement of a flattened tavern where at least three others were killed. They said workers were hampered by the century-old building's crumbling, unstable sandstone walls. "You can't just go in there and tear it apart," the mayor said. "You have to do it by hand." Objections. "Must prostitutes be left exposed to slavery or murder at the hands of pimps because protecting them from crime would encourage them to ply their trade and thus offend almost every religious faith?" the court asked. Radio and television stations plan to play part or all of the tapes from those arguments as part of news coverage of the cases. Ordinarily, news organizations covering the court must rely only on handwritten notes from oral arguments, because reporters are not allowed to bring tape recorders or cameras into the courtroom. Recent years have seen a flowering of nostalgia for East Germany in the east where high unemployment and a declining population have prompted many to recall fondly the advantages of life under the communist regime. "I am angrier because all this time I thought he was crazy," she said. "Seeing him today and hearing him, I don't think that he is crazy." Aborigines believe that to point a kangaroo bone at someone is to bring that person ill fortune, and the black magic is strong enough to cause death. British commuters take note -- the respectable person sitting next to you on the train fumbling with their cell phone might be a "toother" looking for sex with a stranger. Chinese police have broken up a gang of deaf teenaged robbers who carried out a string of thefts on the orders of a brutal leader. The risk was similar to Internet users "running naked through the jungle, which didn't matter until somebody released some tigers." The group said it has seen a surge this year in the number of sites that promote terrorist recruitment, urging young people to join "holy wars" and become suicide bombers. A Mexican cook killed his drinking buddy, cut up his body and boiled him in herbs, according to police who fear he may have been turning him into tamales. Tamales are made of packets of maize dough with a savory or sweet filling, typically wrapped in corn husks or banana leaves. They often contain pork or chicken. "I am not aware of any country that allows free-for-all sex in the barracks," he said. "You can't have people going around the barracks having sex everywhere. It's ludicrous." A German woman and a male friend face prosecution for human trafficking after they put the woman's daughter up for auction on the Internet at a starting price of one euro ($1.18), authorities said on Wednesday. The few arms that have been surrendered so far were "junk," - including rocket-propelled grenade rounds marked "inert," 100 rusted mortar shells, dud rockets and unusable guns. One of the missing pieces is about the size of a pencil. The other is about as thick but is 17 inches long. Photographs of flag-draped cases bearing American casualties from Iraq should not have been made public under a Pentagon policy prohibiting media coverage of human remains, officials said. "As people began to see the reality of it and see the 55,000 people who were killed coming back in body bags, they became more and more upset by the war," he said. "This is not about privacy. This is about trying to keep the country from facing the reality of war. Consider what might happen if government were asked to put out a daily newspaper. Well, for starters, there would likely be a flurry of meetings, leaked memos, and then I suspect leaked recommendations, followed by the adoption of a draft policy guideline and then a 90-day open comment period where interest groups would proceed to shred that guideline." The government has also urged the industry to adopt stringent measures, such as storing aircraft in locked hangars, installing hidden switches to prevent aircraft thefts and securing fertilizer, pesticides and other chemicals. The Army, for example, is reorganizing to increase the number of combat brigades from 33 to as many as 48 over the next several years. And the Pentagon is finding ways to pull troops out of jobs that could be done by civilian Defense Department workers or government contractors, thus freeing more troops for combat-related duties. Jurors deciding the case of a white supremacist charged with trying to hire someone to kill a judge who ruled against him asked to review the testimony of a former follower who said his leader asked him to carry out the deed. The girl became upset and began to use profanity and hit the office assist button on the classroom wall, the incident report said. The teacher then allegedly told two 14-year-old boys to pick up the girl and throw her out the window. Prisoners jumped from the walls of a Brazilian prison to escape an uprising in which inmates have butchered their foes, severed their heads and brandished them from the walls. On Monday, rebel inmates threw the mutilated corpses of rivals from the walls around the prison. They decapitated two of the dead men and hung their heads from the wall. The inmates also strung up three dead bodies by their feet as horrified relatives waiting outside watched. The couple, described by officials as a 32-year-old transsexual with female breasts wearing a purple thong and a 17-year-old boy in white boxer shorts, were admitted to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation. "Lots of believers, men and women, came to me and asked permission to become martyrs and to execute martyrdom operations. I keep telling them to wait, but if there was an assault on our cities or on our religious authorities we will be time bombs and will not stop before destroying enemy forces. Most of the victims died of multiple trauma, many suffering crushed chests and limbs or heads partially or totally torn off. An HIV outbreak in the adult movie industry is contained, a health group said Thursday in arguing against a call for government regulation of the multibillion-dollar industry. Since announcing last week that two performers tested positive for HIV, the Adult Movie Industry Healthcare Foundation has identified 51 performers who had on-screen sex with them after they contracted the virus. Among American, Chinese and Turkish writers, poets died significantly younger than nonfiction writers, and among the entire sample, poets died younger than both fiction writers and nonfiction writers. The document softened a draft that had discouraged the use of altar girls and denounced such practices as applauding and dancing during Mass. The woman described satanic ceremonies in which clergy members placed her in a coffin filled with cockroaches, forced her to swallow what she believed to be a human eyeball and penetrated her with a snake "to consecrate these orifices to Satan." She also alleged that the group of clerics killed an infant and a 3-year-old child, performed an abortion on her and mutilated dogs during the rituals, according to a copy of her statement. The daughter was hospitalized for psychiatric examination. No charges were filed because the mother's death was from natural causes. No further details were available. "Chemical munitions could mean any number of things," including smoke grenades, he said. In all, more than 1 million barrels of oil could not be loaded during the shutdown. "But it's not the company's fault if it has a dumb client. I'm not blaming the companies, I'm blaming the government." Staring back at her was a woman inside a three-foot-long felt and satin vagina. "Loco! Loco!" she squealed. The group gathered around and snapped photos. "These people have no shame!" Cipro became widely known during the anthrax scare in 2001, when it was given to people exposed to the lethal spores. Five people were killed and 17 sickened in the anthrax attacks. Last year, 5 million people became infected. That's a failure of prevention," he said. "Last year 3 million people died of AIDS, more than ever before. That's a failure of providing treatment." But there are downsides to the two commonly used chelation drugs. One requires painful shots directly into muscle and the other is taken orally, a method of little use to a vomiting patient. The potato commission had been supported by 20 different organizations that represent products including toothpaste, bottled water, smoke detectors, and baby products. Justices were told their certification marks are put on more than 17 billion products each year. Some lawmakers worry that private security forces operate too far outside U.S. military control - and laws. And experts wonder what would happen if a contractor did something tragically wrong, like shoot an Iraqi child. Ten companies with billions of dollars in U.S. contracts for Iraq reconstruction have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage. Secret Service agents questioned a high school student about anti-war drawings he did for an art class, one of which depicted President Bush's head on a stick. Another pencil-and-ink drawing portrayed Bush as a devil launching a missile, with a caption reading "End the war - on terrorism." The drawing that drew the most notice showed a man in what appeared to be Middle Eastern-style clothing, holding a rifle. He was also holding a stick with an oversize head of the president on it. "If this 15-year-old kid is perceived as a threat to the president, then we ARE living in '1984', I'm telling Christians to stay indoors and don't be provoked," he said. The judge dismissed the complaint of disturbing the peace, saying it had not broken any noise restrictions. "Laughter is a general sound of life. It will not be banned," he said. It was not clear who shot the policemen. But as the dead and injured officers were taken into a hospital next to the city's largest mosque, an angry crowd gathered. Men armed with machetes and sharpened sticks shouted "God is Great" and called for a holy war against the region's Christian separatists. The first group of three hostages has received the brunt of media coverage. Their kidnapping was announced in a video showing them blindfolded, kneeling before their heavily armed captors. Riot police detain a pro-democracy protester during a demonstration. Nearly every day, angry people fill the streets, demanding a return to democracy. Nearly every evening, hundreds of those same people pack the city's jails. Most are freed after a few hours under arrest. And the next day, the cycle begins again. After hours in traffic, some motorists were so furious that some yelled out for the man to jump. Gunfire and mortar blasts could be heard for more than an hour in the afternoon, then three thunderous explosions shook the area as warplanes circled overhead. Two black plumes of smoke rose over the area, as heavy machine-gun fire continued. After the attack, a cargo truck was left with its tires shot out and windshield pockmarked with bullets. Pools of blood were on either side of the truck's cab, and U.S. soldiers at the scene said two casualties were taken away. Their nationalities were unknown. While Saddam was in power, the government organized festivals throughout Iraq on his birthday. He was ousted from power during a U.S.-led invasion last year. At that time, about 200 people gathered in Tikrit waving Iraqi flags on his birthday, a celebration that was broken up when U.S. soldiers in Humvees with mounted machine guns arrived and threatened to use force. "People were screaming my name," he said. "It was crazy. People who don't normally even talk to me have been very supportive." A narcotic painkiller that looks like a lollipop - designed to speed relief to cancer patients - is starting to show up in illegal sales with the nickname "perc-a-pop." The drug's ease of use and sweet taste have law enforcement officials worried about the potential for abuse. A berry-flavored lozenge on a stick, contains the synthetic opioid fentanyl. "It's a drug that is easily administered or taken by somebody who might be afraid to either take a pill, snort or inject a needle in their arm." The street value of a perc-a-pop is $20. "It is a big problem. Rabbits are being killed with kindness. They are designed to eat grass but are being fed things like pizza, crisps and digestive biscuits." The soft, white, shiny cheese, Druzhba, or 'friendship', comes in small squares wrapped in foil -- and has long been a cult snack to go with vodka. The government had been tipped off about the dawn attacks in the southern provinces and were lying in wait with overwhelming firepower. "We want to express our regret to chickens for having to kill them, while also giving thanks to them for providing us with food, I don't know how chickens feel about it, but humans should show appreciation. There were so many chickens that had to be sacrificed because of the bird flu. So a memorial service is extremely important." There was nothing deliberately humorous about the chicken funeral services. Over 200 officials and poultry producers observed a minute of silence and then bowed to the stack of eggs. "We now have more than 300 blood bottles, compared to only 150 three weeks ago. We are getting stuff more than the usual," he said. The declaration, adopted unanimously, committed the countries to teach children about combating anti-Semitism and to promote remembrance of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. And bits of debris and concrete dust filled the air. "It was not something you wanted to breathe. It was something you had to taste," he said. One picture shows an Iraqi prisoner who was told to stand on a box with his head covered and wires attached to his hands. The prisoner was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted. Other photos showed naked prisoners being forced to simulate sex acts. "We've had a very high rate with our styles of getting them to break; they usually end up breaking within hours." Methods often reported, it said, included prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, exposure to loud music and prolonged periods of being covered by a hood. A policeman in Berlin has been suspended after he gave a fellow officer the stiff-armed Hitler salute at the start of his shift. "These people do not have a specific logic, and unfortunately, we are facing a group of insane people. "Flying saucer fever has gripped Iran after dozens of sightings in the last few days. Fanciful cartoons of alien spacecraft have adorned the front pages. "Nous sommes desoles que notre president soit un idiot. Nous n'avons pas vote pour lui." The translation reads: "We are sorry that our president is an idiot. We did not vote for him." Both stations also showed a photograph of a female U.S. soldier standing by a hooded naked prisoner. The soldier is pointing at his genitals, which are blurred out, and grinning at the camera. The stations also broadcast a picture of several naked men intertwined as if they were engaging in a sex act. "Some people have asked me to tone down my words and to avoid escalation with the Americans. My response is that I reject any appeasement with the occupation and I will not give up defending the rights of the believers. America is the enemy of Islam and Muslims and jihad is the path of my ancestors.It had pretty much turned the right side of my head into hamburger," he testified. Seconds later, he was hurled face-first into a wall as concrete and steel from the floor above him crumbled and fell. He suffered a fractured skull and broken nose, and he suffered permanent blindness in his right eye when a two-centimeter shard of glass pierced it. "Those people all had normal levels of uranium in their urine," the doctor claimed. The scandal comes on the heels of another in January when six veterans of the city's drug squad were charged with, among other things, perjury, extortion and assault. That same month, a homeless man, who said he had been savagely beaten by officers six years ago, was awarded money in his suit against the police department. "We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away." The militants made an unusual and horrific appeal to recruit the young, dragging the bloodied corpse of a Westerner through a high school parking lot and urging the students to join their brethren in a holy war. They appear to have badly miscalculated the response: school officials said some of the boys ran from the scene crying; others spoke of nightmares. "This is not right," said a traumatized 18-year-old. "This is un-Islamic." One of his friends was dead, 12 others lay wounded and the four soldiers still left standing were surrounded and out of ammunition. The siege began after four civilian security personnel were attacked, killed, burned and mutilated. The girl testified that she tried to escape from the trailer, but did not scream or shout for help. "I was too scared. I was afraid he'd hit me or something," she said. In fact, he plans to undergo a sex-change operation. Tom will become Marla. "Was there an environment, a culture that not only condoned this, but encouraged this kind of behavior? Who was in charge? Was there a breakdown in command here? ... We need to understand all the dynamics of this." Passengers walk through a "puffer" machine, which sucks in the air around them and within seconds determines whether they've been in contact with explosives. Every person constantly radiates as much heat as a 100-watt light bulb in a "human convection plume." The puffer machine has a hood that catches the optimal amount of plume, he said. Higher-level radioactive waste, including uranium ore sludge and powdery metallic production wastes, will need a more secure disposal site with lined pits. Asked how many American troops have died in Iraq, the Pentagon's No. 2 civilian estimated the total was about 500 - more than 200 soldiers short. 20 militiamen were killed in the battle - based on bodies and "watching young men fall after being hit." He said there were few civilian casualties because troops were using precision fire. "There will be an investigation, there will be a prosecution, and heads will roll." The growing popularity of hybrid vehicles is a step toward cleaner air and less dependence on gasoline. But for rescuers at accident scenes, they represent a potential new danger: a network of high-voltage circuitry that may require some precise cutting to save a trapped victim. "You don't want to go crushing anything with hydraulic tools," said an assistant chief with the Fire Department. "It's enough to kill you from what they're telling us in training." Hybrids draw power from two sources, typically a gas or diesel engine combined with an electric motor. The battery powering the electric motor carries as much as 500 volts, more than 40 times the strength of a standard battery. That worries those who must cut into cars to rescue people inside. "Everybody's concerned about the electrical side, but could you imagine if we tried to bring gasoline out today as a motor fuel?" It was not immediately clear where the two girls were fatally shot. "The problem is, the information was wrong." If terrorists downed an airliner with a shoulder-fired missile, the cost to the airline industry could run into the billions of dollars. "The nation is awash in conservative misinformation," adding "viewers and listeners are bombarded by conservative misinformation presented as fact." While frogs had been known to hitch rides in the cargo holds of aircraft, it was the first time the Quarantine Service was aware of one being found in a meal. A Texas man so moved by the film "The Passion of the Christ" that he went to police in March and confessed to killing his girlfriend pleaded not guilty to the murder. They said they had been told up until the last minute that he would plead guilty. "I was in shock. I was, like, 'What did he say? Not guilty?" A Texas man is suspected of using a bubble bath by candlelight and soothing music as bait to set a date with death for his wife. He appeared to accidentally bump the radio, the wife was able to bump the radio before it hit the water, and thought that there might be something suspicious. What she found was that her husband had recently visited Web sites that detailed bathtub electrocutions. "These things are complicated, they take some time," he said of the investigations. "The system works." An investigation into reports of inappropriate sexual contact, improper use of physical restraints and long stays in isolation units. "The photos that we all saw last week and into this week stunned every American. It was shocking. It showed acts that are despicable. ... What they did was illegal, against all regulation, against all standards. It was immoral." President Bush rode across Ohio on Monday in a bus emblazoned, "Yes, America can." It turns out the bus was made in Canada. Two men and a woman were convicted of assaulting six children as part of a crime ring that allegedly included sodomy, group sex and pornographic photography. None of the children were ever examined by doctors, even though some of the allegations included forcible sodomy. President Bush told a skeptical Arab world on Wednesday that the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by some members of the U.S. military was "abhorrent" and does not represent "the America that I know." He stopped short of apologizing. Much of the slang is the vernacular of "Javads," a wayward breed of young men who drive around Tehran, trying to lure girls into their cars. Unsurprisingly, many of their racy, often chauvinistic expressions derive from their beloved automobiles. A "zero kilometer," a reference to a car with no mileage on the clock, is a virgin. "Been in an accident" refers to a girl who has become pregnant. Girls' backsides, a favorite talking point of hot-blooded Javads, are "hubcaps." The byproducts of a Texas cow that was destroyed after it showed potential signs of a central nervous disorder must be made into pig feed or be destroyed. "It really doesn't matter if the army is disbanded," he said. "I don't want war. Who likes war? There should be a peaceful solution." Falling in love -- that crazy, blissful feeling -- causes gender-bender changes in men and women's testosterone levels. A study by an Italian researcher shows that when couples fall in love their testosterone levels alter. It falls in men and rises in women so they become more like each other. No one could figure out why Lara the cow stopped giving milk until an Albanian veterinarian pulled plastic from her guts as heavy as the average woman. "This culture is in big trouble. All you see on television are debased images. You saw the Super Bowl. I don't even need to say anything more about it." Among the records were documents indicating that he was transferred from parish to parish after allegations surfaced, and that he had attended a forum with other people who later went on to form the North American Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA. "It's the accumulation of all these miscalculations, misconceptions and missteps - and an arrogant inability to admit his mistakes - that require him to step down." "First they beat us. They hit us all over, then they tore off our clothes." He said the abuse lasted for four hours, during which they were all kept naked, a particularly humiliating experience in conservative Arab culture. "In our cells we didn't have water, we didn't have toilets, we just had buckets for our needs," she said. "There were no beds. There were mattresses on the floor, but they were always damp. There was no contact with your family. You were completely cut off from the outside." At one point, he said, the men were forced to climb on top of each other in a pile. He pointed at a photo of seven nude men stacked in a pyramid. "That's me," he said, indicating the man at the bottom left of the picture. The guards lifted his hood, and as a female guard stood in front of him, ordered him to masturbate, he said. They then pulled his hood back down. "I was standing there, then they took my hand and put it on the head of someone in front of me." Nocturnal with an excellent sense of taste, rats can detect minute amounts of poison, down to one part per million. "We need to close that loophole, because real bullets that killed real people went through those loopholes." By one estimate, rats are behind 26 percent of all electric cable breaks in New York because of their attraction to wires. Their front two teeth grow five inches (12.5 cm) a year and allow them to gnaw on concrete and steel. Their skeletons can collapse so they can squeeze through holes as small as three quarters of an inch wide -- the average width of their skulls. New York subway workers call them track rabbits, and when rats are not foraging for food they are having sex. Rats have sex 20 times a day with as many females as possible. Also, rats in all-male colonies will have sex with each other. "This is the worst destruction I've seen," he said. "Usually it's decay that causes problems. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people," it said. "Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles." Troubling to Israelis is the fact that one influential group of evangelicals believes in a final, apocalyptic battle between good and evil in which Jesus returns and Jews either accept him or perish - a vision that causes obvious discomfort among Jews. "I don't want my people to be assassinated, sacrificed, killed or slaughtered because of their beliefs." Two women and a child died when they were thrown from the SUV, while its other four occupants - a woman and three children - died inside. Troopers initially thought five people died, but two more bodies were found when the SUV was lifted, authorities said. The FBI's nearly $600 million effort to modernize its antiquated computer systems to help prevent terrorist attacks is "not on a path to success," The military said there were signs of trauma to the body, which was found. "Our group today attacked the enemy armored vehicles and these are parts of their armored vehicles," a male voice said. "What is offensive to me is that we have generals and the secretary of defense hiding behind a 20-year-old farm girl from West Virginia who lives in a trailer park. That is a standard psychological war method," he said. An explosion that blew a hole in a sewage tank dumped up to 200,000 gallons of sludge and wastewater into the Spokane River and a parking lot, authorities said. One worker was missing and presumed dead and three others were injured. A search of the river and its banks was called off Monday evening, with authorities reluctantly concluding the missing man was most likely in the sewage tank. "Your attention please, ladies and gentlemen, Building 2 is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building 2. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may use the re-entry doors and the elevators to return to your office. Repeat, Building 2 is secure." The bodies were ripped apart and scattered over the radius of one kilometer. "Sometimes I wish that I didn't know all that I know, I wish I didn't know that it could have been avoided - that hurts much more." The Pentagon issued a statement calling the claims "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture." He said all the assaults were videotaped. "Just because it's on TV, it doesn't mean it's true." On a conservative radio talk show last week, the Republican governor said he "rejects the idea of multiculturalism" and that young immigrants should learn English and assimilate into American culture. On the radio, he referred to multiculturalism as "crap." His remarks came after the state Comptroller complained at a public meeting that he had trouble understanding a restaurant worker who spoke poor English. "I don't want to adjust to another language, this is the United States. I think they ought to adjust to us." Lemurs, once believed to be cute but basically stupid, show startling intelligence when given a chance to win treats by playing a computer game, U.S. researchers reported. So far, it suggests primitive animals such as lemurs need a good reason, such as a treat, to bother trying to count. Humans and monkeys, in contrast, will stretch their minds simply out of curiosity. A Catholic priest shot to death the mayor of a town in Mexico early on Wednesday after the pair got drunk and began punching each other during a religious festival, state officials said. Witnesses described a home where there was barely room to move because of clothes, boxes, papers and debris covering the floor. The air was foul, and the bathroom floor and tub were covered with clothes. "She is never going to have a TV show on the niceties of decorating homes or a living magazine or be a sponsor of a housewares line at Kmart, she never will," he said. "Punish the bullies, not the grieving mothers." He was kicked and punched by bullies and started sleeping in his closet with knives out of fear. He also would defecate on himself to get out of going to school. "It's the first time we can't just point a finger at a leader and say 'You did this wrong' and instead have to say 'We're doing this wrong,'" Someone clogged up a toilet in a bathroom he cleans and scrawled racial epithets on the walls ordering him to clean up the mess. He said he told his supervisor each time. "I actually found a hangman's noose hanging," he said in an interview. "It really shook me up." Access to such technology makes the Vietnam conflict - dubbed the nation's first "living room war" due to greater access to TV images - seem like the Dark Ages. Now it's instant war, in real time. "To me, the war is just kind of like another show on television," says a 28-year-old idiot from St. Louis who works in magazine distribution. "I try to check in on it a couple times a week. But it doesn't have much bearing on my life." And as awful as they are, he says he's not shocked by these latest war images. "America is the enemy of God," fighters shouted. "The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves." He called the U.S. president a "jerk" earlier this year and accuses his administration of seeking to topple him, a charge denied by Washington. Opium and laudanum were among the painkillers, but many of the items on the pharmaceutical list were bleeding or purging agents. The list notes 50 dozen bilious pills -- also known as thunder-clappers -- that were powerful purgatives. The bandits had a good idea of how to get money in the used grease market, but she thinks it odd that anyone would put so much effort into making off with so much cooking byproduct. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core program - pre-approved for operations against the high-value terrorist targets - and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets,'" the source said. A fireworks show before an indoor football game went awry and filled the coliseum with smoke, sending everyone outside trying to catch their breath. Two people sought treatment for respiratory problems. "It felt like I was choking, as I tried to take a deep breath, it felt like I couldn't get any air." Police said the car traveled about 30 feet in reverse, knocking down a 9-year-old girl, who was pushing her 2-month-old brother in a stroller. The car then lurched forward, accelerating as it traveled about 80 feet across the parking lot, striking another 9-year-old girl, a 21-year-old woman and 54-year-old man, police said. "All I could see was a ball of fire rising into the air and there were body parts all around. We picked up the pieces and some of them were burned," he said. Witnesses told police the car then became airborne, hitting a hedge near the front of the church before crashing into a monument bearing the Ten Commandments and pinning two women beneath its wheels. The church's pastor prepared to administer last rites. "I ran for the oils and anointed the people. It didn't look good." Horror stories already abound in the gay community, where meth's reputation for boosting stamina and sex drive made it too tempting for some. "It was euphoric beyond anything I'd ever experienced." That euphoria soon degenerated into sleepless days and deep depression. "But if crystal meth breaks out, it's going to be a big problem." He told the foreign leaders: "Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing." Intelligence led him to believe the Iraqis had mobile biological weapons labs. "It appears not to be the case that it was that solid," he said. In the case of the mobile trucks and trains, there was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate." He continued: "At the time that I made the presentation, it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading." People who eat beef tainted by the aberrant protein that causes mad cow can contract a similar rare but fatal disease. Condemning animals with broken bones is "a waste of wholesome food and an economic burden. I don't have a problem with the ban on 'sick' downers, but what about the 'healthy' animal that slips and falls, and either breaks a leg or 'splits out?'". "All downed animals that are marketed and brought to slaughter are subjected to horrendous cruelties; often they are dragged to slaughter by their tails and ears, or dumped and left to die in agony. Each and every one of them suffers unimaginable pain and fear." Two Portland, Oregon DJs were fired for making jokes as they aired a recording of the Nick Berg's beheading, station management said, calling their actions "beyond comprehension." The DJs and their producer were fired from their morning show after the pair laughed and played background music while repeatedly airing Berg's screams as militant Islamists decapitated him. The poll showed 24 percent of respondents had fallen asleep either at their desk, in a meeting or in the toilet. Thirty-nine percent said they had not fallen asleep at work, but had to make an effort to stay awake. Now's the time to make their move: Billions of the red-eyed insects, who get only one chance every 17 years to mate, are crawling their way above ground for this rare opportunity. Scientists say this year's batch, known as Brood X, is the largest of the cicada groups that appear at various intervals. North Korea harshly condemned the United States for abusing prisoners in Iraq, calling it an "empire of evil." "Yankees have turned Iraq into a chasm of death," The abuses "are a continuation of hideous terrorism and human rights abuses the U.S. has perpetrated against other countries and nations throughout its history, as it is known to be an empire of evil whose main mission is to commit aggression, murder, terrorism and maltreatment," the spokesman said. North Korea is frequently named as one of the world's most egregious rights abusers, accused of torture, forced abortions and infanticide, as well as harsh restrictions on freedom of expression and foreign travel. Angry young Muslim men attacked "nonbelievers" with machetes Tuesday, while others burned cars, stores and apartments in apparent revenge for last week's killings of hundreds of Muslims by a Christian group. Three corpses - one charred and another badly mutilated - lay in the streets; it was unclear who killed them. There were unconfirmed reports of several others killed by young men who barricaded streets with burning tires and garbage. "The terrorists who are seeking to destroy Iraq have struck a cruel blow with this vile act today," he said. "But they will be defeated ... The Iraqi people will ensure that his vision of a democratic, free and prosperous Iraq will become a reality." Women balanced mattresses on their heads, children carried blankets and men carted away sofas. One man lowered a cooking gas container by rope from a second-floor window, and another piled fire wood onto a horse cart. The army is also considering digging a deep trench, or even a moat, to block the tunnels that lead from Egypt. Italian soldier's death in Iraq roils Rome. Opposition leaders contended that after heavy fighting in the past three days and scattered clashes in the past weeks, the mission can no longer be described as humanitarian. "You can watch things about the Holocaust. Why can't you watch this?" one 14-year-old student was quoted as asking. "Shoot me! Shoot me! You'd be doing me a favor!" a badly burned inmate, recalls screaming at guards who trained their guns on inmates fleeing the burning cellblock. Gang members tried to attack firefighters when they arrived, prompting guards to fire in the air "to prevent a massive prisoner escape." The death toll is expected to rise; 103 of the 186 inmates died outright, and 23 more are hospitalized with severe burns, like those of one inmate, his face and body a mass of swollen tissue and peeling tattoos. The gangs' symbols are tattoos of deaths-head, daggers and dice. The 'homies' (fellow gang members) who were sleeping on the floor, they were all dead. There are more than 100,000 gang members belonging to 500 different gangs in Honduras. In response to the government crackdown, they have staged a number of increasingly gruesome killings in recent months, leaving decapitated heads and mutilated bodies - often of young women - alongside scrawled messages of defiance. 19 hijackers "defeated the INS, they defeated the Customs (Department), they defeated the FBI, they defeated the CIA." Nerve gases inhibit key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. In large enough doses, sarin causes convulsions, paralysis, loss of consciousness and potentially fatal respiratory failure. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly. "The details we will be presenting may be painful for you to see and hear." With gays and lesbians now legally wed in Massachusetts, foes of gay marriage vowed Tuesday to campaign hard, in state and national elections, for candidates willing to reverse the tide. "It's very difficult, once a right has been claimed in law, to reverse that right, but we're going to try," said a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. As many as 17,500 people each year are brought to the United States by human traffickers who trap them in slavery-like conditions for forced sex, sweatshop labor and domestic servitude. The women experienced food deprivation, beatings, physical restraint and were forced to live in guarded barracks. About two-thirds of the cases prosecuted involve prostitution or sex slavery, with most of the rest involving forced labor. Still, significant threats remain, especially now, as high "background noise" from terrorists and heightened sensitivity during the election year has officials on guard for a possible attack whose nature they can't quite pin down. Now - based on captured material, interviews and other sources of information - al-Qaida wants to strike with something other than a conventional explosive device. He worries about chemical and biological attacks, including a dirty bomb. And, in particular, he points to the possibility of another anthrax biological attack, following the one that wreaked havoc on the postal system, closed a Senate building for three months and killed five in 2001. "If the past is indeed prologue, then we are going to screw up, or they are going to get lucky," he said. "I can't sleep." Under heavy cover fire from helicopters, Israeli troops combed this refugee camp for weapons and gunmen Tuesday in the biggest Gaza offensive in years. Twenty Palestinians were killed, including two teenagers shot as they gathered laundry. "The kids were terrified, there was very loud boom, they started screaming and crying," he said. The Israeli army said the aim of "Operation Rainbow" was to destroy weapons-smuggling tunnels and arrest Palestinian militants. It said it did not intend to demolish large numbers of Palestinian homes. Troops tore down four homes Tuesday, witnesses said. Last week, Israel destroyed about 100 houses, making more than 1,000 Palestinians homeless. "Again and again Israel has defended itself with skill and heroism," Bush said. The cement-floor holding rooms and massive freezers are nearly ready for the horses, two years after fire destroyed the only horse slaughtering plant in Illinois and one of only three in the nation to process the meat for human consumption. "Can you imagine if we had a plant to kill dogs for human consumption?" A third recently released British detainee at Guantanamo has accused the prison camp of having a brutal punishment squad, called "The Extreme Reaction Force" and says the abuse was videotaped. The Pengtagon acknowledges that there is such a force and that everything it does is videotaped. Actions by the Extreme Reaction Forces were taped so they could be reviewed by senior officers, the newspaper said. "There was always this guy behind the squad, filming everything that happened," he was quoted as saying. He was punched and kicked and had his beard, hair and eyebrows shaved by the guards. On one occasion, he said, "they pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed." During interrogation, he was shackled and left in a cold room for up to eight hours. They were forced to squat with their hands chained between their legs for hours during interrogations when guards used strobe lights, dogs and loud music to extract information. The troops sometimes chat at breakfast about the images capturing the brutality of Iraq's conflict, when the power is on and the staff sergeant in charge of the chow hall turns the television to the news, or when they return at night to base camp, gritty and dusty from daylong patrolling of the desert. "Hey, you heard of that American whose head was cut off?" one Marine shouts to a buddy. "Man, those pictures, with the prisoners, that stinks," says another. "Something like this really puts the stain on all of us here, we are trying to help and this gives us all a bad eye. It's a big pool of manpower to get up to date with," he said. "It's like I've been dropped in from outer space when I look at images like that." The grisly beheading of the American by killers who said they were avenging the victims in the prisoner abuse scandal became one more argument for keeping the additional pictures of abuse under wraps for now. "The way we treated these men was hard even for the soldiers, especially after realizing that many of these 'combatants' were no more than shepherds." Charge 1 - Maltreatment of subordinates by taking "a photograph of nude detainees being forced into a human pyramid position." Charge 2 - "negligently failed to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty and maltreatment, as it was his duty to do." Charge 3 - "did maltreat a detainee, a person subject to his orders, by escorting the detainee to be positioned in a pile on the floor to be assaulted by other soldiers, conspiracy to maltreat detainees, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees, assaulting detainees, indecent acts, adultery and obstruction of justice. "When the issue becomes one of holy sites, there will be no place for anything other than ... great sacrifices and the call of martyrdom," He urged supporters to demonstrate on Friday while wearing "martyrdom shrouds" to show their readiness to die. A 50-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, jabbered about being innocent and demanded his rights just before receiving a lethal injection Tuesday evening. His last words were a plea: "Give me my life back." The high court has also said an inmate may not be executed if he doesn't know why he's on death row and the punishment he faces. "He's basically saying that all we can do with someone like him is take him out back and shoot him," he said. "Everybody on the street knows he's the sacrificial lamb." Throughout his capital murder trial, outbursts earned him repeated expulsions from the courtroom. He frequently talked about "remote control devices" and "implants" that controlled him. "I don't know how to put it delicately, but when men are locked up for a long time and they see their girlfriend, or their wife, or someone else's girlfriend, it can cause tension. That's not a good thing in this kind of environment," he said. Unfortunately, with the death, it kind of sets a little different mood than we'd like to have at this time." He was drifting in and out of consciousness, incoherent and combative. "It's going to take the legal system and the political system quite some time to work this all out." A woman tried to get rid of unwanted houseguests by gassing them. A family friend introduced the 51-year-old woman to two men and she agreed to let them spend the night, investigators said. But they overstayed their welcome - refusing to leave for six weeks as they allegedly sold drugs from her apartment. The woman finally decided to open her oven's natural gas line in hopes of driving them away. Even after filling the apartment with gas, however, the house guests remained. "I'd like to apologize to the Iraqi people and those detainees," he said in his statement. "I should have protected those detainees, not taken the photos. The whole thing is kind of hard to swallow. It's like, 'You pull me to duty, you make me fight and do all this, and then you say I'm wrong and that I'm an animal when I'm following what you ordered me to do.'" Kansas City, Mo. - Five high school seniors in Missouri have been charged with assault for allegedly trying to tape a teacher to a chair. "The fact that the students continued joking about the event, even after they were handcuffed and being led to jail, shows a distressing lack of respect for school and police authorities." A U.S. helicopter fired on a wedding party early Wednesday in western Iraq, killing more than 40 people, Iraqi officials said. The U.S. military said it could not confirm the report and was investigating. Most of the bodies were wrapped in blankets and other cloths, but the footage showed at least eight uncovered, bloody bodies, several of them children. One child was headless. News footage from the area near the Syrian border showed a truck containing bloodied bodies, many wrapped in blankets, piled one atop the other. Several were children, one of whom was decapitated. The body of a girl who appeared to be less than 5 years of age lay in a white sheet, her legs riddled with wounds and her dress soaked in blood. Military officials in Washington refused to address the question of whether anyone from a wedding party was among the people killed. Title of one story: U.S. Concerned About Mideast Violence. Title of next story: U.S. Reportedly Kills 40 Iraqis at Party. The yen extended gains against the dollar and other currencies on the strength of a rally in Tokyo stocks and growing optimism about the Japanese economy. The dollar, which fell more than 1 percent against the yen, also weakened against several major currencies and fell toward key support levels in a broad-based decline triggered mostly by the Japanese stock rally. "I think the question is whether this is going to be a sustainable bounce. People are nervous about it." A German court convicted a police sergeant with a fetish for women's handbags on 15 counts of theft and sentenced him to two and a half years in jail. A court spokesman said authorities were investigating some 1,000 additional cases of handbag theft over the last six years. The spokesman said a court physician who examined the man, 49, determined he had "progressive deviant sexual development." The police officer, who had been suspended, admitted he had an abnormal interest in handbags and their contents. The world's first Internet church has fallen victim to a plague of virtual demons, some of whom have been logging on as Satan and unleashing strings of expletives during sermons. The Church, organized by the multi-denominational "Ship of Fools" project, said it had removed a "shout" function where people could speak to the whole congregation. Some were using it to hurl abuse or yell: "Satan loves you." Survivors marked the 50th anniversary of a revolt in a Stalin-era prison camp Tuesday, recalling how troops crushed the rebellion with tanks and machine guns - and urging society to face up to Soviet atrocities. "They crushed us with tanks, with guns and machine guns, and because the crowd was thick, a burst of gunfire would knock out a dozen of us," said a man who participated in the revolt. "But it was a great feeling of freeing one's spirit." A total of 790 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq last year. Of those, 576 died as a result of hostile action and 214 died of non-hostile causes. One in ten caught focus on their families, seven percent on shopping lists and another seven percent worry about the damage the traffic jam might do to their clutch. Only six percent said they don't think about anything in traffic jams. The 41-year-old woman planned to sell the birds and the highly prized feathers, used in black magic rites and to decorate community leaders. German women fed up with a man with a poor aim can turn to the ghost-shaped gadget, which lurks under the toilet rim and, if the seat is lifted, declares in a stern female tone: "Hello, what are you up to then? Put the seat back down right away, you are definitely not to pee standing up ... you will make a right mess..." Amalgam tooth fillings made with mercury should be pulled out before people are cremated to cut emissions of the highly toxic metal. Before helping to launch the criminal information project known as Matrix, a database contractor gave U.S. and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists - sparking some investigations and arrests. The "high terrorism factor" scoring system also became a key selling point the Matrix project. The dragon was richly drawn with multihued scales. Occasionally, it blurted flesh-burning acid that erupted from the dragon's mouth in a gust of swirling grey-green mist. In another scene, a moat ringing a magical castle rippled and undulated like actual water. Simply, it's kill or be killed. Don't even bother trying to slink around from corner to corner, hiding in the shadows. All you really need to do is run headlong into a seemingly endless number and variety of monsters, dodging flying body parts and swords along the way. Be careful - they are quick to squish you like a bug or toss you hundreds of yards to a sudden death. Revelers at the wedding party said they began worrying when they heard aircraft overhead at about 9 p.m. With jets still overhead two hours later, they told the band to stop playing and everyone went to bed. "Mothers died with their children in their arms, I found her a few steps from the house, her 2-year-old son in her arms. Her 1-year-old son was lying nearby, missing his head." Some of the men tried to approach the Americans but were driven back by gunshots, the survivors said. The troops took money and jewelry the dead women had brought for the party, survivors said. "For each one in those graves, we will get 10 Americans," he warned. News footage showed pieces of rockets, bullet shellings, pots and pans, destroyed musical instruments, pillows, mattresses and blankets scattered at the devastated site. Tufts of women's hair and bits of what appear to be human flesh lie in a shallow ditch. An arm lay in the rubble. A crowd of young men stand around a huge blood stain on the ground. Some prisoners at were ridden like animals, fondled by female soldiers, forced to curse their religion and required to retrieve their food from toilets, according to a published report Friday. The photographs depict a U.S. soldier apparently preparing to strike a shackled detainee, a hooded inmate collapsed with his wrists handcuffed to the railing and a baton-wielding soldier appearing to order a naked detainee covered in a brown substance to walk a straight line, though his ankles are shackled. Detainees told investigators they were forced to denounce Islam or force-fed pork or liquor, required to masturbate in front of female soldiers, threatened with rape, and made to walk on all their hands and knees and bark like dogs. "I do think it is a pity that we make the link between the sexuality of breasts and their nutritive function," she said. "Yesterday Vice President Dick Cheney gave a speech at the Coast Guard academy where he vowed that America would fight on in Iraq. Then he said, 'Not actually me, other Americans.' You know, we should have a law in this country, anybody vowing to fight on actually has to do some of the fighting." When scientists put volunteers in a brain scanning tube and showed them pornography they found both men and women showed activity in the temporal lobes linked to memory and perception, but only women used their frontal lobes. "A man dressed as an Arab was prancing about with a prop gun. There is a danger if you get dressed up and play with guns and don't tell us first." As the day's final call to prayer echoed in the mosque, Hadi Hadi pounded his chest in disgust, too distrustful to even watch the speech. "It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," the spokesman said. "You know this president. He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes." The FDA approved olestra's sale in 1996 but required labels warning customers of possible intestinal discomfort and anal leakage. The agency lifted the label requirement in August. The synthetic chemical made of sugar and soybeans tastes like fat, but the body does not digest it. Arms control advocates are warning the Bush administration that proposed research for a new Homeland Security center may violate an international ban on biological weapons and encourage other countries to follow. "The rapidity of elaboration of American biodefense programs, their ambition and administrative aggressiveness and the degree to which they push against the prohibitions of the Biological Weapons Convention are startling," the authors said. "I categorically deny that we will be developing offensive weapons," the director of the department's office of science-based threat analysis and response, said Friday. At least 2,000 pages might have been missing from the copy of the Army report on soldiers' abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners that was delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee. "I don't know" whether pages are missing, he said, "but we'll sure as hell find out." There are no current plans to lift the national alert status from Code Yellow, where it currently stands. That's the midlevel alert level on a five-step warning program, higher than green and blue but lower than orange and red. Of special concern, the counterterrorism official said, is the possibility that terrorists may possess and use a chemical, biological or radiological weapon that could cause much more damage and casualties than a conventional bomb. And the Iraq conflict "has arguably focused the energies and resources of al-Qaida and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition that appeared so formidable" after the Afghan intervention, the survey said. Driving the terror network out of Afghanistan in late 2001 appears to have benefited the group, which dispersed to many countries, making it almost invisible and hard to combat. The United States is al-Qaida's prime target in a war it sees as a death struggle between civilizations, the report said. An al-Qaida leader has said 4 million Americans will have to be killed "as a prerequisite to any Islamic victory," the survey said. "The aim is to destroy everything and to kill the hope of any good future for all of us." A man who sought out the death penalty by killing a fellow inmate had his execution delayed on Tuesday while authorities checked a claim that another inmate confessed to the same killing. "I made it clear, I want off this world. I can't kill myself. I'm not suicidal. But I sure can make it hard for everybody else," the inmate said. "I have nothing to gain from telling you what I have learned," he wrote. "I was just brought up to value life, regardless of how worthless that life may seem to be." A U.S. Army sergeant who gave an insider's view of Abu Ghraib prison to the media has lost his security clearance and has been disciplined by the military for speaking out. "Where 100 years ago authorities had to worry about the anarchist placing a bomb in the downtown square, now we must worry about the terrorist who places that bomb in the square, but packed with radiological material." Wreckage from the second car flew in the air and hit bystanders. Some stumbled away with minor wounds. At least one other was carried away in a stretcher, bleeding heavily, as the second car billowed fire and smoke. Although the city's noise ordinance did not prohibit calls to prayer, attorneys for the city had recommended amending the law to specifically allow it, which would also allow the city council to regulate the noise. "If 500 or 600 people go against us, we're not losing nothing." Two San Francisco police officers have come under investigation after their departments discovered they had starred in a pornographic movie entitled "Bus Stop Whores" that is circulating on the Internet. "Traditionally people have believed that their defense perimeter began at the house. We are pointing out that it in fact starts at the garden fence." Ebola begins with a high fever and can lead to massive internal bleeding. It kills between 50 and 90 percent of victims, depending on the strain of the virus, for which there is no known cure. It is one of the world's most feared diseases. "Your failure to understand the history and to rewrite it from the so-called political correctness follows the hate of past book burners." On Sunday a $200,000 diamond affixed to the nose of a Jaguar Formula One car as part of a sponsorship deal went missing when the team's rookie driver crashed into a guardrail during the Monaco Grand Prix. Four Bosnian convicts cut bars with a smuggled hacksaw and slid down knotted bedsheets to escape Sunday night, just like they do in the movies. The head of Russia's border guards, fed up with their dour image, has ordered them to start smiling at visitors, a spokesman said Wednesday. "I would never have thought you could get sound out of a cucumber," a young woman said. The energy wasted by sending 1.6 billion bottles to landfills would be enough to power 8,500 households annually, according to the conservation department. "If a yuppie pulling down $70,000 or $80,000 a year doesn't care about the dime, someone will care about the dime." She said it was clear the attack was targeted at her, "They looked at us and knew who we were," she said. "They went away to get their weapons and came back. The attack lasted a few minutes and my driver's priority was to speed ahead and leave the scene of the attack," she said. Powerful thunderstorms that spawned tornadoes and soaked the Midwest pushed southward on Friday, leaving flooded roads and toppled trees in its wake. Two young relatives were arrested in the deaths of three children found slain, one child was beheaded, the other two partially beheaded, police said Friday. "I've been around for 35 years and I've seen, unfortunately, my share of murders, but I've never seen something as bad as this," Deputy Police Commissioner said earlier. "There's blood all over my apartment," a woman said in the 911 call, "They've killed my family!" The first officer on the scene "couldn't handle it" and had to give the call to another officer. The 20-page indictment alleges that the men used lab funds to buy television sets, CB radio equipment, vacuum cleaners, barbecues, hunting gear, automobile tires and many other items. Items purchased were given bogus names to make them seem more in line with lab uses. A television was called a "command center monitor," a picnic table was a "workbench," a barbecue rotisserie attachment was a "basket positioner" and a model airplane remote control kit was a "receiver." Redemption is a phone call away with the apology hot line, a college student's effort to offer solace to troubled souls unable or unwilling to unburden their conscience in person. The apologies come in mostly late at night, when people are alone with their thoughts. "I'm sorry that I turned my back on true love," says one man. "I'm sorry for having an affair with a married man," a woman says. Others apologize for embezzlement or for lying. "I'm just leaving it up to God, he knows and he'll take care of it." A man has hanged himself after his wife found him having sex with a hen, police said Friday. The woman caught him in the act when she rushed into their house to investigate a noise. The hen was slaughtered after the incident. "I'm just trying to be quiet and do my thing and not make a lot of noise or draw a lot of attention to myself, and hopefully figure out what I'm doing along the way, and try to carve out my own identity." Sometimes intelligence isn't discovery of a missile but an attempt to peer into the mind of an enemy leader to learn when he will use it. "The prison system just grows like a weed in the yard, almost as if they are on autopilot, regardless of their high costs and disappointing crime-control impact." A baffling disease that makes lobsters ugly, but not inedible, has crept northward from the Buzzards Bay hotspot where it's afflicted lobsters for several years. Kiss toured Australia earlier this month with comments seen as attacking Islam. "This is a vile culture and if you think for a second that it's willing to just live in the sands of God's armpit you've got another thing coming," Simmons said during an interview. "They want to come and live right where you live and they think that you're evil." Angry Muslims flooded the radio station with calls. "I'm not talking about parsing words. We're talking about words that are basically warmongering." Tens of thousands of people lined up Thursday to see one of Buddha's fingers - on loan from China for 10 days - and although they were herded past in a hurry, many spent a few moments gazing at the bone fragment, encased in bulletproof glass. Pope John Paul II warned several U.S. bishops Friday that American society is in danger of turning against spirituality in favor of materialistic desires, giving way to a "soulless vision of life." Anti-coalition fighters regularly fire missiles, rockets and rocket propelled grenades against targets. Seven Iraqi men whose hands were ordered cut off by Saddam Hussein met with President Bush at the White House on Tuesday. "I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein with six other Iraqi citizens as well who suffered the same fate," Bush said. "They are examples of the brutality of the tyrant." The men were accused of doing business in foreign currency, including American dollars. Bush said: "Look, a lot of people didn't like the war. I understand that completely. And I don't like war." Don King's rap sheet makes him an odd choice for Bush front man. He was convicted in the 1967 beating death of a man who owed him money and spent nearly four years in prison. In 1954, he killed a man who was robbing a numbers house he operated, but it was ruled self-defense. King also has beaten tax evasion and fraud charges, faced numerous lawsuits from boxers and their handlers and endured three grand jury investigations and an FBI sting operation - all while cementing his status as one of the world's top boxing promoters. "We are working together, and we will take all necessary actions to protect the American people" including increasing the color-coded terror threat level if warranted, they said. According to the military statement, the pair and two other Marines wanted to discipline the detainee for throwing trash outside his cell and speaking loudly. The Marines attached wires to a power convertor, which delivered 110 volts of electricity to the detainee as he returned from the bathroom, the statement said. Workers at the Madrid station where trains were heading in March when bombs killed nearly 200 people have asked that a makeshift shrine for the victims be removed so they can get over their trauma. "Day after day, for hours, with the smell of candle wax soaking into our lungs like a malignant fluid, we try, frequently in vain, to avoid looking at a permanent reminder which is destroying our nerves." Inspired by guidebooks for the discerning consumer, a right-to-die campaigner has compiled a "Good Euthanasia Guide," listing organizations that help people end their lives and the relevant laws around the world. "I was in a pub and I was eating dinner and they had a bookshelf full of guides -- the 'Good Hotel Guide', the 'Good Restaurant Guide' and so on -- and I thought, that's what we need, It's a book of information for intelligent people who want to make an informed decision about their death." Favorite prayers and psalms from the Bible have been radically reworked for a new Anglican prayer book in a bid to get the faithful to think about issues like Third World debt and fair trade. For example, out goes "Give us this day our daily bread," from the Lord's Prayer and in comes a line about God "giving us our daily bread when we manage to get back our lands or get a fairer wage." In the 23rd psalm, "The Lord is my Shepherd" sees "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil" replaced by: "Even if a full-scale violent confrontation breaks out, I will not be afraid, Lord." Keystroke recorders secretly installed at public Internet terminals can capture passwords, as can "phishing" e-mails designed to trick users into submitting sensitive data to fraudulent sites that look authentic. There are computer viruses programmed to harvest passwords as well as software that guesses passwords by running through words in dictionaries. "We know people are eating a lot of junk food, but to have almost one-third of Americans' calories coming from those categories is a shocker. It's no wonder there's an obesity epidemic in this country." Pope John Paul II reminded President Bush on Friday of the Vatican's opposition to the war in Iraq and said the world has been troubled by recent "deplorable events." Under the watchful eye of police, tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators marched through central Rome to protest Bush's visit, calling for the pullout of Italian troops and waving rainbow flags that said "No to War" and "Not in my name, Mr. Bush." The protest drew 150,000 people, according to organizers. Police put the crowd at around 25,000. In his latest blunt assessment of U.S. society, Pope John Paul II on Friday denounced the acceptance of abortion and same-sex unions as "self-centered demands" erroneously depicted as human rights. "Rights are at times reduced to self-centered demands: the growth of prostitution and pornography in the name of adult choice, the acceptance of abortion in the name of women's rights, the approval of same sex unions in the name of homosexual rights," he said. Bush and other leaders gathering on the beaches of Normandy this weekend will celebrate the heroism and ingenuity of June 6, 1944. But some scholars are paying closer attention to what followed as the victors settled in - black market trade, armed robbery, looting and rape. "There is a great, ugly underbelly that has not been really explored. It was just the behavior of an army that, like any victorious army, feels authorized to do anything it wants: taking women, taking the spoils, It's the prize of many armies." President Bush arrived 15 minutes late for his meeting with Pope John Paul II - unusual for a president who makes no secret of his impatience when others keep him waiting. It was a rare breach of protocol in Vatican City, too, and raised eyebrows in the papal delegation. "The president is 15 minutes late," John Paul's secretary, pointed out to Vatican reporters. Protesters in the city were yelling "George Bush, terrorist," yet the president was insulated from the anti-war demonstrations, tucked safely away in plush digs behind high stone walls and razor wire. The blare of Italian sirens drifted over the walls as faintly as if they were miles away. Noise from outside the compound was practically drowned out by the sounds of birds chirping and breeze rustling through pines. The inscription read in part: "Italians do not curse. Mothers and wives do not weep. Sons, carry proudly the memory of your fathers' holocaust. May the cruel massacre perpetrated against us help, beyond any vengeance to consecrate the rights of human life against the crime of murder." Manholes were sealed and trash bins and cars removed along the routes the president would travel. Helicopters hovered overhead, and the airspace over Rome was closed to private aircraft. Some bus routes were suspended, selected roads were closed to traffic and the city center was largely quiet, with many staying home, while some schools and a few shops were closed. "Their credit as liberators was lost in Vietnam." Russian television showed bloodied bodies lying under tarpaulins or laid on pallets, corrugated metal kiosks torn apart by the blast and the ground strewn with brightly colored clothing, shoes and other goods sold at the market. "The cockpit is not answering their phone," Ong told the American Airlines operations center. "There's somebody stabbed in business class, and we can't breathe in business. Um, I think there is some Mace or something. We can't breathe." Dozens of women have sued a gynecologist, saying he performed unnecessary and painful surgeries, molested them and in some cases raped them in the exam room. Summer's almost here and that means teens will have more time on their hands to pick up bad habits - such as smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, a new federal survey says. The president of the NAACP is criticizing a decision by Catholic University of America not to recognize a chapter of the civil rights group on campus. "It is outright discrimination and intolerance all rolled into one." Three detainees were naked in a room, and an MP was shouting obscenities at them through a megaphone, he said. Then the MPs pulled the men out of the room and ordered them to lie on their stomachs and crawl around the floor. The soldiers then handcuffed the detainees together and shouted homosexual slurs at them, he said. They demanded that they admit to raping a young male prisoner. Police blame an increase in mafia-style murders in recent years on gangs competing for shrinking criminal markets such as drugs and prostitution. Spanish police have arrested a Russian woman carrying 38 "pen guns" capable of firing .22 caliber bullets, saying she was part of a Russian-Kosovan gun-smuggling ring. The silver weapons -- displayed by police Thursday -- look like normal pens. "I've never heard of anything like this before, at least not in these quantities," a police spokeswoman said. While George W. Bush and Pope John Paul talked peace in the Vatican on Friday, a military aide held a bulky black attache case containing the codes the U.S. president would need in order to launch a nuclear war. It is known as "the football." It has been all over the world and on Friday it entered the hallowed halls of the Vatican. It was never very far from the president. While he and the pope were speaking alone in the pontiff's private study, it was in the next room. Sometimes a leather strap links "the football" from the military aide's wrist to the handle of the soft leather case. The football has been to some strange places. A Russian regional government has told its women employees to stop wearing short skirts and tone down their make-up because they were arousing their male colleagues' "animal instincts." The statement referred "crusaders" and warned "all that is affiliated with these crusaders - from compounds, bases and means of transport - especially Western and American airliners, will be direct targets of our next operations, with God's help." A man riding an armor-plated bulldozer went on a rampage in a Colorado mountain town and smashed into city hall, a bank and other buildings before being found dead early on Saturday morning, police said. After 90 minutes, the bulldozer became wedged in a hardware store that it had crashed through. Several hours later, police entered the bulldozer at about 2 a.m. "This enemy," the statement goes on to say, "must be fought. There is no other way but to fight it and eradicate it." BLACK CANDLES AND GOATS' SKULLS - Police announced at the weekend they had uncovered bodies, last seen in January 1998 leaving a pizzeria with other members of their heavy metal rock band "Beasts of Satan." As forensic experts searched the two meter (six foot six inches) deep grave in a wood in northern Italy, police said they had arrested four of the band members for murdering the pair for a human sacrifice. "It is a crime with a level of cruelty and savagery, with an intent to cause extreme pain through ritual activity, that I have never seen before in my career." Investigators were looking into the possibility the "Beasts of Satan" band members were instructed by Satanists in their late 20s or early 30s. He said police were also reviewing two suspicious suicides in the area. A Denver television station showed the makeshift tank cutting a swath of destruction through the town, knocking over light poles, trees and smashing into several buildings. "When you see some advertisement that they are selling ginseng, you would see it and say 'Hey, they're selling it,'" he said. "So we can buy it." Gay puppets, transvestites, assassins and a pedophile child killer piled up Tony honors on Sunday but those shows will be shunned by Republican delegates at the political party's convention in New York this summer. The fact that the United States and the rest of the world will have to depend increasingly for its oil and also for natural gas from Middle East, "is not a matter of ideology or politics," he said. "It is simply inevitable." As for global warming, in the decades ahead carbon dioxide emissions from greater fossil fuel use will climb. Carbon dioxide is the leading "greenhouse gas" that many scientists believe eventually will cause a warming of the earth if allowed to continue to grow. "We periodically hear calls for U.S. energy independence as if this were a real option," he said. "The fact is, the United States is a part of the world energy market and we must participate and compete in that market." The State Department acknowledged Thursday it was wrong in reporting terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding used to boost one of President Bush's chief foreign policy claims - success in countering terror. Instead, both the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department said. The department is now working to determine the correct figures. "You don't just need people who will strap on bombs and walk into crowds. You need people to support them. For terrorism to flourish they have to have a communications network." The product, Reactive Skin Decontamination Lotion, was developed by the Canadian military years ago, won Food and Drug Administration approval in 2003 and is sold in other NATO countries for neutralizing sarin, mustard gas and other chemical agents. "That's one of our big beefs as local emergency management people, is we need to make sure there's a good wave of communication between the federal government, the states and the locals, not only policy but also these materials that are coming through the pipeline. Because we don't know what's good and what's bad." The paper said he was looking for milk for a cup of tea when he discovered the Korean-born victim wrapped up in plastic bags. "I could hear my heart beat in ecstasy before the beauty of the body offered before me. I smothered the body with the sweat of my skin." Through the use of radio waves that carry voice messages to outer space, a Pennsylvania company is enabling people to launch belated goodbyes to lost loved ones, words of comfort to missing pets or birthday wishes to a family member. Endless Echoes, which began operation formally this month, allows people to dial a telephone number and record a one-minute voice message. It's then lofted into space via a radio wave and theoretically travels forever at 186,000 miles per second. The American general who was in charge of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison claimed she was being made a scapegoat for the abuse of detainees, and said her successor once told her that prisoners should be treated "like dogs." Prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them." It was an anticlimactic end to an emotional high court showdown over God in the public schools and in public life. It also neutralizes what might have been a potent election-year political issue in which the Bush administration argued strongly that the reference to God should remain part of the pledge. Congress added the phrase "under God" more than a decade later, in 1954, when the Cold War was under way. Supporters of the new wording said it would set the United States apart from godless communism. "What one does in the bedroom and bathroom should not be displayed publicly." A South African man told a court how he hacked to death his interior designer because she criticized his decor, local newspapers reported on Tuesday. "We went through the house and I told her what I wanted. She did not make any nice comments about my place so I went to my garage and fetched an axe, I killed her because she reminded me of an old school teacher whom I hated very much." Voices in his head had instructed him to become a serial killer. "It should have taken police two days. It was their job to arrest me. I pay taxes and their salary." Web sites featuring videos of the beheading of Americans or captives pleading for their lives have become part of an electronic war of incitement, humiliation and terrorist outreach, experts say, providing a window into the minds of militant Muslims who hate the West. The latest dramatic Web posting came Saturday, a short video that showed no faces but included a voice yelling in English: "No, no, please!" In what is a war of "ideology, images and perception," the Web is a place for militants and their sympathizers to exchange the latest news, debate their definition of Islam, share how-to manuals, extoll their heroes and vilify their enemies. "The aim is really to spread as much terror as possible and make it available to as many people as possible, especially in the West," where Internet use is more common. Images of American soldiers pointing guns at children, Iraqi prisoners being tortured, and Muslims in the Philippines being decapitated pop up again and again. Contributors sign off with pictures of bin Laden or large machine guns. Militants can put images on the Internet most TV news producers would consider too shocking to televise. The Internet, though, also can be subject to censorship. Contributors on forums or chat rooms alert one another to the latest postings. Links are sometimes written in a kind of code, with letters or numerals missing from addresses. The initiated or the patient can figure out what's missing by perusing the rest of the posting. "They have no other part in holy war. Electronic holy war is their contribution, Electronic Jihad." The December report complained that some in the alliance had questioned "the truthfulness of Holy Scripture," refused to affirm the necessity of conscious faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, promoted women preachers, criticized the SBC and its foreign mission board and adopted an "anti-American" tone. "Our concern is schism and division." Batter-coated french fries are a fresh vegetable, according to the Agriculture Department, which now has a federal judge's ruling to back it up. But the department said Tuesday that the classification applies only to rules of commerce, not nutrition, and it doesn't consider an order of fries the same as an apple in school lunches. The department does not plan to repeat its experience in trying to classify ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches. The ketchup-as-vegetable proposal was put forward in the Reagan administration, and the department dropped the idea after it found itself not only opposed but laughed at. A State Department report that incorrectly showed a decline last year in terrorism worldwide was a "big mistake," Secretary of State Colin Powell said. "Very embarrassing. I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong." The conclusion that terrorism was on the decline was used to boost one of President Bush's chief foreign policy claims, success in countering terror. "It's a numbers error. It's not a political judgment that said, 'Let's see if we can cook the books.' We can't get away with that now. Nobody was out to cook the books. Errors crept in." He pledged to release a corrected report as quickly as possible. "I am regretful that this has happened. And we're going to get it fixed, we're going to get it corrected, and that's the best I can do." The April report said attacks had declined last year to 190, down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001. The 2003 figure would have been the lowest level in 34 years and a 45 percent drop since 2001, Bush's first year as president. The report also showed the virtual disappearance of attacks in which no one died. "There's a new terrorist threat information center that compiles this data under the CIA. And we are still trying to determine what went wrong with the data and why we didn't catch it in the State Department. It's a very big mistake. And we are not happy about this big mistake," he added. "We weren't saying terrorism has gone away. The report clearly says terrorism is a main problem facing the world today. We've got to continue going after terrorists. But based on the data we had within the report, there was a suggestion that the number of incidents had dropped and it was the lowest since 1969," he added. "That turns out not to have been correct. We were wrong. We will correct it." The world is turning to dust, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says. One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert - an area the size of Indiana - since the 1950s. "It's a creeping catastrophe, entire parts of the world might become uninhabitable." Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was "no credible evidence" that Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida. In a chilling report that sketched the history of Osama bin Laden's network, the commission said his far-flung training camps were "apparently quite good." Terrorists-to-be were encouraged to "think creatively about ways to commit mass murder," it added. The description of the training camp operations contained elements of faint, grudging praise. "A worldwide jihad needed terrorists who could bomb embassies or hijack airliners, but it also needed foot soldiers for the Taliban in its war against the Northern Alliance, and guerrillas who could shoot down Russian helicopters in Chechnya or ambush Indian units in Kashmir," it said. The options included taking over a launcher and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear missile at the United States, mounting mustard gas or cyanide attacks against Jewish areas in Iran or releasing poison gas into the air conditioning system of a targeted building. A tractor-trailer overturned on a curve on a highway, spilling its load of hundreds of bee hives and unleashing some nine million angry honey bees. The bees buzzed furiously as the driver, his arm scraped to the bone, struggled to flee his rig after it overturned Monday. The truck slid across the highway before coming to a stop between guardrails. An 81-year-old German man whose defense to charges of multiple rape was that he could not get an erection won a victory on Tuesday when the country's highest court ruled he could not be forced to have his potency tested. The man, who was not named, had told the court during his trial that diabetes made it impossible for him to get an erection. One court had ruled medical staff could tie him to a bed, attach a ring to his penis overnight, and use an "erectometer" to check whether there was any stiffening. Talk of trials, burned witches and forbidden books echoed in the Vatican on Tuesday as Pope John Paul asked forgiveness for the Inquisition, in which the Church tortured and killed people branded as heretics. He repeated a phrase from a 2000 document in which he first asked pardon "for errors committed in the service of truth through use of methods that had nothing to do with the Gospel." That was shorthand for torture, summary trials, forced conversions and burnings at the stake. One of the best-known victims was the astronomer Galileo, condemned for claiming the earth revolved around the sun."We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport." Later, Atta tells the passengers, "If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane." When Bush was told of the multiple hijackings, according to notes of the call, he told Cheney: "Sounds like we have a minor war going on here, I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war. ... Somebody's going to pay." Bloody bodies covered in dust were scattered around the blast site. One dead man lay prostrate in the center of a highway median. In fact, baptism figures show "we are declining." Congressional investigators found that prescription drugs obtained from Canadian Web sites pose fewer risks than medications purchased from online pharmacies elsewhere. In some instances, Canadian pharmacies had stricter standards than those in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration has said it cannot guarantee the safety of the foreign products. "They seduced him to their satanic and deviant ideology until they were able to push him to commit such despicable crimes." An Army bomb squad team leader who served on a security detail for President Bush, said he was dismissed from duty after deciding to tell his commander he's gay. "I didn't do it to get out of a war - I already served in a war, after putting my life on the line in the war, the idea that I was fighting for the freedoms of so many other people that I couldn't myself enjoy was almost unbearable." The exodus of soldiers continues even as concerns grow about military troop strength, according to a new study. Some 770 people were discharged for homosexuality last year under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. "The justification for the policy is that allowing gays and lesbians to serve would undermine military readiness." Hundreds of those discharged held high-level job specialties that required years of training and expertise, including 90 nuclear power engineers, 150 rocket and missile specialists and 49 nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare specialists. Eighty-eight linguists were discharged, including at least seven Arab language specialists. The Center for Military Readiness, a conservative advocacy group that opposes gays serving in the military, said the loss of gays and lesbians serving in specialized areas is irrelevant because they never should have been in those jobs in the first place. "There is no shortage of people in the military, and we do not need people who identify themselves as homosexual." Ideas about going on the offensive against Internet attackers "have been bounced around for a while, but I don't think anyone has been foolhardy enough to actually to form a company around the concept." Until now, that is. Hackers, worms and data attacks are costing companies dearly, and open the door to identity theft and the loss of intellectual property. "Make no mistake, we are in the midst of an information warfare conflict which we have not been fighting." Much of it is focused on traditional defensive measures, like blocking unwanted traffic or deflecting it to where it can do no harm. But it can also escalate the response and return fire. "On the Rules of Engagement for Information Warfare" says computer intrusions deserve a response in kind - including "asymmetric" countermeasures that can include flooding the attacking computers with data, rendering them Internet-blind, and other measures to neutralize the problem. Such actions could be disastrous, experts say. The Internet is made up of countless interconnected devices, and any innocent routers between the attacker and retaliator would suffer at least twice in a counterstrike. In most cases, the identity of the attacker isn't clear. Other times, the "attacker" could be thousands of computers whose users have no idea their machine is infected with a virus. In the past, some attempts to fight fire with fire have misfired. Russian media reported only two militant deaths. "The attacks were clearly saber rattling, aimed to demonstrate the rebels' effectiveness to attract funding from foreign terrorist networks." He also said there were a number of civilian deaths, but the exact number was still unknown. Earlier, officials noted how some of the fighters shouted "Allahu akhbar" (God is great) - a frequent rallying cry of Chechen rebels as their insurgency increasingly comes under the influence of radical Islam. Russian TV broadcast image of smoke-charred and burning buildings and burned-out vehicles. One of the attackers, carrying an automatic weapon, identified the group as "the Martyr's Brigade." The man added, "We have shot everyone here. Go and announce that." A 10-day military training exercise involving 15 nations began Monday with a series of simulated suicide attacks on warships. "We think that pushing someone to the brink of suicide, particularly where the person comes from a culture with strong taboos against suicide, and it is evidenced by acts of self-mutilation, would be a sufficient disruption of the personality to constitute a 'profound disruption." Islamic law prohibits suicide. One inmate would bang his head against the door and walls of his cell. "They had him in a helmet to protect his head because he kept pounding it on the wall, sometimes they flexicuffed him because he tried to scratch his face, tried to grab anything he could to mutilate himself." The South Korean Foreign Ministry confirmed that Kim had been killed but did not say he was beheaded. "It appears that the body had been thrown from a vehicle, the man had been beheaded, and the head was recovered with the body." The government banned domestic Internet portals from showing footage of the beheading and warned it would shut down those that don't comply. "We will carry on our jihad against the Western infidel and the Arab apostate until Islamic rule is back on Earth," the voice said. It's a medieval way of dealing death, put before the world's eyes by a 21st century medium. And it's simple to carry out. A victim is snatched, shown bound and menaced by masked gunmen, then days later is killed and beheaded. The bloody images are videotaped, photographed and posted on the Internet. Toxic chemical releases into the environment rose 5 percent in 2002, marking only the second such increase reported by the Environmental Protection Agency in nearly two decades, and the first since 1997. Some 4.79 billion pounds were released in 2002, the latest for which figures are available, not including releases from metal mining, the EPA reports. The agency stopped including that data because of a recent court decision in an industry challenge. Even so, a study by two environmental groups said EPA was underreporting the air pollution portion of releases of chemicals and emissions by 330 million pounds a year. They cast the inventory as particularly soft on refineries and chemical plants, keeping as much as 16 percent of the nation's air pollution off the books. "Ironically, if environmentalists intend to push for an even greater regulatory burden on refineries, they may complicate the smooth introduction of newer, cleaner fuels," the trade group said. Significant acts of terror worldwide reached a 21-year high in 2003, the State Department announced Tuesday as it corrected a mistaken report that had been cited to boost President Bush's war on terror. Incidents of terrorism increased slightly during the year, and the number of people wounded rose dramatically, the department said. The corrected report shows that the Bush administration is "playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to the war on terror, the administration has now been caught trying to inflate its success on terrorism." Six "D's" were given in the areas of: testing cattle 20 months or older; ensuring feed restrictions; increasing surveillance for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease; strengthening authority to recall tainted meat; implementing use of country of origin labels; and allowing for public input. The playing of taps to honor America's fallen soldiers is a familiar sound, but at thousands of military funerals these days, not all is as it seems. Instead of a bugler playing the 24 notes, a computerized chip implanted in the horn renders the heart-stirring song. A push of a button starts the horn. It sounds a tune that not enough people in uniform can play given the pace of dying veterans and casualties from the Iraq war. Some traditionalists object, but other people say it's an improvement upon the more widely used substitute - someone bending over and pressing a button on a boom box to play a recording of taps. "I was worried about a digitized bugle until I saw and heard it, it was indistinguishable from the real bugle. I was impressed, it brought tears to my eyes." But some don't want anything short of the real deal. A digital rendition "would make the honor seem phony, when my father goes, he'll get a gun salute. I wouldn't feel right about them having seven mannequins going out in the field shooting fake guns." Even a good recorded version sounds like it's coming out of a tin can, and cemetery workers have told him some of the ceremonial buglers don't even hold the instrument to their face. "I saw too many boom boxes going bad, and too many reserve units and guard units not even bringing anything." Banning press and public access to the arrival of casualties in Dover was started in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, during the term of President Bush's father. The policy continued through President Clinton's eight years in office, although it was not strictly enforced and there was no conflict on the scale of the either the Gulf War or the war in Iraq during Clinton's tenure. Citing privacy questions on the eve of the war with Iraq a year ago, the Pentagon reiterated the ban and began enforcing it at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Photos often had been allowed at Ramstein before the current Bush administration. The debate over whether Americans should see coffins of the war dead flared in April after The Seattle Times published a front-page photograph of coffins in a cargo plane in Kuwait and a First Amendment activist posted on his Web site dozens of like images from Dover, home to the nation's largest military mortuary. A poll at that time found more than six in 10 Americans thought the homecomings should be covered. A South African woman has settled a lawsuit in which she claimed to have developed a phobia about toilets after falling off one at a hotel. "A lot of people look back on old games like a kind of Camelot. Only when you do, you see that the castle smelled, the food was rancid and the maidens were bloated." About 2,000 protesters rallied at a candlelight vigil Wednesday night to mourn Kim and oppose the troop dispatch. Many held placards reading "Bush and Roh killed Kim Sun-il" or "We don't want to die. Korean troops get out." Bully-Cummings said investigators recovered a handgun and had a good description of the suspect. Nine people, ranging in age from 18 to late 40s, were shot, police said. "These girls were scared to death. They believed they were going to die." He is accused of sitting on the chest of the Iraqi and covering his mouth while he was wrapped in a sleeping bag, according to the document. The military has said he died from asphyxiation due to smothering and chest compression. "I don't think I will ever come back again," Bobo said. Church leaders voted 183-6 to adopt a statement warning lawmakers at odds with church teaching that they were "cooperating in evil," but made no definitive statement on whether they should be denied Communion. Under church law, each bishop decides how to apply Catholic teachings in his own diocese. Voters would be guilty of "cooperating in evil" if they backed a candidate specifically because he or she supports abortion rights or euthanasia. But he left open the possibility that a voter could legitimately decide to support a pro-abortion rights candidate, based on that person's overall platform. After a two-year stint delivering papers to Canadian senators, Marijuana Party candidate and career dominatrix Carol Taylor said she has entered the political arena to help ease people's pain. "I can't believe Elections Canada allows this kind of stuff. I'm not uptight but I can see how some people would consider this to be pornographic," one Senate employee said. "I'm shocked, and a little aroused." A decorated World War II veteran has been charged with second-degree criminal mischief for crossing out curse words in hundreds of books at a New York library and replacing them with religious inscriptions. "I am sick of these phone calls when murders and rapists get no TV coverage. He scribbled in some books and he gets crucified on TV," she said before slamming down the phone. Hundreds of Muslims flocked to a German hospital where an Internet site said the Messiah was being breast-fed by its resurrected mother, a hospital spokesman said Thursday. "The story ended up being that there was a woman in the clinic who had given birth to the Messiah and who had died. She was later dug up and was still alive but her whole body was burned -- just her two breasts were unharmed." Allah ordered the woman to feed the child for 40 days and then die again. Insurgents set off car bombs and seized police stations in an offensive aimed at creating chaos just days before the handover of power to a new Iraqi government. A second-grader sobbed as he sat beneath a palm tree outside a hospital, nursing a gunshot wound in his arm. A few miles away, the body of a young woman in a black chador lay in a pool of blood near a smoldering car. Parts of her face were missing, but her eyes were wide open. These are two of the many civilian victims of widespread violence Thursday in several cities in Iraq, starting with insurgent attacks that sparked heavy battles between militants and U.S. and Iraqi troops. Dozens of Iraqis were killed and hundreds wounded. "I asked the Iraqi civil defense soldier whether it was safe to drive past the Americans, and he said 'yes.' A few seconds later we were fired on," he said, standing next to his car. The front passenger window was shattered and the door pockmarked by gunfire. "May God destroy America and all those who cooperate with it!" screamed a man from inside the emergency ward, venting a fury felt by many, where hatred for the U.S. occupation has been evident from the start. The Americans say the incidental deaths of Iraqi civilians are often caused by failure to stop at checkpoints, being at the wrong place at the wrong time or because insurgents often hide among civilians. More anger at the United States was in evidence a few miles away from the hospital, where a group of Iraqis gathered around the burning wreck of a car punctured with dozens of bullet holes. Inside were the charred remains of three men. Witnesses said the car had continued to travel toward a cluster of U.S. tanks despite shouts from bystanders for the driver to turn back. Lying on the road was the body of another passenger - a woman who looked to be in her late 20s or early 30s, with parts of her face missing. As many as a 100 shell casings littered the site. "Those Americans shoot at everyone. They just want to hurt us," said another bystander, who refused to give his name. More than two hours after the car was attacked, no ambulance or police had arrived. Some motorists slowed down to take a better look, but most just drove past. For the first time, a majority of Americans say they think the United States made a mistake sending troops to Iraq, according to a poll released Thursday. A Canadian man, driving a car packed with weapons and ammunition, was intent on killing as many people as possible in a Toronto neighborhood but gave up the plan at the last minute when he encountered a friendly dog, police said on Thursday. He had set himself up in an east-end park to load his weapons and then planned to drive around shooting. He later told police that a dog then approached and started playing with him. Police found 6,000 rounds of ammunition, two rifles, a shotgun, a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver and an air rifle in the man's car, along with a machete and a hunting knife. The car also contained a throwing knife, a camouflage mask and netting. Australian smokers will soon have to look at the picture of a cancer-ridden lung or a gangrenous foot missing toes each time they light up. Following a trend pioneered by Canada, the government said it wants cigarette companies to put graphic pictures and warnings on 30 percent of the front of each pack and 90 percent of the back. One gruesome photo shows a color cross-section of a diseased lung. Another shows a blackened foot missing a toe and the rest twisted. "Smoking causes peripheral vascular disease," it reads. A third shows a dissected, bloodied brain. Vice President Dick Cheney blurted out the "F word" at Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont during a heated exchange on the Senate floor, congressional aides said on Thursday. The incident occurred on Tuesday in a terse discussion between the two that touched on politics, religion and money, with Cheney finally telling Leahy to "f--- off" or "go f--- yourself," the aides said. "I think he was just having a bad day," Leahy was quoted as saying on CNN, which first reported the incident. "I was kind of shocked to hear that kind of language on the floor." An Oklahoma state judge frequently masturbated and used a device for enhancing erections while his court was in session, charges a petition by the state's attorney general seeking his removal. In the petition, the attorney general charged Thompson used a penis pump, a device billed as providing sexual pleasure and promising better erections and larger penis size, during trials and exposed himself to a court reporter several times while masturbating on the bench. "On one occasion, a court reporter saw Judge Thompson holding his penis up and shaving underneath it with a disposable razor while on the bench," the petition reads. Several witnesses, including jurors in Thompson's court and police officers called to testify in trials, said in the petition they heard the "swooshing" sound of a penis pump during trials and saw the judge slumped in his chair, with his elbows on his knees, working the device. The witnesses said the pump sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up. "Our culture, our customs have been destroyed, the time has come for a showdown." Vandals sprayed swastikas and Nazi SS symbols on more than 40 graves at a Jewish cemetery in western Germany, police said Friday. "How would he feel if (Chelsea) was trashed by the person she had had the relationship with - a person who has denied it to save himself - if she was called a liar, a stalker, crazy, stupid?" A Polish court convicted a Roman Catholic priest Friday of sexually abusing six young girls during a decade-long period and imposed a two-year suspended prison sentence. "This is a historical day ... a day that all Iraqis have been looking forward to. This is a day we are going to take our country back into the international forum." The response in Baghdad was mixed. "Iraqis are happy inside, but their happiness is marred by fear and melancholy, of course I feel I'm still occupied. You can't find anywhere in the world people who would accept occupation. America these days, is like death. Nobody can escape from it." As Iraq's highest authority, Bremer had issued more than 100 orders and regulations, many of them Western-style laws governing everything from bankruptcy and traffic, to restrictions on child labor and copying movies. Some are likely to be ignored. One law requires at least a month in jail for people caught driving without a license - something many Iraqis do not have. Another demands that drivers stay in a single lane, a rule widely ignored in Iraq's chaotic streets. "Occupation will wear a new dress, the occupation will remain so long as the U.S.-British forces are still stationed there." In Cairo, Egyptians voiced similar views. "Giving sovereignty to Iraqis is just a matter of improving the image, as long as the American soldiers are there, they didn't really hand over control." President Bush went "too far" by saying the European Union should admit Turkey. Bush commenting on Turkish-EU relations was like a French leader commenting on U.S.-Mexican ties. "If President Bush really said that in the way that I read, then not only did he go too far, but he went into territory that isn't his," Chirac said. "It's a bit like if I told the United States how they should manage their relations with Mexico." The green, red, white and black banner - with the words "God is great," added by Saddam in the 1990s - fluttered Monday over government buildings. The proposed new flag, approved by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, sank in public esteem faster than a stone in the Tigris river after a firestorm of criticism that the new banner ignored the country's Islamic and Arab character - and looked too much like the Israeli flag. Organizers of a gay pride parade awoke to find the parade route covered in cow manure. Protesters along the route heckled the marchers and held signs such as "Sodomy is a Sin that God forgives If We Repent." Other protesters turned their backs to the marchers and prayed. "What they're doing is an abomination to God." OTHER ROCKETS: Most Palestinian factions manufacture rockets. The Hamas militant group makes Qassams and the Al-Batar and Al-Bana, two types of anti-tank missiles. The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a militant group affiliated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, has a rocket called the Aqsa 1, but it has caused no damage. The Islamic Jihad group manufactures the Saryia 1, which is also ineffective. Al-Jazeera said that in the next scene, gunmen shoot the man in the back of the head, in front of a hole dug in the ground. The station did not broadcast the killing. Lawmakers used to wrangling over troop levels and weapons systems find themselves in a dispute over whether military personnel abroad should be given more of a liberal antidote to conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh. Liberals are upset that the Pentagon's American Forces Radio and Television Service is airing the first hour of Limbaugh's show, five days a week, on one of the 13 radio channels it offers. On military paydays, this rural town surrounded by a sprawling Army base and vast pineapple fields used to bustle, living up to its Hawaiian name meaning "place of noise." No longer. With 10,000 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, Wahiawa businesses - most of which are mom-and-pop shops - are suffering. "It's bad. It really is like a ghost town," he said. "We have big-screen TVs, computers, bedroom sets, freezers, refrigerators and stoves - all we need is renters." Construction of an above-ground storage complex for bomb-grade uranium will begin in August despite auditors' concerns about the design, federal officials said. An earlier proposal had called for partially burying the Y-12 National Security Complex, but U.S. Department of Energy spokesman Steven Wyatt said building the $250 million facility above ground will be "more flexible and cost-effective." arrying a mobile in hip pockets or a holster on the waist could cut sperm count by nearly 30 percent, according to the research. Canadians went to the polls in a federal election on Monday with a firm warning from election officials: Please do not eat your ballots. "Eating a ballot, not returning it or otherwise destroying or defacing it constitutes a serious breach of the Canada Elections Act," Elections Canada warns on its Internet site. Three Alberta men were charged with eating their paper ballots during Canada's last federal election, in 2000. The members of the Edible Ballot Society were protesting against what they said was a lack of real choice among candidates. The potency of cannabis in most EU countries has remained at about six to eight percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active ingredient. The only exception was in the Netherlands, where potency had reached 16 percent by 2001-02, mostly because of supplies of intensively produced home-grown cannabis. A traveling circus in Germany has been ordered to come back and clean up a pile of elephant dung after residents complained about the smell, police said Friday. "We got a call and checked out the site and realized that the turds were far too big to come from horses. It had to be elephants," said a police spokesman. The circus left the site on the outskirts of the western city of Wuppertal four weeks ago and the dung had been ripening in the sun. "The stench was terrible." Firefighters in a Dallas suburb returned to their station to find a fire started by potatoes they left cooking on a stove, officials said on Friday. Fire officials wanted to remind the public to make sure not to leave food cooking before stepping out. "The circumstances surrounding the Marine's absence initially indicated that he was missing," a statement by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said. "However, in light of what we have observed on the terrorists' video, we have classified him as captured." The Times reported that Hassoun had been emotionally shaken after seeing one of his sergeants blown apart by a mortar shell and decided to leave his post and make his way to Lebanon. Most people who post messages on several Islamic Web sites known for their extremist bent believe those are justified. But the issue of whether it is proper kill Muslims taken captive because of their links to the U.S. military has been a hot topic. Opinions are mixed. Some people appealed on the kidnappers to spare the Turks because they were "fellow Muslims." Others urged militants to decapitate them. "Turkish Muslims should be the first to demand that those hypocrites be beheaded, as they are allied with the devil," meaning the Americans, one person wrote on a Web site that has published al-Zarqawi statements and claims of responsibility for other killings. "They should serve as an example to every apostate." Another contributor who identified himself as "enemy of the foreign infidels" said he supported the decapitation of hostages - but not Muslim ones. "Slaughtering is something you started with the infidel Crusaders and their allies, and we hope you won't deviate from that path," he wrote. But "they're Muslims, so don't kill them ... as long as they didn't cause direct harm." Yet another writer suggested that if Muslims must be killed, their deaths shouldn't be filmed. Muslims should be spared from decapitation, the writer said, because "beheadings should only be for the Crusader invaders as a lesson for them that we don't bow our heads." More than 4.5 million children are forced to endure sexual misconduct by school employees, from inappropriate comments to physical abuse, according to an exhaustive review of research that reads like a parent's worst nightmare. The best estimate is that almost one in 10 children, sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade, are targets of behavior ranging from unprofessional to criminal. Some educators immediately took issue with its approach, mainly the combining of sexual abuse with other behavior, such as gestures or notes, into one broad misconduct category. But another prominent researcher supported the findings, suggesting, as Shakeshaft did, that they may even understate the problem. And the American Association of University Women, whose surveys of students were at the core of the new report, stood by its research. The report describes schools as places where abusers come to prey, targeting vulnerable and marginal students who are afraid to complain or unlikely to be believed if they did. It describes adults who trap, lie and isolate children, making them subject to unwanted behavior in hallways, offices, buses or even right in front of other students in class. And the offenders work hard to keep kids from telling, threatening to fail or humiliate them. Misconduct is defined in the report as physical, verbal or visual behavior, from sexually related jokes or pictures of sex to fondling of breasts and forced sex. Shakeshaft did not limit her review to sexual abuse because, she says, that would exclude other unacceptable adult behaviors that can drive kids from school and harm them for years. "Clearly, sexual predators have no place in public schools." Forsythe incurred Mattel's wrath with his "Food Chain Barbie" series of 78 photographs featuring the popular plastic doll in kitchen appliances ranging from a martini glass to a fondue pot. Other photos showed the doll stuffed into a tortilla, a fondue pot and a blender. "I wasn't expecting this work to even be that controversial. It started out as a riff on plasticization, on crass consumerism, but when I started to work with the doll I added the dimension of the impossible beauty myth." Not that the practice is confined to academia -- before the Iraq war, chunks of an infamous government dossier making the case for invasion were found to have been lifted from work by an American student. The FBI said police should increase patrols this holiday weekend, vary the timing, size and routes of the patrols, and make sure all vehicles illegally parked in key areas are approached and their drivers questioned. The Homeland Security Department had no plans to raise the nation's color-coded terror alert level above its current midpoint status of yellow, or elevated. Last week, the agency sent a bulletin urging tighter security to state and local officials and those that operate power and chemical plants and key transportation facilities. The FBI bulletin repeated for local authorities a previously released list of indicators often associated with suicide bomber attacks overseas. These include: _Irregular, loose-fitting clothing not appropriate for warm weather, possibly with "protruding bulges or exposed wires" or a noticeable chemical odor. _"Sweating, mumbling (prayers) or unusually calm and detached behavior." In addition, people who refuse to show their hands, possibly to conceal a detonator. _Disguises, including military, police, medical or firefighter uniforms or someone posing as a pregnant woman. _Large or heavy baggage not appropriate for the location, such as a big duffel bag carried into a restaurant. Terrorists may also make anonymous threats to observe how security reacts and may attempt surveillance disguised as homeless people, shoe shiners, street vendors or street sweepers, the FBI said. The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers Friday that it is investigating side effects, some serious, associated with a popular brand of "permanent makeup" ink used to perform cosmetic-like tattooing of lips and eyes. The FDA said it has reports of more than 50 adverse reactions to certain shades of Premier Pigment brand ink. They include blistering, swelling, cracking and peeling skin around lips and eyes that, in some cases, caused serious disfigurement and difficulty in eating and talking, federal regulators said. South Carolina's attorney general said Friday that it was "grossly inappropriate" for police to draw their guns during a drug raid at a suburban high school last year, but no charges will be brought against the officers. "There is no evidence of any degree of criminal intent on behalf of the police officers or school personnel. Thus a criminal prosecution would not be appropriate." The ads don't have to be particularly suggestive to cause trouble. Christian clergy are upset at one showing a snake coiled around a woman's high-heeled shoe and the slogan "God created women." The clerics say it's a crass use of Biblical language. Such ads were "harming viewers' eyes and hurting their virtues" and women were being used as "merchandise that is sold and bought at the cheapest of prices." An Iranian man who struck a suicide pact with his new bride over their guilt for having pre-marital sex is being held by police after he backed out on his side of the bargain, judiciary officials said on Sunday. The couple, who were not named, had been married for just two days when, "due to their guilty consciences for having illicit sexual relations, they decided to kill each other at the same time," the official said. The man helped to hang his wife but then changed his mind about killing himself and handed himself in to police. "We were going to go down to the beach for a surf and a couple of blokes came up and said, 'Don't go down there somebody's been bitten in half by a shark'." Half of Americans object to the online availability of graphic war images, though millions have actively sought them out, a new study finds. Men, Democrats and younger Americans were more likely to approve of having such images on the Web. Television, newspapers and the Web sites of mainstream media outlets generally refrained from using the most graphic images of Iraqi prisoner abuses and the killings of Nicholas Berg and other Americans in Iraq. But photos and even video could be readily found elsewhere - at anti-war sites, Web journals, the Drudge Report and discussion boards frequented by sympathizers of terror groups. According to the study, 24 percent of adult Internet users, or 30 million people, have seen such graphic images online, and 28 percent of those people actively sought them out. That comes out to more than 8 million active seekers. Yet overall, Americans disapprove of the postings by a margin of 49 percent to 40 percent. Another 4 percent say approval depends on circumstances, while the rest wouldn't say or have no opinion. A third of the Americans who saw the images - some 10 million - regret doing so. "Our experiences on the Internet are built upon experiences with previous media," he said. "What's graphic in most people's minds is a slasher movie or a Sopranos episode with a beheading. Those don't prepare you for how graphic (these images) could be, but once they encounter real-life applications of that principle, in many cases, they are unhappy." Internet users approve of the images' availability by 47 percent to 44 percent, which is within the margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Only 29 percent of non-users approve having the photos, while 58 percent disapprove. Fifty-three percent of men approve, compared with 29 percent among women. Fifty-two percent of adults under 30 approve, while only 31 percent of those 50 or over do. Fifty-two percent of Democrats and 53 percent of independents were OK with having the images, compared with 42 percent of Republicans. "They came and put a paper on the door a few days before which said: 'Close this shop, it is in the service of the devil.'" Then the militants bombed the store."It was always nice to have a drink at night, after dinner, you'd go out and meet friends, have a drink and then go home," said an ice cream vendor, who declined to give his name for fear of retaliation. "We are going to terminate them. We do not want liquor, songs or prostitutes in our sacred city." The next day, Islamic militants shouting "God is great" fired on a Baghdad shop selling liquor, destroying the merchandise, damaging nearby cars and abducting an employee. "You can't believe everything you read in the papers," she said. "This is just part of the rumors. There are all sorts of elements challenging the new government... They are trying to undermine it." Democrats aren't amused by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's use of the mocking term "girlie men" to describe some lawmakers, although a spokesman for the governor said no apology would be forthcoming. "If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers ... if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men," Schwarzenegger said. A 70-year-old Italian died on Saturday when a World War One bomb, part of his collection of military memorabilia, exploded while he was showing it to a friend in his garden. Law enforcement officials in the Florida Keys are mystified by a bizarre new pastime -- young people dangling themselves from meat hooks on a popular sandbar. Video games usually play out in spaceships, dungeons, battlefields or athletic fields. But farm fields? "John Deere American Farmer" is a new computer game that lets players sow digital crops, milk computerized livestock and raise virtual barns. The $20 title simulates market prices, weather, farm hands - and the occasional plague. There are 11 modes of play, including one where you have to raise 10,000 hogs. In "Fixer-upper" mode, you have to dig your way out of $200,000 in debt and repair a dilapidated farm within five years. Singer Linda Ronstadt not only got booed, she got the boot after lauding filmmaker Michael Moore and his new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 during a performance at the Aladdin hotel-casino. Before singing "Desperado" for an encore Saturday night, the 58-year-old rocker called Moore a "great American patriot" and "someone who is spreading the truth." She also encouraged everybody to see the documentary about President Bush.Ronstadt's comments drew loud boos and some of the 4,500 people in attendance stormed out of the theater. People also tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air. The Sept. 11 commission's final report recommended the creation of a new intelligence center and high-level intelligence director to improve the nation's ability to disrupt future terrorist attacks. The panel also determined the "most important failure" leading to the Sept. 11 attacks "was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat." The 9/11 attacks "were a shock, but should not have come as a surprise. By September 2001, the executive branch of the U.S. government, the Congress, the news media, and the American public had received clear warning that Islamist terrorists meant to kill Americans in high numbers." Bush had fought the creation of the panel, resisted the release of documents and battled against letting national security adviser Condoleezza Rice address the panel. But he embraced its work Thursday. Eleven workers from a poultry processing plant have been fired and fast-food giant KFC has halted purchases from the facility following the release of a secretly shot video showing employees kicking and stomping live chickens. "The committed militants ... do not hand themselves in when an amnesty is declared unless they have achieved substantially the objectives which they set for themselves." Between 2000 and 2003, military doctors performed 496 breast enlargements and 1,361 liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents, the magazine said. The magazine quoted an Army spokeswoman as saying, "the surgeons have to have someone to practice on." Two Britons were found guilty on Wednesday of an elaborate plot to smuggle cocaine into the country by surgically implanting packets of the drug inside two Labrador dogs. But the scheme was foiled when officials at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport became suspicious at the behavior of Rex and Frispa when they arrived from Colombia en route to London's Stansted Airport. Rex was lively but a drugs package had burst inside Frispa and she was lying apathetically. Dutch vets operated on the dogs, removing 11 cylindrical objects from Rex and 10 from Frispa, who later died. Altogether the packets contained a total of 1.3 kilograms of cocaine. They may not look cool, but knife-resistant kid's sweatshirts and coats are the latest products aimed at providing parental peace of mind in a Japan horrified by a series of gruesome attacks on children. The sweatshirts, and coats that look like plain waterproofs, are made from the same fibers used in police and military knife-proof and bullet-proof vests, according to the maker. "Today, it's gay marriage. Tomorrow, it could be something else. It's very dangerous for any Congress to move down this road." Separately, a report from congressional Democrats said Halliburton charged the government $2.68 per gallon to import gasoline to Iraq from Kuwait, while a government agency did the same work for $1.57 a gallon. That cost the government an extra $166.5 million, the Democrats' report said. A Halliburton spokeswoman said price comparisons were unfair because the terms of the contracts probably were different. The company has not obtained a copy of the government arrangement cited in the Democrats' report. "Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaida threat? Is al-Qaida a big deal?" - One illustration of such problems is the disagreement over charges for serving meals to troops. The Army did not make it clear to Halliburton whether it should charge for the actual numbers of meals served or for providing enough food for four meals a day for the estimated populations of each base camp. Pentagon auditors say Halliburton should charge only for meals served, while Halliburton argues it should be paid according to the estimated number of troops. That's a discrepancy of about $88 million, the report said. Halliburton's cost estimates are frequently inaccurate or lack the proper documentation, the report said. After Halliburton pledged to improve its contract management the situation improved at some sites but not others, the report said. The company is often behind schedule on its work. At least $100 billion already has been spent or is in the pipeline for the now 16-month-old campaign, according to Defense Department figures. Defense auditors have criticized the company for inadequate cost estimating and poor accounting and documentation as it provided meals and other support to troops and ran oil field operations in southern Iraq. Democrats have accused Halliburton, which Vice President Dick Cheney once headed, of war profiteering. "Halliburton is gouging the taxpayer." A group calling itself "The Holders of the Black Banners" announced this week it had abducted three Kenyans, three Indians and an Egyptian, saying it would behead one captive every 72 hours beginning Saturday night if the Kuwaiti trucking company they worked for did not stop doing business in Iraq and the countries did not pull their citizens out of the country. "Damn you and damn the occupiers." The United States has confirmed that the head found in a Riyadh freezer this week is that of decapitated hostage Paul M. Johnson Jr., the spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh said Friday. "We did see the head on Thursday and have confirmed that it is the head of Paul Johnson, unfortunately." The U.S. Congress late Thursday night passed resolutions declaring that atrocities that have been unfolding in western Sudan are genocide and urged the Bush administration to do the same. An estimated 30,000 civilians have been killed - most of them black Africans - and up to 1 million displaced since two groups from the Darfur region's African tribes took up arms over what they regard as unjust treatment by the government in their struggle with Arab countrymen over land and resources. Dogs chomping on mail carrier-shaped treats is no laughing matter for Canada Post. The unamused Canadian postal service -- whose carriers endure more than their share of real dog bites -- convinced Pet Valu Inc. stores to stop carrying Bark Bars, dog biscuits that come shaped like cats and letter carriers. "This is not in any way, shape, or form funny for us, and to make light of that ... I don't see that as funny at all, not even in the least," said John Caines, Canada Post's national media relations manager. The pet store chain, which has 292 outlets in Canada, agreed to withdraw the treats after it received a letter from Canada Post saying that employees were concerned about the risks mail carriers face from dogs and unhappy with having dog biscuits shaped in their likeness. "My country is not Israel. My country is outside of Israel. Israel didn't respect me for 18 years. For 18 years, Israel condemned me as a traitor, as a spy. I don't like Israel, I don't want to live in Israel. I want to be free and to leave Israel." Saddam was being treated for high blood pressure and a chronic prostate infection, and was gaining weight after losing 11 pounds during a time when he resisted all fatty foods. Saddam and other detainees get an MRE (meal ready to eat) breakfast, and hot food twice a day. Dessert might include oranges, apples, pears or plums, but Saddam also likes American muffins and cookies. Saddam tends a garden during his daily three-hour exercise period. "He is looking after a few bushes and shrubs and has even placed a circle of white stones around a small palm tree. His apparent care for his surroundings is ironic when you think he was responsible for one of the biggest ecocides when he drained the southern marshes. I tried to control my emotions, but to be honest I wanted to vomit. There before me were the men responsible for the industrial pain of Iraq - mass murderers who were responsible for turning Iraq into a land of mass graves." A record 6.9 million adults were incarcerated or on probation or parole last year, nearly 131,000 more than in 2002, according to a Justice Department study. Put another way, about 3.2 percent of the adult U.S. population, or 1 in 32 adults, were incarcerated or on probation or parole at the end of last year. A record 4.8 million adults were on probation or parole in 2003, about 73,000 more than the year before. About 70 percent of adults involved in federal, state or local corrections systems fall into this category. The states of California and Texas together accounted for about 1 million. For a government that routinely lectures foreign countries on their human rights failings, this has been a very difficult year for the United States. Gannett and Captivate Network are staking their newly announced growth plans on the belief that captive audiences will be happier if they can watch something other than elevator floor buttons twinkling on and off. Enter elevator video, which gives office workers something to do with their riding time but also intrudes on one of the few remaining places to get relief from information overload. Research indicates American consumers are largely willing to put up with captive-audience advertising. Results last year indicate cinema audiences do not mind advertisements before films and consider them more acceptable than advertising on the Internet. Still, there is resistance. "In American culture, there's no place to hide," said Ted Rueter, director of Noise Free America, a New Orleans-based group dedicated to fighting noise and visual pollution. Kids are overdeveloping visual senses at the expense of touch or sound. "Children miss out on all these basic learning experiences if they are so attuned to the virtual world." Yet some researchers as well as developers of the Web sites and software aimed at young kids see nothing wrong with exposing children to technology early - as long as it's done in moderation. A suicide car bomb exploded on a busy downtown boulevard, ripping through a commuter bus during morning rush hour, wrecking nearby shops and killing at least 68 Iraqis in one of the deadliest single insurgent attacks since the U.S. invasion. Dozens of burned bodies were strewn in the street and piled on curbsides, and vehicles, fruit stalls and shops were a bloody tangle of twisted metal from the blast, which targeted Iraqis lined up outside a police recruiting station. Most of the victims were civilians or from among the the hundreds of men waiting to join the force. "These were all innocent Iraqis, there were no Americans," an angry man shouted, pounding his hands against his head in grief, as Iraqis tried to cover the dead with pieces of cardboard. In an audio recording posted Wednesday on one site, a speaker purported to be the spiritual adviser of an Iraqi insurgency group justified killing fellow Muslims when they protect infidels or even if they are just bystanders. "If infidels take Muslims as protectors and Muslims do not fight them, it is allowed to kill the Muslims," said the speaker, who also said that if Muslims who "mingled" among infidels were killed in an attack, that would be justified because killing infidels is paramount. "Democracy is hard. Democracy is dangerous. This is the time for us to be steadfast, not get weak in the knees," said Powell. "I was afraid they were going to kill me," he said. "When they saw I was carrying copies of the Quran, they waved me on." He was lucky. Last week, authorities found the corpse of a Jordanian driver dumped alongside the highway with his eyes gouged. Hitting home that point, black-masked, armed militants calling themselves "The Group of Death" threatened in a video to sever the main highway linking Iraq to Jordan in 72 hours and target Jordanians to stop supplies from reaching U.S. troops. Cadaver dogs searched fruitlessly in the early morning darkness Wednesday for clues to the whereabouts of a missing pregnant woman, while her family closed down a command post for volunteers. The White House will project soon that this year's federal deficit will exceed $420 billion, congressional aides said, a record figure certain to ignite partisan warfare over President Bush's handling of the economy. Some aides said they believed the projected shortfall would be close to $450 billion, though one said it would be about $420 billion. Either way, the White House was ready to emphasize that the figure is well below the $521 billion it projected for this year last February, and tie it to improvements in the economy. Democrats have said Bush purposely overestimated this year's budget gap so he could take credit for improvement when the real figures came in. "The new estimate ... will set a new record of fiscal mismanagement and deficit spending." My biggest complaint was the inconsistent artificial intelligence. The AI generally does a great job of mimicking real humans. If you kill a guard, bystanders will run away and bring back reinforcements. Other times, the characters are as dumb as digital doorknobs. While in prison, I managed to snag the keys from a guard standing too close to my cell room door. When I opened the door and made my way to freedom, the guard never seemed to notice my cell door was ajar during his next patrol minutes later. Several glitches really bugged me. While prowling the streets, at one point I walked around a crate to see what was behind it. I apparently discovered a black hole, because when I tried to climb over the crate, I somehow fell out of the game world to an untimely death. Economists searching for reasons why some nations are richer than others have found that those with a wide belief in hell are less corrupt and more prosperous, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Ireland, not far behind the United States in terms of income, likewise has a healthy fear of a nether world with 53 percent of the population acknowledging hell's existence. A poster campaign urging people not to eat smelly foods on London's overcrowded and overheated underground system has sparked a diplomatic incident with Italy. The poster showing an overweight and Mediterranean-looking man lounging in an underground train carriage surrounded by hams, salamis and strings of garlic triggered a torrent of letters from angry Italians and even the Italian ambassador. "These are really good days for the Dead. I'm tempted to call our name the Grateful Living. I don't know how that would go over but I feel like that. I'm grateful to be alive and healthy." South African police are hunting a gang of large women thieves who raid stores, threatening staff with knives, and steal mostly small size clothing, a spokesman says. "When they enter the store they do so in a large group and they intimidate the staff, they're quite large people." The death toll from a weekend fire at a supermarket shot up by more than 100 to reach 464 on Tuesday, as a security guard told investigators he received orders to lock the building's doors just after the blaze began to prevent theft, officials said. Some of the victims were burned beyond recognition, and their caskets are to be marked for possible exhumation in the future to identify the remains. Some neighbors said they were forced to break windows to enter the supermarket because the doors wouldn't open. Toxoplasmosis - a common infection caused by a parasite and transmitted by bites or scratches - can cause fatal complications in human fetuses and people with compromised immune systems. It is rarely fatal in healthy adults. Cat scratch fever can cause sores, blisters, swollen lymph nodes, high fever and encephalitis. But even cat lovers are sometimes annoyed by the unwelcome presents - feces, dead birds and lizards - left on streets, cars and in open-air apartments into which the street cats stray. Hundreds of supporters of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide marched through the slums of Haiti's capital Wednesday to demand his return. Even as the crowd rallied against Haiti's new U.S.-backed interim government, a group of Caribbean nations announced that it would make a decision in about two weeks on whether to recognize the new leadership. "We cannot live without Aristide, we think he will return if we keep protesting," said a former port worker who said past protests brought Aristide back to power. Haiti, with some 8 million people, is the poorest country in the Americas and the Caribbean Community's most populous. "This is where it really starts getting scary," he says upon entering a new level of "Doom 3" where massive hell knights lob deadly balls of energy against a backdrop of shimmering lava pools and torches made of corpses. "I don't know how many times I've been through hell but it just freaks me out." In "Doom 3" you are a marine on a martian outpost that becomes a gateway to hell after a series of top secret experiments involving ancient alien artifacts. With shotguns, rocket launchers, lasers and grenades, you alone must fend off a menagerie of beasts and possessed base workers. "They were all very emotional and very aggressive," he said. "They were putting down Bush, saying he is our enemy and we will pursue him and America until we win." On a rambling Web site, supporters acknowledge to be his home page, Fischer launches numerous attacks on Jews and decries the "international Jewish conspiracy" and "Jew-controlled U.S.," which he says are behind plots to both rule the world and ruin his life. At one point, the site denies the Holocaust. "The so-called 'Holocaust' of the Jews during World War II is a complete hoax! It never happened," it says. "The Jews are liars. Japan beware you're backing a loser," it adds. "Don't go down the drain with the filthy Jew-controlled U.S." Under anti-indecency rules, radio stations and over-the-air television channels are barred from broadcasting references to sexual and excretory functions between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m, when children are most inclined to watch. Bless me Father, for I have committed a foul in the penalty area. The Vatican, long in the business of souls, is now getting into the business of sports. Or more precisely, it is getting into the business of putting the soul back into sports. "With this legislation America's military will know that their country stands behind them as they fight for our freedom and as they spread the peace," Bush said. "No enemy or friend can doubt that America has the resources to prevail," he said. "And we will." Danny and his teenage friends thought the parish priest was "cool." He let them thumb through the Playboy magazines he kept under the driver's seat of his convertible and always made sure there was enough leftover Communion wine for them to share. But Danny's friends also told police investigating the boy's murder that the priest had his dark side and could become violent when crossed. Nigerian police have arrested 30 witch-doctors in a raid on fetish shrines where over 50 decomposing bodies and 20 human skulls were discovered, a police spokesman said Thursday. The heads, genitals and other vital parts of some of the bodies had been severed, a sign they may have been killed for ritual. "We saw more than 50 bodies in various coffins. There were several skulls, some of them really fresh." Kerry declared his enthusiasm for corn by sticking his head out the window of his campaign bus. He waved both hands with corn. As of Wednesday, Aug. 4, 917 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq in March 2003, according to the Defense Department. Of those, 680 died as a result of hostile action and 237 died of non-hostile causes. The British military has reported 60 deaths; Italy, 18; Spain, eight; Poland, seven; Bulgaria, six; Ukraine, four; Slovakia, three; Thailand, two; and Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands have reported one death each. Since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 779 U.S. soldiers have died - 571 as a result of hostile action and 208 of non-hostile causes, according to the Defense Department on Wednesday. "When the police officer is viewed on TV beating a suspect, we have protests and national civil rights leaders flying into the city," he said, referring to the videotaped beating of a suspected car thief by LAPD officers in June. "Yet these heart-rending killings are going on with regularity and there seems to be no resistance. Just because you live behind fancy gates doesn't mean you are secure from violence," he said. The girls allegedly smoked marijuana just before the slayings. Jordan said they also had attempted to get guns by calling friends they had met during their times in juvenile detention centers. Investigators said they had found a poem Harvey had written in which she described how depressed she had been and that she cried herself to sleep. The poem contained the line, "All I want to do is kill." In the new video, a bearded, blindfolded man sits before four masked men clad in black and a black banner with the words Tawhid and Jihad in white Arabic script. The hostage is wearing the orange jumpsuit that has become an iconic element in such videos, meant to evoke those worn by Iraqi prisoners subjected to abuse while in U.S. custody in Iraq. A man is heard saying, "Here we are returning again to cut off the neck of the other hostage." The brief video ends with bloody images of a body in an orange jumpsuit being beheaded with a knife as his assailants repeatedly shout "God is great!" The victim does not appear to struggle, indicating he may have been dead or drugged before the beheading, or that his arms were somehow restrained. In the last scene, one of the men in black brandishes the severed head before the camera. The groups are small, little known and highly militant, with ideologies like al-Qaida's. They have struck around the world, carrying out suicide bombings in Morocco, kidnapping civilians in Iraq and attacking Western residential compounds in Saudi Arabia. The emergence of these groups is making the fight against terrorism more challenging. Instead of targeting one enemy - just al-Qaida - the West and its allies now face many "al-Qaidas," splinter groups that are mostly unrelated to each other but are bound by the same hatred of the West - especially the United States and its allies, including Israel. "It's like McDonald's giving out franchises," said Dia'a Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on militant groups. "All they have to do is follow the company's manual. They don't consult with headquarters every time they want to produce a meal." A key conclusion in last month's Sept. 11 commission report said that even though Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida has been weakened, its imitators pose a "catastrophic threat" to the United States. A dispute over clothes and a video game system between a young woman and a squatter in her grandparents' house apparently sparked the vicious beating and stabbing murders of six people whose bodies were found late last week in a blood-spattered home, police said. The attack was the brutal culmination of an argument between Victorino, an ex-convict, and one of the victims, who is believed to be Erin Belanger, 22. She was singled out for a beating so vicious that even dental records were useless in trying to identify her. The victims, some of whom were sleeping, did not put up a fight or try to escape, Sheriff Ben Johnson said. All had been stabbed, but autopsies determined the cause of death was the beating injuries. Victorino, the last to leave the house, took the Xbox, police said. "It pleases me that he is taking time to apologize for his actions. I am glad that he is taking responsibility for what he did," responding to his statement, the judge called Nichols a "terrorist," saying the redemption and atonement he seeks is only the beginning. "Your criminal acts in this case are historic in proportion," the judge said. "No American citizen has ever brought this kind of devastation, you are in U.S. history the No. 1 mass murderer in all of U.S. history. What could motivate you to do this? There are no answers." After a recent legal setback, a California company that claims its patents cover the streaming video technology used by adult Web sites is boosting efforts to collect money from a very different group of streaming video users: colleges and universities. Acacia Media Technologies Corp. has sent letters to dozens of colleges in recent days claiming the schools' use of streaming video in areas like distance learning and video lectures violates company patents. The message: pay up, or risk getting sued. "Acacia wants to extract a toll on each and every lesson that a student learns over the Internet," he said. "I think that's despicable. Universities are under enough pressure in their budgets right now to try to pay for everything. The last thing they need to do is give a pound of flesh to some tech company that doesn't even make a product." A chain of private California schools that taught immigrants there are 53 U.S. states and four branches of the U.S. government was ordered to stop handing out phony diplomas this week. Authorities seized the assets of California Alternative High School and asked a judge to stop the company's 30 schools statewide from handing out "high school diplomas" to students dreaming of a better life through education. The company charged its mainly Latino students $450 to $1,450 for a 10-week course based on a 54-page book that was riddled with errors, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday. Students learned that Congress had two houses -- the Senate for Democrats and the House for Republicans; that the U.S. flag had not been updated to reflect the addition of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico to the "original" 50 states; that the federal "administrative" branch oversees the Treasury Department; and that World War II occurred from 1938 to 1942. A police raid on fetish shrines in Nigeria which found more than 50 decomposing, mutilated bodies and 20 human skulls was a desecration of the traditional religion of the Ibo culture, a tribal chief said Sunday. MURDER? The trade in human body parts thrives in Nigeria because witch-doctors use them to produce expensive potions, which some believe can make them rich or protect them from harm. "(President GEORGE W.) BUSH is making America look and feel very horrible around the world. He doesn't represent the heart of America. He represents another part of the anatomy but not the heart." -- rock guitarist CARLOS SANTANA, in Billboard. A man and his two sons have been arrested on suspicion of murdering a neighbor and then eating parts of his body after he tripped over a woman relative at a dance, Philippine police said on Tuesday. The three men are suspected of stabbing a neighbor to death last month in a remote village in the southwestern island of Palawan. They ate his ears, tongue and arms after roasting the body over a fire. "They stabbed him repeatedly, cut off the man's ears, pulled out his tongue and ate it." A sworn statement by a witness said he had been forced to eat some flesh taken from the victim's arms. An Islamic Web site carried a videotape Wednesday that appeared to show militants in Iraq beheading a man they identified as a CIA agent. The authenticity of the videotape could not be verified immediately. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said CIA officials have accounted for all employees and no one is missing. U.S. officials were working to determine if the tape was authentic, the official said. The Internet site, regarded as a clearing house for tapes and statements by Islamic extremist groups, displayed footage of eight militants surrounding a seated man who wore a sign around his neck bearing his photograph and the hand-written letters CIA along with the Arabic word for "visitor." In a close-up, the footage showed a masked militant holding a large knife to the man's throat, the militant chopped repeatedly at the neck, severing the head. A masked militant was then shown holding the head aloft. After the beheading, the head was held up and voices were heard yelling "Allahu Akbar" - God is Great. A Homeland Security officer accused of throwing a Chinese tourist against a wall and spraying her with pepper spray was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury. Robert Rhodes, 43, is charged with criminally violating the civil rights of 37-year-old Zhao Yan by causing bodily injury to her in the July 21 altercation in Niagara Falls. Zhao is suing the United States for $5 million, claiming she was thrown against a wall and kneed in the head by Rhodes, leaving her cut and bruised. The state-run China Daily newspaper published a front-page photo of Zhao, showing her with one eye swollen shut and lacerations on her forehead. The businesswoman was quoted as calling the United States "the most barbarous" country she had been to. A man who said the movie "The Passion of the Christ" prompted him to confess to strangling his girlfriend pleaded guilty Wednesday. "I take full responsibility for my actions, and I plead guilty." Despite the confession, Leach had pleaded innocent, and his murder trial had begun Tuesday with jury selection. Ashley Nicole Wilson, 19, was found dead in her apartment in January. It appeared she had hanged herself, and the Harris County medical examiner's office ruled the death a suicide. Two months later, Leach, 21, said he came forward after seeing Mel Gibson's movie depicting the last hours of Jesus. A Connecticut nuclear engineer said he's become enmeshed in a federal terrorism probe - targeted for supporting a militant Islamic Web site when all he may have done is offer to help humanitarian efforts in a war-torn region. Though he hasn't been charged with any crimes, he's also been placed on a U.S. no-fly list - a watch list including suspected terrorists, he said. Maswood, a father of three who has donated to several GOP campaigns and keeps a picture of President Bush in his living room, believes he's being singled out because he is Muslim. "I believe in this country," he said. "I believe in the system. I believe in the fairness of the law. I want to know, what did I do wrong?" From his home, Maswood runs North American Technical Services, which exports radiation detection instruments, water treatment devices and environmental equipment to Middle East and Asian governments. He said he's had difficulties doing business through the government since Sept. 11, 2001. When he was 16 years old, the suspected ringleader of a home invasion last week that left six people dead promised he would never commit another crime if a judge was lenient on an auto theft charge he faced. Victorino, 27, is now back behind bars. He and three teenage co-defendants were charged with first-degree murder for allegedly stabbing and bludgeoning to death six people Friday in a Deltona house - apparently over an Xbox video game system. "Target destroyed," a voice crackled over the radios.\ "Never in my life would I have expected we'd be fighting in a graveyard," said the company commander. "Every day I think about the families whose loved ones are buried here."Dirt paths crisscross the cemetery, which is filled with heavy tombs, some made of concrete, others of brick. Some have rounded brown clay domes with Arabic inscriptions. The more elaborate tombs feature green and blue domes, locked doors, even stairs that lead to underground rooms. Framed black and white photographs of the dead hang inside caged, turquoise crypts. The graveyard is so congested many tombs sit side by side, some inches apart, some leaning into each other. For guerrilla fighters, it's a perfect place to hide. "You can hear 'em, but you can't see 'em," McFall said. "They're hiding down in the catacombs. All you hear is 'phsssst'," he said, mimicking the sound of a passing bullet. Soldiers found a roadside bomb: an artillery shell in the road and wires leading away from it. They blew it up. Darkness hangs like a thick fog in this first-person shooter, shrouding your vision and adding a nearly unbearable sense of dread to a grim mission pitting you against a cast of hell's minions. Somehow, hell's denizens have teleported onto the base and transformed just about everyone else into lumbering zombies. It's up to you to wipe them out before they spread evil to Earth. "I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified."\ -- PORTER GOSS, President Bush's nominee for CIA director, to documentary-maker Michael Moore's production company during the filming of the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." A retired Italian man could face up to a year and a half in prison if found guilty of killing his six pet hamsters and one guinea-pig by throwing them off his terrace into passing traffic. In a stunning declaration, Gov. James E. McGreevey announced his resignation Thursday and acknowledged that he had an extramarital affair with another man. "My truth is that I am a gay American," he said. Israeli jailers may try to break a Palestinian hunger strike with barbecues, hoping the aroma of grilling meat will wear down security prisoners protesting conditions and demanding more access to their families. A wheelchair-bound woman with no limbs sued Air France for discrimination on Friday, alleging she was kept off a flight by a gate agent who told her a "torso cannot possibly fly on its own." The woman, who was born without limbs because her mother took the drug thalidomide during pregnancy, said in the suit she is able to manipulate a wheelchair and has traveled by air many times. The suit states that she had bought a ticket in 2000 for travel between Manchester, England and New York. After Price had checked her luggage, she alleged that she was stopped by an Air France agent who told her that "a head, one bottom and a torso cannot possibly fly on its own." From the cradle to the grave. You can buy baby food, groceries, computers, furniture and a whole host of things at Costco -- now you can even find caskets at some of its stores. The world's largest warehouse club operator said on Tuesday it began a test program that offers caskets at two of its Chicago area stores. "It was unbelievable. They just decided to have their very own private porn movie while on the job." On a hot August day at peak tourist season, visitors to the famous neo-classical landmark were greeted by the smell of 11,000 rotting fish displayed on a 100 meter long table under banners bearing the slogan "Don't waste life!." The net has a huge pipe attached that sucks up fish indiscriminately like a giant vacuum cleaner. The dead fish on display -- some 95 percent of the catch, including endangered species of octopus and sea urchin -- were those that commercial crews would normally throw back overboard for failing to meet traders' criteria. "I think it's crazy to say 'F--- the homeless.' I don't think it's right," he said. "Most of the people I see around here are either mentally ill or have family problems. We don't panhandle over there or anything." McGreevey announced his resignation last week after acknowledging that he is gay and had an affair with a man. Sources close to McGreevey have identified the man as Golan Cipel, a former adviser to the governor, and said the Israeli had demanded millions of dollars to stay quiet. Cipel, who returned to Israel this week, denied the report, claiming he was the victim of a powerful conspiracy. "I am a lone person fighting against a monstrous well-oiled machine of lies and manipulations operating in a methodical manner against me," he said. "I think it's horrific that people would do that," Gov. Jeb Bush said. An FBI agent who said he was ordered not to discuss his role in a 15-year investigation of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant warned Wednesday against creating a wildlife refuge at the site, saying it would be too dangerous. Speaking with difficulty because of thyroid cancer she believes she contracted while working at Rocky Flats, Brever said employees dumped contaminated waste in a duck pond that is not listed among the areas being cleaned. Rocky Flats made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons until production was shut down after the 1989 raid. A federal grand jury investigated allegations of safety violations by the contractor and the Department of Energy. "Please NO men or boys allowed on elevator," warns one sign at San Diego's downtown YWCA. Informational e-mails are called "hot flashes" and tablecloths come in pink. "People laughed at me and called me 'caveman.' I used to throw stones back and fight them as a kid, but now I've grown up and learned how to endure it," he said as he recuperated in a hospital ward from ear surgery. An Oklahoma judge facing removal over charges that he masturbated and used a device for enhancing erections under his robes during trials said on Wednesday he would retire from the bench. "I have greatly enjoyed my public service and offer my gratitude for the public trust reposed in me during the terms I served," he said. Swedish graffiti artists kidnapped a fiber-glass cow from the international art exhibit CowParade, held power drills to its head and threatened to "sacrifice" it unless the sculptures were declared "non-art." A video sent to a newspaper showed the cow flanked by two masked, black-clad figures wielding power drills in front of a sign reading "Stockholm's Militant Graffiti Artists." "We demand that the cows are declared non-art. Otherwise the hostage will be sacrificed," said a voice on the video. The group gave the organizers of the Stockholm exhibit till noon on Aug. 23 to comply with their demand. A group supporting natural breasts staged a small street protest in Hollywood on Wednesday against a U.S. military policy offering free breast implants to female soldiers. The group, led by porn star and former California gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey, said the military should spend its money on "bullets, not boobs." An 8-year-old girl who suffers from a rare digestive disorder and cannot eat wheat has had her first Holy Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained no wheat, violating Roman Catholic doctrine. Church doctrine holds that Communion wafers, like the bread served at the Last Supper, must have at least some unleavened wheat. Church leaders are reluctant to change anything about the sacrament. "This is not an issue to be determined at the diocesan or parish level, but has already been decided for the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world by Vatican authority," Trenton Bishop John M. Smith said in a statement last week. Haley's Communion controversy isn't the first. In 2001, the family of a 5-year-old Massachusetts girl with the disease left the Catholic church after being denied permission to use a rice wafer. The church has similar rules for Communion wine. For alcoholics, the church allows a substitute for wine under some circumstances, however the drink must still be fermented from grapes and contain some alcohol. Grape juice is not a valid substitute. "I'm an unabashed supporter of John Kerry because I've stood beside him in combat and I know what he's capable of and I'd want him at my back if I ever have to go someplace where it gets really ugly really fast." The anti-war group, United for Peace and Justice, and city lawyers met for a hearing before the state Supreme Court, considering whether the expected crowd of 250,000 people can assemble in the park on Sunday for a rally that the city argues would ruin the grass. "I find it hard to believe the vice president would stray from the administration's position on defense policy or tax policy. For many pro-family voters, protecting traditional marriage ranks ahead of the economy and job creation as a campaign issue." Israel's army has developed a pungent new weapon for driving back Palestinian protesters -- the skunk bomb. The new device, which is not yet operational, releases a cloud so pungent that according to initial tests it permeates clothes for five years, the officials said. Palestinians said such a weapon could be particularly unpleasant for devout Muslims since they cannot pray with clothes that smell and would have to throw them away. "It's the most bizarre part of this entire campaign." -- White House hopeful John Kerry to "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart on the number of people who want to introduce themselves while in the men's room. Earlier this month, the New York Police Department showed off a machine called the Long Range Acoustic Device, developed for the military and capable of blasting at an earsplitting 150 decibels - as loud as a firecracker, a jet engine taking off or artillery fire at 500 feet, according to the Noise Center at the League for the Hard of Hearing. The NYPD said it would use the machine to direct crowds to safety if there's a terrorist attack or remind protesters where they're allowed to march. Police said they wouldn't use the earsplitting screeching noise feature at the convention. "It's only to communicate in large crowds." Free speech advocates say New York's police have videotaped past protests, so organizations like United for Peace and Justice are encouraging protesters to bring their own video cameras to videotape the police. A Web protest guide from Just Cause Law Collective suggests that protesters who see police brutality document it by leaving a detailed cell phone message for themselves or recording what they see on their portable music player. Paramedics and residents picked up body parts scattered across the street and put them into boxes. Anguished men lifted bodies burned beyond recognition and lay them gently on stretchers. Helicopters circled. "It was a horrific scene. Seconds earlier people were drinking tea or eating sandwiches and then I could see their remains hanging from trees," he said. "I could see burning people running in all directions." He said he saw a man who had just bought a falafel from him killed by a flying car wheel. Angry crowds of young men pumped their fists in the air and denounced President Bush and interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, saying they had failed to protect Iraqis. "Bush is a dog," they chanted. The deaths of two dairy workers who were asphyxiated by gases rising from a fetid stew of cow manure could have been prevented if the farmer responsible for their safety had given them the proper training and equipment, prosecutors said Monday during opening statements in a case against the farmer. The wastewater "was inside his nose. He gulped it. It was inside his lungs," said the prosecutor. Police have arrested a man who exhumed, cooked and ate part of his grandson's corpse, police said Monday. A police spokeswoman said a hunter found the man eating pieces of flesh in a graveyard. "The man exhumed a corpse and cut off some flesh which he cooked in a pot and started eating ... we went to the grave of his grandson and verified that he had exhumed the body. One official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Islam, 56, was identified by the Advanced Passenger Information System, which requires airlines to send passenger information to Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center. The Transportation Security Administration then was contacted and requested that the plane land at the nearest airport, that official said. Islam was questioned by FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Another federal official, who is in law enforcement and spoke anonymously because of agency policy, said that after the interview, Customs officials decided to deny Islam entry into the United States. Flight 919 continued on to Dulles after Islam was removed from the flight. Some service members who were part of the survey said in interviews that they came out to their colleagues about their sexual orientation despite the policy. Some were discharged when their homosexuality became known; others continued to serve. Some gay friends on his ship were investigated, and he acknowledged his homosexuality to his commanding officer during the probe. Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart apologized Wednesday for saying in a televised worship service that he would kill any gay man who looked at him romantically. In the broadcast, Swaggart was discussing his opposition to gay marriage when he said "I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm going to be blunt and plain: If one ever looks at me like that, I'm going to kill him and tell God he died," Swaggart said to laughter and applause from the congregation. On Wednesday, Swaggart said he has jokingly used the expression "killing someone and telling God he died" thousands of times, about all sorts of people. He said the expression is figurative and not meant to harm. Swaggart was a popular television evangelist during the 1980s until a 1987 sex scandal involving a prostitute that he met in a seedy New Orleans motel. Swaggart never confessed to anything more than an unspecified sin. A few years later, he was stopped by police while driving in California with a suspected prostitute in his car. The initial word of a possible release "was a shadow of light in a big, long, dark, damp, filthy, cold tunnel. Now this has been sabotaged." Bishop Thomas Dupre, the former head of the Springfield Diocese, was indicted on child rape charges, accused of molesting two boys in the 1970s, the county prosecutor said Monday. Dupre's whereabouts Monday were not immediately known. One of the men, who immigrated to America in 1975, said the abuse began when he was 12 after his family was befriended by Dupre. The man claimed the abuse lasted until he began dating a girl in high school. Dupre allegedly took him on out-of-state trips and to Canada, and bought pornography with the boy in Connecticut. Dupre is then accused of starting to abuse the other boy. The second victim says he was abused until he was about 20. Greek Orthodox and Franciscan priests got into a fist fight Monday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Christianity's holiest shrine, after arguing over whether a door in the basilica should be closed during a procession. Dozens of people, including several Israeli police officers, were slightly hurt in the brawl at the shrine, built over the spot where tradition says Jesus was crucified and buried. Four priests were detained, police spokesman Shmulik Ben-Ruby said. Custody of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is shared by several denominations that jealously guard territory and responsibilities under a fragile deal hammered out over the last centuries. Any perceived encroachment on one group's turf can lead to vicious feuds, sometimes lasting hundreds of years. A year earlier, the Greek patriarch and Armenian clergyman designated to enter the tomb exchanged blows after a dispute over who would be first to exit the chamber. Iraq war blogs are as varied as the soldiers who write them. Some sites feature practical news, war pictures and advice. Some are overtly political, with more slanting to the right than to the left. Some question the war, some cheer it. While some military bloggers (or milbloggers) say their commanders have encouraged their online literary ventures, a few say their commanders have shut them down. For the folks back home, soldier blogs offer details of war that don't make it into most news dispatches: The smell of rotten milk lingering in a poor neighborhood. The shepherd boys standing at the foot of a guard tower yelling requests for toothbrushes and sweets. The giant camel spiders. The tedium of long walks to get anything from a shower to a meal. A burning oil refinery a hundred miles away blocking the sun. A terrifying night raid surprised by armed enemies dressed in black. For Buzzell, an infantryman in an Army Stryker brigade, it was grist for his online war diary, , whose fans range from soccer moms and truck drivers to punk band leader Jello Biafra. Before the counter dropped off the site, says Buzzell, he was getting 5,000 hits a day. When Naoko Ito uses a public bathroom, she cringes in embarrassment at the thought that other patrons can hear the sounds coming from her stall. That's when she turns to the "Sound Princess." Ito, like a rapidly growing number of Japanese women, presses a device installed in public toilets to simulate the sound of water flushing - and mask the cruder noises of nature. "Japanese women are very embarrassed by the sounds they make in a toilet." The Japanese are notoriously fastidious: the daily bath is practiced with near-religious fervor, and walking inside with your shoes on is considered filthy. The Japanese word for clean - "kirei" - also means beautiful. And what happens in a bathroom stall is, well, among the dirtiest things that humans do. A elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken's neck, cut it off and his dog rushed up and ate it, the state Rompres news agency said Monday. It said 67 year-old Constantin Mocanu, from a village near the southeastern town of Galati, rushed out into his yard in his underwear to kill a noisy chicken keeping him awake at night. "I confused it with the chicken's neck," Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. "I cut it ... and the dog rushed and ate it." The Supreme Court agreed to consider Tuesday whether family members can sue in federal court after a 14-year-old girl cut her finger on a Star-Kist tuna can and suffered permanent damage. Beatriz Blanco-Ortega, then 9, was at school in Puerto Rico when she cut her finger on the tuna can and bled profusely for nearly 30 minutes. After a nurse stopped the bleeding, her mother took her in for surgery. The doctor reported she suffered scarring and a minor permanent impairment that could get worse over time. Across the Bible Belt this Halloween, some little ghosts and goblins might get shooed away by the neighbors - and some youngsters will not be allowed to go trick-or-treating at all - because the holiday falls on a Sunday this year. "It's a day for the good Lord, not for the devil." It is an especially sensitive issue for authorities in the Bible Belt across the South. "You just don't do it on Sunday, that's Christ's day. You go to church on Sunday, you don't go out and celebrate the devil. That'll confuse a child." In a suburb south of Atlanta, the City Council decided to go ahead with trick-or-treating on Sunday. In 1999, the last time Oct. 31 fell on a Sunday, the city moved up trick-or-treating to Saturday, which brought howls of protest. "We don't need to confuse people with this. About 15 years ago, we decided to have Halloween on Saturday instead. People went crazy. We said, 'Never again,' it messed everybody up to move Halloween." More than 100 jailed street children smeared themselves and their cells with feces in a protest Wednesday, leading police to call in firefighters to hose them down. The homeless boys had been jailed at the central police station for several weeks, awaiting transfer to government-sponsored homes. But their frustration boiled over Wednesday and the 113 in the jail ran riot, attempting to escape and then demanding to be released or charged, police said. "They smeared themselves with shit, smeared everywhere with sh-t and damaged doors trying to escape," said central police station boss. The boys have also refused to eat, and banged prison doors after their escape attempt failed. "The stench was unbearable," said one of the firefighters. "There were never any indications of violence with this family," a Texas Child Protective Services agency spokeswoman said, describing the children as healthy and happy. But, on Monday, authorities discovered a grisly scene after the child's father called a day-care center and asked staffers to check on his wife and daughter. Day-care workers called 911 after talking to the mother; an operator then called. Asked if there was an emergency, she calmly responded "Yes," according to 911 tapes released by police. "Exactly what happened?" the operator asked. "I cut her arms off," She replied, as the hymn "He Touched Me" played in the background. "You cut her arms off?" he repeated. "Uh huh," she answered. It was not immediately clear what instrument was used to sever the baby's arms or why the child's father called the day-care center. The name of the baby was not released. Authorities said the two older daughters in the family, ages 6 and 9, were at school when police arrived, and that their father was at work. No one answered the door Monday night at the family's apartment in suburban Dallas. Children's bicycles rested near the entrance along with angel garden statues. "To see her with the girls, you would just think she was a great mother." A Thai house painter cut off the penises of two teenagers with a knife after he found out they had stolen 50,000 baht ($1,250) of his savings from an ATM machine, police said on Saturday. "There's nothing they deserved more for stealing the money I saved that could have helped me get a job abroad," a police spokesman quoted him as saying. He threw the severed penises into a canal before his neighbors tipped police off about the incident. "I will go to great lengths to avoid flying now, because patdowns make me feel dirty and ashamed," she said. "It just gets worse every time. Now I'm afraid." She has had several upsetting encounters with the screeners, and calls the way she was touched "humiliating and deeply offensive." Women across the nation say the patdowns go too far. Some are so angry that they have stopped flying altogether. "I was almost in tears," she said. "I've never been so humiliated in my life. It's one of the worst experiences I've ever had to endure." For every American soldier killed in Iraq, nine others have been wounded and survived - the highest rate of any war in U.S. history. It isn't that their injuries were less serious, a new report says. In fact, some young soldiers and Marines have had faces, arms and legs blown off and are now returning home badly maimed. But they have survived thanks, in part, to armor-like vests and fast treatment from doctors on the move with surgical kits in backpacks. "This is unprecedented. People who lose not just one but two or three extremities are people who just have not survived in the past," said a surgeon. "This war is producing unique injuries - less lethal but more traumatic," he said. In one traumatic case, an airman lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face. "How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question." A Mexican man killed his lover in a drunken, drugged fight then cooked the man's body in tomato and onion sauce and ate it over three days. Police found him grilling rotting human flesh for his breakfast, including part of a heart, when they raided a shack he lived in near a Caribbean beach resort, a police chief said on Wednesday. "He was preparing stews. There was a grill where he was cooking part of the heart and bits he had cut off the body. It was terrible, terrible," said the local police chief, who was among a dozen police who raided the shack. The victim, a young man, arrived at his cardboard hut in a wasteland area with a mutual friend who then left the two of them drinking and taking drugs. The pair had sex and afterward a fight broke out during which he killed the man with blows to the head, police said. "They said there was a person eating a person, We found him lying on a folding bed and to one side was the corpse which had been torn apart and which it seems he had been eating for three days," he said. The corpse, which had its back ripped open and its innards pulled out, was missing various parts, like a thigh, he said. "The careless burial of dead animals could result in hazardous pollution as rainwater or flooding runs over the bodies," he said. A crackling streak of artillery fire arrives seconds later, shaking the room as the bomb annihilates the target in a thunderous cloud of thick, black smoke. The mission is a success. Except the mission doesn't really exist. The bulk of today's soldiers have been exposed to video games their whole lives, so few have trouble adjusting to the multimedia immersion. 150 miles from the quake's epicenter, dozens of bloated bodies littered the streets as soldiers and desperate relatives searched for survivors. Some 500 bodies collected by emergency workers lay under plastic tents, rotting in the tropical heat. Muslims planned to turn an old sod farm near Memphis into a cemetery, but angry neighbors protested, complaining the burial ground could become a staging ground for terrorists or spread disease from unembalmed bodies. "We know for a fact that Muslim mosques have been used as terrorist hideouts and centers for terrorist activities," farmer John Wilson told members of a planning commission last month. Ladies and gentlemen, you may think this is farfetched, but that is what the Jewish people thought when the Nazis started taking a small foothold, a little at a time, in their community," Wilson said. One woman yelled, "We don't need bin Laden's cousins in our neighborhood." As more of our personal lives go digital, family members, estate attorneys and online service providers are increasingly grappling with what happens to those information bits when their owners die. When U.S. servicemen and insurgents die in Fallujah, the bodies are brought back to camp and laid on a concrete floor under a tent hidden behind blast walls topped with concertina wire. The sign outside says: "Do Not Enter." Five men check the corpses and put them in refrigerators. This is the work of Mortuary Affairs. They must try to stay sane even as they are confronted with the effects of gruesome killings by the shrapnel-filled roadside bombs set by insurgents and terrible U.S. firepower. "Some of the stuff we've seen you wouldn't see in the worst horror movies and it leaves a little imprint." Mortuary Affairs units operate just minutes from the battlefield, sometimes processing a Marine's corpse just hours after he dies. "As for seeing the insurgents dead, I know that these guys were out there killing Marines, they were given a choice whether to surrender or not, so seeing their corpses mangled up doesn't bother you, but seeing the Marines dead, that hurts a little bit more. But you just got to see it as a job." When a body arrives, it is brought inside the tent and placed on a concrete floor. Two men are the "dirty hands" who inspect the body, catalogue wounds and check for unexploded weapons. One sorts through the slain person's belongings. Two more are the "clean hands," writing down what the others find. Whole Foods Markets is reconsidering whether to continue selling a line of microwaveable stuffed animals that an educator said could lead children to believe there is nothing wrong with putting their pets in household appliances. The soft plush animals can be heated in the microwave to become warm dolls. the toys could give children the wrong idea. Children have put cats and dogs in the washer, dryer and even oven. Europeans desperately sought relatives missing from holidays in Southeast Asia - particularly Thailand, where bodies littered the once crowded beach resorts. A naked corpse hung suspended from a tree Tuesday as if crucified. Number of Grizzly Deaths Rises Sharply. Seven were hit by trains or cars. Ten were killed illegally, often shot and left to die. Thirteen were killed by wildlife officials because they had menaced humans or had otherwise become a nuisance. One was killed in self-defense. Phreaks, spoofers and spammers want to invade your home computer, and the tricks of their trade include airsnarfs, wabbits and fork bombs. Wabbit (noun): Any hack that repeatedly replicates itself on a local computer. Fork bomb (noun): A species of "wabbit" that performs a denial of service on a computer system by creating a large number of processes very quickly and overloading the computer. Professional beggars prowling about the streets of Moroccan cities with "rented" and drugged children to attract charity may have their days numbered. "That's the conflicting aspect of our time -- that it keeps producing bad news and puts horror on the assembly line even though we are all craving good news. But the good is never completely lost."