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TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- Japan's GDP fell 4 percent last quarter, the fastest pace on record, the government said on Wednesday. A homeless man pulls his cart filled with possessions and goods for recycling on March 18 in Osaka, Japan. The January-March quarter for Japan was 15.4 percent lower than the same time period last year, according to figures released by the Cabinet Office. Exports fell 26 percent on quarter, while imports were down 15 percent. The GDP slide in the world's second-largest economy is the greatest drop among the world's leading economies. By comparison, GDP in the United States fell 6.1 percent on an annual basis. This was the fourth straight quarter the Japanese economy contracted. Analysts say the drop reflects cuts in domestic spending with job cuts, factory closings and less capital spending as a result of spiraling sales abroad. The news punctuates a month of poor economic news out of Japan in recent weeks. Panasonic, one of the world's largest makers of electronic devices, announced it lost nearly $4 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31. Hitachi lost $8 billion in the fiscal year, with consolidated revenues down 11 percent from last year, the largest loss ever recorded by a Japanese manufacturer. NEC Corporation lost $3 billion in the past fiscal year, down nearly 11.5 percent from last year. Meanwhile, Nissan lost $2.3 billion for the year.Sony Corp. announced net losses of $1 billion for the fiscal year ending March 31, finishing a year in the red for the first time in 14 years.

Japan's GDP fell 4 percent last quarter, the fastest pace on record. First quarter GDP was 15.4 percent lower than the same time period last year . This was the fourth straight quarter the Japanese economy contracted .

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(CNN) -- A Utah man with chronic health problems died Wednesday from complications associated with swine flu, a local health official said. If confirmed, it would be the ninth U.S. fatality associated with the flu outbreak. Memorials appeared at the door of I.S. 238 in Queens, New York, this week after the death of an administrator. The man, who was from around Salt Lake City, was between 18 and 25 years old and "had chronic medical conditions that may have contributed to severe complications from influenza," said Gary Edwards, executive director of the Salt Lake Valley Health Department. Also on Wednesday, health and education officials in New York announced that 21 of the city's public schools had been closed after an increase of reports of students with flu-like symptoms. A school administrator in Queens died after being hospitalized with the H1N1 virus, commonly called swine flu. Nineteen of the schools closed at the recommendation of the Health Department are public and two are private, the city's Education Department announced in a news release. In addition, two private schools in Manhattan -- St. Davis Academy and Horace Mann -- have decided on their own to close after a number of students exhibited flu-like symptoms, according the schools' Web sites. In the city's news release, city Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden repeated what has become a familiar refrain: "We continue to see a rising tide of flu in many parts of New York City. As the virus spreads, we will look to slow transmission within individual school communities by closing individual schools." Late last week the city closed 11 schools in Queens and one in Brooklyn after confirming cases of the virus at Intermediate School 238 in Queens and unusually high levels of flu-like symptoms in the others. Mitchell Wiener, an assistant principal at I.S. 238 who died Sunday after being hospitalized with the disease, had an underlying condition, according to Frieden. The death in Utah was the first associated with the swine flu, or H1N1, virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked eight U.S. deaths to the flu outbreak, but had not confirmed a link to H1N1 in the Utah death as of Wednesday evening. The outbreak has sickened at least 10,176 people and caused at least 80 deaths -- mostly in Mexico, according to the World Health Organization. The actual number of people affected may be higher, as it takes time for national governments to confirm cases and report them to the global body. In the United States, at least 5,710 cases of swine flu have been reported, according to recent figures from the CDC. Utah officials echoed national agencies in saying that the swine flu has largely behaved like typical seasonal influenza, which usually is fatal only among the very old, the very young or people with other health problems. In New York, 19 of the schools closed at the recommendation of the Health Department are public and two are private, it and the city's Education Department announced in a news release. In addition, two private schools in Manhattan -- St. Davis Academy and Horace Mann -- have decided on their own to close after a number of students exhibited flu-like symptoms, according the schools' Web sites. In the city's news release, city Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden repeated what has become a familiar refrain: "We continue to see a rising tide of flu in many parts of New York City. As the virus spreads, we will look to slow transmission within individual school communities by closing individual schools." Late last week the city closed 11 schools in Queens and one in Brooklyn after confirming cases of the H1N1 virus, commonly called swine flu, at Intermediate School 238 in Queens and unusually high levels of flu-like symptoms in the others. An assistant principal of Intermediate School 238 died Sunday after being hospitalized with H1N1. Frieden has said the administrator, Mitchell Wiener, had an underlying condition. CNN's Deb Brunswick contributed to this report .

NEW: New York City has closed 21 schools since virus confirmed, health officials say . Utah reports first death associated with swine flu, or H1N1, virus . If confirmed by the CDC, it would be the ninth U.S. death linked to the outbreak . WHO: At least 10,176 people have been sickened and 80 have died worldwide .

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SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) -- South Korean and U.S. forces have been placed on a higher surveillance alert level, after North Korea threatened military action following its nuclear test earlier this week, the joint forces announced on Thursday. South Korean soldiers use binoculars to look at North Korea on Wednesday in Paju, South Korea. The "Watchcon" alert was raised to its second-highest level on Thursday, a government spokeswoman told CNN. The last time the joint forces raised the surveillance alert was after North Korea's last nuclear test in 2006, according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. The separate five-stage combat alert level, known as "Defcon," has not changed and remains at stage 4, South Korean defense spokesman Won Tae-jae said at Thursday's briefing, according to Yonhap. "Additional intelligence assets, including personnel, will be deployed while reconnaissance operations over North Korea will increase," Won said, according to Yonhap. He declined to give specific details, the news agency said. Watch Hillary Clinton's warning about 'consequences' » . North Korea conducted a nuclear test Monday and fired five short-range missiles Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, the country threatened military action after South Korea joined a U.S.-led effort to limit the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. There has also been recent activity at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility, according to U.S. officials, who cited information from U.S. spy satellites. The officials would not speculate about the type of activity. North Korea agreed in 2008 to scrap its nuclear weapons program -- which it said had produced enough plutonium for about seven atomic bombs -- in exchange for economic aid. But the deal foundered over verification and disclosure issues, and the North expelled international inspectors and announced plans to restart its main nuclear reactor at the Yongbyon complex. CNN's Barbara Starr in Washington contributed to this report.

Joint forces in S. Korea elevate surveillance alert in response to N. Korean threat . Combat alert level unchanged, S. Korean military spokesman says . North Korea tested nuclear device, missiles, threatened military action .

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(CNN) -- Maria Sharapova stepped up her comeback after injury to claim the scalp of 11th seed Nadia Pedrova to reach the third round of the French Open in Paris on Wednesday. Sealed with a kiss. Sharapova celebrates her victory over Petrova. The former world number one had come into the second grand slam of the season with only two matches in a minor tournament in Poland under her belt, but surprised her fellow Russian with a 6-2 1-6 8-6 victory. Still playing with tape on her troublesome right shoulder, Sharapova showed no ill effects as she won five straight games to take the first set. Petrova hit back in style to force a decider and took the lead with an early break. But Sharapova hit back in the eighth game to level and held her own service under pressure in the next two games. Petrova finally wilted as she served at 6-7, giving Sharapova match point with a double fault and then hitting wide on a forehand after two hours 12 minutes. Sharapova will now face qualifier Yaroslava Shvedova of Kazakhstan for a place in the last 16. She had shoulder surgery in August last year and missed both the U.S. Open and Australian Open as fears for her future in the game grew. She made a brief comeback by playing doubles in Miami in March before a return to singles action at the Warsaw Open where she reached the quarterfinals before losing to Alona Bondarenko of Ukraine. Meanwhile, defending champion Ana Ivanovic showed a welcome return to form by sweeping into the last 32 with a 6-1 6-2 victory over Thailand's Tamarine Tanasugarn. The 21-year-old Serbian has slipped down the world rankings since lifting the title at the Stade Roland Garros, but is making a strong defense on her favored clay. World number one Dinara Safina also impressed with a 6-1 6-1 win over fellow Russian Vitalia Diatchenko. She has dropped just two games in reaching the third round as she bids to back up her ranking with a first grand slam title.

Maria Sharapova beats 11th seed Nadia Petrova at French Open in Paris . Former world number one Sharapova is returning after a shoulder injury . Ana Ivanovic and Dinara Safina also go through in straight sets .

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(CNN) -- Somalia needs international help to fight Islamist extremists battling for power in the lawless Horn of Africa nation, the country's moderate Islamist president said Monday. Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed was recently appointed Somalia's transitional president. "I am calling on the international community to help Somalia defend against foreign militants who have invaded the country," President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed said. Speaking at a news conference in Somalia's capital city, Mogadishu, Ahmed called several times for international help in fighting foreign militants whom he claims are the same fighters who have fought the "international community" in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Wherever they come, they fuel violence," the president said. "The Somali people cannot and should not accept that their countries should be a launching pad for these militants to attack." Ahmed told local journalists that he feared these foreign fighters would turn Somalia into another Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S.-led forces are fighting Islamic extremist groups. He also praised local militias in the two regions of Hiiran and Middle Shabelle for struggling against the foreign militias. Last week, al-Shabab militants advanced to the presidential palace in Mogadishu, sparking sporadic fighting and shelling in the Somali capital. The recent fighting has killed more than 40 civilians and wounded about 150 others, according to sources at the scene. Al-Shabab -- once the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union -- has been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, which says it is affiliated with the al Qaeda terrorist network. Ahmed participated in seizing control of Mogadishu in 2006 along with the Islamic Courts Union before it was ousted by Ethiopian forces later that year. He has since split from Somali jihad movements and was recently appointed Somalia's transitional president through a process shepherded by the United Nations. Journalist Mohamed Amiin Adow contributed to this report.

President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed speaking at a conference in Mogadishu . Ahmed fears foreign fighters will turn Somalia into another Iraq or Afghanistan . Fighting in past two days kills more than 40 civilians . U.S. says Al-Shabab militants are affiliated with al Qaeda network .

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Editor's note: CNN.com has a business partnership with CareerBuilder.com, which serves as the exclusive provider of job listings and services to CNN.com. If you've rolled up your sleeves and gotten experience, tell potential employers when applying for a job. Talk to a dozen students on any college campus and you're likely to hear a dozen different perspectives on what they hope to get out of college. Some want high GPAs; some want to get into the work force and earn a lot of money. Ask their parents and you'll get just as many different answers. Some parents hope that their children earn their degree and have an easy time finding a job. Others want them to be at the top of the class so they can get into the best graduate school possible. And some just want their children to stop partying long enough to attend class once in a while. Ask employers what they want from graduates and the answers are equally diverse. Depending on the job, you might need a degree and an internship, a degree and work experience, or the right connections to even land an interview. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 39 million Americans over the age of 18 have a bachelor's degree. Considering that 281 million people live in the country, college graduates are still a small percentage of the population. Still, with a number in the millions, you are competing with a lot of job seekers who also have the same educational background as you. Relying only on your bachelor's to land a job is not the safest route to employment. As with most things, it's all in the presentation. Degree or not, presentation matters . Sue Chehrenegar studied biology as an undergraduate and biomedical research as a graduate student. During her job search, she found herself losing out on job opportunities because she lacked the proper experience, despite her education. Or so she thought. "At the end of the 1980s, I spent more than one year looking for a job," she remembers. "I kept getting this question: 'Have you done anything in the area of molecular biology?'" She would tell employers that she didn't have the proper experience because she wasn't specifically trained for that. "I did not mention the fact that I once assisted a graduate student who was putting DNA and RNA into cultured cells." What does that mean in layman's terms? Because her specialization and the bulk of her experience was not in this particular field, she didn't consider the limited work with the graduate student worth mentioning. She later realized employers weren't looking for someone to be the ultimate authority on the subject; they wanted someone who had a broad range of knowledge. "I realized my mistake more than two years after I got a job," Chehrenegar remembers. "My first year I worked in an infectious disease lab. Later, they put me in a molecular biology lab. When I helped with one of the projects in that lab, I realized that my old, unmentioned experience related to what I was doing at that time." A degree isn't useless . Sure, if you're applying for a job with bio- as a prefix, you know a degree is a requirement. But for less research-intensive jobs, you might think a degree can always be supplanted by enough experience. Depending on your occupation, that could be true but isn't a hard and fast rule for all positions. For example, you might be able to find work at a museum, but you the odds of you transitioning into a curator can be extremely difficult without extensive education in art history and related courses. You could find that you hit a ceiling in an organization. Although this bodes well for graduates who come armed with one or more degrees, it also means that workers in this industry have the opportunity to earn an education while they ascend the corporate ladder. In some cases, the combination of their experience and a recently awarded degree could be more impressive if you've relied on your degree and haven't diversified your experience. How to present yourself . Here are some tips to keep in mind when presenting yourself to employers: . • Even though you know education isn't the single factor in getting hired, it is often a prerequisite to land an interview. Don't hide your degree just because you have a lot of experience -- you don't want to lose out on an interview because your education was overlooked. • Use all of your education to your advantage. Connect the job requirements to any courses you took, whether as an elective or part of your minor. You might not have loved that statistics course, but if it's relevant to the job, mention it. • Treat work experience and internships as proof that you're a professional, not just a student. If you speak as if you see yourself as a student who doesn't consider himself or herself as part of the working world, the employer might not either. Copyright CareerBuilder.com 2009. All rights reserved. The information contained in this article may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority .

Presentation of your experience can be just as important as your degree . Some 39 million Americans have a bachelor's degree . Present any of your internships or work experience that employer may appreciate .

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(CNN) -- When Tiffany Wilson noticed a small growth on her left hip, she didn't think much of it. Tiffany Wilson, 41, found a bump on her hip that she thought was a pimple. It turned out to be skin cancer. "It was bizarre," recalled the 41-year-old salon owner from Minneapolis, Minnesota. "I just thought it was a pimple." Wilson, who is African-American, can't say exactly what prompted her to point out the bump to her physician, but she said she remembered thinking the diagnosis wouldn't be anything serious. "It never occurred to me that it was skin cancer," she said. But it was. She had basal cell carcinoma, the most common skin cancer. Wilson spent long hours as a child in the summer sun at Lake Nokomis in Minnesota and went to the tanning bed before visiting relatives in the Caribbean, she said. She also said she never wore sunscreen. "Back then, I just don't think people were aware of the effects [of the sun]," she said. Those may seem like obvious red flags to people who are sun-conscious, but they were foreign concepts to Wilson, which is why her diagnosis came as a shock. "I just assumed, 'I'm a person of color, I'll be OK,' " she said. Dermatologists say they are concerned because skin cancer rates are increasing among minority groups in the United States. Like Wilson, many people of color often mistakenly believe skin cancer is not something they should be worried about. Pigmentation is no 'free pass' The reasoning is not completely far-fetched: Darker-skinned people do benefit from the protective effects of skin pigmentation. In fact, some studies suggest that for the darkest skin tones, pigmentation cells provide a natural sun protection factor, or SPF, of about 13. The problem is many dark-skinned people believe that means they are born with a natural immunity to skin cancer. "Pigmentation doesn't give you a free pass," said Dr. Charles E. Crutchfield III, a dermatologist specializing in ethnic skin and the doctor who treated Tiffany Wilson. "It doesn't matter what color your skin is, everyone can get skin cancer." Bob Marley, for example, died of malignant melanoma, the most lethal type of skin cancer, that spread to his lungs and brain. All types of skin cancer are increasing among blacks and Hispanics, and their melanomas are more often fatal because they are usually caught later, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. Crutchfield pointed out that pigmentation may have sun-protective qualities but even for the darkest skin it falls short of the AAD's recommendation of a daily SPF of at least 15 for everyone. Crutchfield feels many ethnic groups are missing that key part of the message, if they are getting the message at all. Blog: How to pick the right sunscreen . Researchers acknowledge that many of the messages regarding skin cancer prevention have traditionally targeted fair-skinned people, a group 10 times more likely to develop melanoma. Now, dermatologists say, more needs to be done to encourage all groups to take precautions against sun damage. A Consumer Reports survey found only 27 percent of people with self-described darker skin applied sunscreen when they were in the sun for four hours or more, compared with 64 percent of people with self-described light skin. The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2009 there will be more than 1 million unreported cases of basal cell and squamous cell skin cancer -- most of them curable -- and that more than 68,000 cases of melanoma will be diagnosed. For melanoma, the key to a cure is early detection. That's why dermatologists caution everyone to be vigilant and learn the risks for their skin type. "Race is very important because not all skin is the same," said Dr. Susan Taylor of The Skin of Color Center, a dermatology group focusing on the needs of patients of color. According to Taylor, people with darker skin often get diagnosed at later stages because the cancers often appear in atypical locations. Melanomas in African-Americans and darker-skinned Hispanics and Asians develop more commonly on the palms, soles of the feet, toenails, fingernails and in mucus membranes like around the mouth and genitals, she said. In Caucasian and lighter-skinned Hispanics, melanomas more frequently appear on the back in men and on the legs in women. Also, the signs of melanoma may vary depending on skin tone. "Skin hue can affect the way lesions look," Crutchfield said. "Things that appear red in white skin often look completely different in skin of color." Historically, research and teaching was done on fairer-skinned people, making it more challenging for physicians to recognize suspicious moles on darker skin. While these differences present challenges, they are certainly not barriers. Experts say, the best thing to do is keep it simple. "If you have any lesion or mole change at all, or if you have a spot that bleeds and doesn't heal in three weeks, see a physician or a dermatologist," Dr. Crutchfield recommended. "That's something everyone can do." Visit the American Academy of Dermatology Web site to find free screening locations in your state . Another piece of simple advice: "All racial groups need to use sunscreens," Taylor stresses. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends using a broad-spectrum sunscreen that protects against both deep-penetrating UVA rays and burn-causing UVB rays. Not all sunscreens protect against both. Visit the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep cosmetic safety database . Tiffany Wilson is heeding that advice. She said she's learned that when it comes to prevention, the worst thing you can possibly do is nothing. "I use extreme caution in the sun and make certain that I use a sunscreen, even on a cloudy day," she said. "You shouldn't underestimate the rays of the sun. "

Dermatologists report increased incidence of skin cancer among people of color . Minorities often believe pigmentation makes them immune to skin cancer . More than 1 million new cases of skin cancer are estimated in 2009 . Every 62 minutes, one American dies of melanoma .

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(CNN) -- A Florida man arrested with his wife on anabolic steroid possession charges claimed to have sold steroids to professional hockey and baseball players in the District of Columbia, but the National Hockey League and Washington Capitals said Wednesday they doubted the allegation. Richard Thomas and his wife, Sandra, were arrested Tuesday night at their home in Lakeland, Florida. Richard Thomas, 35, told officers he sold the steroids to unidentified players on the NHL's Capitals and the Washington Nationals of baseball's National League, said Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, Florida. "Richard Thomas told us that he sold steroids to ballplayers on those teams," Judd said after the arrests late Tuesday night. "Now, is that one ballplayer to two ballplayers? We don't know." NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said the league would investigate the claim, but added that the Washington Capitals "have no knowledge of any aspect of this allegation." "Capitals players were subjected to no-notice testing five separate times over the past two seasons pursuant to the terms of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and there was no indication of any improper conduct or wrongdoing," Daly said in a statement issued Wednesday. A separate statement by Capitals president Dick Patrick said the team had "no reason to believe there is any merit to this story," but would fully cooperate with the NHL's investigation. MLB.com, the Web site of Major League Baseball, reported Wednesday that the league would look into the allegation involving the Washington Nationals. The report posted on the Web site of the Washington Nationals quoted Nationals president Stan Kasten as saying the team knew nothing about the steroids claim, and that the league was handling it. Thomas and his wife, Sandra, 49, were arrested Tuesday night at their home in Lakeland, Florida, on 21 counts of possession of anabolic steroids, importation of anabolic steroids and maintaining a residence for drug sales, Judd said. He said the couple has been charged with 10 counts of steroid possession with intent to distribute, 10 counts of importing the drugs and one count of maintaining a residence for drug sales. According to Judd, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Philadelphia received information that the Florida couple would be receiving a shipment of steroids. Judd's office then obtained a search warrant for the Lakeland home, where officers found steroids from points outside the United States, including Iran, he said. The arrest report says Richard Thomas told officers he was "the biggest steroids dealer in central Florida." Bond for Richard and Sandra Thomas was set at $215,000 each, said Carrie Eleazer, spokeswoman for the Polk County Sheriff's Office, and Sandra Thomas was released on bail Wednesday afternoon. The two are scheduled to make an initial court appearance Thursday. CNN's John Couwels contributed to this report.

Couple arrested in central Florida on anabolic steroid possession charges . Claim they sold steroids to professional athletes in District of Columbia, sheriff says . Richard Thomas says he sold steroids to pro baseball, hockey players, sheriff says .

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(CNN) -- A North Korean rocket slated for launch sometime early next month can be clearly seen in a satellite photograph taken Sunday. Patriot Advanced Capability-3 interceptors are located at the Ministry of Defense on March 29 in Tokyo, Japan. The satellite imagery, obtained by the Institute for Science and International Security from DigitalGlobe, shows the rocket at the Musudan-ri launch site in northeastern North Korea, casting a shadow on the ground below. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday there is little doubt that the planned launch is designed to bolster that country's military capability. He also indicated that the U.S. military could be prepared to shoot down a North Korean missile if the rogue regime develops the capability to reach Hawaii or the western continental United States in a future launch. The North Korean government says it will launch a commercial satellite atop a rocket sometime between April 4 and April 8. "I don't know anyone at a senior level in the American government who does not believe this technology is intended as a mask for the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile," Gates said during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday." Gates noted that while the United States believes it is North Korea's "long-term intent" to add a nuclear warhead to any such missile, he "personally would be skeptical that they have the ability right now to do that." Watch how the U.S. is responding to a planned launch » . Japan recently mobilized its missile defense system -- an unprecedented step -- in response to the planned North Korean launch, Japanese officials said. The move, noteworthy for a country with a pacifist constitution, is aimed at shooting down any debris from the launch that might fall into Japanese territory. See a satellite image of the launch site » . In a concurrent response, U.S. Navy ships capable of shooting down ballistic missiles are being moved to the Sea of Japan, a Navy spokesman said Thursday. Gates said that the U.S. military could shoot down "an aberrant missile, one that was headed for Hawaii ... or something like that, we might consider it, but I don't think we have any plans to (do) anything like that at this point." He does not believe North Korea currently has the technology to reach Alaska or Pacific coast. Gates said that an impending missile launch is a clear demonstration of the failure of the recent six-party talks to disarm the North Korean regime. "It's very troubling. The reality is that the six-party talks really have not made any headway any time recently," he said. "If (the missile launch) is Kim Jong-Il's welcoming present to a new president ... it says a lot about the imperviousness of this regime in North Korea to any kind of diplomatic overtures." Gates said that he believes economic sanctions are the best tool to getting countries like North Korea and Iran to the negotiating table. Both countries are believed by the United States and other Western nations to be trying to acquire nuclear capability.

North Korea says it will launch a commercial satellite atop a rocket between April 4-8 . Satellite imagery shows rocket at launch site in northeastern North Korea . U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says rocket aims to boost military capability .

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SOMERSET COUNTY, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- A chain link fence now stands between Tim Lambert's land and the impact site of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed here on September 11, 2001. The property has been in Lambert's family for almost 80 years. A temporary memorial has been set up to honor the victims of the United Airlines Flight 93 crash. "My grandfather purchased about 200 acres in the 1930s, and he would cut timber and sell the timber off, and he would build cabins as well," Lambert says. "That's how he got the family through the Depression." Lambert says he had no plans for the land, he just knew he wanted to hold on to it. "There's a lot of natural resources in this area -- natural gas, coal," he says. That all changed the day 40 passengers and crew died trying to take control of a Boeing 757 that had been hijacked by four terrorists as it took off from Newark, New Jersey, bound for San Francisco, California. It is believed the hijackers had intended crash the plane into the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Plans for a permanent memorial have been in the works for years. Congress passed a law in 2002 instructing the National Park Service to establish a national memorial where the crash occurred. Part of it would be on Lambert's land. In the seven years since, some of the most important land needed for the massive project has remained in limbo, producing an emotional debate among landowners, family members and the National Park Service. See plans for the proposed Flight 93 Memorial . At the center of the dispute is the government's plan to take the remaining land needed by using its power of eminent domain. The government can seize privately owned property to convert it to public use after paying the owner fair market value. Lambert's land is key to the project. He owns 6 acres that are just feet from the crash site. He has yet to reach an agreement with the government to buy his land. "Eminent domain was sort of dropped on us at the last second here," he says, "and it feels like we never even had a chance to talk about some of the issues that we needed to address during the negotiations." Lambert still finds debris from the plane on his land. "Red and blue wire all over the place," he says as he bends over to pick up a piece. "Here it is almost eight years later." The National Park Service says time is running out if the memorial is to be ready by September 11, 2011, the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. It says it has to use eminent domain for 166 essential acres that it has been unable to purchase. "We've held off using it until we've got here, really at the very last stage of this where we have no other choice," says National Park Service associate director Steve Whitesell. The amount of land needed for the memorial is just over 2,200 acres, about 1,400 of which is near the crash site, where there will be a visitor center. The other 800 acres would create a buffer around the site to protect the rural setting. That is where Randy and Linda Musser live -- on more than 100 acres of land, 62 of them within the memorial park boundaries. The Mussers enjoy hunting, fishing and horseback riding on their land, which is about three-quarters-of-a-mile from the crash site. "This eminent domain cloud hangs over this whole piece of property now," Randy Musser says, standing by a pond where he likes to fish. He was a member of a committee formed with Flight 93 family members to establish the boundaries of the park. "If I knew the National Park Service was going to be able to use eminent domain to acquire property within the park boundary, I would had fought that at the time the park boundary was established to keep as much property out of the park as possible," Musser says. The Mussers now fear that their land isn't safe from the government and say it's not needed for the memorial. "We have to play fair, we have to follow the rules and they just change the law to suit their own needs," says Linda Musser. For Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, this project is a labor of love. White's cousin, Louis Nacke, was killed on United Flight 93. White is leading the effort to acquire all the land needed for the memorial. "We're creating a place where the 40 heroes of Flight 93 can be revered and remembered," White said from his law office in Naples, Florida. White says the negotiations with landowners has been challenging and supports the governments use of eminent domain. "No one has ever questioned that there is a public purpose to these lands'" White says. "Their purpose became public the minute that those private citizens' lives and remains became part of those lands." Lambert says he feels the same way as he walks just a few feet from where the plane crashed. "A lot of people lost their lives here and this is their final resting place. ... That's one thing I always keep in mind when I come here and I am walking through these woods." This isn't just about money, Randy Musser says. It's about doing what's right, allowing landowners to continue to live on their land and use it the way they intended before that day. "That loss of freedom is probably the thing that bothers people more than anything else," he says. Neither the government nor landowners will comment on how much money has been offered for the land yet to be acquired. Patrick White said he remains confident the memorial will be completed in time. "Getting this done is a commitment that must be achieved. ... These are folks who as citizen soldiers stood up and we all need to recognize that at a place that's appropriate." To make that happen, the National Park Service says it needs to start construction this November for a ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 11, 2011. The courts may have the final say. Government lawyers are expected to file a lawsuit in Pittsburgh next week to condemn the property for public use.

Hijacked United Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania during the 9/11 attacks . National Park Service says it needs to start construction soon . Emotional debate on eminent domain has thrown a wrench in the plans .

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BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- A Canadian auto parts supplier has come to the rescue of German carmaker Opel, negotiating a deal with the German government that will save the company from insolvency. German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck talks to reporters early Saturday morning following talks on Opel. Officials from all sides announced the agreement after talks lasting into the early hours of Saturday. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called it a "responsible solution" that would preserve the highest number of jobs. Under the terms of the deal, supplier Magna will have a 20 percent stake in GM Europe, an arm of General Motors, which owns the Opel brand. Russia's Sberbank will own a 35 percent share, Opel employees will have 10 percent, and General Motors will retain a 35-percent stake, according to GM spokesman Joerg Schrott. The German government will provide a bridge loan to keep GM Europe operating in the short term. The deal ensures that General Motors' European assets -- which also include the Vauxhall car brand in Britain -- will be unaffected by GM's expected bankruptcy filing. Magna warned during negotiations that it would have to cut about 10,000 jobs. General Motors has around 55,000 employees in Europe. About 2,000 of the job cuts would be in Germany, Magna has said, but a top company official tried to reassure the Germans that it would try to protect the company as much as possible. "We will, and I want to stress that again, preserve all the German Opel locations," said Magna co-Chief Executive Siegfried Wolf. "We're keen to have talks with all the states where Opel has factories in the next few weeks and are confident to be able to find solutions to preserve jobs, because every job that is lost is one too many. We will work with Opel management to try to avoid those job losses." Steinmeier told reporters that such risks can't be avoided. "But," he said. "I think we have found a responsible solution with private investors and interim funding from the state. It is a solution which preserves Opel's location in Germany and also preserves the highest possible number of jobs." German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said early Saturday that the country has guaranteed transitional credit for Opel of 1.5 billion euros ($2.1 billion). In addition, a trust will be created where Opel's stock will be parked prior to the division of shares. Along with Sberbank, Russia's biggest bank, Russian automaker GAZ Group will provide some financing, said Andrzej Kasperek, director of corporate business development with GAZ. "I think the whole arrangement with Magna and the Russian partners made this a very attractive deal for GM," Kasperek said. "Opel is very well regarded as a brand. But we think we can increase sales in the next five years." Financially strapped General Motors is expected to announce as soon as Monday that it is filing for bankruptcy. "Opel has received a perspective for the future," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel after the agreement was reached. "That is a chance for the employees, who have earned it, as I find, because they are not to blame for the situation but instead big mismanagement in the United States of America at GM." Merkel said the German government did "what it had to do" in rescuing Opel. "I had an open exchange in a phone call with the American president, and we agreed that we do everything to bring this complex task to a good conclusion. And this clearly set the tone for the negotiations," Merkel said.

Germany picks Magna to buy majority stake in Opel, news reports say . German government agrees to fund bridging loan to keep Opel in business . Magna also seeking to bring Russian partners into Opel deal . Opel's parent company General Motors set to declare bankruptcy as soon as Monday .

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MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) -- The Mexican navy said Wednesday that it rescued five Ecuadorians who had been adrift without supplies in a fishing boat for more than two weeks off the coast of the southern state of Chiapas. Mexican medical personel examine two of five Ecuadorians rescued at sea. Mexican authorities initiated the rescue, which occurred Tuesday, after the U.S. Coast Guard alerted them that sailors aboard a fishing boat located 45 nautical miles (83 km) southeast of Port Chiapas had signaled to a passing plane that they needed help. The Mexican navy dispatched a helicopter, which located the 15-meter-long (49-foot-long) vessel and carried out the rescue by air, the navy said in a news release. The five aboard identified themselves as Jaime Arturo Alaba Chavez, the 35-year-old captain; Víctor Hugo Alaba Chavez, the 32-year-old cook; Edison Prado Alaba, a 27-year-old sailor; Carlos Cheme Vazquez, a 37-year-old sailor; and Raul Contreras Vera, a 64-year-old machinist. The sailors were taken to the Naval Sanatorium of Puerto Chiapas, where doctors determined they were dehydrated. They said they had departed Costa Rica's on May 6 but, five days later, their motor stopped working and, unable to repair it, they had been adrift and without food since. A naval patrol boat towed the boat to Puerto Chiapas, arriving there Wednesday morning. It will be inspected to rule out the possibility that it may have been used for illicit activities, the navy said.

The Mexican navy said Wednesday that it rescued five Ecuadorians adrift at sea . Men apparently without supplies in a fishing boat for more than two weeks . Men found off the coast of the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico .

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They're bigger, brawnier, and faster than the typical male, but are National Football League players healthier than other men their age? Justin Bannan, who plays for the Baltimore Ravens, participated in the study on NFL players. Yes and no, according to a new NFL-funded study that looks at the cardiovascular health of young athletes. The good news is that NFL players have cholesterol levels similar to other men in their 20s and 30s, and their blood sugar tends to be even healthier. However, they are much more likely to have high blood pressure or borderline hypertension when compared with men who aren't professional athletes. "It's a step in the right direction to have this study," says Justin Bannan, 30, who plays defensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens and took part in the research. "I think the more information we can find out and the more studies we can do, the better." The study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is important, particularly as more and more players are weighing in at 300-plus pounds. The extra weight could potentially strain an athlete's heart in youth or even after retirement, and many question whether it has played a role in a handful of high-profile deaths. Health.com: Eat right advice: Fiber, starch, fats, serving sizes . In particular, the death of Thomas Herrion at age 23 has raised concerns about the heart health of larger players. Herrion, who was 6'3" and 330 pounds, had just finished an exhibition game with the San Francisco 49ers when he collapsed and died in 2005. "He's sort of the prototype of the bigger, stronger linemen that populates the NFL now, as compared with 20 or 30 years ago," says lead study author Dr. Andrew M. Tucker, the team physician for the Baltimore Ravens. "We have so many big, strong guys over 300 pounds. I think that case in particular was important in stimulating the whole study and the investigation." Other heavy players-- such as defensive end Reggie White-- have also died at an early age. White was 43 when he died from cardiac arrhythmia in 2004. In the study, Tucker, who is the cochair of the NFL subcommittee on cardiovascular health, and his colleagues looked at 504 active players from 12 teams in 2007. The researchers measured the players' height, weight, percentage of body fat, and other factors, and then compared them to 1,959 men ages 23 to 35 who participated in a study called CARDIA (Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults). Health.com: 20 little ways to lose drop the pounds and keep them off . They found that players were less likely to smoke or have blood-sugar problems than other men (only 6.7 percent of players had impaired fasting glucose compared to 15.5 percent of other men) and their cholesterol levels were essentially the same. However, 13.8 percent of players had high blood pressure and 64.5 percent had prehypertension, or borderline high blood pressure, compared to 5.5 percent and 24.2 percent of other men, respectively. Tucker notes that the football players outweighed the men in the CARDIA study by an average of 70 pounds and that it's natural to assume that larger people may have higher blood pressure. "But what was fascinating to us was the category of prehypertension," says Tucker, who is also the medical director of sports medicine at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Health.com: How to eat out without getting fat . The study found that NFL athletes are more likely to have prehypertension than other men-- regardless of the size of the player or his position. "So our lean players who play defensive back and wide receiver, they have prevalence of prehypertension just as common as the really big guys playing offensive and defensive line," says Tucker. "So there's something that we're trying to investigate now that accounts for elevated blood pressures in our active players that is not accounted for by size alone-- there's got to be something else." Health.com: Cut up to 900 calories with simple substitutions . That "something else" could be strength or resistance training, the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, sleep apnea (which is characterized by heavy snoring and a hike in blood pressure), or diet, including excessive sodium intake. Dr. Tucker doesn't think anabolic steroids are to blame. Even though he and his colleagues didn't ask players if they used steroids, he says that the NFL's year-round testing program should have ruled out any use. "[However] I'm concerned about the widespread use of performance-enhancing agents, which contain stimulants that can not only increase blood pressure but of course have stimulating effects on the heart," says Dr. Tucker. He adds that, in the last several years, such stimulants have been linked to sporadic deaths in college and even professional athletes. Although today's players are much more likely to weigh in excess of 300 pounds than those in the past, it doesn't necessarily mean they are fat, Dr. Tucker explains. Athletes are larger nowadays due to rule changes in the 1970s and 1980s that were aimed at protecting their lower bodies; those guidelines also gave larger players a competitive advantage. If one goes by body mass index alone-- a measure of height and weight that doesn't take into account muscle mass-- more than half of players are obese, according to a 2005 study. However, Tucker and his team found that the average percentage of body fat was 14 percent, ranging from 8 percent to 10 percent in the leaner positions-- such as wide receivers and linebackers-- to 20 percent in defensive linemen and 25 percent in offensive linemen. "Even our offensive linemen are really on the upper limits of what's considered healthy," says Tucker. "There are plenty of my regular patients who would take that." Health.com: Olympic swimmer discusses life with exercise-induced asthma . Overall, Tucker says he is most worried about older, retired athletes. "I'm concerned about whether there is a constellation of things going on that puts them at risk when they're 45 or 55," he says. More attention is being paid to detraining athletes so that they can adopt healthier lifestyles and better nutrition after they retire, says William Kraemer, Ph.D., a professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut. "It really is tough because you're trying to stay big in your playing days," says Kraemer. "The big fear is, [after retirement] you stop exercising and you keep eating the way you used to when you were expending a lot of calories. A lot of times when kids get out of college or they get out of the pros, there is no system in place that helps them make the transition." The Ravens' Bannan says the older generation is teaching younger players the importance of changing their lifestyle after retirement. "If you're a heavier player, a lineman that's over 300 pounds, really what it comes down to is a lifestyle change and eating healthier, losing weight when you are done, and staying active and staying healthy," says Bannan, who is 6'3" and 310 pounds. "Make a few changes in your life; I think that's going to make things a lot better for you down the road." Enter to win a monthly Room Makeover Giveaway from MyHomeIdeas.com . Copyright Health Magazine 2009 .

Death of Thomas Herrion has raised worries over the heart health of big players . Researchers looked at 504 active NFL players from 12 teams in 2007 . Players were less likely to smoke or have blood-sugar problems than other men . NFL athletes are more likely to have prehypertension than other men .

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SAVANNAH, Georgia (CNN) -- What does it really take to dress someone as fashion-forward and in the spotlight as Michelle Obama? Designer Yigal Azrouël talks with students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. "Bravery," says Isabel Toledo, designer of the first lady's attention-grabbing lemongrass yellow wool and lace ensemble that she wore for the inauguration of her husband President Obama. But along with bravery about their fashion sense, new graduates at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) will need courage in the face of the current recession. "Fashion is being hit particularly hard in the new job market. Fashion as a whole is feeling a greater level of lost revenues and in turn has lost opportunities for sustaining volume and even more so for growth," said Marshal Cohen, chief analyst and expert fashion analyst for the NPD market research group. "The ironic thing is that new ideas and creations are just what the industry needs but is too cautious to react to it," he added. Full of new ideas, student designers say they are aware of the challenges as they head out into the work force, but they're optimistic they can make it in these tough times. "After I graduate, I'm going to New York, I have an internship lined up with a trend forecasting company, Promostyl," said Shelby Simon whose designs made it into SCAD's annual fashion show. See the runway fashions » . "Everyone needs an assistant so hopefully I'll be able to find something pretty easily," said Caitlin Clarke. She would like to land an internship in New York and has interviewed with New York & Co. and applied for positions at Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein and Zac Posen. Toledo, a world-renown designer, knows it can be tough to make it in fashion. She and her fashion illustrator husband Ruben Toledo didn't have much money when they arrived from Cuba in the late 60s as political refugees. She says she found inspiration in the little things. Experts' advice on getting to top of fashion business » . "Go out there and look at things, look at things well. Study them; the smallest things can inspire you. That will make you able to do what you want on any level. Many times kids think you have to have all this backing coming into a big industry. I didn't do that, I started from the bottom and as a matter of fact you can only go up," said Isabel Toledo. Toledo was at the school last weekend to accept the 2009 André Leon Talley Lifetime Achievement Award. But for six months, two other top designers, Yigal Azrouël and Lars Nilsson, have been mentoring and critiquing 23 students to help them develop their designs for the runway. Azrouël, a self-taught designer, says it's a tough industry and students have to pay their dues. "It's not what people think it is or what it looks like from the outside. If you want to be a fashion designer you have to carry fabric on your back, you need to learn how to cut and sew. The fame is going to come later." More known for his expert draping techniques, Yigal Azrouël taught students more than how to incorporate intricate folds and pleats in their designs. "If you love something, go ahead and do it, but, be very consistent with it," advised Azrouël. SCAD senior Caitlin Clarke says working with Nilsson really helped her create new silhouettes and structured angles with interesting seams. "Lars was so helpful. I remember this one time when he came in and said 'Ah, there's something not right with this dress' and then he helped me cut it up and fix it," said Clarke. Nilsson enjoyed the process. "I really tried to spend a lot of time seeing what they [the students] had to say, giving them advice and push them forward to express themselves," said Nilsson. "It's been a great collaboration, and I must say that I've learned a lot myself, too." The visiting designers give the students an edge in their job search, says SCAD president Paula Wallace. "It's very important to bring in the top professionals because they inspire the students and they provide contacts and networking for the students after they graduate." Students are also using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to reach out to their peers and other industry professionals. In order to succeed you have to have innovative approaches to market, sell and sustain your product lines, said retail analyst Hitha Prabhakar. Right now retailers are in "survival of the fittest" mode and a handful of designers including Mui Mui, Allessandro Del Acqua, Allegra Hicks and Krizia have had to shut their store doors on Madison Avenue, she said. SCAD senior Shelby Simon feels some students went into fashion because they like to shop, but she warns there is so much more to learn about the craft.. "The truth is hard work, nose to the grind stone and learning. All the people I know who became great designers didn't do it over night," said Vogue magazine's editor-at-large André Leon Talley, who has been involved with SCAD students over the years. "Jason Wu, a wonderful designer, a young designer, was making doll clothes for years. He was saving his money then opened his own company and look where he is today, dressing Michelle Obama."

Fashion industry job market is being hit very hard, analyst says . Students at Savannah College of Art and Design get advice from designers . Vogue's André Leon Talley says Jason Wu made doll clothing for years . Designer Isabel Toledo says when you start at bottom, you can only go up .

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TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Gunmen on motorcycles fired Friday on a campaign office for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wounding two adults and a child, according to a report by Iran's state-run news agency. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not present at the time of the attack. The shooting happened about 5 p.m. in front of the entrance to the campaign office, campaign representative Mohammed Reza Zahed Shaikhi told IRNA. Ahmadinejad, who is running for a second term in office, was not present. Iran's presidential election will take place on June 12. The attack happened in Sistan-Balochistan province in southeastern Iran, the same province where a Shia mosque was bombed Thursday. Several suspects have been arrested in connection with Thursday's attack in the town of Zahedan, which killed between 15 and 20 people, according to Iranian media reports. No group publicly accepted responsibility for the mosque attack, but the provincial governor, Ali-Mohammad Azad, blamed a terrorist group that he said would be unveiled to the public once the suspects have been interrogated, IRNA reported. Zahedan is about 1,100 km (700 miles) southeast of Tehran, near Iran's borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sistan-Balochistan province -- which shares a border with Pakistan -- is the site of frequent clashes involving Iranian police, drug dealers and armed groups. The province is located on a major narcotics-smuggling route between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Azad said information on the arrested terrorist group would be unveiled to the public once interrogations were complete. "The terrorists and notorious gang planned to stir order and security in the province on the eve of (the June 12 presidential) elections, using ongoing insecurity in our eastern neighbors," he said Thursday. Several days of mourning were reported to be under way for victims of the explosion. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a hard-line cleric who led Friday prayers in Tehran, said there were signs that the United States and Israel were involved in the mosque bombing, IRNA reported. The cleric, who put the death toll at 25, condemned the bombing before a congregation on the Tehran University campus. CNN's Shirzad Bozorghmehr contributed to this report.

Gunmen fire on campaign office for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, . Two adults and child wounded in attack; Ahmadinejad not present . Attack happened near where Shia mosque bombed Thursday, killing up to 20 . No group has accepted responsibility, but local governor blamed terrorist group .

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- This classic chant of "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" -- barked out by battalions of newsboys hawking newspapers -- died decades ago, a casualty of home delivery, mass distribution and the advent of coin-operated newspaper machines. Some coin-operated newspaper machines have lasted for 30 years, but lack of sales may force their retirement. But now as newspapers across the country wage a battle to survive in a market where readers are increasingly gravitating to the Internet for information, the fate of another industry fixture seems inevitable. Could those steel machines on street corners, distributing newspapers since the '50s, be headed for the scrap pile? To begin to answer the question, all it takes is an early morning visit with a man who feeds those machines. It's 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and a white delivery truck for the New Jersey Record has just pulled into the parking lot outside the Plaza Diner in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The driver -- Mike, who asked that his last name not be used -- is at one of his 130 stops on an eight-hour shift that began at midnight. Mike's job, which takes less than a couple of minutes per stop, entails filling the coin-operated machine with the day's papers, collecting unsold copies and emptying the machine of its coins. Even though Mike has a full schedule and lots of stops, it doesn't equate to pushing as many papers as he once did. Mike loads 15 copies of the Record into one machine -- and that's a good load, he says. Other locations receive only five to seven copies. He's also tasked with filling machines for USA Today. Though he's been on this job for only two years, Mike has been on the route long enough to know business is down. He says newspapers sell better at train stations than from the street machines he services. The demise of newspapers across the country is getting a lot of front-page headlines. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in Washington was just one of the most recent victims, ceasing print publication in March as declining circulation and plummeting advertising sales forced it to retrench and become just an online provider of journalism. Even the legendary New York Times will force readers to dig deeper for more coins as it raises prices June 1, with the price of a paper going from $1.50 to $2. The publication that touts "All The News That's Fit to Print" has been relying less on newspaper racks. In 1999, the Times had 13,300 vending machines, but today that number has shrunk to 5,678, according to Diane McNulty, spokeswoman for the Times. "One of the factors is home delivery," McNulty said, adding, "This was due to our national expansion -- where once many readers could only get copies from the newsstand or vending machine, they can now enjoy home delivery service." But all the gloom-and-doom predictions that newspapers will one day disappear isn't scaring workers at the Kaspar Sho-Rack Company, based in Shiner, Texas. The company lays claim to being the world's largest manufacturer of coin-operated and no-charge newspaper vending machines. Don Kaspar is president and a fourth-generation member of a family business that began in 1898 manufacturing wire products. "There'll be printed newspapers for years and years" said Kaspar, president of a company that is actually part of the larger Kaspar Wireworks. Still, he concedes, "Business is down about 25 to 30 percent from about five years ago." It wasn't until the late 1950s that the privately owned company was approached by the now defunct San Antonio Light newspaper to develop an early version of coin-operated newspaper machines. The early versions of newspaper machines were simple and made mostly of wire, but by the mid-1960s they were all made of metal. The machines typically consist of a thick metal housing, shelves, doors and hinges. But the heart of any machine is the coin mechanism, which can have 150 moving parts, according to the manufacturer. Some advanced models introduced in 1999 feature lithium batteries to run the coin-collecting mechanism. Often weighing around 100 pounds, these hand-assembled machines cost on average $450 each, with refurbished models selling for around $300, the company says. The zenith of the company's business may have been the 1980s, when the introduction of USA Today landed it a contract to build and deliver 100,000 coin-operated machines. Today only 65,000 machines populate the nation's sidewalks, according to a USA Today spokesperson. In 1985, Sho-Rack sold its 1 millionth newspaper machine and it has sold several hundred thousand since. Its biggest clients have been the giants of newspaper publishing, including Gannett, Tribune, Newhouse and the McClatchy newspaper groups. But the fate of those publishers directly affects the bottom line at Sho-Rack. "Business now? It's certainly slowed down," said Kaspar. "Free publication racks ... we've stayed fairly busy with those. Coin- operated machines? Newspapers are cutting costs and pulling a lot of the racks from outlying areas. As a result this causes a surplus number of racks and then ultimately less of a need for new racks from us." Though the coin-operated machine business makes up 25 percent of the parent company's overall business, Sho-Rack has learned to diversify and adapt. "We're not dependent on any one industry," Kaspar said. The company, which employs nearly 500 workers and occupies more than 500,000 square feet in a small rural town, also manufactures thousands of wire, tubing and sheet metal products. The average life span of a coin-operated newspaper machine depends on several factors. Some machines, even with modest refurbishments every couple of years, have lasted for 30 years. For others it can be five minutes after an encounter with a snowplow. For the Kaspar Sho-Rack Company, as long as newspapers are printed and sold, its machines will gladly continue to accept coins.

Fewer customers buy from coin-operated newspaper machines . Delivery man says newspapers sell better from train stations than street machines . Texas company that makes the machines says business is down . "There'll be printed newspapers for years and years," firm's president says .

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(CNN) -- IBM's reported plans to lay off thousands of U.S. workers and outsource many of those jobs to India, even as the company angles for billions in stimulus money, doesn't sit well with employee rights advocates. Business Week reports that IBM's workforce increased from 386,558 in 2007 to 398,000 at the end of 2008. IBM employees are being dealt a double blow, said Lee Conrad, national coordinator for Alliance@IBM, a pro-union group that has been fighting IBM's outsourcing for years. "We're outraged that jobs cuts are happening in the U.S. and the work is being shifted offshore," Conrad said. "This comes at the same time IBM has its hand out for stimulus money. This to us is totally unacceptable." IBM wants a share of the money in President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for projects updating power grids, creating electronic health care records and furthering the use of broadband. "In the research we've done working with the transition team, we know that $30 billion could create 1 million jobs in the next 12 months," IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said in January. Watch how IBM hopes to benefit from the stimulus » . The problem is where those jobs would be, said Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "This is really a question of policy," Hira said. "IBM is doing what's in its best interest, and in this case it's not in the best interest of America. And that's why you need policymakers to step in to ensure that this money gets spent to create American jobs." Watch the outcry generated by IBM » . IBM has not responded to multiple requests for comment from CNN after the Wall Street Journal's report that the IT giant would be shipping 5,000 U.S. jobs overseas. "We have no problem with job creation in other countries," Conrad said. "We have no problem with global expansion. We realize IBM is a global company and has been for many years. But this is different. This is cutting jobs in the U.S. and shifting the work offshore. This isn't job creation. It's job shifting." According to Business Week, IBM has indeed been shifting jobs. The magazine reported that the company's workforce went up from 386,558 at the end of 2007 to 398,000 at the end of 2008. But U.S. employment fell from 121,000 to 115,000 during the same time. Hira, author of the book "Outsourcing America," said it's not just IBM moving jobs out of the United States. "The problem here, though, is that these companies have an inordinate influence over the political process," he said. "They have a huge, disproportionate amount of power, political power, and can influence the process." For that reason, he said, "you really do need the American public to sort of stand up and say, 'Wait a second. This is just not right.' ... I certainly hope that there's a backlash, because there should be. This is bad for America." CNN's Mary Snow, Jennifer Rizzo and Vivienne Foley contributed to this report.

IBM criticized for plans to shift U.S. jobs to India while seeking stimulus money . IBM CEO has said $30 billion could create 1 million jobs in next 12 months . Plan shows conflicting interests between IBM and U.S., analyst says . American public needs to stand up and say, 'This is just not right,' analyst says .

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JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (CNN) -- Police armed with rubber bullets were patrolling neighborhoods in Johannesburg on Tuesday in an effort to quell a recent spree of violence aimed at foreigners that police say has killed 22 people and displaced an estimated 13,000. A crowd armed with clubs, machetes and axes rioted on the outskirts of Johannesburg on Tuesday. Many of the victims are Zimbabweans who have fled repression and dire economic circumstances in their homeland. Evidence of the violence was seen in smoke rising from burned homes in one Johannesburg neighborhood. Locals angry about the rising number of foreigners arriving in South Africa had set homes ablaze. Firefighters said they had fought more than 100 such blazes since Thursday. Standing outside a row of charred homes, Diamond Minnaar said there is a solution for foreigners. "Most of them just have to go back to their country and leave us in peace," Minnaar said. "That is the only solution. Or they are just going to get killed. Look at how many shacks have burnt down." The attacks and looting have drawn condemnation from South African officials and other African leaders. iReport.com: Are you there? Send photos, video . The violence began a week ago in Johannesburg's Alexandra Township, police say, and has been concentrated in the city's poorest areas. "People are angry because they are unemployed, poverty-affected people struggling for basic needs every day," said Dean Christopher Barends, a local Lutheran minister. "This will explode into something." One person victimized was Pascoal Sendela Gulane, a Mozambican man, who said gangs broke into his home and stole his belongings. He fled to a church with his family and is now living with his children in his car on the church's property. For him and many others, churches and police stations have become safe havens. Watch footage of the attacks » . On Monday, South African President Thabo Mbeki called for an end to the violence. "We dehumanize ourselves the moment we start thinking of another person as less human than we are simply because they come from another country" he said in a statement. "As South Africans, we must recognize and fully appreciate that we are bound together with other Africans by history, culture, economics and, above all, by destiny. I call upon those behind these shameful and criminal acts to stop! Nothing can justify it." He has called for an investigation into the violence. Also Monday, the Nelson Mandela Foundation issued a statement condemning the "senseless violence." South African police have arrested more than 200 people in connection with the violence for offenses including rape, murder, robbery and theft. Police director Govindsamy Mariemuthoo said that at least one foreigner was burned alive over the weekend, while others saw their houses torched, their shops looted and their possessions stolen. Tuesday there was a large police presence in the neighborhoods were the violence had occurred, according to a CNN producer on the scene. Despite the police presence, sporadic looting still took place in several townships east of Johannesburg. Mbuso Mthembu, provincial manager at the Red Cross office in Johannesburg, said that the number of people fleeing is continuing to grow and that violent attacks seem to be spreading into other areas. His organization has made an emergency appeal for people to donate 1 million rand (about $135,000) to help support the estimated 13,000 who have fled their homes. Many had to flee quickly, leaving all their belongings behind, Mthembu said. "We have delivered blankets, kids clothing, baby formula," he said. "But we need more."

An estimated 13,000 people fled homes after violence targeting foreigners . Attacks have been concentrated in Johannesburg's poorest areas . Police arrest more than 200 people after at least 22 are killed . Zimbabweans who have fled their own country are driven from squatter camps .

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(CNN) -- "American Idol" viewers had a clear choice when it came down to the final decision: the low-key but sincere Kris Allen or the flamboyant and powerful Adam Lambert. "American Idol" winner Kris Allen, left, and runner-up Adam Lambert say they're good friends. The vote went for Allen, and Lambert told Ryan Seacrest on CNN's "Larry King Live" that the outcome didn't surprise him. There are no hard feelings, though. Allen, Lambert, Danny Gokey and the other seven finalists spoke of their friendship and camaraderie on "Larry King Live." Here is an edited transcript of the interview. Ryan Seacrest: I think the first thing you said [after being announced as the winner] was "Adam's great." Actually on the air, you were complimenting him at the moment you should be complimenting yourself. Kris Allen: I think that's kind of how I am. Seriously, we're really good friends and he's amazing. He's been probably the most consistent performer this year, and just overall probably one of the best performers that's ever been on the "Idol" stage. Watch Kris Allen heap praise on Adam Lambert » . Seacrest: So aside from getting more votes, why do you think you won? Allen: I don't know. I think it was a combination of a lot of stuff. It was maybe, probably, a little bit of personality, a little bit of -- hopefully it was about the music, as well. I know that's not always the case on "American Idol." That's what I care about the most: the music and how I portray it. Seacrest: It's no secret that you're a man of faith, that you referred to the "Christian thing," as it were. You didn't rely on the Christian vote. Do you think that played a part in your win, though? Allen: I hope it didn't. Because I guess me and Adam were doing an interview before the show: "Kris, do you think you're going to get the Christian vote now that Danny's gone?" And that was rough, that was kind of upsetting, because the show's not about religion. We're not running for president. We are there to do music and there to sing, and hopefully people vote on that. Seacrest: I've seen the show 300-plus episodes, and I know that you have to develop some sort of strategy. So what was yours? Allen: I think my strategy throughout the whole thing was, 'don't steer away from what you know how to do.' And that's just go out there and be yourself. I went out there and I played my type of music. And I really wanted to change stuff up a little bit and be kind of bold in my music choices, and just do what I believed in. Seacrest: You guys have been through it. The question everyone wants an answer to, finally I get to ask you. What kind of guy-liner do you wear? Adam Lambert: I don't know, whatever the make-up artist puts on me, you know. Seacrest: In that beat before I [announced the winner], what were you thinking? Lambert: I kind of figured, OK, it's anyone's game at this point. I knew it was going to be a close race. And actually in my head, believe it or not, I went, that's so Kris, it's so going to be Kris. I felt it. Seacrest: You're human, so you had to be let down a little bit. Lambert: You know what? I honestly mentally prepared myself for any possibility. And we kind of kept telling each other, you know, it's such an honor to be here. We had so much fun last night. And tonight we got to sing with Queen. The point is not a title. The point is the opportunity. And I feel like we got that opportunity. Watch the shock over the "Idol" finale » . Seacrest: So what do you think happened with the voting? The judges called you the darling throughout the course of the season. And then you didn't get the first-place votes. What happened? Lambert: Well, I'm sure that when Danny was out of the competition, I think his fans probably would be more apt to go for Kris' style. Allen: I think a lot of people thought that too. Lambert: I wasn't worried. I just assumed that would be the case. Seacrest: Why? Lambert: Kris' appeal is more like Danny's appeal than mine. I just kind of figured. Seacrest: Does the fact that the judges pick you out early in the season hurt in the long run? Lambert: I kind of think it helped me because I think that because I'm something a little bit different, it allowed people at home to feel it was OK to root for me. Seacrest: Kris, how did you size up the rest of the competition? Allen: Well, I think Adam and Danny were, I mean, very -- I think they were the front-runners for a long time. And they're amazing. So kudos to them. I think they deserved it completely. But I never went out there to beat anyone. We talk about that a lot. Seacrest: I can't believe that totally. You never went out there to beat anyone ever? Allen: No. How do you compare me or Adam or me or Danny or me or Matt or me or Allison? Seacrest: I've done the show for eight seasons and we've never seen anyone quite like Adam. That's great. That's the beauty I think in the show. It can continue to reinvent itself with the contestants. Lambert: That's why I felt it wasn't a competition thing. I knew it was apples and oranges. The people are like, I like that guy, I like that guy, or I like that girl. To me, it was like, go out there and do your best. That was the goal for me every week. Do something new, do something new to get people talking. Watch the "Idol" finalists and Paula Abdul dish » . Seacrest: Kris, how did you feel about the love Adam was getting from the judges during the season? Allen: I thought he deserved it. I think he's amazing. I think he was probably one of the most original and one of the most -- seriously, one of the best singers that's been on "American Idol". Lambert: This is why we're friends. It's real. Seacrest: Let me ask you this: The speculation about your sexuality, do you think that had anything to do with coming in second place? Lambert: No, I think if anything, I think it -- I think my lifestyle is just I'm different. I'm a little bit -- I'm not your typical guy next door. The guy next door versus the guyliner. Sexuality aside, I think it more had to do with maybe my appearance and what songs I gravitated toward and my performance style. I think that had more to do with it. Seacrest: Kris, when I asked the question, you were nodding your head, why? Allen: Because I agree with him. It's not about who he is or who I am. It's about -- what we want, we want it to be about the music, you know?

Winner Kris Allen calls runner-up one of the best performers ever on show . Finalist Adam Lambert says he had a feeling Allen was going to win . Allen says he hopes fan support was because of his music, not his faith . Lambert says questions about his sexuality may have helped him stand out .

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(CNN) -- Cyclist Lance Armstrong said Thursday the surgery to repair his broken collarbone proved to be more complex than doctors originally anticipated and that he will take his recovery "day by day." Cyclist Lance Armstrong needed 12 screws to repair his broken collarbone. "I thought everything went very smooth," he said in a video to his supporters about Wednesday's three-hour operation. Doctors in Spain, where Armstrong injured himself Monday when he fell during a race, initially thought he had suffered a simple fracture. However, additional X-rays and CT scans in Austin, Texas, where he lives, proved otherwise. "They realized that the collarbone is actually in quite a few pieces," said the 37-year-old cyclist, who pointed to an X-ray of a 4- to 5-inch steel plate held in place by a dozen 1-inch screws, intended to stabilize it. "That should keep things together," he said. "Ultimately, that will have to come out, but for now, it's necessary." Watch how Armstrong "tweets" from hospital » . Armstrong said he felt "very lucky, very blessed" that, in almost 20 years of professional cycling, he has rarely crashed. "We don't know how my recovery will go, we'll just take it day by day and ultimately get back on the bike and try to sort things out." Armstrong's remarks came a day after his surgeon, Dr. Douglas Elenz, told reporters that the cyclist will require two to three months of healing. The four breaks "made treatment more challenging, but we're confident that the treatment performed today is going to be successful," Elenz said. During the next week, Armstrong "will need to take it easy" to ensure the wound does not become infected, the doctor said. After his wound has healed, Armstrong will begin using an exercise bike to train his lower body, "but we won't let him do a whole lot with his upper extremities," Elenz said. "After several weeks, we can take his training to the street, but we will need to take that day by day and week by week." He said that, over the longer term, he will be looking for evidence that Armstrong is laying down new bone, that the plate is stable, that the athlete's arm is strong and that his motion is fluid. Armstrong, riding for Team Astana, crashed about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the end of the first stage of the five-day Vuelta Ciclista a Castilla y Leon race. Watch Armstrong's crash » . Armstrong announced last year that he was returning to competitive biking and would use the Spanish race as a warm-up for the Tour de France, which he won seven times before retiring in 2005. He also had planned to race May 9-31 in the Giro d'Italia, one of Europe's most prestigious and grueling stage races. This would have been the second comeback of his career. His first came in 1998, two years after he was diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. Doctors gave him a less than 50 percent chance of survival.

Lance Armstrong's broken collarbone was worse than doctors expected . Armstrong was injured Monday in crash at Spain bike race . Armstrong announced last year he was returning to competitive racing .

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- A police officer chasing a theft suspect was fatally shot Thursday night by another officer after he failed to drop his weapon when ordered to, authorities said. Officer Omar Edwards, 25, was not wearing a bulletproof vest and did not fire a shot, authorities say. Authorities said Officer Omar Edwards, 25, was shot three times. The incident is under investigation. Edwards was in plainclothes and carrying a handgun as he chased the suspect past a police car. Authorities said the officer who shot him said he didn't realize Edwards was a police officer. Edwards had just left the Housing Bureau Station House on East 124th Street, said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly at a news conference Friday. As Edwards approached his vehicle, he saw a man rummaging through it. Edwards took out his gun -- a Smith and Wesson 9 mm -- and chased the alleged thief, 43-year-old Miguel Santiago, said NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne. Meanwhile, a police cruiser with a sergeant and two officers, including Officer Andrew Dunton, had just turned onto 125th Street from 1st Avenue. Santiago ran in front of the unmarked vehicle as it approached halfway up the block and the vehicle stopped. The officer in the front passenger seat got out of the vehicle and shouted for Edwards to stop running and drop his weapon. According to Kelly, the officers reported that, after the command was given, Edwards turned toward Dunton with his gun in his hand. Watch Commissioner Kelly describe the shooting » . Dunton fired his Glock 9 mm six times, hitting Edwards three of those times -- once in the left arm, once in the left side and once in the back, according to police. Emergency crews responding to the scene found Edwards wearing a police academy T-shirt under his clothes and found his police shield and ID in his front left pants pocket, according to Browne. Edwards, who lived in Brooklyn, was recently married and had two small children, according to CNN affiliate WABC-TV in New York. On Friday, his relatives remembered him as a good person who achieved what he set out to do. "He was a wonderful, wonderful child from when he was small," his father, Ricardo Edwards, told WABC. "His desire was always to be a policeman and to play football," his uncle, Jerome Harding told the New York TV station. "And he did accomplish both, because he plays for the Police Department." Edwards was pronounced dead at Harlem Hospital at 11:21 p.m. Thursday, according to Kelly. "Tragic accidents like this are another reminder of the dangers our police officers often face as they keep our city the safest big city in the nation," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday. "Rest assured we will find out exactly what happened here, see what we can learn from it so it may never happen again. All the city's prayers are with Omar Edwards and his family." Five eyewitnesses, along with 20 people who reported hearing gunshots, were interviewed by police. The officer who fired the shots has 4½ years' experience, authorities said. The officers involved have been placed on administrative duties while the shooting is investigated. Police later arrested the alleged thief on suspicion of breaking into Edwards' car.

Authorities: Omar Edwards, chasing a suspect, was fatally shot by another officer . Edwards, in plainclothes, witnessed suspect trying to break into his car . Another saw his pursuit, jumped out of unmarked vehicle and fired six shots . Officers placed on administrative duties while shooting is investigated .

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(CNN) -- Internet sensation Susan Boyle came up short, coming in second during "Britain's Got Talent" finale on Saturday. Fans cheering on Susan Boyle react after she comes in second during "Britain's Got Talent." Boyle was upset by winner Diversity, a 10-person dance group from Essex and East London, England, ranging in age from 12 to 25 years old. The group won 100,000 British pounds ($161,000) and will perform for Queen Elizabeth II in the Royal Variety Show. "The best people won," Boyle said. The dancers appeared shocked Saturday when it was announced that they had won. The group was formed in 2007, and in the same year won the United Kingdom Dance Championships. The group's choreographer "tries to create a dance style that is eye-catching and entertaining" and uses films such as 2007's "Transformers" for inspiration, the show's site said. Boyle wowed the crowd Saturday night with an encore performance of the song that first made her so famous around the world -- "I Dreamed a Dream," from the musical "Les Miserables." After her performance Saturday, the crowd and judges gave Boyle, who wore a floor-length gown, a standing ovation. Boyle finishes second » . "You had the nerve to come back here tonight, face your critics and beat them," judge Simon Cowell told her. "You did it." Boyle had vowed to leave the television show before the finale, after a hectic week, but recanted and performed at the finale Saturday. The 48-year-old Scottish singer wowed audiences and judges during her audition in April when she belted out "I Dreamed a Dream." Her performance earned her a string of global television appearances. During the semifinals Sunday, she started off by missing the first note of her performance of "Memory" from the musical, "Cats." Watch Boyle's semifinal performance » . She redeemed herself to earn a standing ovation and a spot in Saturday's finale. The global fame and the "odd bit of negative press" in the past week have been too overwhelming for her, judge Piers Morgan told CNN's "Larry King Live" on Friday. "She's just had a pretty rough week because I think the full enormity of what has happened to her is beginning to hit home," Morgan said. "Earlier this week, she had a lot of tears. ... At one stage, she was going to leave the show. So, fortunately, we've calmed everything down." Watch how Boyle may be feeling the pressure » . Boyle said that that she has put the tumultuous week behind her and is getting ready for the finale. "It's all I've been thinking about," she said on the show's Web site. "I'm not going to throw away my big chance now." "Britain's Got Talent" defended Boyle on its Web site, saying that media reports of an emotional outburst "have been taken out of context." The unemployed charity worker has inspired millions in the face of pop music's penchant for pre-processed princesses. Before she sang during her audition, the unassuming single woman with a loose mop of curly hair drew snickers from the audience, including notoriously hard-to-please judge Simon Cowell. The scowls and eye-rolling were replaced by wild cheers as soon as she sang the first line. Cowell later apologized for poking fun at her during the auditions stage. "You are one special lady," he said last week. "You really are." Reporters made their way to her quiet home in Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland, much to Boyle's great surprise. "I keep my feet firmly planted on the ground, because you have to," Boyle told CNN last month. Asked what has been the most surprising change since her audition, she responded simply -- "The way everyone seems to have embraced me. The way they seem to have apparently fallen in love with me."

NEW: 10-person dance group Diversity seemed shocked to win "Britain's Got Talent" 48-year-old Internet sensation Susan Boyle came in second . Show judge Piers Morgan says Boyle thought about leaving show after rough week . Singer catapulted into media spotlight after her audition wowed audiences worldwide .

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- It was a typical November day in 1971 when an eighth-grader left her house in a sleepy New Hampshire town with her pet dog, Tasha, in tow. Kathy Gloddy was found murdered a mile from where she was last seen. The German shepherd returned home that day without its 13-year-old master, Kathy Gloddy. To her family's horror, the little girl's body was found the next day, three miles from her home. She had been beaten, raped, strangled and run over by a car repeatedly until she was dead. Her body was found clothed only in her kneesocks. At the time, police had several possible suspects, but not enough evidence for an arrest, said Sgt. Scott Gilbert of the New Hampshire State Police. In 2006, Gilbert said, Kathy's body was exhumed in search of further clues, but authorities were unable to obtain forensics from the remains. Kathy's family asked private investigator Tom Shamshak to aid in the investigation and he agreed to volunteer his services. So far, investigators have only been able to piece together a timeline of the day Kathy went missing. Watch an update on the case » . It is believed that she left her family's home at 5 p.m. to go to a convenience store, where she bought ice cream and potato sticks. Soon after leaving the store, she was spotted at Franklin High School, where one of her older sisters was attending a banquet. It is unclear where Kathy went next, but what is known is that later that evening her dog returned home acting frantic and anxious, family members said. "When Tasha came home without Kathy, we were worried," said Kathy's sister, Janet Young. "And then the dog was running around in circles, acting crazy and pawing at the door as if looking for Kathy. We always came home when we said we would and never stayed out late worrying our parents." Private investigator Shamshak said he believes the killer may not have been a stranger. "This kind of brutality and rage-driven crime can only come from someone that knew her or her family," he said. Jim Conrad, a former New Hampshire State Police trooper who worked on the case, said Kathy was found in the woods not far from a small gravel road near a popular swimming hole in Franklin, New Hampshire. Investigators believe the area -- which is only one mile from where she was last seen at the high school -- was merely a dumping site for the body and not the actual crime scene. "One of the things my team is working on is trying to get the post-mortem DNA evidence collected by the forensic pathologist who examined her," Shamshak said. While there is not a lot of evidence left, it is the one piece of evidence the family hopes could link potential suspects to Kathy's murder. "We have waited so long for justice and closure," said Karen Beaudin, another of Kathy's sisters. Gilbert said there are at least two persons of interest authorities have focused on and both were acquainted with Kathy Gloddy and her family. Gilbert said police thought they'd caught a break in 2004 when convicted sex offender Edward Dukette, who served time in a Florida prison for raping and nearly killing a young girl, unexpectedly came forward to police claiming he had key information about Kathy Gloddy's murder. Dukette was a former neighbor of the Gloddys and had been evicted from the multiple-family dwelling eight months before Kathy's murder. Gilbert was one of several investigators who traveled to Florida to question Dukette, but the potential suspect recanted his earlier statements and refused to speak further with officials. The Gloddy family and Tom Shamshak have said they believe there is more than one person responsible for Kathy Gloddy's murder. The family is organizing a reward fund in conjunction with the Carole Sund Foundation. Anyone who has information that could lead to the arrest of the individuals responsible for Kathy Lynn Gloddy's murder is asked to call the New Hampshire State Police Crime Unit tip line at 603-271-3636.

Teen girl found wearing only socks after being raped, murdered . Kathy Gloddy left home with her pet dog, who returned without her hours later . Police have few clues and at least two persons of interest . A former neighbor came forward claiming information, but later recanted .

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Editor's note: CNN affiliates report on where job seekers are finding work across the country and how those looking for employment are coping with the situation. Tennessee's Williamson County Public Library in Franklin is trying to improve computer skills of older job seekers. (CNN) -- An Ohio company transforming its business model will build its headquarters in the town of Greenville. LAH Development will become a wind turbine manufacturer and installer after years of constructing commercial buildings. The company's new building is expected to cost $1 million, CNN affiliate WHIO-TV in Dayton reported. The state of Ohio has granted the company a tax credit of almost $400,000 to help create jobs. The company expects to hire 100 new employees. iReport.com: Share your job hunt story . Under an agreement with the state, the company is required to operate at the new site for 12 years. Read the full report on WHIO . Northeast: Grant money used to train veterans . Pennsylvania is providing $311,000 to train 80 unemployed veterans in the field of welding. The state's Department of Labor and Industry grant will be used to train the former military members for 96 hours in beginner welding over an eight-week period. "As more troops return home after tours of duty, it's important that we provide tools and resources to help them reintegrate into civilian life," Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato told WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh. Read the full report on WPXI . South: Library to teach computer skills to job seekers . In Franklin, Tennessee, the county library is trying to help older job seekers by expanding its computer course offerings. Teachers will instruct students on how to use social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to search for jobs as well as make sure they have basic skills. "If you don't know those skills and you can't use them readily, it makes everything else so much harder," said Janice Keck, director of the Williamson County Public Library, told WSMV-TV in Nashville, Tennessee. Read the full report on WSMV . Midwest: Indiana business to add 125 positions . An Indianapolis, Indiana, life science firm is more than doubling the size of its staff. Biostorage provides biomaterials storage and distribution for companies around the world, according to WTHR-TV in Indianapolis. "Ninety percent of our clients are actually outside Indiana," John Mills of Biostorage Technologies told the station. "So we are earning Indiana dollars from companies outside Indiana." The current staff has 70 people; Biostorage plans to add 125 more employees. Read the full report on WTHR . Around the nation . Quintiles Transnational Corp. is moving its world headquarters to the Research Triangle Park near Raleigh, North Carolina, News 14 Carolina reports. A new Wal-Mart in Owasso, Oklahoma, is expected to hire 100 people, Tulsa's KOTV-TV reports.

Ohio company gets $400,000 tax credit to hire workers . Pennsylvania program will train veterans in welding skills . Indiana bioscience company looks to hire 125 people .

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(CNN) -- Thomas the Tank Engine, whose television adventures on the fictional island of Sodor have delighted children around the world for years, is now on a real-life mission to help kids with autism. Thomas the Tank Engine is part of a new online game to help autistic children recognize different emotions. The steam locomotive and his friends are the stars of a new game in Australia, designed to help autistic children recognize emotions. Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect), a nonprofit that provides services to people diagnosed with the developmental disorder, unveiled the game on its Web site Tuesday. The game asks players to recognize which engine has a sad face, or which is happy or angry. Children with autism often have a difficult time distinguishing different facial expressions. Each time a child plays the game, he/she is presented with a different sequence of emotions. In doing so, the game takes advantage of the single-mindedness of autistic children to assist in their development. "It's a great way to help develop social and communication skills," said Anthony Warren of Aspect. A study conducted in the United Kingdom found that autistic children were far more fascinated by the television series, "Thomas and Friends," than they were with other fictional characters. The study, by the National Autistic Society, summarized that the show held such appeal because of the clear facial expressions of the characters, the pacing of the program and the easy-to-follow story lines. "We got those results down here, and we thought, how could we leverage that strength and give a little back to the community?" said Tom Punch with Haven Licensing, the company that handles licensing for the characters in Australia. Warren said one of the reasons Thomas is particularly stimulating and motivating for children with autism is that it's very predictable. "Children can understand the clear visual messages -- the big smile on the front of the engine," he said. "The messages it communicates are very concrete, not abstract. And the emotions are primary emotions. It's uncomplicated." Autism is a developmental disorder that affects physical, social and language skills. It usually appears before age 3, though the earliest signs are subtle. More doctors and researchers are referring to "autism" as "autisms," because each child's case is different, as are the causes, helpful therapies and potential treatments. The Australian nonprofit unveiled the game this month to coincide with Autism Awareness Month in that country. After all, as the show's theme song attests: "Red and green and brown and blue; They're the really useful crew."

Online game uses Thomas the Tank Engine to help autistic children . Children try to recognize which engine has happy, sad, angry face . Autistic children often have trouble distinguishing different facial expressions . UK study: More autistic kids fascinated with "Thomas" than other fictional characters .

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LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Smoking in youth-rated movies has not declined despite a pledge two years ago by Hollywood studios to encourage producers to show less "gratuitous smoking," according to an anti-smoking group. The American Medical Association Alliance has been trying to get movie studios to make smoking-free films. The American Medical Association Alliance, pointing to research that big-screen smoking leads teens to pick up the tobacco habit, called for an R rating for any movie with smoking scenes. The head of the group that gives U.S. movies their ratings, however, said the smoke has been clearing from youth-rated movies, a result of the film industry's sensitivity to the issue. The alliance, the medical association's advocacy arm, launched a summer campaign this week aimed at publicly shaming studios into making smoke-free films. "Research has shown that one-third to one-half of all young smokers in the United States can be attributed to smoking these youth see in movies," said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, head of the Los Angeles County Public Health Department. Fielding cited another study that he said "found that adolescents whose favorite movie stars smoked on screen are significantly more likely to be smokers themselves and to have a more accepting attitude toward smoking." The Motion Picture Association of America, the industry group that issues ratings and parental guidance for U.S. films, added smoking scenes as a factor in ratings two years ago, but Fielding said it has not made a difference. "In all, 56 percent of the top box office movies with smoking released between May 2007 and May 2009 were youth-rated films -- G, PG or PG-13," he said. Joan Graves, who chairs the Motion Picture Association's movie rating committee, offered her own statistics, based on all of the 900 films rated each year, not just the top movies included in Fielding's numbers. The association has given no G ratings in the past two years to a movie with smoking, Graves said. Overall, 55 percent of the movies rated in the past two years showed some smoking, but 75 percent of those with smoking scenes were given R ratings, Graves said. Twenty-one percent were rated PG-13 and the remaining 5 percent were PG, she said. A G movie is deemed suitable for all audiences, while a PG rating is a signal to parents that a film may include some material they might consider inappropriate for children. PG-13 indicates a stronger warning that some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. No one under 17 can be admitted to see an R movie without a parent or guardian. American Medical Association Alliance President Sandi Frost used as her chief example of a movie with "gratuitous smoking" this month's blockbuster "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," which was rated PG-13 "for intense sequences of action and violence, and some partial nudity." "Millions of children have been exposed to the main star of the film, Hugh Jackman, with a cigar in his mouth in various scenes," Frost said. "I'm willing to bet that not one child would have enjoyed that movie or Mr. Jackman's performance any less if he hadn't been smoking." A spokesman for Twentieth Century Fox, the studio responsible for the Wolverine movie series, said Jackman's cigar was never lit and it was limited to just two scenes. In one scene, the cigar is shot out of his mouth, prompting Jackman's Wolverine character to suggest its loss would lead to clean living -- an anti-smoking statement -- the studio spokesman said. He said that while the Wolverine character has a cigar in his mouth in almost every panel of the comic book series, producers made "a conscious decision" to limit the cigar in the movie. The American Medical Association Alliance, hoping to draw studio executives' attention, hired a mobile billboard to drive around the major studios this week. "The billboard shows a teenage girl asking the question, 'Which movie studios will cause me to smoke this summer?' " Frost said. The alliance will keep an online scorecard throughout the summer to count "how many tobacco impressions each studio delivers to G, PG and PG-13 audiences," she said. "At the end of the summer, whichever studio has delivered the most tobacco impressions to youth audiences will be named in a billboard that will run outside of their headquarters," she said. Motion Picture Association of America spokeswoman Angela Martinez said the group "is very sensitive to the concerns of parents about the purpose of the rating systems." "It's reflective of society," Martinez said. "It's really a tool for parents to help determine what their kids see." They began factoring smoking scenes into the ratings two years ago as "a reflection of changes in society and health concerns," she said. "Smoking is rated like all the other factors, including violence and sex," she said. Fielding said it should be absolute -- and not just a factor. "Any movie with smoking should be rated R," he said. "And if they worry about an R rating hurting their profits, then they should work with studios to remove smoking from films that hurt youth." Graves, whose committee makes the decisions, indicated such a zero-tolerance policy would not be accepted.

American Medical Association Alliance wants films with smoking to be rated R . AMAA says that kids who watch smoking often turn to habit . Hollywood rating organization says smoking in movies has declined .

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LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Music producer Phil Spector was sentenced Friday to the maximum sentence of 19 years to life for the murder six years ago of actress Lana Clarkson. Phil Spector's first murder trial in 2007 ended in a mistrial as jurors said they couldn't reach a verdict. That means Spector, 69, would be 88 before he would be eligible for parole. Slumped, stone-faced and wearing a dark suit and bright red tie, he sat silently throughout his sentencing by Judge Larry Paul Fidler. Spector's lawyer gave a $17,000 check to Donna Clarkson, the victim's mother, to pay for her funeral expenses -- part of the court-ordered sentence. "All of our plans together are destroyed," the mother said, reading a statement on behalf of her family. "Now, I can only visit her at the cemetery." Fidler denied a motion for a new trial by defense attorney Doron Weinberg, who said he would file an appeal. "The evidence did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty for the simple reason [that] he did not kill Lana Clarkson," Weinberg said. Watch Spector receive his sentence » . "Obviously, he's not very happy," Spector's wife, Rachelle, told reporters about her husband. "I'm going to stand by him and get him out of that awful place so he can come home where he belongs." Clarkson, 40, was found dead -- slumped in a chair in the foyer of Spector's Alhambra, California, mansion with a gunshot wound through the roof of her mouth -- in February 2003. View a timeline of the case » . Spector's trial, which began in October, ended last month when jurors deliberated for 30 hours and then announced a guilty verdict on the second-degree murder charge. Fidler had ruled jurors also could consider the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter. Spector's first murder trial in 2007 ended in a mistrial as jurors said they couldn't reach a verdict after 15 days of deliberations. Jurors then were deadlocked 10-2 in favor of conviction. Fidler declined to allow Spector to remain free on bail pending sentencing, citing Spector's years-long "pattern of violence" involving firearms. "This was not an isolated incident," Fidler said, noting Spector's two firearms-related convictions from the 1970s. "The taking of an innocent human life, it doesn't get any more serious than that." In closing arguments at the retrial, prosecutor Truc Do called Spector "a very dangerous man" who "has a history of playing Russian roulette with women -- six women. Lana just happened to be the sixth." Weinberg argued that the prosecution's case hinged on circumstantial evidence. He said the possibility that Clarkson committed suicide could not be ruled out. Do pointed out to jurors, however, that Clarkson had bought new shoes on the day of her death -- something he said a suicidal woman would not have done. A female juror who declined to be identified told reporters the jurors considered all the evidence and testimony to reach their verdict. "This entire jury took this so seriously," she said with tears in her eyes, before adding that "it's tough to be in a jury," because another person's life is in the jury's hands. Clarkson starred in the 1985 B-movie "Barbarian Queen" and appeared in many other films, including "Deathstalker," "Blind Date," "Scarface," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and the spoof "Amazon Women on the Moon." She was working as a VIP hostess at Hollywood's House of Blues at the time of her death. In the 2007 trial, Spector's attorneys argued that Clarkson was depressed over a recent breakup and grabbed a .38-caliber pistol to kill herself while at Spector's home. But prosecution witnesses painted Spector as a gun-toting menace. Five women took the stand and testified that he had threatened them with firearms. His driver testified that he heard a loud noise and saw the producer leave the home, pistol in hand, saying, "I think I killed somebody." Spector's professional trademark was the "Wall of Sound," the layering of instrumental tracks and percussion that underpinned a string of hits on his Philles label -- named for Spector and his business partner, Lester Sill -- in the early 1960s. The roaring arrangements were the heart of what he called "little symphonies for the kids" -- among them No. 1 hits like the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'." Spector co-produced the Beatles' final album, "Let It Be," and worked with ex-Beatles George Harrison and John Lennon on solo projects after the group broke up. His recording of Harrison's 1971 benefit concert for war relief in Bangladesh won the 1972 Grammy award for album of the year. That was one of two Grammy Awards won by Spector, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. He stayed out of the public eye for two decades before his 2003 arrest in Clarkson's death.

NEW: Music producer sentenced for 2003 slaying of Lana Clarkson . Actress was found shot dead in foyer of Spector's California mansion . Defense argued it was a suicide; first trial ended in a mistrial . Grammy-winning Spector, 69, was inducted in 1989 to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame .

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ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- It probably would have been just another ho-hum city council budget meeting. Except that the leader of Atlanta's police union, and second-highest ranking member of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, said he wanted to beat Atlanta's mayor with a bat. "I want to beat her [Mayor Shirley Franklin] in the head with a baseball bat sometimes when I think about it," Sgt. Scott Kreher said into a microphone earlier this month in an apparent off-hand remark during a presentation he was giving to the council. Within days, the 17-year department veteran was suspended. Kreher said the "it" that made him want to club the mayor was that, despite repeated complaints, the police union contends the city is not honoring workers' compensation claims for cops whose careers ended when they were seriously injured on the job. Franklin, one of the nation's high-profile mayors, told CNN on Tuesday that the officers' complaints are a "separate issue" from Kreher's comments. "Some people think I'll just shake it off," she said of the sergeant's threat. "I can't shake off an officer at City Hall -- not in his shower or in his front yard, but in official capacity -- threatening to hit me in the head with a bat. That is a severe act of violence. When you hit someone with a bat, you intend to kill them." The police officers union called a news conference Thursday, in part, to defend Kreher, who's their second-highest ranking member. Three officers in wheelchairs were there, at times crying, their voices raised, as they told their stories of being shot on duty and paralyzed for life. They say they've made repeated calls for months to city officials to get help with their medical claims and have been ignored. They are part of a group of officers alleging that NovaPro, a San Diego-based private insurance company, has refused or made it difficult for them to get the medication they need to alleviate pain and repair or replace medical equipment. "I've been calling the mayor's office for more than a year, and no one has called me back or I've been told to talk to another department. Kreher called me back the same day," said Ryan Phinney, a 43-year-old paraplegic whose squad car was T-boned in 1989. He said he suffered with kidney stones, made more painful due to his paralysis, because NovaPro either ignored or rejected his claims for months. "Kreher was defending us against people who refused to listen, and that is so offensive. It's no wonder he got upset," Phinney said. The city used to provide its own services, but "there were concerns about internal management," Franklin's office explained to CNN, so it began contracting in 2004 with NovaPro. The police union complained for months about the company. Atlanta officials this month renewed the city's agreement with NovaPro for $3.7 million over three years, saying no other company they're aware of was in position to do a better job. Russ Whitmarsh, chief operating officer of NovaPro, referred all questions about the officers' allegations to city officials. Mayor Franklin's spokesperson issued this statement to CNN: . "We are aware of the complaints of the five injured former Atlanta police officers. We greatly respect the service of these officers on behalf of Atlanta and the sacrifice they have made. The City of Atlanta has worked and will continue working with the employees' attorneys to address their current complaints. We take that responsibility and obligation seriously and intend to address every complaint within the framework of the Workers' Compensation Act." A few days after the bat comment, Kreher apologized to Franklin in a letter, which was published on the union Web site. He called his remark "inexcusable," explaining that it sprung from "frustration and anger."

Atlanta police union head says he got frustrated at city meeting . Other cops quick to defend him, saying mayor is ignoring larger issue . Police: Company refusing to help cops injured in the line of duty . Mayor Franklin's spokesperson says mayor will work to address complaints .

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LAGOS, Nigeria (CNN) -- A man "angered" by Manchester United's defeat to Barcelona in the final of the Champions League killed four people when he drove a minibus into a crowd celebrating the Spanish side's victory, police in Nigeria have told CNN. Barcelona fans celebrate in the city's Las Ramblas thoroughfare early Thursday morning. Ten people were also injured in the incident in the town of Ogbo, where the driver was subsequently arrested, a Port Harcourt Police spokesperson said. "He was displaying his anger at his team losing the match. The driver had passed the crowd then made a U-turn and ran into them," spokesperson Rita Inomey-Abbey said. Both Manchester United and Barcelona have a large fan base across the African continent, with millions tuning in to watch European football on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, more than 100 people were arrested in Barcelona city center in the early hours of Thursday morning following the Catalan team's 2-0 victory in Rome in the final of Europe's top club competition. Police arrested 119 young people after violence flared at a special celebration party in Place de Catalunya near the Las Ramblas thoroughfare, while 238 people suffered minor injuries. City officials estimated the damage at up to 100,000 euros ($140,000) as the youths attacked police with bottles and damaged shops, parks and public utilities such as lamp-posts. The trouble took some of the gloss off the achievement of Barcelona, who became the first team to win the Champions League, Spanish League and Spanish Cup titles in one season. Manager Josep Guardiola led the club to glory in his first season in charge, ending a period of three years without a trophy.

Man drives minibus into a crowd celebrating Barcelona's Champions League win . The Manchester United supporter was angry after his team's defeat in final . Nigerian police confirm that 10 people were also injured in the attack . Man was arrested after incident that took place in the town of Ogbo .

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(CNN) -- It is a boarding pass unlike any other. It's a memory of a day that nearly was his last on earth. US Airways passenger Barry Leonard now has the other half of his boarding pass from the fateful flight. When a FedEx package arrived at Barry Leonard's home recently, he had no idea it contained items from his flight that ended up in the Hudson River. Leonard was seated at the front of US Airways Flight 1549, and when pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger amazingly landed the plane in the river, Leonard left everything he had behind and dove into the frigid water. He thought all he had left from that January day were the clothes he had on, including a pair of jeans he still wears. But recently the package with most of his left-behind belongings showed up at his Charlotte, North Carolina, home. "Everything from the Wall Street Journal of that day to my W-2 form that I didn't even realize was in this package," he says. "You know my briefcase that I'd had for decades, it was all of those things." Watch as Leonard brings out the items recovered from the water » . As he showed CNN the contents he discovered another item -- a memorable slip of paper. "This is actually the other part of my boarding pass from January 15. As you can see here January 15, flight 1549 and my seat number 1C," he says. To help return personal items to its passengers, US Airways hired Global-BMS, a Texas-based company that recovers and restores items from large disasters. Global-BMS sorted through nearly 30,000 items from the flight, cleaning them in a slow, tedious process that often involved freeze-drying items to preserve them while they waited to be processed. "Passengers' emotional ties to their possessions because of a traumatic incident like this, it's highly emotional. So we just want to make it available," Mark Rocco, a senior vice president of Global-BMS, tells CNN. Some of the items that were returned to the 150 travelers were unusable after being submerged, especially electronic items like headphones and music players. But for a lot of folks, personal effects show a little damage but are still good. Vicki Barnhardt tried on her running shoes, and though they were a little tight at first, she wears them now when she goes jogging in Huntersville, North Carolina. She tells CNN that she evacuated the plane only with her cellphone, leaving behind her purse, her wallet, driver's license, some flash drives and other items. She got most of her possessions from the plane back -- a coat, a pair of gloves and her cash are still missing -- and the items in the boxes seem in pretty good shape. The flash drives still work, though you can see some "corrosion" on them. She also got back a three-ring binder, and all her notes are still readable. Maryann Bruce found her diamonds in the parcel that was returned to her in Cornelius, North Carolina. It brought back memories of the landing in the river and made her thankful to be alive. "I just focused on wow, you know, I got all this stuff back," she says. "I can't believe I got all this stuff back, and I'm here to get the stuff back, versus the alternative where they would've been giving it to my loved ones. I didn't relive the anguish; I relived the 'Wow, I'm here to get it.' "

US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River on January 15 . Passengers scrambled to save their lives, leaving behind personal belongings . Texas company has recovered, restored and returned most of the 30,000 items . Some items, like one woman's four flash drives, are still in good shape .

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(CNN) -- Millions of people around the world have taken part in ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the Scouting movement. Scouts renewed their promise to build a tolerant and peaceful society. Dawn celebrations involving 28 million young people took place across the globe, from Ecuador to Bhutan. In southern England, 40,000 young people from around the globe gathered to take part in the largest ever 12-day world Scout Jamboree. The island where the movement was born, Brownsea Island off the coast of England, has been the focus of celebrations, with 300 scouts from more than 160 countries attending a commemorative camp. It was on that site that Scouting founder Robert Baden-Powell held an experimental camp for 20 boys, following his experiences in the Army during the Boer War. The movement requests its members, boys and girls from the age of six, to uphold values such as trustworthiness, loyalty and to "do their best". Scouts from countries including the UK, Lebanon, Nepal, Rwanda, Serbia, Libya and Argentina, displayed their flags on the island, before taking part in a sunrise ceremony. In Romania, scouts formed a human chain around the Parliament building in the capital Bucharest to express how young people will play a role in the country's future. In Namibia, Africa, around 1,000 scouts cooked breakfast over a camp fire, and groups from Malawi camped at the top of Mulanje mountain. The Taj Mahal in India, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Sydney Opera House in Australia also witnessed sunrise ceremonies. The small gathering at Brownsea Island led the rest of the globe in renewing their Scouting promise to build a tolerant and peaceful society. A speech written by Baden-Powell during the first scout camp was also read out to the group. It includes a call for peace, comradeship and cooperation over rivalry between "classes, creeds and countries which have done so much in the past to produce wars and unrest". Alistair, 16, from Manchester, at the Brownsea Island ceremony, said: "It has made me think how one man has changed the world. "It is one world, one promise. We are all here as peace ambassadors. We are the next generation. We are the ones bringing peace forward into the world," he told the Press Association. Ana Mejia, 14, from Honduras, added: "It doesn't matter what our nationality, our religion, our color, we are a family and we have to support each other. Baden-Powell's book "Scouting for Boys" is the fourth biggest selling book in the world after the Bible, the Koran and Mao's Little Red Book. E-mail to a friend .

At least 28 million scouts across the world took part in sunrise ceremonies . Scouts renewed their promise to build a tolerant and peaceful society . Started by Robert Baden-Powell it upholds values such as trust and loyalty .

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NEW YORK -- Talking excitedly and pacing the front of her classroom, Molly Greer engages her students. "What are different paces you can go when you're reading aloud? Christina?" Molly Greer, in her New York classroom, says she now wants to make teaching her career. "Low." "Okay, low or soft, yes." On the first day of school, most of the kids in Greer's eighth-grade class could not read at a sixth-grade level. With summer almost here, it's a totally different story for these kids, who according to their school are expected to read at or near grade level. "It is an incredible thing for these students." Greer graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin. She arrived at PS 212, the multicultural magnet school in the Bronx, New York, two years ago with a degree in political science and a desire to change the world. "When I found out about Teach For America," she said, "I realized that teaching would be such an incredible way to make an impact." Teach For America is like a local Peace Corps serving some of the country's poorest public schools in inner cities and in rural areas. It has grown every year since its inception in 1990, sending 20,000 college graduates into the nation's neediest classrooms for a two-year commitment. This year, amid a tight job market, it is more popular than ever. According to the organization's Web site, their teachers get paid the same salary and benefits as beginning teachers in their area and are paid by the local school district. About 35,000 college seniors applied for the 2009 school year, a 42 percent jump from last year. "We had less competition from Wall Street firms, banks and places like that. It just led a lot of students to really think about what they wanted to do and how they could make an impact," said Kevin Huffman, executive director of Teach For America. "Eleven percent of the entire Ivy League senior class applied to join, 20 percent of African-American seniors at Ivy League schools, 8 percent of the University of Michigan and University of North Carolina," Huffman said, "just an incredible outpouring of interest by people competing to teach in low-income communities." David Stanley went through the program and now recruits for Teach For America. He sees education as this generation's civil rights issue and says there is a direct correlation between the program's popularity and President Obama's call to service. "With Obama talking about the need for people with talent to go into public education, and the fact that people are still really frustrated that we live in a country where 90 percent of kids in low-income communities don't go to college, and that the best way we can predict the number of prisons we're going to have to build in 25 years is by looking at third-grade reading skills, and so at this particular moment in time, I think it's really about getting our very best and asking them to go to the root of the problem, and the root of the problem is education." This year, Teach For America will place its largest corps ever. About 4,100 high achievers from the nation's top colleges will head to classrooms in 34 regions across the country, teaching in places like Boston, Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee; and in more rural areas such as South Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta. But schools in Appalachia and elsewhere desperately need help. Huffman said, "Districts across the country are facing the same economic pinch that many businesses are facing. And there are just fewer positions across the country available for teachers." Which is why a teachers union says those positions should go to career teachers, not inexperienced recruits who may stay only the required two years. "It's very hard to justify laying off teachers who have given service to a school system and then turn around and bring in new teachers," argued John Wilson of the National Education Association, the nation's largest professional employee organization for the advancement of public education. Besides the matter of taking away potential jobs from career teachers, unions question whether these young recruits have the right credentials and experience to handle tough classrooms. "When you're assigning these teachers to the highest poverty schools, the most challenging schools, these children need the most experienced, the most prepared teachers, and they're not getting them," Wilson said, "and that's quite a disadvantage." Teach For America maintains that its members go through a rigorous five-week training camp and that while on the job, many pursue a teaching certificate or master's degree in education. New York will be taking 330 corps members into its schools this year. Vicki Bernstein, who is in charge of teacher recruitment and quality for the city's Department of Education, says teachers coming in through alternative programs, like Teach For America, perform as well as teachers from traditional routes. "They serve some of our highest-need children, both in terms of neighborhoods that we have difficulty attracting traditionally prepared teachers and in subject areas where we have difficulty, that teacher colleges are not preparing teachers in those areas." The organization says two-thirds of its recruits stay in academics, like Greer, who now plans on teaching as a career. She says her experience in the classroom has been incredibly rewarding. "When the kid makes the two years of reading growth and they have the biggest smile on their face because they achieved their goal through their own hard work," she said, "that feeling that I contributed to that student is the best compliment I can get, because I know that kid is in a better place to succeed in their future."

Teach For America places college grads as teachers in low-income schools . Some question whether graduates are qualified to teach in tough classrooms . Group will place more than 4,000 teachers across United States this year .

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Leslie Sanchez is a Republican political strategist and co-chair of the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity Institute (www.hapinstitute.net), a pro-business advocacy organization. She was director of the Bush administration's White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001 to 2003 and is CEO of the Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics. Leslie Sanchez says it remains to be seen if Sotomayor agrees with the broader Hispanic community's values. WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Obama administration has no intention of pushing comprehensive immigration reform any time soon, but with his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the president may have found a suitable consolation prize for the Hispanic community. A prize is due. Hispanics gave 67 percent of their votes to President Obama, delivering key states like Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico to his electoral column, and sending him two new Democratic senators and three new House Democrats from those states alone. But the problem with identity politics is that not just any Hispanic will do. Obama made clear he wanted to pick a justice who would have empathy for those whose cases come before the court. As impressive as Sotomayor's life story is, it remains to be seen whether she truly has the much-talked-about "empathy" for Hispanic values and dreams. If Sotomayor is truly representative of our values, she will understand that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the Hispanic community and is our best hope for moving Hispanic households solidly into the ranks of the American middle class. In a study earlier this year, HispanTelligence, the research arm of Hispanic Business magazine, confirmed that there are at least 2.2 million Hispanic-owned businesses in the U.S., generating about $388 billion in combined revenue. Empathy with the lives of millions of Hispanics today means that she must appreciate the impact of federal, state and municipal tax and regulatory schemes on individuals and small businesses alike. Her writings should reflect the view that access to the marketplace is a constitutional guarantee no less important than freedoms of speech, religion or assembly. If she understands the hopes and aspirations of the Hispanic community, she should have a record of interpreting the Commerce Clause of the Constitution in ways that encourage individual risk-taking, free enterprise and job creation, not in ways that discourage it. Likewise, Sotomayor should show evidence of being suspicious of government's power. Many Hispanics are fresh from regimes where the rule of law has been crushed or never existed; we know that with centralized power comes arrogance, and that bureaucracies inevitably become cold, callous, unyielding and corrupt. She should be imbued with a core appreciation that our Constitution establishes a government of limited, enumerated powers, and should have a record of writings and decisions that support the conclusion that she will err on the side of limiting, not expanding, the powers and influence of government. Like all other immigrants, Hispanics came here with the hope of acquiring property for themselves and their children. We treasure as sacred our own homes, farms and land, and we know there is often little practical difference between broad government restrictions on the use and enjoyment of that property and its being taken outright. As a Supreme Court justice, Sotomayor should believe, as we Hispanics do, that the Constitution affords us due process and just compensation in either case -- and that no property should be taken unless there is a legitimate public use. As everyone knows, at the core of the Hispanic experience are our families and the opportunity to freely exercise our religion. The next justice, if she is empathetic to our lives and values, will protect the sanctity of the family and of life itself. Obama's nomination of the first Latina to the Supreme Court is a historic moment that has moved each of us, but our pride will be fleeting if she doesn't really share Hispanic values. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Leslie Sanchez.

Leslie Sanchez: Obama sought a high-court nominee who would show empathy . But, Sanchez asks, as a justice, who would Sotomayor empathize with? Hispanic community places high value on entrepreneurship and family, she says . Sanchez: Will Sotomayor share those values if confirmed to the court?

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BENTON HARBOR, Michigan (CNN) -- Former President Bush said that if Laura Bush hadn't been his wife, he isn't sure he could have counted on her vote. Laura Bush's "patience and her enthusiasm ... made our marriage a really good marriage," President Bush said. "I can promise you that her life dream when she was growing up was not to be first lady of the United States," he told a Michigan audience in one of his first major domestic speeches since leaving the White House. "Frankly, I am not so sure that if we hadn't married, she'd have voted for me," he joked of his wife, who was raised in a Democratic family. The high-tension atmosphere of the presidency strengthened his marriage, Bush said. "There's a lot of pressure in the White House, as I'm sure you can imagine. Pressure sometimes can make a marriage stronger or weaker. In my case because of her patience and her enthusiasm, it made our marriage a really good marriage," Bush said. The pressure of the presidency, he said, weighs most on family members. "It's much harder to be the son of the president than to be the president. And it's much harder to be the father of the president than to be the president," he said in a reference to his dad, former President George H.W. Bush. "And I used to have to admonish him not pay attention to what they were writing on the editorial pages about his son. I had gone through the same agony myself. And so I am confident that the end of the presidency is a great relief because of our strong love." Something else Bush called a great relief: having a vice president, Dick Cheney, who had no plans to run for the top spot. "I was pleased to have someone serve as my vice president who was not running for president, because someone who is running for president, at times, will try to distance themselves," Bush said. "If things got tough, [he] could be one of the first persons off the ship, and that would be really unpleasant in the White House." Bush said he wasn't surprised to lose public support for some of the main elements of his national security agenda. "I was frustrated because the stakes were so high in some of the decisions that I had to make. I wasn't surprised that people would forget the feeling of how they felt after September 11. I was grateful that people were moving beyond September 11. As a president, you don't want your nation to be so worried about an attack that people don't go about their lives. ... The psychology of the nation concerned me. Which then made it harder to get people to listen to you, to some of the decisions I made." The fact that Americans tuned out media coverage of the risk of terrorism wasn't surprising to him either, he said; he ignored most news coverage himself. "The truth of the matter is, I never watched the nightly news, because it was predictable, I thought. Nor did I ever pay attention to the editorial pages, good editorials or bad," he said. "I knew what was in the news. When you're president, you can get so obsessed with this stuff that I felt it would cloud your vision. "The truth of the matter is, there is so much attention paid to you, I thought it was important even in the toughest moments to be upbeat and not to be so worried about myself that I couldn't convey a sense of confidence." He mused on the transition to a far calmer existence after the presidency. "People ask, what is it like? Well, I have never stopped at a traffic light for eight years," he said. "The neighborhood we live in is nice. You know, Laura bought this house sight unseen. At least she saw. I didn't. It was like a faith-based initiative." Bush will take the stage Friday night with former President Clinton in Toronto, Ontario, for what's being termed a "conversation."

Ex-President Bush gives one of first major domestic speeches after White House . Bush discusses his marriage and life after presidency . "I am not so sure that if we hadn't married, she'd have voted for me," Bush says . Bush also says he wasn't surprised to lose public support on security issues .

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(CNN) -- Described as the largest single gathering of displaced residents in the world today, tens of thousands of civilians are seeking shelter along the Afgooye corridor outside Mogadishu, according to the United Nations. Members of the U.S. Navy take a young Somali boy to safety after rescuing him and 51 others adrift in a skiff. Fighting between government forces and Islamist militias has triggered the flight of more than 67,000 Somalis in and around Mogadishu since May 8, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday. Most of them are heading to the Afgooye corridor, a 30-kilometer (19-mile) stretch of ramshackle housing described by the United Nations' World Food Program as "a nightmare." The corridor between Mogadishu and the town of Afgooye is already home to 400,000 displaced Somalis, some of them living in huts made of twigs and branches. The clinics are already overwhelmed with malnourished and sick children. This week, Somalia's transitional president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, asked the international community "to help Somalia defend against foreign militants who have invaded the country." Ahmed told local journalists Monday that he feared these foreign fighters would turn Somalia into another Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S.-led forces are fighting Islamic extremist groups. The fighting has cut supplies of "desperately needed humanitarian aid" to the displaced Somalis near the capital city, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "We are starting today the distribution of aid for some 50,000 people in Afgooye corridor through our local partners in Somalia," the refugee office said Tuesday. "Today's distribution will include cooking sets, plastic sheeting, blankets and mats." The number of Somali refugees fleeing to nearby countries also continues to rise, with some 500,000 already in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Djibouti, Eritrea and Tanzania. Many Somalis have also made the dangerous journey across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. On Saturday, a U.S. guided missile destroyer rescued a group of 52 Somali men women and children -- including a woman who was eight months pregnant -- who had been stranded aboard a small skiff for nearly a week off Somalia's coast, the U.S. Navy said. See photos of the rescue » . A helicopter based on the USS Lake Champlain happened to spot the stranded mariners, according to the vessel's commanding officer. "It's fortunate that our helicopter was flying over the right place at the right time," Capt. Kevin P. Campbell said in a U.S. Navy news release. "I'm glad we were able to be of assistance and rescue these men, women and children. Our chief hospital corpsman stated that had we not found them at the time we did, the pregnant woman may not have survived." USS Lake Champlain has been deployed as part of the U.S. 5th Fleet's mission to patrol the Gulf of Aden region, which has been plagued by pirate attacks off Somalia's coast. "We were very fortunate to have come across these people in the state they were in," said the ship's chaplain, Lt. j.g. Jarrod Johnson. "Seeing their condition really makes your heart go out to them. You can see the relief and hope in their eyes, and hear it in their conversation."

Fighting has triggered flight of more than 67,000 Somalis since May 8 . Most heading to Afgooye corridor, a 30-kilometer stretch of ramshackle housing . President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed speaking at a conference in Mogadishu . Ahmed fears foreign fighters will turn Somalia into another Iraq or Afghanistan .

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- As the first splinters of sunlight spread their warmth on the south bank of the River Thames on Thursday, it became clear that after more than a century, the vision of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St. George had finally been realized. The Telectroscope lets Londoners and New Yorkers see each other in real time. In all its optical brilliance and brass and wood, there stood the Telectroscope: an 11.2-meter-(37 feet) long by 3.3-meter-(11 feet) tall dream of a device allowing people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and, in real time, see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. (Think 19th-century Webcam. Or maybe Victorian-age video phone.) And all the credit goes to British artist Paul St. George. If he had not been rummaging through great-grandpa Alexander's personal effects a few years ago, the Telectroscope might still exist only on paper, hidden away deep inside some old box. But fortunately, St. George could not bear that thought and thus decided he should be the one to finish what his great-grandfather had started. It was quite simply the right thing to do. Plus, it would make a pretty cool public art exhibit. Send us your videos, images or stories . During the twilight hours Tuesday, massive dirt-covered metal drill bits miraculously emerged -- one by the Thames near the Tower Bridge and the other on Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge in New York -- completing the final sections of great-grandfather Alexander's transatlantic tunnel. The drills were removed Wednesday night and replaced with identical Telectroscopes at both ends, allowing Londoners and New Yorkers to wake up Thursday, look over to the far and distant shore and stare at each other for a while (the telescope-like contraption permits visual but not vocal communication). Of course, only part of this story is true. St. George is an artist in Britain who does have a grandfather -- minus the great prefix -- named Alexander. And the trans-Atlantic tunnel is really a trans-Atlantic broadband network rounded off on each end with HD cameras, according to Tiscali, an Italian Internet provider handling the technical side of the project. As for the Telectroscope, well, it was a fanciful idea that, according to St. George, came about from a typo made by a 19th-century reporter who misspelled Electroscope, a device used to measure electrostatic charges - as Telectroscope. "The journalist also misunderstood what it was about and wrote in the article that it was a device for the suppression of absence," St. George said. "The accidental hope captured their imagination, and lots of people at the end of the 19th century thought it was a great idea." The Telectroscope captured St. George's imagination five years ago, when he began pondering how to do a project on the childhood fantasy of digging a hole to the opposite side of the Earth. And because the artist also happens to have an expertise in Victorian chronophotography -- a precursor to cinematography -- he had a slight idea of where to look for the proper equipment. "We all have that idea in our head if we could make a tunnel to the other side of the Earth," St. George said."But we are not all crazy enough to actually try and do it." St. George was crazy enough to actually try and do it, but he realized he could not do the digging alone. So about two years ago, he pitched the idea to Artichoke, the British arts group responsible for taking the Sultan's Elephant -- a 42-ton mechanical creature -- for a stroll through central London in 2006. The company was immediately taken by St. George's idea. "The whole thing is about seeing what is real and what isn't real and how the world is," said Nicki Webb, a co-founder of Artichoke. "Is it nighttime when we are in daytime, and does it look familiar to us or not?" When the sun illuminated the lens of the Telectroscope next to the Thames, it was, of course, still nighttime in New York. So the screen inside the scope broadcast back only an empty sidewalk silently framed by the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. But then something miraculous occurred. A police officer and a street cleaner walked into the frame. Stopped. And waved. The Telectroscope will be on display and open to the public 24 hours a day in London and New York until June 15. Artichoke is arranging requests to synchronize special reunions between friends and family or, the company hopes, maybe even a marriage proposal.

Telectroscope allows Londoners, New Yorkers to see each other in real time . Giant scope was Victorian age idea, came about when reporter made typo . Artist St. George inspired by childhood notion of digging to other side of Earth .

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(CNN) -- One was the archetypal military strongman, intent on maintaining the social order and saving his country from "catastrophe." The other was a charismatic shipyard electrician and trade union leader who was just as determined to lead his countrymen to freedom. Wojciech Jaruzelski and Lech Walesa attend the first multi-party session of the Polish parliament in 1989. Yet nowadays Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last leader of communist Poland, and Lech Walesa both claim, in their different ways, to have played their part in setting Poland on the path to democracy. The rise of Solidarity, the union and social movement which Walesa founded among the dockers of Gdansk in 1980, was crucial to the ultimate collapse of communism in Poland and across the Soviet bloc. Feted in the West, Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 after spending nearly a year locked up as Jaruzelski clamped down on dissent, becoming a symbol of a rising tide of resentment behind the Iron Curtain. By 1989, Solidarity had become an unstoppable social movement, sweeping to victory as the communist authorities relinquished their grip on power by allowing free elections. Walesa describes the union as a screw turning in the opposite direction to the communist regime, ultimately "destroying the engine." "The system was 10 times less efficient than the western system," Walesa told CNN, recalling his decade-long struggle. "It paid less, life was worse. Each country enslaved by the Soviets was different and in Poland we had TV and people could travel so we knew life could be better... and we'd never given up." But Jaruzelski still believes that without his decision to impose martial law in 1981, Poland's revolt against Soviet domination would have been as ruthlessly and violently quashed by Moscow as had those in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. "For me personally it was a great tragedy, the consequences of which I've felt to this day," Jaruzelski told CNN. "Martial law was evil. But it was less evil than the real and inevitable threat we were facing. There was a threat of an explosion -- and an explosion in Poland would have meant an explosion throughout Europe." As a key link in the Soviet Union's chain of Eastern European satellite states, Jaruzelski believes Moscow would never have allowed Poland to break away peacefully: "I feared a terrible catastrophe. If martial law had not happened, Poland might have been flooded by a sea of blood." Walesa admits the threat of Soviet intervention in the early 1980s was real, but says Solidarity had already won the argument against communism by the time Jaruzelski imposed martial law. "I knew we were not going to fight," he said. "Because in Poland there were over 200,000 Soviet troops, they had nuclear arms, and they shot better than us. We could conquer them only this way: You can arrest us, but when we come out we do the same, and we will never work for communism again." Even his arrest and imprisonment only deepened Walesa's belief that Jaruzelski's government could be toppled: "My friends advised me to run away but I made a different decision. When they came to arrest me, I said, 'You have lost, I have won. You have just put the last nails into the coffin of communism.'" These days Jaruzelski is no defender of the system which he served, describing communism as "beautiful and noble, but utopian." Yet he believes Solidarity's demands in the early 1980s amounted to an "economic time bomb" and that Poland was not ready for democracy at the time. "The system was bad, I admit it today," he said. "But at the time, I wasn't aware of that. Everything has to ripen -- corn, fruit, man and societies. Western countries took centuries to arrive at democracy. Except for six or seven years after World War I Poland had never been democratic so it was a difficult process." The Polish authorities also realized the urgency of economic and political reform, Jaruzelski adds, and had already begun the process before the Round Table talks with Solidarity in 1989 that led to elections. "It was a difficult and painful process for both sides," he said. "I can talk primarily of the government side, and what huge resistance I had to overcome among the people who were in power -- in the party, in the state, the army and the security apparatus." Both men pay tribute to outside forces which made the leap to democracy possible. For Jaruzelski, Mikhail Gorbachev's emergence in the Kremlin marked a "breakthrough moment" in which the threat of Soviet military intervention in Poland was lifted, and a possible end to the Cold War loomed into sight. Walesa and Jaruzelski also acknowledge the unique role of the Polish-born Pope John Paul II and the Catholic church in brokering peaceful talks between the two sides. For Jaruzelski, though, the fall of communism was not the product of Solidarity alone or a single summer of upheaval but "a great river made up of numerous streams." "Nobody should monopolize that victory," he said. "Because in this stream there was Gorbachev; there was Reagan and then Bush, who caused the weakening of the Soviet Union by the arms race; there was Solidarity; there was the pope, and there were also -- which I will say without humbleness -- the reformists within the authorities at the time." Both Jaruzelski and Walesa paint themselves as reluctant leaders. Jaruzelski describes his decision to become Polish prime minister as "one of the greatest mistakes of my life," while Walesa, who was elected Polish president in 1990, says it was never his wish to lead his country -- "but who else could have done it?" Jaruzelski remains a divisive figure in modern Poland, derided by many as a living symbol of an oppressive past and occasionally summoned to court rooms to answer charges relating to his career as a leading servant of the communist regime. "My generation, which remembers those times and can evaluate them in a balanced way, is passing away," he said. "And the new, younger generation, through school, books and TV, are being indoctrinated to be critical of martial law. Still, a large part of the society -- the majority, I think -- considers martial law to have been inevitable and justified." Yet even Jaruzelski says Poles can be "proud" of their role in the downfall of communist regimes across Europe: "The Polish elections preceded the revolutions in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall. That impulse, that example that came from us, was of great significance and I think it is our great historical tribute." Walesa, unsurprisingly, offers a more direct assessment: "Poland knocked out the teeth of the Soviet bear. Once we had done that, knocking down the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, all was made possible -- but only once the bear had no teeth." CNN's Claudia Rebaza interviewed Wojciech Jaruzelski. CNN's Fredrik Pleitgen interviewed Lech Walesa.

Former Polish leaders Jaruzelski, Walesa speak to CNN . Jaruzelski was military leader who declared martial law in 1981 . Walesa was leader of Solidarity, first president of post-communist Poland . Both men claim to have played key roles in Poland's transition to democracy .

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(CNN) -- The winner of the 82nd annual Scripps National Spelling Bee said Friday she is "pretty excited" but a little tired. Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kansas, reacts to winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night. "This has been my dream for so long; I've always wanted to win the bee," Kavya Shivashankar, 13, of Olathe, Kansas, told CNN. "I was just really excited when I was able to go up and spell the last word." The eighth-grader won $40,000 in cash and prizes for nailing the final word, "Laodicean," which means lukewarm or indifferent, particularly in matters of politics or religion. This year's bee -- an event that has skyrocketed in popularity thanks to exposure on television and in movies -- started Tuesday in Washington with a record 293 spellers. Kavya endured 15 rounds. In an event that has seen contestants crack under the strain of the national spotlight, Kavya -- competing in her fourth national finals -- appeared composed throughout. Watch the poised winner describe the thrill » . As she spelled words such as "phoresy," "hydrargyrum" and "huisache," she calmly went through the routine of asking each word's pronunciation, origin and roots before ticking their spellings off for the judges. "I focus so much on my word; I don't really pay attention to all the cameras and photographers and all the media in front of me," she said Friday. Kavya's father, who is her spelling coach, would tap his foot in time as she spelled the words, and at one point he appeared so confident that he waved to someone while his daughter was in the middle of spelling a word. Second-place finisher Tim Ruiter of Reston, Virginia, bowed out after misspelling "Maecenas," meaning a generous patron of the arts. Kavya said she would miss competing in the spelling bee, as the rules do not permit her to enter next year. "It was such a big part of my life, and I love doing it," she said. However, she may someday have a new role in the competition. "If my [little] sister gets to D.C. sometime soon, I'd really love to help and coach her," she said. Kavya attends California Trail Junior High School in the Kansas City suburb. Her hobbies include swimming, cycling and traditional Indian dance, according to the contest's Web site. She plans on becoming a neurosurgeon. The first National Spelling Bee took place in 1925, with five contestants. CNN's Devon Sayers contributed to this report.

Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kansas, wins in fourth trip to national finals . The 13-year-old eighth-grader will receive $40,000 in cash and prizes . Focus on task keeps cameras and media from distracting her, Kavya says . Girl may return to scene if younger sister does well in future competitions .

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher on Saturday denied that he is the man shown pointing at the Google Street View camera as it drove past his local pub in London last summer. Liam Gallagher says the figure captured on Google Earth outside a pub in London is not him. "Just saw google earth apparently that's meant to be me, who ... wears legwarmers with reeboks?? Not this kid!! LG," he wrote on Twitter. Though available for a while in the United States, Google Street View only launched in Britain last week. As in America, the launch in Britain prompted people all over the country to try to find themselves or spot funny images and famous faces on the service. Gallagher was apparently spotted outside The Queens pub in Camden, in north London, a place he's known to frequent. The picture shows a man dressed in a dark T-shirt and long shorts sitting at an outdoor table. He points at the camera, obviously having seen the Google car and its Street View camera drive by. The service blurs people's faces so it is hard to confirm whether it is Gallagher. Though the man isn't wearing legwarmers, Gallagher is apparently talking about the man's ankle-high shoes and thick black socks.

Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher denies Google Earth appearance . Fans said man captured on camera drinking outside London pub was singer . Gallagher said the man was too embarrassingly dressed to be him .

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(CNN) -- An American human rights group documenting widespread sexual violence against Darfuri women in Sudan and Chad has called for "vigorous prosecution of rape as a war crime." Sudanese women in a refugee camp in southern Chad in March. Physicians for Human Rights, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, issued a report Sunday "documenting the scope and long-term impact of rape and other sexual violence" experienced by women who fled the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur and now live as refugees in neighboring Chad. The report -- titled "Nowhere To Turn: Failure To Protect, Support and Assure Justice for Darfuri Women" -- is based on interviews with 88 female refugees living in Chad's Farchana refugee camp. The study was done with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. "Many Darfuri women refugees live in a nightmare of memories of past trauma compounded by the constant threat of sexual violence around the camps now," said Susannah Sirkin, the physician group's deputy director. "Women who report being raped are stigmatized, and remain trapped in places of perpetual insecurity. There's no one to stop the rapes, no one to turn to for justice for past or ongoing crimes, and little psycho-social support to address their prolonged and unimaginable traumas." Dr. Sondra Crosby, a Physicians for Human Rights consultant and expert in refugee trauma, said "the atmosphere of intimidation was palpable as we listened to women describing their profound suffering and fear, and their yearning to return safely and with dignity to their former lives." Of those refugees interviewed, "32 reported instances of confirmed or highly probable rape" -- 17 in Darfur and 15 in Chad, the group said. "Among the instances of rape reported in Chad, the vast majority (10 of 11 confirmed reports) occurred when women left the camps to gather firewood." And just over half of the 88 women interviewed -- 46 of them -- live in fear of sexual assaults around the refugee camp. The group supports the issuing of International Criminal Court warrants against the Sudanese perpetrators. The group also called for "legal reforms in Chad to end impunity for sexual violence," and for "effective psychosocial support to survivors." And it said increased protections are needed by police and peacekeepers, including "effective firewood patrols." The conflict in Darfur began in 2003 after rebels in the western region of Sudan began attacking government positions. Sudan's government responded with a fierce military campaign that has led to some 200,000 deaths and forced 2 million people to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.

88 Darfuri women interviewed in Chad described "profound" suffering and fear . Expert in refugee trauma says "the atmosphere of intimidation was palpable" 200,000 people have died, 2 million have fled the region since fighting began in 2003 .

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Fourth seed Elena Dementieva avoided an embarrassing early exit when comeback queen Jelena Dokic's French Open hopes were ended by a back injury on Thursday. Jelena Dokic was left in tears after being forced to retire hurt against Elena Dementieva at the French Open. Dokic, taking part in her first French Open since 2004 following well-documented family problems, won the first set 6-2 and -- after her first break for treatment -- broke the 2004 finalist to lead 3-2 in their second round clash. But the Russian won the next two games as the tearful former world No.4 was reduced to walking pace before calling it quits. "I went for a return and I just went down and couldn't get back up," she said. "It's very painful and very disappointing because I felt as if I had the match in my hands." Dokic, now ranked 80th after reviving her career with a run to the quarter-finals of the Australian Open in January, had won her opening match on Tuesday when she came back from a set down to beat Slovenia's Karolina Sprem 3-6 6-1 6-2. The 26-year-old's career had nosedived following her highly-publicized split from controversial mentor and father Damir. Dementieva will next play Australian 30th seed Samantha Stosur, who won her second-round match in straight sets against Belgium's Yanina Wickmayer. Earlier on Thursday, the Williams sisters also progressed through to the third round with contrasting victories. Second seed Serena crushed Virginia Ruano Pascual 6-2 6-0 to set up a clash with another unseeded Spaniard, Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez. Third seed Venus survived a scare against unseeded Czech Lucie Safarova before completing a match that was halted on Wednesday night due to bad light. The American saved a match point at 5-4 down in the third set before managing to hold, break her opponent and then serve out to love for a 6-7 (5-7) 6-2 7-5 success. Venus, who lost the 2002 final to Serena, will next play Hungarian 29th seed Agnes Szavay. Fifth seed Jelena Jankovic had no such troubles in beating Magdalena Rybarikova of Slovakia 6-1 6-2, setting up a third-round clash with unseeded Austrian Jarmila Groth. Seventh-seeded Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova also advanced along with Danish 10th seed Caroline Wozniacki, but 13th seed Marion Bartoli of France made a surprise exit. The 2007 Wimbledon finalist lost 6-3 7-5 to Tathiana Garbin of Italy, who will next take on unseeded Virginie Razzano of France.

Jelena Dokic's emotional French Open comeback ended by a back injury . Former world No.4 was in tears before walking off the court at Roland Garros . She had led Elena Dementieva 6-2 3-2 in her first Paris outing since 2004 . But she called it quits after Russian fourth seed won the next two games .

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(ESSENCE) -- Two weeks ago, 3-year-old Jaquan Reed was fatally shot on Chicago, Illinois', West Side. Men participate in the Million Father March to support children going to school. While the case shook the city, such shootings involving children are no longer rare in the Windy City. Within the current academic year, 36 Chicago-area students were killed. Essence.com spoke to Phillip Jackson, a well-known political activist in the city and also founder of Black Star Project, a Chicago-based community outreach group, about what is being done to end the senseless shootings involving children. The following is an edited version of that interview: . ESSENCE: There have been so many shootings and deaths. Please tell us what's happening in Chicago? ESSENCE: Xerox names Ursula Burns CEO . Phillip Jackson: This is a national catastrophe that is happening while we as a country do nothing. We're asking for national attention. This is a pandemic. We will not be able to solve this problem in Chicago unless they can solve this same problem in Houston [Texas] and other cities. Watch our panelists talk about the growing violence in Chicago » . ESSENCE: The nation's first black president is from Chicago. And you still do not feel like there is enough attention placed on this problem? Jackson: Newspapers from all over the world have come to our offices this past week to say, "What is happening in President Barack Obama's backyard?" And 75 percent of the children murdered here in Chicago happened within eight miles of President Obama's former house. So if he doesn't respond as president, and we are hoping he does, he needs to respond as a resident. ESSENCE: What has been the police response? Jackson: They've put together a 400-unit gang SWAT team. They're trying to match guns with the gangs. But with all of that they can't stop one murder because they're approaching it from the wrong way. ESSENCE: Obama's time in office . ESSENCE: What is the right way to approach it? Jackson: Instill strong families and strong communities. Build strong parenting groups. Do you know what has been the best mentoring organization in the United States of America? Street gangs. ESSENCE: In other cities, where there is a lot of gang violence, like Baltimore [Maryland], there are regular people in the community coming together and trying to fix it. What are regular people doing about this in Chicago? Jackson: First of all, they're raising their voices. Number two, they're rallying, they're marching, and they're organizing. That's what this effort is going to take. Number three, they're engaging in recreational programs. ESSENCE: Toledo cops say teen provoked them . So there is more happening at the grassroots level than at the federal level. But those people cannot succeed without support. And that's why we're asking President Obama to bring his resources. ESSENCE: What is the mind-set of Chicago youth with all of these horrendous acts of violence occurring? Jackson: Hopelessness, desperation, anger. They live in America. They see how America takes care of the whole world but won't take care of them in the communities in which they live.

Essence speaks to political activist in Chicago about children's deaths . 36 Chicago-area students killed in current academic school year . 75 percent of children killed within 8 miles of President Obama's former house . Children see how America takes care of the world but not them, activist says .

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LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets in January, will star in a reality television series about her family, a TV executive said. Nadya Suleman will star in a "quasi-reality TV series," says a TV executive. The Eyeworks executive, who asked not to be named, confirmed a Us magazine report that quoted Suleman's lawyer, Jeff Czech, saying a deal has been reached after months of negotiations. The "quasi-reality TV series" would be "an arrangement whereby several events in the children's lives would be filmed in a documentary series," Czech told Us. Eyeworks' British division will produce the show, the Eyeworks executive said. "There is a story to be told" about the family, he said. "They might be several shows aired during a year. There are all kinds of possibilities. It really depends on what the networks want," Czech was quoted as saying. Though he said the show has not been named, Suleman has sought to trademark her media nickname -- Octomom -- for a TV show and a line of diapers. Suleman has six other children. All 14 were conceived through in-vitro fertilization.

Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets in January and had 6 children already . Suleman will star in a TV show, produced by Eyeworks' British division . The "quasi-reality TV series" would film the lives of her children in documentary style .

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- A crude bomb made from a water bottle was used in an explosion that damaged a Starbucks coffee shop on New York's posh Upper East Side, New York police said. Monday's explosion shattered glass at the Manhattan Starbucks coffee shop. No one was injured. The Memorial Day explosion damaged the shop, but no one was injured and no motive has been identified for the bombing. "We believe it to be ... a six- to 10-ounce water bottle that was wrapped in black tape," New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told CNN on Wednesday. He said the bomb's powder may have come from fireworks components, including a fuse. The powder was placed inside the bottle in a way that made it "more powerful," Kelly said. He said a forensics unit is working on finding fingerprints. The homemade bomb, which went off around 3:30 a.m., shattered glass, but no one was injured. The store was not open. Police have said the device was planted under a wooden bench outside the coffee shop. "We have a witness who believes he saw two young people he describes as teenagers, both white males," the commissioner said. One is described as blond, wearing a red shirt, and the other had brown hair and wore a gray shirt. Kelly said the witness saw the two approach the Starbucks, then looked away. After the witness heard the blast, he said he saw the two young people run away from the building. Kelly said that for now, it's impossible to say whether the bombing was politically motivated. "We don't know if they were a corporate target or somebody had a problem [with] what was going on on that corner, in general ... we're not ruling anything out." In 1999, a Starbucks in Seattle, Washington, was vandalized during a world trade conference. In February 2008, a Vancouver Starbucks and another restaurant were damaged by an overnight explosion. New York police say they're aware of both incidents, but Kelly says it is too early to draw any conclusions. "In the past, they [Starbucks] sort have been identified with the globalization movement. ... We're not saying that this is the case in this matter."

New York police say the bomb outside a Starbucks was made from a water bottle . The Memorial Day explosion damaged store but injured no one . The blast happened about 3:30 a.m. on the posh Upper East Side of Manhattan . Suspects and motive -- including possibility of political motivation -- still being sought .

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg plans to undergo a "precautionary" course of chemotherapy following her surgery last month for pancreatic cancer, the Supreme Court announced Tuesday. President Obama greets Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on her arrival for his February 24 address to Congress. The treatments will begin later this month at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington, the court said. In a statement, the justice said the treatment is "not expected to affect my schedule at the court. Thereafter, it is anticipated that I will require only routine examinations to assure my continuing health." Ginsburg, who turned 76 on Sunday, has consistently signaled her health outlook is positive. She termed the February 5 removal of her cancer "successful," and was back on the bench 18 days later when the high court resumed oral arguments. Ginsburg's post-op recovery has gone well, and doctors and the family are cautiously optimistic, court sources said. The disease was caught early and had not spread beyond her pancreas, doctors have said. "Cancer patients with no evidence of disease after surgery but who have a statistical chance that there is microscopic spread often get chemotherapy to kill off that disease," explained Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. Getting back into her regular routine was important to the justice, and it would help her cope with future medical treatment, sources close to her said. She successfully fought colorectal cancer a decade ago. Almost 35,000 Americans are estimated to have died from pancreatic cancer in 2008, making it the fourth leading cause of cancer death overall, according to the American Cancer Society. For all ages combined, the one-year survival rate is 24 percent; the five-year survival rate is 5 percent. The low survival rate is a result of the disease commonly going undetected until it has reached an advanced stage. Ginsburg -- the only woman on the Supreme Court -- entered a New York hospital after a CT scan in January "revealed a small tumor, approximately one centimeter across, in the center of the pancreas," a previous news release said. She has kept a busy schedule, on and off the bench. Since her diagnosis, she has released three opinions, attended President Obama's February 24 address to Congress, gone to an opera production in the company of Justice David Souter, and traveled for several speeches. She told an audience last week in Boston, Massachusetts, that she had no plans to retire, but on the subject of court retirements she hinted cryptically, "We haven't had any of those for some time, but surely we will soon." Ginsburg, Souter and Justice John Paul Stevens frequently have been mentioned as likely to step down in the next few years. Ginsburg also said her former colleague, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- herself a cancer survivor -- had offered her some good advice. "She said when you're up to chemotherapy, you do it on Friday, Friday afternoon. You'll get over it over the weekend, and you'll be able to come to the court on Monday," said Ginsburg, who noted O'Connor returned to work nine days after her breast cancer diagnosis. "So I've been following her advice meticulously." Ginsburg has been on the Supreme Court since 1993.

Supreme Court justice, 76, will receive chemotherapy treatments . Doctors removed small tumor from her pancreas in February . Ruth Bader Ginsburg consistently signals her health outlook is good . Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave Ginsburg advice on chemotherapy .

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(CNN) -- Arizona reported its fourth death from the H1N1 virus, commonly known as swine flu, health officials said Wednesday. The H1N1 strain is relatively mild, but it's being closely watched for mutations that might become severe. The victim was the second child in the Pima County area to die of flu complications, health officials said. The age of child who died Wednesday was not released, but the patient's health was "medically compromised." Earlier, officials in Cook County, Illinois, recorded their second death from H1N1. The latest victim, from suburban Chicago, died within the past couple of days and had "significant underlying medical conditions," said spokeswoman Kelly Jakubek. The first fatality occurred in a Chicago resident over the weekend. That victim also had underlying medical conditions, Jakubek said. Citing family privacy, she would not reveal the victims' ages or genders. By late Wednesday, the most-recent deaths in Arizona and Illinois had not been included in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's official tally of 11 U.S. deaths from the disease. They are in Arizona (three), Missouri (one), New York (two), Texas (three), Utah (one) and Washington (one). Nor did the CDC's count include two more deaths reported by the New York City Department of Health and Hygiene. The World Health Organization has counted 14,557 cases of H1N1 -- 96 of them fatal -- in 48 countries. Seasonal flu typically kills 36,000 Americans in any given year, though such cases usually have tapered off by this time of year, according to the CDC. Though the H1N1 strain is considered relatively mild, public health officials have been scrutinizing its spread since it was first identified in April in Mexico because they are concerned it could mutate and become more severe.

Arizona reports its fourth death linked to H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu . Officials in Cook County, Illinois, report their second flu death . Latest two deaths not in CDC's official tally of 11 swine-flu deaths in U.S. World Health Organization has counted 14,557 cases of H1N1 -- 96 of them fatal .

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(CNET) -- If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house. The production team at Pixar faced many new technological challenges on "Up," its tenth feature film. That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on "Up," its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday. There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen. In "Up," the story revolves around the main character, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, who, frustrated with his mundane life, ties the thousands of balloons to his house and sets off for adventures in South America. A small boy ends up marooned on board, and hilarity ensues. The cluster of balloons is so central to the film's branding--it's called "Up," after all--that to promote the film, Pixar teamed up with two of the world's cluster ballooning experts for a nationwide tour involving a real-life flying armchair and dozens of huge, colorful balloons. "You have a movie that's about a house that flies, which is a pretty far-fetched idea," said Steve May, the supervising technical director on "Up." "We all know, from kids' parties, how a bunch of balloons behave, so if we could animate balloons in a realistic way, the believability that the house could fly would sell." For May, "Up" producer Jonas Rivera, director Pete Docter, and the many others involved in making the film, believability was key, even within the context of a story about a flying house. And while a major part of instilling that believability must come from a well-conceived and executed story and script, the animation is no less responsible for winning over potentially skeptical audiences. Balloons, the mother of animation invention May said that the animation department at Pixar never even considered hand-animating the balloons. But even standard computer animation wouldn't be up to the task, because of the N-squared complexity involved in the thousands of interdependent balloons. Instead, the studio's computer whizzes figured out a way to turn the problem over to a programmed physical simulator, which, employing Newtonian physics, was able to address the animation problem. "These are relatively simple physical equations, so you program them into the computer and therefore kind of let the computer animate things for you, using those physics," said May. "So in every frame of the animation, (the computer can) literally compute the forces acting on those balloons, (so) that they're buoyant, that their strings are attached, that wind is blowing through them. And based on those forces, we can compute how the balloon should move." This process is known as procedural animation, and is described by an algorithm or set of equations, and is in stark contrast to what is known as key frame animation, in which the animators explicitly define the movement of an object or objects in every frame. Procedural animation has been around for some time, but May suggested that even the most difficult uses of it in the past don't come close to what Pixar had to achieve in "Up." Pixar fans may remember the scenes in "Cars" of a stadium full of 300,000 car "fans" cheering on a high-speed race below, each of which was independently animated. That, too, was done with procedural animation, May said, since creating so many cars individually would have been a non-starter. But even that complex computation problem didn't approach the balloon cluster issue in "Up": the "Cars" scene involved no interdependent physics. Getting the simulator humming properly is no easy task, as one might imagine. May said it involves setting rules for how individual objects should behave, giving the computer these initial conditions, and then "let it run." Oddly, because the simulator does indeed run with those conditions and rules and the peculiarities of physics, the animators found themselves without precise control of what would happen with the balloons--or other objects in the film animated using these techniques. "If the (balloon cluster) is moving too slow, we increase the amount of wind, and then run the simulator again," May said. "Then maybe we turn the wind down. It's a little fun science experiment where sometimes, hopefully by the end, we're getting what we want." Losing control of balloons Sometimes, given the vagaries of physics and chaos theory, unexpected things happen. The computer team inputs the rules and because some of the initial conditions are random, "you get semi-random results." One of May's favorite examples is that early in the film, when the house first is hoisted aloft by the balloons, a small group of the balloons actually broke off of the main cluster. May said that this breakaway group of balloons is actually visible--albeit very briefly--in "Up." Eagle-eyed moviegoers can see the escaped balloons in the upper right-hand side of the screen, he said. "We didn't mean for that to happen," he said, "but (we said) 'It's cool, let's keep it.'" Even being able to make such choices wasn't possible at the beginning of the film's production, however. May said Pixar's physical simulator, an open-source program called ODE, couldn't initially handle the complexity of modeling the behavior of more than 10,000 balloons. "We could handle about 500 (balloons), and we knew we needed tens of thousands," he said. "We knew we needed to develop a new simulator software pipeline...to handle an order of magnitude more complex simulation." Of course, at Pixar, adjusting to evolving computer needs on the fly is nothing new. In fact, May said the studio has done so in one form or another on many of its films. For example, he said that when the studio made "Monsters, Inc.," it had to figure out how to animate the movie's monsters' fur. Similarly, when Pixar made "Finding Nemo," the animators had to figure out how to simulate underwater scenes. "We had to learn about (how light refracts under water), and murk and how particulates float under water," May said. And in "Up," too, there were additional animation challenges. Among them were figuring out how to animate and render the feathers on Kevin, a bird that is a major character in the film, and how to make the cloth on (main character) Carl's clothes seem believable. Carl's threads were "the hardest clothing we've ever had to animate here," said May, "in part because Carl's a (small) man in an oversized suit. That was another case of (using) the physical simulation, and of setting up rules for how cloth should behave. And the looser the clothing, the more it can behave badly." Even Carl himself presented some animation difficulties, May said, because the character's head is shaped like a cube. Like many other elements in "Up," the cube-shape of Carl's face wasn't a random whim of the director. Rather, it is a story element: May explained that Carl's character is based on someone who, as a young man, was vivacious and adventurous. But as he grew older, his small house became more and more surrounded by buildings, and "it's like his world has compressed him into a square." Thus, a cube-like face. But May said animating his facial expressions, which must fit into this cube shape, was complicated. Smiles, for example, had to come up and wrap around his cheek. Still, for the award-winning filmmakers at Pixar, the goal is to make even the hardest animation problems look simple on the silver screen. As producer Jonas Rivera put it, "The audience looks at (the balloon cluster) and says, 'Oh, that's pretty.' But they have no idea how much work went into it. We worked on that for over a year. (Then) the kid takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair. My mother will never know that took 15 people six weeks." © 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. CNET, CNET.com and the CNET logo are registered trademarks of CBS Interactive Inc. Used by permission.

Pixar faced many new technological challenges on its film "Up," opening Friday . The movie is about an old man who flies away on a house lifted by balloons . Pixar used a programmed physical simulator to animate thousands of balloons . Studio's goal is to make even the hardest animation problems look simple on screen .

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(CNN) -- River waters spread over highways and farms, towns and parks in Washington on Thursday, shutting down traffic on a 20-mile stretch of heavily traveled Interstate 5 between Seattle and Oregon and threatening the federal roadway north of Seattle. Rescue boats are sent out Wednesday in Pierce County, south of Seattle, Washington. "If you're trying to do commerce between Portland (Oregon) and Seattle, there is no way right now," said Bob Calkins, a spokesman for the Washington State Emergency Operations Center in Camp Murray, near Tacoma. "That's the major way into Washington state from Oregon." Flooding south of Seattle near Chehalis covered parts of I-5 with 30 inches of water, prompting its closure until at least Monday, state transportation officials said. And state and local roads were also victims of the water. "The problem is, the one real good detour is just as flooded," Calkins said. North of Seattle, a levee failure in Arlington brought the Stillaguamish River up to the edges of I-5, which remained open although some access ramps were closed, transportation officials said. The rain also caused Amtrak to suspend service between Seattle and Portland until Saturday, "with no alternative transportation," the rail line said Thursday on its Web site. iReport.com: Are you there? Share pics, video . Across the state, a number of rivers had crested, but flooded roads remained hazardous. The risk of landslides was high, leading to the closure of all passes across the Cascades, officials said. A meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Seattle said 15 inches of rain that began Monday had ended. The rainfall swept across virtually all of the state, but its biggest effects occurred along the western half of Puget Sound, Calkins said. The swollen Puyallup River threatened the city by the same name, but Loretta Cutter, sprang into action. Watch how Washington copes with wicked weather » . The administrator of a group home and a longtime resident there helped evacuate 47 residents from the Valley Community Inn, a home for the mentally challenged and developmentally disabled, to a shelter at a nearby church. And she made sure her husband and a grandson left their one-story rambler house and got safely situated. "It's a situation you don't realize you are going to be in; it's always someone else," she said from the shelter at the Sunrise Baptist Church in Puyallup, a few miles east of Tacoma. "It was pretty traumatizing to all of us." Cutter is one of 40,000 western Washington state residents in at least 19 communities whom authorities asked to leave their homes Thursday amid heavy flooding along the region's rivers and streams. Only 260 of them sought shelter Wednesday night at the 39 shelters for people, Calkins said. In addition, seven livestock shelters and two pet shelters were set up, he said. Meanwhile, the torrential downpours of the past few days transformed Thursday into drizzle, common in western Washington, which typically gets less rainfall in any given year than does Miami. "It just drizzles every day, or so it seems, whereas in Miami, when it rains, it's a bellywasher," Calkins said. This week's flooding was worsened by a warm spell that melted up to 7 feet of snow that had fallen around Puget Sound, he said. Health authorities have issued occasional boil-water orders, but that's not what worries Calkins. "The larger issue is, as people go to their homes, they may be walking through floodwater that is contaminated by sewage," he said.

NEW: A 20-mile stretch of Interstate 5 between Seattle area and Oregon closed . Amtrak suspends service between Seattle and Portland until Saturday . More than 40 evacuated from care home in Puyallup, Washington . Up to 15 inches of rain reported in some areas of Washington state .

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- She may have finished second, but Susan Boyle continued to make newspaper headlines in the UK Sunday following her shock defeat in the final of "Britain's Got Talent." Susan Boyle fans watch her perform for the final time on "Britain's Got Talent." "Boyle Backlash" said the headline in the tabloid News of the World, suggesting that the Scottish 48-year-old's alleged "four-letter tantrum" earlier this week had influenced millions of viewers to switch their votes to dance act Diversity. The buildup to Saturday night's live final had been dominated by reports that Boyle lost her temper in a London hotel and had even considered pulling out of the talent show finale. The Mail on Sunday said she had been been "comforted by psychiatrists" ahead of Saturday's final. "They have a whole army of doctors, psychiatrists and experts all available to any contestant at any time. They have all been taking great care of Susan," the paper quoted "Britain's Got Talent" judge Piers Morgan as saying. Watch how Boyle's rise to fame has been an emotional ride » . In Scotland, where crowds had gathered in Boyle's hometown of Blackburn in anticipation of victory, celebration parties were stopped in their tracks as the unexpected result was announced. "Boyle foiled in final: Susan's dream is over," said the headline in the Sunday Mail. Earlier, the paper said, Blackburn's community center had been "a sea of hands" as Boyle performed her signature tune, "I Dreamed a Dream" from the musical "Les Miserables." "They stood with tears in their eyes as Susan hit every note. Stamping and chanting her name, her fellow villagers could not have been more proud." Watch the dramatic end to Susan Boyle's dream » . But "the cheers were caught in the collective gullet ... as dance troupe Diversity gatecrashed this most expectant of parties," the Sunday Herald reported. "Jaws were left agape. Tears were shed. And then the supportive chanting of 'SuBo' began again." Boyle could still be the real winner from the series, which became a global hit after clips of her audition of "I Dreamed a Dream" racked up millions of hits on YouTube. Did Susan deserve to win? Sound Off below . "£6M superstar" said the Sunday Mirror, claiming that "Britain's Got Talent" impresario Simon Cowell plans to take Boyle across the Atlantic to "conquer the U.S." The News of the World upped Boyle's likely earnings on the back of "Britain's Got Talent" to £8 million ($13 million). On top of a multi-million dollar record deal and share of album sales, Boyle is also set to earn from a Hollywood movie of her rags-to-riches life, a book deal, and millions more from image rights, endorsements and television appearances, the paper said. In an interview with the News of the World, Cowell said Boyle could be the biggest star he had ever discovered. "They don't care in America whether she wins a British TV show -- they care about the woman they saw singing on YouTube," a Cowell insider also told the paper. "If anything, £8 million in her first year might be an underestimate." Meanwhile, competition winners Diversity are also set to cash in on their success with a film deal and a possible slot supporting Michael Jackson when the superstar plays a series of shows in London next month, the Sunday Mirror said. The group collected £100,000 ($162,000) for winning the final and will perform in front of Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Variety Show later this year. "We feel electric. Words can't describe it. I'm genuinely shocked. We thought Susan was unstoppable -- she's an unbelievable talent," the paper quoted the group's choreographer, Ashley Banjo, as saying.

Susan Boyle suffers from backlash in talent show final, UK papers suggest . 48-year-old Scottish singing sensation beaten by dance act Diversity . Boyle expected to earn millions of dollars after becoming global celebrity . Simon Cowell plans to take Boyle across Atlantic to "conquer the U.S."

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HOLLYWOOD, California (CNN) -- Reality television featuring law enforcement officers on the beat is nothing new. A show featuring a lawman who makes jailed inmates wear pink underwear and uses actors to trick suspects, however, is a new twist. Maricopa Co. Sheriff Joe Arpaio now has his own TV show, "Smile: You're Under Arrest." Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- whose showy brand of justice has raised charges of discrimination and civil-rights abuses while making him a hero among fans of his tough-on-crime attitudes -- will star in "Smile: You're Under Arrest." The show, which premiers this weekend on Fox Reality Channel, features Arpaio and other officers using elaborate ploys crafted by comedy writers and carried out by professional actors to arrest suspects with outstanding warrants. In one, a suspect is invited to a fake fashion shoot and told he's going to become a supermodel, according to Fox Reality's Web site. In another, a suspect is tricked into what he thinks is a job as a movie extra and, after a staged argument between the film's "director" and another actor, gets promoted to the starring role. "It's kind of fun to show how stupid they are and, as I say, the looks on their face," Arpaio, 76, said of the suspects wanted for DUIs, drug charges, missed court dates and other offenses. Watch Arpaio explain his methods » . But Arpaio's critics aren't amused. They say they fear the show will give the controversial sheriff positive publicity, ignoring what they call a darker side to his 16-year tenure as top lawman in the county that includes Phoenix. "It's going to celebrate a sheriff that's frankly scaring this community, a sheriff that has seen violent crime increase significantly in his county, a sheriff that is racially profiling the Latino community, and I doubt that the show is going to reflect that," said Paco Fabian, spokesman for the immigrant-rights group America's Voice. In a statement on the group's Web site, Fabian calls Arpaio a "modern day Bull Connor," comparing him to the public safety commissioner in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, whose use of attack dogs and firehoses on civil rights demonstrators made him a symbol of racial intolerance. Dubbed "America's Toughest Sheriff," Arpaio makes many of his county's 10,000 or so inmates live in tents. He reinstituted chain gangs -- including crews for women and juveniles -- banned smoking, coffee and movies in his jails and, most recently, moved to require all inmates with money in their jail accounts to pay for their own meals. And then, of course, there's the pink underwear. "They were stealing the white underwear, smuggling the underwear out of the jail," Arpaio told CNN. "So you know what? Give them pink. The other reason is they hate pink. Why would you give the 10,000 inmates the color they like?" Earlier this year, the mayor of Phoenix wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney general's office, asking the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division to investigate Arpaio's aggressive illegal immigration crackdowns. Mayor Phil Brown wrote that Arpaio's sweeps show "a pattern and practice of conduct that includes discriminatory harassment, improper stops, searches and arrests." The letter came after Arpaio, who had already been the target of hundreds of lawsuits, launched a series of what he calls crime-suppression patrols in largely Latino neighborhoods. Critics say the patrols use racial profiling to unfairly target Hispanic drivers and pedestrians, while Arpaio says they have resulted in the deportation of hundreds of illegal immigrants, including some with criminal records. "We are the only ones cracking down on the state's human smuggling law," Arpaio said. Fabian said America's Voice is considering putting pressure on companies that advertise during Arpaio's show. Either way, the series offers another moment in the spotlight for a lawman who has never shied away from it. "I'm not going to brag," Arpaio said, "but there isn't anybody in the world who doesn't know who this sheriff is." CNN's Brooke Anderson and Doug Gross contributed to this report.

Maricopa Co., Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio now has own TV show . Arpaio proud of sometimes unorthodox methods, has been criticized for them . Show, "Smile: You're Under Arrest," gets people with outstanding warrants .

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(The Frisky) -- There exists a school of thought that dictates if you think something catastrophic, then it won't happen. What would happen if my family died in a car accident? What would happen if my house caught on fire? "What makes men connect with the girl of their dreams after sparking with me?" the author asks. Two summers ago, I asked myself: Wouldn't it suck if my first love met someone unexpectedly and got over me before I could begin to move on? Thankfully, my family and my house are safe, but my feelings, my love life, and my ego still need mending. "I met someone." The text message appeared on the screen of my phone and I stopped walking. A group of my friends and I were leaving the movie theater, and it was as if all feelings he had for me were obliterated in one night. We broke up because he was studying in Europe. Poetically, we had expressed our feelings for each other just two nights before. Then he became someone else's boyfriend, and remained so, for much longer than he and I lasted. I should've known it would happen, since it happens quite often. My first kiss, who refused to be my boyfriend, met the girl of his dreams while I still ached for him. They're still together today. Since then, I've been the second choice for several more men. The most recent ones occurred this summer, when I tried and failed to win the heart of my friend Ken -- he started dating the person that he truly liked instead of settling for me. I lost Brian to his ex-girlfriend (although, in that case, I think they belonged together anyway). Each time, I laughed one of those sad, desperate guffaws -- here we go again! What makes men connect with the girl of their dreams after sparking with me? Another concept may be more applicable to my situation: the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps I'm so aware of my "magic touch" that I'm making it happen. While the first love arrived in Europe, I even warned him what may happen. At the time, though, he waved the thought away. "I'm so picky, I rarely really like a girl like I like you," he typed. A month later, he must've been pleasantly shocked to discover my unfortunate power reached across the Atlantic Ocean. When Ken told me he was dating Mary, I was angry I'd let this happen to me again. I raged at him. He argued that it's irrational to use my past experience to predict the outcome of my future relationships (or my attempts at them). I'm sure that there'll be a guy someday who doesn't find me easy to move on from, but in the meantime I can't ignore the pattern and pretend that each time was a coincidence, as Ken had wanted me to do. I don't know if there is a way to avoid the seemingly inevitable. Each time I let my hopes conquer my superstition, there's a crash, a burn, a deflation, and the temporary loss of the ability to giggle, but I choose the chance of being the girl before the girlfriend over giving up the chance for breaking my streak. TM & © 2009 TMV, Inc. | All Rights Reserved .

Author's ex-boyfriend meets someone else before she can get over him . She lost Brian to his ex-girlfriend and her friend Ken to another girl . Author: Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy . "I choose the chance of being the girl before the girlfriend," she says .

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Frank Buckles considered it his duty to represent his fellow soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day. Frank Buckles, 107 and the last living U.S. WWI veteran, said it was his duty to represent his fallen soldiers. "I have to," he told CNN, "because I'm the last living member of Americans" who fought in what was called The Great War. Buckles, 107, who is the sole living U.S. World War I veteran, attended ceremonies Tuesday at the grave of Gen. John Pershing, the top U.S. commander in that war. He was present for the first Veterans Day in 1918 -- though it was originally called Armistice Day -- that marked the end of WWI. Buckles was warmly greeted with standing applause by those in uniform and others who had gathered for the commemoration, but he said he did not think the fuss was about him. "I can see what they're honoring, the veterans of World War I." "Time has passed very quickly to me," he said after a wreath-laying. "I've had a lot of activity in the last 90 years." Watch interview with Frank Buckles » . According to an autobiography released this year by the Pentagon, Buckles was eager to join the war. Although only 16 in the summer of 1917, he lied about his age to get into the armed services. He said his recruiter told him "the Ambulance Service was the quickest way to get to France," so he took training in trench casualty retrieval. Buckles was an officer's escort in France before joining a detail transporting German prisoners of war. A few decades later, Buckles was in the Philippines as a civilian, on the day in December 1941 that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He was taken as a prisoner of war in Manila and held for 39 months. Today Buckles is the symbolic leader of a drive to improve a run-down city-owned memorial on the National Mall for those lost in the World War I. The gazebo-styled structure was built in the 1930s. There is no national memorial in the nation's capital for the troops known as "doughboys" who served in the war that ended 90 years ago. Legislation in Congress would provide federal funding to restore and enhance the city's memorial. A $182 million World War II memorial was dedicated on the National Mall in 2004.

Frank Buckles, 107, is the last living U.S. veteran of WWI . Buckles was present for first Veterans Day in 1918 when it was Armistice Day . Buckles said it was his duty to represent soldiers since he is last WWI vet . There is no national memorial in Washington for WWI veterans .

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(CNN) -- Seoul is a bit of curio. On the surface it's as modern as any city could hope to be, addicted as it is to technology and modern design. Let me entertain you, Korean-style. Bars and karaoke rooms abound in entertainment areas. Yet among the blocky skyscrapers and highways running through the sprawling city like monuments to the country's rapid industrialization, are vestiges of the 600-year-old capital. Mountains, parks and 16th century palaces are in stark contrast to the neon and noise of the city's shopping and entertainment areas. Duck off one of the main boulevards like Saemunangil in the center of the city and you can discover one of pulsating areas where Seoulites relax -- often in city's thousands of restaurants, bars and noraebang (karaoke bars) that should feature in even a flying visit. Home to over 10 million people, the best policy is to make the most of just a few of the city's districts. Start near City Hall in Myeongdong, a downtown area close to some of the city's best sites and shopping (located on and around Myeong-donggil) and all within a walkable distance. Steps away from City Hall subway station is one of the city's Joseon dynasty palaces, Deoksugung, where you can sample a quieter side of Seoul. It's the site of one of Korea's King Seonjo's residences; he turned the old aristocratic house into a palace in 1593. If you're in the city on Sunday, a reenactment of the changing of the guards takes place outside the main gate; false beards are moustaches are attached as the brightly colored guards go through the motions. A few minutes from the palace is the decent National Museum on Contemporary Art, where international and Korean artists get a regular showing. The tranquility of the palace grounds are a great contrast to much of the rest of the city -- not far away original parts of old Seoul's city walls can still be seen in mountains to the north. For a closer inspection of Seoul of old, history buffs can get their fill at the Seoul Museum of History, twenty minutes walk from Deoksugung Palace. Better is to push on another 20 minutes from the museum and you'll hit Gyeongbokgung, the largest and grandest of the city's palace grounds. To save pounding the concrete there hop in a taxi -- standard cabs are white, but for the sake of a bit more legroom, shinier leather seats, and twice the cost, black deluxe taxis are also cruising the streets. In true Seoul tech style, many are equipped with a free digital translation service, useful as many drivers don't speak much English. The preserved village of Bukchon lies between Gyeongbok Palace to the west and Changdeok Palace to the east, where you can wander around restored timber houses and courtyards, and also grab a bite to eat in one of the area's cafes or restaurants. The city and Korea in general has a fascination with technology and design and is constantly positioning itself on the cutting edge of both. The most recent addition to the city's modern landscape is Dutch architect Rem Koohaas' "Transformer". His shape-changing building can flip onto one of its three sides depending on its use and is currently home to a Prada Exhibition. It sits in a cozy juxtaposition next to the 16th century Gyeonghui Palace pavilion. For a less ambiguous view of the city, hop in a taxi to Namsan cable car station. It will propel you up to a peak in Namsan park -- central Seoul's biggest -- next to the Seoul Tower, from where you can survey the sprawling metropolis. Throw yourself back into the thick of it by hitting Namdaemun market, also known as the goblin market. It's a hive of goods from cheese to camcorders, often sold at cheaper prices than elsewhere. Don't expect just stalls, it's more a mix of buildings, underground malls and shops. Shinsegae department store is a city favorite in Myeongdong, but those after a bit of South Korean kitsch or quirk should be happy browsing around the boutiques off Myeongdong-gil and Myeongdong Jungang. More Meccas to mammon can be found at Dongdaemun to the east. It's been the site of a market since 1905, but inevitably is now a block of towers stuffed with shopping malls. Be careful, it could take a whole day to explore each one. Crossing downtown Seoul is the Cheonggye stream -- a river that was covered by a road until it was unearthed in 2005 and transformed into one of the city center's most popular urban oases and worth a stroll in the evening. Just north of Cheonggye is the slightly twee area of Insadong, an area as close as Seoul comes to its past in its present work-a-day guise. The area has as few tacky tourist shops, but gets enough local life to make it a good area to grab a bite to eat. The narrow winding streets off Insadonggil are crammed with traditional style buildings housing restaurants where Korean barbeques, bibimbap, kimchi and other delights of Korean cuisine can be sampled and often quite reasonably priced. For a bit of local flavor on the go, street vendors serve up kimchi pancakes, octopus and other Korean snacks, while mobile restaurants appear on some of the street corners around Myeong-dong and Insadong when night falls. Duck under the temporary tarpaulin hoisted over these carts, take a seat next to a local and enjoy cultural feast as well as simple, fresh cooked local dishes. Soju, the local firewater, or some Korean beer is a typical accompaniment. It could get you in the mood for a bout of karaoke in a private room, or noraebang. In which case it could be worth asking your hotel concierge for a recommendation for an English language-friendly one, or just dive in and indulge in the randomness of it all. North east of downtown is Hongdae; a decent area for bars and music, and its more salubrious that Itaewon, twenty minutes south in a taxi from downtown Seoul. Here you're more likely to see U.S. military police in a club or bar than a local, which is another reminder that the other world that is North Korea is only 30 miles away. If you have an extra few days, take a trip to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) -- organized tours are the only way to see it.

Among the urban sprawl are pockets of tranquility, neon-lit fun and greenery . The Joseon dynasty palaces are a must, offering a contrast to the city's concrete . Insadong provides some old world charm and great places to eat Korean cuisine .

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(CNN) -- Mount Redoubt volcano in southern Alaska has erupted again, shooting ash as high as 45,000 feet in the air on Saturday, experts said. A series of eruptions has been rattling Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano since Sunday. The eruption occurred at about 1:30 p.m. (5:30 p.m. ET), the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN. Some of the ash fell around Anchorage, resulting in the airport to close, the Federal Aviation Administration said. The volcano erupted three times Friday, at times shooting ash as high as 51,000 feet. The eruptions are the latest in a series that began March 22. The Alaska Volcano Observatory has set the alert level at its highest possible designation -- red -- indicating that an eruption is under way or imminent and that the eruption will produce a "significant emission of volcanic ash into the atmosphere." Friday's volcano activity prompted Alaska Airlines to limit flights to and from Anchorage, according to the airline's Web site. It canceled all its Thursday flights to and from Anchorage after an eruption earlier in the day sent an ash cloud 65,000 feet high. The eruptions are the latest in a series that began Sunday.

NEW: Mount Redoubt volcano in southern Alaska erupted again on Saturday . NEW: Eruption sent ash as high as 45,000 feet in the air, experts said . NEW: FAA says ash falling around Anchorage resulted in closure of the airport . Mount Redoubt has been erupting since March 22 .

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(CNN) -- Five leaders of what was once the nation's largest Muslim charity were given long prison sentences Wednesday by a federal judge, months after they were found guilty of aiding a militant Palestinian organization. Ghassan Elashi, seen here at 2001 news conference, was sentenced to 65 years in prison. "These sentences should serve as a strong warning to anyone who knowingly provides financial support to terrorists under the guise of humanitarian relief," said David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security. Five leaders of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were convicted in November by a federal jury for providing money and resources to the Palestinian group Hamas, designated by the United States as a terrorist organization. The trial resulted from a 15-year Justice Department investigation. Two of the men -- Shukri Abu Baker, 50, of Garland, Texas, and Ghassan Elashi, 55, of Richardson, Texas -- were also convicted on tax fraud charges. At a federal court in Dallas, Texas, U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis sentenced Abu Baker and Elashi to 65 years in prison. The other three received lesser sentences: Mohammad El-Mezain, 55, of San Diego, California, and Abdulrahman Odeh, 49, of Patterson, New Jersey each received 15 years in prison. Mufid Abdulqader, 49, of Richardson, Texas, received 20 years. Federal authorities said the Holy Land Foundation was incorporated by Abu Baker, El-Mezain and Elashi. The other two worked as fundraisers. The Bush administration shut down the Holy Land Organization in 2001 and froze its assets, charging that it was raising millions of dollars for Hamas. Before it was shut down, the group, based in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, was hailed as the largest Muslim charity in America. The Justice Department accused it of funneling $12.4 million to Hamas in the guise of humanitarian donations. A first trial in 2007 ended in mistrial, prompting the Justice Department to refile charges. The jury in the second trial, which lasted two months, deliberated for eight days. Wednesday's sentencing, said Kris, culminated "many years of painstaking investigative and prosecutorial work at the federal, state and local levels."

Holy Land Foundation has been called the biggest Muslim charity in U.S. 5 charity leaders got prison sentences ranging from 65 years to 15 years . Charity accused of sending $12.4 million to Hamas under humanitarian cloak . Assistant AG: "These sentences should serve as a strong warning"

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(CNN) -- A ship carrying U.N. relief supplies, including food and water, arrived Friday in the hurricane-ravaged Haitian city of Gonaives, an official with the United Nations' World Food Programme said. The ship sailed from the capital, Port-au-Prince, carrying 19 tons of high-energy biscuits, 50,000 bottles of water, water purification tablets and other supplies, Myrta Kaulard said. An ambulance, two trucks, a four-wheel drive vehicle and a small speedboat to be used in rescues were also aboard the ship, she said. "Distributions are ongoing at present," she said, speaking by phone from the capital. "We are also airlifting biscuits now to Gonaives." Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has endured three storms -- Hanna, Gustav and Fay -- over the past month. The last storm, Hanna, killed at least 137 people when it passed Tuesday over Gonaives and lingered nearby for days. It left water more than 4 meters deep in some places in the city, according to Abel Nazaire, Haiti's assistant coordinator of Risk and Disaster Management. Watch as flooding overwhelms Haitians » . Much of the water remained Friday in Gonaives, and the city was unreachable by car or truck, as roads were flooded and bridges had collapsed, Kaulard said. "We need to send food and water and primary needs," said Jean-Pierre Gueatou, executive director of the Haitian Red Cross. "The other things, they will come later." People trudged through city streets that were covered in murky brown water thigh-deep and higher in some places. Some residents camped out on their roofs, their clothing and blankets hung over the sides of buildings. "Drinking water is the biggest problem," said Joel Trimble, co-founder of Haiti for Christ Ministries. "That water that everybody's been wading in -- now for days -- is contaminated with dead carcasses of animals, and cadavers of people." "We remember the last time this happened," a man told The Associated Press, according to the agency's translation. "It was the same situation. A lot of aid money was given for nothing. They did nothing with that money. If that money had been invested in this town, we would not be in this situation today." "People really have lost a lot of things," Kaulard said. "They are asking for clothes, they are asking for water, they are asking for food. "The situation is very tense, people are exhausted." Kaulard said World Food Programme officials hope to send another ship laden with similar supplies on Saturday, before Hurricane Ike, a Category 3 storm in the central Atlantic, approaches. Ike is predicted to sweep more than 100 miles north of Hispaniola -- the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. "We really hope that the current trajectory ... is maintained," Kaulard said. On Friday, the U.S. Coast Guard delivered enough hygiene kits, plastic sheeting and water jugs for 2,000 people in Gonaives, according to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. With those supplies, and others expected to arrive Saturday in Gonaives on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the United States expects to help about 10,000 people, the embassy said. In addition, the USS Kearsarge is expected to arrive Monday in Haiti from Colombia to support relief efforts, the embassy said, though it noted that Hurricane Ike could delay its arrival. U.S. ambassadors in Jamaica and Haiti have authorized $100,000 in emergency relief for each country, and the United States is providing $50,000 worth for the Dominican Republic, said State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood in Washington. The United States offered to send humanitarian relief and a disaster assistance team to Cuba, but has received no response from the Cuban government, the State Department said. "The situation in Gonaives is catastrophic," Daniel Rouzier, Haiti chairman of Food for the Poor, wrote in an e-mail, according to the AP. "We, just like the rest of the victims ... have limited mobility. You can't float a boat, drive a truck or fly anything to the victims." CNN's Charley Keyes contributed to this report .

International aid groups struggle to reach thousands after Tropical Storm Hanna . Hurricane Ike also could hit Haiti this weekend . Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere has been hit by 3 storms in a month . Drinking water in Haiti is contaminated by bodies, Haitian volunteer says .

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to examine whether prosecutors can aggressively prosecute illegal immigrants for identity theft if they didn't know the documents they were given belonged to someone else. The Supreme Court has agreed to grapple with the issues of identity theft and illegal immigration. The justices announced they will hear arguments in the appeal of a Mexican national arrested in a government work site raid in the Midwest. A ruling is expected by June. At issue is whether people who use fake IDs to obtain work in the United States but did not know the documents belonged to someone else can be convicted of "aggravated identity theft." Stealing personal identification such as Social Security numbers is illegal, but federal courts around the country are divided over how to treat people who buy them on the black market. Federal law states that for aggravated identity theft to occur, it must be proved that a person "knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person." Many criminals steal a person's identification to empty his or her bank account or falsely obtain loans or credit. Lawyers for the detained illegal immigrants say their clients simply used numbers picked "out of thin air" that happened to belong to another person. They used the numbers only to obtain work, not steal to money, the lawyers said. The Justice Department argues its prosecutors need not prove "knowledge" that the documents belonged to someone else instead of being fabricated. The difference could mean an additional two years in federal prison under an enhanced sentence. Most workers with false papers serve only a few months behind bars, and many are then deported. At stake is the government's crackdown on undocumented workers, most of whom must rely on fake IDs to obtain employment. Read a report from the front lines of the immigration debate . The case before the justices involves Mexican immigrant Ignacio Flores-Figueroa, who worked at a steel plant in East Moline, Illinois. He was arrested with phony Social Security and alien registration cards that had been assigned to someone else. He admitted obtaining the documents but said he did not know they were someone else's. He was convicted and sentenced to 75 months in prison. The court did not act on a similar appeal from a Mexican national who was arrested during a raid on a meat processing plant in Iowa, the largest criminal workplace enforcement operation in U.S. history. Nicasio Mendoza-Gonzalez was among 389 people arrested, most of whom were given five months in prison.

Attorneys for illegal immigrants argue their clients used random numbers . U.S. says prosecutors need not prove "knowledge" that ID belongs to someone . A decision is expected by the end of June .

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YANGON, Myanmar (CNN) -- Courts in Myanmar have sentenced a blogger, a poet and several dissidents to several years in jail for anti-regime activities, a court official told CNN Tuesday. Young people at an Internet cafe in Myanmar. The verdicts were announced Monday and Tuesday, the court official said. Blogger Nay Phone Latt was sentenced to more than 20 years in jail for his illegal Internet activities, the court official said. The blogger was a "major source of information for the outside world" when the military junta used force last year to suppress anti-government demonstrations, said The Irrawaddy, an online newspaper published by exiles from Myanmar, which is also known as Burma. The government exercises strict controls over media outlets in the southeast Asian country. Dissidents often turn to the Internet to disseminate information. In the second case, poet Saw Wai received a two-year jail sentence for a poem he wrote for Valentine's Day that contained a veiled jab at the junta's leading figure, Senior Gen. Than Shwe. The first words of each line in the eight-line poem, "February the Fourteenth" spelled out the message: "Senior General Than Shwe is crazy with power." On Tuesday, the government handed down prison sentences to about a dozen members of a pro-democracy group known as the '88 Generation Students. Irrawaddy said the members were each sentenced to 65 years in jail, but CNN could not independently confirm the figure. Members of the group took part in the anti-government demonstrations that ended with the death of as many as 100 people last year after security forces clashed with thousands of protesters. The dead included 40 Buddhist monks. Witnesses said the violent crackdown in September 2007 came as hundreds of monks defied a military ban on public assembly. Until then, demonstrations led by the monks -- who are highly respected in the predominantly Buddhist country -- had gone largely unchallenged by the military, which has ruled the country since the 1960s. The protests were sparked by a huge fuel price increase imposed by the military government, and quickly escalated. The action was informally dubbed the "Saffron Revolution" because of the maroon robes with saffron sashes that the monks wore.

Myanmar court jails blogger, poet and dissidents for anti-regime activities .

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(CNN) -- Reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward relied on FBI insider W. Mark Felt as a reliable but anonymous source for their stories on the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. Carl Bernstein says "Deep Throat's" information on Watergate was "absolutely invaluable." Felt, referred to as "Deep Throat" in the Washington Post stories and in Woodward and Bernstein's book "All the President's Men," died Thursday in California at 95. He revealed his identity for the first time in 2005. Bernstein never met Felt until this year, but praised his courage during an interview Friday on CNN's "American Morning." AM: What are your thoughts on the occasion of Mark Felt's death? Bernstein: I think it's a little emotional, even though he was 95 years old. He was integral to our coverage. He was one of many sources in Watergate who had both the intelligence and the courage to tell the truth. And in his own organization he was one of the few, and he was near the top. What his information enabled us to do was to confirm stories that we had really obtained elsewhere, more than anything else, rather than give us that much primary information. But it was invaluable, and he performed a great act of courage and national service. Watch a video obituary of W. Mark Felt » . AM: The way that he was portrayed by Hal Holbrook in "All the President's Men" was he would give your partner Bob Woodward a little bit of a tease and say, "I'm not going to tell you anything more than that; you've got to follow the trail." Was that an accurate portrayal? Bernstein: Yeah. Yeah, that's what we did. But his knowledge gave us a grounding and assurance that we were right in what we were saying and reporting. [He gave us] a certainty in a situation where you had the leader of the free world attacking the press every day, making our conduct -- Woodward's, myself's, the Washington Post's -- the issue in Watergate rather than the conduct of the president and his men. So I think Mark Felt's confirming this information (and occasionally he gave us some important information that we hadn't obtained, toward the end, elsewhere), it was absolutely invaluable. AM: It was always Bob Woodward's intention to keep the identity of Deep Throat secret until the occasion of Mark Felt's death. Bernstein: Well, we both kept it. I knew who he was. The two of us knew. AM: Was it a surprise when it came out in 2005? Bernstein: To both of us. It was a total surprise, even though I'm a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine and they disclosed it. They scooped everybody on that one. Yeah, we were surprised. Bob and I went out to San Francisco a few weeks ago; we had a speech out there. And we went to see Mark Felt, and we had a kind of wonderful couple of hours with him. He knew we were coming; he was looking forward to it. But he had been very ill, and it was a kind of closing of the circle, and it was a wonderful experience. AM: Was that the first time you had met him in person. Bernstein: First time I had met him, yes. Bob had met him as a young ensign in the Navy, when he was a messenger at the Pentagon and had renewed the acquaintance. AM: So what did you think of him when you met him? Bernstein: First of all, I was aware that he was 95 years old and in the last stages of his life. But I was amazed at his relative vigor given the fact that he had been quite ill. I was also surprised that there were some moments of clarity, because he had dementia. AM: His family, when the news came out in 2005, declared him to be an American hero. Would you agree? Bernstein: Obviously he is. Look, Watergate was a constitutional crisis in a criminal presidency. And he had the guts to say, "Wait. The Constitution is more important in this situation than a president of the United States who breaks the law." It's an important lesson, I think, for the country and for people in our business, as well.

Watergate reporter Bernstein knew who Mark Felt was; only Woodward contacted him . Important source for scandal story died Thursday at age 95 . Bernstein: Felt "performed a great act of courage and national service"

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WOODBURY, Minnesota (CNN) -- At 14, Andrew Busskohl got a second chance at life when he underwent a heart transplant. But four years later, neighbors have more fear than compassion for him. Police say Andrew Busskohl plotted to kill a neighbor but was stopped before it got to that point. Busskohl, 18, has been charged with two felony counts relating to a break-in attempt. But police say he was up to something more sinister: a murder plot that involved cutting out the victim's heart or slicing off his eyelids. Busskohl posted $100,000 bail on condition he undergo psychological evaluation. He's living with his mother and brother in the same neighborhood where authorities say he had planned to carry out his attack. As condition of his release, he is allowed to leave the Woodbury, Minnesota, home only for medical, psychological and legal appointments. Defense attorney Joe Friedberg says that his client is a threat to no one and that his medications affected his mood. "The Woodbury police are excited because they got something that's more serious than a cat up a tree," Friedberg said. "This is a very unique case, and frankly, I don't know the ramifications of anything yet." Busskohl has been charged with one count of first-degree attempted burglary with a dangerous weapon and one count of aggravated harassment with a dangerous weapon. He has not entered a plea in the case. Busskohl's release has sent shockwaves through this quiet Minneapolis suburb of about 50,000 people. Residents say they survey their homes before entering, secure their windows and check behind curtains and other household items once inside. Once rarely used, alarm systems now are on constantly. "My whole family is feeling a lot more nervous," said one neighbor, who asked not to be identified. "We're just always looking out the windows. ... The whole neighborhood in general is feeling the same way." Tim Kinateder said that his alarm system is on "nonstop now" and that everyone in his family has taken extreme precautions around the home. He didn't mince his words when he spoke of Busskohl being out on bail. "That, to me, is ridiculous. I don't understand how that can happen," Kinateder said. Across the street, Jim Fratto has taken more security measures than most. Fratto sleeps with a baseball bat next to his bed and a flashlight on his nightstand. A 10-foot-long 2 by 4 barricades his bedroom door. He's installed lights with motion sensors on the outside of his home and added locks on his doors, both inside and out. Tour Fratto's high-security house » . It is Fratto who, authorities say, was to be Busskohl's possible victim. He lives just a few blocks from Busskohl. Walking through his home, Fratto shows off the locks on his interior doors. They rattle and clang with every movement. "He's going to have to bang a little bit to get in at me. And hopefully, I'll be able to wake up by then," he said through a wild-eyed gaze and booming laugh. "If not, sayonara." Busskohl admits breaking a window of Fratto's home, police say, in the early hours of August 6. Although it may not sound like much on the surface, police now say it was the first step of the plot. Busskohl was planning to return to that shattered window in the next couple of days for an easy entry, one without commotion, according to the criminal complaint filed against him. The complaint says one of Busskohl's friends, Eric Eischens, went to police shortly after the window-breaking incident. "Mr. Eischens stated that Mr. Busskohl told him that he had come up with a plan on how to murder someone," the complaint says. "Mr. Eischens stated that Mr. Busskohl wanted to find an adult male who lived by himself and within walking distance of the defendant's house." Eischens is quoted in the complaint as also telling police that "Mr. Busskohl stated that he would then either stab the potential victim in the chest or slash his throat. Mr. Busskohl told Mr. Eischens that he would then either cut off the eyelids of the victim or cut out his heart." The complaint alleges that Busskohl acknowledged to police his conversation with his friend but also told them, "I'm not even sure I would have gone through with it." Friedberg, the defense attorney, said he could understand Fratto being "frightened or mad." "The evidence I received, [Busskohl] discussed very openly these things with the police," Friedberg said. "When you said bizarre, that's probably an understatement." Busskohl was taking seven or eight medications -- a combination of anti-rejection medicine for his heart and anti-depressants -- at the time of his arrest, according to Friedberg. He said a doctor who evaluated him in jail recommended that he be taken off one medication and two others be substituted in its place. "Within eight to 10 hours, the bizarre type of thinking he was undergoing was gone," Friedberg says. "If anybody were to meet him and talk to him at this point, he represents no threat to anyone." He has advised his client not to talk with members of the media. In 2004, Busskohl became a common face on local Minnesota media when he underwent a successful heart transplant. Shortly after the surgery, according to the Star Tribune newspaper, he showed off his scar to a reporter and said, "I plan on becoming a surgeon." If convicted on the charges, Busskohl could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of $17,500 for the first count and a maximum of 5 years and $10,000 fine for the second count. Busskohl has no prior arrests, and the prosecutor's office said that under the sentencing guidelines of Minnesota, it would be unlikely he'd serve more than 48 months if convicted. His arraignment is set for September 3. According to the criminal complaint filed this month, authorities obtained a search warrant for Busskohl's car and found a swim cap, black gloves, latex gloves, scrubs, gauze, an address card with Fratto's name and address, a map to Fratto's house, shoe covers, a pry bar, a black mask, two bags, one knife, two flashlights, one set of tweezers, two pairs of scissors and one scalpel. Busskohl told authorities the items were there "if [he] somehow went through with the act," according to the complaint. Fratto says it was difficult to grasp when police first informed him of the alleged plot. "I didn't even look at it as a murder plot until they actually started putting it on the news," he said. Standing in his backyard, he pointed into the air. "What bothers me is: If you throw a rock, he's about four blocks away." Although many neighbors said they believe that a much more serious charge of attempted murder should have been pursued, the prosecutor stands by his decision. Washington County attorney Doug Johnson said the two felony counts Busskohl faces are the only ones he could pursue under state law. For a charge of attempted murder, he said, an individual has to follow through on an act "which is a substantial step toward, and more than preparation for, the commission of the crime." "Now I'm not saying I'm happy with that [law]," Johnson said. "But if we have somebody that's just simply preparing to commit the crime and does not take a substantial step toward committing that crime, we can't charge an attempt. And that's what this is all about." As for Fratto, he'll still keep locking his doors, armed with his flashlight and baseball bat. He's thankful to still be alive. "If it wasn't for his friend and the grace of God, that'd be it."

Police: Heart transplant teen planned to cut out possible victim's heart . Andrew Busskohl, 18, charged with two felony counts relating to broken window . Prosecutor stands by charges; neighbors upset teen not facing attempted murder . Defense attorney says teen's medication affected his thinking .

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. attorney general is trying to prevent immigration authorities from sending a Muslim woman to her home country, where she was a victim of female genital mutilation. Attorney General Michael Mukasey ordered an immigration court to reconsider an African woman's case. In a stinging order overriding federal immigration courts, Mukasey blasted a decision that said a 28-year-old citizen and native of Mali should be expelled "because her genitalia already had been mutilated [so] she had no basis to fear future persecution if returned to her home country." Calling the rationale "flawed," Mukasey sent the case back to the Board of Immigration Appeals with orders to reconsider. The woman, a native of Mali, begged the court not to send her back to her Bambara tribe. The 28-year-old said if she returned and had a daughter, the child also would be subject to mutilation. The woman also said she faced forced marriage if she had to go home. Mukasey cited what he concluded were two significant factual errors in the court's rejection of her appeal. "Female genital mutilation is not necessarily a one-time event," Mukasey said. He noted that the board in a previous case had granted asylum in to one woman whose "vaginal opening was sewn shut approximately five times after being opened to allow for sexual intercourse and child birth." He also concluded that the Board of Immigration Appeals was wrong to assume that the woman "must fear persecution in exactly the same form [namely, repeat female genital mutilation] to qualify for relief." Mukasey had been urged to look into the matter by angered members of Congress in the wake of the January decision. "This recent action taken by the Board of Immigration Appeals is a step backward for the rights of women worldwide," declared Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, in a January letter. "Female genital mutilation is a gross violation of a woman's human rights and has traditionally been grounds for the granting of an asylum claim," Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, said in the letter. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, issued a statement applauding Mukasey's action, and declaring female genital mutilation a "barbaric practice widely regarded as a human rights abuse." The Justice Department acknowledged it is extraordinarily rare for an attorney general to jump into a relatively low-level immigration case. The immigration courts decide about 40,000 cases a year, and an attorney general has issued an opinion on a case only three times in the past three years. Female genital mutilation is common in parts of Africa, Asia and in some Arab countries, according to the United Nations. The operation is viewed by some ethnic groups as a means to control a woman's sexuality and is sometimes a prerequisite for marriage or the right to inherit. The procedure can cause tissue injury, severe infection and fever, among other complications. The U.N. has recorded cases in which hemorrhaging and infection lead to death.

Court ruled that because woman already had surgery, she should not get asylum . In rare move, Attorney General said court's ruling was "flawed" Michael Mukasey ordered court to reconsider its ruling . Mali woman said she fears any daughter she had would be subject to mutilation .

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(CNN) -- The ozone hole over Antarctica in 2008 is larger in both size and ozone loss than last year, but not as large as in 2006, the European Space Agency said Tuesday. Some chemical processes produce ozone-depleting gases. The hole is a thinning area in the ozone layer over Antarctica and the size of the hole varies every year depending on weather conditions. This year, the size of the thinned area reached about 27 million square kilometers (10.4 million square miles), compared to 25 million square kilometers (9.65 million square miles) in 2007. In 2006, the hole was a record 29 million square kilometers (11.2 million square miles), larger than North America, the ESA said. The ESA announced its results based on information from German and Dutch researchers who analyzed satellite data. Depletion of ozone is caused by extreme cold temperatures at high altitude and the presence of ozone-destroying gases, such as chlorine and bromine, in the atmosphere, the ESA said. Those gases originate from man-made products like chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which were phased out under a global agreement two decades ago but continue to linger in the atmosphere. Ozone is a protective atmospheric layer found at an altitude of about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles). It acts as a sunlight filter, shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays that put humans at greater risk of skin cancer and cataracts and harm marine life, the agency said.

2008 ozone hole larger than in 2007, European Space Agency says . It covers area of about 27 million square kilometers . Ozone layer acts as a sunlight filter, shielding Earth from some ultraviolet rays .

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- A police officer chasing a theft suspect was fatally shot Thursday night by another officer after he failed to drop his weapon when ordered to, authorities said. Officer Omar Edwards, 25, was not wearing a bulletproof vest and did not fire a shot, authorities say. Authorities said Officer Omar Edwards, 25, was shot three times. The incident is under investigation. Edwards was in plainclothes and carrying a handgun as he chased the suspect past a police car. Authorities said the officer who shot him said he didn't realize Edwards was a police officer. Edwards had just left the Housing Bureau Station House on East 124th Street, said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly at a news conference Friday. As Edwards approached his vehicle, he saw a man rummaging through it. Edwards took out his gun -- a Smith and Wesson 9 mm -- and chased the alleged thief, 43-year-old Miguel Santiago, said NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne. Meanwhile, a police cruiser with a sergeant and two officers, including Officer Andrew Dunton, had just turned onto 125th Street from 1st Avenue. Santiago ran in front of the unmarked vehicle as it approached halfway up the block and the vehicle stopped. The officer in the front passenger seat got out of the vehicle and shouted for Edwards to stop running and drop his weapon. According to Kelly, the officers reported that, after the command was given, Edwards turned toward Dunton with his gun in his hand. Watch Commissioner Kelly describe the shooting » . Dunton fired his Glock 9 mm six times, hitting Edwards three of those times -- once in the left arm, once in the left side and once in the back, according to police. Emergency crews responding to the scene found Edwards wearing a police academy T-shirt under his clothes and found his police shield and ID in his front left pants pocket, according to Browne. Edwards, who lived in Brooklyn, was recently married and had two small children, according to CNN affiliate WABC-TV in New York. On Friday, his relatives remembered him as a good person who achieved what he set out to do. "He was a wonderful, wonderful child from when he was small," his father, Ricardo Edwards, told WABC. "His desire was always to be a policeman and to play football," his uncle, Jerome Harding told the New York TV station. "And he did accomplish both, because he plays for the Police Department." Edwards was pronounced dead at Harlem Hospital at 11:21 p.m. Thursday, according to Kelly. "Tragic accidents like this are another reminder of the dangers our police officers often face as they keep our city the safest big city in the nation," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday. "Rest assured we will find out exactly what happened here, see what we can learn from it so it may never happen again. All the city's prayers are with Omar Edwards and his family." Five eyewitnesses, along with 20 people who reported hearing gunshots, were interviewed by police. The officer who fired the shots has 4½ years' experience, authorities said. The officers involved have been placed on administrative duties while the shooting is investigated. Police later arrested the alleged thief on suspicion of breaking into Edwards' car.

Authorities: Omar Edwards, chasing a suspect, was fatally shot by another officer . Edwards, in plainclothes, witnessed suspect trying to break into his car . Another saw his pursuit, jumped out of unmarked vehicle and fired six shots . Officers placed on administrative duties while shooting is investigated .

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (CNN) -- Antiviolence protesters stretched out 16,000 coconuts on Brazil's world-famous Copacabana beach Saturday, each one representing a victim of urban violence. Protesters used dummies to represent victims of violence on Brazil's Copacabana beach this week. Activists from ONG Rio de Paz led a protest march Saturday morning that included residents and tourists who usually can be found on the beach on weekends. The protesters strung up a sign on the sand that said "Shame" in Spanish, Portuguese, English and French. They finished with a minute of silence for the victims of violence. Rio de Paz said the coconuts represent victims of violence, homicides, dead police officers and those who have been shot in gunfights between authorities and gangs of narcotics traffickers. The figure itself was obtained from official information from the Rio de Janeiro governmental Institute of Public Security. It was the second protest staged this week on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach by the group Rio de Paz. On Tuesday, the group created a mock cemetery in the sand with mannequins representing 9,000 people who Rio de Paz says have been slain and secretly buried since January 2007. Rio de Paz President Antonio Carlos Costa said he believes that about 6,000 of the missing people were killed, many by drug traffickers fighting for territory in Rio's slums and poor neighborhoods. Others, he said, were killed by hit squads and police acting on their own. "In general, they are assassinated by police -- police acting outside of their regular work hours," Costa said Tuesday. "They are also assassinated by narcotraffickers. The bodies are disposed of in secret cemeteries in the metropolitan Rio de Janeiro area or incinerated alive by narcotraffickers in what they call 'microwaves.' " To illustrate the point, demonstrators also constructed facsimiles of the "microwaves" that narcotics traffickers and death squads reportedly use to cremate remains of those they have abducted. CNN's Fabiana Frayssinet contributed to this report.

Protesters line up coconuts on Brazil's Copacabana beach . Rio de Paz says coconuts represent victims of urban violence, drug wars . Protesters string up sign in sand that says "Shame" in four languages . Earlier, group staged mock cemetery in beach sand representing missing people .

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- Three years ago Tuesday, Leslie Marva Adams, an attractive, 40-year-old hair stylist from Atlanta, Georgia, chatted on the phone with her mother in the morning. Leslie Adams, 40, filed a restraining order against an old boyfriend and disappeared three years ago. It was the last conversation she would have with a family member. On the third anniversary of Adams' disappearance, her family is still waiting for answers. Her daughter, Cierra Burk, 19, clings to the belief that Adams is alive. "We will find her," Burk says. The family became concerned when Adams failed to show up for her sister's birthday party the day after she talked on the phone with her mother. Two days after the missed party, Adams was officially reported missing. At her apartment in suburban Lilburn, police found evidence suggesting foul play -- a 12-inch blood stain near her bed and a .45-caliber bullet casing. Adams' car was parked in her driveway and a handwritten note was found on her door. Investigators soon learned the note was from her sister, Roberta. It said, "Leslie, we're worried about you, please call me as soon as possible." Watch how the mystery began with a missed party » . Adams had been having trouble with her ex-boyfriend, Billy Joe Cook, in the days leading up to her disappearance. She had accused him of stalking her and had filed a restraining order. In the court document, she alleged that Cook had verbally and physically abused her. She said she feared for her life. A temporary restraining order was granted by the court, but Adams vanished before a scheduled hearing on the matter. Phyllis Adams said her daughter told her in their final conversation that she had argued with Cook over the phone on the previous day. According to the temporary restraining order, Cook was not to have any contact with Adams. Police brought Cook in for questioning and learned he had spoken to Adams on the phone twice the day before she last spoke to her family. Although he was questioned extensively, police have not named Cook a suspect. Police say he was very cooperative and there is no evidence suggesting his involvement in her disappearance, although they have not ruled him or anyone else out as a potential suspect or person of interest. Just when they thought the trail had gone cold, police found what could be a lead in the case. In May 2007, clothing was recovered that could belong to the missing hair-dresser. Police found a pair of men's size 8 Reebok sneakers, size 10 capri pants, and a black sweater in the woods along I-85 in Franklin County, 90 miles from Adams' home in Atlanta. They also discovered human bones and a breast implant near the clothing. Police have sent the remains to a DNA testing lab and they have yet to be identified. The results are inconclusive, and police continue to collect DNA samples from Adams family members for future tests. Leslie Marva Adams is an African-American female who stands 5 feet 5 inches, weighs 130 pounds, and has breast implants. Family members fear the remains could be Leslie Adams, but they are still hopeful that she will be found alive and well. Burk, Adams' daughter, says she struggles with her emotions at this time of year. "I still believe she is alive and we will find her, but this time of year is very hard," she said, fighting the tears. "It's my aunt's birthday, the day my mom didn't show up and we never saw her again, so it's hard not to break down." Police and family urge anyone with information on the whereabouts of Leslie Adams to call the Gwinett County Police Department at (770) 513-5300. There is a $25,000 reward for information that helps locate Leslie Adams or leads to the arrest of the person responsible for her disappearance.

Atlanta hair stylist Leslie Marva Adams disappeared three years ago . She failed to show up at her sister's birthday party . Adams had taken out a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend . Police continue with DNA tests to determine if skeletal remains are hers .

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(CNN) -- A grandmother, mother and her child died when a military fighter jet crashed into a house in San Diego Monday, igniting a huge fireball, CNN's San Diego affiliates and the San Diego Union Tribune are reporting. Fire rages in a San Diego neighborhood where an F/A-18 jet crashed Monday. Another child is missing, authorities said. A search ended Monday when night fell but will continue Tuesday morning, a spokesperson for the medical examiner said. The father is a businessman who was at work at the time of the crash, and was not reached for comment, according to the Tribune. The paper also reported that Monday night, a pastor and congregants at the family's church, the Korean United Methodist Church of San Diego in Clairemont. The pastor told a television station that the mother was in the home with her two sons -- a 2 month-old and 1 year-old. The mother was a nurse at a hospital. The F/A-18D plane, which authorities described as disabled, was trying to land at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. The jet had just performed landing training on a Navy aircraft carrier before the pilot reported having trouble, according to the Marine Corps. See map showing crash site, airfield » . "It was, oh gosh, maybe a couple of hundred feet off the ground. And it was quiet -- I think the engine was off," said San Diego resident Ian Lerner, who was heading to lunch at a shopping center about a half-mile from the neighborhood of about 20 homes when he saw the jet flying low. iReport.com: See Lerner's photos . "Then all of a sudden we saw the canopy of the jet explode and go up, and then we saw the pilot blast out of the plane and the parachute open," Lerner said. Another witness said the jet was flying at a low altitude, and "just spiraled, right out of [the movie] 'Top Gun.'" Watch witnesses describe the scene » . The house was destroyed. A photograph taken at the scene showed the pilot, who ejected safely, sitting on the front lawn, making a call on his cell phone. He was taken the hospital, the Marine Corps said in a written statement Monday. Watch burning debris near crash site » . The pilot, whose name was not released, was the only occupant of the two-seat aircraft, according to the Marine Corps. The Tribune spoke with Steve Diamond, a retired naval aviator, who found the pilot in a tree behind a house and helped the man who Diamond said was a lieutenant in his 20s, down from the tree. The pilot told him that after he lost power in the first engine, and that it was decided he would try to get the jet to Miramar on the single working engine, Diamond told the paper. The pilot was in communication with military air traffic controllers before the jet crashed, and the crash site is about two miles (three kilometers) from the airfield, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Burning debris scorched two additional homes and a slice of jet knifed another home. "This could have wiped out half a dozen homes depending on how it landed," said Maurice Luque, a spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. See photos of fiery crash site » . Inside one of those houses, Robert Johnson sat in the living room with his daughter, Heather Certain, and her 2-year-old son, Nicholas, according to the San Diego Union Tribune. They heard the explosion then saw a giant fireball in their picture window facing their front yard, the Tribune reported. They ran out of the house. "The house shook like an earthquake," Johnson said. "I saw the flames right there in front of my house." iReporter Chris Morrow of San Diego said she went to the crash site Monday and saw "Two houses that looked liked they'd blown up." One resident interviewed by CNN affiliate KFMB said he saw a fighter jet at a very low altitude, and "it just spiraled, right out of 'Top Gun.' " Watch aerial footage of crash site » . The Marine Corps said it is investigating what went wrong with the plane. The military has jurisdiction over the crash site. iReport.com: Smoke rises from fiery crash .

Officials: Three people in San Diego home killed in crash of F/A-18 . One believed to have been in home is missing, officials say . Marines: Pilot -- the jet's only occupant -- ejected safely, was taken to hospital . Two homes destroyed in crash about 2 miles from airfield, officials say .

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(CNN) -- A 13-year-old Minnesota boy who has cancer has resumed chemotherapy treatments and is not responding well, a family spokesman said Friday. Doctors say Daniel Hauser's lymphoma responded well to a first round of chemotherapy in February. Danny Hauser started a second round of chemotherapy treatment this week, Jim Navarro said in a statement on the family's Web site, dannyhauser.com. "The doctor changed the number of chemotherapy drugs in the protocol submitted to the court. Danny is not tolerating the drugs well and has been vomiting all day. He is understandably angry and depressed about being forced to go through the ravages of chemotherapy again." Daniel underwent his first round of chemotherapy in February, a month after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. But his parents were concerned about the treatment's side effects, which typically include nausea, and decided to end the chemotherapy regimen and pursue holistic treatments instead. When Daniel's oncologist learned of the decision to reject standard treatment, which doctors say is associated with a cure rate of as high as 90 percent, he asked a court to intervene to ensure the teen got chemotherapy. Doctors say that, without it, the disease would likely prove fatal. But last week, before the court could act, Colleen Hauser packed up her son and flew with him to Southern California, from where they were planning to continue to Mexico to seek alternative alternative medical treatment. She said he would have run on his own had she not helped him flee. She changed her mind before crossing the border and returned this week with Daniel to Minnesota, where the family agreed to comply with whatever treatment the court ordered. A medical examination revealed that the boy's tumor had grown since he was diagnosed and the boy's doctor recommended he resume chemotherapy. After examining the boy on Monday, Dr. Michael Richards estimated the tumor's size at 5.3 inches by 5.1 inches by 6.3 inches, and said it was "protruding outside the chest wall." He said initiation this week of standard chemotherapy treatment was "imperative." Richards recommended at least another five cycles of chemotherapy followed by radiation, and added that the "goal will be to include alternative therapies in which the family is interested, as long as there is not data to suggest that a particular danger exists with any alternative medicine." District Court Judge John Rodenberg originally took custody of the boy away from his parents, but returned him to his family on the condition that they comply with the recommendations of the cancer specialist. Hodgkin's lymphoma is a cancer that affects the lymphatic system, which is part of the immune system. As the disease progresses, it compromises a body's ability to fight infection. CNN's Aaron Cooper contributed to this story.

Daniel Hauser started second round of chemotherapy this week, spokesman says . Daniel "angry and depressed" at being forced to undergo chemo, Jim Navarro says . 13-year-old needs chemotherapy, doctors and court say . Mother took him out of the state to seek alternative treatment, returned this week .

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(InStyle.com) -- Engagement season is in full swing, which, of course, means an influx proposals, but more importantly, tons of creative "will you marry me?" scenarios to top. Take a cue from these celebrities by jaunting off to memorable destinations for a proposal your partner won't forget (or turn down!). Venice was the scene of Avril Lavigne and Dereyck Whibley's engagement. St. Barts . On their first date, Billy Joel took Katie Lee out to dinner, but on that November 2002 evening she got much more than a scene from an Italian restaurant. "Afterward he took me to see "Movin' Out" [the hit musical based on Joel's tunes], got onstage and sang the last two songs," recalls Lee, 23, who was visiting New York from Ohio and first met Joel, 55, in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel, where both were staying. "I knew he was trying to impress me." It must have worked; six months after that meeting she moved to Long Island, New York, to live with him, and in January 2004 he proposed on a trip to St. Barts. "He got down on his knee, and it was a complete surprise," Lee recalls. "That made me feel really special." Though Scott Wolf, 35, of "Everwood," and Kelley Limp, 28, formerly of "Real World New Orleans," credit a friend with setting them up, in a way they can thank Oprah Winfrey. "When I first called Kelley," says Wolf, "she said, 'I just sat down with strawberries and chocolate milk to watch "Oprah." '" Apparently it was not the best timing. "Nobody calls me at 4 o'clock," says Limp. "It's an unwritten rule that I'm watching "Oprah"." So Wolf decided to catch the episode, and they discussed it afterward. The chatting continued over a dinner date at Raoul's in New York City. A year later, on a trip to St. Barts, Wolf took Limp boating and pulled into a cove for a sunset dinner, where he gave her a Bruce Winston (son of Harry Winston) 2.7-carat diamond ring. "I said yes, like, 15 times," says Limp. New York City . It was Stephanie March's first and last blind date ever. After weeks of delays, March, then starring on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit", finally agreed to meet Food Network chef Bobby Flay for dinner at Nobu in New York. Within seconds of meeting Flay, her misgivings about blind dates were dispelled. "I know it's a cliché, but I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, this is the rest of my life," says March. She was right: Just before Christmas 2003, Flay took March ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, where he surprised her with another kind of ice -- a princess-cut diamond ring -- and a proposal. Africa . On the golf course during the 2001 British Open was probably the last place Tiger Woods, 28, expected to meet his future wife, Elin Nordegren, 24. The thunderbolt struck when fellow golfer Jesper Parnevik introduced Woods to Nordegren, who was then working as the Parneviks' nanny. If his scores are any indication, Woods was more than a little distracted by the stunning Swedish former model. He lost the tournament but soon won her heart. And on a South African safari two years later, Woods proposed to Nordegren during a sunset stroll around the Shamwari Game Reserve. Nantucket, Massachusetts . Devon Gummersall, 29, thought he'd blown it after a 1998 date with "Quarterlife's" Majandra Delfino, 27. "I showed up in this awful leather jacket, and Majandra was like, 'Who is this guy?'" recalls Gummersall, the former co-star of "My So-Called Life." After losing the leather, he reconnected with Delfino at a concert five years later -- and didn't miss a beat. Soon, the future groom bought a garnet ring from the Beverly Hills Watch Co. and hid it for a scavenger hunt on a Nantucket, Massachusetts, beach. Says Delfino, "I dug up this white box, all sandy, and opened it. Devon said, 'Do you know what this means?'" Delfino definitely did. New Zealand . The romance that blossomed between "Two and a Half Men's" Melanie Lynskey, 30, and Jimmi Simpson, 31, star of "The Farnsworth Invention" on Broadway, surprised them both. The pair, who had become friends while co-starring in a Stephen King miniseries in 2000, were sharing a taxi when "good night" turned into a good-night smooch. "We kissed each other unexpectedly!" says Lynskey of the moment. "Once that happened, I was head over heels for him." Simpson chose a moonlit moment on the deck of Lynskey's family beach house in New Zealand in 2005 to get down on one knee. "He opened the ring box," she recalls, "but then he set it on the table. I was like, 'Can I try that on?'" Six months after Matthew Perry introduced them at a 2004 barbecue, actor Jonathan Silverman, 41, proposed to "Close to Home" actress Jennifer Finnigan, 28, in a New Zealand rain forest. Hawaii . Channing Tatum surprised his "Step Up" costar Jenna Dewan with a weekend proposal in Maui in September 2007. Tatum arranged to have close friends of the couple fly in for the festivities. Canada . When commissioning an engagement ring for his girlfriend Heidi Klum, Seal had one key word for New York City jeweler Lorraine Schwartz: canary. Schwartz's sister delivered the 10-carat yellow diamond stunner to Whistler, British Columbia, where Seal proposed to Klum on a glacier -- with the sunny piece of ice. England . In May 2004 Jason Priestley arranged a trip to London, England, -- to the very street corner where he and girlfriend Naomi Lowde first met. Once there, Priestley presented Lowde with an emerald-cut, three-diamond ring by Steven Pomerantz. "It became evident that my life was better with Naomi in it," says Priestley. In the summer of 2006, after 3 years of dating, "Superman Return" star Brandon Routh purchased the 3-carat diamond ring that had caught girlfriend Courtney Ford's eye during an earlier visit to Beverly Hills jeweler Neil Lane. But since the two were traveling for the "Superman Returns" press tour, Routh asked Gilbert Adler, one of the film's producers, to hold the ring until they arrived in England. "Poor man!" says Routh. "He carried it around for two and a half weeks." Finally, while picnicking in Glastonbury, England, Routh popped the question. Italy . One year after Avril Lavigne and Dereyck Whibley's friendship turned romantic, Whibley, 26, proposed with a 5-carat diamond solitaire after a picnic and gondola ride in Venice, Italy. It was something of a shock for the bride-to-be. "I might look like a tough chick -- and I am," Lavigne once said, "but I'm a hopeless romantic inside." Puerto Rico . Just two days before Christmas 2007, under a full moon at midnight in a bay off the coast of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, Roselyn Sanchez and Eric Winter were seated in a double kayak, taking in the bioluminescent organisms shimmering in the water all alone, except for a tour guide in a second kayak. After giving an "amazing speech," Winter pulled out a 4.3-carat brilliant-cut diamond ring by Michael Barin, Sánchez's favorite jeweler. California . "I can't remember the exact day I knew she was the one; I remember it was an accumulation of what she's about, where she came from, and her family," says tennis star Pete Sampras of his bride, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras. After nine months of dating, Sampras proposed to Wilson at his Los Angeles, California, home with a platinum ring with oval-shaped diamond from Cartier. The romance between Noah Wyle, 29, and Tracy Warbin, 31, a movie makeup artist, was born on the frigid Maine set of the 1997 film "The Myth of Fingerprints." Recalls Warbin, "At the end of one shoot, there was a huge snowball fight. Noah pushed my face into a snowbank. It really, really hurt! I knew then that he liked me, because it was so kindergarten-y." Wyle concurs: "It's a technique I learned in grade school, and it's worked for me ever since." Three years later, on Valentine's Day 1999, at a picnic for two on the couple's Santa Ynez, California, ranch, Wyle got down on one knee to propose, a marquise-cut diamond ring in hand. In February 2005 Christina Aguilera and her beau, Jordan Bratman, went on a Valentine's Day getaway to Carmel, California, where Bratman proposed with a five-carat diamond-and-platinum ring by Stephen Webster. Eight months later, the pair -- who share a love of the wine country -- wed in Napa Valley. Get a FREE TRIAL issue of InStyle - CLICK HERE! Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Billy Joel proposed to Katie Lee in St. Bart's . Roselyn Sanchez and Eric Winter got engaged while in a double kayak . Jordan Batman proposed to Christina Aguilera on a Valentine's Day getaway . Seal gave Heidi Klum a 10-karat yellow diamond on a glacier in Canada .

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JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (CNN) -- Saudi King Abdullah confirmed Sunday that his country will increase daily oil production from 9 million barrels to 9.7 million in the near future to counter the sharp rise in international oil prices. Saudi Arabia has announced an increase in oil production in a bid to ease the pressure on oil prices. The Saudi petroleum minister, Ali I. Al-Naimi, said the country will reach the 9.7 million level by July. The announcement comes after Saudi officials announced modest increases. It would be Saudi Arabia's highest production rate since 1981. White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto praised the step, saying, "Any increase in production in today's oil market is welcome. It is important that we also take steps to increase domestic production and our refining capacity." Meanwhile, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. rose nearly 10 cents in the past two weeks to almost $4.10 a gallon for self-serve regular, according to a national survey released Sunday. The survey showed the national average was just a fraction of a cent under $4.10 a gallon, said survey publisher Trilby Lundberg. That is up 9.7 cents a gallon from the same survey two weeks ago, Lundberg said. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, downplayed the Saudi increase. "Nice try, but no cigar. When gas is at $4 per gallon, demand increases almost daily, and the Saudis have millions of barrels per day more in spare capacity," he said. "This isn't nearly good enough." Al-Naimi, the petroleum minister, also said the Saudi government will invest in oil projects that would allow Saudi Arabia to have the capacity to produce 12.5 million barrels per day by the end of next year. King Abdullah's announcement came at the end of the Jeddah energy summit, where he also called for OPEC to set aside $1 billion for a strategy to ease the oil price crisis. He said $500 million should be given to developing nations to help them get the energy they need. King Abdullah said there are "many factors that made oil prices high." Along with increased demand, he also cited oil speculators and an increase in taxes in consumer nations. "Now we see a lot of people point the finger at OPEC as it is solely responsible for this," he said. The king's statement came a day after U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, attending the summit, blamed the record oil prices on lack of production. "All nations must be better at conservation, and the U.S. is at the top of that list," said Bodman, who met with journalists ahead of the international meeting of oil producing and consuming nations focusing on high oil prices. Some observers have blamed speculators for driving up oil prices. A key adviser to Saudi Arabia's oil minister said Friday that a number of factors, including speculators and currency fluctuations, are to blame for rising oil prices. "We need stability," Dr. Ibrahim al Muhanna said, adding that Saudi Arabia would like to see producers, consumers and distributors cooperate. But Bodman said he did not believe that they are the cause. Since 2003, he said, global demand for oil has increased because of industry in China, India and the Middle East. But from 2005 to 2007, there was very little increase in supply. Nations need an additional supply of energy to market, whether that energy is nuclear, coal, fossil fuels, solar or wind power, Bodman said. "We spent 30 years digging ourselves into this hole," he said. "It won't be solved soon." On Wednesday, President Bush asked Congress to permit drilling for oil in deep water off the U.S. coast to combat rising oil prices. He also renewed his demand that Congress allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, clear the way for more refineries and encourage efforts to recover oil from shale in areas like the Green River Basin, which encompasses parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. "In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply here at home," Bush said in a Rose Garden statement.

Saudis will increase daily oil production from 9 million barrels to 9.7 million . Increase from July, boosting production to highest level since 1981 . Announcement at Jeddah energy summit to help ease pain of oil price hike . Saudis: OPEC should give $1B for strategy, $500M of which for developing nations .

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- The Pakistani military says security forces have taken back the city of Mingora from the Taliban, calling it a significant victory in its offensive against the Taliban. Pakistani solders escort a suspected Taliban militant inside an army base in Mingora. Mingora is the largest city in Pakistan's Swat Valley where security forces have been fighting the Taliban in a month-long offensive. "It is a great accomplishment," said Pakistani Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas. "This is the largest city in Swat and for all practical purposes, Mingora has been secured." Abbas said militants put up a stiff resistance, but their resistance weakened as troops moved in. Abbas told CNN pockets of militants remain just outside Mingora. The fighting has uprooted about 2.4 million Pakistanis from their homes in the northwestern region of the country, according to the latest data from the United Nations. Of those displaced, about 10 percent -- or 240,000 -- are living in refugee camps, according to the U.N. The announcement that the military has pushed the Taliban out of Mingora comes after days of Taliban attacks in other areas in the country. The military issued a press release on Saturday saying that 25 militants and a soldier were killed in fighting across the region over the last 24 hours. Pakistani authorities increased security throughout Islamabad on Friday after a string of deadly bombings in Lahore and Peshawar, and a threat by the Taliban to carry out further attacks. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for Wednesday's suicide attack in Lahore on a building housing police, intelligence and emergency offices. Twenty-seven people were killed. The militant group also threatened to continue attacking cities in Pakistan until the military ends its operations against Taliban militants in the country's northwest.

Pakistani military says it has taken back key Swat Valley city of Mingora . Army spokesman says operation is a "great accomplishment" Fighting in northwestern region has displaced about 2.4 million Pakistanis . Pakistan raises security levels after deadly blasts in Lahore, Peshawar .

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(Travel + Leisure) -- With its tranquil beaches, the tiny northern island of Sylt is the country's best-kept summer secret. An ideal way to see the island -- especially in late summer when the heather is in full bloom -- is by bike. Where to stay . Long and narrow, and spread over 36 square miles, Sylt has a verdant countryside peppered with its signature low-slung cottages. Many house tiny hotels, like the secluded Dorint Söl'ring Hof (1 Am Sandwall, Rantum; 49-4651/836-200; doubles from $550), a 15-room inn tucked into the dunes on the southern coast with its own hidden stretch of sugary sand. For those who want to be closer to the action, there's the Hotel Stadt Hamburg (2 Strandstrasse; 49-4651/8580; doubles from $253), in the charming village of Westerland. You'll have to walk five minutes to the beach, but this tidy hotel, built in 1869, is an ideal base for exploration. Where to eat . The island's dining scene attracts a number of German celebrities (Claudia Schiffer, Boris Becker), and many frequent the stylish Sansibar (80 Hörnumer Str., Rantum; 49-4651/964-656; dinner for two $130). The restaurant's North Sea-meets-Asian dishes, like fresh mussels in a sweet curry sauce, are a potent draw. In Kampen, you'll find Greta's Rauchfang (5 Strönwai; 49-4651/ 42672; dinner for two $92) next to Louis Vuitton and Hermès. Here, socialites enjoy bottles of Kristall (opened dramatically with sabers), along with small plates of the sweet local shrimp. To get away from the fabulous set, head to Alter Gasthof (5 Alte Dorfstrasse, List; 49-4651/877-244; dinner for two $65) on the isle's northern tip. This 200-year-old inn dishes out classic regional food, including stellar house-smoked salmon and eel. What to do . Sylt is known for its nude beaches. The most famous is Buhne 16 (133A Listlandstrasse, Kampen), where Germans of every stripe let it all hang out as they lounge in wicker basket chairs. For those who like things a bit more covered up, try Am Roten Kliff, just north of Kampen, which is also (no surprise) less crowded. An ideal way to see the island -- especially in late summer when the heather is in full bloom -- is by bike. Fahrrad am Bahnhof (49-4651/5803), in Westerland's main train station, has a terrific rental selection, and the staff will happily suggest a route along Sylt's 136 miles of well-laid-out paths. Getting there . Sylt is reached by train from Berlin (5 hours) or Hamburg (3 1/2 hours). By car, take the autobahn to Niebüll from Berlin (290 miles) or Hamburg (120 miles). There is no road connecting Sylt to the mainland; vehicles board a train for the 30-minute trip to the island. For more, see bahn.de. Planning a beach getaway? Don't miss Travel + Leisure's guide to Affordable Beach Resorts. Copyright 2009 American Express Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

The island of Sylt is five hours from Berlin by train . Sylt is known for its nude beaches . The island's dining scene attracts a number of German celebrities .

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Navy is investigating how thousands of dollars went missing in the rescue of the captain of the Maersk Alabama in April, a Pentagon source told CNN. The USS Bainbridge tows the lifeboat in which Capt. Robert Phillips was held for days. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service opened an investigation into how $30,000 disappeared after special forces snipers shot and killed three pirates, ending the multi-day siege and freeing the captain, who had been held hostage. Investigators are talking to anyone who may have had contact with the money or knowledge about what happened to it, the source said, including military personnel on the warship, Navy SEALs who rescued Capt. Richard Phillips, and the crew of the Maersk Alabama. The NCIS and the Maersk Line Ltd., which owns the Maersk Alabama, have not responded to CNN's request for comment. In a criminal complaint filed against the one surviving alleged pirate, Abduwali Muse, the government contends the alleged pirate demanded money from the ship's captain and led him by gun point to the ship's safe. Watch CNN's Chris Lawrence on the investigation » . "The captain opened the safe and took out approximately $30,000 in cash. Muse and two other pirates then took the cash," the criminal complaint contends. It goes on to allege that Muse distributed some of the money to the other pirates who retreated to a lifeboat where they were holding the captain as a captive. See timeline of events that led to piracy case » . All three of the other pirates were killed by U.S. Special Forces snipers during the rescue but the complaint does not list any money recovered from the boat after the rescue. It only lists rifles, a hand gun, artillery, cell phones and handheld radios.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service opened an investigation into missing cash . $30,000 disappeared after rescue of captain of Maersk Alabama by Navy SEALs . SEALs shot and killed three pirates, ending multi-day siege, freeing captain in April . Pirates reportedly led captain at gun point to the ship's safe .

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(CNN) -- Former first lady Nancy Reagan has been released from a hospital after fracturing her pelvis during a fall at home last week, a spokeswoman said Friday. Former first lady Nancy Reagan is shown at an event in the nation's capital in September. Reagan, 87, returned to her Bel Air, California, home, spokeswoman Joanne Drake said. Doctors expect a full recovery, prescribing a regimen of daily physical therapy and a reduced public schedule, Drake said in a written release. The former first lady admitted herself to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on Tuesday after experiencing what Drake described as "persistent pain." Tests revealed a fractured pelvis and sacrum, the triangular bone within the pelvis. She also was hospitalized for two days in February after a fall. President Reagan died in June 2004 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. Since his death, Nancy Reagan has remained involved with the national Alzheimer's Association and its affiliate, the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute in Chicago, Illinois. However, she has appeared in public only rarely in recent years. Reagan expressed her thanks in the release Friday to all those who prayed for her and sent cards, flowers, phone calls and e-mails.

Nancy Reagan admitted herself to a hospital with a fractured pelvis Tuesday . Reagan, 87, returned to her Bel Air, California, home Friday . She previously was hospitalized for two days in February after a fall .

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LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets in January, will tell her story in a book, although no publisher has been found to sell it, her lawyer said. In addition to her reality TV show, Nadya Suleman has met with a ghost writer for a book. Jeffrey Czech also confirmed details of a "less-intrusive" reality show about Suleman and her 14 kids, although no U.S. network has been signed to carry it. The advance money for the TV show deal will help Suleman pay her bills, Czech said. "Obviously, she needs to do something more than just flip hamburgers all day," he said. Suleman was set to sign an agreement with a ghost writer for her book Monday, Czech said. While he would not name the writer, he said the two "hit it off." In addition to the eight children born this year, Suleman has six other children. All 14 were conceived through in-vitro fertilization. The TV deal was signed with the British division of EyeWorks, Czech said. Headquartered in the Netherlands, EyeWorks produces and distributes television programs in Europe, parts of South America, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Its U.S. productions include "The Biggest Loser," which takes overweight participants through what producers call "radical physical makeover without any kind of surgery." "EyeWorks is a strong company and they did offer some money up front, which is obviously attractive to a woman with her financial situation," Czech said. He would not reveal terms of the TV deal or how much money was involved. The show would be similar to what EyeWorks has produced in Europe, in which a camera crew does not follow the family every day, he said. It would, instead, record milestones and special events. Suleman will handle the camera for much of the taping of her TV show, reducing the intrusion into her children's lives by television crews, Czech said. Though he said the show has not been named, Suleman has sought to trademark her media nickname -- Octomom -- for a TV show and a line of diapers. Suleman has said no to some opportunities to make money, Czech said. She declined an offer from Vivid, a porn movie company, to star in its productions, he said. CNN's Alan Duke contributed to this report.

Nadya Suleman's lawyer says she's met with ghost writer; no publisher yet . She's also getting an advance on reality TV show; she will handle the camera . Lawyer: "She needs to do something more than just flip hamburgers all day" Suleman, already mother of six, gave birth to octuplets in January .

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(CNN) -- Mauricio Funes was inaugurated Monday as El Salvador's president, promising to work for the nation's poor and disadvantaged. El Salvador's new president, Mauricio Funes, takes power Monday after his inauguration in San Salvador. Funes, elected March 15, is a member of a political party that waged guerrilla war against the government 17 years ago. He is El Salvador's first leftist president. "The Salvadoran public asked for a change, and that change begins now," Funes said in an inauguration speech before an audience that included Latin American leaders and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Funes, a member of the FMLN party, won a narrow victory over the ARENA party's Rodrigo Avila. Funes' victory ended a 20-year hold on the presidency by the right-leaning ARENA. With Funes' win, El Salvador joined other Latin American countries that have elected leftist leaders in recent years -- Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil. The FMLN, which is the Spanish acronym for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was formed in 1980 as an umbrella group for five leftist guerilla organizations fighting a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. The guerrillas and the government signed a peace pact in 1992, and the FMLN became a legitimate political party. By some estimates, 75,000 Salvadorans died during the war. The new president will find "a country that still retains a lot of bitterness, a lot of division," Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue policy institute, said before the election. "This country is completely divided," ARENA party official Adolfo Torres said on CNN affiliate TCS TV on election night. Funes acknowledged that division Monday, promising to "create a country without hate and without resentment." He also seemed to acknowledge the difficulties ahead, saying, "We don't have the right to make mistakes." Despite a dire economy, Funes promised an ambitious social program that would include construction of 11,000 homes, scholarships for children ages 6 to 18 and improvement in delivery of water, electricity and sanitary services to 32 poor municipalities. He may be hard-pressed to follow through, some analysts said. "Once Funes assumes office on 1 June, his government will face major challenges to boost the economy, cut government expenditures to trim the fiscal deficit and maintain support to the poor, who are being hit hardest by the economic downturn," analyst Heather Berkman wrote in a report last week for the Eurasia Group consulting firm. "Cutting expenditures and reducing the deficit will be the most important challenges," Berkman wrote, adding that to "do this, the Funes administration plans to cut government spending and eliminate redundant presidential commissions; retarget propane subsidies (and perhaps eventually eliminate them); and propose a number of new taxes on alcoholic beverages, tobacco and new vehicles." Funes campaigned on a platform of fiscal reform that aims to increase the government's tax take incrementally, Berkman said. Funes did not offer any details Monday, speaking instead in general terms of the El Salvador he would like to see under his five-year administration. He will not, Funes said, "govern for a few or be complacent to corruption." Funes, a former freelance journalist for CNN en Español, noted in particular that his administration will fight organized crime and narcotraffickers. "In this government," he said, "those who have merit will be compensated and those who are guilty will be punished."

Mauricio Funes is inaugurated as El Salvador's president . Funes of the FMLN party is El Salvador's first leftist president . Funes' political party waged guerrilla war against government till early '90s . Secretary of State Hillary Clinton among dignitaries at inauguration .

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ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- I'm the mother of two daughters, a teen and a tween. So every day, I tiptoe through hormonally laced minefields hoping to avoid emotional carnage in response to any of my random comments or actions. The cervical cancer vaccine, approved in 2006, is recommended for girls around 11 or 12. As I tiptoe, I sometimes stumble, as any mother of girls that age knows. No adult woman in her right mind would knowingly, willingly utter comments that result in young people hissing, hurling verbal grenades such as, "Thanks, Mom, for calling me fat, AGAIN." Or "Are you EVEN listening to me?" Or any version of the very popular, "I hate YOU," "I hate you SO much," "I hate this family," or just plain "AAAARRRRGGGHHHHH!" followed by stomping feet and slamming doors. So given this background, you might understand why, when I chose to broach the subject of the latest vaccine for young girls, I was braced for a fight. Oddly enough, for once, the battle didn't come. I told my teenage daughter I wanted her to get the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine the next time she went to see her doctor. "I don't want to." "Well, sorry. You have to." "I heard it hurts." "Well, that's too bad. But it might prevent you from getting cancer later in life." "Oh. (pause) OK." If you were keeping score, you might chalk that one up as a Mom win. The only problem with that is after winning over my daughter, I now had to convince myself. This drug has its own emotional battlefields. The HPV vaccine has been available to the public for almost two years. When Merck launched it in 2006 under the name Gardasil, many people enthusiastically embraced it as a wonder drug. Dr. Kevin Ault, associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University's School of Medicine, says the vaccine helps women avoid an assortment of ailments, some not too serious, but others that are potentially deadly. "There are about 100 different types of human papillomavirus," he said. "Some of them are pretty common and not dangerous, like plantar warts or warts on your hand. About 30 of them infect the genital tract, and about a dozen of them are associated with cancer." Health for Her: Watch more the HPV vaccine and girls » . In this case, the cancer Ault is talking about is cervical cancer. The National Cancer Institute estimates that in 2008, there will be over 11,000 new cases of cervical cancer diagnosed and almost 4,000 women will die from it in the United States. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that at least 50 percent of people who have had sex will have one type of HPV at some time in their lives. Given those stats, this vaccine would seem like a pretty good thing, right? The hitch is that the vaccine is suggested for adolescent girls, but the viruses in question are sexually transmitted. And that is one of the big reasons the HPV vaccine has divided parents in the question of "to give or not to give." Let's face it. Parents don't like thinking about their daughters having sex at all. Ever. Now a new drug comes along, and not only are parents told they should embrace this new vaccine for their young daughters, but it's also part of the set of routine vaccines that doctors are strongly encouraged to give their patients. Merck says the drug has been safely tested for girls and women between the ages of 9 and 26. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that girls get the vaccine at age 11 or 12. Ault explains why youth is key. Human papillomavirus is sexually transmitted, "so one of the advantages of giving it to adolescents is that they are unlikely to have been sexually active, so they will not have been exposed to the virus before getting the vaccine." Another reason to do this early, Ault points out, is that "our immune system is a lot better when we are 11 than when we are, say, at 22." Ault also suggests that parents could use this experience to teach their children about sex and, even more important, about the realities of life, such as sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. These arguments aren't convincing to some parents, the ones that are choosing not to have their daughters vaccinated. There are several reasons for doing this, including religious beliefs. Some faith-based groups feel the vaccine is inviting their young daughters to become sexually active. Others believe the drug is just too risky. CDC spokesman Curtis Allen says the vaccine is constantly being monitored by a joint CDC /FDA hotline. Parents, patients and physicians can call the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, to report any adverse reaction to the vaccine. Through a Freedom of Information Act petition, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch got records from VAERS that showed three deaths in girls who'd had the vaccine in March-April 2007 and over 1,600 adverse reactions reported from June 2006 to April 2007. All said the response came after getting the HPV vaccine. Allen cautions restraint in considering the reports. "Most of these reactions were minor," he said, and the deaths "were linked to circumstances not related to the vaccine." The CDC and the FDA are constantly monitoring the VAERS hotline and won't hesitate to act should they see any dangerous trends due to the HPV vaccine, he said. The vaccine does have some known side effects. Ault has seen his share. "I certainly hear from women who get the vaccine that it's painful, and I think some dizziness has been reported." In fact, fainting has been added to the list of potential side effects to watch for. Allen says doctors are now recommending that girls stay in their doctor's office for a short period after they get the injection for just that reason. Three injections are necessary to get the full benefit of the vaccine. The shots need to be administered over a six-month period and at this stage are guaranteed to work for at least five years. All of this information leaves me confused. Frankly, I'm not really sure I have won myself over when it comes to the "shot or no shot" decision for my daughters. However, in the back of my mind, I hear the words a father spoke when he thought about not giving the vaccine to his still-young daughter. He said, "How am I going to be able to turn to my daughter when she's older and tell her, 'When you were younger, I had the chance of making sure you never got a certain type of cancer, and I decided not to do it' ?" That's an emotional minefield I truly don't think I'm emotionally equipped to walk through. E-mail to a friend .

Human papillomavirus, or HPV, can cause cervical cancer . Gardasil, a vaccine against HPV, was approved for U.S. use in 2006 . CDC: Girls 11-12 should get the vaccine, before they're sexually active . Reported side effects causing some parents to reconsider vaccination .

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MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- A passenger jet caught fire early Sunday, exploded and crashed into railway tracks in the central Russian city of Perm, killing all 88 people on board. Wreckage from the Aeroflot-Nord Boeing 737, which crashed near Perm, lies across a railway track. The exact cause of the pre-dawn crash is under investigation, but government spokesman Vladimir Markin said "a technical breakdown" was a likely cause. Markin said in televised remarks that the failure of one of the Boeing 737-500's two engines may have caused the plane to come down, The Associated Press reported. Airline officials have said there is no indication of terrorism. "We think it's very doubtful that it was the result of a terrorist attack, because at the scene, there were no traces of explosives as we know for now," said Lev Koshlyakov, Deputy Director General of Aeroflot. It took firefighters more than two hours to extinguish the blazing wreckage. When the sun rose, pieces of the Aeroflot jet were strewn about the railroad tracks. "It slammed in front of my house, and there was a huge flame," an unidentified woman in Perm told Russian state television. "It looked like fireworks." She said the impact of the crash "threw me across my sheets.... Then my daughter ran in from the next room and asked if a war had started." She and other witnesses said they saw the aircraft burning before it came crashing down. "It looked like a comet," she said. The jet was en route to Perm from Moscow when the pilots lost communication with air traffic control just before landing about 3:10 a.m. (2110 GMT), an Aeroflot official said. He described the weather at the time as "mediocre." The public safety minister for the Perm region said investigators were combing a 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) area, including homes and railways. Watch more about the crash » . "Right now, it's apparent that there was a fire on the plane at one kilometer in the air," Yuri Orlov said. "After that, all contact was cut off -- the plane exploded." The flight data recorder has been recovered and will be analyzed by the International Aviation Commission, Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said. The plane carried 82 passengers, including seven children, and a crew of six. At least 21 non-Russians were on board, including passport-holders from Azerbaijan, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland and Ukraine, said Lev Koshlyakov, Aeroflot's deputy director general. The U.S. Embassy confirmed that no Americans were on board the flight, even though one passenger was listed as a U.S. citizen. It is the second crash in the region involving a Boeing 737 in less than a month. An Iran-bound Boeing 737 with 90 people on board crashed on August 24 just outside the airport in Kyrgyzstan's capital, Bishkek, killing 68. The 737 is a workhorse of the airline industry, with thousands of planes in service. Aeroflot said the one that crashed in Perm was manufactured in 1992 and was operated by its Aeroflot-Nord subsidiary. "This Boeing 737 has all the necessary certificates," Koshlyakov said. "We conduct audits and inspections of all the affiliate companies we work with in the realm of their effectiveness, safety and reliability of the airplanes." Airline safety in Russia and the former Soviet Union is among the worst in the world. Aviation experts say poor maintenance, inadequate pilot training and weak government controls are major factors. But Aeroflot is considered one of the safer airlines in the region. Sunday's crash is the first fatal accident for the airline since 1994, when a Russian pilot handed control of an Airbus to his 15-year-old son. It crashed, killing all 75 people on board. Russia's government has now ordered an inquiry into the latest incident, to find out how another routine flight could have ended in tragedy. The National Transportation Safety Board will send a team of investigators to Perm to look into the incident -- a standard practice when a U.S.-made aircraft crashes. CNN's Kathleen Koch and Michael Sefanov contributed to this report .

NEW: National Transportation Safety Board to send team from U.S. to investigate . NEW: Crash likely caused by engine failure, investigator reported as saying . Boeing 737 en route to Perm from Moscow was operated by Aeroflot Nord . Officials have said there is no indication of terrorism .

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(CNN) -- Thousands of inmates rioted at the Reeves County Detention Center in Texas on Saturday, the second disturbance at the prison facility in the last two months. As many as 2,080 inmates from two of the center's three buildings began fighting in the prison yard about 4:30 p.m. CT, said county Sheriff's Office Dispatcher Anna Granado. Authorities from several law enforcement agencies responded to quell the violence. However, officials had not brought the unrest under control as of 1 a.m. Sunday, according to the sheriff's office. Officials said they do not know what prompted the riots. Three inmates were hospitalized, including one with a severed finger, the sheriff's office said. On December 12, inmates took two workers hostage and set fire to the recreation area at the center in Pecos, located about 430 miles west of Dallas. The inmates, who had made several demands, surrendered later that night. The prison is a 2,400-bed, low-security facility, operated by Geo Group Inc. It houses federal prisoners as well as inmates from other states. CNN's Janet DiGiacomo contributed to this report.

NEW: Inmate unrest at Texas prison enters second day . NEW: Authorities: Three inmates have been hospitalized; one has severed finger . Prison was site of another inmate riot in December . Officials say they do not know what sparked latest riot .

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(CNN) -- A drunk passenger tried to hijack a Turkish Airlines flight to Russia on Wednesday before he was brought under control, the head of Turkey's civil aviation authority said. The Turkish Airlines passenger jet was en route from Turkey to Russia when the incident took place. The plane landed safely and on time Wednesday afternoon in St. Petersburg. Russian authorities promptly arrested a "slightly intoxicated" passenger from Uzbekistan, Russia's Interfax News Agency reported, citing a national police spokesman. The suspect, in his early 50s, was arrested on suspicion of trying to hijack the plane, Interfax reported. Turkish media initially reported that the plane had been hijacked. When asked about those reports, a Turkish Airlines spokesman said the flight experienced an "urgent situation" as it headed to St. Petersburg, without offering further details. Interfax said the flight was carrying 164 Russian nationals. There have been several attempts to hijack Turkish airlines in recent years. In August 2007, two men hijacked an Istanbul-bound Atlasjet Airlines flight with 136 passengers and crew on board from Cyprus, claiming to have a bomb on board the flight. They forced the crew to make an emergency landing in Antalya. Both hijackers eventually surrendered to Turkish authorities. In April 2007, Turkish authorities detained a man they believed tried to hijack a Turkish airliner, possibly to Iran. The suspect, Mehmed Goksin Gol, was not armed and all 178 passengers and crew aboard the Pegasus Airlines flight were unharmed. The flight was heading from southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir to Istanbul, but landed at Ankara's airport, where the suspect was detained. In October 2006, a Turkish man hijacked a Turkish jetliner with 113 people aboard en route from the Albanian capital Tirana for Istanbul. He forced it to fly to a military airfield in Brindisi, Italy, where the passengers and crew were released unharmed. CNN's Maxim Tkachenko in Moscow and Nicky Robertson in Atlanta contributed to this report .

Incident on flight between Antalya, Turkey and St Petersburg, Russia . Turkish Airlines: Drunk man tried to hijack passenger plane . Officials: Man brought under control, airline experienced "urgent situation" NEW: Interfax: Flight arrives at St. Petersburg, police arrest Uzbek man in his 50s .

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(CNN) -- Mauricio Funes was inaugurated Monday as El Salvador's president, promising to work for the nation's poor and disadvantaged. El Salvador's new president, Mauricio Funes, takes power Monday after his inauguration in San Salvador. Funes, elected March 15, is a member of a political party that waged guerrilla war against the government 17 years ago. He is El Salvador's first leftist president. "The Salvadoran public asked for a change, and that change begins now," Funes said in an inauguration speech before an audience that included Latin American leaders and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Funes, a member of the FMLN party, won a narrow victory over the ARENA party's Rodrigo Avila. Funes' victory ended a 20-year hold on the presidency by the right-leaning ARENA. With Funes' win, El Salvador joined other Latin American countries that have elected leftist leaders in recent years -- Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil. The FMLN, which is the Spanish acronym for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was formed in 1980 as an umbrella group for five leftist guerilla organizations fighting a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. The guerrillas and the government signed a peace pact in 1992, and the FMLN became a legitimate political party. By some estimates, 75,000 Salvadorans died during the war. The new president will find "a country that still retains a lot of bitterness, a lot of division," Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue policy institute, said before the election. "This country is completely divided," ARENA party official Adolfo Torres said on CNN affiliate TCS TV on election night. Funes acknowledged that division Monday, promising to "create a country without hate and without resentment." He also seemed to acknowledge the difficulties ahead, saying, "We don't have the right to make mistakes." Despite a dire economy, Funes promised an ambitious social program that would include construction of 11,000 homes, scholarships for children ages 6 to 18 and improvement in delivery of water, electricity and sanitary services to 32 poor municipalities. He may be hard-pressed to follow through, some analysts said. "Once Funes assumes office on 1 June, his government will face major challenges to boost the economy, cut government expenditures to trim the fiscal deficit and maintain support to the poor, who are being hit hardest by the economic downturn," analyst Heather Berkman wrote in a report last week for the Eurasia Group consulting firm. "Cutting expenditures and reducing the deficit will be the most important challenges," Berkman wrote, adding that to "do this, the Funes administration plans to cut government spending and eliminate redundant presidential commissions; retarget propane subsidies (and perhaps eventually eliminate them); and propose a number of new taxes on alcoholic beverages, tobacco and new vehicles." Funes campaigned on a platform of fiscal reform that aims to increase the government's tax take incrementally, Berkman said. Funes did not offer any details Monday, speaking instead in general terms of the El Salvador he would like to see under his five-year administration. He will not, Funes said, "govern for a few or be complacent to corruption." Funes, a former freelance journalist for CNN en Español, noted in particular that his administration will fight organized crime and narcotraffickers. "In this government," he said, "those who have merit will be compensated and those who are guilty will be punished."

Mauricio Funes is inaugurated as El Salvador's president . Funes of the FMLN party is El Salvador's first leftist president . Funes' political party waged guerrilla war against government till early '90s . Secretary of State Hillary Clinton among dignitaries at inauguration .

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- North Korea is to blow up a key part of its controversial Yongbyon nuclear reactor on Friday. Hyun Hak-Bong (right), North Korea's deputy negotiator to six-party talks, crosses the border into South Korea on June 5. The destruction of the plant's cooling tower is part of an agreement with the United States aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula in exchange for loosening some restrictions on the highly secretive Communist country. The North Korean government has invited news organizations, including CNN, to witness the event. Earlier this year, Pyongyang agreed to disable its nuclear reactor and provide a full accounting of its plutonium stockpile, "acknowledge" concerns about its proliferation activities and its uranium enrichment activity, and agree to continue cooperation with a verification process to ensure no further activities are taking place. North Korea has been taking Yongbyon's main reactor apart, but imploding the cooling tower is an exceptionally important psychological step given that the highly recognizable shape of the structure is synonymous with nuclear power plants. The United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says it would take a year to rebuild if North Korea decided to go back on its agreement, and that the construction could not be done in secret. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended U.S. diplomacy toward North Korea last week, saying the deal with Pyongyang made Asia and the U.S. safer. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, Rice said that "North Korea will soon give its declaration of nuclear programs to China." China is the host of the six-party talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program, along with Russia, South Korea, Japan and the United States. Rice spoke in advance of her upcoming trip to Asia where she will be attending a meeting of G8 foreign ministers and meeting with her Asian counterparts. Rice said once North Korea submits its declaration, President Bush will notify Congress he intends to remove North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and scrap some sanctions levied against North Korea because of nuclear concerns. But she noted that there would be no practical effect to loosening the restrictions because North Korea still was under the same sanctions because of other areas of U.S. law. Rice said a 45-day review would then begin to see if North Korea is telling the truth and living up to its end of the deal struck in the six-party talks. "Before those actions go into effect, we would continue to assess the level of North Korean cooperation in helping to verify the accuracy and completeness of its declaration," she said. "And if that cooperation is insufficient, we will respond accordingly." The United States softened its demand that North Korea publicly admit to having a highly enriched uranium program and to providing Syria with nuclear technology, key unanswered questions that have left negotiations stalled for months. North Korea has already handed over about 18,000 documents on its nuclear past to the U.S., which the U.S. says are critical to verify North Korea's claims. Rice said that the deal with North Korea wasn't perfect but offered the U.S. the best chance to learn about North Korea's nuclear history. "We must keep the broader goal in mind: the elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons and programs, all of them," she said. "North Korea has said that it is committed to this goal. We'll see." Rice said that "no final agreement can be concluded" unless the U.S. verifies North Korea's claims. CNN State Department Correspondent Elise Labott contributed to this report .

North Korea plans to destroy nuclear plant's cooling tower . Implosion is part of an agreement with the United States . U.N. says the cooling tower would take a year to rebuild . Long-term aim is to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons .

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(CNN) -- Desperation, sophisticated smuggling operations and the emergence of a small Italian island as a migrant destination provide the sad backdrop to Monday's tragedy on the Mediterranean Sea -- the capsizing of a boat carrying African migrants from Libya to Italy. Libyan police officers help rescued migrants off an overcrowded boat that arrived this week in Tripoli. Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said Tuesday that Libya for years has been a destination for migrants from the rest of Africa. Its relatively successful economy is a magnet for people from impoverished regions, and its proximity makes it a logical jumping-off point for Europe. People from places such as Ghana, Nigeria, Niger and Burkina Faso long have traveled to Tripoli and other Libyan locations and have gotten work there, from construction to washing cars. Chauzy said even people from the Horn of Africa, where Somalis and Ethiopians have fled to Yemen via the Gulf of Aden, are choosing to travel to Libya rather than pursue a trip to Yemen. Asians as well are opting to travel to Europe from Libya. While some Africans hope to settle in Libya, many others have their eyes on moving onward to Europe. They tend to sail to Lampedusa, an Italian island lying southwest of Sicily and just north of the African coast -- considered an advantageous way station for entrance into Europe. Italy has been bolstering its efforts to stop the illegal traffic. Some of the people who find their way to the island get asylum. Some migrants eventually are returned to their home countries, but others are taken from Lampedusa to facilities on the mainland, where they are sometimes simply released instead of being deported. Chauzy said people head to Europe first and foremost to help their families back home with a paycheck. He said the global economic crisis has led to a drop in the money sent back home, and that in turn has affected hurting African economies, where prices for staple crops have plummeted. He said that the bolstering of border controls sparked by such a tragedy could prompt migrants to take other dangerous routes. Watch as details emerge on latest tragedy » . Officials said at least hundreds of migrants are believed to have perished in the Mediterranean over the past year. In the latest incident, more than 200 African migrants are believed to have died after their vessel, carrying 250 people, capsized in rough waters. At least 20 people are confirmed dead, and 23 have been rescued. Another boat with more than 350 migrants aboard was rescued, and these migrants -- mostly Africans but also including some Asians -- were taken to Tripoli in Libya. The International Organization for Migration believes there are two other boats in the Mediterranean that could be carrying migrants. The flight of migrants on rough seas is not just a local phenomenon. "We are seeing it all over the world," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said Tuesday. Smugglers, for example, also take people from western Africa to the Canary Islands, from Myanmar to Thailand, and from Turkey to Greece. Guterres said the tragedy shows the urgent measures people take "to escape conflict, persecution and poverty in search of a better life." Some of the people can be classified as refugees -- people fleeing war and persecution and who could qualify for asylum in other countries. Others are migrants from countries where there is no persecution. They are in search of jobs and a better life. Thousands have died on their journeys, but thousands have survived as well, with many awaiting asylum and resettlement opportunities. There has been much publicity about the flight of Ethiopians and Somalis across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. Many have died en route, with smugglers at times throwing people overboard to avoid getting arrested by navies for their operations. Ron Redmond, the UNHCR spokesman, said he believes such movement will persist as the "economic situation continues to worsen worldwide." The agency said the number of asylum seekers in industrialized countries increased last year for the second year running, in part because of higher numbers of asylum applications by citizens of Afghanistan, Somalia and other turbulent nations. Last year, 36,000 people arrived in Italy by sea from North Africa. Some 75 percent of them applied for asylum, and about 50 percent of those received some form of international protection from the Italian authorities. Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of Washington-based think tank Migration Policy Institute, said the movement of migrants is organized, with smuggling syndicates making "obscene profits" and "enormous amounts of money." "These are organized flows," Papademetriou said. As for the tragedy, "you will see this again and again and again," he said.

Libya has long been a destination for migrants from the rest of Africa . Many African migrants try to find work in industries such as construction . Others attempt to move on to Europe, with Italy a common destination . Strict border controls often prompt migrants to take other dangerous routes .

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- In "Marley & Me," it doesn't take long to learn why Marley, an incorrigibly frisky golden Labrador retriever adopted by Florida newspaper writers John and Jenny Grogan (Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston), is the "world's worst dog." In "Marley & Me," Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston's characters welcome a dog into their lives. He's friendly and lovable, but he devours everything in sight -- drywall, socks, big chunks of furniture (no, he doesn't just chew on them, he eats them). As a dog owner, I can testify that "Marley & Me," based on the real John Grogan's smash 2005 memoir, is the single most endearing and authentic movie about the human-canine connection in decades. As directed by David Frankel ("The Devil Wears Prada"), though, it's also something more: a disarmingly enjoyable, wholehearted comic vision of the happy messiness of family life. John and Jenny share an existence that, from the standpoint of our current economic times, already looks like paradise. He's a reporter who gets refashioned, by his testy editor (Alan Arkin), into a lifestyle columnist (only to keep complaining about it -- poor guy!). She's a feature writer who becomes a stay-at-home mom. As the kids come along (three of them), the Grogans move into bigger and bigger houses, yet they have thwarted ambitions, fights that go on for days, and a general attitude of wistful loss toward all the freedoms they have given up to become parents. "Marley & Me" celebrates two ordinary people as they try to fit love, work, children, and one volcanically misbehaved pooch into a single space. Marley may be the dog from hell, but we're meant to see that the Grogans, in their hearts, wouldn't have it any other way. Marley stands in for all the unruliness that can never be domesticated out of life. You can domesticate Owen Wilson, but the shock is how good the role of beleaguered breadwinner looks on him. He and Aniston forge a nimble connection (they even get mad in style), and Wilson has a scene near the end with Marley that's the most wrenchingly tender acting of his career. Using his scratchy, lackadaisical warmth to voice a testament to family, and to where dogs fit into it, he makes you feel like it's a wonderful life indeed. EW Grade: A- . CLICK HERE to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly . Copyright 2009 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved.

"Marley & Me" works as both comedy about dog and profile of family . Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston star in film version of memoir . High marks for Wilson, in particular, as newspaper columnist and dog owner .

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(CNN) -- Voluble real estate mogul Donald Trump called alleged Wall Street scam artist Bernard Madoff a "sleazebag" and "a total crook" Thursday in an interview on CNN. Donald Trump said investors who lost money in a Ponzi scheme were victims of their own greed. Trump recently hosted a party at his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, Mar-a-Lago, that was attended by several people who say they were victims of an alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme run by Madoff. Madoff, 70, is a former chairman of Nasdaq. He was charged last week with fraud. Trump, chairman and president of the Trump Organization, a New York-based real estate development empire, spoke with Kiran Chetry on CNN's "American Morning." CNN: How angry are people at this situation with Madoff? Donald Trump: ... The people in Palm Beach, many of those people have been just ripped off by this sleazebag, and they'll never see the kind of money that they've seen. You have some people gave 100 percent of their net worth to him in trust, because they trusted him, they trusted his family, they trusted everybody, and now they literally are selling their houses in order to live. And some of them mortgaged their houses in order to give that money to this Madoff. And it's really a terrible thing. I'd see him around Mar-a-Lago, I'd see him around Palm Beach -- and he's a disgrace. Watch the possible ramifications of the Madoff case » . CNN: ... How did he get away with this? How did so many smart people entrust somebody -- and we keep hearing over and over again, 100 percent of their money going to this guy. Would you ever let 100 percent of your money go to something, even if you trusted the person? Trump: I would not, and a lot of my friends would not, but obviously a lot of my friends did. The word is very simple. It's a word called "greed." Greed. That's all it is. People were greedy. They thought he was going to get them a little bit more return, or a lot more return. I mean, he was a Svengali for rich people. There are Svengalis for women; this guy was a Svengali for rich people -- very rich people. But when you think of a person putting up 100 percent of their net worth and even mortgaging their house, even though they had a lot of cash -- mortgaging their house to get more cash to this guy -- and now they're going to have to go out, literally, and maybe work in a drugstore. I don't know what they're going to do. CNN: Did you lose money from Madoff? Trump: No, I did not. CNN: Some are blaming the [Securities and Exchange Commission], saying for years they did not investigate any claims. Chairman Christopher Cox said there were some credible accusations against Madoff made nearly a decade ago that were never referred to the commission to act. So what's your take on the oversight, how the SEC and government handled this? Trump: I would not blame the SEC. This guy was a total crook. The people in his own organization supposedly didn't know about it. Now, that's another thing; I find that hard to believe. He's got two sons, and they didn't know about it? And they worked there for years? I think the whole thing is a swindle. I think even that's a swindle: The father said, "Look, you guys turn me in and pretend you don't know anything and I'll save my two sons." But it's impossible for me to believe that his sons didn't know about this. CNN: So you also think it's impossible that he acted alone. Trump: I don't know how you could act alone. They had three floors of a major office building. How could one man be manipulating that much money without all of the people knowing -- without at least a large number of the people knowing about it? So I would certainly think that his sons are guilty.

Real estate giant lashes out at suspect in $50 billion investment scheme . People were victims of their own greed, Trump says . Trump doubts that Bernard Madoff could have acted alone . Trump says he did not lose any money to Madoff .

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(AOL Autos) -- A directive recently handed down by a Detroit-area suburban mayor has ignited the latest round of a seemingly endless debate -- one that always burns with more intensity in the home of the Big Three than anywhere else. Many residents in the Detroit, Michigan area are auto workers. Thousands have been laid off recently. It's the debate that relates to cars and goes something like this: "Buy American!" vs. "I'll buy what I want!" That debate sometimes, but not always, begins as a civil conversation. But the Detroit area has been hit hard in the last five years by the ongoing, sometimes enormous financial losses posted by the Big Three. The Big Three's financial woes have had a direct impact on the Michigan economy with hundreds of thousands of layoffs and/or buyouts. Given that so many of the state's workers have lost their jobs -- and in some cases, their homes - it sometimes doesn't take long before the car debate escalates into an emotional one. That can lead to angry name-calling and insults - like many of the reader comments that flooded the online edition of the Detroit newspaper that first reported a controversial story. AOL Autos: Best new car deals this month . This latest round of the discussion was inspired by a decision made by Jim Fouts, the mayor of Warren, Michigan, a large Detroit suburb and Michigan's third-largest city, and where a good portion of the residents are (or were) autoworkers. In mid-August, Fouts told his department heads, which amount to 40 or 50 of the city's more than 700 employees that he "expects" the next car they buy will be an American model. More to the point, he expects them to drive General Motors or Chrysler vehicles, since both companies have various manufacturing or assembly plants in Warren -- not to mention GM's sprawling Tech Center -- and therefore are the city's two highest taxpayers. Fouts, who drives a 2001 Chrysler Concorde himself, isn't being draconian about it. That is, he hasn't ordered his appointees to run right out and dump their Hondas, Toyotas, Saabs or Audis immediately. "But I strongly suggested that the next car they buy should be an American one, and that I had an equally strong expectation that they will do so," Fouts said. "Legally, since they are 'at-will' employees, I have the right to mandate, and an expectation that they will meet that mandate." AOL Autos: Best hybrid SUVs . Some have accused Fouts of over-stepping his authority by "butting in" to his employees' private lives, while others have given the policy a hearty "thumbs up." "Some of them are not enthusiastic about it," Fouts said, noting that one department head currently drives a Mercedes-Benz vehicle. "But many of these department heads make more than $100,000 a year, and I told them that they might not be able to enjoy the economic comforts they currently enjoy if it were not for the amount of taxes that GM and Chrysler pay to the city. AOL Autos: Luxury cars with the best MPG . "I think of it as 'economic patriotism.'" Fouts said he did not know how many of his department heads currently drive imports, although one of his appointees, Warren Police Commissioner Bill Dwyer, guessed that about 90 percent of the appointees already drive American-made cars. "But the ones who are not happy about this -- well, they won't talk to [reporters] about that, because they know how I feel about it," said Fouts. Dwyer, who drives a Jeep Cherokee, supports the mayor's "buy American" expectation. "I believe that, the way the economy is that Americans should be buying American cars. And, as department heads, I think it's important for us to be setting an example for the other city workers." AOL Autos: Safest cars . One of the reasons usually cited for the U.S. automakers' loss of market share are consumer perceptions that imports are higher in quality -- although several recent surveys by various research groups have revealed that Detroit carmakers have closed the "quality gap" in recent years to the point that it is almost negligible. And the handful of Detroit-area residents/natives we talked to about the "Buy American" debate had no complaints about the quality of their American-made cars - or their foreign-made ones, for that matter. One is Tracy Balazy of Dearborn, Michigan - the Detroit suburb that is home to the Ford Motor Company's world headquarters. AOL Autos: Most popular crossover vehicles . "I drive a 2000 Saturn, because it was cheaper than a Honda," Balazy said. "And other than brakes and the usual things, I've had no problems with it, and it now has 101,000 miles on it." Balazy has an interesting take on the topic of whether we should feel compelled to "buy American," when it comes to cars, however - and whether we should be instructed to do so. "The average American probably spends a lot more on other things - clothes, household goods, you name it - than on cars. I think it's hypocritical for someone to tell everyone to 'buy American' as it pertains to cars, but then take advantage of the great prices on imported goods at say, Wal-Mart," Balazy said. "I've passed up many good deals, and have abstained from buying a lot of consumer goods I've wanted over the past year, just to avoid buying foreign-made products." Ken Reibel, a Michigan native who's lived in Milwaukee for more than 20 years, drives a 2002 Mazda Protégé, while his wife motors around in a 2001 Toyota Corolla. "We bought both of them used, from neighbors," he says. "They've both been good runners. No serious problems. The Protégé is a sweet ride. "But I'm not even sure what it means to 'Buy American' anymore," says Reibel. "Ford has a huge stake in Mazda, and Japanese automakers build most of their cars for the American market right here in the U.S., with American labor. It's easier to 'Buy American' if you're purchasing a shirt or case of beer. But cars are different. I'm sure if you disassembled a Chevrolet Malibu or a Ford Windstar you would find an appalling number of foreign-made components and assemblies." Gary Galusky is a Detroit-area native/resident who gives high marks to quality of his American-made vehicle. For the last couple of years, Galusky has actually maintained two residences: one in Dearborn and one in Sutton's Bay, in Northern Michigan - a five-hour drive. "I make that commute regularly, about every three weeks, in a 2005 Ford Escape that I bought new. It now has 103,000 miles on it, and it's never required anything other than ordinary maintenance," says Galusky. Conrad Sutter grew up in Harper Woods, a Detroit suburb just a few miles from Warren, and now lives in Richland, in western Michigan. Sutter says he agrees with the "Buy American" sentiment. "I believe what the mayor of Warren is doing is okay," says Sutter. "I wouldn't suppose there are a lot of Apple Computers being purchased in Redmond, Washington (home of Microsoft Corp.), either. "Nothing wrong with that."

Detroit mayor sparks debate when he tells employees to buy American cars . Big Three's financial woes have had impact on Michigan economy . Customer: Hypocritical to buy American cars then buy other imported goods . Differences in quality between American and foreign are negligible .

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JERUSALEM (CNN) -- A rocket fired by Palestinian militants fell on a Gaza home and killed two children, Palestinian sources said Friday, the same day Israel opened three Gaza border crossings for the first time in 10 days. A truck carrying grain enters Gaza from Israel on Friday at the Karni crossing point, one of three Israel reopened. A third child was in critical condition. The children, all girls, were cousins -- the two who died were 7 and 12, and the injured child is 5, Hamas security and Palestinian medical sources said. The rocket struck a house north of Gaza City. In a separate development, the Israeli military said it allowed a Palestinian who was badly wounded by rocket fire Wednesday to enter Israel for treatment. The Palestinian entered Israel through the Erez Crossing between northern Gaza and Israel. Israel closed the crossing for all but humanitarian reasons because of rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel by Palestinian militants. But it opened three other crossings Friday, allowing fuel and commodities into the Palestinian territory for the first time in more than a week. About 80 trucks filled with commodities were expected to cross into Gaza. Among the goods were 400,000 liters of fuel and 120 tons of cooking gas. The decision to open the crossings at Kerem Shalom, Karni and Nahal Oz came after requests from international aid groups and Egypt, said Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. In addition, he said, Israel has no desire to hurt the civilian population in Gaza. Lerner said whether to keep the crossings open would be a daily decision. United Nations assistance programs in Gaza have run out of flour and several essential pharmaceuticals, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. A tenuous six-month truce between the Hamas government in Gaza and Israel expired a week ago. Under the Egyptian-brokered deal, Hamas agreed to end militant attacks on Israel from Gaza, and Israel agreed to halt raids inside the territory and ease its blockade on humanitarian goods. In reality, the truce started breaking down two months ago. Rocket attacks by militants became more frequent, and Israel resumed airstrikes inside Gaza. Since then, dozens of rockets have been fired by Palestinian militants into Israel. Israel Defense Forces said about nine rockets have been launched from Gaza since midnight, pushing the three-day total to more than 110. There are no reports of casualties in Israel. The crossings opened a day after Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met in Cairo and Egypt expressed concern about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. Livni criticized Hamas after her meeting with Mubarak. "Hamas needs to understand that Israel's basic desire to live in a tranquil region doesn't mean that Israel is willing to accept ongoing shooting at its population," she said, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "Enough is enough. We cannot accept this situation, and the situation will change." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has threatened to respond to the escalating violence. He warned Hamas again Thursday in an interview on the Al Arabiya television network and seemed to suggest that time was running out. "We do not want to fight the Palestinian people, but we will not allow Hamas to strike our children," Olmert said. "I did not come here to declare war," he continued. "But Hamas must be stopped -- and so it will be. "I will not hesitate to use Israel's strength to strike at Hamas and Islamic Jihad. How? I do not wish to go into details here."

NEW: Militants' rocket hits Gaza house, killing Palestinian cousins . NEW: Military says it allowed wounded Palestinian into Israel despite blockade . Trucks filled with commodities cross into Gaza at three locations . Militants have fired 110 rockets since Wednesday, Israel says .

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HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- From the runway to the store rack, Vivienne Tam is one designer who uses creativity and business acumen in equal measure. Leading fashion designer Vivienne Tam spoke to CNN's Andrew Stevens in The Boardroom. Since her start in the fashion business in the early '80s and establishing her own brand in the '90s, she has risen to fame with her east-meets-west styles. Today it's her skills in business which have expanded the label to some 30 stores worldwide, from New York to Beijing. CNN's Andrew Stevens caught up with the designer in Hong Kong to talk about what it's like to lead both the business and creative direction of a global fashion line. Tam: The business side is like designing, it's like I like the touch of the fabric, I like to know the details about it. And you feel about it, you know about the deal, because who's the person who knows what the best deal for you is? Yourself. It's like designing clothes, I love to know how to solve every single thing, you know. Like what kind of budget . Stevens: It's just natural curiosity? Tam: Natural curiosity, I love it. I love every aspect of it. Stevens: Who have you learned your business skills from or have you made it up as you went along? Tam: I self-taught myself in business; I know nothing about the business, I learned everything -- about the pricing, the shipping, the contracts, everything -- by doing it. When you're doing it yourself, you know everything. If you don't do it, you just listen to somebody telling you how to do it, you're not experiencing it. Once you're experiencing it, you can grow so much from it. Once you experience it, you can go further, much further. It's a feeling of it. Stevens: When you won the Hong Kong businesswoman of the year award, you said that your mother was one of your greatest inspirations. How did she inspire you? Tam: She inspired me so much you know, like you say, the determination, persistence. When she really wanted to make something, she would really go to the end, she'd really want to make it happen and I see her, she's really the force behind me. We were quite poor, we had no money, my parents were working really hard. When I grew up, I saw them working so hard, and then deep inside myself that I wanted to change the situation, I wanted to make something, this one thing. Stevens: What do you think are the most important qualities for a businessperson? Tam: For me, it's most important, a vision, determination, and to never say no to yourself. And be open to criticisms, open to learning, and open to criticisms and knowing nothing about the business; nothing, so you can learn everything by knowing nothing, you know, and be successful in the things that you didn't know. Stevens: You work in a very creative industry, how do you keep your staff motivated in this industry, how do you keep them going, how do you keep them working for you? Tam: I always tell them my story, how I was in school when my teacher asked for one outfit -- I give them 8 outfits. I told them, do things that I didn't ask you, give me, do your work with passion, it's more important than "Oh, 6 o'clock, I have to leave." Do something that is out of the box. E-mail to a friend .

Designer Vivienne Tam speaks to CNN's Andrew Stevens in The Boardroom . She started in the fashion industry in the '80s, launched own brand in the '90s . Said her mother was inspiration when made Hong Kong businesswoman of the year .

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(CNN) -- Two men were in custody and a third was still on the run Friday after the shooting of two police officers in Indiana sparked a manhunt across the Ohio River into Kentucky, authorities said. One of the injured officers is taken out of an ambulance and rushed into the University of Louisville Hospital. Vincent Windell, 22, and another man whose name was not released were in custody in connection with Thursday's shooting, Jeffersonville, Indiana, Chief Detective Charlie Thompson told CNN. A third suspect, Robert Dattilo, 37, fled into Kentucky, where Louisville police were pursuing him, according to Louisville Metro Police spokeswoman Alicia Smiley. The incident began Thursday when Jeffersonville Police Cpl. Dan Lawhorn, 39, and Patrolman Keith Broady, 32, responded to a call from a Motel 6 employee about possible drug activity, Thompson said. The two were apparently ambushed when they arrived, Indiana State Police told the Louisville Courier-Journal. Lawhorn, an 11-year veteran, was shot in the leg, and Broady, a 4-year veteran, was shot in the upper body, Thompson said. The two officers returned fire, but it wasn't clear whether the suspects were hit. Lawhorn and Broady were able to reach their patrol cars and call for help after the shooting. They were rushed to the University of Louisville Hospital for surgery and are both listed in serious but stable condition, hospital spokesman David McArthur told CNN.

Vincent Windell, 22, and another man in custody for Thursday's shooting . Third suspect, identified as Robert Dattilo, 37, fled into Kentucky, still on run . Police say incident started when cops were ambushed responding to drug call . Both officers who were shot are listed in serious but stable condition .

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TAMPA, Florida (CNN) -- There's probably no way to describe the feeling. Joe Pirrone's pride and joy, his F350 Super Duty turbo diesel truck, turned out to be a stolen "clone." One moment, Guiseppe "Joe" Pirrone was on a long weekend at the beach. The next moment, he found out the pickup that he bought a year ago is stolen, and he is still on the hook for the $27,000 loan. Stories like Pirrone's are scattered across the country, and Tuesday the FBI announced that it has broken up one of the largest auto theft cases in the U.S. Capping "Operation Dual Identity," arrest warrants for 17 people were executed in Tampa and Miami, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; and in Mexico City and Guadalajara, Mexico. The suspects were accused of "cloning" vehicles, which is making stolen cars look like legal ones. The FBI says that the ring was operating in the U.S. for more than 20 years. More than 1,000 vehicles were stolen in Florida, with more than $25 million in losses to consumers and banks. "Individuals have been victimized at every level, from the average Joe, to the banks, to big companies," said Dave Couvertier, of the FBI's Tampa field office. Car theft rings clone vehicles by taking license plates, vehicle identification numbers (VIN), and other tags and stickers from a legal car and putting them on a stolen vehicle of similar make and model. "This does not just affect big business. Anyone could become an unwitting victim of this particular scam. It could happen to anyone," said Couvertier. Pirrone knows how it was done because it happened to him. Last year, he bought a used 2005 F350 Super Duty turbo diesel pickup to use for his landscape business in Fort Myers, Florida. He bought it off a small used car lot and took out a $27,000 loan from a credit union. "I had it for about nine months. It was a great truck," he told CNN. In the fall, Pirrone decided to drive across the state to spend a long weekend in Fort Lauderdale. He was lying on the beach when his father called him to tell him that a detective from the Lee County Sheriff's Office was at his house with a tow truck. Pirrone got back in his car and drove back home immediately. "I was confused, honestly," he said. "I had to ask the detective for credentials. I didn't believe what was going on." Pirrone said the detective explained to him that he was the victim of a scam, that he was sold stolen goods. Left without a truck, Pirrone called the Suncoast Schools Federal Credit Union. He found that his $536 a month payment would live on after his truck was long gone. Pirrone said he was able to get a 30-day payment exemption, but was told that he had a signed agreement with the bank, and he was still obligated to pay the loan in full. "I am making payments on a piece of property that I don't have," Pirrone said. "They can't even repossess it. The bank doesn't have any help to offer me." The bank is a victim in the car cloning scam as well. Lisa Brock, a spokeswoman for Suncoast Schools Federal Credit Union, told CNN that the company never discusses private information about any of its members. "It is a police matter, and it's nothing we can make any substantial comment on," she said. Pirrone has hired an attorney, and he is considering filing a lawsuit against the dealership to get the bank's money back. Pirrone said he was advised by his lawyer not to name the used car lot. Law enforcement hopes that this is the beginning of the end of the "car cloning" scam. The National Motor Vehicle Information system (NMVTIS) database was implemented in January. It allows state DMVs to share title and registration information. Cloned vehicles were moved and sold to buyers in 20 states and several countries, often for less than market value, the FBI said. Many of the vehicles were exchanged for drugs, according to the bureau. The FBI says that people need to be careful when buying a car independently. "Folks should be educated enough so that they don't buy a car from a stranger, on the street, or in a back alley somewhere," said the FBI's Dave Couvertier. "And if you're getting it for too good a deal, it should be raising flags." Like so many others, Pirrone is feeling the economic squeeze. Without a truck, he had to sell his landscaping business, which he had as a side business. He is still working his other job as a restaurant manager. "It's not a good time for this to happen. I've had hours cut back at work, I'm not making what I used to make." "I don't know what's real anymore," he said. CNN National Correspondent Susan Candiotti contributed to this story.

FBI to announce 17 arrests in huge "car cloning" scam . Under scam, VINs, other details taken from legal car, given to similar stolen model . In one case, owner lost truck but was still saddled with payments . Ring stretched from Chicago to Florida to central Mexico .

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Editor's note: Campbell Brown anchors CNN's "Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull" at 8 p.m. ET Mondays through Fridays. She delivered this commentary during the "Cutting through the Bull" segment of Friday night's broadcast. CNN's Campbell Brown praises Mark Felt, the Watergate case's "Deep Throat." (CNN) -- Cutting through the bull. It's hard to think of anyone who gave those words more meaning than Mark Felt. The man we all came to know as "Deep Throat" died Thursday at his California home after a life in the shadows. His willingness to risk everything -- career, family, and even his safety -- helped bring down President Richard Nixon in disgrace. Felt was the No. 2 man at the FBI. And yes, it's fair to say he had an ax to grind after being snubbed for the top job. Watch Campbell Brown's commentary » . But that didn't make his information less accurate or crucial. And even after taking that huge risk, he gave up all kinds of chances to cash in on his secret identity. Imagine the book deal "Deep Throat" would have gotten or the movie rights to a blockbuster like "All the President's Men"? What millions did he lose by not spending years on the lecture circuit? No, Felt's willingness to keep Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward pointed in the right direction as Woodward and Carl Bernstein flushed out the greatest political scandal in American history had its roots in the integrity that no one else would show back then. We remind you of this because the timing of Felt's death is not lost on us. Just this month, we've watched a governor accused of redefining crooked politics in Illinois. We're in the final days of a White House that pushed the limits of the Constitution and never appeared eager to share information with the American people. And just this week, the president-elect, who talks of change, tried to stop a journalist from finishing a question at a news conference. Now, as ever, we need people like Woodward and Bernstein to keep asking questions. But more importantly, we need people brave enough to give the answers. People like Mark Felt. A man whose name you never heard until he finally surfaced near the end of his life. By then, he was a quiet, meek-looking person who changed our country forever -- by cutting through the bull. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Campbell Brown.

Mark Felt, Watergate's "Deep Throat" dies . Brown: Felt risked everything to help bring down a crooked president . Felt had integrity that no one else would show back then, she says .

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(CNN) -- Hanny van Arkel was poring over photos of galaxies on the Internet in August 2007 when she stumbled across a strange object in the night sky: a bright, gaseous mass with a gaping hole in its middle. Hanny van Arkel made her discovery by poring over images of galaxies on an astronomy Web site. "It looked a bit like an irregular galaxy, but I wasn't sure what it was," Van Arkel said. So she posted a query on the Web site of the Galaxy Zoo project, which encourages members of the public to join in astronomy research online. Van Arkel is a 25-year-old schoolteacher in Heerlen, The Netherlands, not an astrophysicist. But her startling find -- a mysterious and unique object some observers are calling a "cosmic ghost" -- has captivated astronomers and even caught the attention of the people who run the Hubble Space Telescope, who have agreed to take a closer look next year. "This discovery really shows how citizen science has come of age in the Internet world," said Bill Keel, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama and a Galaxy Zoo team member. "There was a time when I spoke pejoratively of armchair astronomers. And I've gotten up at a star party and publicly apologized for that." Not so long ago, the term "amateur astronomer" conjured images of stargazers peering through backyard telescopes. But today's are as likely to be analyzing reams of sophisticated data collected by observatories and posted on space-related Web sites. Armchair observers like van Arkel increasingly are making significant contributions to science, said Steve Maran, spokesman for the American Astronomical Society, a group of 6,500 professionals. Amateurs have been invited to present papers at recent AAS conferences, "which wouldn't have happened years ago," he said. A successful example of amateur-professional collaboration, the Galaxy Zoo project was launched last year by Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and Chris Lintott at the University of Oxford in England. The pair were looking for help in cataloging archived photographs of galaxies -- one million images -- taken by the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in remote southern New Mexico. Knowing that the human eye is sometimes more sensitive than a computer at picking out unusual patterns -- and that they didn't have time to do all the work themselves -- Schawinski and Lintott posted the images on the Galaxy Zoo Web site last summer. The professors then invited amateur astronomers, with the help of a brief online tutorial, to classify the galaxies as spiral, elliptical or something else. Online galaxy-sorting might not sound as fun as, say, surfing YouTube, but it was an immediate hit. "We were overwhelmed by the response. It completely melted the server," Schawinski said. "People tell us it's addictive. Some of [the volunteers] are professional astronomers, but most of them are not. They're just regular people who got excited about the project." During the past year, more than 150,000 armchair astronomers from all over the world volunteered their time, submitting more than 50 million classifications. The public's collective wisdom -- the same principle that guides jury trials or Wikipedia -- proved remarkably astute, Schawinski said. For example, if 33 of 36 volunteers thought a galaxy appeared elliptical, then astronomers could be confident the classification was correct, he said. Van Arkel had been classifying photos on Galaxy Zoo for about a week when she came across the image that quickly became known as "Hanny's Voorwerp," Dutch for "object." The primary school teacher does not own a telescope -- "my [astronomy] background doesn't really go further than looking at the stars when walking outside in the evening," she said -- but when she posted her finding August 13 on the Galaxy Zoo forum, the astronomers who run the site began to investigate. They soon realized van Arkel might have found a new class of astronomical object. The Galaxy Zoo team asked scientists working at telescopes around the world to take a look at the mysterious Voorwerp. Their best guess: The Voorwerp is probably a cloud of hot gas punctured by a central hole 16,000 light years across and illuminated by the "dying embers" of a nearby quasar, Schawinski said. Quasars are distant, highly luminous astronomical objects powered by black holes; scientists suspect that light from the quasar still illuminates the Voorwerp even though the quasar itself burned out in the past 100,000 years. "It's this light echo that has been frozen in time for us to observe," said Lintott, the Oxford scientist. "It's rather like examining the scene of a crime where, although we can't see them, we know the culprit must be lurking somewhere nearby in the shadows." Galaxy Zoo leaders are eagerly awaiting images from NASA's orbiting Hubble, which is scheduled to train its powerful instruments on the Voorwerp in 2009. In the meantime, van Arkel is enjoying the fuss over her contribution to astronomy. "It's amazing to think that ... amateur volunteers can help by spotting things like this online," she said. "What excites me the most is that all of this leads to more interest in science."

Using the Web, a Dutch schoolteacher has discovered a strange astronomical object . The find illustrates how more amateur astronomers are contributing to science . The Galaxy Zoo project encourages the public to join in astronomy research online . Hubble Space Telescope has agreed to take a closer look at the object next year .

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KINGSTON, Tennessee (CNN) -- The Environmental Protection Agency has found high levels of arsenic and heavy metals in two rivers in central Tennessee that are near the site of a spill that unleashed more than a billion gallons of coal waste. Four days after the spill, the water is cloudy on the east bank of the Clinch River in Kingston, Tennessee. The agency said it found "several heavy metals" in the water in levels that are slightly above safe drinking-water standards but "below concentrations" known to be harmful to humans. "The one exception may be arsenic," the agency said in a letter to an affected community. "One sample of river water out of many taken indicated concentrations that are very high and further investigations are in progress." However, arsenic was not detected in a water intake facility near Kingston, Tennessee, where the spill happened, said EPA spokeswoman Laura Niles. The metals were found in the Emory and Clinch rivers, near the site of a major spill last week that unleashed enough sludge to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools. The EPA's letter comes as the head of the largest public power company in the nation pledged to clean up the massive spill. "This is not a time where TVA holds its head high," said Tom Kilgore, president and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority. "But we won't hang our head, either, because that won't get the job done. I'm here to tell you that we will clean it up, and we will clean it up right." The sludge is a byproduct of the ash from coal combustion. A retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained the waste until a wall breached last Monday, sending the sludge downhill to damage 15 homes and cover at least 300 acres. All residents in the area were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, according to the TVA. The TVA's initial estimate for the spill tripled from 1.8 million cubic yards, or more than 360 million gallons of sludge, to 5.4 million cubic yards, or more than 1 billion gallons. The plant sits on the Clinch River, which is a tributary of the Tennessee River. Video footage from the river, a popular fishing site, reveals piles of dead fish on its banks. The TVA says that has nothing to do with the toxicity of the sludge, though environmental advocates say the ash contains concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic. TVA officials have said water quality tests from a nearby water treatment facility have shown that the water from the river intake meets federal and state guidelines for potable water. But coal operation critics remain concerned about the long-term effects of the spill, and residents have expressed concerns about drinking water, especially from wells. Roane County Emergency Management Director Howie Rose said the county has asked the state and the federal Environmental Protection Agency to monitor groundwater from wells around the area. He and Kilgore spoke at a town hall meeting Sunday. Rose said the county has also requested air quality tests from the state and federal agencies. Steve Ahlstedt, an independent aquatic biologist, told CNN that a spill of this magnitude probably will affect the area's ecological balance. "Once the ash has settled to the bottom of the rivers, all heavy metals will hang around for a long time," he said. "When coal releases into the water, the mussel population goes into deep freeze. They are the 'canary in the coal mine.' They are the main indicator of how healthy our water is." CNN's Helena DeMoura contributed to this report.

"Several heavy metals" found in levels above safe drinking-water standards . TVA pledges cleanup; officials say treatment facility tests show water is potable . Breach at retention site has released more than a billion gallons of coal waste . 15 homes damaged, at least 300 acres covered; area residents evacuated .

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(CNN) -- The leader of a religious group that authorities believe preys on children was released from a Pennsylvania prison Friday but won't be required to register as a sex offender, triggering outrage in the community where he plans to live. George Feigley, who was released from prison Friday, is the subject of community protests. George Feigley, now 68, was convicted in 1975 on charges including statutory rape, indecent assault and corrupting the morals of minors. Because Feigley's 1975 conviction predated the passage of Megan's Law, he will not be required to register as a sex offender. And, having served his maximum sentence, he was not put on parole upon his release. Feigley's Neo American Church, which authorities have called a sex cult, operated a school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that police said was a front for sexual activity. The church's manifesto says, "We hold that the changes called creation and procreation are divine and that human sexuality is to humans the most available expression of that function of divinity," according to community activist Scott Portzline, who has researched Feigley's history and that of the group. "Sexual activity is the greatest act a human can do." Court documents filed in connection with Feigley's criminal case alleged a less lofty goal. "The defendants' design was to operate a 'church oriented' school, which is free of any governmental regulation, for the ostensible purpose of education when their real goal was to gratify their own deviant sexual desires," the documents stated. One of Feigley's victims, identified only as "J," told the Harrisburg Patriot-News she was part of the organization from the ages of 5 through 12, when her mother left the Neo American Church. Children were beaten for letting anyone but fellow cult members see them, she said, and their genitals were pierced with a lock to be controlled by Feigley, who called himself "The Light of the World." Children also were photographed in graphic sexual poses, she said. Feigley is "not a man who should be out with society," J said. "He preys on -- at least he did -- the people who believed in him." And, community members say, there will be no protections in place to stop him from continuing to do so. Watch why the case inflames emotions » . Feigley was convicted of additional conspiracy charges in 1995. Authorities said he was attempting to direct sexual activity involving children by telephone from prison. However, conspiracy charges do not require listing on a sex offender registry. Feigley "never admitted what he did was wrong," said John Goshert of the Dauphin County district attorney's office, who interviewed him last week as part of a pre-release program. Protests took place Friday in front of Feigley's Harrisburg home and the church headquarters. His wife, Sandra, still lives in the home. She was convicted in 1975 on one count of corrupting the morals of minors. She served a brief prison sentence, according to the Patriot-News. Sandra Feigley now operates a Web site ostensibly aimed at benefiting state, local and federal prison inmates. The site has a lengthy section with articles discussing sex in prison and elsewhere. Some of them are written by George Feigley, using his own name and some of his aliases. "Thanks to the Christian crazies who were and are so influential in this country, America has criminalized more sexual conduct than any other Western nation," says an article on the site, which does not name an author. "It's a neurosis. As a result, there are a lot of 'sexual offenses.' " Another article bearing George Feigley's alias of G.G. Stoctay, Ph.D., and included in Portzline's research says, "There is nothing injurious to sexuality. It's good and pleasant, not an evil. Children exposed to it are simply not injured." Angel Fox, who will be Feigley's next-door neighbor, helped organize Friday's protest and is circulating a petition to prevent his return to the neighborhood, according to the Patriot-News. "I mean, what happens when I'm not at home?" she asked. "Do I have to worry about what's happening with my kids? I have to try to do something." The community is "outraged," said Annette Antoun, publisher of a weekly newspaper. She said authorities are looking into whether Feigley would be required to register under a federal statute. And, she said, if there is a loophole in the law, legislators are starting to work on ways to close it. She said she has spoken to Feigley's victims, and "they have scars they say will never go away. ... They're frightened." In 1976, Feigley escaped from a Pennsylvania prison. He was captured two years later in West Virginia but escaped again from a local jail and was recaptured by the FBI. In 1983, two members of the Neo American Church drowned in what authorities believe was an attempt to break Feigley out of prison. Laura Seligman and James Gilbert drowned in the sewer line outside the prison where Feigley was being held. The two had crawled a mile and a half through the line, according to Portzline. A rainstorm caused an overflow gate to open, flooding the line. CNN's Aurore Ankarcrona contributed to this report.

Feigley was convicted before passage of Megan's Law . Because he served a full prison term, he wasn't put on parole . Protests held at church and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, home of Feigley's wife . Prosecutor says Feigley never acknowledged wrongdoing .

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Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist and a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Read his column here . Ruben Navarrette says Sarah Palin's critics challenged her because of prejudices about small-town values. SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- During the presidential election, some Democrats demanded to know how I could defend Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Simply put, Palin is my people. She's small-town folk who wound up in the big leagues. Because I grew up in a small town with a population of less than 15,000 people, I was disgusted by the insults and condescension coming from those who think of themselves as the enlightened elite. Meanwhile, in small towns, I detected great affection for Palin. People talked about how she was "a real person" who "reflected their values." The most significant divide in America isn't Red State vs. Blue State, it's rural vs. urban. The country mouse and the city mouse are still slugging it out. In 1982, New York Mayor Ed Koch ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York. Some say the deciding factor was when Koch described life in upstate New York as "sterile" and said he dreaded living in the "small town" of Albany, if elected. That didn't play well in rural areas. Now comes Colin Powell. During a recent appearance on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," Powell attempted an autopsy on the Republican Party's failed presidential bid. He went after Palin, accusing her of pushing the party so far to the right that it went over a cliff. "I think [Palin] had something of a polarizing effect when she talked about how small-town values are good," Powell said. "Well, most of us don't live in small towns. And I was raised in the South Bronx, and there's nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx." You'd think the presidential campaign was about conservatives picking on urbanites. It wasn't. Sure, some Republicans probably made a mistake by using phrases such as "real America" or "real Americans" as a rallying cry for the base. Americans who live in cities might have thought they were being slighted. But those phrases referred as much to people's politics and values as it did their zip code. I live in a city with a population of more than a million people and I never thought the GOP singled me out as not being a "real American." If anything, it appeared that big-city liberals were tapping into prejudices about small-town America to belittle the governor of Alaska . After Powell attacked Palin, one of the governor's most vocal defenders, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, returned the favor by attacking Powell. "What is this hatred for conservatives and small-town people and Sarah Palin?" Limbaugh asked on his radio show. "I know a lot of people that are from the Bronx, Gen. Powell, and if you think the values there in the Bronx today reflect the ones you grew up with, take a trip back and see if the street corners and the activities there are the same as when you were growing up." Limbaugh got it. When people use phrases such as "small-town values," it's as much about time as it is place. The idea isn't that people who live in small towns have better values than people who live in cities. It's simply an attempt to recall, with nostalgia, what life was like when more Americans lived in small towns. It used to be that more families ate dinner together and high school students worked summers and after school. It used to be that our schools didn't make excuses for why some kids don't learn because they were too busy trying to teach them. It used to be that parents weren't interested in being their kids' best friends, only good parents. And it used to be that people pulled their own weight and would never dare ask for a handout. During a recent interview with the conservative newspaper, Human Events, Palin was asked if she thought her humble background accounted for some of the flak she got from the media. Palin acknowledged that she didn't come from elite stock, but said that she was grateful for that. "I got my education from the University of Idaho because that's what I could afford," she said. "No, I don't come from the self-proclaimed 'movers and shakers' group and that's fine with me. It's caused me, or rather, allowed me, to work harder and pull myself up by my bootstraps without anyone else helping me. I think it allows me to be in touch with the vast majority of Americans who are in the same position that I am." Sarah Palin understands a lot about America. Too bad many Americans don't understand Sarah Palin. No worries. They may get another chance to acquaint themselves with her -- in say, four years. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ruben Navarrette Jr.

Ruben Navarrette: Sarah Palin rose from small-town life to big-time politics . She's been accused by Democrats of polarizing the campaign, Navarrette says . He says she was unfairly targeted by liberals prejudiced against small towns . Navarrette: We can expect to hear from Palin again, maybe in four years .

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(CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton will win Florida's Democratic presidential primary Tuesday, CNN projects, although party sanctions have stripped the state of its convention delegates and no Democrats campaigned there. Hillary Clinton addresses a crowd in Davie, Florida, after winning the state's primary. Published polls showed the New York senator and former first lady was heavily favored in the state. Her leading rivals, South Carolina primary winner Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John Edwards, did not campaign in Florida. They opted to concentrate on next week's "Super Tuesday" contests in states such as New York, California, Missouri and Georgia. CNN's projection is based on precincts reporting results, entrance polls and other statistical models -- including the number of votes outstanding in areas where Clinton was expected to do well. The sanctions make Tuesday night's results largely meaningless to the Democratic presidential race. Obama described the primary as a "beauty contest" Tuesday, and his campaign issued a statement declaring the race a tie in the delegate count: "Zero for Obama, zero for Clinton." But Clinton has pledged to fight to have the state's delegates seated at the August convention in Denver, and has increasingly stressed the state's importance since losing Saturday's hotly contested primary in South Carolina to Obama. Though Democrats agreed to leave the state off their itineraries in a show of solidarity with the national party, Clinton attended permitted fund-raisers in Florida on Sunday and planned to appear with supporters there after polls closed. And turnout was high for the race even though no delegates were at stake. Nearly 400,000 people cast early or absentee ballots ahead of the primary, and Tuesday's vote was expected to top the nearly 800,000 who turned out in 2004. Donna Brazile, who managed former Vice President Al Gore's presidential bid, said many Democrats were likely to turn out to vote on a state constitutional amendment that would limit property tax increases and expand homestead exemptions. "People are very afraid this will cut public services, cut back education," said Brazile, a CNN analyst. "So the Florida Education Association and all of the unions are spending millions of dollars to get voters to turn out." E-mail to a friend .

Rivals Sens. Barack Obama and John Edwards did not campaign in Florida . There were no delegates at stake in Florida . Obama and Edwards concentrated efforts on Super Tuesday states .

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AMSTETTEN, Austria (CNN) -- Austrian police believe a 73-year-old man held his daughter captive in his cellar for the past two decades and fathered at least six children with her, according to police and state-run news reports Sunday. The woman, identified as 42-year-old Elisabeth F., has been missing since 1984, when she was 18 years old, police said at a news conference. The situation came to light earlier this month after her daughter -- a 19-year-old woman, identified as Kristen F. -- was hospitalized in Amstetten after falling unconscious, according to police. She was admitted to a hospital in Amstetten, outside Vienna, by her grandfather with a note from her biological mother requesting help. Amstetten is a rural town about 150 km (93 miles) west of Vienna. But police said a DNA test later revealed her grandfather, Josef F., was also her father, according to ORF, Austria's state-run news agency. That sparked a police investigation, which revealed that Josef F. may have fathered at least six children with his daughter, forcing her and three of the surviving children to live in the cellar of his house, according to ORF's Peter Schmitzberger. The children are now between 5 and 19 years old. Police are awaiting DNA tests to verify their relationship to Josef F., who faces arrest for "severe crimes against family members," according to police. So far, he has not given a statement to police. Police spokesman Franz Polzer told ORF that the 73-year-old has led police to several hidden rooms in his cellar accessible only by an electronic passcode that he provided to police. Watch a report on the discovery » . On Sunday, police searched the hidden rooms where Josef F. admitted he kept his daughter and their children, Polzer told ORF. The rooms included sleeping quarters, a kitchen and a bathroom, which Josef F. told police he built, Polzer said. Neighbors told ORF they were shocked to hear the news, and had no indication such horrors were taking place in their town. "One can't imagine how it could happen, how nobody could realize anything of what was going on in the cellar of this house," Schmitzberger told CNN. "It's quite unimaginable." Acting on "a confidential tip," Amstetten police apprehended Josef F. and Elisabeth F. on Saturday near the hospital for questioning, according to a police statement. Once police assured the daughter that she would never have contact with her father again, "she was able to tell the whole story," Schmitzberger said. Josef F. lived upstairs with his wife, Rosemarie F., who police said had no idea about her husband's other family living in the cellar. Josef F. and Rosemarie F. had adopted three of the children that he had with his daughter, according to police. He told his wife that his missing daughter had dropped the unwanted children off at the house because she could not take care of them, police said. The other three children -- Kerstin, 19; Stefan, 18; and Felix, 5 -- remained locked in the basement with their mother, according to police. None had seen the light of day during their entire time in captivity, police said. After she was detained Saturday, Elisabeth F. gave police a "psychologically and physically disturbed impression," police said in a statement. She told them her story after she was assured her children would be protected from further harm. She said her father began sexually abusing her at age 11. On August 8, 1984 -- weeks before she was reported missing -- her father enticed her into the basement, where he drugged her, put her in handcuffs and locked her in a room, she told police. For the next 24 years, she was constantly raped by her father, resulting in the six surviving children, she said, according to the police statement. She told police she gave birth to twins in 1996, but one of the babies died a few days later as a result of neglect, and Josef F. removed the infant's body and burned it. She told police that only her father supplied her and her children with food and clothing, and that she did not think his wife knew anything about their situation. When Kerstin fell ill earlier this month, Josef F. apparently told his wife and the hospital that his "missing" daughter had dropped off the sick girl on his doorstep. In an effort to find out what might be ailing 19-year-old Kerstin, the hospital asked the media to put out a bulletin requesting any information about the girl or her missing mother, attorney general Gerhard Sedlacek told NTV. Sometime later, Josef F. brought Elisabeth F. out of the cellar, telling his wife that she had returned home with her two children after a 24-year absence, police said. He took Elisabeth F. to the hospital to talk with doctors about Kerstin's condition, and at that point, authorities became aware of her situation, Sedlacek said. E-mail to a friend . CNN's Ben Brumfield contributed to this report.

Woman tells Austrian police she was held prisoner in cellar for nearly 24 years . Police believe the 73-year-old man may have fathered at least 6 of her children . The 42-year-old woman had been missing since 1984, when she was 18 . One of her children, a 19-year-old woman, is hospitalized in serious condition .

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MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- A Florida boy remains in stable condition just days after he found his parents' long-forgotten handgun in a closet and accidentally shot himself in the head. Police are deciding whether or not to charge parents after their son found a forgotten gun and shot himself. Sheriff's detectives in Pinellas County, Florida, near St. Petersburg, say the boy found the .25-caliber European semi-automatic handgun in a box in a closet in their home. "They are dealing with this very tragic situation, and at this point, no charges have been filed," said Cecilia Barreda of the Pinellas County sheriff's office. His stepfather found Jacob Larson, 12, with a gunshot wound to the head Friday. The stepfather called 911. Police say the shooting took place between 7:40 a.m., when his mother, Tracy Newman, leaves for work, and about 11 a.m., when his stepfather, Joseph Newton, returns home. The boy normally goes to school about 8:30 a.m. "A few years ago, they moved, and [the gun] was stored in the closet. The mother never checked it, never fired it," Barreda said. "They told detectives that they forgot they had stored it in a box inside a closet. Both her and her husband forgot about it," she said. Newman told detectives that she received the gun six years ago from a former employer. Police say that both she and her husband are cooperating in the investigation into the incident. The sheriff's office says it's unlikely that they will face charges. Florida law prohibits a person from leaving a loaded firearm where a minor might have access to it. Prosecutors do have some discretion, and depending on what happens with the gun, charges ranging from a misdemeanor to a felony can be filed in the event of death or serious injury. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that 17 states have child firearm access protection and safe-storage laws. Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett says that although laws are needed, an accident with a firearm can be a greater penalty than any judge could ever hand down. "Sometimes, the injury of a child is more severe from a punishment standpoint than any kind of criminal charge," he said. The CDC says three children per day, on average, died in accidental incidents in the United States from 2000 to 2005, the last year data are available. Bartlett said his office has filed charges in previous cases when there was culpable negligence on the part of a gun owner. But, he says, there are cases where accidents happen, not crimes. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says that 34 percent of children in the United States live in homes with at least one firearm, so people have to be aware. "It's a horrible thing, and those parents will blame themselves from here out, and you have to look at things real close to see if it warrants any enforcement from our end," Bartlett said.

Boy, 12, found .25-caliber gun in box in closet . Police have not charged anyone in relation to incident . Florida law prohibits leaving a loaded firearm where minor can access it . Prosecutor: "Sometimes, the injury of a child is more severe" punishment .

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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (CNN) -- Five members of the Sri Lanka's Civil Defense Force (CDF) were killed in a suicide blast in Sri Lanka at a church outside the capital of Colombo Sunday morning, police said. Sri Lankan police officers investigate Sunday's suicide bombing near Colombo. Eight other CDF officers and two civilians were wounded, police said. Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, but police suspect the bomber was a member of the Tamil Tiger rebels. There was no immediate response from the Tamil Tiger rebels to the incident, which, police said, occurred at St. Anne's Church in the Colombo suburb of Wattala, located on a roadway to the country's only international airport about 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the capital. The attack happened during a weekly festival that usually draws a large crowd shopping for vegetables and household goods. The suicide bomber walked into an area where CDF officers were stationed and detonated his explosives, police said. Investigators suspect the bomber targeted the area because 150 police officers who help patrol the road to the airport are billeted there. Government forces have engaged rebels in heavy fighting for more than a year in the Kilinochchi region, once the center of political power for the Tamil Tigers. The 25-year civil war between ethnic Tamil separatists and the Sri Lankan government has left more than 65,000 people dead. The Tamil Tigers were founded in 1976, and the U.S. State Department designated the group a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. The rebels, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), are fighting for the creation of an independent nation, citing discrimination by the country's Sinhalese majority. Earlier Sunday, Sri Lanka's navy said it had destroyed a Tamil Tiger rebel boat allegedly attempting to smuggle in military supplies through the northern coast. Commander D.K.P. Dissanayake, a navy spokesman, told CNN that four rebels were killed in attack after the boat was engulfed in fire. He said the incident occurred just after midnight Sunday but gave no other details. There was no immediate response from the Tiger rebels to that incident. CNN could not independently verify the government's claim because media is debarred from Sri Lanka's battle zones. In the past, both sides in the conflict have exaggerated accounts of military operations. On December 20, the Navy said it destroyed a similar rebel boat trying to smuggle military supplies through the coast near the northeastern coastal village of Mullaitivu. However, a second supply boat was caught on Air Force aerial surveillance cameras unloading along the coast. "They included assorted ammunition, artillery shells, mortar shells and other items," a senior Air Force official told CNN. He spoke on grounds of anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the media.

NEW: Attack coincided during a weekly festival that draws a large crowd . NEW: Police suspect the bomber was a member of the Tamil Tiger rebels . No immediate response from Tiger rebels on church blast, destroyed boat . Four rebels killed in boat attack after midnight Sunday, Navy says .

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(CNN) -- Lectures, slide shows and notes are often boring, but people are using technology to find entertainment in these unlikely places. Spoof notes of "Star Wars" are scribbled into a fun online "pencast." Some use high-tech pens to track presentations. Others share PowerPoints in slide show form online. These technologically spiced-up presentations seem to be getting more attention these days. They're also creating buzz about what the future of presentations might hold. Consider "pencasts," which are made using the Pulse SmartPen and specially gridded paper, both sold by the California startup Livescribe. The pen writes like an ordinary pen but also has a voice recorder, and it "notes" (so to speak) which notes were taken at which point in the recording. Some quirky SmartPen presentations come off as comedy sketches. One popular presentation muses about how George Lucas might have come up with the idea for Star Wars. Some university students love the technology because they can record and play back what their professor was saying at an exact point in their notes -- which is especially useful when you can't read your own writing. And many professors are all for it, too. "I feel like this is one of those 'Rear View Mirror' moments in which a new technology comes into our lives with enormous potential and we just don't know what to do with it yet," blogs Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropology and digital ethnography professor at Kansas State University. "We think of it in terms of what we know (pen and paper) and fail to recognize the potential." That potential -- for entertainment and serious uses alike -- can be gleaned from pencasts posted on the Livescribe Web site's community section, which is about a year old. The pencasts posted there have collectively received more than 1.5 million views. Soon, it will be easier to embed pencasts on other sites, like personal blogs, the company says. Slide shows are further along in popularity. A startup called SlideShare launched in late 2006 with the idea of allowing people to easily share their PowerPoint presentations. Its site had more than 15 million visitors last month, and its 2008 contest for the best presentations showed off the form's potential. The best are far removed from the dull bullet-point presentations you might have fallen asleep to. Many use dramatic images, striking design and memorable phrases. Former Vice President Al Gore developed his presentation on the planet's environmental challenges into the Academy Award-winning documentary and best-selling book "An Inconvenient Truth." Last year's top SlideShare presentation, called "Thirst," highlights the looming water crisis and has nearly 200,000 views. Others are more light-hearted. The No. 2 spot (with more than 60,000 views) went to a presentation called "Foot Notes." It shows pictures of the narrator's feet in various places she's been (like on cobblestone corridors in Prague and a dance floor in Chicago), interspersed with inspiring quotes related to feet and walking. Finally, for many people, the most dreaded, boring form of communication of all is the lecture. But then, how to explain the popularity of the TED videos? TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. The conference started in the mid-'80s and has become a networking event of sorts for the world's best and brightest. Dozens of speakers give presentations of about 20 minutes each -- the perfect duration for a juicy "media snack." TED.com started introducing TEDTalks to the public for free in July 2006, and by the following year, there were more than a hundred talks dating back to 2002. Broken down into dozens of themes, today they're popular fodder for video iPods. In one, the amputee athlete and model Aimee Mullins talks about how her many pairs of artificial legs often beat having a single pair of regular ones -- some make her taller, others are works of art. In another, Jill Tarter, an astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research, discusses how insanely large the universe is and what a "waste of space" it would be if life on Earth were indeed all there is. It's hard to watch a handful of TED videos and not feel your perspective broadening. That helps explain how, despite the lecture format, TEDTalks has become hugely popular. A few months ago, the videos surpassed the 100 million views mark -- not bad for a bunch of lectures.

Technology injects new life into a dull medium: presentations . SmartPens bring audio and written notes together . Growth in online applications makes slide shows and lectures more interesting . Success of TED lectures means educational content can be popular .

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(CNN) -- The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on Thursday convicted the "mastermind" of the Rwandan genocide and sentenced him to life in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Theoneste Bagosora, right, and his co-defendant Anatole Nsengiyumva, left, arrive in court. It is the first time the tribunal has convicted high-level officials for the 100-day genocide in 1994 which left an estimated 800,000 people dead. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, a colonel in the Rwandan army, was found guilty along with two other men -- Major Aloys Ntabakuze and Lieutenant Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva. All were sentenced to life in prison. The tribunal -- located in Arusha, Tanzania -- acquitted General Gratien Kabiligi, the former head of military operations, and ordered his immediate release. CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour -- who covered the story -- called the verdicts "a real turning point and a milestone in justice." Watch CNN's Christiane Amanpour on the verdict » . "It sends a message that right up the chain of command, you cannot hide," Amanpour said. The court said Bagosora was a key figure in drawing up plans for the genocide. A Hutu, Bagosora was convicted of ordering Hutu militia to slaughter rival Tutsis. The massacres began after a plane crash on April 6, 1994 that killed the presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. The court said the plane was brought down by a surface-to-air missile fired from the airport in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Watch what happened in the court » . Bagosora decided the military should take over and he refused to involve the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, in any discussions, the court found. April 7, while Bagosora held a crisis meeting with top military officials, the prime minister was arrested, sexually assaulted and killed by top members of the Rwandan Army, the court found. Find out more about the world's killing fields » . That made Bagosora the head of all political and military affairs in Rwanda, and in that capacity, he was at the top of the chain of command. The same day the prime minister was killed, the court said, army personnel confined and killed four important opposition leaders -- including the president of the constitutional court and government ministers -- and murdered 10 Belgian peacekeepers who had been dispatched to the prime minister's residence. The court found Bagosora bore responsibility for those and other killings because he commanded those who carried out the crimes. "Bagosora was the highest authority in the Ministry of Defense and exercised effective control of the Rwandan army and gendarmerie," said Presiding Judge Erik Mose. "He's therefore responsible for the murder of the prime minister, the four opposition politicians, the 10 Belgian peacekeepers, as well as the extensive military involvement in the killing of civilians during this period." ICTR Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow said the convicted men "prepared, planned, ordered, directed, incited, encouraged and approved the murder of innocent civilian Tutsis." The killings were carried out by military personnel on the orders of Rwandan authorities including Bagosora, the court said. The court found that from April to July 1994, Bagosora exercised authority over members of the Rwandan Army and their militiamen, who committed massacres throughout Rwanda with Bagosora's knowledge. "In all the regions of the country, members of the Tutsi population who were fleeing from the massacres on their hills sought refuge in locations they thought would be safe, often on the recommendation of the local civil and military authorities," the indictment said. "In many of these places, despite the promise that they would be protected by the local civil and military authorities, the refugees were attacked, abducted and massacred, often on the orders or with the complicity of those same authorities." The indictment against Bagosora alleged he had been opposed to concessions made by his government to Tutsi rebels at 1993 peace talks in Tanzania, and had left the negotiations saying he was returning to Rwanda to "prepare the apocalypse." The U.N. established the tribunal in late 1994. The trial began in April 2002 and has been deliberating since June 1, 2007. During the trial, the court heard 242 witnesses -- 82 for the prosecution and 160 for the defense. The three convicted men will be held in the tribunal's custody until a state can be found to house them. The genocide's impact is still be felt today, with recent fighting in neighbouring Congo blamed on lingering tensions from the slaughter. Rebel leader Laurent Nkunda says his forces are fighting to defend Congolese Tutsis from Hutu militants who escaped to Congo.

Bagosora guilty of masterminding genocide which left at least 800,000 dead . Genocide began after plane carrying the leaders of Rwanda, Burundi crashed . Bagosora was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity . The United Nations established the genocide tribunal in late 1994 .

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