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Four Israeli kids were killed and 30 wounded today by a Palestinian homicide bomber. The young Israelis’ crime? They were waiting in line to get into a nightclub in Tel Aviv. This is the Palestinians’ idea of “peace?” According to the BBC, Alon Kotler, a paramedic who treated several of the wounded told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that rescuers had found "young people lying on top of each other, most of them moderately to seriously wounded". What happened to the “truce” the Palestinian Authority (PA) agreed to with Israel at the summit in Egypt on February 8? What has the...

Big-Money Contributors Line Up for Inauguration President Bush wants to lower barriers to building nuclear power plants, and the lobby that promotes nuclear energy could not be happier. To show its thanks, the group has given $100,000 to help pay for his inauguration. "He's a big supporter," said John E. Kane, chief lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute. "Our donation is just a small way of supporting him." The nuclear energy industry's contribution is part of a record-breaking outpouring of corporate cash to next week's inaugural festivities. At least 88 companies and trade associations, along with 39 CEOs and top...

EXCLUSIVE Hook sues for new hand-out Suing ... Hamza       By JOHN ASKILL LOATHED cleric Abu Hamza is suing benefit chiefs from his jail cell — for stopping cash over his alleged terror links. Hook-handed fanatic Hamza, 47, claims he is owed thousands of pounds over nearly three years — despite his family getting £1,000-a- week hand-outs. A jail source said: “He has a cheek.”      Hamza already gets this lot...   Rent-free £500k house for wife and eight children  £2million from the taxpayer to fund 7-year legal fight against deportation  Bed-linen changed daily plus help to...

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Ahoy, mateys, Rosie O'Donnell's going full steam ahead--her cruise line for gay and lesbian families has launched on its maiden voyage. The first cruise of R Family Vacations, a new company backed by the comic and gay-rights advocate, set sail Sunday from New York for a seven-day cruise to the Bahamas. O'Donnell was on hand in Manhattan Sunday to celebrate the first of several gay family friendly vacations planned by R Family Vacations. According to the R Family Website, the cruise is a seven-day adventure that will take its 2,100 passengers from New York to Florida to the Bahamas and...

Taliban leader on the line By Hamida Ghafour in Kabul (Filed: 09/07/2004) Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader who has eluded capture for three years, has been contacted by Afghan intelligence agents on a satellite phone carried by a captured aide. The brief conversation ended abruptly when Omar appeared to become suspicious and disconnected the call. He has ignored follow-up attempts to contact him. Omar, who recently told an interviewer that al-Qa'eda and Taliban figures maintained communication by "traditional" means, is believed to change his whereabouts frequently. Abdullah Laghmanai, the intelligence chief in the southern province of Kandahar, said contact...

Kerry Cancels Speech, Honors Picket Line Saturday June 26, 2004 10:46 PM By NEDRA PICKLER Associated Press Writer BOSTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry may cancel plans to speak to the U.S. Conference of Mayors rather than cross a police officers' picket line. Kerry spokesman David Wade told reporters Saturday afternoon that Kerry would not give his scheduled Monday morning speech because of protests at the conference. Later, Wade said the campaign was monitoring the situation and still hadn't decided whether he would speak. ``He's never crossed picket lines in his time in public life,'' Wade said. Boston...

An eerie calm prevails at the FleetCenter By David R. Guarino Thursday, June 24, 2004 With convention construction already $5 million over budget and three days delayed due to a picket line, all was amazingly quiet inside the FleetCenter yesterday - 33 days from DNC D-Day. Convention organizers and Mayor Thomas M. Menino say construction's on schedule. But, to the naked eye, the FleetCenter is far from ready for Sen. John F. Kerry's big event. Workers have taken out seats to make room for the convention stage and steel has been added to the ceiling to help light the ceremonies....

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Even as administration officials continued work to finish Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's revised budget due out next week, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez warned the Republican governor Thursday not to cut too deep. "Make no mistake, we are going to fight very hard for the things that we believe in," said Nunez, D-Los Angeles, at a noontime press conference. "We will tell the governor of those things that we really want in this budget, what we think is important and socially responsible. And the governor can tell us how he plans to see that the revenues are there to...

The catastrophe that extinguished the dinosaurs and other animal species, 65 million years ago also brought dramatic changes to the vegetation. In a study presented in latest issue of the journal Science, the paleontologists Vivi Vajda from the University of Lund, Sweden and Stephen McLoughlin from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia have described what happened to the vegetation month by month. They depict a world in darkness where the fungi had taken over. It´s known that an asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous Period. It left a 180 km wide crater and...

YELLING at kids can cross line if personal By MARLON MANUEL The Atlanta Journal-Constitution All parents have disciplined by decibel at one time or another. More than 90 percent yell at their kids, threaten to spank them, swear at them, call them names or threaten to kick them out of the house, said family researcher Murray Straus, concluding what adults have known forever: "Children are frustrating." But there's a huge difference between verbal venting and verbal abuse. A DeKalb County grandmother crossed that line when she yelled vulgarities and threatened her 13-year-old granddaughter, and it landed her in jail. "Please,...

During the Civil War, Old Bridge supplied the Union troops with salt hay to feed their horses. The Mason Dixon Line — the symbolic border between the Union and the Confederacy — passed through New Jersey, geographically separating southern New Jersey from northern portions of the state. The town of Kearney was named for Philip Kearney, a one-armed military general who led many successful battles against the Confederates before being killed in battle. These and many other facts, some little-known, some not, are revealed in a new exhibit titled "Our Long Endurance: The Story of New Jersey in the Civil...

Critics fight border power line Say TEP link to Nogales will mar forest area By Mitch Tobin ARIZONA DAILY STAR With the nation's power grid suddenly in the spotlight, Tucson environmentalists vow they'll sue to pull the plug on a 66-mile power line proposed between Sahuarita and Nogales. Tucson Electric Power says its $70 million project will improve the reliability of electrical service in Santa Cruz County. Past blackouts there and the area's dependence on a single transmission line prompted the Arizona Corporation Commission in 1999 to mandate construction of another link between Nogales and the Western power grid. TEP...

The Saudi Press Agency reports that Egypt and Jordan have inaugurated a partially underwater pipeline that will allow Egypt to supply energy-strapped Jordan with 2.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year. The pipeline runs almost 250 kilometers across the Sinai Desert to the Red Sea, and then continues 15 kilometers underwater to the Jordanian port of Aqaba. The pipeline is scheduled to be extended in the coming years to northern Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, and Europe. Egypt has potential gas reserves of 70 trillion cubic feet and hopes to become one of the world's top 10 exporters...

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House, attacked by critics for a now-retracted line about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa in President Bush's State of the Union address, has gotten some surprising support from former President Bill Clinton.</p> <p>"I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying 'we probably shouldn't have said that,'" Clinton told CNN's Larry King in a phone interview Tuesday evening.</p>

SEATTLE - Some of the nation's largest companies, struggling to provide expensive health insurance to employees, are targeting obesity as a way to reduce their bottom lines. According to an estimate by the Washington, D.C.-based Washington Business Group on Health, a lobbying firm, obesity costs companies more than $12 billion per year. This cost is due to higher health insurance costs, paid sick leave, life insurance and disability insurance. “Obesity has a devastating impact on the health of employees and, by extension, on their employers,” explained Vince Kerr, a physician and Director of Health Care Management at Ford Motor Company,...

Next in the firing line? Alexander Chancellor Saturday May 24, 2003 The Guardian There has been a lot of soul-searching in Saudi Arabia, as well there might be. The country's press was full of it after the massacre in Riyadh last week. Had it brought the tragedy on itself? Was it deluded to blame foreigners for it? And why were so many terrorists Saudi citizens? There was a strong temptation to blame the atrocity on foreigners. This was how one columnist put it in the Saudi newspaper Al-Jazirah: "Oh, foreign cave-dwellers, depart our country and go to hell! You have...

Bodies line the route to the palace of fear Inside the marble-floored opulence of the forbidden city ordinary Iraqis were too frightened even to point at Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad Friday April 11, 2003 The Guardian All roads to the palace passed by corpses - a mini-van with the fighter who had tried to ram it into US soldiers carbonised at the wheel; the attendant sprawled by the towering arch; the guard lying in the shadow of a golden dome; the body of a middle-aged man rotting in his green BMW near the north gate. These were the approaches to...

That Bug Is No Insect: A New Branch On The Tree Of Life The family tree of life has a newly discovered branch. Genetic studies comparing mitochondrial DNA have revealed that what has long been thought to be the group from which insects arose, the Collembola -- wingless hexapods (or "six legs") commonly called springtails -- turns out not to be closely related to insects after all. Instead, these creatures belong to a separate evolutionary lineage that predates even the separation of insects and crustaceans. The research was carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI)...

US forced to consider 'battle lite' options By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent (Filed: 10/03/2003) Turkey's refusal to allow American troops to be based on its soil has reignited a debate within the US military over the future face of war, giving the "modernisers" a chance to prove that the age of the tank is finally over. The deployment of allied troops in northern Iraq is a crucial element of plans to topple Saddam Hussein. They will be asked to secure the northern oil fields and to engage Republican Guard units that have been deployed to protect Saddam's hometown of Tikrit...