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ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Prosecutors in Zacarias Moussaoui's death penalty trial sought Tuesday to unravel his claims that he knew nothing of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, arguing that al-Qaida members are carefully scripted to lie when caught. FBI agent Michael Anticev, testifying for a second day, offered the jury a primer on al-Qaida cover stories and the organization's techniques of deception when cell members are questioned. Moussaoui's lawyers are portraying him as a pathetic loner who dreamed of becoming a terrorist but was shut out of Sept. 11 planning and considered by one al-Qaida leader a "cuckoo in the...

Andrea Yates granted bail by judge. Bail set at 200K. Husband is seeking the 20K for bondsman. Breaking from Fox.

History: The books that a president stacks on his nightstand might seem as mildly prurient as the contents of somebody else's medicine cabinet. But if he's touting a title to another head of state, then we care.Example: the volume President Bush pressed on Germany's Angela Merkel when she visited the White House two weeks ago. He'd just read "Mao: The Unknown Story," he revealed as the two talked of Merkel's upbringing in then-communist East Germany. Bonding with Merkel, Bush felt the new chancellor would recognize the sordid rise to power of China's late tyrant. She'd appreciate it in a way...

OSAMA bin Laden, even in hiding, may still be able to mastermind a major terrorist attack inside the United States, a senior aide to US President George W. Bush said. Asked whether the al-Qaeda chief could engineer such a strike, Bush adviser Dan Bartlett told CBS television: "We have to assume that he can. We have to be very vigilant in what we do to protect our country." His remarks came as the Bush administration waged an aggressive campaign to defend a controversial program by the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept US citizens' international telephone calls and electronic mail....

MIDI - IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS It's beginning to look like one sad Christmas for Saddam Hussein He tells his judge to go to h*ll...what is that awful smell His underwear's a week old, you can tell It's beginning to look like one sad Christmas for Saddam Hussein As we hear of atrocities...the entire world sees We'll soon bid farewell And although Ramsey denies it, the whole world knows it...the man is murdering scum He's plays defiant, but if you look closely, his face is certainly glum In his own mind he thinks he's still...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein told the judge at his trial Monday that "I am not afraid of execution" during an unruly court session in which the first witness took the stand and testified that the former president's agents carried out random arrests, torture and killings. The outburst was one of several by Saddam or his co-defendants at the trial that also saw a brief walkout by his defense lawyers. At one point, Saddam appeared to threaten the judge, saying: "When the revolution of the heroic Iraq arrives, you will be held accountable." Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin replied: "This...

There undoubtedly are many people who consider Stanley "Tookie" Williams a ruthless and cold-blooded killer, fully deserving the sentence of death by lethal injection awaiting him Dec. 13. But those people, say his supporters, only see the wild-eyed young man of the early 1970s — the co-founder of the notorious Los Angeles Crips street gang. They don't see the man he's become today. A small knot of Modesto activists hope to change all that through a teach-in Saturday on Williams and the transformation they say he's undergone while confined to Death Row at San Quentin State Prison. "He's valuable to...

NASHVILLE - Police say a man who has called himself "a monster" has confessed to slayings across the country. Garland Milam, 40, already is charged with killing two homeless men in Nashville. Investigators won't say how many slayings Milam has confessed to elsewhere, but police agencies from Texas, Arizona and possibly Ohio are coming to Nashville to interview him. "We do believe that he's been involved in other murders in other states," police Lt. Pat Taylor told WSMV-TV. Nashville investigators interviewed Milam over several days after the Nashville slayings last month, and during those interrogations, they say, he confessed to...

BOZEMAN, MONT. – In 2001, Michael Finkel was at the top of his game. He had built a reputation for himself as an ultra- ambitious contract writer for The New York Times Magazine, a journalist with a gift for handling heavy stories with literary finesse. But by early 2002, Mr. Finkel's career was in tatters. He was discovered to have invented a source in a piece written for the Times. HIS STORY: Journalist Michael Finkel invented a boy in a story. Why did he do it? "It was all about self-aggrandizement," he says in a recent interview in his cramped...

Robert McNamara says he did not realise during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 just how close the US and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war. Forty-three years later, the controversial former US defence secretary is more concerned than ever about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Sitting in his Washington office, the subject of The Fog of War - the Oscar-winning documentary about his views on the Vietnam war - cautions, in a rare interview, that he does not want to talk about Iraq. The 89-year-old Mr McNamara - who served under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson...

A Foster City man convicted of killing his pregnant wife and 4-year-old daughter by driving the family van off a Moss Beach cliff two years ago was sentenced today to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Eddie Rapoza, a 38-year-old welder, took no responsibility for his family’s death as he addressed Judge Carl Holm of San Mateo County Superior Court, prosecutor Al Giannini said. "He repeated his assertion that it was an accident," Giannini said. "He said, ‘I’m not a murderer,’ and the judge interrupted him and said, ‘Yes, you are.’." Rapoza, who had long contemplated suicide, was...

During their years in a Jordanian prison, inmates remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in his Afghan dress weeping uncontrollably in the courtyard whenever he knelt to pray. Abu Musab cried constantly. He was very emotional, almost like a child," said 35-year-old Yousef Rababaa as he recalled the young militant. Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born one-time street thug who is now the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is remembered as a gentle man obsessed with Islam's past glory. His intense loyalty, his former cellmates say, went hand in hand with a fanatical adherence to his religion. He dreamed of an Islamic utopia...

Exactly 10 years after Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, members of the Norwegian awards committee are adamant that they made the right choice, and that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, rather than Palestinian terrorism, was the prime factor in the collapse of the Oslo process. On the eve of today's 2004 award ceremony, four of the five Norwegian Nobel Committee members, including the chairman and his deputy, as well as the committee's permanent secretary, contacted by the Post, said they still consider Arafat to have been a worthy winner. The other committee...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) Prosecutors said on Tuesday they will charge a Dutch chemicals dealer as an accomplice to genocide for supplying Saddam Hussein with lethal chemicals used in the 1988 chemical attack on a Kurdish town that killed an estimated 5,000 civilians. Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor's office said the suspect, who was arrested in Amsterdam on Monday, will face charges ''for violating the laws of war and involvement in genocide.'' Prosecutors said Frans van Anraat, a 62-year-old chemicals dealer, had been a suspect since 1989, when he was arrested in Milan, Italy, at the request of the...

Wichita police were at a house in southeast Wichita into the early morning hours Thursday in a raid that may be connected to the BTK serial killer. Lead detectives on the BTK investigation were among those seen by reporters leaving the house. Police officers were also seen wearing gloves and carrying out plastic bags from the home in the 1400 block of Mt. Vernon. KWCH Eyewitness News in Wichita has learned police were executing a search warrant in connection with the BTK case but police would not comment on activities at the home on Mt. Vernon. Wichita police booked a...

CAIRO, Egypt - Osama bin Laden, addressing the American public ahead of presidential elections, said in a video aired Friday that the United States can avoid another Sept. 11 attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims. Reading a statement, the al-Qaida leader refrained from threats of new attacks and instead appealed to Americans. "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said, referring to the president and his Democratic opponent. "Each state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security."...

MIDI - FOREVER IN BLUE JEANS (second column) Ain't it sweet...for DemocRATS, this is no special treat We plucked him from deep in his spider hole...he's under control It's Saddam in shackles He's in court...this day the lefties tried so hard to thwart We plucked him from deep in his spider hole...he's under control It's Saddam in shackles He must die...should he fry? Use a rope...many hope Would he enjoy meeting a guillotine? Should he be shot? Bullets we've got Oh, that would be a marvelous scene Liberals cry...brave soldiers went out and they got their guy We plucked...

In his article "A Class War" Victor Davis Hanson paints the picture that General William T. Sherman and his army were fighting a war of equality. He seems to think average "agrarian" men of the northern states, were so inspired they would lay down their tools, leave their families and join the Union army to invade the Southern States on a campaign of social equality. Hanson states Sherman's objective was "freeing the unfree and humiliating the arrogant." This is a nicely packaged version of history that reads well, though historically inaccurate.The Draft - Yankees RiotSupport for invading the South was...

<p>Shuneh, , May. 16 (UPI) -- Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for the Middle East William Burns said Sunday Washington recognizes Yasser Arafat as the elected leader of the Palestinians.</p> <p>Speaking to reporters during the World Economic Forum being held in Shuneh, Jordan, Burns said the U.S. administration also recognized the "status" that Arafat enjoyed in the Palestinian territories.</p>

The longstanding leftist orthodoxy of the Los Angeles Times has improved noticably under Editor-in-Chief John Carroll, a respected newsman who moved here from the Baltimore Sun four years ago. Carroll has made a real effort to rein in the paper's liberal bias, at least in straight news stories; earlier this year he wrote a famous (in media circles) in-house memo scolding a reporter for a story about a Texas abortion law; the piece had implied anyone against abortion is obviously nuts. I should note though, that this improvement at the Times was underway even before Carroll's arrival, with the departure...