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A convicted Scottish sex offender who ran up a 140,000 kronor bill at one of Stockholm's top restaurants has said he wants to serve his sentence in Sweden. John Cronin, from East Lothian in Scotland, is well known as a confidence trickster and sex offender in Britain and Ireland. Earlier in August, he ran up a huge bill at Stockholm's exclusive Operakällaren restaurant, which he refused to pay. Following his arrest, police found that he had also run up a big bill at Malmö's Hotel Savoy. Cronin's lawyer, Bengt H Nilsson, said he had no desire to serve his sentence...

Don't frighten the horses; what Larry Craig tells conservatives about ourselves. Seems to me that confusing politics and Law has led many posters into a welter of contradictions. The Supreme Court has created a problem for conservatives who view this matter from a law perspective alone when it declared that homosexual sex between consenting adults in private is a constitutionally protected right of privacy. In effect, the Supreme Court wrecked the conservative position for those of us who see the question of homosexuality exclusively or largely through a legal prism. So we conservatives have a problem: Many of us have...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A military cargo plane carrying Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, two other senators and a House member was forced to take evasive maneuvers and dispatch flares to avoid ground fire after taking off from Baghdad. The lawmakers said their plane, a C-130, was under fire Thursday night from three rocket-propelled grenades over the course of several minutes as they left for Amman, Jordan. ``It was a scary moment,'' said Martinez, R-Fla., who said he had just taken off his body armor when he saw a bright flash outside the window. ``Our pilots were terrific. ... They banked in...

Convention Site, Other Details To Be Announced (STNG) CHICAGO -- The Green Party of the United States will hold its 2008 national nominating convention in Chicago, the party announced Thursday. Delegates from state Green Parties and caucuses in the party's National Committee completed their vote Wednesday, with Chicago taking the lead over Detroit, Minneapolis, and Oakland, according to a release from the Green Party. Greens from all four cities had submitted proposals for the 2008 convention. The National Committee chose the site using ranked choice voting, a voting reform the party also recommends for single seat offices like governor or...

Burial clue to early urban strife Only a fraction of the burial pit has been excavated Archaeologists working in Syria have unearthed the remains of dozens of youths thought to have been killed in a fierce confrontation 6,000 years ago. According to Science magazine, the celebrating victors may even have feasted on beef in the aftermath. The findings come from northeastern Syria, near Tell Brak, one of the world's oldest known cities. More than 30 years of continuous excavation have revealed the site's remarkable sophistication. Studies by British and American archaeologists published in the journals Antiquity and Science suggest Tell...

Mugabe bans pay rises to push down inflation By Graeme Baker Last Updated: 7:48pm BST 31/08/2007 Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, yesterday banned pay and price rises without his authorisation in an attempt to tackle the country's hyperinflation. "No one can now raise wages, rents, service charges, prices and school fees on account of increases in the official and unofficial exchange rates," the government-controlled Herald newspaper said. "The net effect of the changes will be to push inflation down." Pay rises for the next six months will have to be approved by the national incomes and prices commission, headed...

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig plans to announce his future plans Saturday following calls from Republicans urging him to resign after an arrest in connection to a police sex sting. Dan Whiting, Craig's spokesman, said there would be an announcement Saturday but would not say whether Craig will step down. Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter already appears to have settled on a successor: Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, according to several Republicans familiar with internal deliberations.

The artist behind the controversial caricature of the Muslim prophet Muhammad published in Nerikes Allehanda, Lars Vilks, claims to have begun receiving death threats. Vilks says he is planning to report the matter to the police after a slew of threats arrived over the last 24 hour. "There have been a lot of threats. A variety of death threats have come through via telephone, e-mail and in the comment section in my blog," Vilks told TV4. Despite the death threats, the artist says that he has no regrets about drawing the pictures of Muhammad as a dog.

CBS) Despite all the bad buzz about subprime mortgages, Sunday Morning correspondent Ben Stein says the economy is strong and that the amount of foreclosures is small in relative terms. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Perspective is a great thing. It's especially good where money and the stock market are concerned. Recently, there has been large movement, mostly down, as the stock market reacts to a large number of foreclosures on homes in the so-called "subprime" mortgage area. This is the place where higher risk borrowers got loans during the housing boom of the last three or four years. Now, to people who actually...

Russia enters 'space race' to build moon base By Graeme Baker Last Updated: 5:57pm BST 31/08/2007 Russia has revived another Cold War rivalry by entering a new “space race” with America to build a permanent base on the Moon. The moon from Moscow's Novodevichy Monastery Anatoly Perminov, the head of the space agency Roskosmos, said Russia would organise a manned lunar mission by 2025 and would be ready to build an “inhabited station” between 2027 and 2032. From there, cosmonauts could strike out on a long-planned mission to Mars as early as 2035. “According to our estimates we will be...

SUMMERVILLE — It was raining and lightning was popping when Greg Schneider went out to check the mail shortly before 6 p.m. Thursday. That's about all Schneider, 37, remembers after a lightning strike burned a 2-inch hole in his favorite Ducks Unlimited baseball cap. Schneider wound up sprawled on his back on the front lawn of his house on Alwyn Boulevard. "There was mail all around him," neighbor Brian Koellner said. Schneider said he came to as Koellner's 11-year-old son, Taylor, poked him and called out, "Mr. Greg, Mr. Greg." Another neighbor leaned over him and asked, "Greg, are you...

DENVER — A student who said she was told she wouldn't get her diploma unless she apologized for a commencement speech in which she mentioned Jesus has filed a lawsuit alleging her free speech rights were violated. The school district contends its actions were "constitutionally appropriate." Erica Corder was one of 15 valedictorians at Lewis-Palmer High School in 2006. All were invited to speak for 30 seconds at the graduation ceremony. When it was Corder's turn, she encouraged the audience to get to know Jesus Christ. Corder had not included those remarks during rehearsals. [snip] The lawsuit said Brewer would...

Mystery DR Congo fever kills 60 More than 60 people have died because of a fever epidemic in the centre of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, health officials say. Many of the victims are people who have been in contact with the deceased, including medical staff, and who lack equipment to deal with the illness. The latest victim was a nurse at a local hospital. She died on Thursday after taking care of infected patients. Health officials say the medical staff had no masks and this put them at risk. Speaking from Kananga, the capital of the West Kasai...

Russia's Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov said Friday that a prominent Russian businessman-turned-politician is training to fly to space as a tourist in 2009 and underscored the need to cut his country's dependency on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for manned space exploration. "If we create a new manned spaceship, which our program until the year 2015 provides for, then we will need a new rocket and that rocket will require a new launch pad," Perminov told reporters in a press conference here. We have not decided whether to build that pad at Baikonur or in Russia." While Perminov...

State leads U.S. in investor-owned loan failures, study says Nevada had one of the hottest housing markets for investors two years ago. Now it is the top state for investor-owned mortgage defaults, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported Thursday. The Silver State leads the nation in the percentage of residential real estate mortgage defaults for investors, both in the prime and subprime mortgages categories, the association reported. The association said 32 percent of prime mortgage defaults in Nevada were for non-owner occupied properties as of June 30. Arizona, with 26 percent, came in second. Prime mortgages are loans to borrowers with...

KURŠUMLIJA, UŽICE -- An official says a threat came a month ago that the Kosovo administrative boundary area would be set on fire. While the blazes continue in the area along the administrative line separating Serbia proper and Kosovo, the state forestry management enterprise, Srbijašume, says all the fires that broke out in the region in the past couple of days were the work of arsonists. Fires have often broken out simultaneously in several locations at night time, when firefighters often could not reach the locations for safety concerns. Forestry directorate chief with Srbijašume, Branislav Prolović, told reporters Friday that...

Receivers coach Eric Scott arrested after complaint in Norwalk; he has been lauded for his success as a recruiter. Eric Scott, the UCLA football assistant arrested on suspicion of felony residential burglary, had been sentenced for three other crimes before being hired in March to coach Bruins receivers. UCLA put Scott, 32, on paid administrative leave Wednesday, one day after his arrest. Coach Karl Dorrell also acknowledged in a statement that the school knew about the former Crenshaw High player and coach's criminal background when it hired him. Scott's record includes two incidents of illegally carrying a concealed weapon and...

By DAVID BAUDER NEW YORK (AP) - CBS News is expected to change management at its morning show, bringing a hard-charging former "Good Morning America" executive producer to help a program that's spent generations stuck in third place. Shelley Ross is expected to be named executive in charge of "The Early Show" in the next few weeks, according to two broadcast news insiders with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity on Friday. It's unclear what Ross' hiring would mean for Steve Friedman, brought on in March 2006 as vice president of morning broadcasts at CBS News...

Judge Smith rules. Guilty