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By PHILIP CARDY and ANDY RUSSELL A SUICIDE bomb plot to kill thousands of soccer fans at Saturday’s Manchester United-Liverpool match was dramatically foiled yesterday. Armed cops seized ten terror suspects in dawn raids. Intelligence chiefs believe al-Qaeda fanatics planned to blow themselves up amid 67,000 unsuspecting supporters. A source said: “The target was Old Trafford.” The Islamic fanatics planned to sit all around the ground to cause maximum carnage. They had already bought the tickets for various positions in the stadium, cops revealed last night. But armed cops foiled the horrific plot - which could have killed thousands watching...

Hong Kong: A man has bitten a dog to death in eastern China after it attacked him as he walked home with friends after a night out, a news report said. The man, who was drunk, pounced on the dog when it nipped him on the fingers and cheek in Shanghai. He repeatedly bit it until it died, according to the South China Morning Post.

Research of the clothes alien Aleshenka (found in the Ural region) was wrapped in, revealed that this creature has nothing in common with human being, it is an alien, Moscow expert on UFOs Vadim Chernobrov said in interview to Chelyabinsk media. This sensation goes back to 1996 to village Kaolinovy near the provincial town of Kyshtym in Chelyabinsk region. On August 13, 1996 pensioner Tamara Vasilievna Prosvirina went to the village cemetery. Poor old lady suffered from psychiatric disease, and her perception of the surrounding world was weird. She used to gather flowers from the graves and decorated her room...

Scientists Find Another Huge Mini-World in Outer Solar System The most distant object ever seen orbiting the Sun is nearly as large as Pluto, expanding astronomers notions of how the solar system formed and what resides in its outskirts. The round world is currently three times farther away than Pluto from the Sun, a distance that expands even further on its 10,000-year orbit. It sits in a part of the solar system that some astronomers had thought empty. It is redder and brighter than anything astronomers have seen in the outer solar system, and scientists don't know why. The object...

CHARI, India (Reuters) - On a hot afternoon in Chari, a village just north of Bombay, wide-eyed Warli children with distended bellies pick desultorily at weeds growing from the cracked soil. Slender women with drawn faces go about their tasks silently, one lifting water from the lone well in the area, another stacking hay outside a mud hut. The Warlis are among the more than 90 million "adivasis", meaning original inhabitants, who make up nearly ten percent of India's billion-plus population but are quickly falling by the wayside of the country's newfound prosperity. Displaced from forests by big dam projects...

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - When House and Senate budget negotiators announced a deal on a massive $328 billion federal spending bill, lawmakers proudly noted that they had funded NASA at the amount requested by President Bush in February. But a closer look at the $15.5 billion bill shows that budget writers axed more than $300 million from NASA's budget request and replaced those dollars with money for line items of their own choosing. Many of them are hometown "pork" projects that win legislators political favor at home but no fans inside the federal agencies they affect. For example, the proposed...

Corner Shot is a new weapon system designed for urban combat which enables the user to observe and engage a target from behind a corner without exposing any body parts. The highly technological system was officially unveiled in late December 2003 in Israel and is already being used by some of the world?s elite Special Forces. Corner Shot attaches to most handguns currently used by Special Forces, for example the GLOCK, SIG SAUER, CZ or BERETTA. It includes a small, high-resolution camera and monitor, which can observe and view a target from various vantage points. The detachable video camera...

Anthropologists Hail Romania Fossil Find Sat Mar 6,11:27 AM ET Add Science - AP to My Yahoo! By ALISON MUTLER, Associated Press Writer BUCHAREST, Romania - Experts analyzing remains of a man, woman and teenage boy unearthed in Romania last year are convinced that the 35,000 year-old fossils are the most complete ever of modern humans of that era, a U.S. scientist said Saturday. International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis. But it's already clear that, "this is the most complete...

No smoking . . . Dr Bolton with his hemp crop. Photo: Jeff Dawson If Keith Bolton has his way, hemp - the great symbol of the hippy North Coast - will be coming to a sewage treatment plant near you very soon. And to your wardrobe, your pantry, your car and your medicine cabinet. Interestingly, the strongest opponents of the Southern Cross University academic's dream are the drug dealers in nearby Nimbin. Man has cultivated hemp for fibre, food and medicine for at least 6000 years and Dr Bolton says that, after a 70-year "blip in history" caused...

NASA to Announce 'Significant Findings' of Water on Mars Tuesday By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 03:30 pm ET 01 March 2004 NASA will hold a press conference Tuesday to announce "significant findings" about water on Mars based on evidence from its Opportunity Mars rover. "It's going to be the most significant science results that we've had from the rovers, and it's bearing on their primary mission," NASA spokesperson Don Savage told SPACE.com. That mission is to find signs of water that might support life. Will the announcement change how we think about Mars? "Anything of a significant...

Gibson's Gethsemane The "very flawed" director wants us all to look deeply into "The Passion of the Christ." By Steven Rea Inquirer Movie Critic BEVERLY HILLS - If you had a dollar for each time Mel Gibson said "This is not the blame game" during the week of Feb. 9, you could finance your own modest indie. Encamped at the Four Seasons Hotel for a marathon of proselytizing and propaganda before squadrons of radio, TV and print reporters, the movie star and his team stayed steadfastly on message. The Passion of the Christ - Gibson's self-financed $30 million reenactment of...

(AP) The U.S. Small Business Administration has been ordered to pay more than $500,000 to a former employee who said her boss forced her to quit for refusing to go along with a scheme to discriminate against male workers. A federal judge said the agency and its director, Hector Barreto, should have known about the mistreatment of Mary Conway-Jepson in the agency's Montana office, and failed to do anything. Jepson said she was asked to help in a scheme to rid the SBA office of what former district director Jo Alice Mospan considered too many male supervisors. When she refused,...

Hunt for ancient human molecules By Richard Black BBC science correspondent in Seattle New technologies may soon allow scientists to identify some of the genes of humankind's oldest ancestors. This raises the possibility of plotting the evolutionary tree of humanity from five million years ago to the present. Professor Hendrik Poinar says DNA fragments should be recoverable from fossils that are a million years old, and proteins from even older times. His comments came at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Seattle. Professor Poinar, from McMaster University in Canada, said the key was to...

Kennewick man ruling - politics or science? 10:30 14 February 04 Native Americans called him "The Ancient One", while anthropologists speculated he could reveal who first settled the Americas. Then, for over seven years, the skeleton of Kennewick Man became the subject of a court battle between the two parties, crystallising the debate over who should lay claim to ancient human remains and artefacts. Last week, a federal appeals court finally granted scientists the right to study the 9200-year-old bones, against the wishes of a group of native American tribes, including the Nez Perce tribe of Idaho and those of...

Clovis Man turns 75, plus 13,000 By MICHELLE SEEBER Clovis News Journal CLOVIS, N.M. — He lived among saber-toothed cats, hunted giant mammoths and bison and was smart enough to dig water wells. Other than that, even thousands of years later, we still don't know much about the people known collectively as Clovis Man. Last week marked 75 years since a local amateur archaeologist discovered Clovis Man at Blackwater Draw, about 14 miles southwest of Clovis in eastern New Mexico. Clovis people lived between 11,500 and 13,000 years ago. Since Clovis Man's discovery, evidence has surfaced that prehistoric man's first...

<p>A womens group fired the first legal salvo against the Bush administration's marriage-promotion agenda yesterday, filing a civil rights complaint that a government-funded program discriminates against women.</p> <p>The NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund charged that a pro-marriage program, the Family Formation and Development Project in Allentown, Pa., provides employment services to males only. That constitutes a violation of Title IX, the group claims, because the law prohibits discrimination based on gender in any government-funded program.</p>

Kennewick Man speaks Kennewick Man has held onto his secrets for more than 9,000 years and now, finally, scientists will get a chance to be his voice. This week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals pushed the truths resting within the bones at the Burke Museum closer to the light with its decision that scientists can study them. The appeals court affirmed a lower-court decision that the Interior Department erred in its decision to give the bones to the Native American tribes that claim them as those of an ancestor. The government might appeal to the Supreme Court. But the...

Footprints of Paleothic Man Found on Cheju Island By Han Eun-jung Footprints of a Paleolithic man, the first to be found in Asia, and fossilized animal tracks dating back to about 50,000 years ago were discovered on Cheju Island, the Cultural Properties Administration said at a press briefing in Seoul on Friday. More than 100 footprints of ancient man and thousands of horse, elephant, bird and deer fossil tracks were found in Namcheju-gun on the southern island province of Cheju and along the shores of the island's Andok-myon. The fossils were discovered by Professor Kim Jung-yul of the Korean National...