Free Republic

c By DOUGLAS JEHL ASHINGTON, Dec. 28 - The head of the Central Intelligence Agency's analytical branch is being forced to step down, former intelligence officials say, opening a major new chapter in a shakeup under Porter J. Goss, the agency's chief. The official, Jami Miscik, the agency's deputy director for intelligence, told her subordinates on Tuesday afternoon of her plan to step down on Feb. 4. A former intelligence official said that Ms. Miscik was told before Christmas that Mr. Goss wanted to make a change and that "the decision to depart was not hers." Ms. Miscik has headed...

Researchers scour Cuban records for clues to Calusa By KRISTEN ZAMBO, klzambo@naplesnews.com March 14, 2004 After years of belief to the contrary, the once mighty Calusa Indians, who lived centuries ago in Southwest Florida, may not be extinct after all. Nicknamed "The Fierce Ones," the Calusa Indians lived in Southwest Florida from around A.D. 100 to the early 1700s, when they were believed to have been killed off by invading Native American tribes, Spanish soldiers and foreign diseases such as smallpox. Their largest settlement in Florida was on Pine Island at Pineland, now the site of the Randell Research Center,...

Investigators expanded their hunt for clues Friday to a warehouse used by the Modesto man whose pregnant wife has been missing since Christmas Eve. Also, police and FBI crime-scene analysts spent a second day working inside the La Loma neighborhood home that belongs to the missing woman, Laci Peterson, 27, and her husband, Scott, 30. The warehouse, which Peterson uses in his work as an agricultural salesman, is on North Emerald Avenue near Kansas Avenue in Modesto. Police sealed the warehouse as well as the Peterson home. In other developments: Modesto and Berkeley police went to a marina on San...