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Korey Rowe Arrested Despite Honorable Discharge Papers
Korey Rowe, the Afghanistan and Iraq combat veteran and producer of Loose Change, who was arrested on Monday under charges of desertion, presented his honorable discharge papers to the arresting officers and yet was grabbed after a sophisticated operation where police staked out his house from the woods and cut his phone lines.

Haneef terrorism charges dropped
Australian prosecutors have dropped terror charges against an Indian doctor over the failed bomb attacks in the UK. Mohamed Haneef had been accused of giving "reckless support" to terrorism by providing a relative in Britain with his mobile phone SIM card. Director of Public Prosecutions Damian Bugg said, following a review of the case, that 'a mistake has been made'.

Congress delivers blow to Bush's European missile project by slashing funding
George Bush's plans to establish a European missile defence system suffered a big setback yesterday when a Congressional committee slashed the funding.
The House appropriations committee cut $139m (£69.5m) from the $310m the Bush administration wants for preparatory work on the missile project in Europe.

Pentagon planning for Iraq pullout
The Pentagon has made contingency plans for a gradual troop withdrawal from Iraq a 'priority', the US defence secretary says. Robert Gates said this week that 'such planning is indeed taking place with my active involvement as well as that of senior military and civilian officials and our commanders in the field'. 'I consider this contingency planning to be a priority for this department.'

Credit fears send markets plunging
Fears of a global credit crunch prompted by contagion from the crisis-hit US housing market led to panic selling and big falls on all the world's stock markets yesterday. Amid concern that heavily leveraged corporate deals would collapse in an environment of dearer credit, the FTSE 100 lost more than 200 points and the authorities on Wall Street imposed trading curbs to slow the market's decline.

Space computer 'sabotage' probed
Nasa is investigating the apparent sabotage of a computer due to be flown to the International Space Station. The US space agency said the damage to wiring in a network box was intentional and obvious, but said it could be repaired before take-off on 7 August. Nasa stressed that the lives of its astronauts had not been put at risk.

Two killed in blast at space tourism rocket firm
A huge explosion killed two workers and critically injured four others at a Mojave Desert airport site used by a pioneering aerospace company linked to Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism business. Last night's blast at a Mojave Air and Space Port building belonging to Scaled Composites, which sent the first private manned rocket into space, also left some toxic material, said Kern County fire captain Doug Johnston.

Cannabis 'can increase risk of schizophrenia by 40%'
Young people should be warned that smoking cannabis can increase the risk of developing psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia by more than 40 per cent, researchers say. The risk is doubled among regular users who smoke the drug daily or weekly, according to the review of 35 studies published in The Lancet.

British intelligence 'inadvertently' helped US rendition
No British agency was directly involved in the US policy of 'rendition' for suspected Islamist militants, parliament's intelligence and security committee said in a report published Wednesday. But the cross-party body said the security services 'inadvertently' helped in the transfer of two Arab Muslim residents of Britain to Guantanamo Bay after US authorities ignored riders placed on information supplied to them

School shooting drill gets cops, kids on same page
For students, fire drills and earthquake drills are simply the norm, but on Wednesday, in a sign of the times, students in Albany took part in a school shooting drill that was very intense.This may have been only a drill, but it's just about as real as it gets.

Heathrow puts up legal barricades to keep away protesters
If you're a member of the National Trust, the RSPB, the Woodland Trust or Friends of the Earth, then you could be banned from Britain's biggest airport. And the Piccadilly line. And parts of Paddington station. And sections of the M4. All because the authorities want to halt a protest against climate change. Five million people in peaceful environmental organisations such as the National Trust and the RSPB have become the subject of an extraordinary legal attempt to limit their right to protest.

FBI Director Contradicts Gonzales
The head of the FBI contradicted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' sworn testimony and Senate Democrats requested a perjury investigation Thursday in a fresh barrage against President Bush's embattled longtime friend and aide. In a third blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas to compel the testimony of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, in connection with its investigation of the firings of federal prosecutors.

Boy shot dead after bike chase is 10th young London victim in six months
A 16-year-old boy was shot dead at point blank range yesterday in what a witness said was a random "execution" after he was chased across a south London estate by a gang of armed youths on bicycles. The murder of Abukah Mahamood, who had just finished his GCSE exams, is the 10th high profile killing of a teenage boy in gang violence in London in less than six months.

FBI Wants Its Own Stasi
In a move startlingly similar to that of the East German government during the Cold war, the FBI wants to recruit thousands of covert informants in the US and work with the CIA to train them in an effort to expand and adopt more aggressive intelligence capabilities. According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI, driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush, wants to recruit more than 15,000 informants in the US, entailing a complete overhaul of its database systems at a cost of around $22 million.

A good day to bury the news that ministerial car use has soared
has risen by nearly 8 per cent in the past year, according to government figures, at a cost to the taxpayer of £6m. MPs have also seen their allowances and expenses rise by an inflation-busting 5.5 per cent to a total £95m bill for the taxpayer. And as MPs packed their bags for the 10-week summer recess of Parliament, they heard that the Prime Minister had received a report recommending further increases in their salaries of £60,000, and their allowances.

Judge: FBI Helped Frame 4 Men for Murder
The FBI helped frame four men for a 1965 murder and withheld information that could have cleared them, a federal judge ruled Thursday in ordering the government to pay $101.7 million for the decades they spent in prison. 'The FBI's misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction,' U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner said in issuing her ruling in the civil lawsuit.

July 7 bomber's widow 'has lost her identity'
The widow of the "ringleader" of the July 7 bombings described last night how she had to come to terms with her husband's death, the fact that he had killed innocent people, and the miscarriage of their child all in one day. Hasina Patel, wife of Mohammad Sidique Khan, who killed six in a suicide attack at London's Edgware Road Tube station in 2005, also told of how she had been treated as 'guilty until proven innocent' over the bombings. She said she had lost some faith in the police.