USA
With the Nov. 2 election barely a week away, President Bush hopscotched across Florida to energize the GOP faithful at four rallies, and Sen. John Kerry, his Democratic challenger, arrived in the state Sunday. The war on terrorism took center stage in their verbal volleys. The president again accused Kerry of changing his position on the war in Iraq, while Kerry charged Bush with trying to scare voters with talk of terrorism. With dramatic helicopter landings at rallies, Bush used the powers of the presidency to maximum advantage on a day when several small planes inadvertently penetrated his restricted airspace. Bush is expected to attend six more events in Florida before the election. Kerry moves to Philadelphia Monday for a large rally that will feature, for the first time in the campaign, former President Clinton.
After six months aboard the Intternational Space Station, astronaut Michael Fincke and Rus-sian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka returned safely to Earth, landing Saturday in Kazakhstan. The pair made repairs during four spacewalks and prepared the station for the arrival of a new European cargo ship next year. Above, Finke is welcomed back to Earth by his family.
The CIA secretly transferred as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq for interrogation during the last six months, The Washington Post reported Sunday. Although a White House official disputed any breaks with the Geneva Conventions, some legal experts said they consider the relocation an attempt to reinterpret them. The CIA invoked a confidential Justice Department memo that says Iraqis may be taken out of the country for "a brief but not indefinite period" and may remove permanently those determined to be illegal aliens.
The Transportation Security Administration has begun expanding security checks on foreigners applying to flight schools in the US, it announced late last week. The new measures are aimed at preventing potential hijackers from taking pilot lessons, as occurred leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Previously, only those training on larger aircraft (weighing 12,500 pounds or more) had their backgrounds checked.
A former California pizza delivery man, now in prison on a 2002 rape conviction, has been linked by DNA evidence to the killings of a dozen women in Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. Before Chester Dwayne Turner was identified as a suspect, a mentally disabled janitor was convicted wrongly of three of the killings and spent nearly nine years in jail before being released last March. Turner is expected to be charged with 10 of the murders this week.
