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Parkersburg Police Chief Chris Luhring stands in the storage room where all the lost and found items, that were blown away by the May 25 tornado, are being held until they can be identified and returned in Parkersburg, Iowa on Thursday July 31, 2008. The mementos began arriving at City Hall a couple of days after a tornado destroyed nearly a third of the town, killed eight people and swept away items of daily life. (AP Photo/Des Moines Register, Justin Hayworth)

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Monday, 18 August 2008
Nation Briefing 8/18 Print E-mail
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Florida Keys visitors urged to leave ahead of Tropical Storm Kay

KEY WEST, Fla. -- Florida Keys officials closed schools, opened shelters and urged visitors to leave as Tropical Storm Fay threatened to strengthen into a hurricane Sunday, but residents and tourists seemed in no hurry to evacuate.

Traffic remained light leaving Key West and the Lower Keys on Sunday afternoon as the sky darkened with storm clouds and the National Weather Service issued watches and warnings.

"We've seen worse than this in Omaha," said Diego Sainz, who was visiting from Nebraska with his wife and friends. They had intended to leave Sunday but couldn't get a flight out.

Authorities said traffic was becoming heavy in the Upper Keys, where the 110-mile, mostly two-lane highway that runs through the island chain meets the mainland. The Florida Highway Patrol sent in extra troopers to assist and tolls were suspended on parts of the northbound turnpike.

Fay could start pelting parts of the Keys and South Florida late Monday or early Tuesday as a strong tropical storm or minimal hurricane. Aside from wind damage, most of the islands sit at sea level and could face some limited flooding from Fay's storm surge.


Man rescued after 2 nights in old mine

SONORA, Calif. -- A man was rescued from an abandoned gold mine Sunday after tumbling more than 100 feet and spending two nights at the bottom of the dark shaft, authorities said.

A search-and-rescue team pulled Darvis Lee Jr., 34, from the mine around 6 a.m. after lowering a rescue worker and a mesh basket into the chasm, the Tuolumne County Sheriff's Department said. He was treated at a hospital for back and leg injuries and released.

Lee, of Sonora, fell down the 100-foot shaft while exploring the mine Friday night. Authorities were contacted Saturday after a friend who went with him realized Lee had not returned home.

His rescue was briefly delayed while authorities waited for a search team to arrive from Los Angeles, about 300 miles to the southeast, with the right equipment and experience for the job. In the meantime, local authorities lowered Lee a helmet, food and water.

Lying in the back of a pickup truck, Lee apologized.

"I walked in there, and I fell. It was dark, and I didn't know when I was going to stop," he told the Union Democrat newspaper. "I'm so sorry; I'm so sorry."


Television remains top source of news

NEW YORK -- Fewer Americans are reading newspapers and are instead getting their news online, but television remains the leading source of news in the country, according to a survey released Sunday.

Not surprisingly, younger people tend to get more of their news on the Internet, while older folks use traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Pew Research Center's biannual survey on news consumption habits said.

Pew said the results show an increasing shift toward online news consumption, but that there is now a sizable group of a more engaged, sophisticated and well-off people that use both traditional and online sources to get their news.

The Pew researchers referred to these people as "integrators," and says they account for 23 percent of those surveyed, spending the most time with the news on a typical day.

"Like Web-oriented news consumers, integrators are affluent and highly educated. However they are older, on average, than those who consider the Internet their main source of news," the survey said.

It is this group that advertisers typically like to target, which helps explain why newspaper publishers have seen sharp declines in ad revenues as spending shifts online.


Officials want 8 FLDS kids back in custody

SAN ANGELO, Texas -- More than two months after being forced to return children from a polygamist sect to their parents, Texas child welfare authorities want eight of the youngsters put back in foster care.

Individual hearings for the four mothers of the children, ranging in age from 5 to 17, are set to begin Monday.

Child Protective Services has asked Texas District Judge Barbara Walther to return the children to foster care because their mothers allegedly have refused to limit their contact with men accused of being involved in underage marriages.

"We continue to have concerns in particular for these eight children, which is why we have asked the judge to review the case," said CPS spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner.

None of the children currently live at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, where authorities swept roughly 440 children into foster care in April. Officials said the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which established the ranch, was forcing girls into underage marriages and grooming boys to be adult abusers.

Six weeks after the children were placed in foster care, the Texas Supreme Court forced CPS to return them to their parents, ruling that the agency presented evidence of no more than a handful of teenage girls being abused. Many of the children taken into CPS custody were infants and toddlers.

In the new CPS petitions seeking foster placement for the eight children, the agency detailed alleged underage marriages involving the children's fathers or stepfathers, though only one faces any criminal charges.


Ex-Marine on trial warns of broad consequences

IRVINE, Calif. -- A former Marine sergeant facing the first federal civilian prosecution of a military member accused of a war crime says there is much more at stake than his claim of innocence on charges that he killed unarmed detainees in Fallujah, Iraq.

In the view of Jose Luis Nazario Jr., U.S. troops may begin to question whether they will be prosecuted by civilians for doing what their military superiors taught them to do in battle.

Nazario is the first military service member who has completed his duty to be brought to trial under a law that allows the government to prosecute defense contractors, military dependents and those no longer in the military who commit crimes outside the United States.

"They train us, and they expect us to rely back on that training. Then when we use that training, they prosecute us for it?" Nazario said during an interview Saturday with The Associated Press.

I didn't do anything wrong. I don't think I should be the first tried like this," said Nazario, whose trial begins Tuesday in Riverside, east of Los Angeles.

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