U.S. officials nab record amounts of cocaine

FORT BLISS, Texas -- U.S. authorities seized a record 316 metric tons of cocaine last year, top drug interdiction officials said Thursday as they credited Mexico's increasing cooperation with helping force drug traffickers to raise their prices and try new smuggling methods.

John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the record seizures have led to a 21 percent jump in the price of cocaine and a drop in the purity of the drug. The price of methamphetamine has jumped even more, he said, thanks to a crackdown on U.S. labs and Mexican authorities doing more to stop importation of precursor material.

Walters spoke Thursday at Fort Bliss, just outside El Paso, during a break in meetings with The Interdiction Committee, a multi-agency committee focused on stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S.

Military shoots down ballistic missile in test

HONOLULU -- The U.S. military intercepted a ballistic missile Thursday in the first such sea-based test since a Navy cruiser shot down an errant satellite earlier this year.

The military fired the target, a Scud-like missile with a range of a few hundred miles, from a decommissioned amphibious assault ship near Hawaii's island of Kauai.

The USS Lake Erie, based at Pearl Harbor, fired two interceptor missiles that shot down the target in its final seconds of flight about 12 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

The target was shot down about 100 miles northwest of Kauai in its final seconds of flight, about five minutes after it was fired.

N.Y. considers 'organ-removal' ambulance

NEW YORK -- Saving the living has always been the No. 1 priority for a New York City ambulance crew. But a select group of paramedics may soon have a different task altogether: saving the dead.

The city is considering creating a special ambulance whose crew would rush to collect the newly deceased and preserve the body so that the organs might be taken for transplant.

The "rapid-organ-recovery ambulance," still in the early planning stages, could raise a host of ethical questions and strike some families as ghoulish. But top medical officials in the Fire Department and Bellevue Hospital say it has the potential to save hundreds of lives.

Generally in the U.S., only people who die at hospitals are used as organ donors, because doctors are on hand with life-support machinery and other equipment to preserve the organs and remove them before they spoil. Surgeons have only a few critical hours before kidneys, livers and other body parts suffer damage that renders them unusable.

Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, the director of emergency medicine at Bellevue, said the ambulance project could spark an "amazing transformation" by substantially increasing the pool of donors. The system would be one of the first of its kind in the U.S., although similar ambulances have operated successfully in parts of Europe, he said.

Major blaze breaks out in downtown L.A.

LOS ANGELES -- A fire engulfed a two-story building in the downtown Garment District early Thursday, gutting a labyrinth-like collection of small stores and sending flames and smoke pouring through the roof.

Nobody was in the building at the time and no injuries were reported, authorities said.

The fire broke out shortly before 5 a.m. About 175 firefighters extinguished the blaze at 6:42 a.m., fire spokeswoman d'Lisa Davies said.

About 10 stores shared the first floor of the building and the second floor was storage space, Fire Battalion Chief Ron Villanueva said.

Two climbers scale same N.Y. skycraper

NEW YORK -- A Manhattan skyscraper that is home to The New York Times became the site of twin daredevil stunts Thursday, with two men scaling the 52-story office tower within a matter of hours.

The first man, Alain Robert, unfurled a banner as he climbed that said "Global warming kills more people than a 9/11 every week." He was arrested when he made it to the top.

Hours later, a second man ascended the building -- a stunt that drew the attention of thousands of onlookers, along with TV cameras that captured the drama in real time. At moments during his ascent, the climber appeared to slow and tire, and officers awaiting him shouted encouragement from the rooftop and even dangled a rope, which he did not take, police said.

Crowds pressed against police barricades to watch the climb, and people clapped and cheered for him while snapping pictures on their cell phone.

He, too, was arrested as he reached the top, but police did not immediately identify him. He was taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, according to police.

Stolen Jesus statue returned to church

DETROIT -- A Detroit woman has found Jesus ... in an alley.

The pastor of a church in the city says its stolen 8-foot Jesus statue was recovered from bushes in an alley about two blocks away.

Patricia Bowers says she notified the church late Wednesday that she had seen the statue the previous day after she had gotten off a bus.

Bowers says she didn't realize the green-hued, plaster statue had been stolen until seeing news reports Tuesday night.

The Rev. Barry Randolph says the only damage to the statue is a broken hand. The cross it was attached to suffered major damage.

A church member noticed the statue missing Monday. Randolph says thieves may have thought the statue contained copper, which often is stolen and sold as scrap metal.

Artery vacuum reduces heart attack death rate

A vacuum cleaner-like device that sucks blood clots out of the arteries of heart attack victims before angioplasty reduces the death rate in the following year by nearly half, researchers are reporting Friday.

By physically removing clots, the device prevents fragments from breaking off, flowing through the bloodstream and blocking other vessels.

Based on preliminary results from this study and others, cardiovascular surgeons in many large centers are already using the technique to improve patients' outcomes.

These results "will encourage other physicians to use it," said Dr. Ravi Dave, a staff cardiologist at Southern California's Santa Monica-UCLA and Orthopaedic Hospital, who was not involved in the study but has been using the technique for a year and a half.

Astronauts work on installing Japanese lab

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Spacewalking astronauts worked on the outside of Japan's shiny new science lab Thursday, installing cameras and removing covers.

Dressed head to toe in white, Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. looked like puffy dolls against the 37-foot-long, 14-foot-wide lab, which is now the biggest room at the international space station.

It was their second spacewalk in three days at the shuttle-station complex, orbiting 210 miles above Earth.

"I feel like I'm on a camping trip trying to pack up a wet tent on a Sunday morning," Fossum said as he wrestled with some of the lab's insulation. He and Garan removed thermal covers from the lab's robot arm and added them to a variety of attachment points.