Flood cleanup starts in Ohio, Wisconsin

FINDLAY, Ohio -- Peeking into her waterlogged basement, Gail Leatherman didn't break down until she saw a soggy photo of her and her husband, taken for their 17th wedding anniversary.

She salvaged the picture, but not her treasured Christmas decorations. Next door, her son lost all of his 1-year-old boy's winter clothes.

And that wasn't the worst of it.

"A year ago, our insurer told us we could drop our flood insurance," she said. "So we did."

Water from the worst flood in nearly a century in this northwest Ohio city began receding Thursday, as it did elsewhere in the Midwest, allowing some of the more than 1,000 homeowners who had been displaced to get a look at the soaked photo albums, boxes of clothes and furniture in their basements.

With the flooding and more storms moving through, the death toll across the Upper Midwest and from the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin that swept Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri over the past week also rose to at least 26. In one Ohio county alone, the tally of damaged homes was more than 700.

A hole lot of nothing found by astronomers

WASHINGTON -- Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there.

The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years away.

But what the Minnesota team discovered, using two different types of astronomical observations, is a void that's far bigger than scientists ever imagined.

"This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void," said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal. "It's not clear that we have the right word yet ... This is too much of a surprise."

Rudnick was examining a sky survey from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which essentially takes radio pictures of a broad expanse of the universe.

But one area of the universe had radio pictures indicating there was up to 45 percent less matter in that region, Rudnick said. The rest of the matter in the radio pictures can be explained as stars and other cosmic structures between here and the void, which is about 5 to 10 billion light years away.

Officer's meatball defense too dopey

NEW YORK -- So much for the meatball defense.

A veteran counterterrorism detective's claims that he flunked a drug test because his wife served him marijuana-spiked meatballs "simply weren't credible," and he has been fired by the New York Police Department, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said Thursday.

With the dismissal, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly rejected an earlier recommendation by an administrative judge that the detective, Anthony Chiofalo, be reinstated. Kelly has final say on firings.

An attorney for Chiofalo did not immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment.

Chiofalo, a 22-year-veteran assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, was suspended without pay in 2005 after a random drug test found marijuana in his system. The officer denied ever using drugs and demanded a hearing.

During an investigation, his wife said she had secretly substituted marijuana for oregano in her meatball recipe in hopes of forcing him to leave police work.

2 injured by falling equipment at WTC building

NEW YORK -- Part of the scaffolding surrounding a condemned skyscraper at the World Trade Center site fell Thursday, injuring two firefighters, fire officials said. It was the same building where two other firefighters died in a blaze last week.

The demolition work on the former Deutsche Bank skyscraper had been suspended after Saturday's fire, but workers on Thursday were still busy removing toxic debris from its remaining 26 stories.

Shortly before 2 p.m., the two firefighters were hit by the falling material.

Fire Department spokesman Frank Gribbon said scaffolding fell from the side of the building facing the World Trade Center site, leaving the two firefighters hospitalized in stable condition, one with a head injury. Initial reports that some construction workers also were injured could not immediately be confirmed.

Officer indicted in girlfriend's death

CANTON, Ohio -- A grand jury indicted a police officer on murder charges Thursday in the death of his pregnant girlfriend, whose 2-year-old son was left alone in an apartment to tell police: "Mommy was crying ... Mommy's in rug."

Bobby Cutts Jr. could receive the death penalty if convicted of killing Jessie Davis and her unborn child in June.

The murder indictments allege that Cutts killed Davis, terminated her pregnancy and caused the death of a viable unborn child, "baby Chloe." Cutts, 30, also faces two counts of gross abuse of a corpse and one count each of aggravated burglary and endangering children.

His attorney, Myron Watson, said he would comment after he had a chance to review the indictment.

Myisha Ferrell, a high school classmate of Cutts, was indicted on charges of obstructing justice and complicity to abuse of a corpse. Prosecutors say she helped dispose of Davis's body.

The indictments alleges that Cutts killed Davis at her home on June 14, and that his actions put their son, 2-year-old Blake Davis, in danger. Davis's family says Cutts was also the father of the girl Davis was due to deliver July 3. The Canton patrolman was suspended without pay from his job in June.

Davis was reported missing after her mother went to her home and found Blake in a dirty diaper, the bedroom furniture toppled and a pool of bleach on the floor.

Blake provided authorities with the first clues, saying: "Mommy was crying. Mommy broke the table. Mommy's in rug."

Davis's disappearance drew national attention as thousands of people searched the area surrounding her northeast Ohio home. Her body was found nine days later in a remote park about 25 miles away. She was still carrying the nearly full-term fetus, authorities said.

Edwards dubs himself candidate for change

Former senator John Edwards plans to launch what his campaign describes as a new phase of his candidacy -- declaring himself the candidate of real change and implicitly skewering the Democratic front-runner, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In an address in New Hampshire, Edwards plans to put the contrast this way, according to excerpts released by his advisers: "It is caution versus courage. Old versus new. Calculation versus principle. It is the establishment elites versus the American people. It is a choice between the failed compromises of the past and the bright possibilities of our future." (Predictably, he does not plan to mention Clinton by name).

Clinton has built her candidacy partly around the success of her husband's two terms in office in the 1990s. The Clintons campaigned together in July, repeatedly referring to the economic success of that era -- without mentioning the less memorable moments, such as the failure to capture Osama bin Laden and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Edwards, who is in third place in many national polls and is in a three-way tie with Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama in the first-in-the-nation caucuses in Iowa, is seeking to present himself as the candidate most likely to win the general election in November 2008. He is spending this weekend on a bus tour of New Hampshire.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A5.