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RIVERBANK - A driver who may have thought she was trapped at a railroad crossing drove onto the tracks and an Amtrak train slammed into her sport-utility vehicle, killing her and five children passengers, authorities and witnesses said. "It appears an entire family was wiped out," California Highway Patrol spokesman Tom Killian said. The crash occurred about 2 p.m. on Claribel Road just west of the old Riverbank Army Ammunition Plant. Killian said those killed were the driver, two teen-age girls, a boy about 6 and two boys under the age of 3. Their identities were not released. According to...

No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace --- At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours. Hence workers pulling into the company's amenity-packed headquarters at 2...

A mother's dogged determination to find the truth about her son's death led to the Army investigation that determined she was right — he was murdered. Her son, Army Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, was not ambushed as originally reported by the military, but instead he was shot and killed by Iraqi civil defense forces he helped train. ... "An Army investigation concluded that the two soldiers were killed by Iraqi soldiers who were on patrol with them at the time," Army spokesman Paul Boyce said Tuesday evening. Boyce said the Army had conducted an extensive investigation into the deaths, but he...

This from the mouth of a 14-year-old boy: "They tied the legs and hands of 11 Sunni men and hanged them off the river bridge - head-first. But they still refused to talk, so Sheik Khadum Shibley shot them in the arms and legs and then he cut the ropes." The schoolboy Munthadar Ishmail Kudair's chilling account of a Shiite village's despatch of suspected Sunni insurgents adds credibility to rising Sunni complaints of a long-delayed but vicious Shiite fight-back after two years of relentless Sunni-backed violence in Iraq. The summary executions, confirmed by the boy's father and others in the...

Federal officials believe they have broken up an al Qaeda terror cell operating in Lodi and have arrested two men and detained two others as part of a wide-ranging investigation, authorities said Tuesday. One of the men arrested, 22-year-old Hamid Hayat, is accused in a federal criminal complaint of training in an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan to learn “how to kill Americans” and then lying to FBI agents about it. His training included explosives and weapons instruction and using photographs of President Bush as targets, court documents indicate. More:http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/v-print/story/13022958p-13869232c.html

Russia Standoff Ends in Bloodshed for 200 Sep 3, 7:10 PM (ET) By MIKE ECKEL (AP) A commando takes a postition at a seized school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Friday, Sept. 3, 2004.... BESLAN, Russia (AP) - The three-day hostage siege at a school in southern Russia ended in chaos and bloodshed Friday, after witnesses said Chechen militants set off bombs and Russian commandos stormed the building. Hostages fled in terror, many of them children who were half-naked and covered in blood. Officials estimated the death toll at more than 200. Early Saturday, 531 people remained hospitalized, including 283 children...

<p>TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (AP) - As many as 20 militants seized a large number of hostages Wednesday during a standoff with authorities after a grenade blast in Uzbekistan's capital, police said. A Russian television network said three people were wounded in the latest violence in the Central Asian nation. The Tashkent blast came at the end of a day when police scoured the capital in pursuit of fugitive militants, and reportedly arrested at least 30. A police official said those in custody so far were adherents of the strict Wahhabi Islamic sect, which was believed to have inspired Osama bin Laden, not members of an extremist group President Islam Karimov has implied were behind the attacks.</p>

<p>LOS ANGELES -- A UCLA study released Wednesday says the state constitution should be amended so California's 4.6 million noncitizen adults can vote in local elections. Nearly one-fifth of the state's adults are noncitizens and in 12 cities form the majority, according to the study, which was commissioned by the University of California at Los Angeles' Chicano Studies Research Center.</p>

<p>"Your patient records are out in the open... so you better track that person and make him pay my dues."</p> <p>A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients' confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients' records attached.</p>

<p>Modesto (AP) - The Contra Costa County Coroner's office is examining several bones reportedly found near the spot where Laci Peterson's remains washed ashore.</p> <p>Investigators have not determined whether the bones are human, and a forensic anthropologist will test them in the next few days.</p>

<p>Approximately 250 people gathered at Burwood Cemetary in Escalon Friday afternoon for the burial of Laci Peterson and her unborn son Conner.</p> <p>ESCALON - Family and friends laid Laci and Conner Peterson to rest Friday. About 250 people gathered for the funeral at Burwood Cemetery.</p>

<p>This $4.5 billion piece of next-gen naval hardware is already obsolete - by design. Welcome aboard the flexible technology platform called the USS Ronald Reagan.</p> <p>When the Navy's new $4.5 billion aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, sails off to duty later this year, it will be the world's biggest weapon: more than 100,000 tons, and roughly the size of the Empire State Building tipped on its side. But like any piece of high tech equipment, it will be outdated almost immediately. There's already something better in the works: a $10 billion ship called the CVN 21, scheduled for delivery in the middle of the next decade.</p>

By Andrew Cockburn Photographs by Jodi Cobb There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach—and in the destruction of lives. Sherwood Castle, headquarters to Milorad Milakovic, the former railway official who rose to become a notorious slave trafficker in Bosnia, looms beside the main road just outside the northwest Bosnian town of Prijedor. Under stucco battlements, the entrance is guarded by well-muscled, heavily tattooed young men, while off to one side Milakovic's trio of pet Siberian...

Dissertation Could Be Security Threat Student's Maps Illustrate Concerns About Public Information By Laura Blumenfeld Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 8, 2003; Page A01 Sean Gorman's professor called his dissertation "tedious and unimportant." Gorman didn't talk about it when he went on dates because "it was so boring they'd start staring up at the ceiling." But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman's work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives -- if they could get their hands on it -- would find a terrorist treasure...

Chinese space officials remain on schedule for the first piloted flight of that nation's Shenzhou spacecraft. Chief designers and mission directors say Shenzhou 5 will be launched in autumn, reported the People's Daily last week. All is going well in readying the spacecraft, a Long March booster, and astronauts training for the voyage, despite the SARS epidemic that has struck China hard. Also, space suits are at the ready, including more than 20 kinds of China-made space food. China has a cadre of 14 fighter pilots in training to become astronauts. They are reportedly all under 30 years of age,...

This is a serious question for Christians, and it's been nagging at me for about 10 years. I've already posed this question to both a Catholic priest (I'm Catholic) and a Baptist minister, and both danced around the question without really answering it. I know that we have many religious people here on FR, so I'd like to gather YOUR opinions Is there more than one god in the Universe? As Christians, our first instinct is to answer with a resounding “No!”, but I have developed some doubts over the past decade. These doubts, surprisingly, have sprung from reading the...

<p>Newman resident Vera Alizaga, 41, thinks the tip she provided led Scott Peterson's defense team to examine a van.</p> <p>A Newman woman believes her tip about a suspicious van two weeks ago led Scott Peterson's defense attorneys to acquire the vehicle as a possible clue in the Laci Peterson murder case. The same day police received Vera Alizaga's tip, they examined a van and announced that there was no connection to the double-murder case. They won't say whether her tip led them to the van they towed to a crime lab.</p>

After reading some of the skeptical responses to NASA's push towards a "space junk" explanation for the Columbia loss, I did a little searching on the web. You see, I recalled a story from several years back explaining how we almost lost a shuttle once before when a tiny speck of space debris pegged one of the shuttles windows and blew out a good sized chunk of glass. In my search for background material to support a post about this, I stumbled across something MUCH better: a National Research Council findings document about the dangers of space junk compiled in...

China vows to push ahead with its first manned space flight BEIJING (AFP) Feb 03, 2003 China has vowed to push ahead with plans to launch its own first manned space mission this year despite the Columbia tragedy, state press reported Monday. "China will launch its first manned space shuttle this year," said Tu Shou'e, an astronautics academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to the People's Daily "The key work now is to learn lessons from the accident to make our program better and to make the dream of the Chinese people of reaching into space come true."...

/*snip*/ A decade ago, Wipro was an anonymous conglomerate selling cooking oil and personal computers, mostly in India. Today, it is a $903 million-a-year global company, and most of its business comes from information-technology services. Since 1997, Wipro's revenue has grown by an average of 26% a year while profits have grown by 69%. Its 15,000 technologists write software, integrate back-office solutions, design semiconductors, debug applications, take orders, and field help calls for some of the biggest companies in the world. They are as good at doing all of that as anyone in the world. Perhaps better. And they are...