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Officials handle radioactive scare By NATE CARLISLE of the Tribune's staff Published Wednesday, February 18, 2004 It was suspected of having radioactive material. Then it was a suspected methamphetamine laboratory. Now Columbia police aren't sure what was occurring in the house at 707 W. Sexton Road. "Well, we don't know," police Capt. Moon McCrary said this morning. "There were items that were found ... that could be used in a meth lab. But as far as any meth lab and methamphetamines, we didn't find any." Police and firefighters responded at about 9:50 a.m. yesterday after two construction workers sent to...

Longtime Freepers are aware of the odd but diabolical relationship between cheese and moose. Likewise, we know of the chilling admonition, "all your base are belong to us." Now, through the power of the World Wide Web, further evidence supporting the connection between these seemingly disparate objects and phenomena has been established. Additionally, there is now a vague but apparently real connection with a popular restaurant chain which serves toasted submarine sandwiches.But you need not take my word for it. If you have the flash player installed, you will find proof of the cheese-moose-sandwich connection here. If this were not...

Saddam Hussein has been captured alive near his home town of Tikrit in a major coup for the beleaguered US-led occupation forces in Iraq. US occupying administrator Paul Bremer said Hussein was captured late on Saturday after more than eights months of searching for him. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez told a news conference on Sunday that the army had received intelligence late on Saturday of two possible hideouts near the village of Aghwar. Some 600 special forces participated in the raid to capture the ousted Iraqi leader, who was found hiding in what Sanchez called "a spider hole".US forces showed a videotape of the...

A big explosion is reported in downtown Tel Aviv, in a "major shopping district." Initial reports have at least 10 people injured. Numerous ambulances reported rushing to the scene. Secondary reports have at least 10 dead. Cause not known, but it probably wasn't a space heater.

A Republican Senate Judiciary Committee staff member has been suspended with pay after he admitted that he improperly gained access to "secure committee computers," Fox News Channel reports. Whether the staffer is the person who leaked numerous memos in which Democrats on the committee plotted to turn toe current filibuster of judicial nominees for political advantage was not stated. An angry Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch denounced the staffer's action, saying that senators expect their computers to be secure and calling the staffer's action "entirely unacceptable."

According to a promo aired during Special Report moments ago, Chris Wallace (son of Mike Wallace and broadcast network correspendent in his own right for more than two decades), will become the host of Fox News Sunday beginning December 7. Tony Snow, who has given up his substitute anchor duties on Special Report to undertake a talk show on the Fox Radio Network, has not commented, when making on-air announcements of his schedule change, that he is also giving up the excellent and popular Sunday morning talker on the Fox Broadcast Network. Whether the promo which ran tonight represents a...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A large explosion was heard in central Baghdad Saturday and smoke could be seen rising from an area close to the headquarters of Iraq's U.S.-led administration, Reuters witnesses reported. The blast happened at around 4:35 p.m. (8:35 a.m. EST) and shook doors and windows in the center of the city. A U.S. army spokeswoman had no immediate information on the explosion.

Canaan Banana, the colourfully-named former president of Zimbabwe who died on Monday aged 67, became his country's first black head of state in 1980 following the bloody and prolonged war of independence that toppled Ian Smith's white-only regime; but his career ended in disgrace 18 years later when he was convicted and jailed for sodomy.Although not well-known outside Southern Rhodesia before independence, Banana had had an honourable career as an opponent of the Smith regime, and as a radical theologian. He served as the country's president, a largely ceremonial position, from March 1980 to December 1987, when he was effectively...

Saxby Chambliss begins, saying, "There was a very clear and definite outline of undermining the President, the DoD, the intelligenct community; it would truly undermine the opposition in Iraq." Demands that Democrats disavow the memo and its contents.

Fox reports that the Cook County office building is afire; video shows one whole side of the skyscraper blackened with flames coming from windows, and fire spreading to another side. Firemen have been carrying stretchers in, but there is no firm word as to casualties.

Three American soldiers have been killed, three others injured as the result of an RPG attack as they inspected an ammunition dump near Tikrit. No other information was immediately available.

Israel has launched an attack in Gaza City in apparent retaliation for Tuesday's bus bombing, FNC quotes the Associated Press as reporting. Six "large explosions" have been heard in the city. The attack was apparently carried out by helicopter gunship.

Jerry Nadeau, the self-made Winston Cup stock car driver from Danbury, was critically injured Friday night after he crashed at Richmond International Raceway. Nadeau’s car struck the outside wall during practice for tonight’s Pontiac Excitement 400. The car skidded in a turn, spun halfway around and slammed — driver’s side first — into a retaining wall. "We haven’t heard anything specific about the nature of his injuries. Right now, he’s listed in critical condition,” said Keith Green, public relations director at Richmond International Raceway. He declined to say if Nadeau’s injuries were life-threatening. "I don’t want to speculate on that....

BC-BULLETIN IRAQ INFORMATION MINISTER SAYS US FORCES COMMITTING SUICIDE AT WALLS OF BAGHDAD BC-BULLETIN IRAQ INFORMATION MINISTER SAYS "BAGHDAD IS SAFE" BC-BULLETIN IRAQ INFORMATION MINISTER SAYS US FORCES COMMITTING SUICIDE AT WALLS OF BAGHDAD BC-BULLETIN IRAQ INFORMATION MINISTER SAYS US "COLUMNS WERE SLAUGHTERED" BC-BULLETIN IRAQ INFORMATION MINISTER DENIES 65 US TANKS HAVE ENTERED CENTRE OF BAGHDAD

In a live report just now, Ted Koppel reported the exact location of a "line of tanks and armored personnel carriers a mile and a half long," and provided the additional news that they are nearly out of gas and are awaiting resupply. In so doing, he set them up as targets for what's left of the Iraqi military.

Incensed fans walked out of Pearl Jam's concert Tuesday after lead singer Eddie Vedder impaled a mask of President Bush on a microphone stand, then slammed it to the stage. Most of Vedder's antiwar remarks earlier in the Pepsi Center show were greeted with mixed cheers and scattered boos. But dozens of angry fans walked out during the encore because of the macabre display with the Bush mask, which he wore for the song Bushleaguer, a Bush- taunting song from the band's latest album, Riot Act. "When he was sharing his political views in a fairly benign manner - supporting...

<p>LONDON, April 2 (UPI) -- A Muslim fundamentalist source claimed Wednesday that Osama bin Laden's al- Qaida network captured five coalition troops in Iraq.</p> <p>The source who requested anonymity told United Press International by telephone that the kidnapping of four U.S. troops and a British soldier, took place last Saturday in al- Zubair region of southern Iraq, close to the Kuwaiti border.</p>

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A day after the Pentagon demanded he leave the war zone in Iraq for divulging U.S. troop positions in a broadcast, maverick television reporter Geraldo Rivera has "volunteered" to leave the country, the Fox News Channel said on Tuesday. Rivera, who was traveling with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, ran afoul of military commanders with a live report on Sunday in which he sketched a map in the sand to show viewers his relative location in Iraq and where troops might advance next. Pentagon officials said Monday that Rivera's report "compromised operational security" of the...

Dismissing reports that he's been ejected from Iraq for revealing tactical information about the 101st Airborne Division, reporter Geraldo Rivera said he plans to ride with U.S. troops into Baghdad. Rivera, of Fox News Channel, revealed tactical information and at one point told about an attack two hours before it took place, according to sources at the U.S. Central Command who asked not to be identified. Fox's rivals, CNN and MSNBC, both reported Monday that Rivera had been kicked out of the country. "During a live broadcast, Geraldo drew a map in the sand of where that unit was going....

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two of U.S. television's most controversial war correspondents found themselves in hot water on Monday over their reporting in Iraq, as NBC fired Peter Arnett and the Pentagon pressed Fox News Channel to pull out Geraldo Rivera. Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize winner during the Vietnam War who gained fame in 1991 as CNN's man in Baghdad, found himself out of work and under a cloud after he appeared on Iraqi TV and said the U.S. war plan against Saddam Hussein had failed. But the veteran newsman did not remain jobless for long. Britain's Daily Mirror said...