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CORAL SPRINGS · A burly exotic guard dog, one of several that frightened residents of an upscale neighborhood in recent days, ferociously mauled and killed its owner Friday afternoon, apparently in sight of the woman's young daughter. Police said they found the dog, a Presa Canario named Zino, in the backyard of a home in the 9000 block of the Northwest 39th Court in The Hills neighborhood. It was standing over the body of the mother of two.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi forces strike the Baghdad base of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — but his gunmen hold their fire. U.S. soldiers kill 15 of al-Sadr's followers, drawing little more than a few perfunctory complaints. That's a dramatic departure in style for the youthful firebrand, who launched two major uprisings against the American-led coalition two years ago when U.S. authorities closed his newspaper and pushed an Iraqi judge into issuing an arrest warrant against him. If anything, al-Sadr is more powerful today than he was then. But that power is also a restraint: al-Sadr has more...

Biotech company executives in the Bay Area met Tuesday to begin working with California's sputtering stem-cell research institute, which was jump-started last week by the $150 million boost it got from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. ``I feel we are at a very important point in history here,'' said Michael West, chairman and chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology of Alameda. He added that it was essential ``do do everything we possibly can to see that money is well spent.'' Still, the executives who met in San Francisco with officials at the stem-cell institute, created in 2004 when California voters passed...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2, 2006 – Some Beltway pundits have opined that U.S. force levels in Iraq could fall to 100,000 by the end of this year, but the Defense Department's top official said he won't play the speculation game. The Iraqi security forces, now at about 227,000 soldiers and police, are "doing a good job," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told attendees at the National Press Club here today. "They're increasingly experienced. They're increasingly well-equipped," Rumsfeld said, noting U.S. military members are embedded in Iraqi units to provide mentoring, if needed. "We have near instantaneous visibility into what their weaknesses...

Kerry cautious on probing `Downing Street Memo' By Noelle Straub Monday, June 20, 2005 - Updated: 10:36 AM EST WASHINGTON - Walking a tightrope on a politically charged issue, Sen. John F. Kerry vowed weeks ago to raise the controversial ``Downing Street Memo'' as an issue in Washington, but has since publicly held his tongue on the matter. Instead, Kerry has been enlisting other senators to sign onto a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking answers about the memo, aides said. The memo contained minutes of a 2002 meeting in which British officials told Prime Minister Tony Blair they...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials voiced cautious support for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday, saying they did not know where an inquiry into the U.N. oil-for-food program may lead or whether Annan would survive it. The independent probe led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker on Tuesday cleared Annan of interfering in the award of a contract under the scandal-plagued oil-for-food program in Iraq to a firm that employed his son. However, the investigation faulted Annan for not having investigated possible conflicts of interest properly. "Secretary-General Annan and the United States share a common commitment to working...

McALLEN, Texas - The wife of presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) told a receptive audience in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas that Kerry would seek out all other options before going to war. "John will never send a boy or girl in a uniform anywhere in the world because of our need and greed for oil," Teresa Heinz Kerry told about 1,200 supporters at the McAllen Civic Center. She said her husband, as president, would be able to approach the families of slain soldiers and say, "'I did everything I could to prevent this, I'm sorry.'...

<p>In a departure from legislative Democrats' longtime insistence that the state must raise taxes to ease its budget woes, the Assembly's new Democratic leader said Thursday that his agenda does not include tax hikes.</p> <p>The message from voters in the fall recall election, he said, has prompted him and others to rethink their rigidity on the issue.</p>