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WISCASSET, Maine (AP) - The most visible symbol of Maine's nuclear power past - the massive domed containment building at the defunct Maine Yankee plant - will be eliminated from the landscape with a big boom this week. Explosives will bring down the reinforced concrete structure Friday, the first time explosives have been used to knock down a commercial reactor containment building, said Justin Manafort, of Manafort Bros, which is overseeing the decommissioning. "Other reactors have been taken down but none of this size or magnitude. The majority are done conventionally with cranes and torch cutting. We chose to use...

The founder and president of the Media Research Center believes the ongoing liberal bias at major news organizations will cause their imminent collapse. L. Brent Bozell's new book is called Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media (Crown Forum, 2004). According to the author, that process of destruction has actually already started. He says a look at current trends reveals people's growing awareness of the liberal media's left wing bias, and "the public isn't liking it and is leaving." The change over time has been dramatic. "Fifteen years ago you had about 20 percent of the...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Kentucky's largest church plans to focus on religious tolerance at upcoming services after several of its teenagers destroyed a Virgin Mary statue at an Indiana home. Southeast Christian Church has disciplined a 24-year-old employee who supervised the campers at Country Lake Christian Retreat Center in Clark County, Ind., said spokeswoman Cindee Coffee. She did not identify the worker, who she described as "embarrassed and remorseful." ... Senior pastor Bob Russell planned to address the incident at weekend services and future staff meetings. After a Bible lesson on worshipping idols, the teens went to Barthold's neighboring wooded...

BRASILIA, Brazil - Brazil's army burned all documents about the suppression of a 1970s insurgency against the military dictatorship, the government said Wednesday, angering activists who had hoped that the papers would help them find the remains of missing rebels. The revelation also effectively ruins activists' hopes of properly documenting the guerrilla movement, which was inspired by Fidel Castro (news - web sites)'s Cuban uprising. While insurgencies in other Latin American countries including Bolivia and Peru have been well traced, little is known about Brazil's Araguaia guerrillas. It will also likely make any related prosecutions linked to the disappearances more...

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) - Last month's wildfires burned more acreage and damaged more buildings than any others in California history, state officials said.</p> <p>New statistics from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection show that the Cedar Fire in San Diego County scorched about 273,000 acres, eclipsing a record set in 1932 by the Matilija Fire in Ventura County, which burned about 220,000 acres.</p>

Sold for a Mere Pittance Works of art worth tens of millions of pounds today have been sold off quietly by museums over the past 50 years for a few pounds. British art institutions such as the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Exeter City Museum have disposed of pictures by masters such as Van Dyck and Henri Fantin-Latour. They were sold without public notice, dismissed as too unimportant to keep. Among the most serious cases is a painting by the 19th-century master, John William Waterhouse. In 1965, the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro sold it for £200 ($300) to...

Drought that destroyed a civilisation MARTIN WILLIAMS November 11 2003 IT is one of history's biggest mysteries and has confounded experts for hundreds of years. But a team of scientists believe they have discovered why the world's first great civilisation, established in Egypt nearly 5000 years ago, crumbled and plunged into a dark age that lasted for more than 1000 years. The researchers, including one academic from St Andrews University, have produced new evidence linking the demise of the Egyptian Old Kingdom with decades of drought after a study of layers of sediment at the source of the Blue Nile...

The Battleground Who Destroyed Megiddo? Was It David or Shishak? Timothy P. Harrison Sidebar: Megiddo at A Glance Did King David conquer and destroy Megiddo? Well, that depends partly on the date of Stratum VI. Let me explain why. Most scholars accept David as a historical figure who was an active military ruler in the period portrayed in the Hebrew Bible (the early tenth century B.C.E.). However, there is considerably less agreement on how to interpret the archaeological evidence for this period. That’s where Megiddo Stratum VI figures in. The dispute is over which archaeological material relates to the time...

The Russian Orthodox Church destroyed a chapel after local churchmen declared it defiled because it hosted a "marriage" ceremony for two men. The Rev. Vladimir Enert was defrocked for conducting the service for Denis Gogolyev and Mikhail Morozev at the Chapel of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, 280 miles east of Moscow, the London Telegraph reported. The men said they paid Enert a $500 bribe to ignore the church's ban on same-sex marriages. The Telegraph said a spokesman for the Orthodox Church indicated the chapel had to be demolished because it...

Project to restore wetlands destroyed by Saddam begins By Terri Judd 10 October 2003 A project has begun to reverse one of the greatest humanitarian and ecological disasters of recent times, the draining of the wetlands that were home to Iraq's 250,000 Marsh Arabs. Saddam drained the wetlands after the Marsh Arabs, whose world of reed houses, water buffalo and canoes captivated the writer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, supported the Shia revolt in the early Nineties. Some experts believe it may not be possible to recreate a way of life which had existed for 5,000 years in the largest wetlands in...

The Russian Orthodox Church has demolished a chapel where a priest conducted a marriage ceremony between two men. The Chapel of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God was apparently knocked down after local churchmen decided it had been defiled. The "marriage" of Denis Gogolyev and Mikhail Morozev in Nizhny Novgorod scandalised the Orthodox Church and created outrage among ordinary Russians. The priest, Fr Vladimir Enert, was unfrocked after the men said they paid him a £300 bribe to ignore a ban on same-sex marriages. A spokesman for the Orthodox Church said the chapel had to go as it...

<p>MOSCOW &#8212; The Russian Orthodox Church has demolished a chapel where a priest conducted a "marriage" ceremony between two men.</p> <p>The Chapel of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God was torn down apparently after local churchmen decided it had been defiled.</p>

No Details yet, but it appears to be a heavy raid in response to continued mortar shelling by Hezbollah.

They call them "lessons learned" reports in the Pentagon, and few are getting as much attention as the review of the Army's lumbering M1-A1 Abrams tank's performance in Iraq. Revered by soldiers as the world's best, the report found that lone Iraqis armed with simple rocket-propelled grenades halted a few Abramses in their tracks. Just like those Battle of the Bulge scenes of GIs firing at the bellies of Nazi tanks, a rocket aimed at the armored skirts on the side and back of the Abrams would occasionally disable the tank. That's led some to question the plan to replace...

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Five men stood in a circle outside police headquarters here yesterday, somberly comparing notes on the day's devastation.</p> <p>"Any dead?" Daniel Joseph asked.</p> <p>"Two guards were killed," Albert Paul Younan replied.</p> <p>"I lost three," Joseph said.</p> <p>"What about the factory?" another man asked.</p>

The United States declared Saddams Baath party dead late Sunday, with the war's commander telling Iraqis that the instrument of theior deposed dictator's power was dissolved and promising to purge its influence from the country it dominated for 35 years.General Tommy Franks message delivered in Arabic by an announcer on the coalitions information radio, broadcast a clear message over the AM radio waves across postwar Iraq:Any activity by Baath Party holdouts who opposed United States occupation would not be tolerated.'The Arab Baath Socialist Party is dissolved,' Franks said, but high difficulites remain in eliminating it.American Administrators are struggling to balance...

Al-Qaeda 'crushed' by the US war on terror AL-QAEDA’S failure to launch any major attacks during the Iraq war is adding to a mood of cautious confidence that the organisation’s back has been broken. "They have suffered a number of absolutely crushing blows," said Nick Fielding, a journalist and the co-author of Masterminds of Terror, published this month by the Edinburgh-based Mainstream Publishing . In US intelligence circles, the belief is growing that al-Qaeda is "nearly crippled", the Washington Post newspaper reported. Cofer Black, the head of the state department’s counter-terrorism office, told the newspaper it was "no coincidence" al-Qaeda...

US official says Iraqi scientists helping on arms By Carol Giacomo WASHINGTON, April 30 (Reuters) - Captured Iraqi scientists have started cooperating with the United States, giving U.S. officials renewed confidence that there are unconventional weapons in Iraq and they will be found, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said on Wednesday. "The people we have found are already leading us to other people as well as to computer files and to documents," he told the National Defense University, an elite school for America's military officers. "With these sources of information, we can say with a high degree of confidence...

The White House said yesterday that Saddam Hussein may have ordered the destruction of some chemical and biological weapons on the eve of the war and suggested that the swift military invasion could have prevented the Iraqi dictator from using what remained of his arsenal. A day after President Bush said U.S. air strikes early in the war may have killed or severely wounded Saddam, preventing him from using mass destruction weapons or effectively commanding his troops, his spokesman yesterday said there is evidence some weapons may have been destroyed. "The president says that we have evidence now that we...