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The body of a missing US woman has been found by her family, wedged upside down behind a bookcase in her room.

Mariesa Weber, 38, is believed to have fallen over and become trapped as she tried to reach behind the bookcase to adjust the plug for a TV set.

Her family spent nearly two weeks searching for her, fearing she had been kidnapped from the house she shared with them in Florida.

I guess buying at IKEA has its advantages..

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A handful of women breastfed their babies in a lounge area at Bradley International Airport this morning as part of a national protest against Delta Air Lines, which ejected a woman from her flight for breastfeeding her baby last month.

At least five women settled in a seating area across from the Delta Air Lines check-in counter at the airport this morning and quietly nursed their babies. Airport officials said they received notice of the planned protest Monday night.

Airport officials did not approach the women as they protested, since they were “very low-key,” Acting Airport Administrator Barry Pallanck said.

Tuesday’s “nurse-in” was one of dozens planned at airports across the country, including New York, Nashville, Tenn., and Las Vegas, after Emily Gillette, 27, was kicked off a Freedom Airlines flight at Burlington International Airport in Vermont. Freedom Airlines operates the commuter flight to New York for Delta.

In a complaint she filed against Delta Air Lines, Gillette said she was breast-feeding her 1-year-old daughter, River, when a flight attendant tried to hand her a blanket and told her to cover up. When Gillette balked, she said, she and her husband were ordered off the plane before takeoff.

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What if Leonardo DaVinci worked for an ad agency? We would have Mona Lisa in advertisements for Head and Shoulders shampoo. Imagine the possibilities.

And that’s exactly what people did – here are two great examples:

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Since Bahrain’s government blocked the Google Earth website earlier this year for its intrusion into private homes and royal palaces, Googling their island kingdom has become a national pastime for many Bahrainis.

The site allows internet users to view satellite images of the world in varying degrees of detail. When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land distribution in the tiny Gulf kingdom.

A senior government official told the Financial Times that Google Earth had allowed the public to pry into private homes and ogle people’s motor yachts and swimming pools. But he acknowledged that the government’s three-day attempt to block the site had proved counterproductive.

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Mahmood al-Yousif, a businessman whose political chat and blog site Mahmood’s Den is among Bahrain’s most popular, says that in the tense run-up to the polls, few Bahrainis have not surfed over the contours of their kingdom, comparing vast royal palaces, marinas and golf courses with crowded Shia villages nearby, where unemployment is rife and services meagre.

For those with insufficient bandwidth to access Google Earth, a PDF file with dozens of downloaded images of royal estates has been circulated anonymously by e-mail. Mr Yousif, among others, initially encouraged web users to post images on photo-sharing websites.

“Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages nearby and block access to the sea for fishermen. People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were the surrounding walls,�? said Mr Yousif, who is seen in Bahrain as the grandfather of its blogging community.

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Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii are the best of friends in the Senate, so close they call each other brother. Both are decorated veterans of World War II. They have worked together for nearly four decades as senators from the two youngest and farthest-flung states. And they share an almost unrivaled appetite for what some call political pork.

Mr. Stevens, an 83-year-old Republican, and Mr. Inouye, an 82-year-old Democrat, routinely deliver to their states more money per capita in earmarks — the pet projects lawmakers insert into major spending bills — than any other state gets. This year, Alaska received $1.05 billion in earmarks, or $1,677.27 per resident, while Hawaii got $903.9 million, or $746.05 per resident, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that tracks such figures.

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Hours before he was to be married, a man leaving his bachelor party at a strip club in Queens that was under police surveillance was shot and killed early yesterday in a hail of police bullets, witnesses and the police said. Two of his friends were wounded, one critically, they said.

Many details of the shooting were not immediately clear, but relatives of the dead man, Sean Bell, 23, and community leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, demanded an investigation into what some called an overreaction by officers that killed a man on his wedding day.

Witnesses told of chaos, screams and a barrage of gunfire near Club Kalua at 143-08 94th Avenue in Jamaica about 4:15 a.m. after Mr. Bell and his friends walked out and got into their car. Mr. Bell drove the car half a block, turned a corner and struck a black unmarked police minivan bearing several plainclothes officers.

Mr. Bell’s car then backed up onto a sidewalk, hit a storefront’s rolled-down protective gate and nearly struck an undercover officer before shooting forward and slamming into the police van again, the police said.

In response, five police officers fired at least 50 rounds at the men’s car, a silver Nissan Altima; the bullets ripped into other cars and slammed through an apartment window near the shooting scene on Liverpool Street near 94th Avenue.

In a normal country, the police exists to protect and help the people. In the US it’s different:
Driving while drunk: bad!
Driving while black: bad!
Driving while drunk and black: lethal!

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The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit�? Iraqi officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year.

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Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison’s former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain’s El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

“The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: “Make sure this is accomplished”,” she told Saturday’s El Pais.

Somebody should tell Rummy that a Medal of Freedom, or a presidential pardon, don’t offer protection from the ICC.

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Many people on the run-down northwest Atlanta street where Kathryn Johnston lived fortify their windows with metal bars and arm themselves for protection.

Johnston, 92, was no exception.

Alone in her home, she was waiting with her gun on Tuesday night when a group of plainclothes officers with a warrant knocked down her door in a search for drugs, police said.

She opened fire, wounding three officers, before being shot to death, police said.

Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher called the killing “tragic and unfortunate” but said the officers were justified in returning fire.

“You don’t know who’s in the house until you open that door,” Dreher said Wednesday. “And once they forced open the door, they were immediately fired upon.”

The Rev. Markel Hutchins, a civil rights activist and spokesman for Johnston’s family, said he could understand why the elderly woman would arm herself.

“She was afraid,” Hutchins said. “This is a horrifying situation in a neighborhood where crime happens often. This incident is a result of a mix-up.”

By far the friendliest sentence in this product review:

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Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.