BAD AROLSEN, Germany - World War II is near its end. The Nazi empire is crumbling from its edges inward as Soviet and Allied forces advance. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, and political enemies of the Third Reich already have been systematically exterminated. Hundreds of thousands are still in death camps praying for rescue.

Then, in one final sadistic spasm, the Germans set out to empty camps about to be liberated, and move their inmates to the German heartland.

The final nightmare - death marches - is about to begin.

"A handover is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive," says a handwritten note on plain paper, apparently referring to Dachau. It is signed by Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and dated April 14, 1945.

After the war a copy of Himmler's extraordinary order was delivered from the Dachau concentration camp archive to the International Tracing Service, or ITS, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross which manages a vast repository of wartime and postwar German records in the small resort town of Bad Arolsen.

Now this storehouse of Nazi papers, sealed from public view for 60 years, is the focus of intense diplomacy among the 11 nations governing the Tracing Service as they meet this week in The Hague to discuss how to open them up to researchers. The Associated Press has been given access to the files on condition that victims are not fully identified.

While much has been written about the death marches, the Bad Arolsen collection allows a unique picture to emerge: a weakened, confused SS; a mass of prisoners marching or packed into trains, moving for up to three days at a time on no more than a piece of stale bread; shocked villagers witnessing - perhaps for the first time - their rulers' inhumanity.

Across the Polish, Czech and German landscape, dozens of columns of emaciated men and women in striped prison garb straggled through towns and villages. Dogs snapped at their heels, and SS guards shot or beat to death those who couldn't keep up.

Among the rarely seen papers are hundreds of questionnaires to mayors of German towns asking whether marchers passed through their precincts and how many prisoners died there. Also in the files are statements by survivors and onlookers, their accounts searingly fresh.

"A prisoner stuck out a cup and begged with his eyes for water," said one woman in a statement filed in the archive. When she brought him a drink, "a guard took it from me and threw it in my face. … I went on my way because I could no longer watch what was happening."

Stored in six buildings in Bad Arolsen are some 17.5 million names of individuals who were caught up in the machinery of persecution, forced labor, displacement and death. Last year the governing states agreed to allow researchers for the first time to comb through the 30 million to 50 million pages, so far used mainly to track missing persons, reunite families and substantiate compensation claims. But that decision must go through a lengthy ratification process - frustrating aging Holocaust survivors seeking to know more of their own histories.

The death march documents, bound with string and kept in nondescript cardboard filers, illustrate the kind of raw material waiting to be refined into historical narratives. Besides originals, the archive has assembled duplicated records from museums and municipal libraries scattered across Europe and from the U.S. national archive.

Himmler's April 14 order to abandon Dachau came three days after Buchenwald - one of the largest camps - was liberated by U.S. forces. Prisoners had broken into houses in the nearby town of Weimar. "The prisoners have behaved horribly to the civilian population of Buchenwald," said Himmler's document.

A week earlier, a telegram marked "urgent" from Richard Glucks, chief of the SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, ordered 20,000 prisoners transferred from Buchenwald to Dachau and Flossenburg, noting the other camps already were "overcrowded." The bottom margin and the back are scribbled with figures - apparently a Gestapo officer trying to do the math of the logistics.

By the time Dachau was ordered evacuated, however, most routes were blocked, and only about 7,000 prisoners departed, leaving more than 30,000 in the camp when it fell April 29.

Death marches - a term used by concentration camp inmates and picked up by Holocaust historians - were known as early as 1941 when hundreds of thousands of captured Soviet soldiers were moved from camp to camp.

In the winter of 1944-45, the Nazis began emptying the concentration camps and destroying their records, partly to cover up their crimes, said Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who will soon publish the results of nine years of research on the death marches.

Still hoping to fend off total defeat or to negotiate a deal with the Allies, the Nazis also wanted to preserve a pool of slave labor and to keep the prisoners off the streets. "It was ideological. These prisoners were considered subhuman and not fit for integrating into society," Blatman said in a telephone interview.

In one of the largest evacuations, an estimated 60,000 prisoners were herded in groups, several thousand at a time, from the Auschwitz extermination camp in January.

The Arolsen archive has three volumes of tables and maps retracing the routes of 74 marches, recording the distances between each village. They laconically note the bombardment of prisoners or the bombing of transport trains, without mentioning whether by German or Allied troops.

One chart follows the departure of 3,000 prisoners - Jews from Hungary, France, Poland and Germany - from Birkenau on Jan. 18, 1945. They trekked by foot and train 310 miles through 20 named towns to Geppersdorf in what is now the Czech Republic. At Mikolai, 35 miles from Birkenau, 300-400 prisoners were "probably killed," the chart records, without specifying how. By the time the column reached Ratibor Jan. 21, their numbers had been whittled down by half.

Nearly three months later, only 280 of the 3,000 prisoners reached their destination.

Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, which has 1950s microfilms of some Bad Arolsen documents on death marches, estimates 200,000 to 250,000 prisoners were murdered or died of starvation, exposure and disease on the forced marches during the last 10 months, which continued until the day the Germans surrendered May 8.

From Arolsen's files, an event can take shape from the accounts of different narrators.

In the village of Gauting, Lisl Oppermann, 35, witnessed one march of Dachau prisoners. Townspeople wanted to help two prisoners lying in the street, she said, but SS guards threatened to shoot them if they tried.

"On the next corner a prisoner was being kicked," she told Allied investigators seven months later. "One guard was particularly cruel. I would recognize him immediately. He was tall, slim, a real SS type. He had a brutal look on his face." An SS officer on a motorcycle vowed to kill his own men if any prisoner received food or drink from the townspeople, she said.

Allied authorities distributed hundreds of 16-point questionnaires to the mayors of towns near the camps, trying to pick up the trail of what happened. Among questionnaires reviewed by AP, most mayors claimed to have seen nothing.

The mayor of Wolfratshausen, near Gauting, reported two groups from Dachau passed through his town by foot and rail April 27-28. Seven bodies were unloaded from the train and buried in the town cemetery, but they had no identification papers, said the unidentified official who signed the questionnaire only with his stamp of office.

In the same file is a crude death certificate written in red pencil on lined notebook paper, recording that Otto S., Dachau prisoner No. 146529, had died in the town May 22. The cause of death was not mentioned.

Rupert S. a political prisoner from Wattens, Austria, was on one forced march that passed through Gauting and Wolfratshausen that originated in Allach, a subcamp of Dachau on the edge of greater Munich, where BMW employed slave labor to make cars.

"Many of the sick were left by the wayside. They were executed with a shot to the back of the head or killed with a rifle butt," said the Austrian prisoner, in a three-page, single-spaced, typed account given two weeks after he was liberated in May.

Prisoners fought among themselves for scant rations, he said. Whenever they stopped, they built crude shelters of tree branches against the constant rain and snow.

"Many died. They were all thrown together in heaps," he recounted.

After a night in which the guards grew more brutal, "we realized in the morning we were to be liquidated. Suddenly, the order came to keep marching. Later we learned that a certain Hauptmann (captain) had saved us from certain death … Capt. Longin had threatened to shoot any SS guard who killed a prisoner."

Then one night, the SS "disappeared. About 3 a.m. I heard a loud noise and the cry went up. The Americans are coming."

As for Himmler, British forces arrested him on May 22 in north Germany, and he killed himself the next day by swallowing cyanide.

- AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this article from Jerusalem.

On the Net:

International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org/

Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org/

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org

Documents reveal romance between astronauts, steamy e-mail sent to space

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - Astronaut Bill Oefelein was in orbit aboard the space shuttle in December when he was sent a steamy e-mail from a girlfriend awaiting his return: "First urge will be to rip your clothes off, throw you on the ground and love the hell out of you."

Fellow astronaut Lisa Nowak apparently discovered that e-mail - and some other romantic messages to Oefelein - before she set off on her bizarre, 900-mile road-trip to confront her rival for Oefelein's affections.

The e-mail was among several hundred pages of documents released this week by prosecutors in the case against Nowak, who is charged with trying to kidnap the e-mail's author, Colleen Shipman.

The e-mails, along with statements taken from Oefelein and Shipman, confirm publicly for the first time that Oefelein had a romantic relationship with Nowak. It lasted two or three years before he broke it off to date Shipman late last year.

Oefelein said he considered Nowak to be one of his best friends at NASA.

"We had a relationship but, you know, never really said the word `girlfriend,"' Oefelein told investigators. "We were somewhat exclusive. Nobody prohibited anything, but I would consider her exclusive for a period of time."

Oefelein met Shipman while training in Florida several weeks before his December launch aboard shuttle Discovery. The e-mailed each other regularly, including while he was in space, though Oefelein opened the e-mail expressing Shipman's desire to rip his clothes off only after he had returned to Earth in December.

In another e-mail sent in January, Shipman wrote Oefelein at his NASA e-mail address: "I love you and I am head-over-heals IN love with you." Oefelein responded the next day from his office e-mail: "You must really have me around your finger that I can't even function without you here."

Before every shuttle flight, astronauts give NASA a list of friends and family members who are allowed to send them e-mail during a mission. NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said the agency does not monitor the communications between astronauts in space and their friends and families.

"The whole system is set up to ensure as much privacy as possible," Hartsfield said. "No review. No censorship. No anything."

Detective said they found the romantic e-mails between Oefelein and Shipman in Nowak's possession when she was arrested Feb. 5 in Orlando.

Oefelein and Shipman told investigators they believe the e-mails were taken from a home computer in his apartment. Nowak had a key to the apartment.

Police say Nowak, a mother of three, drove from Houston to the Orlando airport, wearing an astronaut diaper so that she would not have to stop. She donned a wig, confronted Shipman in her car, and pepper-sprayed her through a partially lowered window. In Nowak's car were a BB gun, new steel mallet, a knife and rubber tubing.

Nowak, 43, has pleaded not guilty to attempted kidnapping and burglary with assault. She was released on bail with an ankle monitoring device. Her lawyer had no comment Tuesday on the documents.

The documents include an undated letter to Oefelein's mother in which Nowak wrote that she was taking steps to divorce her husband so she could be with Oefelein.

"Bill is absolutely the best person I've ever known and I love him more than I knew possible," Nowak wrote. Nowak thanked Oefelein's mother for supporting her relationship with Oefelein, "especially since my parents are not as supportive right now."

Oefelein told investigators that when he broke off his romantic relationship with Nowak in January, she "seemed a little disappointed, but she seemed to be accepting of that."

Oefelein and Nowak still agreed to be gym partners and train for a bicycle race together, he said. Nowak still called Oefelein daily and left friendly messages, he said, but "I wasn't always receptive to the phone call."

The lingering feelings between Oefelein and Nowak worried Shipman. Shipman said she asked Oefelein "point-blank" if his romantic relationship with Nowak was over.

"Because you know how these things go," Shipman told detectives. "I said, 'Is there gonna be some crazy lady showing up at my door, trying to kill me?' He said, `No … she's not like that. She's fine with it. She's happy for me."'

Police: Pilot intentionally crashed into former in-law's house, killing himself, daughter

BEDFORD, Ind. (AP) - "I've got her, and you're not going to get her." Beth Johnson heard those words from her ex-husband Monday, shortly before he crashed his rented single-engine plane into his former mother-in-law's southern Indiana home, killing himself and the couple's 8-year-old daughter.

The mother-in-law, Vivian Pace, described the cell phone call Tuesday as investigators tried to determine why novice pilot Eric Johnson strapped his daughter into the plane's passenger seat and apparently crashed the plane deliberately into the one-story house.

Pace said she has no doubt that the crash was intentional because Johnson had been harassing his ex-wife for months, including buying a house three doors down from hers.

"That was the only way he could hurt Beth," she said. "That was the only way he could get to her."

In the cell phone call, Pace said, her daughter could hear the child in the background saying, "Mommy, come get me, come get me." It was unclear whether the call was made from the cockpit or before the plane took off.

Police were treating the crash as a suicide and homicide. State Police Sgt. Dave Bursten said investigators had yet to find any notes indicating Johnson's intentions, but the fact that the house was his ex-wife's mother's home raised serious questions.

"All of those things together lead us in the direction that this was done intentionally," Bursten said.

Andrew Todd Fox of the National Transportation Safety Board said investigators were also reviewing whether the plane was functioning properly and hoped to have a preliminary report within a week.

Virgil I. Grissom Municipal Airport has no controller on duty, so there was no tape available of any radio communication, Fox said.

He declined to say if Johnson, 47, said anything over the plane's radio before the plane crashed into Pace's home around 10:45 a.m. Monday in Bedford, nearly 70 miles southwest of Indianapolis. Pace was home but uninjured.

The plane had already crashed but the occupants had not been identified when Beth Johnson filed a missing person report because her daughter had not arrived at school that morning after spending the weekend with her father.

"It is just gut-wrenching to think about what was happening to that child just prior to the crash," Bursten said Monday.

Witnesses said the aircraft appeared to be trying to land when it veered sharply and went out of sight.

Eric Johnson, a property manager for the state Department of Natural Resources, had recently taken the girl to Cancun for a few days of vacation.

Emily "was to spend the weekend with dad, and dad was supposed to bring her to school Monday morning," Bedford Police Maj. Dennis Parsley said.

Johnson obtained his pilot's license in November, the same month the couple divorced after 12 years of marriage.

Court records showed Beth Johnson had obtained a restraining order against her husband on July 14, 2006, but police would not disclose the reasons.

Pace said Johnson threatened his wife with a gun last summer in an effort to change her mind about the divorce. Bedford police said they never received a complaint about the alleged incident.

Mary Webb, who lived across from the Johnsons for about 12 years, said police cars were parked outside the home for several weeks last summer. Eric Johnson told her they were there to protect his wife and daughter.

"He said, 'I wouldn't hurt her, I wouldn't do that,' and I took his word for it," Webb said. "He didn't seem like that type of person at all."

Webb said Johnson moved out in the fall under police supervision and was "very bitter about the divorce." He wanted custody of Emily but said he would settle for visitation rights, she said.

Police searched Johnson's home, seizing two computers, a briefcase and day planner. There were no notes indicating what his plans had been, Parsley said.

Coroner John Sherrill said results of toxicology tests on Johnson were pending.

A man who identified himself as Eric Johnson's brother declined to comment when reached in Iowa.

Johnson had worked for the state for 20 years and managed more than 18,000 acres of forest, said Mark Farmer, a conservation and public information officer.

"By all accounts, he was a good employee, generally well-liked," Farmer said.

Counselors were available at Parkview Primary School in Bedford, where Emily was a first-grader.

"We're all grieving over this," Principal Sari Wood said. She described Emily as a "dear little girl" who "got a kick out of things and enjoyed life."

"She just was one of those really friendly, really open little kids," Wood said.

Associated Press Writer Tom Murphy in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

Police: Michigan man confesses to killing and dismembering wife he had reported missing

MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. (AP) - Shortly after reporting his wife missing last month, Stephen Grant went before TV cameras, crying, begging her to come home.

But authorities were suspicious.

"We thought it was a confession waiting to happen right then," Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith said Monday without elaborating.

Police said the alleged confession finally came Monday, more than three weeks after Tara Grant last was seen alive.

Stephen Grant, 37, was arraigned Tuesday on charges of first-degree murder and dismemberment of a body, and Judge Denis LeDuc entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. Authorities, however, say Grant told them after his arrest early Sunday that he killed his wife in the couple's home and later dismembered her.

Grant had no attorney at the arraignment. David Griem, who acted as his spokesman, said Sunday he no longer would represent Grant because of irreconcilable differences.

The judge said he would appoint a lawyer for Grant. He also ordered him held without bail.

"Given the extreme, extreme seriousness of the charges, the nature of the allegations here, the nature of the alleged flight, the court agrees with the people. I'm going to order you held without bond. Do you understand that?" the judge said.

"Yes, your honor," Grant replied.

Grant was arrested after investigators tracked him to a park at the tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. He was treated for hypothermia before he was returned Monday to Macomb County outside Detroit to face charges.

Sheriff Mark Hackel said Monday that Grant "gave a very lengthy confession, laying out exactly what took place."

But he didn't offer a motive, said Smith, the prosecutor.

"Evil rarely explains itself," the prosecutor said. "To us, it's not an element we have to prove."

Autopsy results suggest Tara Grant was strangled on Feb. 9, said Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz. That was the date she was last seen alive after returning from a business trip to Puerto Rico. Police have said the couple had recently argued over her frequent trips.

Grant waited five days before reporting his wife missing. Investigators found her torso Friday in the garage of the couple's home in suburban Detroit. Other body parts turned up in a nearby park.

The remains showed signs of a struggle, including neck bruises, according to Spitz. It was unclear when the body was dismembered.

Smith said investigators believe that the couple's two children - a 6-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy - were asleep in the home and didn't witness the slaying.

A child custody hearing for the children was scheduled for later Tuesday, and Smith said his office planned to petition the family court to terminate Grant's parental rights.

Smith said the Michigan Department of Human Services recommends the children live with Tara Grant's sister, Alicia Standerfer, and her husband in Chillicothe, Ohio.

Stephen Grant's sister, Kelly Utykanski, of Sterling Heights, and her husband also were seeking temporary custody. Utykanski said she gave police the information to help find her brother in northern Michigan.

"I'm not here to give my brother a big hug," she said. "I want him to get his punishment. I just want to make sure he has his (legal) representation and that I'm allowed to visit him."

Grant told investigators after his arrest that he initially put his wife's torso in the park but retrieved it before police searched there Feb. 24, according to Hackel. He was "nervous" after learning of the impending search, the sheriff said.

Smith said a neighbor found a plastic bag containing latex gloves, metal shavings and human blood in the woods near the Grants' house. The discovery enabled police to obtain a warrant to search the home and a tool-and-die shop where Grant worked. Smith said the body was dismembered at the shop.

Grant, who had insisted he was innocent, fled in a friend's pickup truck after police obtained the search warrant Friday. Officers traced calls from his cell phone to Wilderness State Park about 225 miles north on Lake Michigan, where he was found early Sunday hiding under a fallen tree, wearing only a shirt, socks and pants in 14-degree weather.

Associated Press writers John Flesher in Petoskey and Sven Gustafson in Mount Clemens contributed to this report.

Subzero wind chills keep kids home in New York state, blowing snow blamed in deadly crashes

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) - Fierce wind and biting cold kept youngsters home from school Tuesday in upstate New York and authorities warned against perilous driving conditions already blamed for at least five deaths.

The National Weather Service posted a wind chill advisory for northern New York and Vermont, saying the temperature and wind could make it feel like 35 degrees below zero into Tuesday afternoon.

In those conditions, exposed skin can be frostbitten within 15 minutes or less, the weather service warned.

"It's the wind. It's so cold it hurts. You see the sun shining and it doesn't look like a bad day but then as you're walking you get hit with this blast and you can't breathe," said Ben Nestor, 17, who was huddled with four friends waiting for a bus in downtown Syracuse.

"We came downtown to eat lunch. I wished we had stayed home. My legs are frozen," he said.

By late morning, the temperature at the northern New York city of Massena was 11 below zero and the wind chill was 34 below, the weather service said. Burlington, Vt., had a temperature of 5 below and a wind chill down to minus 32.

In New Hampshire, National Weather Service meteorologist Bob Marine said nearly all the state would have near-record cold temperatures on Tuesday. At the summit of Mount Washington, where temperatures bottomed out at 37 degrees below zero Tuesday morning, weather observers were throwing pots of boiling water in the air to make snow.

"When it's this cold, it immediately freezes into a cloud of snow," observer Jim Salge said.

Schools canceled classes across New York state from Buffalo to Utica, including Rochester and Syracuse, and other districts delayed the start of classes.

For some areas, it was the second day of hazardous driving conditions caused by blowing snow. On Monday, sections of Interstate 490 in Rochester and Interstate 81 along the eastern edge of Lake Ontario were closed because of accidents blamed on whiteout conditions. Some roads in central New York remain closed Tuesday morning.

Officials in Seneca County, in the Finger Lakes region, issued an emergency declaration and prohibited unnecessary travel.

Crashes Monday killed a 17-year-old driver from Chittenango, a 47-year-old man from Amboy whose vehicle hit a jackknifed tractor-trailer, and two people involved in eight-vehicle accident on the New York State Thruway near Canajoharie. Another woman who stopped in a whiteout and got out of her parked car Monday was killed by a tractor-trailer, authorities said.

"The bad spots sneak up on you," said Gina Calabresee, of Elbridge, 10 miles west of Syracuse.

"You're driving along and the road is clear and then suddenly the road is packed snow, the wind is pushing your car around and you can't see past the front end," she said. "I have two friends who put their cars in ditches."

Alabama military town used to losing soldiers confronts loss of 8 high school students to tornado

ENTERPRISE, Ala. (AP) - Bill Tompkins was serving with the Army in Iraq when he got the call to come home and bury his son, one of eight students killed when a tornado ripped through a high school last week.

Many of his colleagues wore Army green Tuesday as they helped fill a Baptist church to remember 17-year-old Michael Tompkins.

Even among people accustomed to burying soldiers, the funerals this week took a toll on this military community. Five of the students killed at Enterprise High School had family ties to Fort Rucker, the Army's helicopter flight training base next door.

The dead this time did not sign up for war. They simply showed up for school.

Death "is a known risk that soldiers take when going into combat zones, and we prepare for that," Fort Rucker spokeswoman Lisa Eichhorn said Tuesday. "When the shoe's on the other foot, it cuts us very deep as a community."

The base, home to about 6,000 service personnel, trains about 1,150 helicopter pilots each year. Several of its helicopters recently went down in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing crew members.

A memorial service was set for Wednesday at Fort Rucker. Counselors and chaplains have been made available for families there.

"You never think that anything like this is going to happen to your kids, so you have that feeling of: 'My family's safe, they're not in a war zone like I am, so they should be fine,"' said Ricky Davis, who served with the elder Tompkins in Desert Storm and is now stationed at Fort Benning, Ga.

"You just never dream that anything like this could happen."

Mikey Tompkins' navy blue casket was topped with mementos from his school baseball team, including his glove, a baseball, his No. 19 jersey and a baseball cap.

"We know where he is," his father, a chief warrant officer, told more than 750 people who gathered at the Open Door Baptist Church. "He's dancing before Jesus, you all know he is."

Three students were buried Monday, and a joint service was to be held Tuesday for best friends Andrew Joel Jackson, 16, and Ryan Andrew Mohler, 17, who died together in the hallway in an avalanche of bricks and concrete as a wall and the roof collapsed.

Funerals for the other two students were to be held later this week.

The same storm system that killed the students and an elderly woman in Enterprise killed a man elsewhere in Alabama and nine people in Georgia.

Pa. mom pleads guilty to using 4-week-old baby as weapon to hit boyfriend, injuring child

ERIE, Pa. (AP) - A woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to swinging her 4-week-old son like a bat to hit her boyfriend during a fight, fracturing the infant's skull in the process.

Chytoria Graham, 27, pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child under a plea agreement with prosecutors.

By pleading guilty, Graham acknowledged that on Oct. 8 she grabbed her son Jarron by his feet and swung him, hitting her boyfriend and seriously injuring the child.

At Graham's preliminary hearing in December, paramedic Betty Schau, who treated the baby, recalled that Graham was crying and disheveled when medical crews arrived. She testified that Graham told her, "I swung him. I swung him like a bat."

The judge ordered a psychological examination for Graham before her sentencing, set for May 8. The aggravated assault charge carries a minimum of five years in prison because the child was under age 13. The maximum sentence is 20 years, prosecutor Beth Hirz said. The maximum sentence for endangering the welfare of a child is five years. Two lesser charges were dropped.

Graham's previous attorney had said Graham did not use her child as a weapon, that the boy was hurt during a fight between the two adults and that Graham lied to authorities about how the injury occurred to protect her boyfriend.

Her current attorney, public defender Julia Dudics, however, said Tuesday that the choice to plead guilty was Graham's. Dudics declined further comment except to say that Graham had told her she was depressed.

Jarron, who made a full recovery, and Graham's four other children are currently in the custody of her parents.

Amazon wave destroys two houses, leaves man missing in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - A giant Amazon River wave hurled alligators, boats and fish into a village, destroying two houses and leaving one man missing, officials and local news reports said Tuesday.

A mudslide sent a wall of water rushing across the river, local media said, casting river creatures ashore in the village of Costa da Aguia, some 1,700 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.

"It looked like a building, growing with an immense velocity," Marisson Garcia, who lives just across the river from the damaged village, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.

Roberto Rocha, executive secretary for Amazonas state civil defense, said he could not confirm media reports that Friday's wave was 30 feet high, but said it must have been large to cause so much damage. He said the cause of the wave was under investigation.

Rocha said civil defense workers have relocated the village's 21 residents, who lived in wooden houses on stilts along the riverbank, and were searching for the missing man.

Mudslides along the Amazon are common at this time of the year when the river levels rise, though they rarely do this much damage, Rocha said.

Indonesian earthquake kills at least 70, damages hundreds of buildings

SOLOK, Indonesia (AP) - A powerful earthquake jolted western Indonesia on Tuesday, killing at least 70 people and injuring hundreds as they fled shaking hotels, homes and hospitals. Two children were crushed by debris on a playground.

The 6.3-magnitude quake struck Sumatra island just before 11 a.m. and was felt as far away as neighboring Malaysia and Singapore, where some tall buildings were evacuated. Several aftershocks followed, the strongest measuring 6.1, adding to fears of people already too nervous to return indoors.

Many said they would sleep in front of their homes or in the hills Tuesday night.

"Women were crying out in terror. We all just fled as quickly as we could," said Alpion, a welder who joined thousands of others running to higher ground, fearing a tsunami that never came.

Indonesia straddles one of the world's most seismically active zones and has been hit by a string of natural disasters in recent years, the most deadly being the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 160,000 people on Sumatra's northern tip.

At least 70 people were killed by Tuesday's quake, which hit the island's western coast, Cabinet Secretary Sudi Silalahi told reporters in the capital, Jakarta.

The hardest-hit area appeared to be Solok, a bustling town close to the epicenter, where two children were killed when a two-story building collapsed on the school playground, said police spokesman Supriadi, who like many Indonesians uses only one name. In addition, three members of one family were burned alive when their collapsed home burst into flames.

Dozens of buildings were destroyed and hundreds of others were damaged, according to local police chief Lt. Col. Budi Sarwono. TV footage showed a flattened three-story home and wide cracks in the road.

"My house is on the brink of collapse," said Imelda Kusmawati, as she prepared to spend the night in an army tent with her two children and six other families. "I am still traumatized and worried about aftershocks."

Patients poured into hospitals in Solok, many with broken bones and cuts, but most were treated outside because of fears of more quakes. Scores were laid out on cots on a soccer field, where they were attached to intravenous drips and given emergency care.

"So far we have recovered 19 bodies and hundreds of injured people," Sarwono said of the toll in Solok. "The two hospitals are overwhelmed."

At one hospital in the nearby seaside town of Padang, panicked doctors and nurses fled into the street, startled patients limping behind, according to Metro TV. Electricity remained cut in parts of the town as darkness fell.

A witness in the town of Payahkumbuh said several shops in the main street had collapsed and police and soldiers were digging for survivors.

Government spokesman Hasrul Piliang said the number of dead "would likely rise" because tallies from remote areas were still being collected and there were reports of other people trapped under debris.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the tremor struck 20 miles below Solok. It was felt in Singapore, 265 miles away, forcing the evacuation of several older office buildings. In Malaysia's southern coastal city of Johor, citizens fled offices, buildings and shopping centers, witnesses said.

U.S. earthquake expert Kerry Sieh was in Padang on a research trip when the quake struck. He fled his fourth-story hotel room like other guests, stopping only to unplug his laptop.

"I was pretty scared," he said, adding that the fault that spawned the quake was known as the Great Sumatran, which last ruptured in 1945. "I now know why people have a hard time remembering how long earthquakes last."

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

In addition to the 2004 tsunami, an earthquake killed nearly 5,000 on Java island last year.

Tuesday's quake was about 660 miles west of the Jakarta.

Man arrested in wife's stabbing, police say he also told toddler son: 'Now you stab Mommy'

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP) - Police say a man repeatedly stabbed his teenage wife, then gave the knife to his toddler son and told him: "Now you stab Mommy."

Fermin Rodriguez, 21, attacked his 17-year-old wife Sunday night, after accusing her of cheating on him, police said. He slashed and stabbed her multiple times, then handed the knife to his 2-year-old son and told him to stab her, police said.

The boy didn't stab her, police and prosecutors said Tuesday.

Rodriguez was charged with first-degree assault, first-degree reckless endangerment, first-degree unlawful restraint and threatening. He was being held on $350,000 bond.

His wife, Keyschla Rodriguez, was slashed at least 20 times, but most of the wounds were superficial, according to Capt. Lynn Kirwin. Rodriguez also cut off her hair, Kirwin said.

The woman's father became worried because he had not heard from his daughter and arrived at the house while she was still being held against her will, police said.

"Thank goodness her father showed up at the door," Kirwin said. The woman was treated for her injuries and later released.

The boy was safe with relatives, Kirwin said.

Top Iditarod veterans bow out of the race

NIKOLAI, Alaska (AP) - Already feeling overwhelming fatigue, Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race musher DeeDee Jonrowe ate some oatmeal and sipped on hot chocolate as she and her team got some much-needed rest.

"I am bone-tired," Jonrowe said Monday at the Finger Lake checkpoint, as she speculated whether the 25-mile per hour winds and the 30-below wind chill were sucking the strength from her body or if the long-term effect of chemotherapy was making her feel especially lousy.

Jonrowe, 53, decided to bow out of her 25th Iditarod Monday at the Rainy Pass checkpoint in the Alaska Range after taking a series of nasty falls on the trail. Jonrowe broke her little finger and may have incurred more damage to her hand, officials said Tuesday.

Jonrowe, who finished fourth last year, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 and underwent a double mastectomy.

"It is harder after chemo," Jonrowe said. "I am not going to be silly and try to pretend that didn't make a difference. It did."

Jonrowe was the second of the Iditarod's best and most experienced veterans to scratch from the 1,100-mile race from Anchorage to Nome.

It also ended early for four-time champion Doug Swingley of Lincoln, Mont., who withdrew Monday after being injured in a spill on a slick and icy hill a few miles before Rainy Pass, just two days into the race.

Race officials said Swingley, 53, may have broken ribs and possibly dislocated a thumb. He told them he wanted to scratch because he didn't think he could properly care for his dog team. Race rules do not allow mushers to get help with the care and feeding of their dogs.

Swingley's dogs were not injured in the accident.

Swingley, who won in 1995, 1999, 2000 and 2001, knows that better than most. He scratched from the 2004 race after frostbiting his corneas when he took off his goggles when the wind chill factor was 90 below zero.

Swingley and Jonrowe weren't the only veteran mushers having trouble.

When Rick Swenson of Two Rivers - the Iditarod's only five-time champion competing for the 31st time - was asked how his race was going this year, he said "poorly," while packing up his gear to pull out of the Finger Lake checkpoint, one checkpoint before Rainy Pass and about 200 miles into the race. He rested his team 3 1/2 hours.

"I'm here and I sure don't want to be," Swenson said, with more than half a dozen teams already out of the Rainy Pass checkpoint 30 miles up the trail. "I stopped here because I had to."

Swenson said his team had been running well before the race, doing 100-mile training runs, but wasn't performing the same for the big event.

"The dogs just need a break," he said, as his team slept on beds of straw at the checkpoint set up on a frozen lake in the Alaska Range.

Lance Mackey was the first musher in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race to reach the checkpoint at Nikolai on Tuesday.

Teams at the front of the pack on Tuesday were approaching the village of Nikolai on the Kuskokwim River, about 750 miles from the finish. Lance Mackey guided his dog team off the river ice at about 8:10 a.m., and was the only musher there at mid-morning.

Mackey had left the previous checkpoint of Rohn in a group that included Jason Barron of Lincoln, Mont., 35, Cim Smyth of Big Lake, 29, Zack Steer, 33, of Sheep Mountain and four-time champion Martin Buser, 48, of Big Lake.

Mackey, 36, just got his third consecutive win in the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. Most of the dogs in his Iditarod team ran the Quest.

"This is one of the things people say can't be done. I'm trying to prove it can," Mackey said when asked about running both the Quest and the Iditarod. "Right now, I couldn't be happier. Things are looking fine."

Both his father, Dick, and brother, Rick, have won the Iditarod. Mackey is wearing bib 13, the same number his father and brother wore when they won the race.

Musher Jeff Holt, 46, of North Pole, dropped out of the race at Finger Lake on Monday evening after blacking out on the trail, Iditarod officials said. Musher Jacques Philip of Nenana, Frank Sihler of Wasilla and Butch Austin of Fruita, Colo., have also scratched.

Eighty-two teams started the race Sunday from Willow, about 80 miles northwest of Anchorage. The first team is expected to cross the finish line in Nome, a historic gold mining town on the Bering Sea on Alaska's western coastline with a rough and tumble frontier spirit, in about nine days.

On the Net:

www.iditarod.com

Italian prosecutors clear doctor in right-to-die case

ROME (AP) - Italian prosecutors on Tuesday cleared a physician who disconnected the respirator of a paralyzed man who had asked to die, a patients advocate group said.

Dr. Mario Riccio in December assisted in the death of Piergiorgio Welby, a 60-year-old writer with muscular dystrophy whose case had split the Roman Catholic nation.

Anti-euthanasia campaigners and some conservative politicians described Welby's death as murder. But Riccio, Welby's family and now prosecutors called it a suspension of therapy. They said the decision conformed to a patient's right to refuse treatment.

The decision "fully recognizes the right of a citizen to refuse a cure, even when that means certain death," the Luca Coscioni Association patient advocate group said in a statement.

No one answered the phone late Tuesday at the prosecutors' office in Rome.

The case had highlighted an apparent contradiction in Italian law: Patients have a constitutional right to refuse treatment, but the Italian medical code requires doctors to keep a patient alive.

An Italian medical board also cleared Riccio last month. He had faced sanctions ranging from a warning to a permanent ban from the medical profession.

Euthanasia is illegal in Italy, and the Vatican, which wields influence over the country's political and social life, staunchly opposes the practice. Welby was given a lay funeral in Rome after Church officials denied him a religious ceremony.

France's Louvre museum to build branch in Abu Dhabi, angering some in art world

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - France's storied Louvre museum, home to priceless art works like the Mona Lisa, said Tuesday it will open a new Louvre in this Persian Gulf boomtown, prompting outcries from some who accuse the museum of shilling France's patrimony for $1.3 billion in oil money.

The 30-year agreement, signed by French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and the head of Abu Dhabi's tourism authority, Sheik Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, opens the way for the Louvre Abu Dhabi to display thousands of works from some of France's best museums, such as the Louvre, the Georges Pompidou Center, the Musee d'Orsay and Versailles.

The works will be housed in a huge flying saucer-shaped museum designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, which will be erected on the Abu Dhabi waterfront, opening sometime after 2012.

Abu Dhabi's rulers are positioning the Louvre as the centerpiece of a cultural district expected to attract millions of well-heeled tourists and diversify its oil-dominated economy.

Donnedieu de Vabres said the venture represents the globalization of French culture, the first step in a long-term cooperation with the wealthy Persian Gulf region. He promised that the Paris Louvre would not sell any of its 35,000-piece collection, nor would the deal weaken France's cultural policy or its museums.

"We're not selling the French legacy and heritage. We want this culture to radiate to parts of the world that value it," the culture minister said. "We're proud that Abu Dhabi wants to bring the Louvre here. We're not here to transform culture into a consumer product."

But prominent figures in the French art world have accused their government of exploiting art for trade and diplomacy and said lending art will overburden French museums. Led by the art historian and critic Didier Rykner, opponents of the Abu Dhabi scheme collected 4,700 signatures to protest it.

"We have lost a battle, but the combat continues," Rykner wrote this week on his Web site "La Tribune de l'Art," paraphrasing Charles de Gaulle's famous remark after Nazi Germany defeated France in 1940.

Rykner promised to fight similar projects, such as plans by the Pompidou Center in Paris to set up a branch in Shanghai, China.

The ruling sheiks of Abu Dhabi have agreed to spend a staggering sum to bring the Louvre to this fast-developing Arab capital. France will receive $525 million for the use of the Louvre brand alone, plus a gift of $33 million to renovate a wing of the Paris Louvre, which will be named for longtime Emirates ruler Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and house Islamic works of art.

A further $750 million will be spent to bring French managers and 300 loaned works of art to fill and staff the Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as to renovate a French palace and fund an artwork restoration center in Paris.

The price of building Nouvel's museum design has yet to be calculated and is likely to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost, pushing the overall project close to $2 billion.

Louvre director Henri Loyrette said the museum typically lends up to 1,500 works a year, not including its most precious and fragile pieces, like the Mona Lisa. The Louvre Abu Dhabi can expect a loan of about 300 French works during its first year, which would shrink over time as the museum acquires its own collection, organizers said.

Buying artworks to fill the 260,000-square-foot museum once the 30-year loan period expires could be stratospherically expensive. "We'd rather not announce our collection budget," said Mubarak al-Muhairi, director of Abu Dhabi's tourism authority. "We don't want to create a disturbance in the market."

For its part, France has solid reasons for bringing a Louvre branch to Abu Dhabi, Donnedieu de Vabres said. He said the museum will help reinvigorate France's postcolonial stature in the Arab world, noting the negotiations with Abu Dhabi's royal family had already improved bilateral ties.

Donnedieu de Vabres said French President Jacques Chirac sent a message saying the museum is a symbol of a "world which considers the clash of civilizations the most dangerous trap of our time."

The joint venture is another cultural coup for Abu Dhabi, a once-staid oil boomtown that lives in the shadow of its flashier neighbor, Dubai.

In July, New York's Guggenheim Foundation announced it would build its largest-yet museum in Abu Dhabi, designed by American architect Frank Gehry and expected to cost $400 million to construct.

The Louvre and Guggenheim are two of four museums to be designed by celebrity architects that will anchor a $27 billion cultural district on the currently uninhabited Saadiyat Island just off the coast of Abu Dhabi. The district seeks to draw 3 million tourists by 2015.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi will have to breach significant cultural barriers before it opens, since representations of the human figure - even when clothed - can be a religious taboo in the Muslim world. One Arab reporter asked during a news conference Tuesday whether the museum would protect its visitors against "pornography."

Museum officials did not address the issue of nudity in works. But art selection will be done by a committee including Abu Dhabi's rulers, who understand the sensitivities in this city, one of the more liberal bastions in the conservative Gulf.

Inquest into Princess Diana's death postponed until October

LONDON (AP) - The inquest into the deaths of Princes Diana and her friend Dodi Fayed will be postponed until October, more than a decade after the couple died in a Paris car crash, a coroner said Tuesday.

The long-awaited inquest had originally been scheduled to begin in May. But Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, a retired judge who is overseeing the hearings, decided that they will begin "on or about" Oct. 1. It is expected to last at least four months, but could stretch to double that.

At a procedural hearing Monday, lawyers for Fayed's father, Harrods department store owner Mohamed al Fayed, argued that they needed more time to gather experts and documentation. Lawyers for the family of chauffeur Henri Paul backed up the request, which was initially resisted by Butler-Sloss.

"I would be very sad if I was obliged to delay the start of the main proceedings for another six months," she said. "I feel that would be very, very hard on the families."

Michael Mansfield, who represents al Fayed, called the delay "a pebble on the beach" compared to the 10-year wait to begin hearing evidence. He also said Diana's ex-husband, Prince Charles, and Prince Philip should be called to give evidence.

Diana, 36, and Fayed, 42, were killed along with chauffeur Paul when their Mercedes crashed in the Pont d'Alma tunnel on Aug. 31, 1997. The only survivor, bodyguard Trevor Rees - formerly known as Rees-Jones - was badly hurt.

A French investigation ruled that Paul was drunk and in his efforts to evade photographers, lost control of their car, which careened into a column in a tunnel.

The inquest could begin only after the investigations into the deaths were complete. A two-year French investigation, a three-year Metropolitan Police inquiry in Britain and repeated legal action by al Fayed have delayed the inquest.

Police dispatched to all 22 Texas youth prisons to investigate claims of inmate abuse

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Police went to 22 Texas Youth Commission facilities and the agency headquarters Tuesday to investigate claims that young inmates were sexually abused and that agency officials covered it up.

Jay Kimbrough, appointed by the governor to look into the allegations at a West Texas youth prison, said the officers would conduct interviews at the prisons and halfway houses, secure equipment and collect documents if necessary.

He also issued a warning to agency employees.

"If you are part of this gig, you need to move on or we're going to find you and prosecute you," Kimbrough said.

The Texas Youth Commission houses about 2,700 offenders ages 10 to 21 who are considered the most dangerous, incorrigible or chronic. Its new board chairman pledged Tuesday that the agency would cooperate with the investigations.

"I'd like to assure everyone that the board is very, very interested in a new direction of the Texas Youth Commission," Don Bethel said. "We are going to cooperate with everyone."

Late last month, state lawmakers questioned agency staff about an investigation in 2005 that had found evidence that high-ranking officials at the West Texas State School in Pyote had repeated sexual contact with some of the 250 boys and young men housed there. An internal investigation found prison staff members had complained about the abuse to their supervisors but that no one took action for more than a year.

State lawmakers have complained that they didn't know of the problems until this year. But the agency's former chief of staff, Joy Anderson, sent an e-mail about the problem to staff members of several members of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee in March 2005.

The e-mail, given to reporters, said up to 19 students were alleged to have been subjected to sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior, and said staff members were "deeply" upset by the allegations.

Sen. John Whitmire, the committee's chairman, said he never got a copy of the e-mail and didn't even know there was a facility in Pyote until three weeks ago.

The Texas Senate asked Republican Gov. Rick Perry last week to fire the board and take over the troubled agency.

Perry instead demoted the board's chairman and appointed Kimbrough, his former deputy chief of staff, as a special master to conduct an independent investigation. He also ordered the agency's acting executive director to design and implement a rehabilitation plan.

The recently appointed acting executive director, Ed Owens, said the agency will have a "zero tolerance policy of any type of mistreatment of youth."