USA
Thirteen days after being removed from her feeding tube, Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of contentious national right-to-die debate and years of legal wrangling, died in a Pinellas Park, Fla., hospice. She had been in what court-appointed doctors called a persistent vegetative state, stemming from brain damage sustained in 1990. During a seven-year legal battle between her parents and husband, Michael Schiavo, who fought to carry out what he claimed she wanted, Florida lawmakers, Congress, and President Bush tried to intervene on behalf of the parents.
Early indications from investigations of last week's Texas oil refinery explosion were that some sort of spark, possibly from a automobile ignition, might have caused the blast that killed 15 people and injured more than 100 others. The explosion at BP's Texas City plant occurred in the unit that boosts octane levels in gasoline. The refinery processes 3 percent of the US gasoline supply.
In what his lawyer described as an isolated lapse in an otherwise spotless career, the captain of a Malaysian-flagged freighter that broke apart in December off the Alaskan coast pleaded guilty Wednesday to lying to federal investigators. In Anchorage, Kailash Bhushan Singh admitted to deliberately entering an inaccurate time for the engine shutdown that led to the grounding of the vessel and the worst spill since the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. Singh will serve three years probation.
The presidential commission appointed to investigate flawed intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction released its findings in a 600-page document. The commission denied that there was manipulation of intelligence for political purposes but faulted prewar intelligence-gathering for largely ignoring dissenting views about Iraq's weapons. Below, former US Sen. Charles Robb (D) of Virginia, co-chairman of the commission, joined Bush at the White House to present the group's report, which calls for greater coordination and cooperation among the 15 US intelligence agencies.