USA
An international force with "robust rules of engagement" should be deployed as quickly as possible in Lebanon to secure the peace, President Bush said Monday in his first major news conference since July 7. Bush pledged the US would assist the peacekeepers with logistics support and communications, as well as by helping to train and equip Lebanese armed forces.
NASA workers replaced two antenna bolts to complete a delicate repair to the shuttle Atlantis Sunday in preparation for its scheduled Aug. 27 liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Atlantis is on the launch pad being readied to restart construction on the half-built International Space Station, which was put on hold after the 2003 Columbia disaster.
Several hundred protesters and counterprotesters waved American flags and traded hostile remarks Sunday in Riverside, N.J., over a new ordinance that bans hiring and housing illegal immigrants. The ordinance punishes landlords and employers who house or hire any of the estimated 3,500 illegals, many of them from Brazil, who live in the Philadelphia suburb.
Officials at Virginia Tech University ordered the Blacksburg, Va., campus shut down Monday and 25,000 students to stay in dorms and academic areas as a precaution on the first day of classes as authorities searched for an escaped convict. William Morva, who is suspected of killing a hospital guard and shooting a police officer near the university, escaped early Sunday morning from the Montgomery County Jail and reportedly was seen on campus.
After taking murder suspect John Mark Karr into custody Sunday night following a 15-hour flight from Bangkok, Thailand, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said it would detain him up for to 48 hours, pending an extradition hearing to send him to Boulder, Colo. Karr was arrested last week in the unsolved 1996 murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder.
Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who died Sunday in Novato, Calif., was best known for snapping the indelible World War II image of six marines raising an American flag over the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. The photo, taken for the Associated Press in Feb. 23, 1945, was used as the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va.