Those who the particulars Spider-Man singly with chattering teeth Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in the movies might be surprised to learn that in the comic capitalize, the web-spinning hero has been married for almost 21 years.

That’s why the comic Near East is in an uproar over Marvel Comics’ decision to undo the marriage of Peter Parker and red-haired bombshell Mary Jane Watson, reversing two decades of architectonicstelling.


In Amazing Spider-Man #545 last week, Peter and Mary Jane mingle a crying bite with the devil-like character Mephisto: In buying and selling for release Aunt May’s life, Mephisto erases all traces of the Peter-Mary Jane marriage wonderless solemn observance.

In the value out this week, subtitled Brand New Day, Peter Parker beadroll to his roots — infantile, nerdy and single. Aunt May is alive and fount and Mary Jane is again flawless viol of the calved. The marriage never happened.

“People are very anxiousness. They erased a lot of chock that had been set in cornercrystal,” says John Newman, manager of Ultimate Comics in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Wednesday as customers came in to buy the breach chapter of Brand New Day. To help emphasize the new start, Amazing Spider-Man will go thrice-monthly.”We knew it would be a very scrappy thing to do,” says Joe Quesada, Marvel’s editor in arms, who believed so abounding in the embody that he drew the high-priority throw offs himself. “Looking into the future, this is naturally the right thing to do for the long-term naturalnessfulness of the character.”

Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962, was a hit, juxtaposed with babyish masterers because he was a geeky teenager, shy with girls and uncertain of how to use his powers. But in 1987, Peter and Mary Jane, by after that a Platonic form bedizenment, got married. Marvel had existing regrets.

“I recall editors and editors in commanding lamenting that a married Spider-Man was not where we want to be,” Quesada says. “A married Peter Parker piece togethers for a less weariful soap opera else a single Peter Parker going nearby his nerdy kind of life.”

Writers tried A to Z: The brace separated for a while. She miscarried. And in a mass-criticized ghost folktale determinism, Marvel tried to convince scaners that Peter Parker had not gotten married, but his quadruplicate. That didn’t stick, tete-a-tete. Then Quesada took over and insisted the marriage actionable couldn’t continue.

“Nobody wants to say in relation with a married Spider-Man,” says Craig Shutt, a columnist for Comics Buyers Guide. “But in the cramped run, it’s a terrible idea. It disrespects the feel outers by plug A to izzard they study for is wrong.”

At DC Comics, Superman is married to Lois Lane, disrupting that title’s long-standing tensions. DC decletterd to comment for this belt.

Quesada is steadfast that for Spider-Man, the move is the right one: “Ultimately we underplay to do this to armor this character fresh for this generation and generations to come.”

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BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. - A day after reporting his four young children were missing, a shrimp fisherman broke down and confessed that he threw them off an 80-foot-high bridge to their deaths, authorities said Wednesday.

Lam Luong, 37, was charged with four counts of capital murder, and divers searched the murky waters for the bodies of the youngsters, who ranged in age from a few months to 3 years.

Luong had a drug habit and had argued with his wife, Ngoc Phan, before taking the children, said Phan’s brother-in-law, Kam Phengsisomboun.

Luong’s girlfriend, who was living in a hotel in nearby Gulfport, Miss., was a factor in the couple’s argument on Sunday and Monday morning, family members and police said.

Authorities said they believe Luong then drove on Monday to the two-lane Dauphin Island bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, stopped at the highest part of the span and threw the youngsters over the side.

Luong reported the children missing Monday, initially telling police that he had given the kids to his girlfriend, who was living in a hotel in Gulfport, Miss., and that she failed to return them.

But authorities said they found holes in his account, and he later changed his story.

Missing and presumed dead were 4-month-old Danny Luong; 1-year-old Lindsey Luong; 2-year-old Hannah Luong; and 3-year-old Ryan Phan. Phan is not the man’s biological child, but Luong raised him from infancy, authorities said.

About 70 people in boats and helicopters searched water as deep as 55 feet. The search area covered 100 square miles because the current might have swept the children away, Sheriff Sam Cochran said.

The search was called off late Wednesday afternoon when dense fog rolled in, completely obscuring the bridge.

Luong was scheduled to appear in court Thursday. District Attorney John Tyson said he did not believe Luong had a lawyer.

Luong came to Alabama from Vietnam in 1984 and worked as a shrimper, Phengsisomboun said. The couple lived with Phan’s mother at Bayou La Batre, a fishing village 20 miles southwest of Mobile with a large Southeast Asian community.

Phengsisomboun said the couple had recently moved back to the area from Hinesville, Ga.

The family initially feared he had traded the children to support his drug habit, Phengsisomboun said. Luong had a crack habit and had run through an insurance settlement from an auto accident, he said. Authorities in Mobile confirmed Luong had a history of drug abuse but had no details.

He was arrested in October in Hinesville on a crack-possession charge. The case has not been acted on by a grand jury.

Phengsisomboun said he was later told by investigators that a witness had seen someone throw a bundle from the bridge and then saw three children in a nearby car.

Phan, 23, was in seclusion Wednesday morning at her mother’s brick home, the front porch cluttered with children’s shoes.

Some family members and friends held out hope that the children weren’t dead.

“I just pray for the kids, that they are still alive,” said Van Lam, a family friend who was at a market with Phan’s mother Wednesday afternoon.

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CONCORD, N.H. - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton powered to victory in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary Tuesday night in a startling upset, defeating Sen. Barack Obama and resurrecting her bid for the White House. Sen. John McCain defeated his Republican rivals to move back into contention for the GOP nomination.

“I felt like we all spoke from our hearts and I am so gratified that you responded,” Clinton said in victory remarks before cheering supporters. “Now together, let’s give America the kind of comeback that New Hampshire has just given me.”

Her victory, after Obama won last week’s Iowa caucuses, raised the possibility of a prolonged battle for the party nomination between the most viable black candidate in history and the former first lady, seeking to become the first woman to occupy the Oval Office.

“I am still fired up and ready to go,” a defeated Obama told his own backers, repeating the line that forms a part of virtually every campaign appearance he makes.

McCain’s triumph scrambled the Republican race as well.

“We showed this country what a real comeback looks like,” the Arizona senator told The Associated Press in an interview as he savored his triumph. “We’re going to move on to Michigan and South Carolina and win the nomination.”

Later, he told cheering supporters that together, “we have taken a step, but only a first step toward repairing the broken politics of the past and restoring the trust of the American people in their government.”

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Behind the debate over the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of videotapes depicting waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques lies a fundamental question: Can government officials use such aggressive tactics without violating US law?

No American court has yet ruled on the legality of Bush administration interrogation policies. But the war on terror isn’t the first time US officials have used harsh methods to try to “break” a detainee.

From 1964 to 1967, Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko was subjected to extreme isolation and sensory deprivation and was administered drugs because his CIA handlers believed he was still working in secret for the KGB. They imprisoned him in a windowless concrete cell to try to disrupt him psychologically and force him to confess his loyalty to Moscow, according to CIA documents and a congressional investigation. He never did.

The case has been examined in several books – one was published last year – and a 1986 movie depicting the intense debate over whether Mr. Nosenko was an actual defector. Lost in much of the discussion has been the legality of his treatment.

The case has been examined in several books – one was published last year – and a 1986 movie depicting the intense debate over whether Mr. Nosenko was an actual defector. Lost in much of the discussion has been the legality of his treatment.

“It was reprehensible,” says Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA from 1977 to 1981 and ordered an internal examination of the Nosenko affair in 1977. “I was aghast when I uncovered it.”

Nosenko’s experience in CIA custody in the 1960s is relevant today because of similarities between his harsh treatment and the use of some of the same techniques now, more than 40 years later, against suspected Islamic terrorists. Among them are three men who were held at the military brig in Charleston, S.C., after being designated as enemy combatants by President Bush.

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LONDON (AFP) - One of the world’s most famous cruise ships — the Queen Elizabeth 2 — set sail Sunday on its final global voyage before being turned into a floating hotel, British media reported.

The vessel left with a fireworks send-off from the southern English port city of Southampton for her last winter trip, the domestic Press Association news agency said.

Her sister ship, the recently-named Queen Victoria, set off on her first world cruise at the same time. Both ships will travel in tandem across the north Atlantic Ocean to New York.

US cruise operator Carnival sold the QE2 for about 50 million pounds (67 million euros, 99 million dollars) in November last year to Istithmar, the investment arm of state-owned tourism company Dubai World.

On return from her final world cruise in April, she will be refurbished and turned into a five-star hotel at a specially-constructed pier on the world’s largest man-made island, The Palm Jumeirah.

Launched by her namesake in September 1967, the QE2 is previous owner Cunard’s longest-serving ship. The 963-feet (294-metre) long ship weighs 70,000 tonnes and can carry up to 1,778 passengers and more than 1,000 crew.

She has travelled 5.5 million nautical miles — the equivalent of travelling to the moon and back 13 times — undertaken 25 world cruises, crossed the Atlantic more than 800 times, and carried more than two million passengers.

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LOS ANGELES - Napster Inc. said Sunday it will begin selling music downloads as unprotected MP3 files in the spring, joining other online retailers.

The file format change will apply only to single tracks and album purchases, according to a company press release. Tracks downloaded as part of the company’s music subscription service will continue to have copyright restrictions.

Unlike music files that come with copy protections embedded, MP3 files are compatible with most portable music devices, including Apple Inc.’s market-leading iPod media players, Microsoft Corp.’s Zune and mobile phones that play music.

“The ubiquity and cross-platform compatibility of MP3s should create a more level playing field for music services and hardware providers and result in greater ease of use and broader adoption of digital music,” Chris Gorog, Napster’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

The company did not say which record companies had agreed to license music for sale as MP3s via Napster.

Three of the world’s biggest recording companies — Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group Corp. and Britain’s EMI Group PLC — cleared the way last year for some online retailers, including Amazon.com, to sell their artists’ music as unprotected MP3 files.

Many analysts expect the fourth major recording company, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, to follow suit this year.

Napster, which offers a la carte downloads and a monthly unlimited music subscription plan with the option to transfer copy-protected tracks to certain devices, said it would continue to focus primarily on its subscription business.

The company recently told subscribers that it will increase fees on its basic subscription plan from $9.95 to $12.95 a month beginning Jan. 30. It gave existing subscribers the option to lock in the lower monthly fee if they pay for a full year in advance.

Napster did not change the $14.95 monthly fee for its top subscription tier.

The company disclosed in November it had narrowed its loss in the second quarter, which ended Sept. 30, to $5.1 million, from $9 million in the same period a year earlier.

Napster ended the quarter with about 750,000 paid subscribers.

Napster shares closed at $1.94 on Friday.

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LAS VEGAS - Microsoft Corp. might not be the unbeatable giant it once seemed to be, but Chairman Bill Gates made the case Sunday night that its technologies are becoming even more flexible and powerful as they seep into automobiles, Internet-based TV networks and living rooms.

A few months away from leaving his daily duties at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropy, Gates used his traditional kickoff keynote at the International Consumer Electronics Show to highlight how Microsoft is extending the reach of its software beyond desktops and servers, and incorporating alternative inputs like voice and touch.

“The first digital decade has been a great success,” he said. “This is just the beginning. There’s nothing holding us back from going much faster and much further in the second digital decade.”

Traditional PC programs got less airtime than in previous keynotes. That contrast stood out considering not only the tepid response for Microsoft’s year-old Windows Vista operating system but also the way that Web-based applications are threatening Microsoft’s hold on desktop computing.

Instead Gates bounced from cars — Microsoft’s Sync technology for playing music and making phone calls should be available in all Ford, Mercury and Lincoln vehicles in the 2009 model year — to the living room. Gates and Robbie Bach, who heads Microsoft’s entertainment division, announced an expansion of the high-definition Hollywood movies and TV shows that can be downloaded through the Xbox video game console’s online service.

Those include shows from ABC television and other properties of Walt Disney Co. (which, by the way, counts Microsoft uber-rival and Apple Inc. chief Steve Jobs as its biggest individual shareholder).

Gates also explained how Mediaroom, the Internet-based television platform that Microsoft created for telecommunications companies to sell, will work with TNT and Showtime to let users select their own camera angles when viewing sports. For example, a Nascar fan could maintain a constant view from his favorite driver’s car, or plug into a certain ringside shot in a boxing match. For now, though, Mediaroom is mainly used for TV services in other countries.

Microsoft will have another chance to show its video talents this summer, when it runs NBC’s online Olympics portal, which is designed to let people zero in on specific events that interest them.

“Building great connected TV experiences is not just a hobby for Microsoft,” Bach said.

Gates and Bach talked up improvements in ways for people to interact with software by voice, touch and gesture. In addition to the speech-recognizing functions in Sync-enabled cars, Microsoft plans to soon upgrade the voice-activated information searches available through its subsidiary Tellme. It also will augment the system underlying Surface, Microsoft’s computer in a table that responds to users’ touches and gestures.

Surface is debuting as a virtual concierge in hotels, but Gates hopes it will soon be used in retail stores. For example, Gates showed how an outdoors-shop customer could use a Surface table to customize a snowboard and transfer an image of his creation to a mobile device simply by putting it on the table.

It was that kind of demonstration that inspired thousands of techies to begin lining up for the speech more than four hours before it started.

What they might not have expected — and what they clearly relished — was a self-deprecating farewell video in which Gates mocked the idea that he would desperately cast about for things to do after retiring as Microsoft’s chief software architect this July.

It showed a giddy Gates rapping, trying to lift weights, pleading for a spot in U2 and lobbying for a place on a presidential ticket. The video’s cameo appearances from the likes of Brian Williams, Jay-Z, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg and George Clooney provoked uproarious laughter — not a common occurence at a tech conference.

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PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea - For 5,000 years, great tongues of ice have spread over the 3-mile-high slopes of Puncak Jaya, in the remotest reaches of this remote tropical island. Now those glaciers are melting, and Lonnie Thompson must get there before they’re gone.

To the American glaciologist, the ancient ice is a vanishing “archive” of the story of El Nino, the equatorial phenomenon driving much of the world’s climate.

More than that, the little-explored glaciers are a last unknown for a mountaineering scientist who for three decades has circled the planet pioneering the deep-drilling of ice cores, both to chronicle the history of climate and to bear witness to the death of tropical glaciers from global warming.

“No one knows how thick these remaining glaciers are,” Thompson said of Puncak Jaya, or Mount Jaya. “We do know they are disappearing.”

The unknowns on this wild, Texas-sized island extend even to the local climate.

“There are indications of warming,” explained Kasis Inape, a senior government climatologist here. “But we can’t really confidently say the temperature change has been this much or that much, because the actual data are lacking.”

As a companion project to Thompson’s expedition, an international research team including Inape plans a first-ever assessment of recent climate change on New Guinea, especially along the 1,200-mile mountainous spine of the southwestern Pacific island.

Thompson’s quest on Puncak Jaya will be for something deeper in the past.

“We may actually see an El Nino history there,” he said by telephone from his office-laboratory at Ohio State University. And that history may foretell the future, he and others believe.

Knowing how past temperature changes affected El Nino, the atmospheric-oceanic disturbance that roils the tropics every few years, may help scientists predict how much worse and more frequent El Nino’s droughts, tempests and floods may grow as the world warms in decades to come.

Such discoveries would be the latest in a Thompson career whose achievements were recognized by a National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony last July.

Aided by his wife and collaborator, climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Thompson’s career began in the 1970s with climbs to the glacier-draped peaks of the Peruvian Andes, where his team perfected advanced drilling techniques. By 2001, he was making headlines with his discovery that the storied snows of Kilimanjaro, the east African mountain’s glacial cap, might disappear by 2015.

On some 50 expeditions, often with U.S. National Science Foundation support, he and colleagues have braved high winds, frostbite and altitude sickness, survived in ice caves, crossed treacherous crevasses with makeshift bridges, and hauled heavy equipment to unlikely heights.

In 2006, at a 20,000-foot-high site in the Tibetan Himalayas, Thompson had to rely on animal power, dozens of yaks, to carry ice-core segments on their backs to the valley below.

An accumulation of four miles of ice cores, including one Himalayan sample reaching back 750,000 years, now lies in cold storage at the lab in Columbus, Ohio, where the ice is analyzed layer by layer through centuries past.

Flecks of dust, falling seasonally, enable glaciologists to count the years down the ice core’s length. Isotopes of oxygen, in minute air bubbles trapped in the ice, vary with temperature and so tell researchers how ancient climate shifted. Other clues — chemicals, surrounding geology, trapped and frozen vegetation or insects — tell high-altitude investigators still more.

The 59-year-old Thompson’s assault on Puncak Jaya, planned for May-June 2009, will take his crew into isolated, mist-shrouded highlands seldom visited even by tribes in the area, across Papua New Guinea’s border in the Indonesian half of this island. In 2006, a biological expedition to its uncharted tropical forests reported finding new species of birds, frogs, even a tree kangaroo.

The last scientific expedition to the glaciers took place in 1973, when Australian glaciologist Ian Allison and colleagues trekked seven days through the wilderness past gushing rivers and groves of tree ferns, with gear borne by a train of near-naked tribesmen.

“In the fourth or fifth day you see in the distance the sheer limestone cliffs with the ice on top, and it’s really quite a sight,” Allison recalled by phone from Australia.

Thompson should have an easier time scaling those 10,000-foot cliffs.

The mining company Freeport-McMoRan, operating nearby, has agreed to airlift his dozen-member team to Puncak Jaya’s heights by helicopter, along with six tons of equipment — electro-mechanical and thermal drill systems, radar to gauge ice thickness and map the underlying rock, winch and cable, boxes to preserve core segments, high-altitude camping gear and supplies.

They’ll find glaciers very different from those Allison saw.

Although ever-present cloud cover complicates satellite surveillance, meticulous research by Texas A&M University geographers has determined that the glaciers are shrinking rapidly.

“We’re tracking their demise by satellite images,” the university’s Andrew Klein said from College Station, Texas. “If current retreat rates continue, they will disappear in a few decades. This is similar to what’s happening to tropical glaciers around the world.”

Puncak Jaya’s Meren Glacier, one of five ice masses surveyed in the 1972-73 Australian expeditions, vanished completely sometime between 1994 and 2000, the Texas researchers report. In two years alone, between 2000 and 2002, the remaining glaciers lost more than 7 percent of their area.

The researchers estimate that since about 1850, as heat-trapping industrial emissions accumulated in the atmosphere, Puncak Jaya’s ice has shrunk from covering 7 square miles to less than one square mile.

Michael Prentice, an Indiana University paleoclimatologist, or climate historian, believes temperature increases in the New Guinea uplands have far exceeded — “really out of sight” — the 1-degree Fahrenheit average rise recorded globally in the past century.

With Inape and Australian and Indonesian scientists, Prentice is organizing the project to collect and analyze existing climate data, and to emplace or upgrade automatic weather stations at sites including Puncak Jaya.

New Guinea lies on the fringe of the Western Pacific Warm Pool, a center of warm water that generates El Nino disturbances and influences climate from India’s monsoons to the Amazon’s droughts. Because of that, Prentice said, what the glacier ice tells Thompson about the region’s past will help climatologists understand what lies ahead.

He likens the Puncak Jaya glaciers to a “dipstick” rising high into the atmosphere.

“There is no other such record in the wider region, which really stretches from the eastern Pacific to the Himalayas,” he said. “It’s the only record of its kind in what is nearly half of the tropical zone.”

Puncak Jaya’s scientific challenge may be greater than the logistical one. Because of the melting, the veteran Allison observed, “it’s not going to be an easy core to interpret.”

Thompson recognizes that, but puts first things first.

“It’s important to get an archive for the future because 20 years from now our technology will be so much more advanced, and our ability to read these records will be much improved,” he said.

He recalled that New Guinea’s surprising glaciers first attracted him as a student long ago, when he found them in a Southern Hemisphere ice atlas. Now, “it’s clear from Andrew Klein’s work that these glaciers are going to disappear.”

Getting there soon is key, Thompson said. “Whatever history is still there, we’ll try to get it.”

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There’s going to be no feeling-out first round for Manny Pacquiao when he collides with Juan Manuel Marquez in their March 15 rematch in Las Vegas.

“We might just jump on this guy again,” trainer Freddie Roach told boxingtalk.net in an interview that was ran yesterday. “We are going to jump on him with both hands this time.”

Pacquiao had so much success in the first three minutes of the fight when he sent Marquez down thrice with his TNT-laden left hand that Roach is going to order the 29-year-old Filipino southpaw to start fast and furious once again.

Marquez, however, wisely evaded the same punch and managed to counter-punch his way to a 12-round split draw.

Despite his optimism, Roach is not counting out the 34-year-old Marquez, who will be staking his World Boxing Council (WBC) super-featherweight crown before an expected sellout crowd at the 12,000-seat Events Center inside Mandalay Bay.

“Yes, we negotiated the final details of the Marquez fight. We signed the contract over there. We also discussed future opponents, but I don’t want to look ahead too much because we have a tough fight ahead of us,” Roach said when asked by scribe Brad Cooney about his recent visit to the Philippines.

Roach expects Pacquiao to report for work at the Wild Card on Vine Street in Hollywood in two weeks time.

Marquez, meanwhile, anticipates a rough outing against Pacquiao that he even decided to begin light training before the holidays in Mexico City.

Pacquiao parades a 45-3-2 win-loss-draw card with 35 knockouts, while Marquez totes a 48-3-1 ledger also with 35 wins inside the distance.

Should Pacquiao settle the score and win convincingly against Marquez, Top Rank big boss Bob Arum will pit him with David Diaz, the reigning WBC lightweight (135 lbs) king in June or July, before a ballyhooed battle at 140 lbs with British bulldog Ricky Hatton sometime in November.

But, as Roach insists, Pacquiao has to take care of Marquez first.

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