WASHINGTON - For 46,000 Catholics, it was a Mass like no other, with the altar standing on centerfield at a ballpark and the presiding clergyman arriving in a bulletproof vehicle.

But Pope Benedict XVI’s Mass in the nation’s capital Thursday was also different from a typical service in another way: Lay people were not asked to distribute Communion, which was administered exclusively by 300 priests and deacons.

Organizers of the Mass at Nationals Park were only following the letter of church law. But to some Roman Catholics, the ceremony was symbolic of what they see as Benedict’s desire to erect clear boundaries between clergy and lay people.

“What he wants to do really is to reinforce the old categories and classifications — different roles for different people,” said David Gibson, author of books on Benedict and the future of the U.S. church.

“Men and women, priests and lay people. Each one has their role according to their talents, their ordained status in the church.”

The clear division of roles doesn’t sit well with all American Catholics, who are used to living in a democracy. Some would like a greater say in church affairs, including choosing their parish priests. Others cherish the distinct roles held by clergy and point to several examples of the two working together in harmony.

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Lawyers for George Lucas’ Lucasfilm Ltd. and a British prop designer faced off in London’s High Court Tuesday over rights to the molded white Stormtrooper uniforms from the “Star Wars” films.

Standing alongside the bewigged, black-robed lawyers in court was the object of their dispute a 6-foot tall, helmeted warrior of the evil Galactic Empire. Lucasfilm attorney Michael Bloch called the menacing figure “one of the most iconic images in modern culture.”

Lucasfilm claims violation of copyright and trademarks by prop designer Andrew Ainsworth, who sculpted the Stormtrooper helmets for the first “Star Wars” movie in 1977. London-based Ainsworth sells replicas of the helmets and armor, which he says are made from the original molds, on his Web site.

Lucasfilm won a $20 million judgment against Ainsworth in a California court in 2006, and is seeking to have it enforced in Britain.

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A word of warning to office workers everywhere: The next time you feel the urge to curse the geeky-looking IT guy you think caused your laptop to crash, breathe deeply and avoid the smart-alecky comment.

The Mister Peepers-looking guy could be another harmless nerd, but, then again, he could also be Joe Lauzon.

Lauzon is the baby-faced one-time network administrator who looks like he’s still in junior high but fights like he’s the toughest guy on the block.

Which, in most cases, it turns out he is.

Lauzon, 23, is a UFC lightweight good enough that the division’s champion, B.J. Penn, called him “phenomenal” and invited Lauzon from Massachusetts to train with him in Hilo, Hawaii.

He faces Kenny Florian in the main event of Ultimate Fight Night 13 on Wednesday in suburban Denver, an important bout that will push the winner closer to a shot at the title in perhaps the UFC’s most stacked division.

“We’ve got so many great 155s, it’s hard to say who’s next (to meet the winner of the May 24 title bout between Penn and Sean Sherk at UFC 84 in Las Vegas),” UFC president Dana White said. “But this is a huge fight for both of these guys, because a win will be so significant.”

Less than two years ago, Lauzon was content with a full-time career as the guy in charge of maintaining a 130-computer network for Charles River Analytics in Cambridge, Mass., while training for his fighting career part time.

And while he was preparing for what was then the biggest bout of his career, against former UFC lightweight champion Jens Pulver at UFC 63 in Anaheim, Calif., on Sept. 23, 2006, Lauzon was insisting he didn’t want to become a full-time fighter and that he’d lose interest in fighting if it became a job.

After a 47-second knockout over the veteran Pulver and a successful run on “The Ultimate Fighter 5,” Lauzon rethought his decision.

His fuzzy, youthful looks belies a rugged and fierce competitor.

“The only part of him that isn’t really athletic is his face,” said WEC featherweight champion Urijah Faber, who trained with Lauzon in Hawaii at Penn’s camp. “He’s really a strong guy. He can go and go and he’s very athletic. You look at his face and you might think, ‘Ah, this is just another guy,’ but if you get in there with him, you find out he’s got a lot of substance to him (as a fighter).”

Lauzon quit the IT job after his success on “The Ultimate Fighter,” taking up Penn’s offer to train him. But Lauzon didn’t give up his passion for technology just because he became a full-time fighter.

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PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers on Wednesday announced they had detected methane in the atmosphere of a planet 63 light years away, boosting prospects for identifying any life that exists beyond our Solar System.The team also confirmed previous suspicions that the planet, known by the tag of HD 189733b, has water in its atmosphere.
Reporting their work in the weekly British journal Nature, astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the orbiting US-European Hubble telescope to get an infrared spectroscopic signature of the planet’s atmosphere.Spectroscopy entails breaking light into its components to reveal the “fingerprints” of chemicals it contains.They found an unmistakeable signature for methane, a molecule of carbon and hydrogen that can in some conditions play a key role in creating the conditions for life.

In this case, life on HD 189733b is almost certainly out of the question.

The planet, located in the constellation of Vulpecula, or the Little Fox, is one of a type of large planets called “hot Jupiters,” whose surface is scorched and where liquid water could not exist. (more…)

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NEW YORK - The call girl at the center of the prostitution scandal that prompted Gov. Eliot Spitzer to resign in disgrace has been identified as a 22-year-old aspiring musician who struggled in a broken home as a child.

The New York Times reported that the real name of the woman — identified as “Kristen” in court papers alleging that Spitzer paid thousands of dollars for her services — is Ashley Alexandra Dupre.

Don D. Buchwald, a New York lawyer, confirmed to The Associated Press that he represents Dupre, but he wouldn’t comment further.

Dupre told the newspaper she had slept very little since the allegations against Spitzer were revealed, and she declined to comment when asked by the Times when she first met him and how many times they had been together.

She told the Times she was worried about paying her rent in a ninth-floor Manhattan apartment since her boyfriend recently left her. She said she was considering moving back in with her family in New Jersey.

A man who answered the phone at her mother’s home in New Jersey and identified himself as Dupre’s brother told The Associated Press he had no idea why Dupre would agree to be interviewed in the scandal.

“She’s just trying to get through this,” he said. “We are all trying to be supportive of her.”

Dupre’s MySpace page provides a window into her life as she went from a broken home in New Jersey to a music career in the city.

“I have been alone,” she wrote. “I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own. I am here, in NY because of my music.”

In an Aug. 30 blog posting on MySpace, she wrote: “The past few months have been a roller coaster with so called friends, lovers, and family … but its something you have to deal with and confront in order to move on …”

“What destroys me strengthens me” is the slogan next to a photograph of her. The photos show her at various places, including in a bikini on a boat in a tropical locale. The number of hits to the page soared by the tens of thousands after the story broke, and many recent postings to her page ridiculed her.

Dupre describes her favorite musical artists as Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and Frank Sinatra, among many others.

Her Web site boasts a recording of a song, “What We Want.”
“I know what you want, you got what I want,” she sings. “I know what you need. Can you handle me?”

Records show she lives in Manhattan a luxury rental skyscraper called The Chelsea Landmark, where a gaggle of reporters and TV trucks quickly gathered Wednesday night. Rents there start at $3500 a month for a small studio, neighbors said. The 35-story building opened less than a year ago.

The apartments feature imported Italian tiles, 9-foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling corner windows. The building has a gym with a whirlpool and yoga and Pilates studios.

Dupre apparently appeared in federal court Monday as a witness in the case against four people accused of operating the Emperors Club VIP prostitution ring.

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ALBANY, N.Y. - With pressure mounting on Gov. Eliot Spitzer to resign over a call-girl scandal, investigators said Tuesday he was clearly a repeat customer who spent tens of thousands of dollars — perhaps as much as $80,000 — with the high-priced prostitution service over an extended period of time.

Spitzer and his family, meanwhile, remained secluded in their Fifth Avenue apartment, while Republicans began talking impeachment, and few if any fellow Democrats came forward to defend him. A death watch of sorts began at the state Capitol, where whispers of “What have you heard?” echoed through nearly every hallway of the ornate, 109-year-old building.

On Monday, when the scandal broke, prosecutors said in court papers that Spitzer had been caught on a wiretap spending $4,300 with the Emperors Club VIP call-girl service, with some of the money going toward a night with a prostitute named Kristen, and the rest to be used as credit toward future trysts. The papers also suggested that Spitzer had done this before.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a law enforcement official said Tuesday that Spitzer, in fact, had spent tens of thousands of dollars with the Emperors Club. Another official said the amount could be as high as $80,000. But it was not clear over what period of time that was spent.

Still another law enforcement official said investigators found that during the tryst with Kristen on the night before Valentine’s Day, Spitzer used two rooms at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington — one for himself, the other for the prostitute. Sometime around 10 p.m., Spitzer sneaked away from his security detail and made his way to the room where she was waiting, the official said. The three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

In the court papers, an Emperors Club employee was quoted as telling Kristen that Client 9 — Spitzer, according to investigators — “would ask you to do things that … you might not think were safe,” and Kristen responded by saying: “I have a way of dealing with that. … I’d be, like, listen, dude, you really want the sex?”

A law enforcement official said Tuesday the discussion had to do with Spitzer’s preference not to wear a condom and the call-girl’s insistence that he use one.

Spitzer’s vast personal wealth would have made it easy for him to spend thousands of dollars on prostitutes. The scion of a wealthy Manhattan real estate developer, Spitzer reported $1.9 million in income to the IRS in 2006.

Meanwhile, Albany insiders on Tuesday said the governor was still trying to decide how to proceed. Options included quitting immediately, or waiting to use resignation as a bargaining chip with federal prosecutors to avoid indictment.

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OSLO (Reuters) - The wreck of a British warship sunk by the Germans during World War Two, killing more than 100 men, has been discovered on the bottom of a deep fjord in the north of Norway, the Norwegian Navy said.

HMS Hunter went down on April 10, 1940, in the Ofot fjord outside of the Arctic port of Narvik during the first of two battles between the British and the Nazis, during which several other ships were sunk and never seen again in the deep inlet.

“We searched the area where HMS Hunter most likely was located and spent around 14 hours before we found the vessel,” said lieutenant Tom Thorgrimsen at KNM Tyr, the ship that made the discovery last week.

A memorial ceremony was held on Saturday for the victims, with over a thousand British and Norwegian soldiers taking part.

KNM Tyr is designed for deep water operations, and was testing new equipment which can reach depths of 1,000 meters below the surface.

HMS Hunter, an H-class destroyer, sank after taking hits from German forces, leading it to collide with another British vessel, HMS Hotspur.

“This is a big fjord, and it has not been a priority to find the vessel earlier,” Norwegian Navy spokesman John Inge Oglaend told Reuters, adding that there are thousands of shipwrecks along the Norwegian coast, making work difficult.

Supply of iron ore, which was transported to the ice-free port of Narvik from Kiruna in Sweden was the direct cause of the battles. Both sides wanted to secure its iron supply, used to produce steel, while denying it to the enemy.

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London, March 3: Princess Diana was on the contraceptive pill and enjoyed a normal sexual relationship with Hasnat Khan, the Pakistani heart surgeon confirmed today in an astonishingly candid 4,171-word statement read out today in the high court in London.

Hasnat said he and Diana had spoken of marriage but without going into specifics and revealed she was the one who ended their relationship after she had gone on holiday with Dodi Fayed, son of Mohammed Al Fayed, the wealthy owner of Harrods.

Hasnat refused to give evidence to the inquest currently examining how Diana died either in person or by videolink.

But a statement he had given police under his full name of Hasnat Ahmad Khan set out how he had met the princess in August or September, 1995, when she was visiting a patient at the Royal Brompton Hospital where he was a surgeon, and how their friendship quickly became intimate.

“I did notice that she was also very flirtatious with everyone,” commented Hasnat. He invited her to come with him to his uncle’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon. “I was very surprised when she said she would. We drove there together and Diana met my aunt and uncle. We had dinner in a restaurant and then drove back to London. After this, our friendship turned into a relationship.”

He said: “Diana was very protective towards me and wanted to shield me from the attention.” By November, he began to be pursued by the media which had rumbled the relationship.

Such detail has been provided that filmmakers will now be tempted now to make the Diana-Hasnat affair into a movie. (more…)

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WASHINGTON - Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting John McCain has a lunch date Wednesday with President Bush at the White House — and the promise of a Bush endorsement.

There’ll be a formal welcome at the North Portico, followed by lunch in Bush’s private dining room and an endorsement in the Rose Garden.

In recent weeks, Bush has gone out of his way to defend the senator’s conservative credentials, saying criticism of the Arizona senator has been grossly unfair. The two were bitter rivals in 2000.

“The president has said he looks forward to vigorously campaigning for the GOP and tonight it has become clear that the GOP nominee will be Sen. John McCain,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Tuesday night. “Of course the president is going to endorse the GOP nominee, which is going to be Senator John McCain.”

Bush made morning phone calls to McCain’s former rivals Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson to congratulate them on their primary campaigns. He intends to call Rudy Giuliani later.

“He said he appreciated their ability to keep their sense of humor and that he looks forward to working them in the ‘08 election,” Perino said.

Asked about McCain’s past disagreements with Bush, she said: “The point of these elections is for the candidate to run as their own person. Elections are about change and going forward, and one of the most attractive things about Senator McCain to the Republican Party is that he has been his own person. He has blazed his own trail and he will have to make the case as to why voters should vote for him.”

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MOGADISHU, Somalia - The U.S. launched an airstrike Monday on a Somali town held by Islamic extremists to go after a group of terrorist suspects, U.S. defense officials said.

Three missiles hit Dobley, a town four miles from the Kenyan border, destroying a home and seriously injured eight people, police and witnesses said. The remnants of an Islamic force that had once ruled much of southern Somalia took over Dobley last week.

“It was a deliberate, precise strike against a known terrorist and his associates,” one U.S. military official said in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the record.

He gave few other details, except to say the targets were believed staying in building known to be used regularly by terrorist suspects.

Last year, the U.S. shelled suspected al-Qaida targets in Somalia, using gunfire from a U.S. Navy ship off the shore of the east African nation.

“We woke up with a loud and big bang and when we came out we found our neighbor’s house completely obliterated as if no house existed here,” a resident of the town, Fatuma Abdullahi, told The Associated Press. “We are taking shelter under trees. Three planes were flying over our heads.”

A police officer said the eight wounded were hit by shrapnel. An aid worker in Dobley said up to six people were still trapped in the rubble by midday. It was not clear whether these victims were included in the police officer’s tally.

“A minimum of two bombs were dropped,” said the aid worker, who asked that his name not be used because he is not authorized to speak to the media. The worker spoke to the AP by telephone. “Between four and six people are in the rubble.”

Clan elder Ahmed Nur Dalab said a senior Islamic official, Hassan Turki, was in town Sunday to mediate between his fighters and a militia loyal to the government. Turki’s forces took over Dobley last week.

Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on each other.

In early 2007, Somali troops and their Ethiopian allies drove out a radical Islamic group to which Turki is allied that had taken over much of southern Somalia. The Islamic forces have fought to regain power.

AP writer Pauline Jelinek contributed to this report from Washington.

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