Spitzer said the suit filed in New York City against Intermix Media Inc. of Los Angeles combats the redirecting of home computer users to unwanted Web sites and its own Web site that includes ads, the adding of unnecessary toolbar items and the delivery of unwanted ads that pop up on computer screens. After a six-month investigation Spitzer concluded the company installed a wide range of advertising software on countless personal computers nationwide. The AP

State and federal judges approved 1,710 applications for wiretaps of wire, oral or electronic communications last year, and four states — New York, California, New Jersey and Florida — accounted for three out of every four surveillance orders, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. That agency is required to collect the figures and report them to Congress. 

The numbers, released Thursday, do not include court orders for terror-related investigations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, which reached a record 1,754 warrants last year, according to the Justice Department. The AP

Frist's political committee reimbursed the drugmaker $10,809, the equivalent of a first-class fare for the same trip on a commercial airline, as campaign rules require. The price, a fraction of the cost of a charter flight, was almost a wash for Frist; Schering had donated $10,000 to his committee in 2003-04. What he got was worth far more: the convenience, luxury and efficiency of flying on his own schedule.

The drug company's friendly gesture toward the Senate's most powerful member illustrates the political clout of the pharmaceutical industry. It will be needed in the months ahead as the industry faces the threat of increased federal regulation, brought on by mounting concerns about the safety of the nation's drug supply. USA Today

Secrets involving details of mob murders, law enforcement sources said.

Secrets that Frank Calabrese Sr. never should have uttered once the deadly deeds were done, according to Outfit code.

Secrets that were caught on tape.

Doing the taping was Frank Calabrese Jr., who put his life on the line by wearing a listening device while in prison to help build a case against his father.

Some of those secrets unfolded into public view Monday as federal prosecutors revealed what is described as the most significant racketeering indictment ever against the Chicago Outfit. As part of the federal Operation Family Secrets, prosecutors charged the entire Outfit as a criminal enterprise and laid 18 murders and one attempted murder at the doorstep of the Chicago mob.

"Today, the Outfit takes a hit," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said. Chicago Sun-Times

The light from distant quasars, enigmatic and violent galaxy-birthing events on the shores of time, some 10 billion light-years away, has been magnified by the gravitational force of lumps and irregularities in the structure of the nearby cosmos. So the quasars appear slightly brighter in telescopes than they actually are, according to a multinational team of researchers led by Dr. Ryan Scranton of the University of Pittsburgh.

They reached that conclusion after sifting a mountain of data about 13 million galaxies and other celestial objects, obtained by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a continuing effort to remap the heavens.

The magnification, they said, confirms the dark picture cosmologists have built up in the last few years, in which the atoms that make up stars and people are overwhelmed by clouds of mysterious dark matter and that matter is in turn overwhelmed by something even stranger, so-called dark energy, which seems to be wrenching space and time apart faster and faster, taking the galaxies for a potentially fatal ride into endless cold and loneliness.

"This is all hanging together," said Dr. Scranton, lead author of a paper that will be published in The Astrophysical Journal and is being posted today on the physics Web site, www.arXiv.org. The astronomers said that cosmic magnification gave them a new way to weigh the universe and to investigate its evolution. NYT (reg/req)

But in the ever-so-flawed real world, all those things do happen. And although they happen even in the calmest of markets, real estate brokers and lawyers say that home sales in New York City are now more vulnerable than ever to stumble or crumble at the finish line. There are no data to record how many closings die or are delayed, but brokers are seeing and hearing about more 11th-hour problems. NYT (reg/req)

Make no mistake: The Bush Administration and its ideological allies are employing every means available to undermine journalists' ability to exercise their First Amendment function to hold power accountable. In fact, the Administration recognizes no such constitutional role for the press. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has insisted that the media "don't represent the public any more than other people do.... I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function." The Nation

Some observers, including people inside the Public Broadcasting Service, see these recent developments as troubling. PBS, they say, is being forced to toe a more conservative line in its programming by the Republican-dominated agency that provides about $30 million in federal funds to the Alexandria-based service. The Washington Post (reg/req)

What distinguishes the current crop of outsiders is the sheer number who have arrived in the last two years or so, many of them very young and prepared to make the movies themselves rather than relying on studio executives or other insiders. NYT (reg/req)

Even though the economy added 2.2 million jobs in 2004 and produced strong growth in corporate profits, wages for the average worker fell for the year, after adjusting for inflation - the first such drop in nearly a decade. NYT (reg/req)

Quiznos, Jason's Deli and Fazoli's are about to join other chains that led the way in cutting trans fats — Legal Sea Foods, Ruby Tuesday and Au Bon Pain. 

"It's a flood compared to what it was," says Stephen Joseph, president of BanTransFats.com, a consumer group pressing foodmakers and sellers to dump trans fats. USA Today

Textiles are no longer just the stuff of clothing, carpets and furniture covering. Made of high-tech threads, they can also be found in lifesaving medical devices and the bodies of racing cars. One architect is proposing building a skyscraper out of carbon fibers.

"I think there's more areas that are using textiles than there were before," said Matilda McQuaid, head of the textiles department at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where 150 items showing the advances of materials science are on display in a show called "Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance."

In fact, textiles have long been used for more than clothes and rugs, said Dr. Peter Schwartz, head of the textile engineering department at Auburn University. "The Romans used jute fabrics for road stabilization," he said. NYT (reg/req)

US army figures indicate that since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, about 5500 military personnel have absconded.

In 2003 an independent advisory service for US military personnel, the GI Rights Hotline, received 32,000 calls, twice as many as in 2001, from soldiers wanting to leave the military. 

Some refuse to serve for political reasons, others are just unwilling to go to a country where 1500 US soldiers have been killed and more than 11,000 wounded. Aljazeera

These flowers are cheap, thin plastic bags that are tossed to the ground by consumers. This kind of litter has reached a critical mass in Kenya - clogging streams, choking animals and piling up into little mountains of disease. NYT (reg/req)

It will be a partial eclipse rather than a total one, in which the Earth is cast into darkness. But it will be the last partial solar eclipse visible from the continental United States until May 20, 2012. The AP

The two branches are shifting from a strategy that focused first on wooing potential recruits to one aimed at gaining the trust and attention of their parents by using grassroots initiatives and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns.

The public relations push comes as the Army and Marines, which absorb the brunt of the casualties in Iraq, encounter one of their worst periods in recruitment. USA Today

At least 3,797 people were executed in 25 countries in 2004, according to a report released today by Amnesty International.

The report says China easily operates the most stringent capital punishment regime, with an estimated 3,400 executions last year. In second place, Iran executed at least 159, Vietnam at least 64, and 59 prisoners were put to death in the US.

The number of executions worldwide last year was the highest since 1996, when 4,272 were carried out. The Independent

What is believed to be the first psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, was posted this month by Cornell University Law Library on its Web site (www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/donovan/hitler/). Although declassified some years ago, the report, written in 1943, has not been widely cited or available to the public, historians and librarians at Cornell say. NYT (reg/req)

But when it came to sexual attraction, most picked those with differing facial characteristics, said psychologists at Aberdeen University. The results suggest that people steer clear of those who "look like family" to avoid inbreeding. BBC

With the annual sale in full swing in much of the United States, scout leaders are facing critics who think selling $400 million worth of cookies might not be the smartest move in a country where childhood obesity is considered an epidemic. 

If that wasn't enough, the Girl Scouts are fending off concerns that the cookies have high levels of unhealthy trans fats. The national office has even had to deny that child labor was used to produce the chocolate that covers the popular Thin Mints. NYT (reg/req)

Facilities numbered about 8,000 in the mid-1980s, and experts now put the total at between 40,000 and 50,000, most consisting of hundreds of units averaging 100 square feet each. Christian Science Monitor

In a new book published last week, "Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums," the pope attacks Western democratic society for being so obsessed with freedom that it has lost its sense of good and evil.

In the "negative" society of the West, the pope writes, "the principle to which people aspire is to think and act as if God did not exist."

There are such "enormous economic forces" behind the Western antigospel campaign, which supports divorce, free love, abortion, and euthanasia, that the Pope wonders whether the Western way of life is in fact a "new totalitarianism cunningly disguised as democracy."

He noted that it was a democratic parliament in Germany that allowed the election of Hitler in the 1930s. "We have to question the legal regulations that have been decided in the parliaments of present-day democracies," he wrote. Christian Science Monitor