Closing a painful chapter of public condemnation and racial recriminations in a Southern city with an elite university, North Carolina’s attorney general dropped all charges Wednesday against three white former Duke University athletes accused by a black stripper of raping her at a house party 13 months ago.

Atty. Gen. Roy Cooper, condemning Durham Dist. Atty. Mike Nifong for "a rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations," said there was "no credible evidence that an attack occurred in that house that night."

Calling the men victims of "a rush to condemn," Cooper said flatly: "We believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges." Several North Carolina lawyers said they could recall no case in which a sitting district attorney was so harshly and publicly rebuked by a fellow prosecutor.

After a 12-week reexamination of the highly charged case, Cooper said accusations by the stripper, 28, who attended historically black North Carolina Central University in Durham, were inconsistent and contradictory. The woman identified the athletes at what Cooper said were deeply flawed photo lineups approved by Nifong.

"No other witness confirms her story," Cooper said at a crowded news conference. "Other evidence contradicts her story. She contradicts herself."

The case exposed racial and socioeconomic fault lines in Durham, a working-class city that has a black population of 40% and is home to a highly selective university. It also prompted bitter discord within Duke, a school with a national reputation for academic excellence — and one supporters say has been unfairly portrayed as preppy and snobbish.

Inflamed by Nifong’s public charges that the supposed rape was racially motivated, some African Americans — joined by some Duke professors — accused the university of tolerating racists and misogynists. Durham City Council members called the lacrosse team "a ticking time bomb that has not been dismantled."

Details of the purported rape, based solely on the allegations of a party stripper, were amplified by wall-to-wall national news coverage. The woman’s story was shocking: Drunken young white men forced her into a bathroom, choked her and repeatedly penetrated her while screaming racial slurs.

Adding to the graphic and sensational allegations were statements by a second stripper hired for a team party that one man — not one of the accused — threatened to sodomize the women with a broomstick. That stripper also said partygoers shouted racial slurs as she left.

Evans’ lawyer, Joseph B. Cheshire, said Nifong "tore his own city apart in a race-class divide … and his acts hurt the reputation of one of the great universities in this country. What this man reaped is unconscionable."

Cheshire also chastised the news media for fanning both the woman’s accusations and Nifong’s incendiary quotes. He said reporters failed to carry out dogged reporting that could have exposed holes in the case early on.

Cooper called Nifong a "rogue prosecutor" and said the case highlighted "the enormous consequences of overreaching by a prosecutor." He proposed a law that would allow the state Supreme Court to remove a prosecutor from a case in certain circumstances.

"There were many points in the case where caution would have served justice better than bravado," Cooper said.

Asked whether Nifong should apologize to the three men, Cooper replied: "I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to other people. I think those people ought to consider doing that."

Nifong, an appointed district attorney then making his first race for elective office, last spring called the defendants "a bunch of hooligans." He said they had shown "a deep racial motivation" and "contempt … for the victim, based on her race."

Nifong faces ethics charges filed by the state bar association for his actions, which included withholding DNA evidence that showed the three defendants were not the sources of genetic material found on the accuser’s underwear and body; the DNA came instead from several unidentified males. Nifong could be disbarred.

Cooper said he had not ruled out filing criminal charges against Nifong after the bar association case is completed. Defense lawyers said they might file civil suits against the district attorney.

The actions of Nifong have smeared the legal community and it is likely more heads will roll as Nifong’s supporters in the DAs office and on the bench have their actions more closely examined.

A man whose family agreed to donate his organs for transplant upon his death was wrongly declared brain-dead by two doctors at a Fresno hospital, records and interviews show.

Only after the man’s 26-year-old daughter and a nurse became suspicious was a third doctor, a neurosurgeon, brought in. He determined that John Foster, 47, was not brain-dead, a condition that would have cleared the way for his organs to be removed, records of the Feb. 21 incident show.

Foster, who had suffered a brain hemorrhage, died 11 days later at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno. By then, Sanchez said, his organs were not viable for donation.

The apparent close call is the second in recent months to raise questions about whether, amid a national organ shortage, doctors might be compromising the care of prospective donors. Law enforcement authorities in San Luis Obispo County are investigating whether a transplant surgeon tried to hasten the death of a 26-year-old patient last year by ordering high volumes of pain medication.

National experts said they believe that it is uncommon for a patient to be declared brain-dead incorrectly. But the ramifications are great both for the potential donors and for the integrity of the organ donation process.

Brain death means that a person has suffered a total and irreversible loss of brain function. The patient is comatose, cannot breathe without support and lacks reflexes. It often is determined by a mixture of physical examination and clinical tests, and meets the legal standard for death.

There are no national criteria for declaring brain death, but California law requires that two physicians independently verify the condition and that those physicians not have any role in procuring the patient’s organs. Organs cannot be retrieved until a patient is declared legally dead.

Foster, an auto mechanic, collapsed Feb. 18 and was diagnosed with an inoperable Pontine bleed, a catastrophic hemorrhage in his brain stem with almost no hope of recovery.

Hours later, hospital personnel alerted the California Transplant Donor Network — the organ procurement group for much of Central and Northern California — that he was a potential candidate for organ donation. Such notification is routine.

Many men claim innocence when staring at iron bars. But James Giles knew he was no rapist — and he believed three fellow Texas prisoners who told him they too were wrongly convicted of rape.

They shared their despair over games of chess and dominoes, worked on longshot appeals together in the law library, and dreamed of the day they would win exoneration from a justice system that failed them.

It has taken nearly 25 years, but with the assistance of DNA testing, the men — all African American — are proving they are indeed innocent. Two were freed from prison. A third was cleared last month, years after serving his sentence. Today, Giles is expected to clear his name and become the 13th man from Dallas County to prove with genetic testing that he was wrongly imprisoned.

Giles, who spent 10 years in prison and was paroled in 1993, is seeking to vacate his 1983 conviction. New evidence suggests that another man — also named James Giles — committed the rape. Dallas County prosecutors more than two decades ago knew about the other James Giles, who lived across the street from the victim, but never told Giles’ defense.

Giles struggled to rebuild his life after he got out of prison, branded a rapist. The skilled construction laborer had a hard time finding menial jobs, and his wife, who stuck with him through his prison term, eventually sought a divorce.

The Dallas County district attorney was scheduled to personally apologize to Giles today. The three wrongly convicted men whom Giles befriended in prison will be cheering in the courtroom.

The wrongful convictions of these four men are some of the most dramatic examples of prosecutions in the Lone Star State that have come under increasing scrutiny.

Dallas County has had more people exonerated by DNA than all but three entire states. Texas, which leads the nation in convictions overturned by genetic testing, has had 27, Illinois, 26, and New York, 23. California has had nine exonerations.

Revisiting cases

With countless current and former Texas prisoners clamoring for testing to clear their names — more than 430 in Dallas County — law enforcement officials predict that the number of overturned convictions will grow exponentially.

Texas prosecutors have typically fought activists’ attempts to revisit cases. But Dallas County Dist. Atty. Craig Watkins, the first African American elected to the office, has forged an unusual alliance with the Innocence Project, a New York-based group that uses DNA testing to challenge convictions.

Watkins has proclaimed "a new day in Dallas" and is promising to right past wrongs of his office — particularly the many disputed convictions during the reign of Henry Wade, Dallas County’s top prosecutor from 1951 to 1987.

Watkins’ office helped reinvestigate the Giles case. The exoneration request must ultimately be approved by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, but with Watkins’ support, that is considered a formality.

Nearly all the Dallas DNA exonerations have involved men who were convicted of sex crimes based on dubious witness accounts. Most are African Americans — Giles will be the 10th.

Unlike many other jurisdictions, including Houston, Dallas County preserved blood samples and other evidence collected decades ago, a stroke of luck that is allowing felons to seek a review of their convictions.

A lawsuit by three older Circuit City Stores Inc. employees, alleging that the retailer violated California age discrimination laws by laying them off because they were earning too much, is part of a surge in age bias complaints from disgruntled baby boomers.

The lawsuit, filed this week, also reflects employers’ contrasting attitudes toward older workers, experts say.

The Plaintiffs, ages 57, 59, and 66, were laid off last week along with 3,400 other workers nationally. Those employees were earning "well above the market-based salary range for their role," according to a company statement, and will be replaced with lower-paid hires.

Valued for their skills and abilities to connect with customers, these more-experienced employees tend to earn more than younger, less-seasoned workers. Some employers are going out of their way to retain these veteran workers.

But other employers, such as Circuit City, are letting them go to cut costs — prompting lawsuits from displaced employees contending that they are being picked on because of their age.

The lawyer who represents employers, said she had seen a 50% rise in age bias cases over the last three years. Other lawyers have reported similar increases.

However, the lawsuit against Circuit City, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, may face legal hurdles because of a recent appeals court decision upholding the retailer’s requirement that workers must arbitrate employment disputes instead of filing in court.

The Richmond, Va.-based retailer laid off the workers in the face of stiff competition and falling sales. Displaced workers were told that they could reapply for jobs with the company at lower pay after 10 weeks, but there was no guarantee of future employment.

The lawyer who represents the workers, Gloria Allred, is seeking class-action status for the case, said Circuit City’s decision had an "adverse impact on older employees." That, she said, opens the way to the age bias claim under California law. Allred said she didn’t yet know how many of the 621 laid-off California workers were 40 or older.

California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, more stringent than those of most states, protects workers age 40 or older. A 2002 amendment to the statute declares that the use of salary as the basis to terminate employees may constitute age discrimination if older workers as a group are negatively affected.

"Terminated employees in other states may or may not have any rights depending on their state law," Allred said. "But California is on the cutting edge of laws that protect employees’ rights from age discrimination."

Allred added that this case could be pioneering. Her office has not found a published opinion dealing with this provision of California law, meaning that although there might be similar cases in trial courts around the state, none have reached the appellate court level at which it could establish legal precedent.

Jerry Garrett roams Atlanta in a Ford Ranger, stopping frequently at the side of the road to pick up old lumber, metal and junk. It is a routine that does not involve the fastening or unfastening of a seat belt.

"I ain’t never liked seat belts," the 55-year-old construction worker said as he pulled into a Lowe’s parking lot in Atlanta. "I don’t believe the government should force working men to wear them."

Garrett is thankful to live in Georgia, where legislators until now have not supported laws requiring pickup drivers to buckle up. Yet lawmakers are considering a bill that would remove pickup trucks from their exemption in the state’s seat belt law.

Safety statistics and lost federal highway grants are increasing the pressure for change in the few states that don’t require universal seat belt use, including Indiana and New Hampshire. But as the battle in Georgia demonstrates, it is not an easily resolved matter.

There, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Don Thomas, says requiring Georgia pickup drivers to wear seat belts would save lives.

But the proposal has serious opposition in the Georgia Legislature: Some say it would inconvenience farmers — and some believe it would be a small, but symbolic, sign of diminishing freedom on American roads.

In Georgia, the pickup is an icon of traditional, rugged independence — so much so, the vehicle made a star appearance in the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. And some drivers are so galled by the notion of seat belts — or harnesses, as they call them — that they cut them out of the vehicle or disable the audio alert.

Georgia pickup drivers were exempted from the state’s law requiring the wearing of seat belts after rural lawmakers argued it would encumber farmers on back roads.

Over the years, the seat-belts-in-pickups debate has become something of a regular political fixture here as legislators have attempted — but failed — to modify the law.

Yet, as pickups have established themselves as urban and suburban vehicles, safety has become a growing concern.

In late March, legislators in Indiana, which exempts passengers and vehicles plated as trucks, approved a bill that would require wearing seat belts — though the House and Senate have not yet reconciled their versions of the bill.

New Hampshire requires children up to age 18 to wear restraints, but not adults. On Thursday, the state’s House voted to insist adults buckle up too. That bill now goes to the Senate.

Forty miles from the sweet pine scents of Yosemite Valley, the national park’s garbage is contributing to a royal stink.

On the west Sierra slope, a gleaming new composting plant is busy converting trash from Yosemite and the rest of Mariposa County.

Residents who live just above it say there are days when it reeks like a dead animal. Other times it’s like sewage.

Residents say they do not mind the park depositing its biodegradables practically in his backyard, but that the smell from the $8-million composting operation which opened next to Mariposa’s landfill last year, is just too much.

When the Composting Plant opened, Mariposa County officials praised it as an innovative, green-minded solution to the region’s growing garbage disposal needs. Environmentally sensitive composting seemed perfect for a region that depends on tourist traffic heading up California Highway 140 to one of America’s most beloved national parks.

Composting also fit the environmental ethos at Yosemite, which has an award-winning recycling program to divert cans, bottles and tons of other reusable materials from its trash.

As boosters envisioned it, the new plant would slash the volume of garbage by half and produce enough compost to eliminate any need for the costly 1,000 dump trucks of dirt brought in each year to blanket the landfill.

But now, as neighbors complain about odors much worse than from the old landfill, county sanitation and health officials are scrambling for answers.

Yosemite officials say they are eager to see a remedy.

In the old days, the park operated dumps right in the valley. Rangers used to make a show of feeding bears at the Curry Village garbage pit. But after World War II, Yosemite started sending its trash to the Mariposa landfill. Most years, trash from the park accounts for about 40% of the dump’s refuse stream.

The park and other federal agencies provided most of the money to build the new plant, a near twin of a composting operation outside Yellowstone National Park.

And they’re watching.

Sanitation officials say the plant’s odor problem appears to stem from the idiosyncrasies of trash disposal in Mariposa County.

Residents of the rural region used to simply burn their trash in empty 55-gallon oil drums. But that pioneer-style practice fell to the state air board’s regulatory rules a few years back. Because the county has never offered municipal garbage collection, most residents took to loading household waste in pickups for routine dump runs.

Unfortunately, that flood of rubbish — 14,000 tons a year — is not the stuff of which good compost is made.

Outside of Yosemite, most residents don’t bother to recycle. Instead, they send a blizzard of empty soft-drink bottles and other plastics into the plant’s eight concrete-walled composting vessels.

The result is a malodorous mix.

When renowned metallurgist Rosie O’Donnell proclaimed on TV on Thursday that Sept. 11, 2001, was a more significant date than most of us realized. It was, in her words, "the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel."

This, of course, came as news to steelworkers, blacksmiths, firefighters, manufacturers of samurai swords and other fools who hadn’t realized that steel is forged in magic furnaces using dragon breath and pixie dust.

O’Donnell made this and other profoundly stupid comments on the daytime talk show "The View," ABC’s update of the ancient practice of women chattering around the village well.

The former "queen of nice" seems to think that the show is the perfect venue to audition as grand marshal for the next tinfoil hat parade. And if you visit O’Donnell’s website (www.rosie.com), you’ll find her application’s supporting materials: all sorts of unadulterated moonbattery presented in the Esperanto of global derangement — a form of instant-message-style free verse.

Some may not be unfamiliar with such psych-ward stylings. Perhaps if you believe the jackbooted thugs are at your door, it’s reasonable to think you don’t have time to spell out your words.

Anyway, in last week’s rant, O’Donnell focused on World Trade Center Building 7, which has become the grassy knoll for 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Asked if the government was responsible for its collapse, she coyly replied that she didn’t know. All she knows is that it’s "impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved" and that, for the "first time in history, steel was melted by fire." Wink, wink. For the record, fire can melt steel, and buildings also collapse when heat weakens steel. But that misses the point. The point is we shouldn’t have to argue with crazy people.

Regardless, it appears that not even the heat of ridicule can weaken O’Donnell’s steely resolve to make an idiot of herself.

You know what? That’s fine. Normally we expect such outbursts from the poor souls who rage against unseen threats at bus stations and public libraries. But even the rich and famous have a right to mutter inanities, shout non sequiturs or shriek possum recipes.

But ABC isn’t obliged to give O’Donnell a nationally televised platform. Barbara Walters, the matriarch of "The View" and its executive producer, is supposed to be a titan of American journalism. She has all the awards any broadcast journalist could ever want. But today she knowingly gives a soapbox to a wacko.

Walters and ABC no doubt will seek comfort in any number of rationalizations, from gooey platitudes about free speech to the glories of diverse opinion to the fundamental unseriousness of Café Vienna-moment television. And yes, human train wrecks make for good ratings — which is why O’Donnell may get another $40 million before her "View" contract expires in June.

Granted, "The View" isn’t "60 Minutes," so why should we care that much if the girl talk gets a little silly? After all, Walters has spent much of her career muddying the distinction between entertainment and hard news, what with her saccharine "What kind of tree would you be?" interviews.

Yet there is a difference between taking silly topics seriously and being silly about serious stuff. When you discuss hair-care products or lavish weddings, the subject telegraphs its own triviality. Walters may risk her journalistic reputation when she jibber-jabbers about such things, but that ship sailed long ago. It’s another thing entirely when ABC’s most venerated on-air journalist gives a megaphone to someone who frets that poor Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was railroaded, who insinuates that the U.S. government had a hand in any part of 9/11 and who insists Elvis Presley is alive and living on an island with Bruce Lee (OK, I made that last one up).

But so far, O’Donnell has gotten a pass because she isn’t a mere wacko but a left-wing wacko. If O’Donnell sounded like Pat Robertson, the network would call in the butterfly net almost immediately. But because O’Donnell’s crazy accusations are directed rightward at that evil George W. Bush, it’s considered forgivable excess.

So come on ABC, for your own credibility, send her someplace where she won’t be a harm to herself or anybody else, someplace with rubber sporks.

Detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were dealt a setback Monday by the Supreme Court, which refused — for now — to hear their claim that they were being denied the right to habeas corpus that is protected by the Constitution.

This right to go before a judge to determine whether detention is lawful is considered a fundamental principle of Anglo-American law, and the Constitution says this privilege of habeas corpus "shall not be suspended" except during invasions or insurrections. But the reach of this right remains in doubt. Bush administration lawyers say the right to habeas corpus does not extend to foreign-born prisoners held by the U.S. military outside the nation’s borders.

The justices voted 6 to 3 against taking up the issue and deciding it in the current term. But the matter was more closely divided than the numbers indicate, since Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy said they voted with the majority only because the prisoners had not tried all the "available remedies" under the law.

The two justices were referring to a provision, added by Congress to defense appropriations legislation in late 2005, that said detainees held by the U.S. military were entitled to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

In these brief hearings, military officers examine whether there is evidence to hold the detainee as an "enemy combatant." The detained men do not have a right to a lawyer, and they cannot challenge, or even see, all the evidence against them. In more than 90% of the cases, the officers upheld the Pentagon’s decision to hold the detainee.

Congress said the detainees could ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the decisions of these tribunals.

None of the current detainees has tried that option, which their lawyers call a sham. Because the appeals court already has ruled that the detainees have no rights under the Constitution, the detainees have virtually no chance of winning relief in that court.

Now, however, lawyers representing the Guantanamo prisoners will have to go through that lower court before they appeal again to the Supreme Court.

For generations, bottled mineral water from the town of Jermuk has been a kind of national tonic in Armenia, proudly sipped like a fine chardonnay in California or taken for its perceived medicinal value, like chicken soup. As the Armenian population here has grown, demand for the water has grown with it.

So when the FDA warned Americans last month to stop drinking five brands of imported Jermuk water because of unsafe levels of arsenic, the action touched off more than a mere product recall for local distributors. It was seen by many as an insult to Armenians, stirring passions from the ethnic enclaves of Glendale and North Hollywood all the way to the mountain resort in the West Asian country that supplies the bubbly water.

After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warning, Canada and Hong Kong followed suit, issuing their own advisories.

The recall swiftly prompted coverage in the Armenian press, with government officials defending the water. One economist went so far as to speculate in the AZG Armenian Daily that the recall was part of a plot by France, Germany and Italy, who export their own mineral water, to prevent competition from Armenian bottlers.

At one shopping center in North Hollywood, Armenian Americans defended the mineral water of their homeland, proudly saying they have continued to drink Jermuk. Some even stocked up on it immediately after news of the warning and before it was pulled from store shelves.

According to the FDA, the arsenic levels in the Armenian water were well above U.S. safety standards for bottled water.

Federal rules permit no more than 10 micrograms of arsenic per liter of bottled water; U.S. government lab tests showed that the recalled water had between 454 and 674 micrograms per liter. (A liter equals about a quart.)