Trent Christopher Benson made an initial court appearance Thursday and was ordered held without bond. The public defender’s office was appointed to represent him, but a lawyer has not been named.

Police in suburban Mesa said Benson has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of violent sexual assault, three counts of kidnapping and one count of sexual assault.

Investigators watched Benson for a day before arresting him Wednesday and questioning him about four attacks that date back to 2004.

Police said Benson had a criminal record that includes arrests for soliciting prostitutes, which shocked his co-workers.

“This is unbelievable. It would be the last person that I would have expected,” said Mike Fraccola, a used car dealer in Mesa. “He seemed happy in his everyday life.”

However, Fraccola added that Benson “was always somewhat quiet and subdued. He was a little bit mysterious. No one really knows what he did with his spare time.”

Bill Fralick, a former co-worker at the dealership, said Benson told him he enjoyed strip clubs.

But “there is no way, shape or form I would have thought him capable of harming anyone,” Fralick said. “If I had kids, I would have let them be around him.”

Authorities said DNA evidence links Benson to four female victims. The first was a 21-year-old who was found strangled and partially clothed in a west Mesa alley on Nov. 4, 2004.

Nearly three years later, on Oct. 14, 2007, a 44-year-old was found strangled and raped on a west Mesa street.

A Mesa woman was abducted and raped Aug. 16, 2007, but managed to escape. A 35-year-old Phoenix woman was abducted Nov. 4, 2007, behind a business and later was found unconscious by a passer-by.

Each of the fires that Brian Crowder, 31, is accused of setting Wednesday was quickly extinguished, Police Chief Bill Berger said, and investigators have not connected Crowder to larger fires that destroyed about 30 homes and 140 structures.

But Berger called Crowder “a prime suspect” in a string of fires intentionally set around the city Sunday.

Firefighters continued to make gains against the flames Thursday, allowing some schools to reopen and some area residents to return.

Investigators recommended Crowder be charged with three counts of intentionally setting fire to public land - each count carrying up to three years in prison.

Crowder told reporters watching as police led him to a transport van that he may have accidentally sparked a fire, and ran because he was driving without a license.

“I believe that I accidentally may have - may have - started by tossing a cigarette out the door,” said Crowder.

Kepler Funk, who represented Crowder at a short bond hearing, said he fears the public has rushed to judgment against his client. He said police were still looking for other suspects, and Crowder hadn’t been accused of the destructive fires.

“People are losing their homes. It’s serious, it’s horrible, it’s tragic,” Funk said. “But it’s too quick for anyone to jump to the conclusion that this is the man that is in fact responsible for all that devastation.”

Records show Crowder has drug, burglary and automobile theft convictions dating back to 1996.

Berger said investigators on Thursday began interviewing everyone in Brevard County with a history of arson arrests.

Todd Schroeder, spokesman for the state’s Division of Forestry, estimated the fires were 60 percent contained, up from 40 percent contained on Wednesday. Winds had died down and humidity was up above 90 percent.

“People are starting to feel a little bit more comfortable again,” Palm Bay Councilman Ed Geier said. “There’s no big black clouds in the sky. It’s beautiful blue up there.”

Elsewhere, scattered fires were still burning around the state. A total of almost 26,000 acres - 40 square miles - were ablaze as of Thursday, according to an emergency management report.

Aside from the fires in Palm Bay and Malabar, the majority of the fires were in Glades County. In an area around Lake Okeechobee, roughly 11,000 acres had burned or were still burning, though no structures had been damaged.

In California, crews were trying to make more progress against a stubborn 340-acre wildfire. The blaze on Mount Baldy, 45 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, was being fed by winds reaching 40 mph. The fire was 25 percent contained and had moved sluggishly away from populated areas since it began Tuesday.

Firefighters also fought a brush fire in central Los Angeles’ Griffith’s Park and a grass fire in the San Fernando Valley’s Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve.

Retired judge Martin Wabl told the State Court in Graz, Austria, that Ms Kampusch’s mother Brigitte Sirny hatched the plot with Wolfgang Priklopil, the Daily Mail reported.

Priklopil held Ms Kampusch captive and committed suicide hours after she escaped in 2006.

Mr Wabl said Mrs Sirny had wanted to cover up the sexual abuse of her daughter when she was ten.

He made similar allegations after Ms Kampusch’s disappearance in 1998 but was fined for defamation, the paper said. He had now returned to court to have his criminal record erased.

Witnesses told the court Mrs Sirny had known Priklopil well with one saying she often hit her daughter.

Neighbour Anneliese Glaser, who also worked at a delicatessen owned by Mrs Sirny, said Mrs Sirny had little time for her daughter, the paper said.

“I never saw her abuse the child but she would come to me often and the red fingerprints of Sirny would be clearly visible in her face where she hit her,” she told the court.

“When Natascha resurfaced in 2006, I saw the picture of Priklopil and I recognised him instantly. He was at her shop with another man when I was there repairing the electrics.”

Ms Kampusch disappeared on her way to school in March 1998.

Shortly after her disappearance, a Vienna newspaper published photographs found in Mrs Sirny’s flat that showed Ms Kampusch wearing lipstick and riding boots, brandishing a whip and showing her private parts.

Mrs Sirny dismissed the photographs as “harmless horseplay”, although a psychiatrist described them as “highly sexually charged and taken for the sexual delectation of the person behind the camera” , the paper said.

No charges were ever brought against Mrs Sirny.

Ms Kampusch testified for 30 minutes in a closed courtroom due to the sexual nature of the evidence. She refused to answer questions from reporters outside the court, the paper said.

Judge Juergen Schweiger has said she was not sexually abused as a child. He will deliver a written verdict in a fortnight, the paper said.

Lori Drew of St Louis, Missouri was indicted on Thursday on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorisation to obtain information to inflict emotional distress.

Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.

Drew allegedly helped create a fake MySpace account to contact neighbour Megan Meier who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans.

At the time of the incident, the Drews and the Meiers lived four doors apart in Waterford Crystal Drive, in the town of Dardenne Prairie. The Drew’s teenage daughter and Megan were friends.

The online relationship between “Josh” and Megan bloomed for several weeks before the tone suddenly changed.

On October 15, 2006, Josh sent Megan a message saying, ‘I don’t want to be friends with you anymore because you’re not nice to your friends’.

That post triggered a flood of hate posts from other users.

“All of Josh’s friends and all of Megan’s friends were calling Megan a whore, a fat ass. Calling her all kinds of god awful names,” Megan’s mother,Tina, told the ABC network in an interview last year.

Meier hanged herself on the evening of October 16, 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including the last message sent from Josh which read: “the world would be a better place without you, and have a s**t rest of your life.”

After that, Josh’s profile vanished from MySpace.

It wasn’t until several weeks after Megan’s death that the Meiers discovered Drew’s involvement in the fake MySpace profile.

Drew, who was 48 at the time of the incident, has denied creating the account and sending messages to Megan.

She claimed through her lawyers that she did not instigate the Josh Evans profile, nor did she use the fake profile to communicate with Megan. While she knew about the ruse, the lawyer said, she was apparently unaware that the Josh profile had been used to attack her neighbour’s daughter.

She claims the profile was the work of her teenage daughter and a teenage employee called Ashley Grills.

Last month, Grills, now 19, went on national TV saying that while she was responsible for setting up the fake Josh profile, Lori Drew and her daughter were also involved in the cruel hoax

Grills also said she wrote the message to Megan about the world being a better place without her. The message was supposed to end the online relationship with “Josh” because Grills felt the joke had gone too far.

“I was trying to get her angry so she would leave him alone and I could get rid of the whole MySpace,” Grills said.

Authorities in Missouri investigated Megan’s death but failed to charge Drew after they were unable to find a law that she had broken.

The charges being laid by federal prosecutors allege that Drew defrauded MySpace by helping set up a bogus profile,

US Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien said this was the first time the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. It has been used in the past to address hacking.

“This was a tragedy that did not have to happen,” O’Brien said.

Both the girl and MySpace are named as victims in the case, he said.

Drew will be arraigned in St. Louis and then moved to Los Angeles for trial.

The indictment says MySpace members agree to abide by terms of service that include, among other things, not promoting information they know to be false or misleading; soliciting personal information from anyone under age 18 and not using information gathered from the Web site to “harass, abuse or harm other people.”

Drew and others who were not named conspired to violate the service terms from about September 2006 to mid-October that year, according to the indictment. It alleges they registered as a MySpace member under a phony name and used the account to obtain information on the girl.

Drew and her coconspirators “used the information obtained over the MySpace computer system to torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass the juvenile MySpace member,” the indictment charged.

After the girl killed herself, Drew and the others deleted the information for the account, the indictment said.

The Dalai Lama on Saturday encouraged people gathered at the University of Michigan to preserve their own religious traditions while respecting others with differing beliefs.

“As you know, I always believed since all different traditions have the same potential to bring inner peace, inner value … and therefore it is important to keep one’s own tradition,” he told about 8,000 people at Crisler Arena.

The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader said he learned about Islam, Christianity and Judaism through personal contact and that he has a “genuine admiration and respect and appreciation for those traditions.”

A hush had fallen over those at the basketball arena as the Dalai Lama walked on the main floor stage. The audience, as well as monks and others sitting cross-legged on the stage floor, rose as he emerged.

The Dalai Lama, who fled to India after a failed uprising in 1959 in Tibet, arrived in the U.S. last week, a day after demonstrators disrupted the Olympic torch run in San Francisco in a protest of China’s treatment of his people.
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A severe tropical storm lashed southern China on Saturday bringing gale-force winds, as authorities reported the rescue of 38 fishermen who sheltered in reefs as the typhoon approached, state media said.

Typhoon Neoguri brought more than 260 millimetres (10 inches) of rain per hour as it hit Guangdong province after crossing Hainan island the night before, Xinhua news agency reported.

The storm caused transport chaos in neighbouring Hong Kong and Macau as ferry services and flights were cancelled or delayed.

Ferries between Macau and Hong Kong were halted after the former Portuguese colony raised the number eight gale signal in the afternoon, Hong Kong radio RTHK reported. Gusts of up to 162 kilometres (100 miles) an hour were recorded in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Observatory said.

Dozens of flights to and from Hong Kong were cancelled or delayed, according to the airport website. Most of the affected flights were to and from mainland China.

No casualties have been reported and the typhoon weakened to a severe tropical storm after it hit Hainan, Xinhua said.

A separate report from the news agency said the storm had affected 1.3 million people in Hainan, or one in six of the island’s population.

In addition, 550 houses had been damaged, and the direct financial losses came to 337 million yuan (48 million US dollars).
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PIER GIORGIO FRASSATI is coming to Sydney for World Youth Day. He has been dead since 1925 but that will not stop him playing an important role in the Catholic festival.

He was only 24 when he died, after being ill with polio for a week, but he has become a role model for young Catholics because of his fervent faith, not to mention his good looks, robust physique and sunny nature. His favourite sports were skiing and mountain climbing in the Alps, which rise like an amphitheatre behind Turin.

Despite the 83 years since his death, his body is reported to be in surprisingly good condition. Interviewed by phone, the cathedral parish priest, Father Gardiglio, said the body was intact.

A relative saw Pier Giorgio’s body when it was exhumed during the procedure that led to his recognition as Blessed, the phase before recognition of sainthood. The relative said: “It was like meeting him. His body was intact, his skin was fresh.”

The idea of bringing his body to Sydney seems to come from personal contacts between the Frassati family and the archdiocese of Sydney. Anthony Fisher, an auxiliary bishop of Sydney, is a member of the Dominican order, which inspired Pier Giorgio.

After Bishop Fisher visited Turin this year Pier Giorgio’s tomb was opened. World Youth Day said that his body would be flown to

Sydney in June in a new, sealed coffin to be displayed in St Mary’s Cathedral during the festival. It would be accompanied by a photographic exhibition and might be displayed elsewhere in Sydney, too. For pilgrims, being in his presence will be a matter of faith.

One website devoted to him describes him as the saint for the youth of the third millennium.

He believed that Catholics should practise their faith out of enthusiasm rather than duty. He was active in the Catholic University Students Federation as well as the St Vincent de Paul Society.

His father, Alfredo, a lawyer and journalist, was a founder and editor of the Turin newspaper La Stampa. He was also an Italian ambassador in Berlin before World War II and, later, a senator.
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NASA wants astronauts who return to the moon to take one long step for mankind by staying there for up to six months.

The US space agency announced it hoped to build moon bases with an intricate transportation and power system that can house astronauts for long stays.

NASA is examining different designs for lunar outposts that could be inspired by the orbiting International Space Station (ISS), NASA’s Director of Advanced Capabilities Division, Carl Walz said yesterday.

“We need to establish a long, extended presence on the moon, up to six months - same as the time we spend at ISS,” Mr Walz said at a forum on NASA’s future, at the University of Miami.

The ISS usually accommodates three scientists, although it can house more when astronauts arrive on board NASA’s space shuttle on scientific missions.

The station contains a complex set of laboratories from the US, Russia, Europe and Japan that allow scientists to study the effects of very low gravity on humans and plants.

US space officials plan to return to the moon by 2020.

“We will live at the moon, work at the moon and use its resources,” Mr Walz said.

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South Korea’s first astronaut returned to Earth on Saturday, touching down with two International Space Station crew members in a cramped Russian landing pod, space officials said.

The Soyuz craft landed slightly off its target in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan, but Korean scientist Yi So-Yeon and her two colleagues emerged unscathed, the officials said in a televised briefing.

“The landing was within the normal limits… all of the cosmonauts are well,” said Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos.

The three crew members said they felt “wonderful,” another official said.

Yi, whose mission was hailed as a landmark for the Korean space programme, was joined on the descent by Russian flight engineer Yury Malenchenko and US astronaut Peggy Whitson, who has now spent more time in space than any other American.

The three were plucked by Russian helicopters from the barren steppe of Kazakhstan, the centre of the Russian space programme since the Soviet era, Roskosmos head Perminov said.

They landed off target because they changed their landing plan at the last minute without telling mission control, delaying the rescue mission, he said.

Yi, a biosystems engineer, carried out a series of experiments during her nine-day mission on the space station, which has been hailed as a landmark for South Korea’s space programme.

President Lee Myung-Bak described it as the start of a “march towards space” for South Korea.

After paying some 20 million US dollars (12.8 million euros) for Yi’s mission, Seoul is due to launch a satellite from its own space base later this year.

Yi also brought an Asian flavour to the ISS, taking a kimono on board and bringing South Korea’s beloved pickle dish kimchi into space.

While Yi only spent nine days on board, Whitson and Malenchenko were in orbit for 191 days. The trip pushed Whitson’s career total to 377 days in space, more than any other American, US space agency NASA said.

She was replaced as commander by Russian Sergei Volkov, who at 35 is the youngest person ever to run the ISS, which has accommodated 156 astronauts from 15 countries, as well as five “space tourists.”

Volkov is the son of former Russian cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, who launched from the Soviet Union and returned only after the Soviet collapse of December 1991, the two forming the first father-and-son space dynasty.

Back at mission control in Moscow, Malenchenko’s wife Yekaterina said she was not upset that the crew had changed their landing plan at the last minute. “It’s the second time that has happened,” she said.

“My first word to him will be ‘hi’ — it’s been so long since I’ve seen him,” she said.

Malenchenko, who was making his third long-term flight in space, married Yekaterina via a video link up from the space station in 2003.

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A 14-year-old boy survived a frigid night in the wreckage of a helicopter crash that killed four other people and was recuperating at a hospital Wednesday, state troopers said.

The B2 Arrow Star 350 went down in heavy snow Tuesday west of Sheep Mountain, about 120 miles northeast of Anchorage. Bad weather prevented a search by air Tuesday, but a rescuer in state trooper helicopter spotted the wreckage shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Air National Guard jumpers helped stabilize the survivor, Quinn Ellington of Palmer, and he was taken to Mat-Su Regional Hospital by 9 a.m. He wasn’t reported to have life-threatening injuries, said troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters.

The Era Helicopters craft was carrying state technicians working on radio site maintenance, said Jim La Belle, regional director of the National Transportation Safety Board.

The State Patrol identified the dead as the pilot, Benoit Pin, 39, of Anchorage; and passengers Thomas E. Middleton, 46, of Anchorage; Joseph C. O’Donnell, 48, of Girdwood; and Michael D. Seward, 37, of Palmer.

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