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.

Prosecutors said today that 38-year-old Yung Tang placed the bomb in a bag next to Israel Halberstam’s minivan while it was parked outside his Brooklyn home in March 2002. The bag exploded when Halberstam tried to move it.

They say Tang wanted his tenant dead because Halberstam owed him about $US100,000 ($A106,000) in rent on a showroom for his electronics business.

Prosecutors say they don’t know whether Tang has a lawyer. No telephone number could be found for his Greenwood Lake home.

If convicted, he faces up to 50 years in prison.

Eder Rojas was charged today in federal court in Minneapolis. The case will be prosecuted in Fargo.

Officials say the Compass Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Saskatchewan landed safely in Fargo on May 7, after smoke began to fill the back of the plane.

Court documents say Rojas told authorities he was upset at the airline for making him work that route.

Doctors at Larissa General Hospital examined the girl and surgically removed a growth they later discovered was an embryo more than two inches long.

“They could see on the right side that her belly was swollen, but they couldn’t suspect that this tumour would hide an embryo,” hospital director Iakovos Brouskelis said.

The girl has made a full recovery, he said.

Andreas Markou, head of the hospital’s pediatric department, said the embryo was a formed foetus with a head, hair and eyes, but no brain or umbilical cord.

Markou said cases where one of a set of twins absorbs the other in the womb occurs in one of 500,000 live births.

The girl’s family did not want to be identified, hospital officials 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.

Dr. Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester in England calculated that one megabyte of SMS texting costs $730.63 to transmit based on U.K. rates. Hubble transmissions cost between $17.27 to $165 per megabyte based on NASA data.

One megabyte of SMS consists of 7,490 text messages each containing 160 characters.

Bannister used the calculation for the UK’s Channel 4 Dispatches program entitled “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off.”

“Hubble is by no means a cheap mission - but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!” Cellular-news.com quoted Bannister as saying.

Sinatra’s Bar, near Darwin’s home in Seaton Carew, Hartlepool, is changing its name to The Seaton Canoe.

Customers were challenged to come up with a new name for the pub and win £100, but no one came up with the name owners Richard and Angie Lakey had in mind.

The story of Darwin, who was missing, presumed dead, after he paddled out to sea, put Seaton Carew in the national spotlight.

Mr Lakey told the Northern Echo: “I am pleased with the name. It stands out and I am sure it will cause a few smiles.

“Surprisingly, no one guessed the name we had in mind, so we will give the money to the lifeboat, which we thought seemed fitting.

“We are having the signs made up and soon they will be put up and we will celebrate a proper opening night.”

Darwin, 57, gave himself up in December, five years after he was presumed dead when his canoe was found washed up.

He admits a £250,000 insurance fraud and will be sentenced after the trial of his wife Anne in July.

As Interfax news agency reports Nadezhda’s granchildren are descendants of those cockroaches who were conceived in space and were born after returning to Earth.

Namely Nadezhda conceived 30 healthy descendants last September in an orbiting laboratory named Foton-M. “They were normal and just like other cockroaches except for faster maturation rate in space compared to normal conditions,” Dmitry Atyakshin, a scientist at Voronezh Medical Academy, Russia said to the news agency.

Their children were brought back to earth and now Nadezhda has 30 grandchildren, who are growing and behaving just like other household cockroaches. Apparently the conditions of Space didn’t seem to have affected their growth or behavior at all.

The scientists proudly call Nadezhda, a pioneer, stating that studies like this are very useful considering that in the future, mankind has to spend a long time in space.

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