In the News

Two kidnapped in Iraq; No word on reporter

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Armed men wearing military fatigues seized two German engineers from a car in northern Iraq in the latest brazen kidnapping to push a foreign government into another desperate race to free its nationals.

Meanwhile, efforts continued to rescue Jill Carroll, the American freelance reporter kidnapped Jan. 7 in Baghdad. Carroll’s appearance last week on a silent videotape aired on Arab TV marked the only sign of her since her abduction.

More than 250 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and at least 39 have been killed.

Alito has enough support for confirmation

WASHINGTON – As the Senate begins its final debate on Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the conservative jurist already has won enough commitments from senators to become the nation’s 110th justice and likely tilt the high court to the right.

Senators were to consider Alito as the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on Wednesday with an eye toward getting him on the Supreme Court before President Bush’s State of the Union speech Jan. 31.

As of late Tuesday, the federal appeals court judge had enough vote commitments for confirmation-a simple majority in the 100-member Senate-with 50 Senate Republicans plus Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska publicly saying through their representatives, in interviews with The Associated Press or in news releases that they would vote for him.

Officers discharged under gay policy

WASHINGTON – Hundreds of officers and health care professionals have been discharged in the past 10 years under the Pentagon’s policy on gays, a loss that while relatively small in numbers involves troops who are expensive for the military to educate and train.

The 350 or so affected are a tiny fraction of the 1.4 million members of the uniformed services and about 3.5 percent of the more than 10,000 people discharged under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy since its inception in 1994.

But many were military school graduates or service members who went to medical school at the taxpayers’ expense-troops not as easily replaced by a nation at war that is struggling to fill its enlistment quotas.

“You don’t just go out on the street tomorrow and pluck someone from the general population who has an Air Force education, someone trained as a physician, someone who bleeds Air Force blue, who is willing to serve and that you can put in Iraq tomorrow,” said Beth Schissel, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1989 and went on to medical school.

Schissel was forced out of the military after she acknowledged that she was gay.

W.Va. schools get game to fight obesity

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – West Virginia, which has one of the nation’s worst obesity problems, is expanding a project that uses a video game to boost students’ physical activity.

All of the state’s 157 middle schools are expecting to get the video game “Dance Dance Revolution,” and officials hope to put it in all 753 public schools within three years. A pilot project began in 20 schools last spring.

Students 10 to 14 years old are being targeted first because it is a key point in children’s development, said Linda Carson, a professor at West Virginia University’s School of Physical Education in Morgantown.

Those are the ages “when children really begin making more of their own decisions and a time when they could easily choose to be more sedentary,” said Carson, who is conducting an ongoing research project into the video game’s health benefits.

Game players move their feet on a special mat to correspond to arrows that scroll on the TV screen. The player must tap the same symbols on the mat at just the right time to do well.