Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Memorial honors 28 U.S. Marines

Compiled from wire reports The Spokesman-Review

Honolulu Nearly 2,000 people gathered Monday at Hawaii’s Capitol for an emotional service to honor 28 Hawaii-based servicemen killed in Iraq, all but one in a single helicopter crash.

Twenty-six Marines from the base at Kaneohe Bay and a Pearl Harbor sailor were among 31 killed when their helicopter went down in western Iraq in late January. It was the single deadliest event for the American military in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The 28th honoree Monday was a Marine from Grays Lake, Ill., who was killed in Iraq combat in February.

Physicist Hans Bethe, Nobel recipient, dies

Ithaca, N.Y. Hans Bethe, a giant of 20th-century physics who played a central role in building the atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize for discovering the process that powers the sun and stars, has died at 98.

During the World War II race to build the bomb, Bethe, who died Sunday, was head of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, N.M.

Bethe, who fled Nazi Germany and joined the Cornell University faculty in 1935, also made major discoveries about how atoms are built up from smaller particles, what makes dying stars blow up and how heavier elements are produced from ashes of these supernovas.

Threat gets gay man U.S. asylum hearing

San Francisco A gay Lebanese man suffering from AIDS has enough reason to fear persecution in his homeland that he shouldn’t be deported while seeking asylum in the United States, a federal court ruled Monday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, reversing a Board of Immigration Appeals decision, found Nassier Mustapha Karouni’s fear of being arrested, tortured or killed in a country where homosexuality is considered a crime was based on fact.

In determining that sexual orientation makes Karouni eligible for refugee status, the court rejected the Justice Department’s argument that he could avoid the fate of gay friends who were beaten, jailed or murdered if he refrained from having sex upon his return home.