Thousands in Lebanon, Turkey protest Gaza attack

Thousands protesting Israel's ground offensive on Gaza converged Sunday in Beirut and Istangul as the leaders of the only two Mideast Arab nations to sign peace treaties with Israel demanded an end to the attack.

In Yemen, security officials said anti-Israel protesters attacked several Jewish homes in the northern province of Omran, smashing windows and pelting them with rocks. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said at least one Jewish resident was injured among the tiny minority community.

Lebanese police used water hoses to try to push about 250 demonstrators away from the U.S. Embassy …

Jahn firm denies link to cooling at Illinois Center

An attorney for Helmut Jahn's architectural firm, which helpeddesign the State of Illinois Center, said yesterday the firm "bearsno responsibility" for the building's "cooling and heating systemfailures."

The firm in which Jahn is a partner, Murphy Jahn Associates, wasone of 13 companies sued for $20 million by the state yesterday. Theaction seeks damages primarily for air-conditioning problems that lettemperatures in the modernistic, glass-sheathed structure soar ashigh as 110 degrees.

The internationally known Jahn, credited as chief architect ofthe 17-story structure, could not be reached for comment. Hissecretary said he was "on a plane flying to …

Dozens Injured After Cruise Ship Tilts

PORT CANAVERAL, Fla. - A steering problem caused a new cruise ship to roll abruptly Tuesday, throwing passengers and crew to the deck and injuring dozens, including two critically, officials said.

One passenger said seawater flooded several upper decks of the Crown Princess, forcing water from a swimming pool "like a mini-tsunami."

The vessel, with about 3,100 passengers, had just departed Port Canaveral on Florida's east coast en route to New York when it listed badly to its port side, said Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer James Judge.

The ship then righted itself before returning to port, where the Coast Guard said all passengers and crew had been accounted …

London's Olympic stadium shell completed

London 2012 organizers say the external structure of the main Olympic stadium has been completed.

Construction of the outer shell, including roof sections, was finished Thursday, 14 months after work started and three years before the start of the games.

The 80,000-seat stadium will host the opening and closing ceremonies and track and field …

A globetrotting woman of mystery

Agatha Christie fans will devour Duchess of Death, a new biography of the mystery matriarch by author Richard Hack.

As Hack points out, Christie sold over 2 billion books translated into 105 languages. Her output was incredible: 90 novels and short-story collections and 157 short stories. Her play "The Mousetrap" has been performed continuously since 1952.

Hack's book is drawn from more than 5,000 unpublished letters, notes and documents. This is not a work for the casual Christie reader -- Duchess of Death is sometimes weighed down by details.

But the dense biography sings when Hack recounts Christie's globetrotting in the waning days of the British Empire. …

ScanMatch: A novel method for comparing fixation sequences

We present a novel approach to comparing saccadic eye movement sequences based on the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm used in bioinformatics to compare DNA sequences. In the proposed method, the saccade sequence is spatially and temporally binned and then recoded to create a sequence of letters that retains fixation location, time, and order information. The comparison of two letter sequences is made by maximizing the similarity score computed from a substitution matrix that provides the score for all letter pair substitutions and a penalty gap. The substitution matrix provides a meaningful link between each location coded by the individual letters. This link could be distance but could also …

WADA wants China's border detection to match high level of Olympic drug-testing facilities

The World Anti-Doping Agency is urging China to ensure its standards for intercepting banned substances matches its testing facilities for drug cheats at the Beijing Olympics.

WADA officials, meeting in Sydney to discuss cross-border investigation powers in the anti-doping fight, have asked Chinese authorities to increase customs and immigration checks to prevent performance-enhancing drugs reaching the Olympics.

The global anti-doping agency was again close to an agreement with international police body Interpol, WADA president John Fahey said.

"We believe that we've got some commonalities, some common purpose ... sometimes there's a belief …