Coup attempt in Ivory Coast fails
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast
Loyalist troops put down an uprising by security forces who attacked military and police bases across the Ivory Coast yesterday, trying to oust the president while he was visiting Italy.
The Cabinet minister in charge of police was killed along with the former junta leader accused of having a role in the uprising.
President Laurent Gbagbo declared the rebellion had been halted after hours of heavy gunfights and mortar exchanges left at least 10 rebel soldiers and seven loyal police dead.
Bloody bodies littered the streets of Abidjan, the commercial capital.
Gbagbo's government has been struggling to calm ethnic and political tension and a restive military since the once-tranquil country's first-ever coup in 1999.
Government troops killed Gen. Robert Guei, the ex-junta leader, when his car refused to stop for a roadblock in downtown Abidjan, paramilitary police Sgt. Ahossi Aime said.
Guei, the former army chief who took power in the 1999 uprising, was forced out during elections the next year amid allegations he was trying to steal the vote.

German denies link to Sept. 11 terrorists
RETHWISCH, Germany
A Syrian-born German businessman questioned last week by federal police said yesterday that he and his family knew suspected members of the Sept. 11 terror cell in Hamburg, but knew nothing about any terror plots.
In his first interview since the raid on his home and offices amid allegations he had helped bring terrorists into the country, Abdel-Mateen Tatari said that the 111 Arabs he helped with visas in 2000 and 2001 were business clients, or their relatives. He said agents were interested in the Arabs he sponsored to come to Germany on tourist visas who included Saudis, Egyptians and Syrians. "I don't issue the visas," he said. "I just hand the local police a letter of sponsorship and they take it from there."
Speaking in Arabic, Tatari said he and his youngest son told authorities about their relationship with Mohamed Atta, believed to be the leader of the suicide hijackers, and others linked to the Hamburg cell, including Mounir el Motassadeq, and Mohammed Haydar Zammar.
"I have nothing to hide and I am sure this whole thing will come to nothing," Tatari told The Associated Press in his office at Rethwisch.

Tumors shrink after blood cell treatment
WASHINGTON
Some seriously ill melanoma patients were left virtually free of disease after researchers injected them with billions of laboratory-grown white blood cells that attacked and shrank their skin cancer tumors, National Institutes of Health researchers say.
In a study appearing today in the journal Science, a team led by Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute reports using amplified lymphocytes - the body's white blood cells - to attack melanoma tumors in 13 patients. Ten of those patients are still alive, four are "virtually cancer free" and two others have experienced "substantial" shrinkage of their tumors, the researcher said.
Rosenberg, who has spent years developing ways to enlist the body's own immune cells to combat cancer, said his team has learned how to grow huge numbers of cancer-fighting cells within a patient, enough to overwhelm the tumors.

Stronger warnings needed for drug
SILVER SPRING, Md.
Federal scientists urged stronger warning labels yesterday on every bottle of acetaminophen, based on evidence that thousands of Americans may unwittingly take toxic doses that could harm their livers.
"You cannot allow more innocent men, women and children to suffer," Kate Trunk, whose 23-year-old son Marcus was one of about 100 people thought to die every year from unintentional overdoses, told a panel of Food and Drug Administration advisers. "Death is not an acceptable side effect."
The FDA panel voted 21-1 to back her call for more warnings about the risk.
Some 100 million people a year take acetaminophen, and serious liver damage is very rare, manufacturers insist. Although best known by the Tylenol brand, acetaminophen is in almost 200 different branded and generic products, from headache relievers to cold-and-cough remedies. While mostly sold without a prescription, it's also in a few prescription painkillers such as Percocet and Vicodin.

Article: Gays should not be ordained
NEW YORK
A staff member of an influential Vatican office has published an article arguing that gays should not be ordained as priests in the wake of the clerical sex abuse scandal.
If a man is gay, "then he should not be admitted to holy orders, and his presence in the seminary would not only give him false hope but it may, in fact, hinder" the therapy he needs, Monsignor Andrew Baker of the Congregation of Bishops wrote.