Topeka

Former mayor gets 12 months for stealing

Former Topeka mayor Doug Wright was sentenced to 12 months in prison for stealing $86,000 from his elderly great-aunt and taking money from an estate and the Topeka Lawyers Club.

Wright, 54, pleaded guilty July 1 to one count of perjury and multiple counts of theft. He also agreed to surrender his law license.

Before he was mayor from 1983 to 1989, Wright was an assistant city attorney.

Wright is to begin serving his sentence Sept. 17.

Beijing

WHO to improve SARS surveillance

Tracking both rumors and reality, the World Health Organization announced plans Wednesday to test a new SARS surveillance system next week in the regions of China that were hardest hit by the disease.

Health specialists want such surveillance in place in case SARS, which ebbed in June, returns in the cold weather of coming months.

With a four-week trial run of the system, WHO hopes to see China detecting more suspected SARS cases — even if those cases don’t turn out to be the disease — in the belief that many false alarms demonstrate better medical vigilance.

California

Observatory’s camera takes successful pictures

A $1.2 billion observatory recently launched into space has successfully taken its first pictures, NASA said Wednesday.

The images were made as part of a test of the infrared camera on the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which is orbiting the sun along with the Earth.

After another month of fine-tuning, the mission will begin in earnest to capture the infrared glow — invisible to the human eye — of faraway stars and solar systems being born.

“These first images have exceeded our expectations,” said Michael Werner, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The space telescope is the fourth and last of a series of NASA observatories that included the Hubble Space Telescope.

Belgium

Poll: After war in Iraq, Europe sours on U.S.

After the Iraq war, support for U.S. global leadership has faded badly in European nations, most dramatically in Germany and France, which strenuously opposed the war, according to a survey released early today.

President Bush’s standing has about faded in Germany where his approval rating is 16 percent — down from 36 percent in 2002 — and where public opinion increasingly questions American leadership, said the Trans-Atlantic Trends 2003 survey.

“The Germany that never sought to choose between Europe and the United States has now expressed an unambiguous preference for Europe,” it said.

The war has made the trans-Atlantic disconnect so significant that large chunks of public opinion in France (70 percent), Germany and Italy (both 50 percent), Portugal (44 percent) now see U.S leadership as undesirable, the poll showed.