Washington, D.C.

Polls suggest close race

President Bush has a double-digit lead in one new national poll, but he’s tied with Democrat John Kerry in another.

Both campaigns say their own polling has the race close, with Bush’s people seeing a slight lead for the president.

Kerry and Bush are tied in a Pew Research Center poll taken Sept. 11-14, after Bush was up by 12 points or more from a Pew sample taken Sept. 8-10. A Gallup poll being released early today has Bush up 54 percent to 40 in a three-way matchup, with Ralph Nader at 3 percent.

“After so long when the polls were deadlocked no matter what happened, now we have a situation where voter opinion is unsettled,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and you’re going to have more variation in the polls than we’ve had in the past.”

New York

CBS News admits questions on Bush story

CBS News is trying to restore its credibility after a week of questions about its report on President Bush’s National Guard service — yet it may never conclusively know whether it was duped by fake documents.

The news division has acknowledged for the first time questions about the authenticity of documents used to support the story, and it has promised a stepped-up effort to get at the truth.

The memos, purportedly written by Bush’s late squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, indicated he had been pressured to sugarcoat Bush’s performance and that the future president ignored an order to take a physical. Several document experts say they look suspiciously like they were written on a computer, not a 1970s-era typewriter.

CBS flew the late Killian’s former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, from Texas to New York on Wednesday for an interview, in which she said she thought the documents were fake but their content accurate.

Florida

Hurricanes may delay space shuttle launch

Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Ivan have cost NASA at least a week’s worth of work and upset its tight schedule for resuming shuttle flights, throwing into doubt the space agency’s plans to launch Discovery in early spring at Cape Canaveral.

“Can they make that up? It’s too early to say. It was a tight schedule to start with, and the facility survey is still going on,” Apollo astronaut Thomas Stafford, co-chairman of the task force overseeing NASA’s return-to-flight effort, said Thursday.

Charley and Frances caused widespread damage to NASA’s launch site in mid-August and over the Labor Day weekend. Then work on the redesigned external fuel tank for Discovery had to be halted this week when Lockheed Martin Corp.’s assembly plant in New Orleans was shut down as Ivan drew near.

“The impact there is … at least a week, and that’s assuming no damage from the storm,” said task force co-chairman Richard Covey, a former shuttle commander. The tank was supposed to be delivered in early November to Kennedy Space Center.

Dominican Republic

Thousands flee as Hurricane Jeanne hits

Hurricane Jeanne plowed into the Dominican Republic on Thursday, killing a baby and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes. The storm unleashed floods and left two dead a day earlier in Puerto Rico.

Jeanne made landfall at the island’s evacuated eastern tip and weakened to a tropical storm as it raked the north coast. But it was expected to regain hurricane strength and likely head for the Bahamas and then Florida, Georgia or the Carolinas.

Jeanne’s heavy rains reached the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, where a 4-month-old child died when a landslide crushed part of her family’s house.

New Orleans

City’s storm response draws criticism

The skies had cleared Thursday, stores were reopened and residents had pulled the plywood off their windows. But many New Orleans residents questioned the city’s emergency response efforts after the city escaped major damage from Hurricane Ivan.

Among the problems officials faced was how to evacuate 1.2 million people from a city with only one interstate leading out of town. And the emergency shelter proved insufficient to house the tens of thousands left behind, many of them poorer residents who had no cars to leave in. Now another problem is looming, as residents jam the roads again as they return from out of state.

At a news conference Thursday, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin conceded that there was room for improvement in the face of disaster. City and parish officials, he said, would meet next week to work on ideas for better communication among state and local agencies.

Mexico

Mothers of slain women to receive free houses

The government of a northern Mexico state has promised to give free homes to 47 mothers of women killed in a string of sexually motivated slayings, angering some who say the gifts gloss over the lack of results in the criminal investigations.

Thirty families in Chihuahua state will receive the houses later this month, with the rest distributed after the new government takes office in October, said Victoria Caraveo, head of the Chihuahua Women’s Institute.

Mexican authorities say 340 women have been killed during the past decade in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people. About 90 of the victims were sexually assaulted, strangled and dumped in the desert surrounding this sprawling industrial city across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas.

The 235-square-foot homes, made of concrete and tin, and surrounding lots are worth $12,000.

South Korea

N. Korea refuses to join latest nuclear talks

A delay in planned six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear activities appeared certain Thursday, with the communist nation saying it won’t talk until South Korea fully discloses the details of its secret atomic experiments.

China, host of three previous rounds of talks, acknowledged “many difficulties” stand in the way of this month’s talks.

North Korea relayed its position on the talks earlier this week when British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell visited Pyongyang.

The comments further clouded U.S.-led international efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear activities.

South Korea recently acknowledged that it conducted a plutonium-based nuclear experiment more than 20 years ago. That admission came shortly after it said it conducted a uranium-enrichment experiment four years ago.

Washington, D.C.

U.S. drops Thailand from drug countries

President Bush has removed Thailand from the U.S. government list of countries where significant illicit drug trafficking takes place.

The move was the result of Thailand’s progress in reducing opium poppy cultivation along with advances in other areas, the White House said Thursday in a statement.

With Thailand deleted from the list, the number of major drug-transit or drug-producing countries was reduced to 22.

They are: Afghanistan, the Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Austria

U.S. challenges claims about Iran nuclear site

U.S. and European diplomats tentatively agreed Thursday in Vienna to demand a new Iranian freeze on uranium enrichment by fall as they fine-tuned a draft resolution meant to deprive Iran of technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

But negotiations on the text being prepared for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors were overshadowed by a U.S. charge that the U.N. atomic watchdog had kept silent about its concerns about a possible nuclear weapons-related test site in Iran.

“This is a serious omission,” a U.S. official said, alluding to the lack of specific mention of the Parchin complex in a report that agency director Mohamed ElBaradei wrote for the board on the status of a probe into Iran’s nuclear activities.

The U.S. official said the United States thought Parchin, southeast of Iran’s capital, Tehran, was being used to test high explosives, possibly for use with nuclear weapons.

Both Iran and the agency denied the accusations.

Baltimore

1-year-old conjoined twin girl dies after separation surgery

A young girl born with her head fused to that of her twin sister died Thursday, shortly after surgeons separated them.

The surviving 1-year-old twin, Lea Block, was in critical but stable condition.

Lea and her sister, Tabea, from Lemgo, Germany, were separated shortly after midnight, after more than 18 hours of surgery.

Tabea suffered from an irregular heartbeat and low blood pressure, according to her doctors.

Denver

Jury: Authorities withheld document after Columbine

Authorities decided soon after the Columbine High School massacre to withhold a document showing deputies knew one of the killers had been accused two years earlier of making death threats and building pipe bombs, according to a grand jury report released Thursday.

The grand jury also said it was “troubled” by still-missing documents in what remains the deadliest school attack in U.S. history. But it did not hand up any indictments, closing at least the third investigation that has elected not to place any blame for the slaughter of 13 people by suicidal teens Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Victims’ families said the report confirmed their suspicions that the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office covered up mistakes that could have led authorities to the killers as much as two years before the April 20, 1999, attack.

Seattle

Seat-belt use at record high

Seat-belt use among American motorists continues to rise, with a record 80 percent of people buckling up in 2004, federal officials said Thursday.

The rate increased by a percentage point from 2003, according to the survey conducted in June.

The 2004 survey found that belt use was highest in the West, at 84 percent, and the South, at 80 percent. Those regional rates were unchanged from the previous year.

Although there was slight improvement from last year, usage remained lowest in the Northeast, at 76 percent, and in the Midwest, at 77 percent.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began conducting seat-belt use surveys in 1983, when the national use rate was 14 percent.

Washington, D.C.

Report recommends rewards to catch e-mail spammers

What would it take to get someone to turn in one of those spammers who send millions of unwanted e-mails? At least $100,000, the Federal Trade Commission figures.

Six-figure incentives are the only way to persuade people to disclose the identity of co-workers, friends and others they know are responsible for flooding online mailboxes with unsolicited pitches, according to an agency report Thursday.

The commission said a government-funded reward system could work if the payoff was between $100,000 and $250,000 — higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases. For example, the FBI pays $50,000 for tips leading to the arrests of most of its top 10 fugitives.