The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has sent investigators to help control and investigate the outbreak.

The CDC announced it is working to track down 222 airline passengers who sat near two people from Iowa who developed the mumps after traveling on nine flights from March 26 to April 2.

Officials speculate the epidemic might have been sparked by someone from Britain, which has been experiencing a large mumps outbreak for several years. Last summer, a smaller outbreak at a summer camp in New York was started by an unvaccinated British counselor.

The virus in the Iowa outbreak is the same strain as the one in Britain, but officials have not identified which was the first Iowa case.

Omaha Sen. Pat Bourne decried the bill, saying, "We will go down in history as one of the first states in 20 years to set race relations back."

"History will not, and should not, judge us kindly," said Sen. Gwen Howard of Omaha.

Attorney General Jon Bruning sent a letter to one of the measure's opponents saying that the bill could be in violation of the Constitution's equal-protection clause and that lawsuits almost certainly will be filed.

But its backers said that at the very least, its passage will force policymakers to negotiate seriously about the future of schools in the Omaha area.

The breakup would not occur until July 2008, leaving time for lawmakers to come up with another idea.

"There is no intent to create segregation," said Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, the Legislature's only black senator and a longtime critic of the school system.

He argued that the district is already segregated, because it no longer buses students for integration and instead requires them to attend their neighborhood school.

Chambers said the schools attended largely by minorities lack the resources and quality teachers provided others in the district. He said the black students he represents in north Omaha would receive a better education if they had more control over their district.

Coming from Chambers, the argument was especially persuasive to the rest of the Legislature, which voted three times this week in favor of the bill before it won final passage on the last day of the session.

Omaha Public Schools Superintendent John Mackiel said the law is unconstitutional and will not stand.

"There simply has never been an anti-city school victory anywhere in this nation," Mackiel said. "This law will be no exception."

The 45,000-student Omaha school system is 46 percent white, 31 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian or American Indian.

Boundaries for the newly created districts would be drawn using current high school attendance areas. That would result in four possible scenarios; in every scenario, two districts would end up with a majority of students who are racial minorities.

Witnesses described the bear picking up the boy in its mouth while the mother and other visitors tried to fend it off with sticks and rocks, Hicks said. The mother was injured before the bear was chased away.

The girl ran away during that attack, but was found dead a short time later with the bear nearby. A park ranger fired at least one shot at the bear before it bolted off.

The woman and her son were flown by helicopter to Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, where both were being treated for wounds consistent with a bear attack, Hicks said.

Hospital officials did not immediately return calls for comment, but Hicks said the boy was listed in critical condition. The victims' names were not released.

Forest Service employees, TWRA game agents and several hunters were searching for the bear in an area spanning several thousand acres.

The 640,000-acre park runs along the southeastern Tennessee border with North Carolina, southwest of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The frustration here has led to frenzy. Bonnie McGee keeps a pellet gun by her door ready to take on the slithering enemy.

"They eat your flowers and their feces is everywhere," she said, adding that she's killed dozens. "Some people toss them in the canal and the hermit crabs feed on them."

Aaron Diaz, owner of Boca Grande's Barnichol hardware store, said he has sold 75 traps in the past three weeks alone.

"For some people, they've really taken over, climbing into attics, into vents and even into their toilets," he said.

County Commissioner Bob Janes doesn't know how much eradication will cost, so he's not sure how much the tax will be. He said the issue has finally come to a head.

"In 1988, there was talk of a program but people at that time thought they were kind of cute," Janes said. "They're no longer cute little guys. They're very pesky."

Kevin Enge, an exotic species expert with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said he believes the iguana was introduced to Boca Grande in the 1970s by a boat captain who brought a few from Mexico for his kids but released them when they grew too large. Their population exploded because each female iguana can lay up to 75 eggs a year.

The reptiles are found in a few other places in Florida, but nowhere in the numbers seen on Gasparilla Island, home to television renovator Bob Vila and a vacation spot for the Bush clan.

"There's no way you'll get rid of them all. Once they're established to that extent, it's a lost cause," Enge said.

The county hired Florida Gulf Coast University biologist Jerry Jackson to study the problem. He is worried the lizards aren't just a nuisance, but are destroying native habitat, spreading other invasive species through their droppings and endangering the town in the event of a hurricane.

"The majority of their burrows are in the dunes along the beaches," Jackson said. "We're threatening the human population on Gasparilla Island to the extent that the dunes are in danger of just disappearing with a storm surge."

The iguanas feed on the eggs of gopher tortoises, a species of "special concern" that the state says will likely to be bumped up to threatened in a few months as their population declines.

The lizards also carry salmonella.

"The disease organism alone could be a problem for native species, even for humans," Jackson said. "It's a zoo out there. It's an ecosystem gone crazy."

Even the local weekly paper, the Boca Beacon, gets flooded with letters about iguanas.

"Iguanas are not human. They do not deserve humane treatment," resident Richard Zellner wrote. "As far as I am concerned, they can be burned, shot and mutilated."

Some have made catching iguanas into a family outing. Boston resident Michael Mavilia, 49, who owns a house on the island, spent a recent day with his family casting a fishing rod with a tiny green rubber worm toward the foundations of beach homes.

"This is a nice one," Mavilia said, pulling a writhing, two-foot iguana from a cage in his car trunk. "You should have seen us wrestling him in. It was like catching the big one."

Fordyce told police he began arguing with his live-in girlfriend, Mary McCann, 58, early Thursday.

After throwing her to the floor, Fordyce threw a microwave oven onto McCann's chest after she refused to heat up sandwiches for him, he told police. Fordyce also said he stomped on McCann's chest repeatedly then banged her head on the floor until she lost consciousness - but that he also said he didn't mean to kill her, police said.

"It was an accident. I didn't do it on purpose," police quoted Fordyce as saying.

Fordyce ran to a neighbor's house for help, but couldn't find anyone there to call 911, police said. After returning home and checking McCann for a pulse - and finding none - he went downstairs and drank a beer before going to another neighbor's home and asking them to call 911, police said.

Autopsy results were not immediately available.