Pinkard's attorney, Scottie Allen, disputed that account, saying Calloway agreed to let the boy go and even signed a form relinquishing her parental rights.

He said his client and Nunn, who lives in Compton, came across Devon's 2-year-old sister "unaccompanied and running around outside." They found the mother, went home with her to a fetid duplex and offered to adopt both children, he said.

Pinkard was "scared to death" when she learned about the kidnapping investigation while driving back to Texas with Devon, he said. He said she had planned to return to California to apply to a court for adoption.

Dominique Calloway denied allowing her baby to be taken.

"I didn't sign no papers. They lie," she said.

Pinkard and Nunn are charged with one count each of kidnapping and child stealing, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. They were arrested May 24.

Los Angeles Police Detective Maria Rivas said other mothers, also black and poor, had come forward to say that Pinkard had previously tried to buy their babies.

Pinkard had been convicted of forgery in 2000, which her attorney acknowledged. Nunn's attorney said his client also has a criminal record but not an extremely serious one.

"Marie looked at it and all she could say was 'unbelievable,'" said Karen Benzel, public affairs director for the rescue center, which has been rescuing sick and injured birds for more than three decades.

Unfortunately, the duck died quickly and quietly of its injuries.

Initial reports from the center claimed the cause of the alien face was never determined, but Benzel said she was still awaiting results of a necropsy.

Either way, the center has come up with a way to turn its alien encounter into a fundraiser for the center. It will auction off the X-ray on eBay.

The one-of-a-kind image, which measures 17-by-14 inches, will be sold along with a certificate of authenticity. All proceeds will go toward funding the center's rehabilitation programs.

The auction begins Sunday.

Click here to see the X-ray

"Newspapers still have a larger overall audience," says Charlene Li, a Forrester analyst. "But blogs are catching up quickly."

Initially caught off guard by blogs, newspapers and old-guard news agencies are now racing to present their own. So far, the results have been mixed. While papers such as the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman are using blogs to give readers a news voice they never had before, other papers like the Washington Post are struggling with everything from charges of plagiarism in their blogs to being labeled with the word every editor dreads--boring.

Last week, the Associated Press, the century-old news agency, signed a cross-marketing deal with Technorati, a search-engine for blog postings. Technorati agreed to scan for blogs that include links to AP stories. The search engine will then create a Web page where it will display the blogs in addition to original AP stories.

The deal follows similar agreements between Technorati and Washington Post Co., owner of the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine.

Also in recent weeks, the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register and San Jose Mercury News were among a group of publishers that signed up for BlogBurst, a blog syndication service. Under the terms of the agreement, newspapers can publish any of the more than 1,500 blogs featured by the service.

The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman rounds out the newspaper's travel coverage with one of BlogBurst's travel blogs. Jim Debth, who manages the Statesman's Web site, said connecting with a paper's readers now means including their voice. Besides BlogBurst, which is operated by Austin-based Pluck, The American-Statesman also offers tools on its Web site that enable readers to create their own blogs, which can then be posted on the paper's Web site.

Since starting the latter service last September, the newspaper has seen readers create 875 blogs, which are recording about 2,500 page views a day, according to Debth. He acknowledges that the blogs have yet to attract huge audiences, but the point is to offer readers a chance to connect with likeminded folks.

"The idea behind this is to create more of a community," Debth said. "You create community and you'll increase traffic and loyalty."

Ethical stumbles, journalistic detritus

Publishing content produced by nonprofessionals comes after scores of newspapers asked their own editorial staffs to write blogs. At many publications, the results were mixed. In March, the Washington Post was heavily criticized for hiring Ben Domenech, a former Bush administration aide, to write a blog for Washingtonpost.com without doing more to check his writing credentials.

Three days after hiring Domenech, the 24-year-old resigned amid charges that he plagiarized material he had written for other publications. Domenech denied that he knowingly committed plagiarism, the Post reported.

The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, announced recently that it was discontinuing the column and Internet blog of Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, because he posted comments on his blog and other online sites under assumed names. The newspaper said that while Hiltzik did not commit any ethical violations or print any inaccuracies, he violated the Times' policy of writing under pseudonyms.

Another hurdle for newspapers is making sure that their blogs don't bore readers, said Patrick Williams, managing editor of the Dallas Observer, a weekly publication. He says that too often newspaper blogs are filled with leftovers from stories too long to fit in the paper that day.

"They're filled with all the news not fit for print," Williams wrote. "They're a place where writers go when reporting is just too hard. Let us pray...that blogs can go back to what they should be: teenagers and college students talking about sex and music."

Despite his distaste for news blogs, Williams says he values news and he believes that news stories are what drive the need for blogs and not the other way around.

"If I were the king of journalism, I'd force newspapers to stop publishing for a month," Williams said. "Then let's see what would happen to blogs. Facts have to be the basis of opinion at some point. And if a blogger is collecting facts, then at what point does the publication cease being a blog and become an Internet news site?"

"I don't need these guys here."

"It is not safe on the streets, as it is back home in Sydney or Brisbane - no it's not, if it was we wouldn't be here. But things are getting better every day."

Rowe apologised, saying she didn't realise the guards had been placed specifically for the interview.

But Rowe ran into more trouble when she persisted with her line of questioning, and referred to footage of looting and violence.

Brig Slater told her the pictures were a "couple of days old".

TV rival the Seven Network gleefully circulated grabs of the interview this morning, enjoying an element of revenge after Nine's taunting over its exclusive interview with the Beaconsfield mine survivors.

"When we saw the Cassini results, we were surprised that this hot spot was located at the pole," said Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "So we set out to explain how it could end up at the pole if it didn't start there."

Remember Weebles? They wobble but the don't fall down? A similar imbalance seems to have caused Enceladus' cosmic flop, but with a twist.

in the June 1 issue of the journal Nature, Nimmo and colleagues explain that hot material from within Enceladus welled up in one location. Hot material expands and is less dense.

Like all rotating bodies, the moon would be more stable if low-density areas were at the poles and regions of high density were at the equator. So the moon reoriented itself in that manner, the thinking goes.

There is a way to possibly confirm that the moon flipped. Its former leading hemisphere should have had more impact craters than the trailing hemisphere. If it flipped 90 degrees, the pattern of craters now present would reveal as much.

Graham said all the e-mail will eventually be delivered once the glitch is corrected. Meanwhile, some users will receive messages intermittently. However, Graham couldn't say when the software problem might be completely fixed.

"We're working hard on it right now," he said.

E-mail has been a source of public relations setbacks for AOL over the past few months. In April, the company was accused of blocking e-mail in an attempt to thwart the circulation of a petition against the company's certified e-mail program. The company blamed the blockage of e-mail on a glitch.

Opponents of the program, which requires marketers to pay to ensure delivery of e-mail messages, argue that the payment is an "e-mail tax." AOL has said that the service helps prevent spam.

The vessel docked in her home port of Southampton, Hampshire, this morning, one day ahead of schedule.

Passenger Philip Wilson, 50, said: "It was a holiday from hell. That's not even describing it. It was worse than that."

Mr Wilson, his wife Suzanne, 44, 15-year-old daughter Emily and 12-year-old son James all went down with suspected norovirus.

Mr Wilson, from Radstock, near Bath, said the ship's staff could not cope as many of the crew also fell ill.

"It was just a nightmare," he said.

"The World Health Organisation recommend 48-hour isolation but they released me after 24 hours and told me to go back into circulation.

"My wife then went down with it after 24 hours and they isolated her for 48 hours. They told me they didn't think it was serious at first to keep us isolated for 48 hours."

He added: "The ship became under-staffed. It was obvious crew members were sick. Our cabin steward was sick, the nurse admitted she was sick.

"It was quite obvious that they just couldn't cope with the situation at all and that's what forced them to make the decision to come back early."

Mr Wilson said: "They never told any passengers that they had norovirus on the previous cruise.

"The captain then told everyone. He said 'We tried to disinfect the ship in Southampton and obviously we didn't do a good enough job'. He said that over the Tannoy to all the passengers."

Mr Wilson said: "How would you feel if you had paid £2,000 for a cruise and spent seven days in a cabin with very limited food and drink? "It was like being in a prison cell, except prisoners get treated better."

He said he wanted a full refund for the cruise but Carnival has offered all passengers a refund of 30% off the cruise fare and a £150 per person voucher towards a future cruise with Princess.

A spokeswoman for parent company Carnival UK said passengers suffered from acute gastroenteritis, with the illness strongly suspected to be the highly-contagious norovirus.

They were told to stay in their cabins to avoid further spread of the illness. Eight people were still affected by the virus.

The ship will be disinfected over the next 30 hours and Sea Princess will sail as scheduled on her next cruise departing Southampton tomorrow at 5pm, Carnival said.

A Carnival spokeswoman said: "We brought the ship in 24 hours early so we could sanitise the ship and eradicate the illness to stop the spread to future passengers."

In a statement, the company added: "The number of cases increased during the early part of the cruise. However, due to our extensive disinfection efforts during the sailing, the case numbers have dramatically decreased."

Passengers were being helped with their onward travel arrangements and a customer services team was at the terminal.