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There have been no reports of damage or injuries to people, the channel said.

Police officials say they have recovered some particles that are being sent to the Space Application Center in Ahmedabad for testing, the channel said

Some bouts are more like bare-knuckle boxing matches, with the opponents shaking hands before and after they fight. Others are gang assaults out of ultra-violent films such as A Clockwork Orange, with packs of youths stomping helpless victims who clearly don't want to fight.

"When you watch the video, you're appalled by the savagery, the callousness, the lack of morality," says James Hawthorne, deputy police chief of Arlington's West District, who's leading a crackdown on fight clubs. "This is an indictment of us as a society. It's not a race issue or a class issue. It's a kids issue."

Many fight-club brawlers are suburban high school kids, not gang members or juvenile criminals. Chase Leavitt, son of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, was arrested for participating in a fight club at a Mormon church gym in Salt Lake City in December 2001, when his father was Utah's governor.

The younger Leavitt, then 18, pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and trespassing in September 2002 and was sentenced to 40 hours of community service, says Sim Gill, the chief prosecutor of Salt Lake City who handled the case.

According to Gill, Chase Leavitt laced up boxing gloves and punched it out with a 17-year-old opponent at the church, which is in an affluent neighborhood. Organizers handed out fliers advertising the fight. About 100 students from Leavitt's East High School paid admission before cops raided the premises. As the teens fled, they dropped a video camera with footage of several bouts that night.

"This is not something that just happens in poor neighborhoods," Gill says. "This crosses all socioeconomic bounds. It's happening in middle-class and upper-middle-class environments."

Secretary Leavitt and Chase Leavitt declined to comment, referring calls to attorney Loren Weiss. He says Chase Leavitt was "prosecuted for who he was, not what he did."

Fight clubs tap into a dark, nihilistic "part of the American psyche fascinated by the spectacle of blood and violence," says Orin Starn, cultural anthropology professor at Duke University who teaches about sports in American society. "This does seem a phenomenon of the Mortal Kombat, violent video game generation. The fight club offers the chance to bring those fantasies of violence and danger to life - and maybe have your 15 minutes of fame in an underground video."

Chuck Palahniuk, author of the cult 1996 novel Fight Club that was the basis for the 1999 movie, declined an interview request but said, "God bless these kids. I hope they're having a great time. I don't think they'd be doing it if they weren't having a great time."

Fights in public, in daylight

This middle-class community of 360,000 residents between Dallas and Fort Worth is the home of baseball's Texas Rangers and the Six Flags Over Texas amusement park and the site of the Dallas Cowboys' planned football stadium.

Sitting in his office on a hot Texas afternoon, Hawthorne shakes his head as he watches the two-hour Agg Townz 2 (slang for Arlington) video, featuring teens mostly from Arlington and the neighboring town of Mansfield punching, kicking and stomping each other.

Hawthorne points out that many fights on the tape take place in daylight on pleasant, tree-lined streets with brick homes and well-tended lawns. One fight turns into a mini-riot with dozens of teens rampaging through the parking lot of a McDonald's restaurant. Another running brawl spills into a busy city street, where the fighters slam up against rolling cars.

In almost every fight, there are dozens of teens cheering on the pugilists or snapping pictures. Sometimes their schoolbooks are spread out on the lawns. In one scene, an adult holds the hands of a toddler who watches a fight as if it's another street game. In another, teens watch the tape as entertainment at a party like a music video.

During the most gruesome footage, one falling fighter strikes his head on a sidewalk and is knocked unconscious. While the defenseless teen's arms jerk spasmodically and his eyes stare upward, his opponent continues to belt him in the face. As the injured teen is dragged away, his head leaves a bloody smear on the curb.

Police here learned about fight clubs after Kevin Walker, 16, was jumped and kicked in the head outside his grandmother's house March 11, suffering a brain hemorrhage and other injuries. Arlington police arrested the producer of the Agg Townz series, Arlington resident Michael G. Jackson, 18, and five of his friends, ages 14-19.

Hawthorne says the group would pay teens a few bucks to fight, or attack other youths, then film the violence with video or cellphone cameras. Jackson edited the footage, set it to rap and sold two volumes through his own website for $15-$20 each. The footage of the Walker attack (seized by cops as evidence and never released) was part of a third volume Jackson was working on when he was arrested, Hawthorne says.

On Thursday, Jackson and three other adult defendants were indicted for aggravated assault on Walker and engaging in organized criminal activity, both felonies, says Jennifer Tourje, assistant district attorney for Tarrant County. They face possible penalties of two years' probation to 20 years in a state penitentiary if convicted of aggravated assault and five years' probation to 99 years in prison if convicted of engaging in organized criminal activity. Both charges also carry possible fines of $10,000, she adds.

Hawthorne has asked the IRS and the state comptroller's office to investigate whether Jackson paid taxes on his DVD sales. Several parents of injured teens are considering civil lawsuits against Jackson, Hawthorne adds.

In Arlington, fight-club participants can be arrested on several felony and misdemeanor charges, including aggravated assault, fighting in public, engaging in organized crime and criminal mischief. Texas law allows police to arrest active spectators as accomplices to fighting in public. As part of the crackdown that began May 10, cops have made 40 arrests, including Jackson and his friends, and issued about 200 citations involving fighting in public or watching arranged brawls, police spokeswoman Christy Gilfour says.

In an interview with USA TODAY, Jackson confirmed filming fights and selling DVDs of them. However, he denies instigating fights or paying teens to take part in them and says he has shut down his website. Jackson says he simply saw a financial opportunity to exploit fights that were happening anyway.

"I just used my business-savvy mind," says Jackson, who's seen break dancing and flashing a wad of cash in the videos. He says he never participated in the fights, and he won't say how much money he made or how many DVDs he sold.

His Dallas-based attorney, Ray Jackson (no relation), calls the organized crime charge "ludicrous" and predicts his filmmaking client will become another Spike Lee. The lawyer adds that although the Agg Townz series has become a "cult classic," his client has not made money from it. Most DVDs in circulation are bootlegs from which his client did not get a cut of the proceeds, Ray Jackson says.

"This was low-end equipment and high-end talent," the lawyer says. "That's why it sold."

Messaging fuels combatants

Teen fight clubs have staged bouts on school campuses and in backyards, city streets, public parks, parking lots and gas stations.

Mac Bernd, superintendent of the Arlington Independent School District, says ringleaders have orchestrated fights the same way they do parties: through word-of-mouth, phone calls and text messages. Text-messaging enables instigators to inflame a minor dispute between teens at breakfast into a full-scale brawl by lunch. "You have an electronic rumor mill that moves at the speed of light," he says. That's why Bernd, despite the objection of some parents, is outlawing all telecommunications devices for the 2006-07 school year - including cellphones, pagers, beepers, PDAs, digital and video cameras, MP3 and CD players and video games. The ban covers 74 schools with 63,000 students, including a half-dozen high schools with 20,000 students.

"We've concluded schools are for teaching and learning," he says.

Race does not appear to play much of a factor in teen fight clubs' bouts. Rita Sibert, president of the Arlington chapter of the NAACP, says the clubs include "a mix of all children, all races."

Most of those in the Agg Townz video are African-American. However, just a week after Jackson's arrest, Arlington police booked a group of 11 white teens and one Hispanic youth for fighting in public, Hawthorne says. A fight video made in nearby Grand Prairie shows mostly white teens, city police Detective John Brimmer says.

Silence surrounds participants

The fictional fight club led by Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, in the 1999 movie was made up mostly of men in their twenties who made a sadistic and masochistic sport out of fighting one another.

Durden's main rule for his club became the movie's signature line and a slogan in popular culture: You do not talk about Fight Club.

Teen fight clubs in Arlington often and elsewhere follow that advice, and police and school authorities have been frustrated by the wall of silence that has surrounded the clubs. Not one of the hundreds of parents who viewed clips from Agg Townz 2 at several community and church meetings seemed to have a clue that fight clubs existed - or that their kids were involved, Hawthorne says. Among local teens, he says, the clubs have been common knowledge.

"It was a revelation for the parents," notes the NAACP's Sibert.

Bernd and other school administrators say most teens, even the ones absorbing the bloodiest beatings, refuse to roll over on fight-club participants for fear of retaliation by ringleaders or gangs involved.

The teen beaten into bloody unconsciousness in the Arlington video has not come forward and is still unidentified, Hawthorne says. Grand Prairie police have made no arrests in their case because no one has filed a complaint, Brimmer says.

Citing such secrecy, Bernd says he suspects there are more fight clubs operating under the radar.

"It's almost like the kids have created a completely different world we don't have access to and don't understand."

The other, unearthed three months later and 25 miles away in Oldcroghan by workmen digging a ditch, had perfectly manicured fingernails.

"I think the message I'm getting is that although they were living in a different time, a different culture, eating different things, living in a different way, people are people -- they're the same in their thinking," said Rolly Read, head of conservation at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

Read is one of a team of experts from Britain and Ireland who carried out an 18-month examination of the 2,300-year-old corpses and whose findings form the basis of "Kingship & Sacrifice," a major new exhibition at the museum.

MYSTERY OF GRUESOME DEATHS

While the last two centuries have seen hundreds of bog bodies recovered from northern Europe's wetlands -- where they were preserved by the unique chemical composition of the peat -- many were not examined in detail because techniques to further preserve them had not been perfected.

Read said the latest finds had yielded precious insights into Iron Age life.

For example, the hair product used by Clonycavan Man was a gel made of plant oil and pine resin imported from southwestern France or Spain, showing trade between Ireland and southern Europe was taking place almost two-and-a-half millennia ago.

"We've been able to apply techniques that weren't available back in 1984 so it's a chance to actually look at aspects of Iron Age people that haven't been explored before," Read said.

Archeologists have always puzzled over why the bodies ended up in peat bogs and why so many of them show signs of violent death, with much debate about whether they were executed for crimes or ritually slain as human sacrifices.

Both Clonycavan Man and Oldcroghan Man -- who were in their 20s when they died -- met grisly ends, the latter in particular bearing the scars of horrific torture, including having his nipples cut almost through.

Like several other bog bodies, Oldcroghan Man had been beheaded. Other examples, such as Denmark's famous Tollund Man, discovered in 1950, still had the rope used to strangle them around their necks.

Manicured fingernails and evidence of good diet -- not to mention Clonycavan Man's taste for imported cosmetics -- seem to indicate that many of those who ended up in the bogs were from the upper classes.

APPEASING THE FERTILITY GODS

Eamonn Kelly, keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, has developed a new theory about the bodies based on his discovery that nearly all of the Irish examples were placed in the borders immediately surrounding royal land or on tribal boundaries.

"These people may have been hostages or deposed kings or candidates for kingship who have been sacrificed to ensure a successful reign for a new king and this was done as part of a kingship ritual and as a fertility offering to the gods," he told Reuters.

"The king was held personally responsible for the success of the crops and so on -- if he couldn't guarantee the fertility of the land he risked being deposed," he added.

Another theory, prompted by the writings of Roman historian Tacitus from around the same era, is that the perpetrators of "shameful crimes" were put into the bog in order to trap their souls in a watery limbo where the body did not rot.

The Kingship & Sacrifice exhibition includes Iron Age artifacts such as weapons, feasting utensils, boundary markings and kingly regalia -- all of which are often tied in with bog burials in a number of locations, according to Kelly.

The two most recent bodies -- tanned to a mahogany sheen by acids in the bog water -- have now been freeze-dried for long term preservation and have found their final resting place under glass in Ireland's national museum.

The vaccine targeted ghrelin, a hormone discovered in 1999 that helps control appetite in animals and people.

"It appears that active vaccination against ghrelin is one avenue that can slow weight gain and fat build-up in the body," said Kim Janda, a chemistry professor who helped direct the study.

"The study shows our vaccine slows weight gain and decreases stored fat in rats," Janda added.

"While food intake was unchanged in all testing groups, those who were given the most effective vaccines gained the least amount of weight."

The vaccine also appears to help control whether the body stores fat or burns it off, Janda said in a statement.

"To have an impact on appetite and weight gain, ghrelin first has to move from the bloodstream into the brain, where, over long periods, it stimulates the retention of a level of stored energy as fat," Janda said.

"Our study is the first published evidence proving that preventing ghrelin from reaching the central nervous system can produce a desired reduction in weight gain."

Janda hopes the vaccine might help people avoid the weight loss and weight gain seen in "yo-yo" dieting.

"We're not claiming that our study answers the question of obesity treatment once and for all," Janda said.

"What we are saying, and what our study confirms, is that this looks like a serious workable solution to the problem."

The researchers vaccinated mature male rats that were then provided an unlimited amount of low-energy, low-fat food. Unvaccinated rats gained more weight than vaccinated rats fed the same food.

"Whether active immunization against ghrelin would help prevent the development of obesity caused by ... high-fat 'Western' diets, or would facilitate weight loss once obesity is established" remains uncertain, the researchers wrote.

"I was clearing a blockage, when I saw lumps of human meat!" the Zhisn daily quoted him as saying.

Police rushed to the scene, and bloody tracks led them to the door of Evgeny Zorin. Zorin, 69, was known for his documentaries dedicated to Russian outlands. He lived alone in his apartment in peace with the neighbors.

While the police were contemplating the blood on the stairs, a man rushed out of the apartment and ran for the door. The police detained him and went in.

The apartment was covered in blood, and a strange smell was coming from the kitchen where something was boiling in a saucepan. Inside the saucepan the police found a man's head. On the kitchen table was a bowl of soup and a spoon.

Experts later identified human flesh among the soups ingredients.

In the fridge the police found a human heart, and further inspection produced bloodstained instruments - a small axe, a saw and a knife the murderer had used to cut the body to pieces.

Alexander Poyarkov, 29 years old, confessed to the murder. He said the old man had invited him to spend the night at his place when he had nowhere to go, and then raped him.

"He put me up for the night. Then he raped me. And I killed him," Polyakov said.

Poyarkov stabbed his host with a knife several times. Then he disjointed the body, threw some parts away, flushed others down the toilet, kept the heart and boiled the head, to make the body unrecognizable, he said.

Poyarkov has been charged with murder. He is scheduled to undergo a psychiatric analysis in the near future.