Since then both NPR and CNN have jumped on the story. What's worse is that of the 5 cases from this weekend, at least one of them was not even homeless and other reported they did not want to be taken to Skid Row. From CNN:

In one case, a man dropped off at Skid Row was in fact not homeless, said Smith, the LAPD captain. A police officer took him home and the man's family was "outraged," he said.

"Not only did they not know that he was discharged, but the fact that he had been brought to Skid Row instead of being brought home was what further outraged that family," Smith said at a news conference Tuesday.

The investigation began on Sunday, when an LAPD sergeant saw a patient being left in front of the Volunteers of America homeless services facility.

The sergeant called an LAPD videographer, who over the next few hours recorded four more ambulances arriving at the facility and leaving recently discharged patients.

Fenton said three of the five patients had arrived at the hospital from Volunteers of America or the nearby Lamp Community center, and gave the street addresses on their admission information.

Officials at Lamp and Volunteers of America, however, said they had no record of any of the five patients having been at their facilities. Police also said the patients stated in their interviews that they didn't want to be left there.

Rolling, 52, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. EDT, more than 16 years after his killing rampage at the start of the University of Florida's fall semester.

When asked for a last statement, Rolling sang for two minutes what sounded like a hymn with the refrain "none greater than thee, O Lord, none greater than thee," witnesses and prison officials said.

He appeared to continue singing after prison officials turned off the microphone, finally stopping just before he died.

The bodies of his victims were found over three days in late August, just as the University of Florida's fall semester was beginning. All had been killed with a hunting knife. Some had been mutilated, sexually assaulted and put in shocking poses. One girl's severed head had been placed on a shelf, her body posed as if seated.

The killing spree touched off a huge manhunt and plunged the laid-back college town into panic. Students fled and residents armed themselves.

Belongings that Rolling left at a campsite in the woods and DNA taken after a later arrest for robbery linked him to the slayings. When he came up for trial in 1994, he shocked the courtroom by pleading guilty.

"There are some things you just can't run from, this being one of those," Rolling told the judge.

He later told The Associated Press: "I do deserve to die, but do I want to die? No. I want to live. Life is difficult to give up."

Dianna Hoyt, who stepdaughter was slain, said the execution marked "the final chapter of this book."

"This man brought this outcome to himself, and the law of the land carried through to show us justice," Hoyt said.

Outside the prison, death penalty opponents stood in a circle singing "Amazing Grace" after Rolling was pronounced dead.

Other onlookers supported the execution. "They're doing a good thing," said Randy Hicks, 35, a truck driver and former prison guard who occasionally watched over Rolling. "This guy deserves it. It's very overdue."

Death penalty protesters said the execution only served to provide Rolling additional attention.

"The state of Florida is giving this psychopathic killer just what he wanted," said Mark Elliott of Clearwater, spokesman for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

The attention surrounding Rolling's execution reopened old wounds in Gainesville and for the families of the victims.

The victims' families ran an advertisement Thursday in The Gainesville Sun, thanking the community for its support: "We hope you will remember August 1990 and the years that followed without any sense of community shame for what has happened here. You turned a blemish into a rose."

Rolling was calm and cooperative ahead of the execution, Corrections Department spokesman Robby Cunningham said. He spent several hours with his brother Kevin and his brother's pastor, officials said.

The gathering of people on a barren cow pasture across from the prison was reminiscent of the crowds that assembled for Bundy's execution on Jan. 24, 1989 in the state's old electric chair. Bundy was suspected in the deaths and disappearances of 36 women across the country.

Bundy died in the electric chair in 1989 in the same death chamber. The case was still fresh in the minds of many when Rolling's killings began the following year in roughly the same area as some of Bundy's crimes.

Rolling, a police officer's son from Shreveport, La., arrived in Gainesville on a Greyhound bus, pitched a tent in the woods near campus and set out to become, as he would say later, a "superstar" among criminals.

The bodies of Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, were found stabbed to death in a townhouse just off the University of Florida campus. Christa Hoyt, 18, was found decapitated the next morning in her isolated duplex. Tracy Paules and Manny Taboada, both 23, were discovered dead a day later in the apartment they shared.

For months, a task force of local, state and federal agents followed hundreds of leads and took blood samples from dozens of men. They did not know that Rolling was already behind bars for robbing a grocery store.

Then authorities in Shreveport, investigating a triple slaying that they believe Rolling committed, suggested police check out the drifter and ex-con.

Rolling blamed the murders on abuse he suffered as a child and his treatment in prison, and claimed he had good and bad multiple personalities.

But in a letter to The Associated Press in 2002, Rolling wrote: "I assure you I am not a salivating ogre. Granted ... time's past; the dark era of long ago - Dr. Jeckle & Mr. Hyde did strike up & down the corridors of insanety."

He said he killed one person for every year he was behind bars. He served a total of eight years in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi before the killings.

Rolling was the 63rd inmate to be put to death since Florida resumed executions in 1979 and the third this year.

Under legislation introduced after the 11 September attacks, passports issued in Visa Waiver Program countries after 26 October must contain biometric data.

Face-mapping technology is used to create the image stored in a chip on the passport in a bid to fight fraud.

Some civil liberties campaigners are concerned about the use of biometrics.

About 13 million people travel each year to the US under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) - which entitles them to apply for entry to the US on a passport for up to 90 days for business or leisure without needing a visa.

If any of the 27 VWP countries issues a passport without the necessary criteria after 26 October, the holder will have to apply for a visa.

Delay

There will be no immediate impact on those travelling on Thursday, as the US will still accept passports issued before that date which have a digital photo and are machine-readable.

Washington initially set a deadline of 26 October 2005 but extended it by a year after the European Union complained many nations would have trouble completing the changeover in time.

The decision to use face technology, as opposed to fingerprint or the more accurate iris systems, was set out by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2003 - as it was the most developed and widely available of the biometric systems at the time.

The UK Identity and Passport Service has issued more than 2.5m biometric passports since March and claims they are "the most secure passport ever issued by the UK".

Structural dimensions of facial features are taken from an applicant's passport photograph and converted into digital data which is stored on a chip in the document.

The chip also contains the biographical details found on the back page of existing passports. It is hoped they will be more difficult to forge.

David Starkie, of technology firm 3M which provides the passport issuance system, says there is a lot of suspicion around the use of biometrics.

"But if you do clone or copy this, what are you going to do with it, if it is not your face?" he said.

Automated iris recognition systems are being trialled in some countries, enabling pre-registered passengers to avoid passport control, but those travelling to the US will still face a security guard at the port of entry.

Travellers will present their passport to the official, who will swipe it, bringing up the details on a computer. The official can then check that the face scan on the chip matches the photograph on the passport, and the holder.

Next generation

Statewatch director Tony Bunyan says that means the passports are not truly "biometric".

"That is only good for a one-on-one check to confirm the person is who he says he is - but that is no good for a database."

He says the excuse that it will help prevent international terrorism is questionable as you need to know whose face or fingerprints you are looking for in the first place.

He also questions the plans for the introduction of other biometrics - fingerprints and iris scans, which will mean passport applicants having to present themselves at enrolment centres in person.

The EU wants biometric passports to include fingerprints by 2009 - which mean the rolling out of a second generation of biometric passports.

Dr Fred Preston, Director UK Identification and Security for Motorola, says he believes biometric systems will be used more and more to help secure borders.

"Multiple biometrics is the way to go, but following ICAO recommendations for face technology is a great way to start," he said.

Sharron Graves, assistant professor of accounting, who recently won the "Best Paper" award at the International Business Research and College Teaching & Learning conferences in Las Vegas, has been studying students' cheating habits for a year and a half.

Graves has been comparing research done by others around the country to results from "a few small sample surveys" she conducted at SFA.

"The sample size is too small to release any official data about our campus yet," Graves said.

But through her studies, she has found a definite connection between students' cheating habits and the likelihood that those students will act unethically in the workforce.

On average, 70 percent to 75 percent of students in this country admit to cheating on exams or on homework in high school and college, compared to only 23 percent in 1941, according to the Center for Academic Integrity.

Graves credits this increase to business professionals who set a bad example by acting unethically and to the increased competition level in schools.

"As an effect, employees are 13 times more likely to be deviant at work than in 1980," she said.

According to Graves, there are two types of corporate deviance: property deviance and production deviance.

Property deviance describes the theft, defacing or destruction of a business's property by an employee. Production deviance, the more common of the two, includes surfing the internet during work, turning in false work hours and taking long lunch breaks.

"Production deviance leads to a loss in a company's production," Graves explained, "which forces it to raise prices. So ultimately, we as consumers pay for employees' irresponsible behavior."

Graves believes the remedy for such behavior is to start early.

"Honor codes should be implemented at schools to engrain ethical work and study values into students at an early age," she said. "What is our goal in college? Making it harder for people to cheat? No, I think it's to change the mind set about cheating. This, in turn, will reduce the amount of cheating."

Implementation of a student honor code is already on the college of business's list of long-term goals.

The new allegations against Anthony Mercieca were made by a man who lived in North Miami and was an altar boy at St. James Catholic Church, where Mercieca worked, attorney Jeffrey Herman said.

Herman said he plans to file a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Miami. His client, now 40 and identified in the lawsuit only as John Doe No. 26, says Mercieca abused him when he was about 12 years old.

"He had been thinking about it before Foley came forward, and then when Foley came out and the church encouraged other victims to come forward, he decided to come forward," Herman said.

The man said "all of my nightmares came back" when Mercieca's picture appeared on the news last week amid Foley's allegations that the priest had molested him.

Foley (R-Fla.) resigned amid accusations that he sent sexually explicit electronic messages to teenage boys who had worked as pages on Capitol Hill.

Mercieca, 69, now lives on the Maltese island of Gozo in the Mediterranean. No one answered the phone at his home.

Archdiocese spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta said: "Any of this type of behavior by Father Mercieca was unknown to the archdiocese and we had absolutely no information to indicate that the father did or would engage in any type of inappropriate or abusive behavior."

Strangely enough, O'Neill voluntarily took part in the film, agreeing to let retired detective Gordon Davie film the chats they had at Tasmania's Hayes Prison Farm, where O'Neill is serving life for the rape and murder of a young boy near Hobart in 1975.

He was also charged with another similar crime but it never went to trial and he is Tasmania's longest-serving prisoner for a single offence.

Davie's relationship with O'Neill began after he read a newspaper article on the murderer's comfortable living conditions at the prison farm. Wanting to know more and suspicious about just how many other crimes O'Neill could have been involved in, Davie wrote him a letter.

He replied within a week. Davie went to visit him and the two developed a relationship spanning three years. It was only recently when O'Neill reacted angrily to the film that the two stopped talking.

The casual chats they share at the prison farm are the main feature of the documentary and it is chilling to hear O'Neill lie constantly while, at the same time, come across as honest and charming.

Some of these lies are learnt when Davie goes to the Kimberley, researching O'Neill's time there. Here he told people he was a Vietnam War hero, a drover, a lawyer and even an ASIO agent.

Through Davie's gentle questioning (in his more endearing than annoying monotone voice), we quickly learn that O'Neill is not the sort of person you would expect to see in prison.

He is a well-educated and articulate man who knows when he's being manipulated and is quick to change the subject or speak in code on matters (such as murder) he doesn't want to go into.

The documentary also features interviews with a psychiatrist and criminologist and they discuss with Davie whether O'Neill has traits of a psychopath.

But the most spine-tingling scenes are those that open the film. A woman in tears describes how in 1962, when O'Neill was 15, he allegedly showed her the body of a dead boy in his car and threatened to "shove something up (her) bum-hole and murder and bury" her too.

The Fishermen is an intriguing film but don't expect to find out how O'Neill's mind works. Instead be prepared to ponder some of the many rather disturbing questions it raises.

The Fishermen, tonight, 8.30, ABC.