What transpired at 12.45pm at the 137th Street Station on Number 1 line has cast Mr Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker and veteran of the US Navy, into the role of self-deprecating hero. He continues to insist he did nothing to deserve special acclaim. Most New Yorkers beg to differ. And all were asking themselves the same question yesterday: if they had been in Mr Autrey's shoes, would they have done the same?

Mr Autrey was on his way to Times Square to drop off his daughters, Syshe, four, and Shuqui, six, with their mother before going to work. But before a train arrived, his eye was caught by the young man having the fit. He went to his aid, putting a pen in his mouth to stop him swallowing his tongue. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, a 20-year-old student from Massachusetts attending the New York Film Academy, came to and struggled to his feet. But as he did so, he fell over the platform's edge.

"I had a split-second decision to make," Mr Autrey said later. " Do I let the train run him over and hear my daughters screaming and see the blood? Or do I jump in?" Leaving the girls behind, he opted for action. At first he tried to heave Mr Hollopeter back to the platform, but the confused and frightened man began to struggle. Both men risked touching the third rail, charged with 600 volts.

It was then that Mr Autrey saw the twin headlights of a train bearing down on them from the tunnel. In an instant, he had thrown Mr Hollopeter into a 12-inch drainage trough between the rails and leapt in after him. "I just chose to dive on top of him and pin him down."

Mr Hollopeter, slammed into the gulley on his back, continued to struggle with his saviour. The two were lying face-to-face, the rumbling of the train filling the station, when the Navy veteran blurted: "Please don't move. If you move, one of us going to lose a leg or die."

The train driver saw the entwined bodies and slammed on the emergency brakes. But moving too fast, the train stopped only after at least two of its 10 cars had already passed over them. The space between them and the train's underbelly and couplings was no more than two inches.

"Am I dead?" Mr Hollopeter asked, according to Mr Autrey, who recalled what happened to the Daily News. "I said, 'No, we're under the train'." Mr Autrey then yelled to passengers on the platform to be silent. He was worried about his girls. "I've got two daughters up there. Let them know their father's OK."

The station filled with applause. Twenty minutes later ­ the time it took to turn off the power ­ Mr Autrey emerged to be reunited with his daughters. Mr Hollopeter was sedated and taken to hospital where he remained under observation yesterday. His mother, Rachel Hollopeter, spoke for most of the city, calling Mr Autrey an "angel". She added: "If he wasn't there, this would be a whole different call."

But Mr Autrey would have none of it. "I don't feel like I did something spectacular. I just saw someone who needed help."

The FBI on Wednesday released 1,561 pages of documents on Rehnquist to The Associated Press, other news organizations and scholars in response to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act following Rehnquist's death in September 2005. An additional 207 pages were withheld under the federal disclosure law, and the FBI said an entire section of his file could not be found.

Much of the FBI's file on Rehnquist appears to have been compiled almost exclusively for his two Senate confirmations _ his initial nomination to the court by President Nixon in 1971 and his nomination as chief justice by President Reagan in 1986. Administration officials apparently hoped to prevent any surprises from sinking his nominations.

In 1971, Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst directed the FBI to conduct investigations of witnesses who were planning to testify at a Senate hearing against Rehnquist's confirmation. Fifteen years later during the Reagan administration, the FBI was enlisted to conduct background checks on witnesses who were scheduled to testify against Rehnquist's nomination to become chief justice.

The late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986 when Rehnquist was nominated to be chief justice. John Bolton, who resigned in December as President Bush's U.N. ambassador, was an assistant attorney general under Reagan.

"Thurmond just gave these names to Bolton they will testify for the Democrats and we want to know what they are going to say," a Justice Department official told a counterpart at the FBI, according to a memo in Rehnquist's file.

Alexander Charns, a Durham, N.C., lawyer who received the file and has extensively researched the FBI's relationship with the court, said the new disclosures show the two administrations went to some lengths to discredit Rehnquist opponents.

"In many ways, I guess it's the same old story of the political use of the FBI," Charns said.

The documents show that the FBI was aware in 1971 that Rehnquist had owned a home in Phoenix with a deed that allowed him to sell only to whites. The restrictive covenant was not disclosed until his 1986 confirmation hearings, at which Rehnquist said he became aware of the clause only days earlier.

Also detailed in the declassified file was Rehnquist's 1981 hospital stay for treatment of back pain and his dependence on powerful prescription pain-relief medication.

The FBI investigated his dependence on Placidyl, which Rehnquist had taken for at least 10 years, according to a summary of a 1970 medical examination.

When Rehnquist checked into a hospital in 1981 for a weeklong stay, doctors stopped administering the drug, causing what a hospital spokesman at the time said was a "disturbance in mental clarity."

The FBI file, citing one of his physicians, said Rehnquist experienced withdrawal symptoms that included trying to escape the facility and discerning changes in the patterns on the hospital curtains. The justice also thought he heard voices outside his room discussing various plots against him.

The doctor said Placidyl is a highly toxic drug and that she could not understand why anyone would prescribe it, especially for long periods.

Prior to his hospitalization, Rehnquist occasionally slurred his speech in his questions to lawyers at Supreme Court arguments. Those problems ceased when he changed medications, the doctor said.

Charns said some of the censored documents provide intriguing hints of what else Rehnquist's file might contain.

In one previously secret memo from 1971, an FBI official wrote, "No persons interviewed during our current or 1969 investigation furnished information bearing adversely on Rehnquist's morals or professional integrity; however ..." The next third of the page is blacked out, under the disclosure law's exception for matters of national security.

"It would be nice to know what is still classified, three decades later," Charns said.

Asim Nelson, a transit emergency medical technician, told the paper that lack of food was the root cause of fainting passengers.

"Not eating for three or four days, you are going to go down," Nelson said. "If you don't eat for 12 hours, you are going to get weak."

Although the agency doesn't keep an official record of the nature of each rider's illness, the paper said that an average 395 delays each month are caused by sick customers.

The notion that fainting dieters are causing transit delays was previously reported by the newspaper Metro in a 2005 article.

Fainting spells caused by missed meals topped other "sick customer" causes, including flu symptoms, anxiety attacks, hangovers and heat exhaustion, according to Nelson.

Nelson is part of the MTA's "sick Customer Response Program," which consists of emergency medical technicians and registered nurses. When a rider becomes sick, the train conductor must stay with the passenger until emergency responders arrive.

"It's one thing if your gardener gets deported," said the project's Delhi-born lead researcher, Vivek Wadhwa. "But if these entrepreneurs leave, we're really denting our intellectual property creation."

Wadhwa, Duke's executive in residence and the founder of two tech startups in North Carolina's Research Triangle, said the country should make the most of its ability to "get the best and brightest from around the world."

The study comes lmost eight years after a report from the University of California, Berkeley, on the impact of foreign-born entrepreneurs.

At that time, AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, estimated immigrants founded about 25 percent of Silicon Valley tech companies in 1999. The Duke study found the percentage had more than doubled, to 52 percent in 2005.

California led the nation, with foreign-born entrepreneurs founding 39 percent of startups, even though they make up only 25 percent of the state's population. In New Jersey, 38 percent of tech startups were founded by immigrants, followed by Michigan (33 percent), Georgia (30 percent), Virginia (29 percent) and Massachusetts (29 percent).

Saxenian, also co-author of the new study, said the research debunks the notion that immigrants who come to the United States take jobs from Americans.

"The advantage of entrepreneurs is that they're generally creating new opportunities and new wealth that didn't even exist before them," Saxenian said. "Just by leaving your home country, you're taking a risk, and that means you're willing to take risks in business. You put them in an environment that supports entrepreneurship, and this is the logical outcome."

Researchers started with a list of 28,766 companies classified as technology and engineering companies in Dun and Bradstreet's Million Dollar Database, which lists companies with more than 1 million dollars in revenue and at least 20 employees. Researchers were able to reach senior executives to determine the backgrounds of key founders for 2,054 of the tech startups.

Immigrants were most likely to start companies in the software, semiconductor and communications industries. They were least likely to enter the defense sector.

One of the study's biggest surprises was the extent to which Indians led the entrepreneurial pack. Of an estimated 7,300 U.S. tech startups founded by immigrants, 26 percent have Indian founders, CEOs, presidents or head researchers, the study found.

Indian immigrants founded more tech startups from 1995 to 2005 than people from the four next biggest sources -- United Kingdom, China, Taiwan and Japan -- combined.

"People who come from India are laser-focused on technology," said Rosen Sharma, who immigrated from India in 1993 and is now president and chief executive officer of Palo Alto-based management software company SolidCore Systems Inc. "They come here and they learn to tell a story and paint a vision. Once you have those two things, you're off to the races."

The Duke researchers also found that foreign-born inventors living in the United States without citizenship accounted for 24 percent of patent filings last year, compared with 7.3 percent in 1998.

Without permanent citizenship, inventors are more likely to take valuable intellectual property elsewhere -- and U.S. companies would have to compete with them, Wadhwa said.

"The bottom line is: Why aren't these people citizens?" Wadhwa said. "We're giving away the keys to the kingdom. This is a big, big deal once you figure out what this means for U.S. competitiveness."

The Border Patrol will not say whether shots were fired. However, no Guardsmen were injured in the incident.

The Border Patrol says the incident occurred somewhere along the 120 mile section of the border between Nogales and Lukeville. The area is known as a drug corridor. Last year, 124-thousand pounds of illegal drugs were confiscated in this area.

The Border patrol says the attackers quickly retreated back into Mexico.

The appeals court convicted el Motassadeq as an accessory to the murder of 246 passengers and crewmembers aboard all four jetliners used in the attacks, and ordered the Hamburg state court to set a new sentence.

El Motassadeq, 32, a slight man with a long beard who has always maintained he knew nothing of the hijackers' plans, appeared relaxed for much of Friday's session, but became agitated when presiding Judge Carsten Beckmann asked if he wanted to make a statement.

"Can anyone in this room swear by God that what is in this verdict is the truth about me?" he asked.

"I swear by God that I did know the attackers were in America," he shouted in accented German. "I swear by God that I did not know what they wanted to do."

Defense attorney Ladislav Anisic called for the proceedings to be stopped and his client released on procedural grounds, citing constitutional concerns over the way the panel hearing the case was selected.

His colleague, Udo Jacob, argued that the hearings should at least be halted pending a decision by the Federal Constitutional Court on an appeal filed last month against el Motassadeq's stiffened conviction. It is unclear when that court, Germany's highest, might consider the case.

Judge Carsten Beckmann adjourned the hearing until Monday without ruling on either request.

The court has scheduled sessions through Feb. 5, but Beckmann said that, depending how his three-judge panel rules on the defense requests, both sides could make their sentencing arguments Monday - and the court could deliver a verdict then.

Prosecutor Walter Hemberger said before Friday's hearing that his sentence "will certainly be toward the upper end" of what is possible.

Andreas Schulz, an attorney for families of Sept. 11 victims, said he places "a great deal of value on el Motassadeq getting the maximum sentence."

El Motassadeq was a close friend of pilots Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah when they lived and studied in Hamburg. He has acknowledged training at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and that he was close to the three hijackers, but insists he knew nothing of their plans.

However, the federal appeals court said evidence showed el Motassadeq knew that the hijackers planned to hijack and crash planes. It found that his actions - for example, transferring money, and helping the hijackers keep up the appearance of being regular university students by paying tuition and rent fees - facilitated the attacks.

The federal court also said it was irrelevant to el Motassadeq's guilt whether he knew of the plot's timing, dimension or targets.

The sentencing hearings mark the third time that the Hamburg court has considered el Motassadeq's case. But it may not be the end of the saga that started with his arrest in November 2001 and has featured two full trials.

El Motassadeq was convicted and sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison in 2003, but that verdict was overturned by a federal court the following year - largely because of lack of evidence from al-Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.

At a retrial that resulted in the 2005 conviction, the U.S. provided limited summaries from the interrogation of, among others, Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected liaison between the Hamburg hijackers and al-Qaeda.

Jacob on Friday insisted that judges had been wrong to dismiss a statement from Binalshibh supporting el Motassadeq's insistence that he knew nothing of the terror cell's plans. The judges had questioned both its credibility and its value as evidence.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Drivers would have their airport licenses suspended 30 days for the first offense and revoked for two years after the second offense, according to the proposal.

"Our expectation is that if you're going to be driving a taxi at the airport, you need to provide service to anybody who wants it," commission spokesman Patrick Hogan said.

The commission is expected to vote Jan. 16 on the request for public hearings.

Airports Commissioner Bert McKasy said the issue raised by Muslim cab drivers who say that carrying alcohol or dogs, including those that help people with disabilities, violates religious beliefs is "unfortunate."

"I think it's pretty much the consensus of the commissioners and the staff that we have to provide good service to the public, and that's pretty much the bottom line," McKasy said.

Each month, about 100 people are denied cab service at the airport. Airport officials say that in recent months, the problem of service refusals for religious reasons has grown. About three-quarters of the 900 taxi drivers at the airport are Somali, many of them Muslim.

Hogan said the goal is to have a new policy in place by May 11, when airport taxi licenses come up for annual renewal.

"We want the drivers to know about the policy in advance, so that if they don't think they can work under these conditions, they have the option of not renewing their license," Hogan said.

Last year, the airports commission received a fatwa, or religious edict, from the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society. The fatwa said "Islamic jurisprudence" prohibits taxi drivers from carrying passengers with alcohol, "because it involves cooperating in sin according to Islam."

Eva Buzek, a flight attendant and Minneapolis resident, said she was recently refused service by five taxi drivers when she was carrying wine as she returned from a trip to France.

"In my book, when you choose to come to a different country, you make some choices," said Buzek, a native of Poland. "I never expected everything to be the same way as in my homeland, and I adjusted. I never dreamed of imposing my beliefs on somebody else."

But Hassan Mohamud, imam at Al-Taqwa Mosque of St. Paul and director of the Islamic Law Institute at the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, one of the largest Islamic organizations in the state, said asking Muslims to transport alcohol "is a violation of their faith. Muslims do not consume, carry, sell or buy alcohol, and Islam also considers the saliva of dogs to be unclean, he said.

Mohamud said he would ask airport officials to reconsider.

But many Somali taxi drivers don't have a problem transporting passengers with alcohol and are worried about a backlash, said Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center. Jamal said he supports the tougher penalties.

"We tell the taxi drivers, if you don't want to do this, change your job," he said. "You are living in a country where alcohol is not viewed the way it is in your country."