"Gotta be small," he says.

The transcripts, released by court order yesterday, show that callers from the top floors of the second tower were told to stay put after a hijacked plane hit the first tower.

Generosa Ammon Pelosi, who died of breast cancer last Friday, did not mention her estranged husband, Daniel Pelosi, in the 37-page will. She also left $250,000 and a Porsche to a contractor in Manhattan and another $250,000 to her mother-in-law.

He was one of seven young men killed in Braeton, on the outskirts of Kingston, shortly before dawn on March 14 2001.

Families of the victims, who have all had the opportunity to read the transcripts, are split over the release of calls totalling almost 260 hours made on the morning of September 11 2001. Some families are dreading the gratuitous re-publication in the media.

Another space shuttle disaster could occur if Nasa does not address its self-protective culture, which is schedule-driven, hampered by lack of funds and burdened by an insufficient safety programme, investigators of the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia said yesterday.

Almost exactly 23 years after they met, Walter, 44, and Greg, 52, were getting married. And like many same sex couples across America they had to go north to do it. "It's not going to mean anything in the US but it will mean something to us,"Walter said. "It means we're not different."

Stand on the star today and you can witness the city's latest confrontation as the Alabama supreme court house plays host to prayer circles and television trucks in a showdown between the state's most senior judge and the country's highest court.

Forty years on, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" is still a great speech. Still pertinent, even though many of its immediate demands have been met. Still relevant, beyond America's borders and the racial context that it addressed. So universal in its humanism that it spoke to Catholics in Northern Ireland during the 60s, black South Africans in the townships during the 70s and 80s and speaks to the Roma in eastern Europe today.

Prosecutors say Peter Gotti sent hitmen armed with a bomb to Arizona to find Gravano, who was living in Phoenix under an assumed name after his testimony sent John Gotti to jail for life. The don died last year.

More than 5.6 million Americans are either in prison or have served time there - and that number will continue to rise, the report shows.

It's a summer noon in Alabama and those residents of Pell City who brave the outdoors cling to the shade like a life-raft. Because of the heat and humidity they hug the contours of the downtown dollar stores, walking as slowly as a southern drawl. Pell City isn't a city, strictly speaking. It's a small town, 25 miles from Birmingham, where yellow ribbons adorn most available street furniture and American flags hang from porches waiting for a breeze. It's the kind of place those in the urban centres of the west and east coasts look upon with disdain or, at best, a nonchalant disregard. "The America I live in is the America of the cities," said the New York-based essayist and novelist Susan Sontag. "The rest is just drive through."

It was supposed to symbolise liberation and celestial reverence in an independent Jamaica. Two naked 7ft-high bronze figures - a male and a female - looking skywards on a dome-shaped fountain embossed with Bob Marley's lyrics "None but ourselves can free our minds".

Quite how he came to this ill-informed conclusion, and why he would choose to share it, is not entirely clear. He rarely mentions race domestically - the last time there were riots in the north he didn't even venture up there to see what had sparked them. So when he raises it about America, it exposes both his weakness on the subject in Britain and his ignorance of its dynamic in America.

Nicknamed the "Sex in the City voters", single women are less likely to turn up to the polls than married women but more likely to vote Democrat if they do: a potentially rich source of votes if the Democrats can tap their concerns.

"We're going to do something," Thomas Burnett told his wife. Todd Beamer said: "Let's roll." And then, it was believed, they fought their way to the cockpit using a food trolley as a shield, seized the controls and forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than allow it to reach the White House.

William Bulger, 69, the former Democratic leader of the Massachusetts senate, has been a formidable presence in the state's political and civic life for several decades. But a series of unanswered questions and unsatisfactory answers regarding his relationship with his elder brother, James "Whitey" Bulger, a mob figure linked to 21 murders, has forced him to stand down.

The announcement of who had won the contest for homecoming queen at the prestigious, historically black, Howard University, in Washington DC, was always a dramatic affair. A high-backed throne was placed on a revolving stage with its back to the audience and would then be slowly swivelled around in the dark until the lights came on to reveal the winner. But the 1966 election was more dramatic than most. Until then it had been little more than a display of conservative African-American femininity, where the candidates paraded in the latest styles and flashy cars, smiling sweetly and pressing flesh before the secret ballot on election day. In 1966 a young woman called Robin Gregory stood with an altogether different agenda. She canvassed the dorms preaching black power and women's rights and wore her hair in an afro, looking sharp but by no means dainty.

Since Davis was calling for a vote I didn't have, I didn't take much notice. Nor did I link the eloquent man who spoke against subway fare increases at a local meeting I had gone to in February with the man on the poster. Indeed, it was only when his face flashed up on the local news channel that I realised that Davis was a local hero who was rapidly becoming an national news story.

Before Mike Tyson was allowed back in the boxing ring after biting a chunk out of Evander Holyfield's ear, the Nevada Athletic Commission demanded that he underwent a psychological evaluation. During the five-day examination, he told doctors how, in the run-up to the notorious night in 1997, he was "experiencing significant depression", in part because of financial problems. He owed $13m (£8m) in back taxes and had lost faith in those he had once hired to look out for his interests. "People let me down," he said. "People I would have died for."

Yet the film, co-directed by Gibson, who has spent $25m (£15.6m) of his own money on the project, has already attracted lavish praise from evangelicals and stern criticism from Jewish and Catholic scholars, with one academic warning that it could provoke within the US "one of the great crisis in Christian-Jewish relations".

Now Paschal's, the diner once referred to as the kitchen of the civil rights movement, is to be demolished - making way for a new dormitory for the historically black Clark University.

Actors Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, property developer Donald Trump and shock jock Howard Stern, not to mention a number of judges and senior politicians, are among those who can legally carry a loaded gun.

The New York Times moved to restore its battered image in the wake of a journalistic scandal that claimed the jobs of its two most senior editors in June by pledging a review of its journalistic policies and creating the first ombudsman's job in its 152-year history.

My orders were as follows:

"Our churches are too segregated and the Lord never intended for that to happen. It's time to do something radical," said Bishop Fred Caldwell, of the Greenwood Acres Full Gospel church in Shreveport.