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Toxic pollutants rise in U.S., EPA reports

WASHINGTON - The volume of toxic pollutants released into the environment in the United States rose 5 percent in 2002, the first increase since 1997, the government reported Tuesday.

Those two years are the only ones to show an increase since the Environmental Protection Agency began keeping track of the billions of pounds of pollution under a 1986 law. In 1997, the increase was 6 percent.

Even with the most recent rise - a dramatic turnaround from the 13 percent decline in 2001 - environmentalists say the EPA is still letting industry underreport the amount of air pollution by 330-million pounds a year.

Some 4.79-billion pounds were released in 2002, the latest for which figures are available, not including releases from metal mining, the EPA reported. The agency stopped including that data because of a recent court decision in an industry challenge.

BOSTON - A federal judge ruled on Monday that federal sentencing laws are unconstitutional because they give prosecutors too much power.

In an impassioned 177-page decision, the judge, William G. Young, described a system in which prosecutors use various strategies to reward those who plead guilty and to impose exceptionally harsh sentences on those who choose to stand trial and lose.

"The focus of our entire criminal justice system has shifted away from trials and juries and adjudication to a massive system of sentence bargaining that is heavily rigged against the accused citizen," Young wrote in a decision reconsidering the sentences he imposed on two defendants.

For a moment, Michael W. Melvill thought he was going to be a "squashed bug." A day after he piloted a rocket ship to the cusp of space, he said in an interview Tuesday that the problems he experienced during the ascent - including a violent roll to the left and a vital control system gone awry - led him to expect the worst.

Melvill, the first person to reach space in a project developed with private money, recalled that he briefly considered aborting the flight, or even a high-risk bailout that would surely have destroyed the tiny craft, SpaceShipOne.

"I had a sort of resigned feeling in my mind that there was no way to get back with a situation like that," he said.

Soon afterward he was able to switch to backup controls, regain mastery of the ship and glide it safely back to the runway. He enjoyed the glorious view, and then played with M&M's in his few minutes of zero gravity at the top of his climb. But during the worst of it, he admitted, "I was deathly afraid."

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - A federal judge approved a plan Tuesday to try serial bombing suspect Eric Rudolph in Birmingham but pick jurors from throughout northern Alabama, instead of just a three-county area around the state's largest city.

U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith approved the joint proposal that had been agreed to by defense attorneys and federal prosecutors. Rudolph had been seeking a change of venue.

Rudolph is accused of setting the Jan. 29, 1998, bomb outside New Woman All Women Health Care that killed Officer Robert Sanderson and critically injuring nurse Emily Lyons.