African Worms Threaten Food Supply
Ventura's Autobiography
Internet Subpoenas
Violence

Columbia Refugees Return
AOL wants to be the phone company
Climbers Say Body Found on Everest
Cruelty of Children in real audio

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Legions of African army worms chomping through eastern Africa threaten to severely reduce agricultural production in the region, an insect control expert said Wednesday.  The army worms, first spotted in Tanzania more than two months ago, are spreading rapidly, said Charles Muinamia, who is in charge of the Nairobi station of the Desert Locust Control Organization for Eastern Africa.

``If not checked, the worms will have seriously implications for food production,'' he said.

Muinamia said the worms, members of the insect family Noctuidae, feed primarily on the leaves of young maize, rice and wheat plants.  The insects take their name from the manner in which they move across wide expanses of land.

``They move in a line spreading nearly 1 kilometer (.6 miles), literally feeding on all grass family plant leaves, doing a better job than a lawn mower,'' Muinamia said.

Agriculture Minister Musalia Mudavadi said the worms have worked their way through more than 247,000 acres of Kenya's prime agricultural land in Rift Valley, Central and Coast provinces.  But he said their effect would be reduced because most of the agricultural plants in those provinces had already passed the vulnerable stage.

The olive-green worms began munching their way through Nairobi's parks and flower beds last week.  Muinamia said his organization is tracking the location of the worms and is providing governments with details on their movement.  He said the worms are in Burundi and Rwanda, and could spread to Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Eritrea if not controlled.

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Martin Kaste of Minnesota Public Radio reports on the release of Governor Jesse Ventura's colorful and controversial autobiography. Ventura is facing criticism for admitting to a past that included frequenting prostitutes and smoking marijuana. Ventura says he didn't always know he'd be a role model and believes in coming clean about his past.

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What can you do when somebody anonymously says something nasty about you on the Internet? More and more, individuals and companies are seeking -- and obtaining -- subpoenas against Internet service providers to find out the source of the comments. ISP's say they generally cooperate with law enforcement efforts to identify people suspected of criminal activity. But civil liberties groups are concerned about a threat to individual privacy as companies are being asked to reveal personal information in civil suits. Listen as NPR's Larry Abramson reports for Morning Edition.

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NPR's Steve Inskeep reports on a group of people displaced by the war in Colombia who decided to defy the odds and go home. Two years after being forced from their village, two hundred residents of La Union in northwest Colombia returned, declaring themselves a neutral, "peace community." They re-opened the local school, began community projects, and hoped the war would stay away. It didn't. Rightist paramilitaries came back and executed three local leaders.

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NPR's Larry Abramson reports on a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on marketing violence to children. Leaders of the movie and computer game industries defended their products, saying the violent content has been exaggerated, and that most customers are adults. But many lawmakers joined children's advocates in expressing their frustration with the entertainment industry's inability to regulate itself, and its refusal to pressure its members to reduce the violence in their products.

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Heated competition in Britain pushes AOL and Bertelsmann to test Internet phone service.

LONDON -- Britain's AOL said on Wednesday it was testing a new pricing package which gives subscribers free telephone calls when accessing its Internet service.

AOL, a joint venture between America Online and Germany's Bertelsmann AG, plans to offer the free calls to customers paying a monthly fee of 14.99 pounds ($24.40). The offer is expected to be one of a series of pricing packages to be tested by AOL.

The move is seen as an attempt to recapture ground lost to rival service providers such as electrical retailer Dixons' Freeserve. Freeserve is subscription free but customers do have to pay the cost of local telephone calls connecting them to the Internet.

Launched only last September, Freeserve is now Britain's biggest service provider with more than one million subscribers. AOL has just under 700,00 subscribers in this country.

Underlining fierce competition in the sector, pay TV giant BSkyB on Wednesday announced plans to launch its own free Internet Service Provider -- skynow -- from June 1. The announcement dented shares in Dixons, which have rocketed since the successful launch of Freeserve.

Dixon shares were down 4.5 percent or 61p to 1,274p by 1035 GMT while BSkyB, boosted by plans to give away digital TV decoders to drive take-up of the service, added 41.5p to 583p, a 7.6 percent rise.

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BOSTON (AP), Members of an expedition seeking to determine whether Englishmen George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest say they have located Mallory's body near the top of the world's highest peak.   ``They found a name tag sewn into his clothing,'' said Peter Potterfield, editor of mountainzone.com, a Seattle-based Internet company relaying dispatches from the climbers.

Eight climbers have been looking for the bodies of the men, who disappeared in 1924, and a camera that could contain pictures proving they reached the summit 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

They found the body Saturday but haven't yet found the camera or evidence to prove they had reached the summit, Potterfield said.  The expedition is being documented by the Boston-based public television show NOVA, and is sponsored by PBS and Potterfield's company.

Expedition leader Eric Simonson and fellow climber Dave Hahn, who was the first to come across the body, described their excitement over the Internet. ``And so when we realized that it was George Mallory, we were really blown away by that,'' Hahn said. ``We didn't want to disturb him, he'd been lying there for 75 years, but at the same time we thought what better tribute to the man than to try and find out if he had summitted Mt. Everest in 1924.''

The body was found about 2,000 feet from the windblown 29,028-foot summit not far from that of a Chinese climber, whose accounts were used by the NOVA crew to try to locate Mallory and Irvine.

Jochen Hemmleb, a 28-year-old German climber and Mallory historian, chose a location for the team to search based largely on a report from the climber, Wang Hongbao, of a body on the North Ridge route Mallory and Irvine would have taken.   Hongbao described the body as ``English Dead,'' and indicated its vintage clothing broke to pieces when he touched it.  The body was found on a snow terrace, just below the spot where an ice ax believed to be Irvine's was found in 1933. The ax had three notches on the handle, which was how Irvine marked his equipment. Two days after Hongbao told his story in 1975, he died in an avalanche on Everest's North Face.

The climb, which began on March 29, is being made in six stages.   The mountaineers establish camps at ever higher altitudes, and then descend to base camp as they become acclimated to the thin air.  High winds combined with low precipitation have scoured the mountain clean, helping the expedition.

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Writers David Sedaris and Ira Sher on cruelties done by children against other children and against adults. Educator and author Vivian Paley on a classroom experiment to make children less cruel.

1. Ira talks about bullies with a first grader

2. Writer David Sedaris on his own cruelty to boys he perceived as gay - and on the summer when he finally admitted to himself that he was gay.

3. Short story by writer Ira Sher on children taunting a man trapped in a well.

4. Discussion with Chicago writer/kindergarten teacher Vivian Paley, about an experiment she documents in one of her books, trying to lessen children's cruelty to each other in kindergarten. Listen to the whole story in real audio.