BREVITAS

HARDWARE CHESS SET

POLICE BLOTTER

Michigan Live - State police have launched an investigation into the death of a teen whom police tased. The 15-year-old died about 3:40 a.m. Sunday after Bay City police used a stun gun to subdue him at an apartment on South Catherine near East John. Neighbors summoned authorities to quell a large fight, police said. When officers arrived, neighbors directed them to an apartment where they found two people arguing. Officers' attempts to diffuse the situation failed, police said. Police say they used the stun gun after the teen tried to fight with them and others in the apartment.

SPOOKY STUFF

Sunday Herald, Australia - The late President Milosevic's secret police chief and organizer of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States' top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92. The claim that from 1992 until the end of the decade, Jovica Stanisic, head of Serbia's murderous DB Secret Police, was regularly informing his CIA handlers of the thinking in Milosevic's inner circle has shocked the region. Stanisic is said to have loyally served his two masters for eight years. He is facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. . . Like in a Cold War spy thriller, Serbia's secret police chief met his CIA handlers in safe houses, parks and boats on the river Sava to betray his master's action plans. He provided, it is claimed, information on the whereabouts of NATO hostages, aided CIA operatives in their search for Muslim mass graves and helped the US set up secret bases in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace accord.

THE LOCAL

LA Times - Though people sometimes complained about the Carbondale Valley Journal, its demise came as a blow after 34 years as the mountain town's only newspaper. . . A friend of Rebecca Young's died and there was no obituary. "I didn't hear of his death for a couple of weeks," she said. "I was so sad I wasn't at his service." Young, who founded the newspaper in 1975 and ran it for five years before selling it, sent out an e-mail: Was anyone else upset? By the next day, she had 45 messages from people agreeing that something had to be done. So Young and six other residents started a new newspaper, the Sopris Sun, run as a nonprofit and staffed mostly by volunteers. The free weekly is named after a snow-capped peak towering over the Roaring Fork Valley. "It just beat the dickens out of sitting around whining that our paper was dead," Young said.