Aaron's Daily WWW Newspaper

ST. POELTEN, Austria - Prosecutors urged an Austrian jury to hand down a life sentence Thursday to Josef Fritzl — who imprisoned his daughter in a windowless cell for 24 years and fathered her seven children — and not to show mercy just because he pleaded guilty.

YAOUNDE, Cameroon - Pope Benedict XVI told Muslim leaders on Thursday that true religion rejects violence, and he held up peaceful coexistence between Christianity and Islam in Cameroon as "a beacon to other African nations."

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. will release a new version of Internet Explorer Thursday, adding features meant to speed up common Web surfing tasks and bringing the browser's security measures in line with those of major competitors.

WASHINGTON - It's not just consumer groups anymore that say the U.S. food safety system is broken.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - North Carolina coach Roy Williams says Ty Lawson's recovery is going slower than expected and that there's a "huge probability" Lawson will sit out today's NCAA game against the 16th-seeded Radford Highlanders.

DETROIT (Reuters) - Package delivery company FedEx Corp reported a 75 percent drop in profit due to the global recession, gave a low quarterly outlook and said it was taking fresh actions to cut costs.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of U.S. workers drawing state unemployment benefits scaled another record high early this month, government data showed on Thursday, highlighting the difficulties of getting new jobs as the economy battles a severe recession.

ST POELTEN, Austria (Reuters) - Josef Fritzl said on Thursday he was sorry from the "bottom of my heart" for locking up and raping his daughter in a cellar for 24 years as prosecutors demanded he be jailed for life.

SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) - Its name was once synonymous with the Internet. It championed networking at a time most people thought e-mail was revolutionary. It used to be mentioned in the same breath as Microsoft and Intel.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is set to publicly launch Internet Explorer 8 early on Thursday, the latest version of its market-dominating Web browser.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of AIG said he was trying to prevent the company from collapsing when he allowed the payment of $165 million in bonuses that have stoked outrage stretching from the White House to Main Street.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Directors, actors and critics paid tribute to Natasha Richardson on Thursday after her death overnight from a severe brain injury in a skiing accident in Canada earlier this week.

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean security officials have detained two Korean-American journalists who were filming across the Tumen River from the Chinese side of the border, South Korean media and diplomatic sources said on Thursday.

SANKT POELTEN, Austria (AFP) - The eight jurors in the trial of Josef Fritzl withdrew Thursday to decide whether the 73-year-old was guilty as charged of murder, incest, rape, sequestration, grievous assault and enslavement.

PARIS (AFP) - French workers staged a second nationwide strike in as many months Thursday in a show of force against President Nicolas Sarkozy's economic policies.

DUBAI (AFP) - Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called on radical Islamists in Somalia to overthrow new President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, according to an audiotape posted on the Internet on Thursday.

YAOUNDE (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI stressed the common values shared by Christianity and Islam at a meeting with leading members of Cameroon's Muslim community Thursday.

PARIS (AFP) - The discovery of a petite, plant-eating dinosaur with primitive plumage could mean that the dinosaur from which all others evolved had feather-like protrusions, according to the latest study.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - President Barack Obama has accepted responsibility for bailed-out insurance giant AIG's huge bonus payments, as the company's boss said he has ordered employees to return part of their payouts.

LONDON (AFP) - British competition authorities on Thursday ordered Spanish-owned airports operator BAA to sell London's Gatwick and Stansted airports, as well as Edinburgh or Glasgow, within the next two years.