■ United States
Serial killer confesses
A truck painter pleaded guilty in Seattle on Wednesday to strangling 48 drug addicts and prostitutes to death in a killing spree known as the Green River murders. Gary Leon Ridgway, 54, said in a confession that he murdered the women because he hated prostitutes and knew they would not be missed. As details of his grisly crimes unfolded, relatives of the victims wept in court while the owlish-looking Ridgway showed no emotion. Ridgway, who some law enforcement officials believe may have killed more than 100 women, pleaded guilty in return for the prosecutors' agreement to spare his life.
■ United States
Jeb Bush fights suit
Florida Governor Jeb Bush asked a judge on Wednesday to dismiss a suit seeking to stop him from intervening in the case of a brain-damaged woman whose husband wants her feeding tube removed. The request came two weeks after the legislature passed a measure empowering the governor to order a feeding tube reinserted in the woman, Terri Schiavo. Several courts had granted Schiavo's husband, Michael, permission to remove the tube years after she suffered extensive brain damage when her heart stopped beating temporarily in 1990.
■ United States
Top Democrat in race row
Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor and one of the front runners in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, was struggling on Wednesday to limit the damage of a race row, the first significant hitch in his campaign. Dean, who stunned the party by his fund-raising prowess, came under sustained attack from Democratic rivals in the nomination race for remarking on the campaign trail that he wanted "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pick-ups." At a televised debate aimed at the youth vote, Dean refused to apologize for the comment but insisted that it did not represent an endorsement of the flag.
■ France
Striptease lessons for free
A celebrated but hitherto undeniably staid Paris department store is to offer free striptease lessons to women shoppers unsure of how to achieve the best effect with purchases from its lingerie department. "It's completely serious," a spokeswoman for the Galeries Lafayette store said on Wednesday. "When a woman buys underwear, it's to show it off, and you have to know how to do that. We want to teach women how to get undressed in front of their men. It isn't easy to take a pair of trousers off without looking ridiculous, I can tell you," she said.
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