Just four days after escaping a federal minimum-security work camp, "Spam King" Eddie Davidson shot his wife and child and wounded a teen-age girl before turning the gun on himself.

Media and prosecutors have dubbed Davidson "The Spam King" for years for his prolific anonymous e-mails selling a raft of products.

Davidson had pleaded guilty to tax evasion and falsifying information about the sender of e-mail pitches for low-cost, high risk stocks.

For the past century, the FBI has been a vital player in American history, front and center in some of our country's most high-profile national security and criminal issues. Not surprisingly, some myths and misunderstandings about the Bureau have evolved over that time, in part because of the complex and sometimes sensitive nature of our work. We've picked out what we think are the top ten myths down through the years, leaving aside ones that are so fanciful that they don't deserve mention here.

Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.

"In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment," the anonymous bloggers write on the site, "Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States.

The bloggers also said city attorneys earlier this year wrote a threatening letter on city letterhead to a company that produced T-shirts for the bloggers.

SanDisk said Monday that Windows Vista is not optimized for solid-state drives, delaying the delivery of optimized drives until next year.

This is due to Vista's design. "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls," he said.

The government should set a deadline for coal-fired power stations to adopt "clean" technologies or close, according to a parliamentary committee.

A coal-fired station produces about twice as much carbon dioxide as a gas-burning facility of equal power.

The committee heard evidence that five or six other new coal-burning stations may be built in the UK by 2015.

The UK government believes - as do others - that the answer is "clean coal", particularly technologies which capture carbon from the flue gases and store it away in natural underground voids, perhaps under the sea bed.

One resourceful HP purchaser decided that he was as mad as hell and not going to take it any more, so he got on the phone to HP and asked for a refund.

After many days of phone calls, emails and the kind of delay-and-divert tactics from HP which would put a lesser man off of the hunt, our Hawaiian hero emerged victorious clutching a cheque for two hundred bucks. Which given that Vista retails for $240 is quite a result.

No decision has been taken to create a huge database containing details of all phone calls, e-mails and internet use, security minister Lord West says.

Mr Thomas acknowledged that "targeted and duly authorised" interception of communications by terrorists and other suspects could be "invaluable".

Speculation that the government was considering collecting the information - including numbers dialled, websites visited and location of mobile phones being used - has increased because it has talked about "modifying procedures for acquiring communications data" in the Communications Data Bill.

"Piracy is BAD" proclaims every copyright dependent industry lobby group. "Downloading is stealing" is another popular one. How about "downloads are a lost sale"? Ubisoft clearly didn't believe that last one, as they distributed a no-cd patch from the scene group RELOADED as a fix for one of their games.

After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named "R6Vegas2_fix.zip".

However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a "no-cd" crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.

In 2005, 23.9 percent of adults in the United States were obese, or had a body mass index greater than 30, while in 2007, the percentage had grown to 25.6 percent, data issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showed.

No state has achieved the official target to bring obesity down to 15 percent of the adult population by 2010, the report showed.

A Japanese duo who marketed charms said to glow for more than a decade ran out of luck themselves as it came to light that the products were radioactive, police said Thursday.

The pair were based in Hiroshima, site of the world's first atomic attack, where they sold cellphone straps containing tritium, a radioactive substance that can be used in nuclear weapons.

They imported the tritium from Britain and sold the straps through a website, saying the charms would "shine for more than 10 years."