FOUR PEOPLE KILLED IN ROADSIDE BOMBS

Two roadside bombs exploding in quick succession killed four people and wounded 15 in central Baghdad?s Nahda district yesterday, police said.

The first bomb apparently targeted a police patrol in the busy neighborhood. When bystanders rushed to the scene to tend to the wounded, a second bomb exploded, police said. Iraq has become a far less violent place in the past year, but U.S. and Iraqi forces say militants are still capable of carrying out car and suicide bomb attacks, especially on busy urban streets.

SHOPPERS INJURED IN CHEAP FOOD RUSH

At least a dozen shoppers, many of them retirees, were injured in a rush to buy cheap cooking oil and eggs on offer at a supermarket in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, according to a local newspaper. Four were taken to the hospital, including a 58-year-old woman who broke several bones.

The oldest, a woman surnamed Wu, was 81, the Yangtze Evening News reported on Wednesday.

A stampede at a store in Chongqing last year killed three and injured dozens. The Chinese government responded by ordering supermarkets to control special promotions.

SHERIFF GOES TO JAIL FOR AN EDUCATION

There?s a new sheriff in jail.

Sheriff Mark Curran of Lake County, Illinois, walked into his own jail to spend a week as a prisoner, saying he was divinely inspired to learn what it was like to be confined and to sample jail programs designed to reduce recidivism. «The biblical adage that we reap what we sow is very true in criminal justice,» said Curran, 45, before exchanging his business suit for a prison jumpsuit at the Waukegan, Illinois, facility near Chicago. Illinois «has historically had one of the worst-run prison systems in the nation ... treating inmates like caged animals only to see them released back into their communities angrier and more bitter than they originally were,» he said. Curran will spend time in the general population of some 600 inmates who are awaiting trial on charges of murder, rape and lesser crimes, though at times he will have his own cell. He will sit in on high school equivalency classes, and spend a night in the high-security unit and in the medical unit.

COUPLE SURVIVES PLANE CRASH INTO POWER CABLE

A German couple had a lucky escape after their light aircraft hit a 380,000 volt power line and then hung upside down from a wheel for nearly three hours. «They had a very, very lucky accident,» said police officer Edmund Martin at the scene in Durach, southern Germany.

Emergency services freed the pair suspended 20 meters (65 feet) from the ground late on Sunday with a hydraulic lift after a helicopter rescue was ruled out as too dangerous. The couple suffered only minor injuries.