Passengers on a German train mistook a Halloween reveller dressed up as a gore-covered zombie for a murder victim and called the police.

The 24-year-old man fell into a drunken slumber on his way home from a Halloween party in Hamburg, police in the northern town of Bad Segeberg said on Monday.

Believing his hands and face were smeared with blood, passengers alerted police after getting no response from him.

A first aid team called to the scene soon cleared up the confusion. Police told the man to remove his make-up after which he was allowed to continue his journey.

"Bad Segeberg is in a rural area and Halloween isn't very well known there," police spokeswoman Silke Tobies said. "So people weren't expecting anyone to be dressed up in the train."

So I was down in DC this past weekend and happened to run into a well-connected media person, who told me flatly, unequivocally that "everyone knows" The LA Times was sitting on a story, all wrapped up and ready to go about what is a potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate. "Everyone knows" meaning everyone in the DC mainstream media political reporting world. "Sitting on it" because the paper couldn’t decide the complex ethics of whether and when to run it. The way I heard it they’d had it for a while but don’t know what to do. The person who told me )not an LAT person) knows I write and didn’t say "don’t write about this".

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military’s detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

US embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

According to activists in France, who greeted Rumsfeld shouting "murderer" and "war criminal" at the breakfast meeting venue, US embassy officials remained tight-lipped about the former defense secretary's whereabouts citing "security reasons."

Anti-torture protesters in France believe that the defense secretary fled over the open border to Germany, where a war crimes case against Rumsfeld was dismissed by a federal court. But activist point out that under the Schengen agreement that ended border checkpoints across a large part of the European Union, French law enforcement agents are allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing fugitive.

"Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when US forces were hunting him down," activist Tanguy Richard said. "He may never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that in the civilized world, war crime doesn’t pay."

Halle Berry - admitted to Parade magazine that, distraught over her failed marriage to baseball star David Justice, she tried to end her life by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Drew Carey - after a rough childhood that included sexual molestation by an unknown party and his father's death, the lovable Price is Right host attempted suicide twice in his teen years.

Drew Barrymore - after leaving drug rehab in 1989 at the age of 14, she tried to kill herself, but received treatment and successfully kicked the habit.

Gary Coleman - announced in 1993 that he had tried to commit suicide twice by taking sleeping pills.

Vanilla Ice - in 1994, less than five years from the peak of his success, the depressed rapper twice tried to kill himself.

Officials were left worried that the fires could march toward more populated areas along the Pacific Ocean.

“As long as the east wind continues to blow, that is the direction things are going,” said Roxanne Provaznik, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “There are a lot of homes on that coastal community, so there is so much potential injury.”

We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks....The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days....In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.

....It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination....Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Fall events can bring hot weather as well as strong winds. Most high temperature records in coastal California have occurred during a hot Santa Ana. Legend and lore have sprung from these uncomfortable conditions. Early Mexican residents called them los vientos del diablo - the devil winds. It is a strange time for residents near the coast because their mild climate turns into the Sahara for a time. Fires increase, crime seems to go up, and numerous health conditions worsen, such as allergies. Some claim earthquakes are more likely during this “earthquake weather.” Like the time during a full moon, it just seems that more weird things happen.

San Diego County authorities warned more than 250,000 households to evacuate today as wildfires raged across Southern California for another day, destroying hundreds of structures, clogging highways and sending smoke and ash over a wide area.

How do you feel about New York compared to LA?
Overall, I think New York is much more fun, because of the million things to do all the time, never closes. Real people who don't have one-track minds. It's not like the whole fucking place is a popularity contest. When I go to these douchey clubs-- because I do go to the douchey clubs sometimes, I'm not going to try-- it's really like a fucking middle school, it's so immature how much of a popularity contest it is.

If you're in Hollywood in the mix of hot nights out-- I was thinking about how fake girls were. I made a point in a douchey club to look around and listen to girls talk and see if I could find one real person that's not completely wack. And I'm not even basing it on looks. They could be good looking, they could not be good looking, they could be average. And after scooping out the whole place, every single girl in the place seemed like a complete fake moron.

What sort of stuff were they talking about that gave them away?
This girl came up to me and started to talk to me, but acted like I was lucky to talk to her. And I'm like, "You're the one fucking coming up to me, don't act all arrogant." Because she came up to me and started to talk to me and started judging people and pointing out people, like, "Ugh. How can she wear that? What is that? Is that even a dress?" And I'm looking at her, and flat out was like, "Are you out of your mind? Are you here to talk about people and how they look? You sound so retarded." And she didn't like that at all, because I don't think a lot of people call that out. They just drink Grey Goose and talk about how wonderful they are and hot they are.

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you're fine: that's just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both.

That's how we dooz it.

L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there – that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.

The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.

Through their work, you can see the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.

The U.S. workforce grew at a rate of 30% in the 1970s, and at 12% in the 1990s through the present. But it's expected to slow to about 3% and to level off by 2010.

By 2010, the number of workers aged 35 to 44--or those typically moving into upper management--will decline by 19%; the number of workers aged 45 to 54 will increase 21%; and the number of workers aged 55 to 64 will increase 52%.

I agree, boomers are a big factor. Also, changes in the nature of the economy, company consolidation, expectations of post-boomers, becoming a service economy, international outsourcing and other effects of globalization, immigration, life-cycle maturity of the society, individual wealth consolidation, lack of significant follow-up wars similar to WWII and Vietnam, society choices, political choices, and who knows what else. Boomers are taking jobs and they created the jobs and economy of which they are a part, so it is difficult to parse the negative from the positive. It is their life cycle.

OBITUARY: Athanasia "Ethel" Eliopoulos, 94, died Friday, October 5, 2007, at D'Youville Manor. Ethel was born on Feb. 10, 1913, in Lowell, Mass., the daughter of the late Elias and Eleni (Mangiavas) Eliopoulos. [...]

With her passing, Ethel's final wish was ultimately granted when she did not have to see Hillary Clinton become president. [...]

Gore could match George Bernard Shaw, who to date is the only person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar [The Nobel for literature, the Oscar for the screenplay of Pygmalion] - Though unlike Gore, Shaw never won an Emmy.

The leader of an artists' cooperative has been sentenced to probation for setting up a secret apartment inside a shopping mall's parking garage as part of a project on mall life.

Michael Townsend, 36, said he and seven other artists built the 750-square-foot apartment beginning in 2003 and lived there for up to three weeks at a time.

The artists built a cinderblock wall and nondescript utility door to keep the loft hidden from the outside world.

But inside, the apartment was fully furnished, down to a hutch filled with china and a Sony Playstation 2 -- although a burglar broke in and stole the Playstation last spring, Townsend said.