* Motorcycle parts, rusty spark plugs, jagged pieces of steel: some of the items used in an IED (improvised explosive device) set out by the Taliban in Shosharak, Afghanistan, and discovered by the U.S. military when a soldier stepped on a pressure plate rigged to 25 pounds of explosives but it failed to detonate. IEDs have become a weapon of choice for the Taliban, ideal for "elusive fighters who are wary of meeting Western forces head on" (The New York Times). Makers of homemade explosives have advanced from creating them in small cooking pots to using multi-gallon plastic water jugs and other larger containers.
* President Obama is planning a centralized approach to making sure that Democrats get elected in the House, Senate and as state governors. He's turning to his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, and others who worked on Obama's triumphant campaign in 2008.
* In the 1960s, a detective named Frank Serpico (played by Al Pacino in the 1973 movie "Serpico") exposed widespread corruption in the New York City Police Department. Fifty years later, he leads a monastic lifestyle in a one-room cabin by the Hudson River, with no Internet or TV, and he says there are still problems within the department that officials refuse to confront.
* A New York City hospital treating a patient for tongue cancer did not detect a computer error that directed a linear accelerator--a machine that generates beams of high-energy radiation--to blast his brain stem and neck with errant beams of radiation; as a result, the patient went deaf, had vision problems, could not swallow, suffered burns, his teeth fell out, and he suffered from nausea, severe pain, and, finally inability to breathe. The state health department issued an advisory asking hospitals to be extra careful with linear accelerators, but that same day a woman being treated for breast cancer at a different hospital in New York was given three times the prescribed amount of radiation due to a missing filter on a linear accelerator. She received the accidental overdose for 27 days. Both patients died.
* In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a painter named Paul Jude Camelot was injured in the earthquake and lost several fingers.