zens blog

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' hold on his job grew more uncertain Monday as the Senate debated removing his authority to unilaterally name U.S. attorneys and the White House said it merely hoped he would survive the tumult.

Asked if Gonzales had contained the political damage from the firing of eight federal prosecutors, White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "I don't know."

Snow declined to predict how long Gonzales would stay in his job but reiterated President Bush's support of him.

"No one's prophetic enough to know what the next 21 months hold," Snow said. "We hope he stays."

The Justice Department also planned to turn over to Congress late Monday a couple of thousand pages of new documents related to the firings.

White House counselor Dan Bartlett said that Bush had full confid

Researchers at Queens University Belfast are developing a system that will allow police officers to accurately match footprints found at a crime scene against a database of footware, reports The Engineer Online.

Current technology means that once a plaster cast of a footprint has been taken it must then be matched by eye against thousands of recognised prints. This process is incredibly time consuming and can prove inaccurate. If tests prove successful then the whole process of collecting and analysing prints could be digitised. Dr Ahmed Bouridane, leader of the project, explains:

"We are using image transformations that grab the features of a shoeprint at different resolutions, scales and orientations,' he said. 'There's no need for any pre-processing of the image.' The transformations automatically 'clean up' the print, 'correcting' for blurred or scuffed marks and spotting when there are inclusions such as stones.

Graysmith, still an editorial cartoonist, started looking into the Zodiac killings on his own, hoping to find something the cops and reporters hadn't. His investigations would lead to the books "Zodiac" (1985) and "Zodiac Uncovered" (2002). He went on to write true-crime books about the Unabomber, the Trailside Killer, the anthrax killer and the slaying of actor Bob Crane, which became the basis of the 2002 movie "Auto Focus," starring Greg Kinnear.

His favorite suspect in the Zodiac case is Arthur Leigh Allen, whom Vallejo police began investigating in 1971 after Michael Mageau (who survived the July 5, 1969, shooting) identified Allen in a photo lineup.

"I think it was him," says Graysmith of Allen, "and I'll tell you why. One thing is the intuition you get as an artist when your skin just crawls around this guy.