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CHICAGO — Authorities found five people dead Wednesday inside a house on the city's South Side, escalating the body count for an already violent spring for Chicago residents and police.

A cause of death for each of the three men and two women was not immediately available, said police Superintendent Jody Weis. Autopsies were scheduled for Thursday, the Cook County medical examiner's office said.

The victims' identities were not immediately released.

The incident was reported about 3:45 p.m. Wednesday after a woman attempting to visit the house found the bodies, said police spokeswoman Monique Bond.

Police did not believe an offender was on the loose and the incident appeared to be isolated inside the one house, Bond said.

"We don't think that the neighbors need to worry," she said. "We believe that it's been contained inside this residence, and right now detectives are on the scene talking to neighbors and trying to get as much information as possible to follow up on leads."

Investigators cordoned off a section of the residential street as neighbors milled around, talked in groups and watched.

Vanessa Mathis, whose mother lives across the street from the house where the bodies were discovered, said the neighborhood has many older residents and is not a crime-ridden area.

"We've never had anything like this to happen before," Mathis said.

The past few weeks have been bloody in Chicago after a spate of shootings.

Nine people were killed in 36 shootings last weekend, one of Chicago's first spring-like stretches of weather this year.

One man died and three others were wounded, including one of the alleged offenders, in shootings that took place late Monday in a South Side McDonald's restaurant parking lot.

The recent violence followed a six-month period during which more than 20 Chicago public school students were shot to death.

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attache was caught on camera by Secret Service pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans, FOX News has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, whose first name is Rafael, took six or seven of the handheld devices from a table outside a special room in the hotel where the Mexican delegation was meeting with President Bush.

Everyone entering the room was required to leave their cell phones, BlackBerries and other such devices on the table, a commonplace practice when high-level meetings are held. American officials discovered their missing belongings when they were leaving the session.

It didn't take long before Secret Service officials reviewed videotape taken by a surveillance camera and found footage showing "Rafael" absconding with the BlackBerries.

Sources said "Rafael" made it all the way to the airport, where the Mexican president was preparing to leave New Orleans, before Secret Service officers caught up with him. He was forced to return the BlackBerries.

Sources said the man claimed to have taken the devices accidentally. The sources said they believe no further actions were taken against him by American authorities, though it is unclear what disciplinary measures, if any, await him in Mexico.

DETROIT — Detroit police say they've found the partially mummified body of a woman in her 80s on the kitchen floor of a house where her mentally troubled sister was living.

Police say they believe the surviving sister had been living with the body for one to three years. They say the body was partially covered with newspapers and that a cat and dog apparently ate part of it.

The Detroit Free Press says authorities removed the surviving sister Wednesday night and took her to a crisis center. She's also in her 80s and appears to have mental problems.

Police say they went to the house after a neighbor called to express concern.

DETROIT — One of two teenagers charged in the slaying, burning and beheading of a man was sentenced Wednesday to 20 to 30 years in prison.

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Annette Berry sentenced Alexander Letkemann in the Nov. 7 slaying of Daniel Sorensen, 26.

Letkemann, 18, also was sentenced to three to 10 years for mutilation of a corpse. The sentences will run concurrently.

He received a stern lecture from Berry, who asked why Letkemann didn't do something to stop his friend, Jean Pierre Orlewicz, from killing Sorensen in a Canton Township garage belonging to Orlewicz' grandfather.

"This was a premeditated, calculated act. Nothing short of violent, sadistic pleasure," said Berry, leaning forward toward Letkemann in the Detroit courtroom.

"This is what the court doesn't understand. What's missing inside? There's something missing here, fundamentally missing and it's called compassion for human life."

He couldn't find a reason for his actions, Letkemann told Berry.

Letkemann, of Westland, had pleaded guilty earlier this month to second-degree murder, admitting to helping prepare the garage for the ambush on Sorensen and helping dispose of his body.


Orlewicz faces mandatory life in prison after his first-degree murder conviction last week.

A new study by Japanese scientists shows that cells from menstrual blood may be useful in repairing heart damage.

Researchers obtained menstrual blood from nine women and focused their study on a kind of cell that can act like stem cells.

Click here to read about menstrual blood banking.

About 20 percent of these cells began beating spontaneously about three days after being put together in vitro with cells from the hearts of rats, the study says. The cells later formed sheet-like heart muscle tissue.

The success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow, researcher Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University's school of medicine, told French news agency AFP.

Experiments showed that rats who had suffered heart attacks improved after they received the menstrual blood cells, according to the study, which appeared in the medical journal Stem Cell

WEED, Calif. — Vaune Dillmann thought the wording on his bottle caps was just a clever play on the name of the Northern California town where he brews his beer — Weed.

Federal alcohol regulators thought differently. They have ordered Dillmann to stop selling beer bottles with caps that say "Try Legal Weed."

While reviewing the proposed label for Dillmann's latest beer, Lemurian Lager, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau said the message on the caps he has been using for his five current beers amounts to a drug reference.

In a letter explaining its decision, the agency, which regulates the brewing industry, said the wording could "mislead consumers about the characteristics of the alcoholic beverage."

Dillmann scoffs at the notion that his label has anything to do with smoking pot.

"I've never tried marijuana in my life," he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "I don't advocate that. It's just our town's name."

The town of 3,000, sitting beneath Mount Shasta about 230 miles north of the state capital, takes its name from Abner Weed, a timber baron who opened a lumber mill there in 1901 and eventually was elected to the state Senate.

Dillmann, 61, started the Mount Shasta Brewing Co. in 2004. He said he has always used the town's name on his beers and named the company's first official brew Abner Weed's Pale Ale.

His bottle labels follow a long tradition of exploiting the town's name. Even city officials do it.

A sign posted on the way out of town reads, "Temporarily Out of Weed," while another says "100 Percent Pure Weed." Dillmann noted those examples in an appeal letter he sent to the alcohol bureau.

Once, Dillmann said, his wife, a former teacher, was delayed on a field trip to San Francisco as tourists clamored to pose next to the school bus, which said "Weed High."

But illegal drugs are no joke to the federal agency, which maintains meticulous rules about labeling. Drug references on alcoholic beverages were banned in 1994, agency spokesman Art Resnick said.

"We protect consumers of alcohol beverages against misleading advertising and labeling," he said.

He said the agency is reviewing Dillmann's appeal.

The Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association, which represents 1,100 craft brewers nationwide, said the Tax and Trade Bureau seems to have become more aggressive in recent years. It has gone after brewers for seemingly innocuous claims, such as descriptions that say one beer is stronger than another, said association director Paul Gatza.

"We're seeing the TTB starting to poke around at breweries' Web sites and issuing letters," he said. "Our trade association is feeling like TTB is overstretching a little bit."

Gatza said a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 1980s protected truthful speech on beer labels.

Meanwhile, Dillmann has placed a rush order on unmarked bottle caps so he can keep bottling while he awaits word from the federal agency on his appeal. He has enlisted the help of his congressman, Republican Rep. Wally Herger, who has asked the agency to explain why it rejected Dillmann's bottle cap labels.

The decision banning the "Try Legal Weed" caps came just after Dillmann had placed an order for 400,000 of them, at a cost of about $10,000. It took him four years to go through the first batch of bottle caps, but Dillmann said his sales have been increasing steadily.

Still, the native of Milwaukee said he wonders how some other brewers have gotten away with the names for their products, such as Hemp Ale or Dead Guy Ale. And he can't understand how his label has run afoul of federal alcohol regulators who must surely be aware of one of the most famous advertising slogans in American marketing: "This Bud's for you."

haha . . . When I first read the heading to this, I thought it meant fruit. Cell phones should not be named after food!

That's so sad, but hard-core at the same time. That's right. I'm not going to lie, a little piece of me thought is was so freaking hard-core.

Is it terrible that my first thought was that this girl could be eligible for the "headless hunt?" Again, this is sad, but I can't stop my mind from going down these paths.

That's gross. This is like the amish pimple remedey dilemma. It's gross, but it could be so much better than the alternative . . . it's just a matter of who you can trust to ask for something like uring or menstrual blood who won't go around telling every one about it.

Seriously, what was this guy thinking? He wasn't! Exactly!

Ya know, I heard on Broadway that the Cook County jail is a rough place...

ravvy...do you love me enough to keep me as a mummified pet forever?

A thrill kill? Wow, the fact that our society even has that phrase is disturbing.

I can imagine guys being like, "No, it's okay... I would rather live with a damagaed heart...."

Quote:

Still, the native of Milwaukee said he wonders how some other brewers have gotten away with the names for their products, such as Hemp Ale or Dead Guy Ale. And he can't understand how his label has run afoul of federal alcohol regulators who must surely be aware of one of the most famous advertising slogans in American marketing: "This Bud's for you."

you know I hate hypcocrisy.... But I never knew that "This Bud's for you" could be taken as a drug reference... this article just changed my whole way of thinking about beer....