Egyptian man gets six months in jail for lying

NEW YORK -- An Egyptian man who flew to Kennedy International Airport a week after Sept. 11 with a fake pilot's uniform and license has been sentenced to six months in jail.

District Judge Charles Sifton said Friday that imposing a longer sentence would be improperly punishing Wael Abdel Rahman Kishk since prosecutors, though suspicious of his terrorist ties, had not proven Kishk intended any wrongdoing.

"It will not do to prosecute people for a minor crime, and then ask us to punish them on some suspicion that they may have committed some more serious offense," Sifton said.

Kishk, 21, was found guilty last month of making false statements in federal court. A jury acquitted him on a separate count of trying to impersonate a pilot.

Government to approve biotech tobacco

WASHINGTON -- From cereal to corn chips, Americans consume a variety of products made from genetically engineered crops. They can soon add cigarettes to the list -- new smokes are due this spring with tobacco genetically altered to be low in nicotine.

A new Agriculture Department study confirmed the low levels of nicotine, the chemical that gets smokers hooked, in the biotech tobacco and found that the crop poses little risk to the environment.

Tobacco from crops grown on test plots last summer is going into the cigarettes made by Vector Group, parent company of Durham, N.C.-based Vector Tobacco.

The company has asked the Agriculture Department to remove restrictions on where and how the tobacco can be grown, and the agency probably will go along.

Man dies in police custody from stun gun

PHILADELPHIA -- The death of a man shot by police with a Taser stun gun highlights the potential dangers of weapons that are considered nonlethal, civil liberties groups say.

"Our understanding is that the reason for using these kinds of weapons is that a person can be subdued but not killed," said Larry Frankel, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. "The safety issue needs to be closely looked at, and if there is a growing body of facts that this is a more dangerous weapon than was first thought, then it's time for reconsideration."

Many police departments nationwide have added weapons like pepper spray, electronic shockers, rubber bullets and net guns to their arsenals in recent years, in an effort to subdue suspects without firing a gun.

Obesity a problem in world's remotest places

BOSTON -- Obesity is joining and even surpassing malnutrition as a dietary concern in some of the farthest reaches of the planet, experts warned Saturday.

Weight problems have long been recognized as a health hazard in the United States, Europe and other industrialized places, but in recent years the same worries have begun to emerge elsewhere.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Saturday, biological anthropologists documented this trend, both in people who migrate to wealthy countries and in those who stay put.

"Obesity has penetrated the remotest places on Earth," Stanley Ulijaszek of the University of Oxford said.

The International Obesity Taskforce estimates that 300 million are obese.

-- From wire reports