Head of Chicago-area Islamic charity indicted

CHICAGO -- The leader of a Chicago-area Islamic charity was indicted Wednesday on racketeering charges accusing him of funneling donations to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

Enaam M. Arnaout, 40, of the Chicago suburb of Justice, head of Benevolence International Foundation, has been held in federal custody since April.

The indictment said a criminal enterprise that existed for at least a decade had used charitable contributions of innocent Muslims, non-Muslims and corporations to support bin Laden's al-Qaida network, Chechen rebels fighting the Russian army and armed violence in Bosnia.

"It is sinister to prey on good hearts to fund the works of evil," U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in announcing the charges in Chicago. "We will find the sources of terrorist blood money."

Analytical advances win Nobel Prizes for five

Five researchers, including three Americans, won Nobel Prizes Wednesday for inventing techniques to analyze proteins in lab samples and human psyches in economies. Their work revolutionized the hunt for new medicines and the methods of economic research.

Winners of the chemistry prize invented procedures that let scientists rapidly identify proteins and produce three-dimensional images of them, a boon to cancer diagnosis as well as the pharmaceutical industry.

John B. Fenn, 85, of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and Koichi Tanaka, 43, of Shimadzu Corp. in Kyoto, Japan, will share half of the $1 million chemistry prize. The other half goes to Kurt Wuethrich, 64, a scientist with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

The $1 million economics prize went to Americans for the third year in a row: Daniel Kahneman, 68, a U.S. and Israeli citizen based at Princeton University in New Jersey, and Vernon L. Smith, 75, of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

--From wire reports