Florida

Former astronaut Lisa Nowak turned to face the woman she was accused of attacking nearly three years ago after driving 1,000 miles across country: Colleen Shipman, who sat in the front row of a packed Florida courtroom. "I am sincerely sorry for causing fear and misunderstanding and all the intense public exposure you have encountered," Nowak said. Then Orange County Circuit Court Judge Marc Lubet accepted Nowak's guilty plea of burglary of a car, a third-degree felony, and misdemeanor battery.

An airline passenger whose identity was apparently stolen by someone on a federal no-fly list was briefly detained before his fingerprints cleared him, the FBI said. The Delta Air Lines flight from Colombia was diverted to Naval Air Station Key West, and the passenger and his luggage were removed from the plane before it continued to its original destination of Atlanta. The passenger was fingerprinted and released, said FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela.

Hurricane Isabel weakened slightly but was still a powerful Category 4 storm as it plowed across the Atlantic Ocean on a course that could slam it into the central East Coast late this week. "It's looking more and more likely that this is going to be a big event for the Eastern United States," National Hurricane Center meteorologist Eric Blake said in Miami. Isabel is expected to hit "somewhere between North Carolina and New Jersey" on Thursday or Friday, hurricane specialist Stacy Stewart said.

An exhausted Australian distance swimmer, battered by a stormy night inside a shark cage, ended her attempt to swim unassisted from Havana to Key West, Fla., when she reached U.S. territorial waters Sunday. Susie Maroney, who was trying to become the first person to swim solo across the Florida Straits, was about 10 miles off the Florida Keys when she was pulled from the water, dehydrated and disoriented after reaching her revised goal of U.S. waters.

Fighting choppy seas, Susie Maroney entered the water off Havana on Saturday in her bid to become the first person to swim 110 miles across the Florida Straits to Key West. By nighttime, she was more than a third of the way there. "She looks really good, and she's feeling really good," said Connie Pignatiello, president of the company that owns a boat traveling beside the swimmer. "When she was out of the [shark] cage this afternoon, a 40-foot whale swam right by, and [she] was pretty excited."

The bad blood between Linda Weldon and Walter Young goes back almost 20 years. And that feud would seem to account for some of the behavior that has transformed this bucolic small town into crackpot city. "I've never been Mr. Young's favorite person," says Weldon, who has been city manager here since 1979, in speculating on why Young and another local businessman, Earl Rice, would break into her office to plant a bug in her telephone while police videotaped the crime through the window.