TEXAS CITY, Texas – Schools canceled classes and residents were urged to stay inside Tuesday after power outages shut down three Houston-area refineries, including BP unit where a 2005 explosion killed 15 people, and a Dow Chemical plant.

Emergency officials were working to determine what caused the Texas City outages, which a spokeswoman for Texas New Mexico Power company said involved a “customer-owned equipment problem.”

Utility spokeswoman Cathy Garber said the company provides power to the affected plants but was not the source of the outages. Garber said four “events” affected transmission lines Monday night, but said she did not have details.

Texas City’s emergency sirens sounded and residents were advised to stay indoors as a precaution after the BP refinery and Dow plant lost power about 11 p.m. Monday, Texas City Homeland Security coordinator Bruce Clawson said. Valero and Marathon Oil refineries lost power nearly six hours later.

Officials said there were no immediate reports of hazardous emissions.

“There was constant monitoring going on at all times and it did not reveal anything, although there’s a strong smell of hydrocarbons in the air,” Clawson said.

The BP and Valero refineries activated their flaring systems after the outages, sending tall flames shooting from stacks into the sky. Marathon also activated flaring, the Galveston County Daily News reported. Flaring allows the plants to control the release of excess gas in order to avoid unhealthy air, or explosions, inside the refineries.

“I knew when them flares were going, something messed up is going on out there,” said retired carpenter Dwight Crawford, 66, who lives about a mile from the BP plant.

A fire broke out at the BP refinery shortly after the power went out, but was quickly extinguished, spokesman Michael Marr said. He said there were no injuries at the refinery, the site of the deadly March 2005 explosion that also left 170 people injured.

Marathon quickly brought its power situation under control, Clawson said. And most of the Valero refinery’s units had been safely shut down early Tuesday, spokesman Fred Newhouse said.

Workers could be seen reporting for their shifts at the BP plant around sunrise Tuesday, while flaring continued as part of the shutdown process.

“That’s a normal part of bringing down some of these operating units,” said BP spokesman Tom Mueller. “In an emergency shutdown like this one, you would send a lot of materials to the flares.”

Despite the order to stay inside, Crawford was sitting at a table on his front lawn drinking coffee and reading a newspaper Tuesday morning. He said he has grown accustomed to plant-related disruptions while living in Texas City.

“It’s just a hazard of living close to this plant,” Crawford said. “I’m going to try to stay inside, but I do have to go about my daily routine. I can’t let the plant shut me down.”

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Associated Press writer Diana Heidgerd in Dallas contributed to this report.

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Information from: The Galveston County Daily News, http://www.galvnews.com

PHOENIX (Reuters) – Spreading drug cartel violence in northern and central Mexico has led U.S. authorities to increase the number of states Americans should avoid for safety reasons.

A U.S. State Department travel advisory issued over the Easter weekend warned Americans to avoid all but essential travel to 10 states in northern and central Mexico due to “ongoing violence and persistent security concerns,” up from six states named in a caution issued last September.

The latest advisory added warnings against nonessential travel to parts of Sonora, south of Arizona, and to parts of Mexico’s central Jalisco, San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas states, where cartel violence has spiked in recent months.

It also kept in place warnings issued last September advising against nonessential travel to northern Tamaulipas and central Michoacan states, as well as parts of northwestern Durango and Sinaloa states and the border states of Coahuila and Chihuahua, south of Texas.

“Bystanders, including U.S. citizens, have been injured or killed in violent incidents in various parts of the country, especially, but not exclusively in the northern border region, demonstrating the heightened risk of violence throughout Mexico,” the warning said.

More than 37,000 people have been killed in Mexico since late 2006 when President Felipe Calderon took office and sent the armed forces to crush powerful cartels battling for lucrative smuggling routes to the United States.

The State Department advisory noted that 111 Americans were reported murdered in Mexico last year, up from 35 in 2007.

In one gruesome sign of escalating violence, authorities earlier this month retrieved 177 corpses from a mass grave in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Mexico’s Attorney General blamed the Zetas drug cartel for the killings.

In another high profile crime, a U.S. federal agent was shot dead and a second wounded while driving on a highway in San Luis Potosi in February, in an attack also blamed on the Zetas.

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Jerry Norton)

PORTLAND, Ore. – Reddening, a rivulet of sweat running across her cheek, Amy McCullough hunched over the stationary bike, pumped her legs like crazy and began producing serious power — enough watts to run a flat-panel TV and a ceiling fan.

She thrust her arms upward and exclaimed: “Oh, 180!”

And, with that, her electrical output drooped. The generator attached to her exercise machine slowed, and the digital readout from the device on the handlebars fell below 100 watts.

The transient burst was a personal best for the 43-year-old legal aid lawyer who works out five days a week at a storefront fitness center in north Portland where members on exercise machines fitted with compact generators can burn calories and generate electricity at the same time.

Their workouts satisfy a modicum of the electrical draw at the 3-year-old Green Microgym. More important, they satisfy a demand among its 200 members to be fit in a way that fits Portland’s green-indie-local ethos.

The 3,000-square-foot gym aims for a neighborhood trade. It features solar panels, recycled toilet paper, renewable-source flooring and lots of reminders on the wall about turning off lights, fans and TVs.

“I was really attracted to the idea that it would be green,” said McCullough, who joined shortly after the gym opened in 2008. “I could go in and generate electricity. How cool is that?”

It has occurred to many exercisers during long stretches on machines that it would be cool to turn sweat into watts. In recent years, a few tinkerers and entrepreneurs have brought the idea to market.

So far they have but a teensy sliver. The two leading startups sell equipment to retrofit existing bikes and elliptical trainers, and each reports hooking up about 1,000 machines. An executive of one company estimates that American fitness centers house 8 million to 10 million machines that could generate power.

They don’t, though. Like much in energy that’s efficient or alternative, from plug-in cars to compact fluorescents, initial capital outlays are steep. Absent a subsidy, or a quantifiable green marketing rationale, the returns on investment don’t come quickly, if at all.

Kurt Broadhag, a Los Angeles consultant to health clubs and an advocate of greening them, says it appears the payback period for electricity-generating exercise equipment is about 15 years — two to three times the machines’ life span.

“The only sense it makes is in educating people in taking care of the environment,” he said.

When Adam Boesel opened the Green Microgym in Portland’s artsy, gentrifying Alberta district, he figured on a market among people already educated about the environment.

The former teacher from Seattle looked at Portland, a city that, when cut, bleeds green. It’s regularly in top 10 lists for bicycle and mass transit commuting, recycling, composting, energy-efficient buildings and so on.

“When I was researching Portland businesses, they all were talking about sustainability — all the good ones,” he said.

He’s gotten a lot of publicity about the technology — helpful for a business that opened on credit-card financing a few weeks before the economy tanked.

But the machines, he said, are “just the shiny wrapper on a package, which is energy efficiency,” something gym members such as Martha Jones take seriously.

“Whoops, I have to turn off the lights,” she said at the end of an interview in the gym’s basement studio, dashing back inside.

Prominent in the gym are signs that explain how to use the individual, adjustable controls for lights and fans. A wall-mounted button connects to a remote device that allows the cable boxes to be shut down, not just put on standby and using 29 watts when the flat-panel TVs are not in use.

Jones is an Intel engineer who likes seeing her workout quantified in watts. But it’s not primarily the electricity that attracts her to the Green Microgym.

“It’s just really supportive,” she said. “If you have somebody who knows you, who knows your name, they will keep you moving. I know for sure I will cheat right and left on my workout without that.”

She counts hoofing it to the gym as warm-up and cool-down. “And I do more shopping in Alberta because I’m walking here,” she said. “It helps the local businesses.”

Boesel sees opportunity in such thinking. Emerging from what he called scary times in the recession, he’s franchised a second neighborhood gym in southeast Portland and plans to open a third on his own. With a Seattle partner, he’s getting into the manufacturing end, selling machines whose plugs feed electricity from the machine into a gym’s distribution system.

Theoretically, in states like Oregon with “net metering” rules, such machines could power the gym itself and feed excess energy into the grid, perhaps generating a utility bill credit. But that level of output would likely be rare, especially in big gyms heavy on lights, heating, cooling and other energy draws. Most often, electricity-generating machines would supplant some of a gym’s draw from the grid, a smaller savings.

Boesel said he doesn’t try to calculate how many kilowatt-hours the Green Microgym produces. “The payback period is irrelevant to me,” he said.

But the machines themselves and the potential they represent are “pretty cool,” he said. “It’s not inevitable that all the machines will make electricity someday. … It’s all going to have to be pushed along. That’s what I think I’m doing.”

SAN FRANCISCO – Rumors swirled that the federal judge who had struck down California’s same-sex marriage ban last summer was gay, but the lawyers charged with defending the measure remained silent on the subject. Their preferred strategy for getting the ruling overturned on appeal was to focus on the law, not a judge’s personal life, they said.

Eight months later, Proposition 8′s proponents and their attorneys have taken a new position. They filed a motion Monday seeking to vacate Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s historic ruling, a move they said was prompted by the now-retired jurist’s recent disclosure that he is in a long-term relationship with another man.

Lawyers for the ban’s backers argue that the judge’s relationship status, not his sexual orientation, gave him too much in common with the couples who successfully sued to overturn the ban in his court. The judge should have recused himself or at least revealed the relationship to avoid a real or perceived conflict of interest, the lawyers say.

“If at any time while this case was pending before him, Chief Judge Walker and his partner determined that they desired, or might desire, to marry, Chief Judge Walker plainly had an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding,” wrote attorneys for the coalition of religious and conservative groups that put Proposition 8 on the November 2008 ballot.

They are now asking the judge who inherited the case when Walker retired at the end of February to toss out Walker’s August decision. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals already is reviewing its legal merits at the request of the voter-approved measure’s sponsors.

Walker has said that he did not consider his sexual orientation to be any more a reason for recusal than another judge’s race or gender normally would be. A spokeswoman said Monday that the judge wouldn’t comment on the motion.

American Foundation for Equal Rights President Chad Griffin, whose group has funded the legal effort to strike down Proposition 8, scoffed at the notion that the judge’s personal life could imperil his ruling.

Griffin noted that the Obama administration recently had decided to stop defending the federal law that bans recognition of same-sex marriage after determining that it, too, was unconstitutional.

“This motion is another in a string of desperate and absurd motions by the proponents of Proposition 8, who refuse to accept that the freedom to marry is a constitutional right,” he said.

Walker, a 67-year-old Republican appointee, declared Proposition 8 to be an unconstitutional violation of gay Californians’ civil rights. He also ordered the state to stop enforcing the gay marriage ban, but the 9th Circuit put his order on hold while the case is on appeal.

Speculation about Walker’s sexual orientation circulated during the 13-day trial that preceded his decision and after he handed down his ruling. Lawyers for Protect Marriage, the coalition that sponsored Proposition 8, however, had purposely refrained from raising his sexual orientation as a legal issue until Monday.

But they decided it gave them grounds for getting Walker’s decision struck down after the judge disclosed his 10-year relationship this month to a group of courthouse reporters, said Protect Marriage general counsel Andy Pugno.

“We deeply regret the necessity of this motion. But if the courts are to require others to follow the law, the courts themselves must do so as well,” Pugno added.

Indiana University Law School professor Charles Geyh, an expert on judicial ethics, said that without more evidence that Walker stood to personally benefit if same-sex marriages were legal in California, he found it difficult to imagine that the particulars of the judge’s same-sex relationship provided gay marriage opponents with an avenue for reversing his ruling.

“It really implies it would be fine if he were essentially surfing at bars and had a new partner every night because he wouldn’t want to be married,” he said. “I don’t see that as advancing their cause.”

Proposition 8′s sponsors also have been trying to get the federal appeals court to order Walker to return his personal video copy of the trial. The judge has been using a three-minute segment of one of their witnesses being cross-examined for a lecture he’s been giving on cameras in the courtroom.

NEW YORK – Jurors on Monday considered the fate of a hedge fund founder accused of making tens of millions of dollars through insider trading after a judge reminded them that they can rehear any of the dozens of taped conversations between the defendant and his friends.

Deliberations began at noon Monday as the trial of Raj Rajaratnam entered its eighth week. They ended for the day four hours later after jurors asked to see some defense exhibits that they didn’t know they already have in binders and some graphs prosecutors showed them during closings, which they can’t see again because they’re not exhibits.

Before they were sent away to deliberate, jurors were instructed on the law by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Holwell, who said they could choose to listen to the secretly taped conversations that prosecutors say represented the first extensive use of wiretaps in an insider trading case.

The conversations have given jurors a colorful dose of the go-big-or-go-home mentality at Wall Street firms, including the offices where the 53-year-old Rajaratnam made his name and enough money to be listed for a time among the world’s richest billionaires.

Now the jury must determine whether the conduct caught on tape was criminal. Regardless of its decision, the highly publicized audio evidence alone seems certain to make an impression on high-stakes financiers and how they do business.

The wiretaps should “scare the hell out of anyone thinking about doing insider trading,” said Ed Novak, a veteran white-collar defense attorney in Phoenix.

Federal prosecutors in New York played nearly 50 tapes of conversations between the defendant and fellow portfolio managers, analysts and executives at public companies, including some who have pleaded guilty to charges that they tipped him off.

Prosecutors accuse Rajaratnam, who was arrested in October 2009, of making at least $68 million by trading illegally after he started his now-defunct family of hedge funds, the Galleon Group, more than a decade ago.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Streeter said in final rebuttal closing arguments Monday that the defense wanted the jury to defy logic, reality and common sense and to ignore wiretaps, cooperating witnesses and a pattern of trading securities that points to guilt.

Defense attorney John Dowd told the Manhattan federal jurors in closing arguments last week that what they hear on the tapes is nothing more than his client discussing stock outlooks that were widely known among professional traders who pay attention to every scrap of information on the securities they follow.

The defense focused on the intricacies of what constitutes material and immaterial or public and non-public information and on the finer points of when Rajaratnam received guidance from an in-house analyst versus one of the people prosecutors say was a tipster.

Those details are “going right past most jurors,” Novak said. He predicted jurors were “going to immediately talk about those tape recordings, and that’s where the case is going to be decided.”

One of the only defenses against the wiretaps is “don’t believe your ears,” said Jonathan New, a former prosecutor now in white-collar defense in New York. “That’s a very hard thing to sell.”

Prosecutors alleged in their closing arguments that Rajaratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, was motivated by money and a desire to “conquer the stock market at the expense of the law.”

The gunslinger mindset of the Galleon chief and others, the government says, was demonstrated in a July 2008 conversation with admitted conspirator Danielle Chiesi in which they gloat over a blockbuster inside trade.

“But it’s a conquest right?” Rajaratnam says.

“It’s a conquest,” she says. “It’s mentally fabulous for me. … You’re a warrior. I’m a warrior.”

And there’s more, like the day in July 2008 when prosecutors say a brassy-sounding Chiesi called Rajaratnam to give him an inside tip that a stock price was dipping.

“They’re going to guide down,” she says. “I just got a call from my guy. I played him like a fine-tuned piano.”

Prosecutors say Rajaratnam taught Chiesi to cover her tracks when she was trading on secrets by moving money in and out of companies to imitate an innocent investment pattern. During an August 2008 conversation, she asks him if she should use the tactic with a computer chip maker whose stock she thinks might shoot up 30 percent once a secret’s out.

“I think you should buy and sell, and buy and sell, you know?” Rajaratnam tells her.

At a minimum, the sometimes brazen tone of the tapes shows that Rajaratnam and others — while cautious in email and instant messages — were uninhibited on phone calls. In another call, Chiesi muses that she might be under investigation and tells Rajaratnam she’s “glad that we talk on a secure line” — a segment that drew muffled chuckles in the courtroom.

The exchange reflects a sense in the hedge fund culture “that the phone is a safe place,” said Eric Fisher, a New York defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. “And it usually is — absent a wiretap.”

The behavior exposed in the Galleon case is still outside the norm on Wall Street, said New, the federal ex-prosecutor and New York defense attorney. Still, he added, if federal authorities are seeking to send a warning, the securities industry is hearing it.

“There’s a concern on Wall Street that you have a very aggressive prosecutor in the picture,” he said.

The Galleon investigation, which led to more than two dozen arrests and 20 guilty pleas, has already led firms where employees have access to secrets about public companies to tighten policies and procedures, said Latour “L.T.”‘ Lafferty, a former federal prosecutor now practicing white-collar defense in a Tampa, Fla., firm.

“When you start seeing people in handcuffs doing the perp walk, that’s called one healthy dose of reality,” Lafferty said. “The government warns you against this type of conduct, and everybody looks the other way until people start getting arrested.”

But Richard Scheff, a former Department of the Treasury official and defense attorney in Philadelphia, predicted that human nature would trump the case’s deterrence effect.

Decades of wiretapping by federal authorities in a variety of cases “hasn’t deterred a lot of people, and the reason is nobody thinks it’s going to be them,” Scheff said.

“What drives this kind of conduct,” he added, “is greed, and greed colors judgment.”

SAN DIEGO – A well-known former University of San Diego basketball player has made an appearance in federal court in a sports bribery case.

USD’s all-time leading scorer Brandon Johnson pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Monday, then returned home to Houston. He is free on a $25,000 bond and was appointed a local public defender, Oliver Cleary.

Johnson was arrested without incident April 9 in Houston.

The indictment alleges that Johnson took a bribe to influence a USD game in February 2010 and solicited someone else this January to affect the outcome of USD basketball games while playing for the Dakota Wizards, an NBA development team.

He is one of 10 defendants in the marijuana distribution and sports gambling case. Each faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court rejected a call Monday from Virginia’s attorney general to depart from its usual practice and put review of the health care law on a fast track. Instead, judicial review of President Barack Obama’s signature legislation will continue in federal appeals courts.

The justices turned down a request by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a leading opponent of the law, to resolve questions about its constitutionality quickly. The Obama administration opposed Cuccinelli’s plea.

Only rarely, in wartime or a constitutional crisis, does the court step into a legal fight before the issues are aired in appellate courts. Hearings already are scheduled in May and June in three appeals courts.

The case still could reach the high court in time for a decision by early summer 2012.

Cuccinelli said he asked for speedy review to end “crippling and costly uncertainty” about the law.

“Expediting our case would have been the exception and so, although disappointing, this is not surprising,” he said.

Justice Elena Kagan apparently took part in the court’s order Monday, as there was no announcement that any justice sat out. There had been questions about whether she would participate because she served as Obama’s solicitor general when the law was passed. Kagan indicated in Senate testimony last year that she played no role in the administration’s planning and handling of challenges to the law.

So far, five federal judges have ruled on challenges to the law. Two Republican appointees, in Florida and Virginia, have declared it unconstitutional in whole or in part. Three Democratic appointees, in Michigan, Virginia and Washington, D.C., have upheld it.

Cuccinelli filed suit on behalf of Virginia, while 26 states joined in a separate lawsuit in Florida claiming that Congress exceeded its authority in requiring citizens to buy health insurance or pay a penalty starting in 2014.

In December, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson in Richmond declared that the individual mandate, the heart of the sweeping legislation, is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson of Florida came to the same conclusion in January in striking down the law in its entirety.

Both rulings have been put on hold pending appeals.

In the meantime, the federal and state governments have begun to put in place other parts of the law, including changes in payment rates under the Medicare system for older and disabled Americans and a provision allowing children up to age 26 to remain on the parents’ health insurance policies.

LITTLETON, Colo. – An apparent attempted bombing at a Colorado shopping mall likely was not related to the 12-year anniversary of the shootings at nearby Columbine High School, according to the FBI.

Investigators have found a motive but aren’t releasing additional information, FBI Denver spokesman Dave Joly said Monday.

The agency on Sunday alerted field offices covering all 50 states and Puerto Rico to be on the lookout for Earl Albert Moore, 65.

Moore has been named the suspect in Wednesday’s fire at Southwest Plaza Mall, about two miles from Columbine, where 12 students and a teacher were killed in 1999.

Authorities discovered a pipe bomb and two propane tanks after the fire, raising fears from Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink that the incident was timed to coincide with the anniversary.

“It is unlikely that the events of 4/20/11 are related to any other incident that may have occurred on that date, previously,” Joly said, declining to mention Columbine by name and adding that nothing has been ruled out.

Colorado authorities said they discovered a pipe bomb and two propane tanks in a hallway of the mall’s food court after firefighters responded to a fire. The explosives, which did not detonate, were found after the fire in the hallway prompted an evacuation of the mall. No one was injured.

Mink, the sheriff, noted that the times of the mall fire and the Columbine shootings were similar, as well as the use of a pipe bomb and propane tanks, which were used during the attack at the school in 1999. Authorities declined to release details about what was found at the mall.

Federal Bureau of Prisons records show that Moore was released from prison April 13 after serving time in a federal prison in Atlanta and Estill, S.C. Federal court record show that Moore pleaded guilty in May 2005 to robbing a bank in Crab Orchard, W.Va., of $2,546.

A story published in the The Register-Herald in nearby Beckley, W.Va., described the March 2005 robbery as a man with a beard entering the bank, waving a gun and demanding cash. Moore, who was arrested a short time later, did not have a beard. Authorities told the paper that the beard was a fake.

A judge sentenced Moore to 18 years in prison for the bank robbery, but a federal appeals court in 2006 ruled his stiff sentence was “unreasonable” and Moore’s sentence was reduced to seven years. Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman Edmond Ross said Moore received a “good conduct” release from prison after serving six years of his sentence.

Moore has an extensive criminal record and should be considered dangerous, federal officials said.

Colorado Bureau of Investigation records show several arrests for possession of dangerous drugs, theft, and possession of burglary tools dating to 1984. Arapahoe County court records show that an arrest warrant had been issued for Moore in September 2004, six months before the West Virginia bank robbery, for his failure to appear at a sentencing hearing related to a possession of burglary tools case.

In that case, Moore was accused of stealing more than $1,500 worth of computer storage disks from a Costco in Aurora on March 22, 2004, opening packages with a knife and stuffing the disks in the lining of his jacket. Prosecutors dropped a theft charge and Moore pleaded guilty to possession of burglary tools in July 2004 in exchange for a six month sentence. An arrest warrant was issued when he failed to show up for sentencing.

Authorities served Moore with the Colorado arrest warrant after his arrest in West Virginia for the bank robbery. A judge in January of last year ruled that because Moore was held on the Colorado arrest warrant while in federal custody, Moore should get 1,382 days credit for time served. The case was discharged over objections from prosecutors.

Moore also served a year in Danbury, Conn., federal prison in 1983, according to Ross. In 1985, federal court records in Colorado show Moore pleaded guilty to unlawful escape from custody of the attorney general and possession of an unregistered firearm. Details of that case, including where he served his prison sentence, were not immediately available from the Federal Records Center in suburban Denver.

Moore has used at least seven aliases that include variations of the names Earl Albert Buchannan, Donald Charles Morelli and Gary Steele, according to state arrest records. In addition, the FBI said Moore also uses the alias, John Lindzy.

Moore lived in Colorado at least part time from the mid-1980s to 2004, according to public records.

James Wicks, a former son-in-law living in Denver, said he was previously married to Moore’s stepdaughter, Rebecca Duncan Wicks, who has since moved out of state. He declined to provide additional details when The Associated Press reached him at his home Sunday evening.

Moore is described as being between 6 feet and 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighing about 200 to 225 pounds. He’s bald with blue eyes and a grey mustache and has a tattoo of a Viking on each of his arms.

BURLINGTON, Vt. – A childhood fascination with archaeology and a chance encounter with a 2,700-year-old Egyptian mummy are helping Vermont doctors and law enforcement officials find truth in some of the most challenging of modern-day crimes: the unexplained deaths of young children.

After spotting the mummy at the University of Vermont’s Robert Hull Fleming Museum in Burlington, Dr. Jason Johnson, a radiology resident, arranged to have it put through his hospital’s state-of-the-art CT scanner. He wanted to know about the life of what is believed to be the remains of an Egyptian servant girl of about 14 — and what led to her death.

What Johnson didn’t expect was that some of the scientific techniques used to reveal the mummy’s secrets would have other applications, including helping Vermont’s medical examiner and prosecutors determine if children who die in infancy are the victims of crimes.

The hospital’s CT scans helped doctors create a full-size, three-dimensional model of the mummy’s skull — thanks to the latest technology and the sharp detail obtained by cranking up the power on the scanner to levels unsafe for living patients. That also helps in forensics by revealing patterns of injury in modern infant death cases that other scan techniques might miss.

“It made me feel good I came up with the protocol to work on the mummy,” said Johnson, 31, a fifth-year radiology resident at Fletcher Allen Health Care, the teaching hospital at the University of Vermont. “I never sat up at night thinking, ‘How can I save children from abuse?’”

Since the mummy was scanned in November, physicians working with the Vermont medical examiner’s office have started using the techniques on infant deaths, which average about one a month.

“It was tremendously helpful,” said Washington County State’s Attorney Tom Kelly, who used the information gleaned from a CT in a recent case to help determine the age of the bone breaks in a young abuse victim. The case, completed before the mummy technique was developed, has not been discussed in open court so he couldn’t give further details.

Johnson said that just as important as helping officials learn if a crime has been committed, the new techniques can help prove an infant’s death was natural.

“It’s not always pattern of injuries that we find suggesting somebody did something wrong,” Johnson said. “There could be findings that nothing wrong happened or the story fits. It’s in the interest of truth.”

Medical examiners across the country are turning more to CT scanners to complement traditional autopsies and X-rays, said Dr. Mary Ann Sens, the president of the National Association of Medical Examiners and chair of the pathology department at the University of North Dakota’s medical school.

“This got really wide acceptance in the United States in the last five to 10 years based on the work done at the Dover facility by the armed forces medical examiner,” she said of the Delaware location where the remains of all deceased service members are processed after being brought back from overseas.

And now it’s being expanded to deceased children.

In North Dakota, Sens said, “We are just now starting to request on infants, children under 5, that a CT scan be done. It really does assist a great deal. It also allows a 3-D reconstruction so you can actually take off layers of the skin and graphically show where wounds are.”

Vermont’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Steven Shapiro, said he’s been doing full-body CT scans of infants for two or three years. The new techniques developed for the mummy scan are just improving the process.

“Since the person is not living, you don’t care about the radiation dose,” said Fletcher Allen radiologist Dr. Christopher Filippi, who helped scan the mummy and develop the new techniques. He hopes to present a paper on the techniques at the fall meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. “Normally, in clinical scanning you have to worry about the patient. If the person is deceased or a mummy, you can take your time and get exquisite detail.”

New CT technology is almost 1,000 times faster than 20 years ago, which also helps improve the ability to produce three-dimensional images, such as those used to create the model of the mummy’s skull, said Dr. George Ebert, the chief of imaging technology at the Radiology Department at Fletcher Allen.

The Fleming Museum acquired the mummy in 1910 after George Perkins, the university’s first curator of collections, bought it at a market in Cairo. The mummy is believed to be about 2,700 years old and to have come from the Nile Valley, about 350 miles south of Cairo, museum officials say.

Since shortly after arriving in Burlington a century ago, the mummy has been displayed at the Fleming, just downhill from the medical complex now known as Fletcher Allen. It’s still one of the museum’s most popular attractions.

“It’s not just a body. It’s wrapped in linen. It’s beautifully wrapped and then painted and then encased in a further decorated tomb,” said Fleming Director Janie Cohen.

And it was in the Fleming that Johnson first saw the mummy in the fall of 2009 when he was there to see a different exhibit.

Johnson grew up in Globe, Ariz., where a fifth-grade teacher helped instill in him a fascination with Egyptology, honed by watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with his father and learning about archaeological sites in his home state.

So he checked into the history of the Vermont mummy. It was X-rayed in 1937, but the relatively crude imagery available 74 years ago did little to tell the physicians who examined her much about her past. So he enlisted his colleagues and anthropologists at UVM and elsewhere to undertake their own mummy project.

Early one morning last fall, Johnson and museum staff took the mummy out of its glass display case, protected it in bubble wrap and trundled it the quarter-mile from the museum to the radiology department. They rolled it into a state-of-the-art machine and spent an hour scanning it from every angle. The doctors came away with about 10,000 images, some with a resolution of about one-hundredth of an inch.

A skull fracture above the right ear stood out. The injury would have been enough to kill her, but no one could say whether it happened before she died or after. There was a cyst above one tooth, and the scans showed that the Egyptian embalmers removed the girl’s brain through the base of her skull rather than the more common method of extracting it through the nose.

The mummy is back in its museum case and the Fleming staff is planning to build a new exhibit with the information gleaned from the scan, including CT images and the 3-D reconstruction of the girl’s skull. What they didn’t know was that those same imaging techniques would help play a role in modern forensic medicine.

“That’s what science is all about,” said Sens, the North Dakota pathologist. “Every person’s death can mean something. When we examine it carefully it benefits society, it benefits the family and ultimately it benefits everyone.”

SPRING VALLEY, New York (Reuters) – Tiny white caskets of three children who drowned with their mother when she intentionally drove into the Hudson River were buried on Monday several miles away from her grave.

After a tense funeral marked by shouting between the two sides of the family, a hearse followed the father’s orders and drove to the children’s burial plot at Gethsemane Cemetery in Congers, New York. It was six miles from where their mother, Lashondra Armstrong, 25, was buried in New Hempstead, New York.

Armstrong, 25, killed herself along with her sons Landen, 5, and Lance, 2, and daughter Laianna, 11 months, on April 12 after an argument with their father, Jean Pierre, said police in Newburgh, a city about 25 miles north of New York City.

Her eldest son, La’Shaun, 10, who has a different father, was in the minivan but saved himself by climbing through a window as the vehicle disappeared beneath the waters.

The Armstrong family had arranged for the mother to be interred with her children, but Pierre intervened and arranged for a separate plot in another town.

His lawyer, Stephen Powers, said, “He thought it was inappropriate in light of the fact that the mother murdered the three children.”

Tensions mounted on Monday as family members filed past police officers standing guard outside the funeral home where the ceremony took place.

An Armstrong family member, Gwendolen Green, said the mother’s relatives were largely banned from the ceremony and guests were checked against a list before being allowed entry.

At one point, yelling could be heard coming from inside the funeral home and soon afterward Green, the mother’s second cousin, was escorted from the building.

“You could cut the tension with a knife,” Green said, adding that she had been asked to leave the ceremony after an argument.

Green said she had attended the funeral despite not being on the guest list.

“You’re not gonna keep me from going in and seeing my family,” she said. “I saw the children, and they were beautiful.”

Green said the surviving son had not attended the funeral because it was “too much.” She said the two dead boys were dressed in dark suits and the baby girl was wearing a white dress.

Soon after Green was escorted out, three little caskets accompanied by small bouquets of blue and white flowers, were loaded into a white hearse headed for Congers.

(Edited by Barbara Goldberg and Greg McCune)