Increased use of fingerprinting to identify foreign detainees reveals many have U.S. arrest records.

California firefighters got a gift of a mild, mostly windless night and a forecast for similar conditions Sunday as they attempted to protect thousands of homes from a huge wildfire.

Barack Obama said his plan to end the Iraq war was unchanged and he was puzzled by the sharp reaction to his statement that he might "refine" his timetable for withdrawing U.S. combat troops.

John McCain calls himself an underdog. That may be an understatement.

John McCain has thrived in the give-and-take of campaign buses, late-night TV couches and town meetings. Now come the more formal speaking demands of a general election campaign.

AP - Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.

AP - Internet company Terra says it has been awarded Internet and mobile rights to transmit the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Latin America.

AP - Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.

AP - Internet company Terra says it has been awarded Internet and mobile rights to transmit the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Latin America.

What do you get when you cross scholarly research and dick jokes? Nothing to laugh at, normally. But science writer Jim Holt defies the Heisenberg principle of humor — you can`t study it without killing it — in his book Stop Me If You`ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. We caught up with him walking into a bar.

Wired: One question you tackle is who invented the joke. Weren`t we cracking wise back in the caves?

Holt:No, the classic joke form — setup with incongruity, punch line that resolves the incongruity—seems to have come out of Greece and Rome. There`s this guy in Greek -mythology called Palamedes who invented practically everything — numbers, currency, lighthouses, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He also supposedly invented the joke. And, of course, he was stoned to death.

Wired: So where do new jokes come from?

Holt:It used to be that all the jokes I got came from Wall Street. Now, with the Internet, they`re sort of everywhere and nowhere at once. But the ideas for jokes are cultural — concepts that keep reappearing in different guises over the centuries.

Wired: There are lots of theories about why we joke. Which do you find most plausible?

Holt:Well, there`s the superiority theory, that jokes express scorn for your inferiors — cripples and cuckolds and foreigners and the like. Plato said we laugh at vice. Then there`s the Freudian interpretation, that it`s all about sexual repression. Finally, there`s the seduction theory, based on the observation that men do most of the joking while women do most of the laughing. Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece in Vanity Fair arguing that the only way most guys can impress women is to make them laugh.

Wired: But your favorite explanation is a mashup of Kant and evolutionary biology, right?

Holt:V. S. Ramachandran, the brain researcher, has a theory about the origin of laughter — that when you`re in the jungle and there`s an apparent threat, the first member of the kinship group to notice that it`s not a real threat emits this stereotyped vocalization. And it`s contagious, so everyone starts laughing. That`s also the basis of the relief theory of humor, that there`s a release of the energy you had summoned up to solve some puzzle. Kant said that the essence of humor is a strained expectation dissolving into nothing.

Wired: Did you find any candidates for the perfect joke?

Holt:I did find what might be the shortest possible joke: "Pretentious? Moi?"

AP - Barack Obama celebrated "active faith" as an obligation of religious Americans and a chief agent of societal change while speaking Saturday to a nearly all-black roomful of churchgoers, but hoping to reach far beyond them.

AP - John McCain calls himself an underdog. That may be an understatement. The GOP presidential candidate trails Democrat Barack Obama in polls, organization and money while trying to succeed a deeply unpopular fellow Republican in a year that favors Democrats.

AP - Home foreclosures will keep rising next year no matter who is elected president in November.

AP - President Bush said Sunday he does not feel the need to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics to state his opposition to China`s human rights record. Skipping the event would be an "affront" to the Chinese people, he said.

AP - Firefighters got a gift of a mild, mostly windless night and a forecast for similar conditions Sunday as they attempted to protect thousands of homes from a huge wildfire with their energy and resources taxed by more than 300 blazes still burning around the state.

AP - Afghanistan`s president has ordered an investigation into allegations that missiles from U.S. helicopters struck civilians, though the Ministry of Defense said Sunday that the attack killed or wounded 20 militants.

AP - Thrilled as she was to win her fifth Wimbledon singles championship, Venus Williams dialed down her celebration. No hopping in place and skipping to the net after match point, the way she`s done so often on that Centre Court lawn. No giddy laughter and whoops of joy, as she`s let out in the past.

AP - Kyle Busch fell a lap down at Talladega and came back to win. So when a steering problem dropped him to the back of the field at Daytona, he didn`t panic. He simply settled in for the long drive back to the front. And back to Victory Lane.