A 52-year-old man from the German town of Darmstadt tried in vain to get a refund for 400 euros ($475) worth of what he said was "bad marijuana" from his dealer before turning to the police for help, according to authorities.

Whittington was treated on the scene by Cheney's traveling medical detail before being taken by helicopter to a Corpus Christi hospital. He was in the intensive care unit at Christus Spohn Health System and listed in stable condition yesterday evening.

(CBS/AP) Questions are being raised about why it took the Bush administration a full day to disclose the news that Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a companion on a weekend hunting trip. The incident occurred Saturday but was not reported publicly by the vice president's office for nearly 24 hours.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - The 78-year-old lawyer who was shot by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident has some birdshot lodged in his heart and he had "a minor heart attack" Tuesday morning, hospital officials said. Source: Hunter Shot by Cheney Has Heart Attack

Sources told ABC News that the vice president's team had debated issuing a statement early Sunday morning per the White House's request. But sources said Cheney's team decided it would be more credible to allow ranch owner and witness Katharine Armstrong to make the information public.

Armstrong is the daughter of a former Halliburton official who hired Cheney as CEO.

If Google's a corporation non grata these days at least thank God for its cache function. That's the one that allows you to see a snapshot of a page even after it's been removed from the site.

That's what happened with a little mention of beer at a pre-shooting party attended by the veep on MSNBC's website. According to David Allen . . .

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (Reuters) -- Vice President Dick Cheney, publicly silent since accidentally shooting a Texas lawyer while hunting last week, will offer his first words on the incident Wednesday, the White House said.

So far, local authorities have said the shooting was simply an accident with no misconduct involved.

[...]

But if Whittington were to die, local district attorney Carlos Valdez said there could be a more-thorough investigation, including possibly a grand jury probe that might end up issuing criminal charges such as negligence or reckless behavior.

Cheney said he had no regrets about his decision to allow his host, Katharine Armstrong, to disclose the accident by calling her local newspaper in Corpus Christi. ``I thought it made good sense for several reasons,'' Cheney said in the Fox interview.

Giving the Account

The vice president said Armstrong was an eyewitness to the incident, had grown up on the ranch and hunted there throughout her life, and was an ``acknowledged expert'' on hunting. Cheney added that he did not have a press aide traveling with him on the weekend trip.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released by John Walters, the national drug policy director, indicates 1.5 million girls ages 12 to 17 started drinking alcohol in 2004, the most recent year for which data is available. That compares with 1.28 million boys.

Among the same age group, 730,000 girls started smoking cigarettes in 2004, compared with 565,000 boys, and 675,000 girls starting using marijuana, compared with 577,000 boys, the survey found.

The nationwide survey, based on interviews with 70,000 families, also found that girls surpassed boys in abusing prescription drugs. Of the youths surveyed in 2004, 14.4 percent of girls and 12.5 percent of boys reported misusing prescription drugs.

But while the Somalis can eagerly soak up that knowledge now, they also must learn to navigate a sometimes-cruel teenage world in which subtle differences in hairstyle, clothing, physique, friends, grades and extracurricular activities mark a student's place in a complicated and often unforgiving caste system. And in a process that many American teenagers find difficult, the Somali students -- and in particular, the five girls -- are under even more pressure to decipher where they belong.

Teenage girls who have sex with more than one partner in a short period of time are likely to engage in other risk behaviors such as fighting, binge drinking, smoking cigarettes, using cocaine or sniffing glue, according to results from a national survey of American high school youth.

The study of more than 3,000 female students appears in the American Journal of Health Behavior.

Between 20 and 45% of boys who commit serious violent crimes by the age of 16 or 17 were violent as children, while 45 to 69% of violent girls were violent in childhood. The small group of teens that were engaged in serious violence before the age of 13 generally commit more crimes, and more serious crimes, than those teens that start later.

This is the rare idea that developed over beers and blather at the neighborhood saloon, survived through a couple of years of bull sessions, and is now poised to reach toward reality. It started with this: Remember the night during the 2004 Summer Olympics when the U.S. men's basketball team lost to, of all opponents, Puerto Rico? When the guys hanging out at the Adams Mill Bar in Adams Morgan got over the initial embarrassment of that loss, somebody raised the question: Why exactly does Puerto Rico have an Olympic team?

This is an effort to creatively promote DC's lack of Congressional representation -- and we need all the help we can get. Most Americans don't even know that we have no voting representation. To put it in another context, we were all rightfully incensed when votes weren't counted in Florida, but when it comes to Congressional representation -- the voters of DC haven't had their votes counted in 200 years.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The Dutch city of Groningen looks set to open the Netherlands' first pharmacy totally dedicated to providing high quality cannabis for pain relief at affordable prices, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

Although cannabis is readily available in Dutch coffee shops, the foundation for Medicinal Cannabis Netherlands, a support group for patients, intends launching a pharmacy in the northern Dutch city so people can have access to high-grade cannabis for medical use, the daily NRC Handelsblad said.

Groningen city council member Fleur Woudstra, who supports the cannabis pharmacy, told the paper that while pot may be cheaper in coffee shops -- usually around 10 euros ($12) for the equivalent of 3 or 4 joints -- quality often suffers.

Police were searching for an 18-year-old man who allegedly attacked patrons of a gay bar early Thursday with a handgun and a hatchet, wounding at least three people in an apparent hate crime.