PORTLAND, Ore. – A Portland massage therapist accused former Vice President Al Gore of “unwanted sexual contact” at a hotel during an October 2006 visit, but no charges were filed due to lack of evidence, law officials said Wednesday.

An attorney representing the woman contacted police in late 2006, said Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk. Schrunk said the woman — who has not been identified — refused to be interviewed by detectives and did not want the investigation to proceed.

The woman, however, contacted police in January 2009 and gave a statement, saying Gore tried to have sex with her during an appointment at the upscale downtown Hotel Lucia, where Gore was reportedly registered as “Mr. Stone.”

The National Enquirer first reported the allegations Wednesday, identifying the accuser as a 54-year-old woman.

Gore family spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said the former vice president has no comment. Gore and his wife announced June 1 they were separating.

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The commander of international forces in Afghanistan was scheduled to pay a surprise visit to Marines at Combat Outpost Hanson in Marjah this week, some four months after they waged a fierce offensive to break the Taliban’s grip. Instead, General Stanley McChrystal headed back to Washington, his job in jeopardy over published remarks that criticize President Obama and senior staff members for hamstringing efforts to turn around the nine-year war.

The trip was canceled “thanks to a Rolling Stone article,” an officer deadpanned as word was announced at an evening briefing inside a dust-caked tent on the base. At dinner, a Marine joked that McChrystal, known for his spartan habits, had asked for trouble when he broke “standing order No. 1: no drinking,” referring to a booze-soaked evening at an Irish pub in Paris that was described in the article, during which he and some of his aides unwound in the presence of a reporter. “I talk trash about the President sometimes too,” he says, “but at least I don’t get fired for it.” One lesson from the Rolling Stone episode among both officers and grunts: wariness of prying reporters. Almost everyone TIME talked to for this story asked not to be quoted by name. (See pictures of General Stanley McChrystal at work.)

Most of the low-level troops on the base say they are unaware of any McChrystal-related controversy. A lance corporal from Denver explains that political news tends to trickle down slowly among Marines with limited access to the Internet, newspapers and other creature comforts readily available at rear bases. “Half of these guys don’t even know why we’re here in the first place,” he said with a laugh. “The rest of us aren’t gonna worry: we’re just focused on today” – a point well taken when mortars and gunfire are at times audible in the near distance. (See why President Obama wants to shift the focus from McChrystal to the Afghanistan war effort.)

While some blow off speculation that the general may be replaced as “back-home talk,” the fact remains that they are fighting in this hostile swath of Afghan desert by the general’s design, waging a brand of counterinsurgency campaign that bears his signature. Rich in opium poppy and, until the February offensive, under full Taliban control, Marjah was supposed to be a test case for a government-in-a-box strategy aimed at quickly winning over locals with security, jobs and basic services. Once affairs were consolidated in Marjah, the general’s plan was to then push forces east toward Kandahar, extending a belt of security across the volatile Pashtun heartlands.

But Marjah remains a deadly stumbling block. Near daily firefights and the threat of roadside bombs have kept many residents who were displaced by the initial fighting from coming back. While there are nascent signs of progress, shops in the main bazaar are mostly empty, the Taliban ready and able to dispatch suicide bombers from nearby hideouts. Indeed, in a different article published earlier this month, McChrystal was quoted as likening Marjah to a “bleeding ulcer.”

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CANBERRA (AFP) –
Welsh-born lawyer Julia Gillard became Australia‘s first woman prime minister Thursday after the once hugely popular Kevin Rudd fell to a party coup less than three years after taking office.

The tough, flame-haired Gillard was elected unopposed in a shock Labor Party ballot called just hours earlier as factional support suddenly swung behind the former deputy prime minister after Rudd’s public support plunged.

Gillard said Rudd’s government was “losing its way” and pledged elections within months. She promised to pursue a dropped carbon trading scheme and urged the mining industry to drop its damaging campaign against a new resources tax.

“I asked my colleagues to make a leadership change because I believe that a good government was losing its way … and at risk at the next election,” Gillard said. “I was not going to sit idly by.”

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SEOUL, South Korea – South Korea says investigators are questioning a North Korean who reportedly crossed the sea border into South Korea.

A Defense Ministry spokesman declined to give further details Thursday and would not be named as the probe was under way.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency cited an unidentified government source as saying the North Korean crossed the western sea border in a small boat earlier Thursday.

South Korea’s top spy agency said it could not immediately confirm it.

Another North Korean fled to South Korea by boat earlier this month.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry says more than 18,000 North Koreans have arrived in the South since the Korean War ended with a 1953 cease-fire.

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KINGSTON, Jamaica – Christopher “Dudus” Coke was born into gang royalty, running a smuggling operation that supplied drugs up and down the U.S. East Coast. He used the proceeds to cast himself as a Jamaican Robin Hood, and his power grew to rival that of the prime minister.

That reign was at an end Wednesday, with Coke behind bars at a secret location and facing almost certain extradition to the U.S.

The threat of extradition sparked a week of violence in May that killed 76 people, but his capture after a monthlong manhunt was surprisingly peaceful: He was arrested at a police checkpoint while wearing a wig in a preacher‘s car outside the capital.

In some ways, it was a fitting end since Coke was known as a low-key kingpin — more Godfather than Scarface — who quietly exercised his power over the most notorious Jamaican slum.

“He was perfectly calm,” Leslie Green, an assistant police commissioner, said of the arrest late Tuesday on the Mandela Highway outside Kingston. It was the reaction of a “professional and calculated” criminal, he added.

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