ABCNEWS.com News Break

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Judge Silences Napster

Plus: Sabotage Nearly Ruled Out in Concorde Crash and Cash-Strapped Strawberry Ditches Rehab

July 26 —

Napster has hit a sour note in court. A federal judge in San Francisco imposed an injunction on the popular music swapping Web site — saying the online company encourages “wholesale infringement” against music industry copyrights. The injunction will go into effect at midnight Friday, after the nation’s largest record producers post a $5 million bond against any financial losses Napster suffers from being shut down pending trial. In a hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel noted that 70 million people are expected to be using Napster by year’s end unless the service is halted. “It is pretty much acknowledged by Napster that this is infringement,” Patel said.

ABCNEWS has learned that officials have all but have ruled out sabotage as a cause of the deadly Air France Concorde crash, after completing their analysis of the doomed jet's flight data recorder. Investigators are now trying to sync up the information from the flight data recorder with the cockpit voice recorder, a process that is expected to take three days. They are concentrating on a last-minute repair ordered by the pilot and a critical engine malfunction.

Republican vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney is standing by his congressional voting record. Appearing today on ABCNEWS’ Good Morning America, Cheney defended himself against a flurry of attacks by leading Democrats who say his votes on a host of key issues during his decade-long tenure as a congressman from Wyoming show that he is an ideological extremist. “I was a great believer and am a great believer today in the second amendment — the right of citizens to keep and bear arms,” said Cheney, who voted against a ban on so-called cop killer bullets, against a waiting period for handgun purchases and against restrictions on the sale of plastic guns that could be more easily slipped through metal detectors. “The solution to our gun problems really lies in enforcing existing regulations — rather than imposing new requirements on law-abiding citizens.”

Consumer confidence treaded water this week, still far higher than usual but well below its January peak. Seventy-one percent of Americans say the economy is in good shape, 66 percent rate their personal finances positively and 52 percent call it a good time to buy things. Ratings of the buying climate have improved in the last month as gasoline prices moderated. Get the details at ABCNEWS.com.

Darryl Strawberry, the Yankee slugger who is serving a one-year suspension after testing positive for cocaine, suddenly left a Florida drug clinic — claiming he needs money to support his family, according to a published report. In an exclusive interview with the New York Daily News, Strawberry, 38, said he left the Sobrenity Clinic in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after 3½ months and will work for the St. Paul (Minn.) Saints, a minor league baseball team.

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