In the Nation

DETROIT - A prosecutor yesterday accused Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of violating his bond in an assault case by spending time Saturday with his sister, one of 11 witnesses listed by authorities.

The mayor and Ayanna Kilpatrick were together at their mother's house, a day after his Friday release from jail, where he had been sent for violating bond in a separate perjury case, Doug Baker of the Michigan Attorney General's Office said.

The mayor is charged with assaulting two investigators who tried to deliver a subpoena at his sister's house in July in the perjury case. In a court filing, Baker said the mayor had been ordered to have no contact with witnesses.

Kilpatrick attorney Jim Thomas said a magistrate clarified Friday that the mayor could have contact with his sister. A judge will hold a hearing today.

- AP

NEW ORLEANS - Federal agents descended yesterday on a nonprofit the city hired to run a home-cleanup program after Hurricane Katrina and were photographed carting off boxes, days after a U.S. attorney announced an investigation involving the organization.

Recent local media reports have scrutinized ties between the former director of the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corp. and some top-earning contractors and raised questions over whether some cleanup work billed to the city was actually performed.

Agents from the FBI, IRS, and offices of the inspectors general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the city were at the nonprofit's office yesterday, FBI spokeswoman Sheila Thorne confirmed. Mayor Ray Nagin said last week that the city had been unable to document work on 90 of the roughly 870 projects NOAH claimed to have done.

- AP

LOS ANGELES - A kidnapping suspect being held in Boston is a German man who lived in the guesthouse of a Los Angeles-area couple who vanished in 1985, a sheriff's spokesman said yesterday.

Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators have identified Christian Gerhartsreiter as the same man who used the aliases Clark Rockefeller and Christopher Chichester, spokesman Steve Whitmore told the Associated Press.

He said Gerhartsreiter had been identified as a "person of interest" in the case of Jonathan and Linda Sohus, who vanished in 1985 while living in wealthy San Marino. Under the Chichester name, Gerhartsreiter had rented a guesthouse at their home.

Police said the man, using the Rockefeller name, snatched his daughter from a Boston street July 27 in an elaborately planned kidnapping.

- AP

A gun ban

at the world's busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, was upheld by a federal judge after a gun-rights group sued.

Prosecutors said

that they plan to seek the death penalty against Demario James Atwater, 22, who is charged in the kidnapping and fatal shooting of Eve Carson, student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.