Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said Dec. 8 he will confess to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, throwing his death-penalty trial into disarray and shocking victims' relatives who watched from behind a glass partition.

Four other men also abandoned their defenses, in effect daring the Pentagon to grant their wish for martyrdom. The judge ordered lawyers to advise him by Jan. 4 whether the Pentagon can apply the death penalty — which military prosecutors are seeking — without a jury trial.

In an about-face that appeared to take the court by complete surprise, the five men announced they were abandoning their attempts to mount a vigorous defense and instead requested "an immediate hearing session to announce our confessions."

However, that didn't mean they had repented.

"I reaffirm my allegiance to Osama bin Laden," Ramzi Binalshibh blurted out in Arabic at the end of the hearing. "I hope the jihad continues and I hope it hits the heart of America with weapons of mass destruction."

Fighter jet crashes in San Diego

A fighter jet returning to a U.S. Marine base after a training exercise crashed in flames in a San Diego neighborhood, killing four members of a Korean family and destroying two homes.

The pilot of the F/A-18D Hornet jet ejected safely just before the crash around noon Dec. 8 near Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

The four people killed were a mother, 36; her two children, 2 months old and 15 months old; and their grandmother, visiting from South Korea to take care of the newborn.

The pilot was in stable condition at a naval hospital in San Diego.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said the crash was apparently caused by a power failure.

Illinois governor arrested for graft

The words on the recording sound as if they were uttered by a mob boss. Instead, the feds say, it is the governor of Illinois speaking.

"I've got this thing and it's (expletive) golden, and I'm just not giving it up for (expletive) nothing. I'm not gonna do it," Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich (pictured) says in a conversation intercepted by the FBI.

Federal prosecutors Dec. 9 arrested the 51-year-old Blagojevich and accused him of scheming to enrich himself by selling President-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat for cash or a lucrative job.

"I want to make money," he declares, according to court papers. Blagojevich allegedly had a salary in mind: $250,000 to $300,00 a year. (He earns $177,412 a year.)

Even in Chicago, a city inured to political chicanery — three other governors have been convicted in the past 35 years and numerous officeholders from Chicago have gone to prison for graft — the latest charges were stunning for the naked greed, recklessness and self-delusion they suggest.