(Continued from page 32)

The National Weather Service called for 118 in Phoenix, and 117 in Las Vegas on Sunday -- a mark reached only twice in Sin City.
• ___

• MORANBAH, Australia (AP) -- A lone woman checking into a motel in the Australian mining town of Moranbah can expect some blunt questioning from the owners: "Are you a working girl?"
• Turning on a heel and storming away indignantly will be taken as an admission to prostitution.
• "That sort of reaction is really positive proof as far as I'm concerned," said Joan Hartley, the 67-year-old owner of the Drover's Rest Motel and champion of motel operators who want to rid their businesses of sex workers cashing in on a mining boom.
• Moranbah in the coal-rich Bowen Basin is part of the new landscape of Australian mining. Workers are increasingly leaving their homes and families for weeks on end to earn big money in distant mines in the Outback. It's a workforce known as fly-in, fly-out, or FIFO (feye-foh) for short.
• Where the FIFO miners go, the FIFO prostitutes follow. With miners earning 110,000 to 160,000 Australian dollars ($100,000 to $150,000) a year, many sex workers find working the remote mining towns more lucrative than the economically moribund cities in which they live, despite the travel costs and a recent slowdown that has seen the mothballing of some inefficient mines.
• ___

• BALTIMORE (AP) -- In the 15 years between a shotgun blast that ravaged the bottom half of Richard Norris' face and the face transplant that ended a hermit-like life for him, the man from rural southwest Virginia faced cruelty from strangers, fought addiction and contemplated suicide.
• But even if he could go back in time, he's not sure he would erase the accident that left him severely disfigured.
• "Those 10 years of hell I lived through, it has given me such a wealth of knowledge," Norris recently told The Associated Press, one of only two news outlets

(Continued on page 34)