Former supermarket worker Alexander Pichushkin confessed to killing 63 people with the goal of marking each death on a chessboard, which has 64 squares.

Prosecutors last month charged him with 49 murders committed between 2001 and 2006 in a park on the edge of Moscow.

Though he claims to have killed several people years earlier, prosecutors had focused on the series of killings that occurred in Bittsa Park in 2001, leading to his nickname as the "Bittsa Maniac." Most of the victims were men, whom Pichushkin had lured to the park with the promise of a drink of vodka to mourn the death of his "beloved" dog.

Pichushkin allegedly killed 11 people in 2001, including six in one month, prosecutors said, adding that he killed about 40 of his first victims by throwing them into a sewage pit and in a few cases strangled or hit them in the head, prosecutors said.

From 2005, he began to kill with "particular cruelty," hitting his intoxicated victims multiple times in the head with a hammer, then sticking an unfinished bottle of vodka into their broken skulls, prosecutors have said. He also no longer tried to conceal the bodies, leaving them at the crime scene.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.

The Associated Press learned about the NASA results from one person familiar with the survey who spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to discuss them.

A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits. Luedtke acknowledged that the survey results "present a comprehensive picture of certain aspects of the U.S. commercial aviation industry."

The AP sought to obtain the survey data over 14 months under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

"Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related, could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey," Luedtke wrote in a final denial letter to the AP. NASA also cited pilot confidentiality as a reason, although no airlines were identified in the survey, nor were the identities of pilots, all of whom were promised anonymity.

Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" — potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans.

Officials at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have said they want to publish their own report on the project by year's end.

Internet phone company Vonage Holdings Corp. suffered another blow, disclosing that a third major telecom company had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against it.

AT&T Inc. filed suit Wednesday in federal court in Wisconsin claiming Vonage is violating a single patent that lets users access an Internet phone system using a standard phone device, Vonage said in a regulatory filing.

Vonage's stock, which was down 13 cents to $1.54 in 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading, was down another 24 cents to $1.30 in after-hours trading. Vonage went public in May of last year at $17.

One of the early players offering Internet telephone service, Holmdel, N.J.-based Vonage, has been reeling in the past year as it has lost two high-profile patent lawsuits. All the major phone companies have patents they claim cover aspects of voice over Internet phone technology.

Verizon opened the floodgates with the first suit months ago. A federal jury ruled that Vonage had illegally used Verizon patents, which concerned routing Internet calls through traditional phone switches. Vonage was ordered to pay $66 million and pay a 5.5% royalty fee. An appeals court recently upheld an injunction barring Vonage from using two of the Verizon patents but sent a decision on a third patent back for further review.

Earlier this month Vonage agreed to settle a lawsuit by Sprint Nextel Corp. and pay the carrier $80 million in a licensing deal that covers past and future use of patents related to connecting Internet phone calls. The deal came a couple of weeks after a jury in Kansas had found against Vonage and awarded Sprint $69.5 million in damages.

AT&T said it has been trying to arrange a settlement with Vonage for the past two years but was unable to negotiate a "reasonable licensing arrangement" with the company, an AT&T spokesman said.

"We were forced to file a lawsuit," the spokesman said.

In a statement, Vonage said the company had hoped to keep negotiating. "It's our preference to settle disputes through negotiation rather than litigation," said Vonage chief legal officer Sharon O'Leary in a statement. "We will continue to work toward an amicable solution."

Vonage, which has been losing customers since the legal disputes became known, said in the statement that its primary focus was to improve the quality of service to customers and maximize value for shareholders.

After their post-midnight deal, leaders hugged each other and toasted with champagne a treaty that will be signed on December 13 in Lisbon. But for some, the celebration was tempered with pangs of regret for the constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

"At least it's a good thing it is over now. Now we need to continue to work to have it ratified in all countries -- it won't be easy," said Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, one of the most fervent backers of the constitutional project.

Asked to comment on the deal, French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a thumbs-up to reporters but said nothing before entering a second day of talks, set to cover economic issues.

Provided it is ratified by all 27 member states, the treaty will take effect in 2009 giving the EU a long-term president, a more powerful foreign policy chief, more democratic decision making and more say for the European and national parliaments.

Clinched after midnight, the accord ends a crisis opened by Dutch and French rejections that were votes of no confidence in an organization seen as remote and bureaucratic.

The Supreme Court is hearing challenges against his landslide victory in the October 6 presidential election, which was boycotted by most of the opposition.

Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, cannot claim to have won re-election for another five-year term until the court decides. The general has not ruled out imposing martial law if the judgement goes against him.

"These threats have no value for us. This is an issue to be decided in accordance with the law and according to the merits," Javed Iqbal, the head judge hearing the challenges, told the court.

"The case will be decided in 10 to 12 days," he told the court.

The court started Wednesday hearing petitions against Musharraf's victory lodged by two candidates in the election who say Musharraf was ineligible to stand while he is still army chief.

The court had ruled earlier this month that the election could go ahead but the official result could not be announced until it resolved the challenges.

The general has vowed to step down as army chief and become a civilian ruler once his victory is declared official.

The Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile in India since staging a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, is to receive the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday after being hosted at the White House by President George W. Bush.

"We are furious," Tibet's Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, told reporters. "If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world."

China, which views the Dalai Lama as a separatist and a traitor, pulled out of a meeting this week at which world powers were to discuss Iran in protest at the U.S. plan to honor him.

China has also cancelled an annual human rights dialogue with Germany to show is displeasure over German Chancellor Angela Merkel's September meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said China had expressed its "resolute opposition" to the award.

"China has solemnly demanded the United States cancel the above-mentioned and extremely wrongful arrangement," Yang told reporters on the sidelines of the 17th Communist Party Congress.