In the early morning, nearly 12 hours after an eight-lane Minneapolis bridge packed with rush-hour traffic collapsed into the Mississippi River, Sam Crabtree walked to the surreal scene from his home a half-mile away. The sky was clear and the water looked calm. "It's a beautiful summer morning here," he told WORLD a few hours later from his office at nearby Bethlehem Baptist Church. "But the smell of death is in the air."

PHILADELPHIA- Early this summer, Paul Crouch of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) wrote to supporters, telling them that the network's spring "Praise-a-Thon" was a success. For five days, Crouch and a slate of other televangelists had raised money on-air for TBN, the largest Christian television network in the world. "TBN is debt free," Crouch wrote. "Free to invest every penny into expansion to the rest of the world!"

According to Richard Land, two words sum up Fred Thompson's burgeoning appeal to Republican voters: "red meat." That's what Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, says Thompson offers Republicans hungry for a conservative presidential candidate.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.- In the well-appointed lobby of the Founders Inn on the campus of Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., gold-framed oil portraits of America's first presidents line the walls. In a nearby ballroom, Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani is busy trying to convince an audience of some 650 people that he should be next in line.

GREENVILLE, S.C.- When Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) strode into a shopping mall in Greenville, S.C., he wasn't hunting for sales. Instead, the Democratic presidential candidate told an energetic crowd of nearly 3,500 supporters packed into the atrium of Greenville Technical College: "All we're selling here today is hope, change, and a new kind of politics."

Allen Holman wants to die. The 47-year-old death row inmate admits how he murdered his estranged wife, Linda Holman, on July 28, 1997: After chasing her down at a high speed, and ramming her car from behind, Holman gunned down his wife of seven years in a convenience store parking lot in front of a police officer.

A North Carolina jury sentenced Holman to death in 1998. Since then, he has dropped his appeals, fired his lawyers, and repeatedly asked the state to impose his death sentence.

NEW ORLEANS-In the lobby of the Holiday Inn Superdome in downtown New Orleans, a handful of sunburned tourists in shorts and flip-flops hover over maps of the French Quarter, planning their day. In a sprawling hotel conference room nearby, camouflage-clad Louisiana National Guard troops hover over maps of hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods, planning their day as well.