GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Hamas both mocked and reached out to its defeated Fatah rivals on its first day in full control of Gaza, offering them amnesty Friday but also rifling through President Mahmoud Abbas' bedroom, stripping a former Gaza strongman's home down to the flowerpots and throwing a Fatah gunman off a rooftop.

Safe in the West Bank, Abbas moved quickly to cement his rule there, after losing control in Gaza in a five-day Hamas assault on his forces. He replaced the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, with Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, a respected economist, as part of a new moderate government.

Hamas, overwhelmingly elected in a 2006 parliament vote, denounced Abbas' moves as a coup. Hamas' supreme leader, Syrian-based Khaled Mashaal, later said Abbas has legitimacy as an elected president and promised to cooperate, but warned Fatah against going after Hamas supporters in the West Bank.

The sparring made little difference on the ground: the Palestinian territories, on either side of Israel, are now separate entities with two governments — one run by Hamas and backed by radical Islamic states, and the other controlled by the Western-supported Fatah.

Abbas received immediate pledges of support from Israel, the U.S., Egypt, Jordan, the U.N. and Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by phone that he would take steps to bolster Abbas. Officials in Olmert's office said he will consider releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax funds that was frozen after Hamas came to power.

PACE DECLINES TO VOLUNTARILY RETIRE

WASHINGTON — In his first public comments on the Bush administration's surprise decision to replace him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace disclosed that he had turned down an offer to voluntarily retire rather than be forced out.

To quit in wartime, he said, would be letting down the troops.

Pace, responding to a question from the audience after he spoke at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va., on Thursday evening, said he first heard that his expected nomination for a second two-year term was in jeopardy in mid-May. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on June 8 announced Pace was being replaced.

"One thing that was discussed was whether or not I should just voluntarily retire and take the issue off the table," Pace said, according to a transcript released Friday by his office at the Pentagon.

"I said I could not do that for one very fundamental reason," which is that no soldier or Marine in Iraq should "think — ever — that his chairman, whoever that person is, could have stayed in the battle and voluntarily walked off the battlefield.

PENTAGON MAY DROP MENTAL HEALTH QUESTION

WASHINGTON — U.S. troops would no longer be asked to reveal previous mental health treatment when applying for security clearances under a proposal being considered by the Pentagon.

The idea stems from the finding that service members avoid needed counseling because they believe that getting it — and acknowledging it — could cost them their clearance as well as do other harm to their careers, The Associated Press has learned.

"This is just one of several items under review by the Department of Defense and the services in an effort to remove the stigma associated with mental health issues," said Air Force Maj. Patrick Ryder.

The proposal is to omit a question regarding mental health treatment that appears on a form required by the Office of Personnel Management, the agency that does the majority of investigations for granting clearances to military and civilian workers in the federal government.

Currently, the questionnaire asks applicants whether they have consulted a mental health professional in the last seven years. If so, they are asked to list the names, addresses and dates they saw the doctor or therapist.

DUKE PROSECUTOR CONFIRMS RESIGNATION

RALEIGH, N.C. — A tearful Mike Nifong said Friday he will resign as district attorney after admitting that he made improper statements about three Duke University lacrosse players who were once charged with raping a stripper.

"My community has suffered enough," Nifong said from the witness stand at his ethics trial on allegations that he violated rules of professional conduct in his handling of the case.

The players were later declared innocent by state prosecutors.

The North Carolina State Bar said Nifong withheld DNA test results from the players' defense attorneys, lied to the court and bar investigators, and made misleading and inflammatory comments about the three athletes, who were cleared of charges they raped a stripper at a team party in March 2006.

Nifong said he did not make all the mistakes alleged by the bar, "but they are my mistakes."

ROMNEY WOOS ANTI-ABORTION ACTIVISTS

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Friday told hundreds of anti-abortion activists that his conversion to their cause is genuine as he sought to fend off rivals' criticism that he's inconsistent on the issue.

"I know that it is not time but conviction that unites us," Romney said in remarks on the second day of the National Right to Life's annual convention. "I proudly follow a long line of converts — George Herbert Walker Bush, Henry Hyde, and Ronald Reagan to name a few."

Romney's speech was interrupted several times by applause.

"My experience as governor taught me firsthand that the threat to our culture is real," Romney said. "When responsibility for life or ending life was placed in my hands, I made the right decision."

Two of Romney's rivals — Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas — have questioned the former Massachusetts governor's record on abortion. Romney repeatedly vowed not to change state abortion laws and backed abortion rights as recently as 2› years ago, even though he insists he has always personally opposed the practice.

1957 BELVEDERE UNEARTHED AFTER 50 YEARS

TULSA, Okla. — Thousands watched Friday as a crane lifted a muddy package from a hole in the courthouse lawn: a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere buried a half-century ago to celebrate Oklahoma's 50 years of statehood.

The wrapped car was covered in red mud as it came out of the hole. Its trademark fins were exposed, caked with either rust or mud, and a bit of shiny chrome was visible on the bumper.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Miss Belvedere," said event organizer Sharon King Davis, a fourth-generation Tulsan whose grandfather helped bury the Plymouth.

The gold and white two-door hardtop spent the last half-century covered in three layers of protective material and encased in a 12-by-20-foot concrete vault, supposedly tough enough to withstand a nuclear attack.

But event officials already had to pump out several feet of water from its crypt.

FBI INVESTIGATED GEORGIA GOVERNOR IN LYNCHINGS

MONROE, Ga. — Newly released files from the lynching of two black couples more than 60 years ago contain a disturbing revelation: The FBI investigated suspicions that a three-term governor of Georgia sanctioned the murders to sway rural white voters during a tough election campaign.

The 3,725 pages obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act do not make conclusions about the still-unsolved killings at Moore's Ford Bridge. But they raise the possibility that Eugene Talmadge's politics may have been a factor when a white mob dragged the four from a car, tied them to a tree and opened fire.

"I'm not surprised ... historians over the years have concluded the violently racist tone of his 1946 campaign may have been indirectly responsible for the violence that came at Moore's Ford," said Robert Pratt, a University of Georgia history professor who has studied the case. "It's fair to say he's one of the most virulently racist governors the state has ever had."

Talmadge, who died just months after his 1946 election to a fourth term, dominated Georgia politics in the 1930s and 1940s with a mix of racism and pocketbook populism.

He came under FBI scrutiny because of a visit he made to the north Georgia town of Monroe two days before the Democratic gubernatorial primary and a day after a highly charged racial incident there, a fight in which a black sharecropper stabbed and severely wounded a white farmer. The sharecropper was one of the four people who would later be lynched.

HASSELHOFF SAYS HE WON CUSTODY FIGHT

LOS ANGELES — A beaming David Hasselhoff said Friday he had won a long-running legal battle with ex-wife Pamela Bach over custody of their two teenage daughters.

"The judge said, 'Enough is enough,' " Hasselhoff said outside Superior Court after a closed hearing.

Hasselhoff was awarded primary physical custody and full legal custody of the two girls, said Melvin Goldsman, his attorney.

The teens will mainly live with their father, who will have responsibility for making decisions about their health, education and welfare, Goldsman said.