UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council expressed "grave concern" Thursday over the capture of 15 British sailors and marines and called for an early resolution of the problem, including their release.

Britain failed to win support for a stronger statement deploring weeklong Iran's detention of the Britons and calling for their immediate freedom, primarily because of Russian opposition.

Britain sought Security Council help as Iran rolled back on its promise to release Faye Turney, the sole woman among the captives, and a senior Iranian official suggested all 15 Britons might be put on trial.

Iran's military chief, Gen. Ali Reza Afshar, said that because of the "wrong behavior" of the British government, "the release of a female British soldier has been suspended," the semiofficial Iranian news agency Mehr reported.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to allow a Turkish diplomat to meet with the British captives and also urged the release of Turney, Iranian state television reported.

EX-AIDE SAYS GONZALES PLAYED KEY ROLE IN PROSECUTOR FIRINGS

WASHINGTON — Contrary to his public statements, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was deeply involved in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, his former top aide said Thursday, adding that the final decision on who was to be dismissed was made by Gonzales and President Bush's former counsel.

"I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate," Kyle Sampson, who quit this month as Gonzales' chief of staff, told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign."

Responding to questions from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Sampson rejected the notion that the dismissals were ordered by young or inexperienced Justice Department officials.

"The decision makers in this case were the attorney general and the counsel to the president," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I and others made staff recommendations but they were approved and signed off on by the principals."

The White House response was notably muted.

ALLEGED AL-QAIDA MEMBER DENIES SENDING MONEY TO 9/11 HIJACKERS

WASHINGTON — A Saudi accused of arranging financing for the Sept. 11 terrorist plot participants told a hearing he got money transfers from two hijackers inside the United States just hours before the attacks, said a transcript the Pentagon released Thursday.

But Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who was based in the United Arab Emirates on Sept. 11, 2001, denied that he was a member of the al-Qaida terrorist network and he also denied that he sent money to the hijackers.

He is one of 14 "high value" detainees who was transferred to Guantanamo last September after being held in secret CIA prisons abroad. The transcript of his Guantanamo hearing contained no reference to his detention; a portion in which he explained how he was captured in Pakistan in 2003 was censored by the Defense Department.

The hearing, held to determine whether he is an "enemy combatant" eligible to be charged with war crimes, was conducted March 21.

4 DIE AS SPRING STORM HITS PLAINS

OKLAHOMA CITY — A tornado as wide as two football fields carved a devastating path through an eastern Colorado town as a massive spring storm swept from the Rockies into the Plains, killing at least four people in three states, authorities said Thursday.

Sixty-five tornadoes were reported in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska on Wednesday, the National Weather Service said.

One twister killed an Oklahoma couple as it blew their home to pieces. A Texas man was found dead in the tangled debris of his trailer, and a woman died of her injuries early Thursday after the Colorado tornado threw her into a tree.

The massive storm system stretched from South Dakota to Texas on Thursday morning, threatening flash flooding in central Nebraska and Kansas and more severe weather farther south.

Winter storm warnings were still posted for most of Wyoming, where heavy snow was blamed for interstate pileups, forecasters said. In central Wyoming's Wind River Mountains, 58 inches of snow from the storm was recorded by Thursday morning.

SHARK OVERFISHING MAY BE ENDANGERING BAY SCALLOPS

WASHINGTON — Overfishing of powerful sharks — a top predator in the ocean — may endanger bay scallops, a gourmet delicacy. With fewer sharks to devour them, skates and rays have increased sharply along the East Coast and they are gobbling up shellfish, particularly bay scallops, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Ecologists have known that reducing key species on land can affect an entire ecosystem, but this study provides hard data for the same thing in the ocean, said lead author Charles H. Peterson of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina.

Co-author Ransom A. Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Peterson were studying different ends of the food chain, Peterson said in a telephone interview.

"Myers was working on great sharks and I was working on cownose rays and their impact on bay scallops and other shellfish. We realized that separately we had interesting science, but together we had an absolute revelation," he said.

MAE LABORDE HOT IN HOLLYWOOD AT AGE 97

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Hollywood's starmakers always are on the lookout for a fresh new face and they found one in Mae Laborde, albeit of the wrinkled variety.

The 97-year-old Laborde is just four years into her acting career and hotter than ever. Standing 4-feet-10, with snow-white hair, rosy-red cheeks and a sweet-as-peaches-and-cream smile, she's becoming TV's ubiquitous grandma.

She was "Wheel of Fortune's" Vanna White (40 years in the future) for a recent episode of "MADtv." She was the stunned fiancee whose boyfriend finally gets around to proposing in a jewelry commercial. She faced down the Grim Reaper himself in a bit about elderly people without health insurance for "Real Time With Bill Maher."

She's also been a cheerleader on ESPN, appeared in a Lexus commercial, had a recurring role on Spike Feresten's "Talkshow" and had a role in a JP Morgan Chase Bank commercial.