WASHINGTON — Nearly two dozen officials who received hefty performance bonuses last year at the Veterans Affairs Department also sat on the boards charged with recommending the payments.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press raise questions of conflicts of interest or appearances of conflicts in connection with the bonuses, some of which went to senior officials involved in crafting a budget that came up $1.3 billion short and jeopardized veterans' healthcare.

The documents show that 21 of 32 officials who were members of VA performance review boards received more than half a million dollars in payments themselves.

Among them: nearly a dozen senior officials who devised the flawed 2005 ##involving themselves, fellow members and spouses that made questionable performance claims and neglected agency problems.

GONZALES RELIED ON OUTGOING DEPUTY

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday he relied on his resigning deputy more than any other aide to decide which U.S. attorneys should be fired last year.

His comments came a less than a day after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty announced he would resign at the end of the summer — a decision that people familiar with the plans said was hastened by the controversy over the purge of eight prosecutors.

"You have to remember, at the end of the day, the recommendations reflected the views of the deputy attorney general. He signed off on the names," Gonzales told reporters at a National Press Club forum in Washington. "And he would know better than anyone else, anyone in this room, anyone — again, the deputy attorney general would know best about the qualifications and the experiences of the United States attorneys community, and he signed off on the names."

McNulty, reached in San Antonio after Gonzales' remarks, declined to comment.

McNulty has acknowledged approving the list of prosecutors who were ordered to leave last October, a few weeks before the firings were made official. But documents released by the Justice Department show he was not closely involved in picking all the U.S. attorneys who were put on the list — a job mostly driven by two Gonzales staffers with little prosecutorial experience.

BRAZILIAN RANCHER GUILTY IN NUN'S DEATH

BELEM, Brazil — A Brazilian rancher was convicted Tuesday of ordering the killing of an American nun and rainforest defender in a case seen as an important test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. A judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura "showed a violent personality unsuited to living in society," the judge said in sentencing him to the maximum penalty for the 2005 slaying of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang.

The "killing was carried out in violent and cowardly manner," Judge Raymond Moises Alves Flexa said.

Stang's brother David, who flew to Brazil for the two-day trial, trembled and wept after the verdict. "Justice was done," he said, adding that he now believed another rancher also accused of ordering his sister's killing may be convicted when he goes to trial later this year.

Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio, helped build schools and was among the activists who worked to defend the rights of impoverished and exploited farmers drawn to the Amazon region. She also attempted to halt the rampant jungle clearing by loggers and ranchers that has destroyed some 20 percent of the forest cover.

JAMES COMEY: WHITE HOUSE PRESSED

WASHINGTON — A top Justice Department official thought President Bush's no-warrant wiretapping program was so questionable that he refused for a time to reauthorize it, leading to a standoff with White House officials at the bedside of the ailing attorney general, a Senate panel was told Tuesday.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he refused to recertify the program because Attorney General John Ashcroft had reservations about its legality just before falling ill with pancreatitis in March 2004.

The White House, Comey said, recertified the program without the Justice Department's signoff, allowing it to operate for about three weeks without concurrence on whether it was legal. Comey, Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials at one point considered resigning, Comey said.

"I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," Comey told the panel.

A day after the March 10, 2004, incident at Ashcroft's hospital bedside, President Bush ordered changes to the program to accommodate the department's concerns. Ashcroft signed the presidential order to recertify the program about three weeks later.

U.S. BORDER INSPECTORS DON'T USE SCANNERS

SAN DIEGO — The face- and fingerprint-matching technology that has been touted over the past decade as a sophisticated new way to stop terrorists and illegal immigrants from entering the country through Mexico has one major drawback: U.S. border inspectors almost never use it.

In fact, the necessary equipment is not even installed in vehicle lanes along the border.

Government officials said that checking more people would create too big a backup at the border, where hours-long traffic jams are already common.

Some members of Congress who voted for the system in 1996 are complaining they were misled. They said the intent was to use biometrics — or a person's unique physical traits — to screen everyone.

"Congress would not have gone to the trouble of requiring biometric features on the border crossing card if it knew the administration would not require that those features be read by scanners," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who wrote the legislation.

HEAVY VITAMIN USE MAY RAISE CANCER RISK

WASHINGTON — There's more worrisome news about vitamins: Taking too many may increase men's risk of dying from prostate cancer.

The study, being published Wednesday, doesn't settle the issue. But it is the biggest yet to suggest high-dose multivitamins may harm the prostate, and the latest chapter in the confusing quest to tell whether taking various vitamins really helps a variety of conditions — or is a waste of money, or worse.

Government scientists turned to a study tracking the diet and health of almost 300,000 men. About a third reported taking a daily multivitamin, and 5 percent were heavy users, swallowing the pills more than seven times a week.

Within five years of the study's start, 10,241 men had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Some 1,476 had advanced cancer; 179 died.

Heavy multivitamin users were almost twice as likely to get fatal prostate cancer as men who never took the pills, concludes the study in Wednesday's Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

SHOCK JOCKS OPIE, ANTHONY SUSPENDED

McLEAN, Va. — XM Satellite Radio suspended shock jocks Opie and Anthony for 30 days Tuesday, one week after they aired crude sex comments about Condoleezza Rice, Laura Bush and Queen Elizabeth II and one day after they made light of the incident in their broadcast.

"Comments made by Opie and Anthony on yesterday's broadcast put into question whether they appreciate the seriousness of the matter," Washington-based XM said in a statement. "The management of XM Radio decided to suspend Opie and Anthony to make clear that our on-air talent must take seriously the responsibility that creative freedom requires of them."

Opie and Anthony, who last week apologized for the sex comments, struck a more defensive tone on Monday's broadcast. They lamented the state of radio and what they perceived as excessive reactions to comments made by themselves and other radio disc jockeys.

"We're under the same scrutiny as (National Public Radio) — it doesn't make sense," they said on Monday's show.