JOHN GIBBINS / Union-Tribune At the Barkley Seed facility in Brawley last week, field representative Robin Lemaster said the bumper crop of durum wheat forced the company to temporarily store the grain outside until space becomes available in storage tanks and warehouses.

What's Inside A virtual vacation to your home away from home Owners use Web cams to monitor residences – or just to daydream Applegate fighting cancer Avoiding beaches that are polluted This day in history Evidence in anthrax case reportedly circumstantial Anglican leader calls for gay bishop moratorium University scientists targeted in bombings police call 'terrorism' Scientists seek answers to porpoise deaths in Northern California More News

In the Imperial Valley, wheat farmers such as Mark Osterkamp greatly increased the acreage they planted – and their water use – with an eye toward reaping big profits this year.

2008 VOTE: PRESIDENT

WASHINGTON – America's troubled economy may offer Sen. Barack Obama a golden opportunity to turn the presidential campaign into a referendum on Republican policies, but Sen. John McCain is betting that he can trump him by embracing a favorite move in the GOP playbook – cutting taxes.

• Obama urges committee to grant full votes to Fla., Mich. delegates

NEW DELHI – Thousands of panicked pilgrims stampeded yesterday at a remote mountaintop temple in northern India during celebrations to honor a Hindu goddess, sending dozens of people plummeting to their deaths and trampling scores more. Police said 145 people were killed.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – At least nine climbers are feared dead on K2, the world's second-highest mountain, after an avalanche cut ropes used to cross a treacherous wall of ice, officials and other climbers said yesterday.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature whose pitiless and searching chronicles of Soviet tyranny made him a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit, died yesterday in Moscow. He was 89.