Two men who pleaded guilty to “tagging” buildings with spray paint have been sentenced to wear T-shirts identifying them as graffiti offenders while they perform 500 hours of community service.Neal Stava, 20, and Charles N. Roberts, 21, likely will not be the last offenders hit with the unusual punishment. The city has ordered 10 of the shirts as part of its crackdown on graffiti.

The red shirts are emblazoned with the message: “Graffiti is not art. Graffiti is vandalism.”

Stava and Roberts were involved in a recent spate of tagging, in which people leave their personal stamps on buildings, fences, trash bins and utility boxes, said Deputy City Attorney Cynthia Hall. Tags are often pseudonyms sprayed in a series of loops and swirls.

From time to time, Hall said, tagging incidents surge in Norfolk. Generally, a few people are responsible for many incidents, she said.

The convoy turned a corner through the tent camp when the roadside bomb went off.Obscuring smoke streamed over the military vehicles and machine guns and assault rifles popped as the armed figures in desert camouflage struggled to defend themselves and strike back at their ambushers.

“Fire Team 1, let’s go!” a convoy leader called out.

Though they looked just like soldiers with their Kevlar helmets, body armor and M-16 automatic rifles, the convoy unit was made up of sailors training for combat on the ground in the Middle East.

“This is the kind of training that sailors, outside of going to the desert, would not be doing,” said Master Chief Jeffrey Reed. “It’s a transition from a Navy job to what’s really an Army job.”

And, Reed said, “It’s a culture shock in many ways.”

About 400 Navy reservists with the Navy Expeditionary Logistics Support Group at this base near Williamsburg are undergoing six weeks of beefed-up training before taking on the customs-inspection mission for service members returning from Iraq.

A developing story out of Atlanta.

A tornado struck the downtown area Friday night.

The storm smashed skyscraper windows, literally crumbled part of an apartment building, and rattled the rafters of two major sports arenas.

One of those arenas was the Georgia Dome filled with baseketball fans at the time.

The storms ended up affecting several SEC men’s college basketball games.

Delaying one and canceling another.

ESPN is reporting today’s SEC games are scheduled to start at noon on Georgia Tech’s campus in Atlanta.

In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

There may not be a hotter player in the country right now than West Virginia’s Joe Alexander. He is big, versatile and quick, and he creates a ton of problems for opposing defenses. On Thursday, he took care of Connecticut, scoring a career-high 34 points to lead the Mountaineers to a 78-72 victory in the quarterfinal round of the Big East tournament.

Top-seeded Georgetown also advanced to the semifinals at Madison Square Garden, making a team-record 17 3-pointers in an 82-63 victory against No. 8 seed Villanova. Now, Alexander is Georgetown’s problem. The Mountaineers and the Hoyas meet Friday night in the semifinals.

Tyler Hansbrough’s baby hook with 21 ticks left gets fifth-ranked North Carolina past Virginia.

Two last-minute 3-pointers took Virginia to the brink of an upset over fifth-ranked North Carolina on Tuesday night.

If it hadn’t taken 39 minutes for the Cavaliers to find their touch from long range, it might have been a different story.

Some better defensive rebounding would have helped as well.

North Carolina scored 16 points on second-chance baskets and held off the Cavaliers 75-74 without starting point guard Ty Lawson.

Virginia had the preeminent point guard on the floor Tuesday night, but senior Sean Singletary, who finished with a game-high 27 points, had little support.

The Cavaliers didn’t have another double-figure scorer before Calvin Baker hit a 3-pointer to cut Carolina’s lead to 73-71 with 51.7 seconds left.

Virginia needed a defensive stop at that point and gave little ground before Tyler Hansbrough scored on a half-hook from the baseline with 22 seconds left.

“We like to think it’s a jump hook, but it’s not,” UNC coach Roy Williams said. “It’s a shotput, jump hook, Hansbrough special. Needless to say, he delivered for us and made a big basket.

– Andy Pettitte admitted using human growth hormone in 2004, saying it was supplied to him that time by his father.

After the Mitchell Report was released, Pettitte said he used HGH for two days in 2002 while with the New York Yankees. Last week, the pitcher was asked to discuss drug use in both a deposition and affidavit before a congressional committee.

“In that affidavit, Andy informed the committee that in addition to the two shots a day of HGH he took for two days in 2002, he also took HGH for a one-day period in 2004, shortly preceding season-ending elbow surgery,” his lawyers, Jay Reisinger, Thomas Farrell and James Sharp, said in a statement Wednesday.

Pettitte pitched for his hometown Houston Astros from 2004-06 before rejoining the Yankees last year.

Excused from testifying before a congressional committee focusing on Roger Clemens’ alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs, Pettitte issued a statement through his lawyer minutes before the session began.

“Andy had not previously mentioned this usage because he acquired the substance from his father, who had obtained it without Andy’s knowledge in an effort to overcome his very serious health problems, which have included serious cardiac conditions,” the statement said. “Andy did not want his father, whom he deeply respects and loves, to be brought into this matter and sought to shield him from publicity. In both cases, Andy used HGH in a misguided effort to recover from injury.”

High voter turnouts led to long lines at polling stations across the metro Richmond area yesterday, but Chesterfield County may have seen some of the worst.

The problems spanned several polling sites after the huge and obviously unexpected turnout left the registrar lacking Democratic ballots. Election officials scrambled to get more ballots to local precincts, but they didn’t arrive fast enough.

Dozens of voters at polling sites like Hening Elementary School were told to write their choice of Democratic candidate on a piece of paper - a move that is facing a gauntlet of legal questions today.

Some voters refused to hand write their ballots and stuck it out until new ones arrived. Others were forced to go with the only other alternative and vote in the Republican primary.

Wildfires chased some residents from churches and led others to seek them out for sanctuary as flames fed by strong winds spread in the rain-starved Carolinas and Virginia.About 60 homes were briefly evacuated Sunday afternoon as a fire sent smoke billowing above this city of about 11,000 people, about 15 miles northwest of Myrtle Beach.

Lewis Cooper fled the flames — one of the state’s 106 forest fires — with his wife, and said the heat was intense from seven football fields away.

“The flames were at the top of the trees and I could feel the heat,” said Cooper, 37, who went to a Baptist church being used as a shelter to check on his neighbors.

Joseph Schell got word about Conway’s evacuations from one neighbor and, as smoke made it difficult to breathe, told another, “Get your dogs, get in your car, and get out of here!”

Twelve small structures, including at least one business and an unknown number of homes and sheds, were damaged by a blaze near the South Carolina coast; no injuries were reported, authorities said.

Barack Obama swept Hillary Clinton in three more primaries in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, giving him eight consecutive wins and a clear lead in the race for delegates.Obama’s decisive victories yesterday in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., follow wins in five contests over the weekend. The next elections are Feb. 19 in Hawaii, Obama’s childhood home, and Wisconsin, where he has the support of the state’s governor.

“This movement won’t stop until there’s change in Washington, D.C., and tonight we’re on our way,'’ Obama, 46, told a crowd of more than 19,000 people at the Kohl Center in Madison, Wisconsin. “We have now won east and west and north and south and across the heartland of this country we love.'’

Clinton, 60, is looking ahead to a March 4 showdown with Obama in the delegate-rich states of Texas and Ohio to halt his progress. After her string of losses, she needs wins in both states to regain momentum. She already has begun a staff shakeup, with deputy campaign manager Mike Henry last night becoming the second top aide to leave.

“We’re going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks, bringing our message about what we need in America,'’ the New York senator told supporters last night in El Paso. “I’m tested, I’m ready, let’s make it happen.'’

McCain Beats Huckabee

On the Republican side, John McCain, 71, defeated former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, 52, in all three contests, as the Arizona senator moves to seal his party’s presidential nomination.

“We are approaching the end of the first half of this election on quite an upswing, McCain said to his supporters in Alexandria, Virginia.

Huckabee’s strength in parts of Virginia, however, showed there are still a number of conservatives in the Republican Party who haven’t fallen in behind McCain.