ELECTION UPDATE 3

1450 - Stephen Hawking shoots his mouth off. Calls Iraq War a 'war crime.' Buys into the bogus 100,000 casualty count spewed by The Lancet last week.

1440 - Philippine Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas confirmed that a 29-year old Filipino accountant Roberto Tarongoy, was kidnapped. He was working with the Saudi Arabian Trading and Contracting Co. (SATCo), a company that caters food to American troops.

1430 - Six people died when an explosives-laden car slammed into concrete blast walls and protective barriers surrounding the Education Ministry and exploded in Baghdad's Sunni Muslim district Azamiyah. Ten others were injured.

1302 - Voting irregularities alleged in Philadelphia. It appears that the machines had been preprogrammed with a few hundred votes. Other problems noted:

Five voting locations in Franklin County, Ohio, opened up to a half hour late due to tardy election workers.

An election judge in Essex, Md., left a polling place briefly, saying he'd forgotten something at home.

A South Carolina precinct had to switch to paper ballots because of equipment trouble.

In Florida, an optical-scan voting machine failed in Volusia County Monday and didn't count 13,000 ballots. Officials said they would count those ballots Tuesday.

The head of the civic group Common Cause said the high turnout will "add more confusion to already overburdened, understaffed polling places."

By midmorning on the East Coast, an online and phone hotline run by voting-rights activists had logged more than 1,600 complaints and questions.

1230 - Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado turnout may be affected by winter storm.

Earlier - Osama bin Laden had vowed to bleed the US to bankruptcy, according to a full transcript of the Al-Qaeda chief's latest message released yesterday by the Al-Jazeera Arabic language network.