Freight drivers began a 62 hour strike at 1100 GMT, and are expected to be joined by passenger train drivers at 0100 GMT on Thursday.

Drivers’ union GDL is demanding a 31% pay rise, but the national rail operator Deutsche Bahn is not prepared to improve on its current 10% offer.

The move comes as France is also suffering from industrial action that has halted public transport services.

Read full story.

As flames continued to light up the sky, most of these evacuees have no choice but to wait out what may be the worst fire in San Diego’s history, reports CBS News correspondent Hattie Kauffman.

By day three, the dozen wildfires had burned 1,200 homes and businesses and set 245,957 acres — 384 square miles — ablaze, and the destruction may only be the start for the region. Tuesday’s forecast called for hotter temperatures and more explosive Santa Ana gusts.

A vast curtain of smoke was dropped crosswise from the mountains all the way to the Pacific shore, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds.

The blazes bedeviled firefighters as walls of flame whipped from mountain passes to the edges of the state’s celebrated coastline, spreading so quickly that even hotels serving as temporary shelters for evacuees had to be evacuated.

“I mean, it’s like freaking Armageddon around here,” a resident told The Early Show. “I mean, it’s black, there’s smoke everywhere, the flames came right to the back of some of the houses.”

Read full story.

Human rights groups often have criticized European Union member Hungary for legalizing prostitution — which has been fully allowed under certain conditions since 1999. Opponents say legalization does not help prostitutes.

The permits allow prostitutes to give receipts to customers and become part of the legal economy by paying taxes and making social security contributions, said Agnes Foldi, head of the Hungarian Prostitutes’ Interest Protection Association.

Hungary’s sex industry — including prostitution and the production of pornographic materials — generates an estimated $1 billion annually, said Agnes Bakonyi, the spokeswoman of Hungary’s tax authority APEH.

“It is one of the leading sectors of the shadow economy,” Bakonyi said. “With this project, APEH is trying to help a group of professionals, in what is called the world’s oldest profession, who have never paid taxes in their life.”

Read full story.

NEW YORK (AP) — A group representing thousands of taxi drivers said last week it will idle cabs in September if the city goes ahead with a plan to require installation of GPS tracking systems.

Starting October 1, as the city’s 13,000 taxis come up for inspections they must have the GPS equipment along with touch-screen monitors that will let passengers pay by credit card, check on news stories and look up restaurant and entertainment information.

If the Taxi & Limousine Commission abandons the GPS part of the plan, “then there’s room to sit down and talk,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which counts more than 8,400 members.

But if the plan moves forward, she said, the group will specify the date, duration and other details of the potential work stoppage next month.

Read full story.

Source: www.cnn.com.

Editor’s opinion

Cabbies know that when will have GPS devices on their cars will not be able to rob the citizens anymore by taking other routes than optimum ones. In Japan this system works very well.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) — Seven years ago, police in North Carolina covered shooting victim Marcelo Cruz with a tarp, believing he was dead. He wasn’t. Cruz survived the street fight shooting, but was left paralyzed from the waist down.

The Mexican native rebuilt his life, and at 26, was living in Minneapolis, driving a specially equipped van so he could get around the city.

That’s what he was doing Wednesday when he drove onto the Interstate 35W bridge just after 6 p.m., only to see the bridge in front of him start to shake — and in a few short seconds, tumble down.

Cruz saw 10 or 20 cars in front of him plunge into the water. He applied the brakes, but on the now-sloping bridge deck, he couldn’t stop.

I thought I was going to die,” he told CNN.

But he wasn’t afraid, he said. He just thought about what he needed to do and how to do it. How to stop a car if the brakes don’t do the job?

Cruz swerved, and plowed his van into the concrete guard rail. It worked — the van stopped, less than 15 feet from what was now the end of the bridge before it dropped into the Mississippi River.

Read full story.

Source: www.cnn.com

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) — The search for bodies in the Mississippi River was painstakingly slow as divers navigated debris and coped with low visibility after Wednesday’s deadly bridge collapse, officials said.

About 15 divers from local counties did a bank-to-bank search Thursday afternoon and found 11 vehicles, including an 18-wheeler, said Lynn Schwartz, Communication Specialist for the Bridge Collapse Command Center.

Vehicles with bodies inside are being taken out of the river, while empty ones are being marked and left in the water, she said.

Dozens of cars are trapped in the rubble or in the river after the eight-lane interstate bridge collapsed during Minneapolis’ evening rush hour. Eight people are still missing, said Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek.

“[We] don’t have a hard understanding of how many vehicles are underneath the bridge and that won’t be known until there’s an opportunity to get some heavy equipment in to move the bridge or portions of it,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty Thursday.

Read full story.

Source: www.cnn.com

A key road bridge over the Mississippi river in the US state of Minnesota has collapsed in the evening rush hour killing at least seven people.

At least 60 were injured when part of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis gave way at 1805 (2305 GMT) on Wednesday.

As the structure buckled, up to 50 vehicles were hurled into the water.

The US Department of Homeland Security said there was no reason to suspect the collapse of the bridge, which had been undergoing repairs, was terror-related.

“Obviously this is a catastrophe of historic proportions,” Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty told a news conference.

Fire chief Jim Clack said rescuers did not expect to find any more survivors after the search was called off earlier because of darkness.

Full story: BBC

A bridge collapse in Minnesota at peak rush hour Wednesday sent vehicles and debris tumbling into the Mississippi River, killing at least seven people, injuring more than 60 and leaving a dramatic pile of rubble linking the Twin Cities.

The Department of Homeland Security quickly announced that there was no “terrorism nexus,” and that the eight-lane Interstate 35-West bridge, built in 1967 and currently undergoing construction, may have suffered some type of engineering failure.
At least seven people were killed when the estimated 500-foot span collapsed shortly after 7 p.m. EDT, Minnesota officials announced Wednesday night. One construction worker remained missing.

“It will be a very tragic night when it is over,” Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak told a news conference. “Obviously, this is a catastrophe of historic proportions for Minnesota,” said Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Up to 50 vehicles stuck in near bumper-to-bumper traffic plunged into the water below, according to the Coast Guard, which dispatched boats and a helicopter to the scene. Other vehicles ended up in awkward positions, battered by concrete and tangled in steel that exploded in all directions when the span gave way. A freight train rolling beneath the bridge was crushed.

Full story: ABC.

Source: ABCNEWS

An interstate bridge jammed with rush-hour traffic suddenly broke into huge sections and collapsed into the Mississippi River Wednesday, pitching dozens of cars 60 feet into the water and killing at least seven people.

The eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge, a major Minneapolis artery, was in the midst of being repaired and two lanes in each direction were closed when the bridge buckled. About 20 families gathered at an information center, looking for information on loved ones they couldn’t locate.
“There were two lanes of traffic, bumper to bumper, at the point of the collapse. Those cars did go into the river,” said Minneapolis Police Lt. Amelia Huffman. “At this point there is nothing to suggest that this was anything other than a structural collapse.”

By 1 a.m. Thursday, Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said all search efforts had been called off for the night and that searchers did not expect to find any survivors.

“It’s dark, it’s not safe with the currents in the water and the concrete and rebar,” he said. “At this point it is a recovery effort.”

Jamie Winegar of Houston was sitting in traffic shortly after 6 p.m. when all of a sudden she started hearing “boom, boom, boom and we were just dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping.”

The car she was riding in landed on top of a smaller car but did not fall into the water. She said her nephew yelled, “‘It’s an earthquake!’ and then we realized the bridge was collapsing.”

Full story: FOX.

Source: FOXNEWS.com.

Recovery workers were to begin searching at dawn Thursday for victims missing in a massive bridge collapse that killed at least seven people and sent dozens of vehicles plunging into the Mississippi River.
The accident occurred during rush hour Wednesday, shortly after 6 p.m. (7 p.m. ET) when dozens of cars were on the bridge.

Witnesses described a “dust cloud” as it collapsed, sending cars and and chunks of concrete falling into the river.

At least 60 people were taken to local hospitals, according to Minneapolis Fire Chief Jim Clack.
All survivors have been taken off the bridge, said Minneapolis police Chief Tim Dolan during a news conference Wednesday night. Crews have searched 50 cars and will be looking for more possible victims, but the mission has changed from a rescue to a recovery mode.

“We have confirmed that this will be a very tragic night when it is over,” said Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported nine dead in the collapse, and said authorities expected the death toll to rise. Twenty people were reported missing from the disaster, the Star-Tribune reported.

Full story: CNN.

Source: CNN.com.

(CBS/AP) One of the Twin Cities’ major bridges suddenly turned into a scene of horror Wednesday evening, making a strange noise, breaking into huge sections of concrete and twisted metal and sending a thick cloud of dust into the air as it collapsed into the Mississippi River.

Authorities say dozens of cars were pitched into the water below, at least seven people were killed, and over 60 others were injured, some critically.

Minneapolis Fire Chief Jim Clack says the death toll could rise. “We think there are several more vehicles in the river we can’t see yet,” said Clack, adding that the likelihood of finding survivors is slim.

Friends and relatives of the unaccounted for are waiting for news in a crisis center set up at a nearby hotel. “I’ve never wanted to see my brother so much in my life,” said one woman, as she waited for word at the Holiday Inn. “I’m overwhelmed with not knowing. I want to see my brother, and my son wants to see his uncle.”

Full article CBS

A US man put under quarantine after being found to have a rare strain of tuberculosis has been moved from Atlanta to a specialist Denver clinic.

Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer, could be treated for months, restricted to a room with special ventilation.

US authorities have launched a worldwide search for people who may have come into contact with him during two trans-Atlantic flights.

European officials are also trying to trace passengers who sat near him.

The European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) considered the risk of contracting the drug-resistant disease to be low, a European Commission spokesman said.

Nevertheless it was recommending that people who sat in the same row or in the two rows in front of or behind him to be checked.

Mr Speaker travelled from Atlanta to Paris on 12 May on Air France flight 385. He returned to the North America on CSA flight 104 from Prague to Montreal on 24 May and continued his journey into the US by car.

He was honeymooning in Italy when he was told he had the rare form of TB – but still decided to return home.

The personal injury lawyer was initially placed under federal quarantine at an Atlanta hospital, the first such order since 1963.

Full story

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Infected man ID’d, taken to Denver hospital; others on 2 flights sought
ATLANTA – The honeymooner quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was identified Thursday as a 31-year-old Atlanta personal injury lawyer whose new father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB and other bacteria.

Bob Cooksey would not comment on whether he reported his son-in-law, 31-year-old Andrew Speaker, to federal health authorities. He said only that he gave Speaker “fatherly advice” when he learned the young man had contracted the disease.

In a statement issued through the CDC, Cooksey also said that neither he nor his CDC laboratory was the source of his son-in-law’s TB.
The CDC had no immediate comment on how the case came to the attention of federal health authorities.

“I’m hoping and praying that he’s getting the proper treatment, that my daughter is holding up mentally and physically,” Cooksey told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “Had I known that my daughter was in any risk, I would not allow her to travel.”

Full story

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

The honeymooner quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was identified Thursday as a 31-year-old Atlanta personal injury lawyer whose new father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB.

Bob Cooksey would not comment on whether he reported his son-in-law, 31-year-old Andrew Speaker, to federal health authorities. He said only that he gave Speaker “fatherly advice” when he learned the young man had contracted the disease.
In a statement issued through the CDC, Cooksey also said that neither he nor his CDC laboratory was the source of the TB bacteria that infected his son-in-law.

The CDC had no immediate comment on how the case came to the attention of federal health authorities.

“I’m hoping and praying that he’s getting the proper treatment, that my daughter is holding up mentally and physically,” Cooksey told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “Had I known that my daughter was in any risk, I would not allow her to travel.”

Speaker said in a newspaper interview that he knew he had TB when he flew from Atlanta to Europe in mid-May for his wedding and honeymoon, but that he did not find out until he was already in Rome that it was an extensively drug-resistant strain considered especially dangerous.

Full story

Source: abcnews.go.com

(CBS/AP) A tuberculosis patient under the first federal quarantine since 1963 was taken Thursday to National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, which specializes in respiratory disorders, officials said.

CBS News has learned the man with the extreme form of tuberculosis is Andrew Harley Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer from Atlanta. A medical official in Atlanta also confirmed the name on condition of anonymity.

In an odd twist, Speaker’s father-in-law works as a microbiologist at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory that studies tuberculosis and other bacterial infections.

Bob Cooksey said he gave his son-in-law “fatherly advice” when he learned he had contracted the disease.

Cooksey said that had he known his daughter was at any risk, he would not have allowed her to travel. He said he did not act in any official capacity with the CDC on the case.

Speaker has a rare and dangerous form of tuberculosis that has proved resistant to drugs. He arrived at Denver’s National Jewish Medical and Research Center for treatment Thursday, walking under his own power after flying from Atlanta with his wife and federal marshals, hospital spokesman William Allstetter said.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — The man infected with potentially fatal tuberculosis is receiving treatment at a Denver, Colorado, hospital as federal health officials continue to track down airline passengers who may have been exposed to the illness.

The man has been identified by multiple medical and law enforcement sources as Andrew Speaker, 31, a lawyer from Atlanta, Georgia. Hospital officials have not disclosed his name.

Speaker’s father-in-law works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, an agency spokesman said Thursday.

The father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a microbiologist who has conducted research on tuberculosis for the National Center for Infectious Diseases, according to a CDC biography posted on the agency’s Web site.

CNN affiliate WSB-TV reported that Cooksey gave his son-in-law, Speaker, “fatherly advice” after he found out his son-in-law had contracted the infectious disease, but did not advise him in any official capacity.

Cooksey did not immediately return a call to his work number seeking comment.

Speaker was put in isolation at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital after tests last week confirmed he had extremely drug-resistant TB, or XDR TB, the most dangerous form of the illness.

He was transferred to Denver on Thursday morning on a private aircraft, hospital officials said.

A spokesman for Denver’s National Jewish Medical and Research Center said Speaker was wearing a mask and was escorted by federal marshals when he arrived, but seemed normal otherwise.

“He looked kind of like you guys, more or less,” spokesman William Allstetter told reporters.

He said Speaker told him he felt fine.

Full story

Source: www.cnn.com

(AP) A man who fatally shot a teenage neighbor because he walked on the man’s carefully tended lawn has been sentenced to life in prison.

Charles Martin, 67, must serve 18 years before he can be considered for parole, Clermont County Common Pleas Judge William Walker ordered, adding that he would urge that Martin never be considered for parole.

The man was convicted last month of murder in the March 2006 shotgun killing of 15-year-old Larry Mugrage Jr., a high school freshman.

Martin told the court he was sorry the shooting occurred but said the teen knew how much Martin cared for his lawn and provoked him.

“He stepped on it and he walked 40 feet through it,” Martin said. “I cared about it. I cut it every five days.”

Prosecutors said Martin had confronted the teen earlier in the day when he walked into Martin’s yard on his way to a friend’s house, then loaded his .410-gauge shotgun and waited more than three hours for him to return.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

For those of you scoring the Floyd Landis doping case at home, a bit of advice: Take a deep breath.
It remains to be seen whether three-time Tour de France victor Greg LeMond’s sensational testimony against accused 2006 Tour winner Landis will have any significant impact on a fight that most likely will pivot on deep science, not the deep and twisted roots of a three-way feud between the only U.S. riders to win cycling’s most famous event.

The only sure bet is that Landis’ battle to win over public opinion took a massive hit Thursday after his business manager, former teammate and close friend Will Geoghegan was revealed to have made a legally ill-advised and personally vicious phone call to LeMond on the eve of LeMond’s appearance at Landis’ arbitration hearing.

Full story

Source: abcnews.go.com

(CBS/AP) A bipartisan immigration deal that would grant legal status to millions of people in the country unlawfully is drawing criticism from across the political spectrum.

The bargain reached between key Democratic and Republican senators and the White House faces an uncertain future in the Senate, which is set to begin debating it Monday.

As CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports, the deal is a big, first step but it is only a first step. The small team of negotiators will now try to sell their plan to the rest of Congress.

“I don’t know if the immigration legislation is going to bear fruit and we’re going to be able to pass it,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who harbored “serious concerns” about the deal.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(MALIBU, Calif.) — Floyd Landis’ sleepy, scientific arbitration hearing morphed into a pulp-fiction blockbuster Thursday, replete with revelations of sexual abuse, allegations of threatening phone calls and even a Donald Trump-style firing.

It came courtesy of Landis’ fellow American Tour de France champion Greg LeMond, who disclosed he had been sexually abused as a child and received a call Wednesday from Landis’ manager who threatened to reveal the secret if LeMond showed up to testify.

Shortly after LeMond dropped those bombshells, the manager, Will Geoghegan, walked up to LeMond, apologized and admitted he made the call, LeMond said. Which led to “You’re fired” — the message Landis attorney Maurice Suh gave to Geoghegan while they were still standing in the hearing room.

“It was a real threat, it was real creepy, and I think it shows the extent of who it is,” LeMond said before leaving the Pepperdine law school after his spellbinding day. “I think there’s another side of Floyd that the public hasn’t seen.”

Full story

Source: www.time.com

In what could be a sweeping change for immigration policy, several senators Tuesday were mapping out a plan that could make every illegal immigrant in this country legal.

It is one of the most controversial issues and one of the most divisive to be debated in Washington in recent years. Just this week, the Texas town of Farmers Branch made national headlines for passing an ordinance barring landlords from renting to illegal aliens. (The ordinance is already being challenged in the courts.)
Late into the evening five key senators were working on legislation that would produce a path to citizenship for the 12 million immigrants now in this country illegally.

The White House is keeping quiet about the potential deal, but the key negotiators are a group of five, bipartisan senators: Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., Ken Salazar, D-Calif., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa. — legislators who hail from the left, right, and center of the political spectrum.

Full story

Source: abcnews.go.com

Firefighters were keeping an anxious eye on the weather Wednesday as they fought to contain a massive wildfire that has consumed more than 12,000 acres, almost 20 square miles, of brush and pine forest in southern New Jersey.

Dry conditions and strong winds helped fan the blaze, which began Tuesday afternoon on a military aerial bombing range about 25 miles north of Atlantic City.

No deaths or injuries have been attributed to the fire, but it has forced the evacuation of about 2,500 homes in the area along the border between Ocean and Burlington counties.

Firefighting operations were scaled back overnight, with about 100 firefighters from the New Jersey Forest Fire Service as well as 200 emergency responders from Ocean, Burlington and Atlantic counties on the job, said Willie Cirone, deputy public information officer for the forest fire service.

Cirone said officials were considering conducting a burnout operation along the Garden State Parkway during the overnight hours to try to get the eastern side of the fire contained.

Full story

Source: www.foxnews.com

(AP) The King Center in Atlanta – set up to preserve the legacy of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King – says his oldest child, Yolanda Denise King, has died.

Steve Klein, a spokesman for the King Center, says Yolanda King, who was 51, died late Tuesday in Santa Monica, California.

A spokesman for the King Center says the family does not know the cause of death but suspects it might have been a heart problem.

The death comes just over a year after the death of her mother, Coretta Scott King – a civil rights leader in her own right – at the age of 78, of complications from ovarian cancer, and after a battle with the effects from a stroke.

The children of Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King – Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice Albertine – have each in their own way worked to carry on their parents’ work fighting for racial equality and social justice.

Born on Nov. 17, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, King was just an infant when her home was bombed during the turbulent civil rights era.

As an actress, she appeared in numerous films and even played civil rights heroine Rosa Parks in the 1978 miniseries “King.” She founded a production company called Higher Ground Productions.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

LYNCHBURG, Va. — The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University. He was 73.
Ron Godwin, the university’s executive vice president, said Falwell, 73, was found unresponsive late Tuesday morning and taken to Lynchburg General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later.

“I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast,” Godwin said. “He went to his office, I went to mine, and they found him unresponsive.”

Click here for pictures from Falwell’s life.

Carl Moore, Falwell’s physician, said the evangelist had a heart rhythm abnormality.

Falwell had survived two serious health scares in early 2005. He was hospitalized for two weeks with what was described as a viral infection, then was hospitalized again a few weeks later after going into respiratory arrest. Later that year, doctors found a 70 percent blockage in an artery, which they opened with stents.

Full story

Source: www.foxnews.com

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University. He was 73.

Ron Godwin, the university’s executive vice president, said Falwell was found unresponsive late Tuesday morning and taken to Lynchburg General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later.

“I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast,” Godwin said. “He went to his office, I went to mine, and they found him unresponsive.”

Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell’s physician, said the evangelist had a heart rhythm abnormality. He said Falwell was found without a pulse and never regained consciousness.

Falwell had made careful preparations for a transition of his leadership to his two sons, Jerry Falwell, Jr., now vice-chancellor of Liberty University, and Jonathan Falwell, executive the pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church.

One daughter, Jeannie Falwell Savas, Surgeon, Richmond, Va. Godwin said. “He has left instructions for those of us who had to carry on, and we will be faithful to that charge,” Godwin said.

Full story

Source: abcnews.go.com

LYNCHBURG, Va. – The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University. He was 73.

Ron Godwin, Liberty’s executive vice president, said Falwell had been found unresponsive around 10:45 a.m. and was taken to Lynchburg General Hospital.

Godwin said he was not sure what caused the collapse, but noted that Falwell had “a history of heart challenges.”
“I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast,” Godwin said. “He went to his office, I went to mine and they found him unresponsive.”

Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell’s physician, said the evangelist had had a heart rhythm abnormality. He said Falwell was found without a pulse and never regained consciousness.

Falwell had made careful preparations for a transition of his leadership to his two sons, Godwin said. “He has left instructions for those of us who had to carry on, and we will be faithful to that charge,” Godwin said.

Full story

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

(CNN) — The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television minister whose 1979 founding of the Moral Majority galvanized American religious conservatives into a political force, died Tuesday at age 73.

Falwell was found unconscious and without a pulse in his office at Liberty University, the college he founded in Lynchburg, Virginia, said Ron Godwin, the school’s executive vice president.

Though paramedics tried to revive him at his office and en route to Lynchburg General Hospital, “Those very timely and very efficient and effective efforts were unsuccessful,” Godwin said.

Godwin said he had breakfast with Falwell Tuesday morning and said they talked about the future.
“He seemed to be in good spirits,” Godwin said.

Godwin said they finished breakfast about 9:50 a.m. ET and Falwell went into his office. He was found there about 11:30 a.m. ET.

The minister, who had a history of heart trouble, was pronounced dead of heart failure at 12:40 p.m. Tuesday, his doctor, Carl Moore, told reporters. He had been hospitalized twice in early 2005 with acute onset pulmonary edema, or congestive heart failure, and at one point was placed on a ventilator.

Full story

Source: www.cnn.com

(CBS/AP) The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University.

He was 73.

Ron Godwin, the university’s executive vice president, said Falwell was found unresponsive late Tuesday morning and taken to Lynchburg General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later.

“I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast,” Godwin said. “He went to his office, I went to mine, and they found him unresponsive.”

Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell’s physician, said the evangelist had a heart rhythm abnormality.

Falwell had survived two serious health scares in early 2005. He was hospitalized for two weeks with what was described as a viral infection, then was hospitalized again a few weeks later after going into respiratory arrest. Later that year, doctors found a 70 percent blockage in an artery, which they opened with stents.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) A cruise ship ran aground off the Alaska coast early Monday, and it was taking on water as its passengers were transferred to nearby ships, Coast Guard officials said.

The company that operates the Empress of the North cruise ship said all the passengers have been safely taken off the ship and it’s on its way back to Juneau under its own power.

Majestic America spokesman Dan Miller in Seattle said the damage will be assessed to determine whether the ship can resume its summer schedule of cruises out of Juneau.

There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The Empress of the North, carrying 281 passengers and crew, was listing 6 degrees after hitting a rock at the southern end of Icy Strait, about 15 miles southwest of Juneau, said Petty Officer Christopher D. McLaughlin at the Coast Guard base in Kodiak.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS) It was five years ago that an American man was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused of plotting with al Qaeda to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” inside the United States.

Monday, the trial of Jose Padilla will finally begin with opening statements before a federal jury in Miami. But CBS chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports the words “dirty bomb” will not likely feature in the proceedings.

Eight months after the September 11 attacks, the FBI detained Brooklyn-born Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. President Bush quickly proclaimed the former gang member an “enemy combatant”, intent on detonating a radioactive device on U.S. soil.

However, federal prosecutors will now present far less sensational conspiracy charges against the 36-year-old — attempting to convince a Miami jury that he and two co-defendants intended to “murder, kidnap and maim” people overseas.

MURFREESBORO, Tennessee (AP) — Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

“The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them,” said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

Some parents said they were upset by the staff’s poor judgment in light of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 students and professors dead, including the gunman.

Full story

Source: www.cnn.com

It’s one of the top-rated universities in the world, but all is not well on the leafy campus of Yale University.

A Yale junior has filed a $20 million lawsuit against the school and a male student whom she accused of sexually assaulting her in 2005.

In August 2005, the female student and fellow Yale freshman Gregory Korb both attended an on-campus event the school throws to welcome freshmen to the campus.

After a day of partying and drinking, Korb accompanied the girl to her dorm room and, according to court papers filed by the alleged victim’s lawyer in New York State Supreme Court, “subjected her to physical and sexual assault, biting her about the face and breasts, causing several physical injuries, pain and suffering. He physically restrained her and prevented her from leaving until he was done.”

Korb was arrested early on the morning of Aug. 27, 2005, and charged with first-degree sexual assault, second-degree assault and first-degree unlawful restraint in the first degree. Last November, he pleaded no contest to third-degree assault and second-degree threatening and was sentenced to 18 months’ probation and prohibited from making contact with the victim or being on the Yale campus during his probation. At the time, Korb did not make a statement but through his lawyer maintained his innocence.

Full story

Source: abcnews.go.com

(CBS/AP) Nature’s fury made life miserable from one end of the United States to the other, with people forced out of their homes by wildfires near both coasts and the Canadian border and by major flooding in the Midwest.

And although the calendar still said spring, the first named storm of the year was whipping up surf on beaches along the southeastern coast.

However, it was not quite a day for the record books.

“It’s a major flood,” National Weather Service meteorologist Suzanne Fortin said Wednesday of the flooding in Missouri. “It won’t be a record breaker, but it will be in the top three.”

But in southern Georgia a three-week-old fire had become that state’s biggest in five decades after charring 167 square miles of forest and swamp.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

CNN) — Winds from the first named storm of the year fanned wildfires in Georgia and northern Florida on Wednesday, more than three weeks ahead of the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Subtropical Storm Andrea, with maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (65 kph) and higher gusts, was centered about 135 miles southeast of Savannah, Georgia, and about 100 miles northeast of Daytona Beach, Florida, as of 5 a.m. ET on Thursday, forecasters said.

Tropical storm-force winds extended outward up to 105 miles from its center, mainly to the east.
Forecasters had described Andrea as “meandering” throughout the day, but late Wednesday said it was nearly stationary and that no significant motion was expected in the next 24 hours.

A tropical storm watch was issued for the Southeastern U.S. coast from Georgia’s Altamaha Sound south to Flagler Beach, Florida, the weather service said.

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LOS ANGELES — Firefighters were taking advantage of cooler temperatures and dying winds early Wednesday as they sought to corral a fierce wildfire in the brush-covered hills behind the Griffith Observatory.

The 600-acre blaze in sprawling Griffith Park was 40 percent contained at daybreak, but with temperatures expected to soar into the 90s and humidity levels forecast to drop back into single digits, firefighters wouldn’t estimate when full containment was expected.

“It’s not moving too quick right now,” said fire Capt. Carlos Calvillo, adding that could all change when the weather heats up.

The blaze started around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, closing several of the park’s major attractions including the Observatory and Greek Theater, and evacuating nearby homes. Animals at the Los Angeles Zoo were moved indoors.

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BOSTON — The Rev. Al Sharpton, who recently urged that radio host Don Imus be fired for making a racially insensitive remark, said in a debate that “those of us who believe in God” will defeat Republican Mitt Romney for the White House. But Sharpton denied he was questioning the Mormon’s own belief in God.

Rather, the New York Democrat said he was contrasting himself with Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author he was debating at the time.

“As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don’t worry about that; that’s a temporary situation,” Sharpton said Monday during a debate with Hitchens at the New York Public Library’s Beaux-Arts headquarters.

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MERRILL, Wis. — A service station that offered discounted gas to senior citizens and people supporting youth sports has been ordered by the state to raise its prices.

Center City BP owner Raj Bhandari has been offering senior citizens a 2 cent per gallon price break and discount cards that let sports boosters pay 3 cents less per gallon.

But the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin’s Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price.

Bhandari said he received a letter from the state auditor last month saying the state would sue him if he did not raise his prices. The state could penalize him for each discounted gallon he sold, with the fine determined by a judge.

Bhandari, who bought the station a year ago, said he worries customers will think he stopped the discounts because he wants to make more money. About 10 percent of his customers had used the discount cards.

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ALMA, Mich. — A U.S. Marine drowned after saving two children who were swimming off Atlantic Beach in North Carolina, the military said.

Master Sgt. Michael Wert, an intelligence chief for the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Cherry Point in Havelock, N.C., was vacationing this past weekend with his family at the beach when he saw two boys struggling in the surf, the Marines said in a statement.

His wife, Debbie, said her husband rushed into the water to help while she went to call 911. Their daughter, Katrina, grabbed a boogie board and followed Wert, a Michigan native, into the water.

“She managed to help the boys onto the board, but didn’t see her dad with them,” Debbie Wert said in the statement. “The one little boy told her (Michael Wert) had to let them go and had died.”

Rescue personnel found Wert but could not revive him.

Wert joined the Marines in 1989 after graduating from Alma High School, where he was a cross-country runner, The Saginaw News reported. He served in Operation Desert Storm and supported Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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Firefighters made progress early Wednesday against a wildfire blazing over Dante’s View in the brush-covered hills behind the city’s iconic Griffith Observatory. Animals at the nearby Los Angeles Zoo were moved indoors, and dozens of homes were evacuated.

The 600-acre blaze in sprawling Griffith Park was just one firefighters were battling across the nation. A wildfire in northern Minnesota has already destroyed 40 homes and buildings, and brush fires in Georgia and northern Florida have charred more than 200 square miles.
Overnight, five helicopters flew dangerous water-dropping missions in Los Angeles, helping fire crews get the blaze about 40 percent contained.

Griffith Park is a mix of wilderness, cultural sites, horse and hiking trails and recreational facilities set on more than 4,000 acres in the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

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SEATTLE (AP) — A Seattle hospital acknowledged breaking state law when doctors performed a hysterectomy on a severely developmentally disabled girl whose parents have pursued medical treatments to stunt her growth, making her easier to care for.

Sterilization surgeries must not be performed on children without a court order, Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center said Tuesday after an investigation by Washington Protection and Advocacy System. The hospital also agreed to appoint “someone with a disability rights perspective” to its ethics committee.
Doctors performed the experimental surgeries in 2004, removing the girl’s uterus and breast buds. The girl, identified only as “Ashley,” was 6 years old at the time. The hospital’s ethics committee supported the treatment, which included hormone therapy, but noted before the surgeries that court review would be required.

A lawyer for the girl’s parents disagreed, saying the state law did not apply in Ashley’s case, and the hospital performed the procedures without court permission. Ashley was diagnosed with severe brain damage shortly after birth, and her condition has left her in an infant state, unable to sit up, roll over, hold a toy or walk or talk.

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(CBS/AP) Cooler temperatures and dying winds were helping firefighters make progress against a fierce wildfire that torched hundreds of acres in the city’s sprawling Griffith Park, where famous landmarks and nearby homes were evacuated.

Fire officials said they hoped an aggressive attack Wednesday morning would bring the blaze under control, though there were still visible flames and many hotspots in the hills above Hollywood.

“A very significant stop was made on the fire on the south end where the homes were located,” interim Fire Chief Douglas L. Barry said late Tuesday, citing the combined work of aircraft and ground crews.

The area’s lack of rain — just 2 ½ inches since July — has made the west coast a tinder box, CBS’ The Early Show meteorologist Dave Price reports, adding that this is not only a big problem for California firefighters Wednesday, but all summer long.

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WASHINGTON (CNN) — The federal government has charged five alleged Islamic radicals with plotting to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

A sixth was charged with aiding and abetting the illegal possession of firearms by three of the others.

“The philosophy that supports and encourages jihad around the world against Americans came to live here in New Jersey and threaten the lives of our citizens through these defendants,” New Jersey U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie said at a news conference Tuesday.
The men were arrested Monday night and heard the charges against them Tuesday in federal court. They will be held without bond pending a hearing Friday, according to Michael Drewniak, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey.

Christie described Tuesday how the group’s plot — which he said had been in the works since January 2006 — was foiled.

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(CNN) — Just hours before his execution by injection, a Tennessee death row prisoner who was convicted of killing a police officer ordered his final meal — pizza for a homeless person.

Philip Workman, 53, requested a vegetarian pizza be delivered to a homeless person in Nashville, Workman’s attorney confirmed.

Riverbend Maximum Security Institution refused, said Riverbend spokeswoman Dorinda Carter.

“We can get some special things for the inmate but the taxpayers don’t really give us permission to donate to charity,” Carter said.

According to the state’s protocol, a last meal’s cost cannot exceed $20.

Workman was executed early Wednesday, The Associated Press reported.

Carter said Workman met with a spiritual adviser Tuesday evening and had also spoken in person with his brother.

Although Tennessee law gave him the option to choose between the electric chair and lethal injection, he refused to make that choice.

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LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Los Angeles firefighters took advantage of cooler temperatures overnight as they tried to gain the upper hand on an urban brush fire that has scorched nearly 15 percent of the city’s historic Griffith Park.

The spreading flames prompted mandatory evacuations Tuesday in the Los Feliz neighborhood on the south side of the park, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

A shelter was set up at nearby Marshall High School.
The fire “laid down” overnight, and firefighters hoped to be able to extinguish it on Wednesday, Fire Chief Douglas Barry told reporters. No homes were in immediate danger from the flames.

“We will be working well into the night to make sure we get this fire controlled and get a containment line around it,” Deputy Fire Chief Mario Ruda told reporters.

An estimated 200 firefighters battled the flames, and eight helicopters were used at the height of the blaze.

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The death toll from one of the strongest tornadoes to hit the U.S. in the past eight years climbed to 10 on Tuesday when a critically injured police officer from a nearby town was removed from life support.

Robert Tim Buckman, a 46-year-old officer from Maxville, received a head injury in Friday’s storm that left nine others dead in Greensburg, officials said. Buckman was taken to a Wichita hospital, where he was declared dead shortly before 8 a.m. Tuesday, the son, Derick Buckman, told The Associated Press.
“He died being a hero,” said Derick Buckman. “He was sworn to protect people and that’s what he was doing the night he got picked up by a tornado.”

Search and rescue operations were continuing Tuesday in Greensburg, where emergency responders have struggled to find out how many of its 1,600 residents may be safely staying with friends or relatives, rather than in shelters.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

With less than a month passed since the devastating shooting on their campus, Virginia Tech officials are planning a weekend commencement that will honor the victims without forgetting the accomplishment of the graduates.

About 4,000 graduating seniors will be honored at a joint observance Friday night before they receive diplomas Saturday at services for individual colleges.

“We want to keep the ceremony as celebratory as possible,” said Ed Henneke, an engineering professor and chairman of the commencement committee.

The panel, which Henneke has overseen for 15 years, usually just adjusts aspects of the previous year’s ceremony.

But this year they will cope with the memories of gunman Seung-Hui Cho killing himself and 32 others.

The panel has had two emergency meetings to rearrange the Friday night ceremony, which is expected to attract 25,000 people.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

Washington turned out adoring schoolchildren and ladies in hats for Queen Elizabeth II’s visit. The White House, too, laid on special touches at President Bush’s first-ever white-tie state dinner to honor America’s closest ally and make the queen feel welcome.

The centuries-old vermeil flatware and candelabras came from a London silversmith. A made-of-sugar replica of the queen’s 1953 coronation rose graced the cake. English farmhouse cheeses accompanied the salad course.
And the traditional “special guest” invited only at the last minute was sure to be of interest to an avid horse enthusiast such as the queen: Calvin Borel, the jockey who rode Street Sense to victory in the Kentucky Derby this weekend with the royals in attendance.

“It’s just like winning the Kentucky Derby it might even be better,” Borel said as he arrived for the dinner.

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Six members of an alleged homegrown terror cell that intended to launch a commando-style attack on a military base in New Jersey were arrested by the FBI Monday night after a 15-month investigation.

“Their alleged intention was to conduct an armed assault on the army base and to kill as many soldiers as possible,” a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in New Jersey said.

The Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey, Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and the FBI building in Philadelphia were allegedly considered as targets and put under surveillance by a New Jersey-based terror group before members settled on Fort Dix, where one cell member allegedly had unfettered access as a pizza delivery man, ABC News has learned.

Three high-level law enforcement sources told ABC News that the investigation into the plot had been ongoing for 15 months. Four of the six suspects were born in Yugoslavia, one was born in Jordan and the other in Turkey. All were U.S. residents.

It began when a man walked into a photo shop and asked to convert a tape to a DVD, two law enforcement officials said.

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MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. — At least five people were arrested on charges they plotted to attack the Fort Dix Army base and “kill as many soldiers as possible,” federal authorities said Tuesday.

The suspects were scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Camden later Tuesday to face charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. servicemen, said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey.

Five of them lived in Cherry Hill, about 10 miles east of Philadelphia and 20 miles southwest of Fort Dix, he said.

“They were planning an attack on Fort Dix in which they would kill as many soldiers as possible,” Drewniak said.

The suspects were described as “Islamic radicals” by Greg Reinert, a spokesman for the United States Attorney’s Office. A law enforcement source told FOX News that all of the suspects are recent converts and were not born Muslims.

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The source told FOX News that there were between five and six arrests; the exact number is unclear.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Further evacuations were ordered Monday in windy, parched Florida as a wildfire crept within a quarter-mile of several homes, one of numerous blazes that occupied crews around the country.

A fast-growing fire forced evacuations in northeastern Minnesota, and the area damaged by Georgia’s largest-ever wildfire surpassed 100,000 acres — about 156 square miles — as that blaze continued to spread.

Residents in at least three areas of Florida were ordered to leave, and hundreds more were on standby. About 20 homes in Walton County in the Panhandle were evacuated as a 300-acre fire threatened the neighborhood, said Jim Harrell, a spokesman for the state Division of Forestry.

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NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. — A woman forced an 83-year-old housemate to smoke crack cocaine so she could steal personal information to get a credit card and run up more than $3,000 in charges, authorities said.

Pasco County sheriff’s investigators accused Theresa M. Stanley-Morgan, 41, of getting the older woman to smoke the drug at least twice to make it easier to exploit her financially.

Stanley-Morgan was arrested April 28. She admitted to investigators that she used Shirley Hathaway’s name, birth date and Social Security number to open the account, a sheriff’s report said.

Hathaway and a witness told investigators that Stanley-Morgan forced Hathaway to smoke a lit crack pipe, the report said.

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(CBS/AP) Six nationals of the former Yugoslavia were arrested early Tuesday on charges they plotted to attack the Fort Dix Army base and “kill as many soldiers as possible,” federal authorities said.

The six were scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Camden later Tuesday to face charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. servicemen, said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey. Five of them lived in Cherry Hill, he said.

At the time of the arrests, the plot was in the planning stages and no attack was imminent, CBS News has learned. Officials said this is more of a “homegrown” plot with no ties to al Qaeda or any other international terrorist organization, CBS News reports.

A law enforcement official said that the men had lived in the United States for some time and were arrested as part of a joint federal and local investigation.

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MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. – Six men from the former Yugoslavia were arrested on charges they plotted to attack the Fort Dix Army base and “kill as many soldiers as possible,” federal authorities said Tuesday.

The suspects were described as “Islamic radicals,” said U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Greg Reinert.

They were scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Camden later Tuesday to face charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. servicemen, said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey. Five of them lived in Cherry Hill, he said.

“They were planning an attack on Fort Dix in which they would kill as many soldiers as possible,” Drewniak said.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because documents in the case remain sealed, said the attack was stopped in the planning stages.

Authorities believe the men trained in the Poconos for the attack and also conducted surveillance at other area military institutions, including Fort Monmouth, the official said. The official said that the men had lived in the United States for some time.

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CAMARILLO, Calif. — Gasoline prices have surged to a record nationwide average of $3.07 per gallon, nearly 20 cents higher than two weeks earlier, according to oil industry analyst Trilby Lundberg.

The previous record was $3.03 per gallon on Aug. 11, 2006.

But despite inventory fears that have sent prices higher, there are signs that the rising prices at the pump may be peaking.

Just two weeks ago, the U.S. average for a gallon of regular gas was $2.87, but the Lundberg Survey of 7,000 stations nationwide on Friday showed an increase of about 19.5 cents to $3.07. That’s up 88.4 cents since Jan. 19, Lundberg said.

The nationwide average for mid-grade gasoline was $3.18 and premium was $3.28.

The nation’s lowest average pump price was $2.80 per gallon in Charleston, S.C., while the highest was $3.49 in San Francisco.

The recent increases are due mostly to refinery problems, Lundberg said, noting there have been at least a dozen additional partial shutdowns in the U.S. and internationally that cut refining capacity.

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LOS ANGELES — Police Chief William Bratton said Sunday that up to 60 members of an elite squad that swarmed into a park and fired rubber bullets during a May Day immigration rally are no longer on the street.

Bratton said he spent the weekend viewing video of the MacArthur Park incident and he said LAPD failures were widespread with officers from the top on down culpable.

“I’m not going to defend the indefensible,” Bratton told journalists groups during a meeting at a television studio in Hollywood. “Things were done that shouldn’t have been done.”

Journalists were among those roughed up as Metropolitan Division’s B Platoon moved through MacArthur and fired 148 rubber bullets to break up what had been a peaceful and lawful immigration rally.

Police said they moved in after rocks and bottles were thrown at them by 30 to 40 agitators, he said.

The Metropolitan Division is the city’s premier police squad, made up of experienced officers who have extensive training in crowd control.

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GREENSBURG, Kan. — Rescue crews have twice searched the debris-strewn yards and splintered homes that once held Greensburg’s 1,500 residents. They began a third sweep Monday to secure the area before families who lost almost everything were to be allowed back in.

Not much remained in Greenburg to go back to.

The F5 tornado, the most powerful to hit the U.S. in eight years, demolished every business on the main street. Churches lost their steeples, trees were stripped of their branches, and neighborhoods were left unrecognizable. Officials estimate as much as 95 percent of the town was destroyed. At least 10 people died in the storms.

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A mega-twister leveled Greensburg, Kan., this weekend, leaving the small farming community devastated after the powerful tornado hit.

“Everybody has damage — every single person,” said Kansas Highway Patrol Sgt. Ronald Knoefel. “Most cases, not only do they have damage, they have nothing left. Absolutely nothing left.”
The town’s junior high and elementary schools were reduced to rubble, as were churches and other public services.

“If it had been at another time with kids in attendance, it would have been so, so tragic,” Knoefel said.

But despite the heartache, there’s hope.

“What I can tell you is this community will be back — stronger, better than ever,” Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

Police Chief William Bratton said Sunday that up to 60 members of an elite squad that swarmed into a park and fired rubber bullets during a May Day immigration rally are no longer on the street.

Bratton said he spent the weekend viewing video of the MacArthur Park incident and he said LAPD failures were widespread with officers from the top on down culpable.
“I’m not going to defend the indefensible,” Bratton told journalists groups during a meeting at a television studio in Hollywood. “Things were done that shouldn’t have been done.”

Journalists were among those roughed up as Metropolitan Division’s B Platoon moved through MacArthur and fired 148 rubber bullets to break up what had been a peaceful and lawful immigration rally.

Full story

Source: abcnews.go.com

(CBS) Teri Horton is a 74-year-old retired truck driver with an eighth grade education. She likes to gamble a bit, and now she thinks she has hit the jackpot. Not in a casino, but in the high-stakes world of modern art.

Teri isn’t the kind of person who knows—or cares—much about art. But as CNN’s Anderson Cooper reports, she has caused a stir in the upper reaches of the art world because of a painting she bought years ago, a painting she now believes is the work of the famous abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.

If Teri’s painting is by Pollock, it would likely be worth tens of millions of dollars. Not bad, considering she bought it as a gift for a friend and only paid $5 for it in a thrift shop in San Bernardino, Calif.

“I picked up the canvas and took it up to the lady in the thrift store,” Teri remembers. “And I asked her what she wanted for it and she said, ‘Oh, give me eight dollars. And I said, ‘I love my friend, but I don’t love her that much.’ So she gave it to me for five. And that’s why, how I bought, why I bought it.”

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(CBS/AP) Paramedic Annette Gasten and her German shepherd, Greta, had a grim weekend searching amid the piles of wreckage left by one of the strongest tornadoes to rake across the Plains.

Every business on Greensburg’s main street was demolished and officials estimate as much as 95 percent of the town was destroyed. Tree trunks stood bare, stripped of most of their branches. All the churches were destroyed.

Walking through mounds of rubble, CBS News correspondent Hari Sreenivasan reported Monday morning that almost every commercial business was wiped out.

At least eight people in this community of 1,500 were dead, putting the state’s total death toll at 10. No one was found Sunday in the debris.

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GREENSBURG, Kansas (CNN) — A top official of a Kansas town destroyed by a deadly tornado said Monday that it was possible victims still remained trapped under debris from the disaster.

Search and rescue operations continued Monday from Friday’s storm in Greensburg, which authorities said carved a path more than a mile wide, leveled most of the community and killed nine people.

“Virtually the entire city has been destroyed, ” said Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting of the Kansas National Guard on Monday. “It’s as bad as anything I’ve seen.” The general said in some ways the damage is worse than Hurricane Katrina because the entire city lays in ruins.
“There’s no place to go to stage to rebuild,” said Bunting, a nearly 30-year veteran of the Guard. “We’ll have to create that.”

Residents were expected to be allowed to return to what’s remaining of their homes Monday at 9 a.m., according to The Associated Press.

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GREENSBURG, Kansas (AP) — Four soldiers and a reserve police officer were arrested Sunday on suspicion of looting cigarettes and alcohol from a store in this tornado-ravaged town, state officials said.

In a separate incident, two people wearing Red Cross jackets who were not members of the relief agency were arrested Sunday on suspicion of looting, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the adjutant general’s office. She did not have any additional details.

The soldiers from Fort Riley Army base and the reserve police officer had come to assist on their own and were not part of any official detachment, said Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, the state’s adjutant general.

“These were people who weren’t supposed to be there,” Bunting said.

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LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Police Chief William Bratton said Sunday that up to 60 members of an elite squad that swarmed into a park and fired rubber bullets during a May Day immigration rally are no longer on the street.

Bratton said he spent the weekend viewing video of the MacArthur Park incident and he said LAPD failures were widespread with officers from the top on down culpable.

“I’m not going to defend the indefensible,” Bratton told journalists during a meeting at a television studio in Hollywood.

“Things were done that shouldn’t have been done.”
Journalists were among those roughed up as Metropolitan Division’s B Platoon moved through MacArthur and fired 148 rubber bullets to break up what had been a peaceful and lawful immigration rally.

Police said they moved in after rocks and bottles were thrown at them by 30 to 40 agitators, he said.

Full story

Source: www.cnn.com

The evangelical movement has long been considered a powerful political entity. An estimated 65 million Americans consider themselves conservative Christians. Their anti-gay, anti-abortion views are well known as is their support for mostly Republican political candidates.
But times are changing.
Now there are evangelicals speaking out on global warming and supporting adoption. Neither would have been endorsed only a few years ago.

“There’s a great deal of foment in the evangelical community right now,” John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life told ABCNews.Com.

“I do think there is a change afoot,” said Randall Balmer, an evangelical Christian and professor of religion at Barnard College. “Finally, evangelical voices other than those on the hard right are beginning to make themselves heard.”

The implications for the Republican party are not necessarily good.

“I think the Republicans can no longer count on evangelical votes falling into their laps,” said Balmer. “There’s going to be a die-hard core that will stick with it but on the whole, there will be some shifting on the issues.”

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(CBS) When the Senate Judiciary Committee served a document subpoena upon the Justice Department on Wednesday for more of Karl Rove’s e-mails relating to the U.S. Attorney scandal, it was a strong sign that this springtime drama is likely to last well into summer and beyond.

And when news broke later in the day that former Justice Department official Monica Goodling might have broken the law by hiring federal employees based upon their political parties, you can bet that a great many legal beagles started drooling over their computer screens as they tried to comprehend the impact the news would have upon her still-far-off testimony before the committee.

But the truest and most poignant words of the day came from some of the very people at the center of the controversy. The House Judiciary Committee released the written answers from six of the eight fired federal prosecutors. They ought to be required reading for anyone interested in truly comprehending the scope of the White House’s misfeasance in this matter. For only in their reading do you really comprehend just how these sharp and ambitious these public servants were before they were canned — just how much they resemble precisely the sort of government employees we need more of, not less, in this country.

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(CBS/AP) Democratic Sen. Barack Obama was placed under Secret Service protection Thursday, prompted in part by information with a racist bent, a senior law enforcement official said.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff authorized Obama’s protection after consultations with the bipartisan congressional advisory committee, according to Chertoff spokesman Russ Knocke and the Secret Service.

According to a senior law enforcement official, the security detail was prompted by general concerns about the safety of a prominent black candidate. Although there was no direct threat to Obama, several factors raised concerns, including some racist chatter on white supremacist Web sites.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the security issue.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters Thursday night that several weeks ago he received information that made him concerned for Obama’s safety. The number of people Obama was attracting at campaign events also worried him, Durbin said.

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Valentino Achak Deng is on the move. Last week, he was in Atlanta, where he recited the Pledge of Allegiance and officially became a United States citizen. From there, he traveled to New York to headline two events promoting a book based on his life. Then it was off to San Francisco, where he spoke at a Darfur rally.

Deng is crisscrossing America, speaking to anyone who will listen to his story. And thanks to Dave Eggers’ latest book, “What Is The What,” many people are listening. The novel, a National Book Critics finalist, chronicles Deng’s life, from his harrowing trek as one of the so-called “Lost Boys” of Sudan to his eventual resettlement in America.

Twenty years ago, Deng was running for his life. Now the soft-spoken native of Marial Bai is in the midst of a 65-city book tour.

Deng and Eggers’ collaboration started in 2003 in Atlanta. After just one weekend, they had forged a bond and taped 14 hours of Deng’s most disturbing childhood memories.

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LOS ANGELES – Angry over recent raids and frustrated with Congress, thousands of people protested across the country Tuesday to demand a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

From Phoenix to Detroit to Miami, thousands of people carried American flags in the streets.

Organizers say immigrants feel a sense of urgency to keep immigration reform from getting pushed to the back burner by the 2008 presidential elections.
“If we don’t act, then both the Democratic and Republican parties can go back to their comfort zones and do nothing,” said Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “They won’t have the courage to resolve a major situation for millions of people.”

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LOS ANGELES — Thousands of illegal immigrants took their message to the nation’s streets Tuesday, carrying American flags and signs to demand a path to citizenship from Congress.

Demonstrators hope the marches will push Congress to answer their calls for action for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States before the presidential primary season.
Participants dressed in red, white and blue in cities from coast to coast began gathering with signs and American flags for events in major cities including New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago and San Antonio on the May 1 International Workers’ Day.

A few hundred people in Los Angeles County, home to an estimated 1 million illegal immigrants, showed up a few hours before a downtown Los Angeles rally was to begin.

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(CBS/AP) Angry over recent raids and frustrated with the U.S. Congress, thousands of people protested across the United States on Tuesday to demand a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

From Phoenix to Detroit to Miami, thousands of people carried American flags in the streets.

Organizers say immigrants feel a sense of urgency to keep immigration reform from getting pushed to the back burner by the 2008 presidential elections.

Tuesday’s rally in Los Angeles is expected to draw up to 100,000 people, CBS News correspondent Steve Futterman reported.

Though this year’s turnout likely will be lower, organizers say immigrants feel a sense of urgency to keep immigration reform from getting pushed to the back burner by the 2008 presidential elections.

“If we don’t act, then both the Democratic and Republican parties can go back to their comfort zones and do nothing,” said Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “They won’t have the courage to resolve a major situation for millions of people.”

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS/AP) Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, said Tuesday it received an unsolicited bid from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to buy the company for $5 billion, but the family that controls the company said it would oppose the deal.

Dow Jones said its board had received the offer from News Corp. to buy the company at $60 a share, either in cash or a combination of cash and News Corp. stock. News of the offer, which was first reported on CNBC, sent Dow Jones’ shares soaring, and also lifted those of other newspaper publishers.

However Dow Jones said later Tuesday that the Bancroft family, the company’s controlling shareholders, intended to vote shares representing just over 50 percent of the voting power of Dow Jones against the deal.

That put the ball back in Murdoch’s court, leaving open the possibility that he could raise his offer, or that other bidders for the company could possibly emerge.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) The largest cheating scandal ever at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business involved more than a take-home exam as initially suspected, a business school official said Tuesday.

After finding consistencies in exam answers, “the professor said, ‘Let me take a look at other stuff that’s been handed in,”‘ said Mike Hemmerich, an associate dean at the business school. A judicial board later investigated the final exam and other assignments, resulting in the punishment of 34 graduate students.

Nine students face expulsion from the competitive two-year program, which will cost first-year students in 2007 almost $50,000 for tuition, books and a laptop computer. Another 15 students could be suspended for one year and receive a failing grade in the course.

Nine others are set to get a failing grade, and one student could receive a failing grade on an assignment separate from the exam. Four others were found not guilty, Hemmerich said.

“Typically, students do file an appeal on an honor code violation,” Hemmerich said.

Full story

Source: www.cbsnews.com

Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, was ordered to receive out-patient care at Cook Counseling Services, an on-campus facility run by Virginia Tech, his lawyer has told ABC News. But with no agency responsible for checking up on court-ordered psychiatric care it is unclear whether Cho showed up for treatment or if he received care at another facility.
Two years before Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people in a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, he was ordered by a court to undergo out-patient psychiatric treatment at an on-campus facility, Cho’s court-appointed lawyer told ABC News.

This was in addition to the already reported order that sent Cho to a private facility off campus for evaluation.

Full story

Source: abcnews.go.com

A Virginia Tech journalism professor and several of his students have inked what appears to be the first book deal about the campus massacre. The book’s title is “April 16th: Heartbreak in Blacksburg.”

Plume Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing, is scheduled to publish the book this summer. Plume said Monday that it had signed Roland Lazenby and three of his students — who run the planetblacksburg.com Web site — to write the book.
The student-run Web site was a frequent and much-clicked-on Internet resource for journalists around the world who tried to get an inside look into the minute-by-minute chaos on campus that day.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

The woman charged in a federal indictment with running a high-class Washington, D.C. call girl service says she plans to call her prominent clients to testify at her trial.

Jeane Palfrey, dubbed the D.C. Madam, says among those she will call to testify are Randall Tobias, who resigned Friday as deputy secretary of state after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of Palfrey’s escort service.

Tobias said he “had some gals come over to the condo for a massage” but denied any sex was involved.

Also on Palfrey’s list of customers who could be potential witnesses are a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials.

“I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever,” Palfrey told ABC News correspondent Brian Ross in an interview to be broadcast Friday on “20/20.” “I’ll bring in every last one of them in if necessary,” she said.

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Source: blogs.abcnews.com

(CBS/AP) Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency following the collapse of one of the San Francisco Bay area’s most traveled sections of freeway, as workers began clearing debris from a fiery accident that destroyed an important commuter link.

An elevated section of highway that carried motorists from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to a number of key freeways was destroyed early Sunday morning after flames from an overturned gasoline truck caused part of one overpass to melt and collapse onto another.

The accident damages an essential interchange connecting the busy San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to three major freeways, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone. Locally it’s known as “the MacArthur Maze” for good reason: it’s a tangle of roadways and overpasses which 280,000 vehicles a day pass through on their way to and from the bridge.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

Tie-ups. Backups. Gridlock. The American commute has never been so painful. Is there any solution?
For Kathy Kniss, staying calm while getting to and from work is about sticking to her rules. The 29-year-old publicist must be out the door of her Long Beach, Calif., home by 7:45 a.m. at the latest. Some car-choked neighborhoods are just off limits. When leaving her office in Culver City, she must shut down her computer by 5:54 p.m., so she can be in her car by 6:00 to avoid the traffic buildup on side streets and make it to La Cienega Boulevard before 6:15.
Five years ago, Kniss says, commuting caused so much stress that she had panic attacks on the road and had to see a hypnotherapist. But moving closer to her office is out of the question. “I live on the beach, and I pay the same amount for a two-bedroom that I would be paying in the middle of Los Angeles for a complete dump,” she says.

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Source: www.usnews.com

With the Dow industrials making new records every day of late–even cracking the 13,000 barrier to fascinate all the Wall Street numerologists out there–I thought it would be a real kick to see how the stock market has performed since Congress passed the 2003 Bush tax cuts on May 23, 2003. (The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act accelerated the 2001 tax cuts and cut taxes on capital gains and dividends.) Since then, the Dow is up 52 percent, the S&P 500 60 percent, and the Nasdaq 69 percent. (Overall, the stock market has created some $6.8 trillion in new wealth since then as the size of the economy has grown by some $2.8 trillion, not adjusted for inflation.)
Now the U.S. House passed the tax cuts in 2003 by 11 votes, 211 to 200. In the Senate, Vice President Cheney had to cast the tie-breaking vote for the bill to pass, 51 to 50. Yet I wonder if those narrow votes would have been so close had Congress somehow known that the housing market was topping out. The rising stock market, along with–finally–strong income growth, has helped cushion some of the blow from that nasty and ongoing decline.

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Source: www.usnews.com

Businesses want to build better employees, but will that really mean a better education for your child?
It took less than a year for Algene Patrick to learn all she needed to know about William H. Brazier Elementary School: rock-bottom test scores, spoiled milk in the cafeteria, and teachers who logged more absences than their students. These were the lessons her granddaughter, Lawrenesha Williams, brought home from kindergarten. When Patrick, who is Lawrenesha’s custodial guardian, asked the principal about the 50 absences Lawrenesha’s teacher had logged, he just cited the teacher’s personal problems. The grandmother decided enough was enough, and she put Lawrenesha in parochial school.
For Trinity Gardens, a poor neighborhood in Mobile County, Ala., that sends children to Brazier Elementary, the neglect wasn’t a huge surprise. In 1965, a nearby Air Force base closed-taking away 10,000 jobs-and a series of paper mills shut down in the 1990s, stealing at least 3,000 more. Most of the Gardens’ residents live below the poverty line, holding two jobs to get by. Who had time to care how many fifth graders passed a state writing test? (In 2003, only 7 percent.)

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Source: www.usnews.com

Evelyn Murphy travels the country teaching women how to get paid as much as men.

The former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts said when she started working 40 years ago, women earned 59 cents on the dollar and they were told they lacked the education and experience men brought to the job.
“All that meritocracy stuff, that’s gone,” she now counsels young women. “If this were about merit, there shouldn’t be any wage gap.”

Murphy repeats this mantra again and again as president of the WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) Project, a national organization that aims to end wage discrimination against working women. The club holds meetings in roughly 200 locations around the country and the women who come to hear Murphy speak are both shocked and motivated by her message.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

(AP) A man driving a dead woman’s car shot a police officer, then opened fire in a parking lot and a mall Sunday, authorities said. By the end of the day, four people, including the gunman, were dead.

Police shot the gunman to death outside a Target store inside Ward Parkway Center in south Kansas City, police spokesman Tony Sanders said.

Target employee Cassie Bradshaw, 19, was in a break room with two other people when they heard shots. Then, her co-workers saw a man in his 50s with a rifle “shooting everywhere,” she said.

“It sounded like maybe firecrackers at first but then they got louder and louder and louder, and it sounded like someone shooting a gun,” she said.

The string of violence began early Sunday afternoon, when police went to a home to check on an elderly woman relatives hadn’t seen for days. The woman was found dead and her car missing, Sanders said.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS) As director of the CIA, George Tenet has kept America’s most important secrets. And until now, his lips were sealed.

Tenet’s CIA has been blamed for failing to stop 9/11, praised for the fall of the Taliban, and vilified for predicting that Iraq held chemical and biological weapons.

Now, three years after leaving the CIA, Tenet has written a book, aptly named, “At the Center of the Storm.” This month, correspondent Scott Pelley sat down with Tenet. 60 Minutes wanted to know how he got “weapons of mass destruction” wrong. Are we using torture in the war on terror? And who was it at the White House who finally put the knife in his back?

60 Minutes found him passionate, combative, apologetic, defiant, and fiercely loyal to the people of the CIA and their fight against terrorism.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii (AP) — The Army’s new chief of staff said he wants to accelerate by two years a plan to increase the nation’s active-duty soldiers by 65,000.

The Army has set 2012 as its target date for a force expansion to 547,000 troops, but Gen. George Casey said he told his staff to have the soldiers ready earlier.

“I said that’s too long. Go back and tell me what it would take to get it done faster,” he said in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press during a stop in Hawaii.

Casey became the Army chief of staff April 12 after serving as the top U.S. commander in Iraq for more than two years.
He visited Hawaii for a few days in a Pacific region tour to talk with soldiers and their families. He next heads to Japan, South Korea and Alaska.

Casey said his staff has submitted a proposal for the accelerated timeline but that he has yet to approve the plan. He said the Army was stretched and would remain that way until the additional troops were trained and equipped.

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Source: www.cnn.com

OAKLAND, California (AP) — A section of freeway that funnels traffic off the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and caught fire beneath it, authorities said.

The heat was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck’s driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns.

No other injuries were reported, which officials said was only possible because the accident happened so early on a Sunday morning. The truck driver took a taxi to a nearby hospital, Officer Trent Cross of the California Highway Patrol said.
Authorities said the damage could take months to repair, and that it would cause the worst disruption for Bay Area commuters since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged a section of the Bay Bridge itself.

Transportation officials said they already had added trains to the Bay Area Rapid Transit light rail system that takes commuters across San Francisco Bay, and were urging people to telecommute if possible.

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Source: www.cnn.com

WASHINGTON — Former CIA Director George Tenet may go easy on President Bush in his new book, but he is very critical of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

In the book titled “At the Center of the Storm” out Monday, Tenet writes that the Bush administration was in a rush to take down Saddam Hussein and stretch intelligence to justify the action.

Tenet also claims that he told Rice in the summer before Sept. 11, 2001, that a significant terrorist strike on the United States was in the works.
He defends his now famous line that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was a “slam dunk,” saying the remark was taken out of context “and has haunted me ever since it first appeared in Bob Woodward’s book ‘Plan of Attack.’”

“Woodward quotes the president in his book as saying that my ’slam dunk’ comment was a very important moment. I truly doubt President Bush had any better recollection of the comment than I did. Nor will I ever believe it shaped his view about either the legitimacy or the timing of waging war. … ‘Slam dunk,’ [Woodward] said, ‘was the basis of this incredibly critical decision the president and his war Cabinet were making on, do we invade Iraq?’” Tenet wrote.

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Source: www.foxnews.com

OAKLAND, Calif. — A section of freeway that funnels traffic off the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and caught fire beneath it, authorities said.

The heat was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck’s driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns.
No other injuries were reported, which officials said was only possible because the accident happened so early on a Sunday morning. The truck driver took a taxi to a nearby hospital, Officer Trent Cross of the California Highway Patrol said.

Full article

Source: www.foxnews.com

A section of freeway that funnels traffic off the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and caught fire beneath it, authorities said.

The heat was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck’s driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns.

No other injuries were reported, which officials said was only possible because the accident happened so early on a Sunday morning. The truck driver took a taxi to a nearby hospital, Officer Trent Cross of the California Highway Patrol said.
Authorities said the damage could take months to repair, and that it would cause the worst disruption for Bay Area commuters since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged a section of the Bay Bridge itself.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

For many parents, the issue is what their children might call a no-brainer: If their offspring has stalked a peer or stayed in a mental-health clinic or been watched for suicidal inclinations at college, they want to know. Immediately.

Yet parents may be among the last people to be told of any concerns. Because of strict confidentiality laws, such problems cannot be reported to parents — or roommates or others close to a young adult in trouble.
The laws, say counselors and mental-health experts, are there for good reason. Without them, few students would seek help, and a trusting relationship could be impossible.

But such legal constraints — particularly in the wake of the killing of 33 students and staff at Virginia Tech — are deeply distressing to many parents who harbor a sense of love as well as responsibility for children they may see as not yet fully adult. Add to that their role in providing financial support, and parents can find it tough to be barred from learning about a child’s mental health — or that of a child’s roommate — without the appropriate consent.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS/AP) A freeway interchange that funnels traffic off the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed onto another highway ramp early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and caught fire, authorities said.

Authorities said the accident, which closed two sections of road that carry cars through Oakland and then east and south of the city, would cause the worst disruption for Bay Area commuters since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged a section of the Bay Bridge itself.
State transportation officials said it could take months to repair the damaged interchanges, and advised motorists to take public transportation into and out of San Francisco. They said that drivers who chose to take alternate routes on Monday would face nightmarish commutes.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) A tank fire sparked by a lightning strike that engulfed two 80,000-barrel tanks at the Wynnewood Refinery continued to burn Saturday, sending flames and thick black smoke into the air, authorities said.

There were no reports of injuries and no immediate evacuations ordered in this south-central Oklahoma town, said Mike Hancock, a spokesman for Wynnewood Refinery Co.
“Tank fires are pretty pesky fires. They’re easy to keep contained, but they’re hard to fight,” Hancock said. “It’s hard to estimate how long it will be. It can take a day or so to burn the product.”

Firefighters continued to douse the area surrounding the tanks to keep the iron from overheating, Hancock said.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

CARY, Illinois (AP) — A high school senior was arrested after writing that “it would be funny” to dream about opening fire in a building and having sex with the dead victims, authorities said.

Another passage in the essay advised his teacher at Cary-Grove High School: “don’t be surprised on inspiring the first CG shooting,” according to a criminal complaint filed this week.

Allen Lee, 18, faces two disorderly conduct charges over the creative-writing assignment, which he was given on Monday in English class at the northern Illinois school.

Students were told to “write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing,” according to a copy of the assignment.

According to the complaint, Lee’s essay reads in part, “Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s…t…a…b…puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.”

Officials described the essay as disturbing and inappropriate.

Read full article.

Source: www.cnn.com

NEW YORK (CNN) — The Food and Drug Administration says it will test ingredients imported for human consumption in connection with the recall of pet food that has killed at least 16 pets and perhaps more than 100.

In addition, the FDA on Tuesday announced plans to expand testing of the animal food supply after hogs on farms in three states were quarantined after testing positive for melamine, the toxic substance at the center of the recall.

A poultry farm in Missouri is also being investigated, federal officials said.
“I want to emphasize that this is a proactive step,” said David Acheson, chief medical officer for the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

The comprehensive testing will begin at the end of the week and focus on public awareness and checking of samples, Acheson said.

Full article

Source: www.cnn.com

EAGLE PASS, Texas Apr 25, 2007 (AP)— A tornado swept thpeople were killed when severe storms spawned a tornado that struck a small community near the Mexican border Tuesday, officials said.

The six people killed were reportedly in one home, said Eagle Pass Fire Chief Roy Delacruz. The tornado took the greatest toll on the unincorporated areas of Maverick County known as Loma Linda, Chula Vista and Rosita Valley, officials said.
The tornado destroyed Rosita Valley Elementary School, more than 20 homes and the Eagle Pass municipal sewer treatment plant, Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster said. Nobody was in the school when the tornado hit, he said.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

CONCORD, N.H. Apr 24, 2007 (AP)— A couple convicted of tax evasion for concealing $1.9 million in income was sentenced to prison Tuesday, but they refused to attend the hearing and have vowed not to leave their fortress-like mansion.

Ed and Elaine Brown insist tax laws do not exist and have holed up in their hilltop home in Plainfield, which has a watchtower, concrete walls and the ability to run on wind and solar power. Ed Brown, 64, said he has stockpiled food and supplies.
“The world belongs to the creator. It doesn’t belong to man,” he said Tuesday. “It doesn’t belong to the United States government.”

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Source: abcnews.go.com

April 24, 2007 — Seung-Hui Cho hired her to dance for him in a motel room one month before the massacre at Virginia Tech’s campus, dancer Chastity Frye said in an on camera interview with at TV station in Roanoke, Va.

“He was so quiet. I really couldn’t get much from him. He was so distant. He really didn’t like to talk a lot,” Frye said in the interview. “It seemed like he wasn’t all there.”
Frye said that a “creepy” Cho, 23, called the escort service she works for and hired her to meet him for one hour at a Roanoke motel, about a 30-minute drive from Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus.

About 15 minutes into the performance for Cho, Frye said, it appeared that her client had no interest.

“I danced for a little while and I thought we were done because he got up and went to the restroom and began washing,” said Frye, a white woman with blond hair.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

(AP) Teachers in a village school in western India sprinkled cow urine on several low-caste students to purify them, a news report said Saturday.

Sharad Kaitade, a new upper-caste headmaster at a school in Surewada village in Maharashtra state, allegedly ordered a few teachers to hold a special prayer ceremony and purify the school premises and the low-caste students, The Times of India reported.

The cow is held sacred by observant Hindus and “gau mutra” or cow urine is considered a purifier.
The school has 210 students, most of them belonging to the upper castes, and until recently had a lower-caste headmistress.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

The proposal, approved 46-19, with one abstention, would take effect with the expected signing by the federal district’s leftist mayor. But abortion opponents have already vowed to appeal the law to the Supreme Court, a move likely to extend the bitter and emotional debate in this predominantly Catholic nation.
The law alarmed Mexico’s conservative ruling party and prompted the Vatican to send its top anti-abortion campaigner to the Mexican capital, where ranks of riot police separated chanting throngs of demonstrators from both sides outside the city legislature.

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(CBS/AP) Virginia’s governor said Tuesday he may be able to close the loophole that allowed Seung-Hui Cho to buy the guns he used to kill 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus.

According to the 1968 Federal Gun Control Act, no one can buy a gun who’s been “adjudicated as a mental defective or … committed to any mental institution,” reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews.
In December 2005, a Virginia justice directed Cho to undergo “court-ordered outpatient treatments,” which was not a commitment to an institution, so Cho’s name wasn’t sent to the federal data base used for gun purchase background checks.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine now wants the state to report all patients ordered into therapy, adds Andrews.

Fulal article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS/AP) Severe storms spawned a tornado that killed at least six people and destroyed a school and more than 20 homes as it churned through a small community near the Mexican border, officials said.

Emergency responders worked into the morning Wednesday to recover any remaining victims and assess damage from the tornado that hit a few miles south of Eagle Pass in an unincorporated area of Maverick County, about 150 miles south of San Antonio.
The tornado caused the only reported fatalities Tuesday in Texas as severe thunderstorms brought high winds, flooding rains and hail to parts of the state.

Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster said four of the six fatal victims were apparently in one mobile home when the tornado hit Tuesday night. A local hospital received 74 injured patients. Four patients in critical condition were transported to regional hospitals, he said.

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WAYCROSS, Ga. – Firefighters used bulldozers Monday to widen breaks that were protecting a small community from a wildfire that has blackened more than 87 square miles of forest in southeast Georgia.

The fire, started April 16 by a fallen power line that ignited tinder-dry trees near the sprawling Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, was about 45 percent contained after burning about 55,600 acres, officials said.
“It’s not directly a threat at this time” to homes and communities, said Byron Haire, a spokesman for the Georgia Forestry Commission.

It was about 10 miles southwest of Waycross and about five miles south of Manor, where firefighters were using bulldozers to broaden fire breaks from 6 feet wide to 20 feet.

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Source: news.yahoo.com

CACTUS, Texas – Fifty people left unaccounted for after a tornado destroyed homes in this Texas Panhandle town have been located and appear to be safe, an official said Monday.

Moore County Judge Rowdy Rhoades said the 50 residents likely evacuated after hearing tornado sirens go off through the poor, mostly rural community of 2,500.

Buildings were flattened, power was knocked out to thousands and debris was scattered for miles after the tornado touched down late Saturday. Fourteen people were injured, one critically.
“Everything’s gone for a lot of people,” Rhoades said.

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Source: news.yahoo.com

FORT BENTON, Mont. – Law enforcers fatally shot a 13-year-old boy after he fired a gun at them on a state highway, authorities said Monday.

The boy was declared dead early Sunday, soon after he was shot and flown to a hospital in Great Falls. A coroner identified the boy as Mark Keeley.

Chouteau County Sheriff Vern Burdick said the boy was driving a car that matched the description of one involved in a gasoline drive-off.
The boy would not pull over, and a state trooper stopped the vehicle by placing “stop sticks” on the highway, Burdick said.

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PHOENIX – A Border Patrol agent was charged Monday with first-degree murder in the shooting of an unarmed illegal immigrant at the border in January.

An investigation found that Agent Nicholas Corbett’s killing of Francisco Dominguez-Rivera, of Puebla, Mexico, was not legally justified, said Cochise County prosecutor Ed Rheinheimer.

Corbett is also charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide. A judge will determine which of the charges the evidence supports best, Rheinheimer said.
“We have concluded that the evidence shows that at the time he was shot, Mr. Dominguez-Rivera presented no threat to agent Corbett,” Rheinheimer said.

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NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – A jury convicted a nurse Monday of killing her husband, hacking up his body and stuffing the parts into three suitcases she tossed into Chesapeake Bay.

Melanie McGuire, who sobbed as she heard the verdict, was convicted of murder, desecration of a corpse, perjury and a weapons offense.
She was acquitted on two counts of hindering prosecution and falsifying evidence. Authorities charged that she wrote anonymous letters in an attempt to thwart investigators.

During the six-week trial, prosecutors said McGuire, 34, organized William McGuire’s 2004 murder using her expertise as a nurse so she could begin a new life with her lover, her boss at a fertility clinic.

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WASHINGTON – As the Army probed Pat Tillman’s death, investigators implored the
CIA and
Pentagon last year to scour their databanks for aerial video of the friendly fire incident, footage they believed might have been captured as a Predator drone flew over the scene.

The trail ran cold in October, but lawmakers plan to press the Pentagon on Tuesday with questions still hovering over the one-time National Football League star’s shooting: Was a drone flying overhead when Tillman was killed? Did it videotape the incident, and if so, where is the footage?
Some members of Congress hope to elicit the new information Tuesday when the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform holds a hearing as part of an investigation into misleading information from the U.S. military.

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BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) — When a judge deemed Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho a danger to himself due to mental illness in 2005, that ruling should have disqualified him from buying a handgun under federal law.

It didn’t.

And his slaughter of 32 people last week has raised questions about the efficacy of instant background checks for firearms purchases by the mentally ill.
His status should have been noted in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a database of people disqualified from gun purchases.

But, in Cho’s case, his mental status never went in the system.
A deadly information gap

That’s because the federal government relied on Virginia to provide the information, and Virginia law disqualifies a person from buying firearms only if they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

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Source: www.cnn.com

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) — When student gunman Seung-Hui Cho went on a rampage at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people before turning a gun on himself, students and teachers had to make split-second decisions.

Senior Zach Petkewicz and others in his class in Norris Hall on April 16 threw up a table against a door to form a barricade to keep out the gunman.

“He came to our door, tried the handle and couldn’t get in because we were pushing up against it,” said Petkewicz.
“[He] tried to force his way in and got the door to open up six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. … That’s when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door thinking we were up against it trying to get him out.”

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Source: www.cnn.com

SAN FRANCISCO Apr 24, 2007 (AP)— David Halberstam, a journalist who produced a steady stream of well-regarded books on topics as diverse as the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement and sports, died as he lived: On his way to an interview.

The 73-year-old author was killed in a car crash Monday while working on a book about the legendary 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.
Halberstam was riding in a car that was broadsided by another vehicle in Menlo Park, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and the cause appeared to be internal injuries, according to San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

April 23, 2007— New court documents filed Monday in the investigation into last week’s deadly shootings at Virginia Tech revealed that the Virginia state police are examining a wealth of information of university e-mail records from both alleged shooter Seung-Hui Cho and his first victim, freshman Emily Hilscher.

Officials said Cho shot Emily Hilscher in her residence hall early on the morning of April 16. Investigators are now trying to determine whether Cho contacted Hilscher before the shooting and whether that contact might explain why he targeted Hilscher in the first place. The evidence might also point to a relationship, if any, between Cho and the other victims of last week’s attack.
One of the documents submitted by investigators notes that “in 80 to 85 percent of homicide cases, the victim is known by the offender.”

Previously released records indicate that Cho had contacted other female students in the fall of 2005, resulting in at least two of those women calling the police to complain about Cho.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

On the April 19 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show , the famous conservative talk radio host opined about the political views of Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia tech massacre madman.

“If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? ” Limbaugh asked. “This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other — this guy’s a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it’s a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I’m attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That’s exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I’m just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I’m just pointing it out. “
imbaugh went on to say that “back in the early ’90s, when there was any kind of an incident, crime or what-have-you that attracted national attention, in the early days of this program, the drive-by media went out and they tried to connect the perpetrator to this program.

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Source: abcnews.com

SAN FRANCISCO Apr 11, 2007 (AP)— A U.S. House committee announced Tuesday it would hold hearings on misleading military statements that followed the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan and the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch in Iraq.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said an April 24 hearing would be part of its investigation into whether there was a strategy to mislead the public.
“The truth, the truth, this is only a search for the truth,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a news conference in San Francisco. “It’s about holding this administration accountable for the message that it sends out. … It’s about reality.”

Word of the hearings comes two weeks after the Pentagon released the findings of its own investigations into Tillman’s death, and three years after he was killed.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

(WebMD) An experimental drug called PTC124 may override a gene glitch seen in Duchenne muscular dystrophy and various other genetic disorders.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is one of nine major forms of muscular dystrophy. It’s the most common type of muscular dystrophy in children and affects males. In Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the muscles decrease in size and grow weaker over time yet may appear larger. Disease progression varies, but many patients need a wheelchair by the time they’re 12 years old.
The new drug, called PTC124, isn’t available yet, but clinical trials are currently under way.

Today, researchers posted the results from lab tests in mice with a genetic glitch like one seen in a large group of genetic disorders, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who chronicled the Washington press corps, the Vietnam War generation and baseball, was killed in a car crash early Monday, a coroner said. He was 73.

Halberstam, of New York, was a passenger in a car that was broadsided by another vehicle in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said.
The accident occurred around 10:30 a.m., and the driver of the car carrying Halberstam identified him as the victim, Foucrault said. The driver, a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, was taken to Stanford Medical Center. Two others were injured.

A call to Menlo Park police wasn’t immediately returned.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS/AP) A man who spent 25 years in prison for rape was exonerated Monday as a judge threw out his convictions because DNA evidence showed he couldn’t have committed the attack. An advocacy group said it was the 200th such case.

Jerry Miller smiled and the courtroom erupted into cheers after Cook County Circuit Court Judge Diane G. Cannon read the ruling that cleared him of all charges.
Miller, 48, had been found guilty of rape, robbery, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated battery even though he testified he was at home watching television at the time of the 1981 attack. He was paroled in March 2006 and now works two jobs and lives with a family member in a Chicago suburb.

“I will get on with my life, start a life, have a life,” Miller said at a news conference after the hearing. “I’m just thankful for this day.”

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS) In late 2005, a year before a deadly outbreak of E. coli in spinach, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to California growers expressing its “serious concern” over ongoing outbreaks of foodborne illness from that state’s lettuce and spinach crops, CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes reports.

There had been 19 outbreaks since 1995.
The letter did not indicate plans to step up inspections. Instead, it called on the industry to take “the appropriate measures to provide a safe product.”

One year later, outbreak No. 20 — the spinach — killed three and sickened more than 200.

A former FDA deputy commissioner says the agency is so understaffed it has little capacity to prevent outbreaks, even predictable ones.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

The days of teenagers fuelling their smoking habits by buying cigarettes in cheaper packs of 10 could be numbered, under radical proposals being considered by the Department of Health.

Leading doctors have drawn up recommendations to reduce the number of young people smoking, including banning the smaller packs of cigarettes and keeping tobacco out of sight in shops.

The proposals, contained in a report from the British Medical Association (BMA), also include plans to ban tobacco-vending machines and impose regular price increases to try to cut demand.

Read full article.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

DARLINGTON, S.C. Apr 23, 2007 (AP)— A jury has found a convicted sex offender accused of raping two teen girls in an underground bunker not guilty of kidnapping, sex crimes and assault with intent to kill.

Kenneth Glenn Hinson, 48, wiped his eyes and mouth and appeared to cry after the jury read its verdict, which followed about four hours of deliberations over two days.

“I think the verdict says it all,” he said as he was escorted from the courtroom.
Authorities had charged that Hinson snatched the 17-year-old girls from their bedroom last year and dragged them one at a time to the underground room hidden beneath a tool shed, where he raped and bound them with duct tape. Prosecutors said Hinson expected the girls to die because the room had no air supply.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

BLACKSBURG, Va. Apr 23, 2007 (AP)— Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho was as mysterious in death as he was in life, leaving behind few clues for medical examiners. Dr. William Massello, the assistant state medical examiner based in Roanoke, said Sunday that Cho died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his temple after firing enough shots to wound his 32 victims more than 100 times.

But there was nothing unusual about Cho’s autopsy, he said, and nothing that would have hinted at any psychological problems that might have led him to commit the worst shooting massacre in modern U.S. history.
Pathologists sent blood samples for toxicology testing to determine if Cho was on drugs at the time of his rampage, but Massello said it could take as long as two weeks to get results.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

April 23, 2007 — On Sunday former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blamed 40 years of liberalism for an increasingly violent and vicious society.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Gingrich said young people are being dehumanized by violence in video games, and liberalism has created a “zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things.”

“We don’t have any discussion about what’s happened to our culture because while we’re restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech,” Gingrich said.
The potential GOP presidential contender commended President Bush’s handling of Virginia Tech and touted “legitimate concealed carry” as his solution to last Monday’s massacre.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

(AP) Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, a seven-term congresswoman from southern California, has died of cancer.

The 68-year-old California Democrat died late Saturday at her home in Carson, according to her chief of staff, Bandele McQueen.

The congresswoman had asked for a four- to six-week leave of absence from the House last week to deal with her illness. McQueen couldn’t immediately provide details on what form of cancer Millender-McDonald had, but said she had been receiving hospice care.
“Juanita Millender-McDonald was a trailblazer, always advocating for the full participation of all Americans in the success and prosperity of our country,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. “The dignity with which she faced her illness was an indication of the determination with which she always served the people of her district.”

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) A man and a woman were killed at a luxury oceanfront resort when police fired into their bungalow after they refused to drop a handgun, authorities said.

Police were called Sunday to the Montage Resort and Spa by a security guard who said a man and a woman were engaged in a domestic dispute, said police Sgt. Jason Kravetz.

Several subsequent 911 callers said a naked woman was running around the hotel waving a gun, authorities said.
Police arrived at the pair’s room minutes later, and a gun was passed between the man and the woman, who both pointed it at police, authorities said.

Two officers fired into the room after the couple refused to drop the gun.

Police searched the room after the shooting and found a loaded semiautomatic handgun and extra ammunition.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) FEMA exposed taxpayers to significant waste — and possibly violated federal law — by awarding $3.6 billion worth of Hurricane Katrina contracts to companies with poor credit histories and bad paperwork, investigators say.

The new report by the Homeland Security Department’s office of inspector general, set to be released later this week, examines the propriety of 36 trailer contracts designated for small and local businesses in the stricken Gulf Coast region following the 2005 storm.
t found a haphazard competitive bidding process in which the winning contract prices were both unreasonably low and high. Moreover, FEMA did not take adequate legal steps to ensure that companies were small and locally operated, resulting in a questionable contract award to a large firm with ties to the Republican Party.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) Massachusetts plans to review its prison operations to make sure errors that led to the wrongful confinement of at least 14 inmates — including one who was released four years after his sentence was completed — are not repeated.

Public Safety Commissioner Kevin Burke said the state Department of Correction violated its moral and ethical obligations.

“None of this is acceptable,” Burke said. “There is no reason for any kind of error given the system and the numbers of lawyers who examine these cases.”
According to a report in the Boston Sunday Globe, the prisons department in some cases failed to modify some sentences for time spent on parole. The department in some cases relied on an inadequate computer system that tracks time served and good behavior credits, or simply botched the math.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS/AP) Classes at Virginia Tech resumed Monday, one week after gunman Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people before turning a gun on himself.

At 9:45 — the time of the second shooting — the university held a moment of silence, with a single bell tolling from the tower of the main administration building. A minute later, the bell tolled 32 times — once for each victim — as 32 white balloons were released, one at a time, from the field below.

Then 1,000 maroon-and-orange balloons were released.

“As the balloons drifted skyward, people stood for several minutes, in silence, watching the balloons float off into the distance,” reports CBS News correspondent Jim Krasula.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

Withdrawn, silent, never making eye contact… throughout his relatively short life, Cho Seung-Hui disturbed and troubled nearly everyone he came into contact with. No one was surprised when he was named as the “shooter” who had slaughtered 32 staff and students at Virginia Tech and then shot himself: the alarm bells had been ringing for a worryingly long time.

At his university in the Blue Ridge Mountains, professors were alarmed by the warped writings and intimidating demeanour of Cho. Female students complained that he was stalking them and a judge sent him for mental treatment.

A few years earlier, in the comfortable suburbs outside Washington DC where he lived with his family, classmates in high school had, only half-jokingly, suspected that the taciturn and often teased teenager had drawn up a “hit list” of other pupils. So alienated did he seem from them and the world that some recall the Asian boy being derisively offered dollar bills if he would just utter a single word.

During those school days, his mother turned to her pastor and doctors for help with her troubled silent son, to no avail, according to relatives in South Korea. His sister later asked his college acquaintances to help him, with similar lack of success.

Read full article.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

(CBS/AP) A Navy Blue Angel jet crashed during an air show Saturday, plunging into a neighborhood of small homes and trailers and killing the pilot.

Witnesses said the planes were flying in formation during the show at the Marine Corps Air Station at about 4 p.m. and one dropped below the trees and crashed, sending up clouds of smoke.
Buzz Henry, who was in the front yard raking when the jets passed overhead, told CBS News he saw one of the planes burst into flames while still in the sky, spitting a strip of fire across the sky as it headed down into the trees. Henry says he found the pilot’s body. He added that the parachute had not been released and that it appeared that the pilot did not attempt to eject himself from the plane.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) — I am a Hokie. Virginia Tech is my school, my home and my life. The morning of the tragic events this week, I was woken up by a phone call telling me there was a shooting in a dorm.

Shortly after that, another call from a friend said there was a gunman loose and not to go to campus. This sounds like a typical account of events, but there’s one large difference.

I have been working with CNN since I heard about the first shooting. Once reporters arrived in Blacksburg, we began finding people who wanted to talk. While walking toward the scene of the events, we came across a girl who was in Norris Hall and saw her friends’ lives taken.
This was the first time I felt the tears in my eyes, but certainly not the last.

I have helped the large group of “visitors” find their way around our town in much the way you would for a freshman arriving in August. The days following have felt like weeks. Emotions have dramatically changed on this campus.

Many were fearful when their friends were missing, angry when the answers to questions didn’t come and destroyed when their friends were listed among those killed or wounded.

Full article

Source: www.cnn.com

HOUSTON (AP) — A NASA contract worker took a handgun inside an office building Friday at the Johnson Space Center and fatally shot a hostage before killing himself, police said. A second hostage escaped with minor injuries. The gunman shot himself once in the head more than three hours after barricading himself on the second floor of Building 44, which houses a laboratory.

The slain hostage was probably killed “in the early minutes of the whole ordeal,” Houston Police Capt. Dwayne Ready said.

None of those involved were immediately identified.

The man was believed to be an employee of Jacobs Engineering, which has a technical support contract with NASA.
“We understand it is one of our employees,” said John Prosser, the company’s executive vice president.

Roads within the 1,600-acre campus were blocked off during the confrontation. A nearby middle school also kept its teachers and students inside as classes ended.

Full article

Source: hosted.ap.org

HOUSTON (Reuters) – An armed man killed a hostage, then himself, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Friday, the latest incident to rattle the United States after the shooting massacre this week at Virginia Tech university.

Another hostage, a woman who was gagged and bound, was not harmed, police said.

No motive was known for the incident, which began about 1:40 p.m. CDT (1840 GMT) when the gunman went into a building brandishing a gun and was heard to fire at least two shots. The man, who had not yet been identified, barricaded himself into a room.
Workers quickly evacuated and heavily armed police moved in.

As they drew closer, they heard a shot and went in to find the gunman and his male hostage dead, said Houston Police Department spokesman Dwayne Ready.

“As our SWAT members made entry, they did indeed determine that the suspect shot himself one time to the head,” Ready said.

Full article

Source: www.reuters.com

April, 20— Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai, one of Bollywood’s best-known screen couples, married on Friday in a traditional Hindu wedding in which the groom rode a white horse before the pair took their vows around a sacred fire.

The ceremonies concluded three days of celebrations at the actors’ homes in India’s entertainment capital of Mumbai, creating, what industry pundits said is, Bollywood’s ultimate power couple.
Rai, 33, is a former Miss World and Bachchan, 31, belongs to Indian film royalty, being the son of Amitabh Bachchan, the country’s best-known actor who has a huge fan following around the world.

Bachchan, wearing a white “bandhgala” or a long Indian tunic, a silver-coloured turban and a veil of flowers on his face, rode a white horse as part of a custom and waved to hundreds of fans gathered outside his house.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

BLACKSBURG, Va. Apr 20, 2007 (AP)— Silence fell across the Virginia Tech campus at noon Friday and bells tolled in churches nationwide in memory of the 32 victims of the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

At Virginia Tech, hundreds of somber students and area residents, most wearing the school’s maroon and orange, stood with heads bowed at a memorial on the Drillfield in front of Norris Hall, where most of the victims in Monday’s massacre died. Along with the bouquets and candles was a yellow sign covered in maroon and orange handprints, bearing the words “Never forgotten.”
“It’s good to feel the love of people around you,” said Alice Lo, an alumna and friend of Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French instructor killed in the rampage. “With this evil, there is still goodness.”

The mourners gathered in front of simple stone memorials, each adorned with a basket of tulips and an American flag. There were 33 stones one for each victim and Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old gunman who took their lives.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

April 20, 2007 — ABCNews has obtained new court documents that show police are probing the possibility that Seung-Hui Cho may have told someone about his plans to unleash a bloody campus massacre that left 32 victims dead earlier this week.

An affidavit filed by Virginia State Police Friday states the shooter “may have communicated with others concerning his plans to carry out attacks on students and faculty” at the Virginia Tech.”

Police are asking the courts for the right to search all of Cho’s cell phone records, in hopes that the data on his phone will show who he was communicating with and whether Cho told someone of his plan.
That affidavit also provides an insight into Cho’s relationship with his parents,. “He normally spoke to his parents on Sunday evenings,” it reads.

In another affidavit filed Friday, police seek a warrant to mine Virginia Tech’s computer servers, to see if Cho may have communicated with Emily Hilscher, one of two victims in the dormitory shooting inside Ambler Johnston Hall, by e-mail.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

BLACKSBURG, Va. Apr 20, 2007 (AP)— The family of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho told The Associated Press on Friday that they feel “hopeless, helpless and lost,” and “never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.”

“He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare,” said a statement issued by Cho’s sister, Sun-Kyung Cho, on the family’s behalf.
It was the Chos’ first public comment since the 23-year-old student killed 32 people and committed suicide Monday in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

Raleigh, N.C., lawyer Wade Smith provided the statement to the AP after the Cho family reached out to him. Smith said the family would not answer any questions, and neither would he.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

April 20, 2007— Houston police say that in an ordeal that lasted almost four hours, a white male who had barricaded himself with a weapon inside Building 44 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, killed himself and one male hostage. The male hostage was shot in chest.

A female hostage was also discovered duct taped at the scene, she is receiving medical attention, but is believed to be alright.

ABC News local affiliate KTRK reports that the suspect was 60-year old William Phillips Jr.
In a press conference, Houston Police Capt. Dwayne Ready said that police heard a gunshot and decided to break through the barricade. They discovered that the suspect had shot himself in the head. Capt. Ready also said the suspect was carrying a sort of revolver or handgun with a 2 inch barrel.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

President says murders drop by half as military continues buildup.
EAST GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – President Bush said Friday that sectarian murders have dropped by half in Baghdad since the U.S.-Iraqi military buildup began in February, rejecting a Democratic leader’s claim that the war is lost.

“These operations are having an important effect on this young democracy,” Bush said in a speech on terrorism, his second in two days. “They’re showing Iraqi citizens across the country that there will be no sanctuary for killers anywhere in a free Iraq.”
Bush said he continues to believe that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is committed to peace and reconciliation. At the same time, he said the U.S. military commitment in Iraq is not-open ended.

Full article

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

A federal background check cleared Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui to buy weapons. It should have stopped him cold.
April 19, 2007 – The disclosure that Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui was once involuntary detained for mental illness may change the typical debate over gun control that inevitably follows gun-related tragedies.
At the time Cho legally purchased the weapons used in the shootings, he had no criminal history and was a permanent legal resident with a green card. He followed the law and underwent the required background checks. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, law-enforcement officials said there was nothing that would have prevented him from buying the guns—short of major changes to the gun laws that most members of Congress were clearly not ready to support.

Full article

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

One other hostage found alive at Johnson Space Center building
HOUSTON – A NASA contract worker armed with a handgun killed a hostage and then himself after a nearly four-hour standoff Friday in an office building at Johnson Space Center, Houston police said.

The slain hostage, a man, was shot in the chest and was likely to have been shot “in the early minutes of the whole ordeal,” Police Capt. Dwayne Ready said. Initial reports indicated two shots were fired at about 1:40 p.m. CDT and another shot was heard about 5 p.m.
A second hostage, a woman, escaped after being bound to a chair with duct tape, Ready said.

Full article

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

HOUSTON, Texas — A NASA contract worker armed with a handgun Friday killed a hostage and then himself after a nearly four-hour standoff in an office building at Johnson Space Center, Houston police said.

A second hostage, a woman, escaped with minor injuries, said Houston Police Capt. Dwayne Ready.

The gunman, an employee of Jacobs Engineering of Pasadena, Calif., shot himself once in the head more than three hours after barricading himself on the second floor of Building 44, which houses communications and tracking development lab, Ready said.
The slain hostage, a man, was likely to have been shot “in the early minutes of the whole ordeal,” Ready said.

None of those involved were immediately identified.

Police Capt. Dwayne Ready said he had no idea what the man’s motive was, but described him as a white man, between 50 and 60 years old, armed with one handgun.

Full article

Source: www.foxnews.com

(CBS/AP) The family of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho told The Associated Press on Friday that they feel “hopeless, helpless and lost,” and “never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.”

“He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare,” said a statement issued by Cho’s sister, Sun-Kyung Cho, on the family’s behalf. It was the Chos’ first public comment since the 23-year-old student killed 32 people and committed suicide Monday.
The family reached out to Raleigh, N.C., lawyer Wade Smith, who provided the statement to the AP. Smith said the family would not answer any questions.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS/AP) A NASA contract worker armed with a handgun killed a hostage and then himself after today a nearly four-hour standoff in an office building at Johnson Space Center.

Houston police say a second hostage, a woman, escaped with minor injuries.

The gunman was identified as an employee of Jacobs Engineering of Pasadena, California.

Police say he shot himself once in the head more than three hours after barricading himself on the second floor of Building 44, which houses communications and tracking development lab.
Authorities said the slain hostage, a man, was likely to have been shot “in the early minutes of the whole ordeal.”

None of those involved were immediately identified.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) It was inevitable that the online video world would offer its take on a crime glimpsed as it unfolded most dramatically via a cell phone camera, carried out by a student who put together a CD-ROM of his manifesto and mailed it to a TV news network.

A quick search of YouTube brings up dozens of videos posted in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, many of them simply news footage lifted from the various networks.
But one of the most-watched videos — viewed by some 150,000 people — is a song dedicated to the families of the 32 victims. Playing keyboard, Kojo Best sings: “God bless your family, and your community, through this insanity.”

Many of those who posted material simply talked into their Webcams to vent their feelings about the tragedy; others assembled photos in tribute to the victims.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

Inconsistencies between state and federal laws allowed Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui to purchase guns legally despite his record of exhibiting signs of a dangerous mental illness. But even if it had been illegal for Cho to buy the handguns, Virginia law would have been powerless to prosecute the dealer who sold them–both issues of the state law that at least one leader in the state legislature says will be “of significant debate” in the next legislative session.

At issue in Cho’s case is the difference between being deemed by a judge as a “danger to himself or to others”–the standard for prohibition according to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives–and actually being committed against one’s will to a mental health facility, the threshold for prohibition in Virginia. (See the federal and state statutes).
Furthermore, the Virginia Code only outlines punishments for the illegal sale of firearms to convicted felons or those acquitted of a crime for reasons of insanity, neither of which applied to Cho.

Full article

Source: www.usnews.com

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (AP) — The family of Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui told The Associated Press on Friday that they feel “hopeless, helpless and lost,” and “never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.”

“He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare,” said a statement issued by Cho’s sister, Cho Sun-Kyung, on the family’s behalf.

It was the Chos’ first public comment since the 23-year-old student killed 32 people and committed suicide Monday in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
Wade Smith, a lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina, provided the statement to the AP after the Cho family reached out to him. Smith said the family would not answer any questions, and neither would he.

“Our family is so very sorry for my brother’s unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us,” said Cho Sun-Kyung, a 2004 Princeton University graduate who works as a contractor for a U.S. State Department office that oversees American aid for Iraq.

Full article

Source: www.cnn.com

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) — A gunman who took two hostages Friday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has apparently killed himself and one hostage, police said.

Another hostage has been taken to the hospital, said Houston Police Capt. Dwayne Ready.

The gunman forced the evacuation of the building and put the entire center on alert around 1:40 p.m. ET.

Earlier a witness in Building 44 on the campus reported two shots fired, said Ready, who described the suspect as a white man with blond hair, about 5 feet 9 inches and 50 to 60 years old. He had a handgun, said Ready.
Ready said he had barricaded himself in a room. The apparent suicide happened on the second floor of Building 44, he added.

Full article

Source: www.cnn.com

The 22-caliber Walther semi-automatic pistol used by Cho Seung-Hui in the Virginia Tech massacre was purchased on the Internet from a Green Bay, Wisconsin-based Web site, The Gun Source.

Cho bought the pistol with a credit card for $267 on Feb. 2 and picked it up one week later, as CBS News previously reported, at JND Pawnbrokers, near the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va.
In an e-mail exchange with the online vendor, Cho gave his parents’ address as his home and wanted an assurance that he was getting the latest model gun. “Is Walther P22 product 10632 second generation? What year was the assembly date?” he asked.

“All our firearms are the latest generation,” the store replied. (See the complete email exchange on the CBS News Primary Source Blog.)

Eric Thompson, president of TGSCOM, which owns 50 websites that sell guns, confirmed that thegunsource.com sold Cho the Walther P22.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS) Family and friends of a Virginia Tech professor gathered at a cemetery in Ra’nana, Israel on Friday to remember Liviu Librescu as a survivor, and bury him as a hero.

At 76-years-old, the engineering professor blocked the door to his classroom on Monday morning to allow students to escape out the window. Some of the last ones to make the jump looked back to see Librescu killed by bullets from the gun of Cho Seung-Hui.
Librescu, who lived in Israel for a while but was of Romanian descent, was a holocaust survivor.

At the funeral service Friday, his body lay wrapped in a traditional white Jewish funeral shroud, surrounded on one side by family, and on the other by media photographers.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

It should surprise no one that news of this week’s Virginia Tech massacre has rubbed old wounds like Brian Rohrbough’s raw.

It’s not that the killings rekindled grief over his only son, Daniel, who was shot dead eight years ago this Friday during a bloody rampage by fellow Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
“Those feelings [of grief] never really go away,” Rohrbough says. “They’re something you just learn to live with.”

Rather, Monday’s hauntingly similar killings by Cho Seung.Hui–a deeply troubled student whose hostile behavior was well known to fellow students, school officials, and police–sent Rohrbough into a seething funk because he has spent much of his life since his son’s murder fighting to prevent another campus slaughter.

“What we’re seeing in Virginia so far is the same exact pattern,” Rohrbough says in frustration. “And the likelihood is that it probably could have been avoided.”

Full article

Source: www.usnews.com

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) — Students remaining on Virginia Tech’s campus will look to events planned for Friday to help ease their grief after this week’s massacre, while some expressed anger at the media for broadcasting the killer’s rantings.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has declared Friday a day of mourning, and the university’s alumni have also organized a “Hokie Hope” day.

In the early-morning darkness on Friday, mourners gathered at the site of a makeshift memorial on the school’s Drill Field honoring the 32 victims of Monday’s shootings. (Honoring the victims)
Some wrote messages of hope, love and support on large boards moved beneath tents due to the rain on Thursday. Nearby, a handful of students was relighting candles.

Reading the messages on the boards moved many visitors to tears.

“I’m glad I hugged you at our last practice,” read one message to slain student Reema Samaha, a dancer.

Full article

Source: www.cnn.com

April 19, 2007 — The media frenzy at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., has spurred resentment among family and friends who continue to mourn for the victims of Monday’s shooting.

Anti-media signs have been spotted around the campus as the relationship between the community and the media becomes increasingly strained.
Students have also been handing out a flier that reads: “We are Hokie Nation and we need to mourn and heal. We need each other. The media has taken advantage of our situation and are exploiting us for their own sensationalism. We will not tolerate the abuse; we love our community far too much to stand for this any more.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Long before he boiled over, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in suburban Washington, former classmates say.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.
Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,”‘ Davids said.

Full article

Source: www.foxnews.com

It was designed to be an act of remembrance. But for one of Virginia’s largest school districts, “Hokie Hope” has turned into a public-relations nightmare after a leaked memo said schools would not require student participation.

Parents were voicing anger Thursday after learning the 58,000-student Chesterfield County school district would discourage participation in “Hokie Hope” day on Friday, according to local media reports. Virginia Tech alumni organized the event, which calls for those across the country to wear orange and maroon in honor of the 32 students and faculty slain by Cho Seung-Hui on the school’s campus on Monday.
But the school district says the anger stems from a big misunderstanding.

“It’s been misinterpreted,” Debra Marlow, the Chesterfield County Public Schools director of community relations, told FOXNews.com. “So today in the best way that we can, we’ve rescinded any thoughts that we’re not supportive of the governor.”

The trouble began Wednesday afternoon, when Marlow sent an e-mail to the principals of the district’s 60 schools clarifying the district’s plan for “Hokie Hope.”

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Source: www.foxnews.com

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday said the war in Iraq is lost militarily and “can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically” after more than four years of fighting.

“Now I believe, myself, that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows: that this war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything,” Reid, D-Nev., told reporters.

Repeating remarks he made to President Bush during a meeting of congressional leaders at the White House, Reid said the president is hearing only from people who are backing up his view of the war.
“I know I was the odd guy out yesterday at the White House, but I at least told him what he needs to hear. … I told George Bush what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear, I did that and my conscience is great,” said Reid, who was one of several lawmakers who met with the president on Wednesday at the White House. Reid added that more people need to tell Bush the same.

Reid’s prognosis came after Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a surprise visit to Iraq and repeated remarks of a day earlier in which he said that Iraqi officials have to move faster in taking control of their country, including through political means. He added that America’s military commitment is not open-ended.

Full article

Source: www.foxnews.com

Report Warns That Conflicts Over Water And Food Could Intensify As Climate Changes.
For years, the debate over global warming has focused on the three big “E’s”: environment, energy, and economic impact. This week it officially entered the realm of national security threats and avoiding wars as well.

A platoon of retired U.S. generals and admirals warned that global warming “presents significant national security challenges to the United States.” The United Nations Security Council held its first-ever debate on the impact of climate change on conflicts. And in Congress, a bipartisan bill would require a National Intelligence Estimate by all federal intelligence agencies to assess the security threats posed by global climate change.
Many experts view climate change as a “threat multiplier” that intensifies instability around the world by worsening water shortages, food insecurity, disease, and flooding that lead to forced migration. That’s the thrust of a 35-page report by 11 admirals and generals this week issued by the Alexandria, Va.-based national security think tank The CNA Corporation. The study, titled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” predicts:

# “Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states. … The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide, and the growth of terrorism.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

Cho Seung-Hui Was Mocked For His Poor English And Aloof Behavior In High Schoo.
(CBS/AP) Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, with Cho in 2003, recalled that Cho almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.
Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,’” Davids said.

Cho was born in South Korea.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

Gun Control Group Says Cho Seung-Hui’s Purchases Should Have Been Blocked.
The 22-caliber Walther semi-automatic pistol used by Cho Seung-Hui in the Virginia Tech massacre was purchased on the Internet from a Green Bay, Wisconsin-based Web site, The Gun Source.

Cho bought the pistol with a credit card for $267 on Feb. 2 and picked it up one week later, as CBS News previously reported, at JND Pawnbrokers, near the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA.
n an e-mail exchange with the online vendor, Cho gave his parents’ address as his home and wanted assurance he was getting the latest model gun.

“Is Walther P22 product 10632 second generation? What year was the assembly date?” he asked.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

School Had Been Recognized For Its Burgeoning International Student Community.
The student shooter was from South Korea. The professor who died while trying to stop him was a Romanian-born Jew. The man who captured some of the deadly pistol shots on his cell phone was a Palestinian.

One reason Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech university has become such an international incident is that the university itself has been transformed from a small college populated by what founding president Charles Minor called “plain lads” into a diverse and increasingly international institution.
Last year, some 565,000 foreign students attended U.S. colleges and universities. Even here at Virginia Tech, nestled in the deep folds of the Appalachian lowlands, 7 percent of the nearly 28,500 students come from abroad. In some departments, 60 percent of the graduate students are foreign-born.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

(AP) Oklahoma City is marking the 12th anniversary of the bombing that killed 168 people here by reaching out to victims of the Virginia Tech shootings and victims of violence everywhere.

Mourners gather each April 19 at the former site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to observe the anniversary of the bombing, which injured hundreds.
Participants will observe 168 seconds of silence, followed by family members reading the names of their lost loved ones.

Organizers said attention also will focus on the killings of 32 people at Virginia Tech by a student who then killed himself.

“Violence obviously is happening,” said Nancy Coggins, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. “We hope there are ways we can reach out to them and offer support. They will be in our minds and in our hearts.”

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

Va. Tech Shooter Was Laughed At
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.
Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

Full article

Source: hosted.ap.org

(AP) An industrial chemical that led to the nationwide recall of more than 100 brands of cat and dog food has turned up in a second pet food ingredient imported from China.

The discovery expands the month-long cascade of recalls to include more brands and varieties of pet foods and treats tainted by the chemical.
“This has exposed that the safety standards for pet foods are not in place in any significant way and the kind of drumbeat, day after day, of recalls has shaken consumers’ confidence in the pet food industry’s adherence to food safety standards,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive officer of the Humane Society of the United States.

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

Va. Tech Senior Was Saved By Heroic Classmates From Possible Death.CBS) Garrett Evans was in German class when the Virginia Tech senior heard what he thought was construction noise. Then, a scream.

That, reports The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, is when Evans knew what he was hearing was gunfire.

By then, Cho Seung-Hui was at the classroom door.

“The gun was already drawn and pointed,” the economics major from Plainfield, Ill., told Smith from his bed in Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg, Va. “Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. This girl gets shot, this girl gets shot. The teacher went down, too.
“He wasn’t erratic or anything with his shots. He was totally deliberate.

“He had this face. It was total concentration on what he was doing. He had a purpose in mind and the purpose was taking lives. And he just kept shooting, and he loaded a clip, and reloaded in that room.”

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS) We don’t know exactly who Cho Seung-Hui was talking to in his last statements on video. It could have been people who had hurt him or ignored him, or maybe they were figments of his imagination. He is particularly vicious toward people who have money.

Most people who knew him agree that Cho was strange. But Karan Grewal, who lived in the same dormitory suite with him, said he never saw the side of them that was on display in the multi-media package he sent to NBC News in the hours between his first two murders and his rampage that left 31 other people dead, including himself.
“I just feel like it was a totally different person on these videotapes than who I lived with for the past nine months,” he told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. “It was a totally different attitude. He was much more confident and real, I would say. It just seemed like he had been putting on an act when he lived with us, just trying to keep low.”

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

(CBS/AP) The following is a confirmed list of victims in Monday’s shooting spree on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., during which 32 people were killed before the shooter took his own life. Names were confirmed by CBS. Police identified the shooter as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior and English major at the school.

Ross Abdallah Alameddine, 20, of Saugus, Mass., according to his mother, Lynnette Alameddine. Friends described the sophomore majoring in English, business information technology and French as “an intelligent, funny, easy-going guy.”
Christopher James “Jamie” Bishop, 35, taught German at Virginia Tech and helped oversee an exchange program with a German university. According to his Web site, Bishop, a Fulbright scholar at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, spent four years living in Germany, where he “spent most of his time learning the language, teaching English, drinking large quantities of wheat beer, and wooing a certain fraulein” — the “fraulein” being Bishop’s wife, Stephanie Hofer, who also teaches in Virginia Tech’s German program.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

Cho Had Harassed Two Female Students; Officials Concerned He Was Suicidal.
April 18, 2007 — A court found that Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho was “mentally ill” and potentially dangerous. Then it let him go.

In December 2005 — more than a year before Monday’s mass shootings — a district court in Montgomery County, Va., ruled that Cho presented “an imminent danger to self or others.” That was the necessary criterion for a detention order, so that Cho, who had been accused of stalking by two female schoolmates, could be evaluated by a state doctor and ordered to undergo outpatient care.
According to the “Temporary Detention Order” obtained by ABC News, psychologist Roy Crouse found Cho’s “affect is flat and mood is depressed.

“He denies suicidal ideation. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder,” Dr. Crouse wrote. “His insight and judgment are normal.”

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

In the Middle of the Massacre, Va. Tech Gunman Sent a Video Manifesto and Photos to NBC.
BLACKSBURG, Va. Apr 19, 2007 (AP)— Two days after the worst killing spree in modern U.S. history, the shooter again assaulted Virginia Tech though this time it was in videos and photographs.

In the images, mailed to NBC midway through his rampage, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui delivered a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich “brats” and their “hedonistic needs.”
“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” the 23-year-old says in a harsh monotone. “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

Seung Cho did not fall between the cracks. Two women and a professor reported worrisome behavior in 2005; the Commonwealth of Virginia issued a “temporary detention order,” which we’ve obtained, to have his mental state evaluated.

Then he was let go. He was a legal adult who was judged to have been a threat to himself but not others. Authorities had no contact with him between then and Monday’s shootings.
In the midst of work on today’s STORY, I got a call out of the blue from a man who began by saying, “Thank you. You got the story right.” He appreciated our description of Cho as mentally ill, he said. He objected to headlines elsewhere that called Cho a “monster.”

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Source: abcnews.com

Seung-Hui Cho’s Parents Lived the Immigrant Dream, So What Happend to Their Son?
April 18, 2007 — By any measure, they were a quiet unassuming immigrant family living the American dream.

After moving to the United States from South Korea in 1992, Sung and Hyang Cho set up a dry cleaning business near Washington, D.C. The couple lived in a two-story cream-colored town house in the upper-middle-class Sully Station neighborhood of Centreville, Va. And their daughter, Sun-Kyung, who graduated from Princeton in 2004, moved back home while she worked as a State Department contractor.
But that dream was shattered after their son Seung-hui Cho’s murderous Monday morning rampage at Virginia Tech University, where authorities believe he killed 32 students and professors before turning his gun on himself.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

(WebMD) Two vaccines for preventing cervical cancer, one that is already available and another that is undergoing FDA review, continue to offer nearly 100 percent protection five years following administration,
new research shows.

The findings come at a time when use of the vaccines is being hotly debated, with states grappling with the issue of access to a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease.
Darron R. Brown, M.D., professor of medicine, microbiology, and immunology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, says the durability of the protection is an important issue.

“Right now, the data suggest strong sustainability with either vaccine.
We don’t know if a booster will be needed, but from what we’re seeing, I think the vaccines will provide protection for a lifetime,” he tells WebMD.

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

Cho Left Suicide Note And “Manifesto” In Dorm; Also Sent Photos, Videos And Writings To NBC.
(CBS/AP) The search of the Virginia Tech gunman’s dorm room and backpack produced eight pages of notes that law enforcement sources characterize as a “suicide note,” reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr. Cho Seung-Hui also sent photographs, videos and writings to NBC in New York before he died in the massacre that left 33 people dead, authorities said.
Midway through his murderous rampage, Cho went to the post office and mailed NBC a package containing photos and videos of him brandishing guns and delivering a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich “brats” and their “hedonistic needs.”

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui says in a harsh monotone. “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

Full article

Source: www.cbsnews.com

April 18, 2007 — Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Timothy McVey, Charles Whitman, Seung-hui Cho — all architects of mass murder, but one stands apart from the pack.

Cho, a 23-year-old Korean-American who killed 33 people, including himself, in a shooting rampage on the Virginia Tech campus, is one of few Asians to garner national attention for committing a horrific act of violence. As the world tries to make sense of Cho’s brutality, some Korean-Americans worry about how his actions might affect their status in the United States.
On West 32nd Street, the heart of New York City’s Koreatown, a neighborhood crammed with Korean barbecues, salons and Internet cafes, young people buzzed about Cho and the Virginia Tech massacre.

“I’m worried,” said Sarah Song. “My family says be careful.”

Song, an 18-year-old New York City native who’s deciding where to go to college next year, believes Cho had something seriously wrong with him.

“I heard he had problems with his girlfriend,” she said. “I don’t know, he was like crazy.”

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

WASHINGTON, April 18, 2007 — For the first time today a sharply divided Supreme Court has upheld a ban on a specific abortion procedure.

In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court upheld the partial-birth abortion ban that President Bush signed into law in 2003.

Kennedy wrote that the ban did not pose “an undue burden on a woman’s right to abortion” and that it furthered the government’s legitimate interest in promoting “respect for life, including life of the unborn.”
A sharply written dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned that the court’s decision “deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.”

Ginsburg, joined by the three other liberal justices, said the court’s “hostility” to the abortion right guaranteed by Roe was “not concealed.”

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Source: abcnews.go.com

April 18, 2007 — Almost anyone who has spent time in a school or workplace will tell you there is always that someone who seems a little off. The guy most likely to “go postal,” people tend to say in an off-handed way.

The more the nation learns about the Virginia Tech killer, the more we realize the signs were everywhere. It’s not always that easy. So how do you know, how can you protect yourself?
Unfortunately, psychiatrists say there is no way to definitively predict the kind of horrific behavior seen at Virginia Tech.

“There are millions of people who are depressed who are not violent, and there are millions of people who are lonely or write crazy kinds of things who are not violent either,” said Dr. Peter Marzuk, associate professor of psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and a published expert on the topic of murder-suicide.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

Poet Moves Campus Mourners: ‘We Will Prevail’.
BLACKSBURG, VA.–At an emotional convocation marked by words of condolence from President Bush and Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine, it was the rousing words of Virginia Tech University distinguished professor and poet Nikki Giovanni that produced the most stunning response on this campus of 26,000 students, still visibly shaken by Monday’s tragic school shooting that claimed 33 lives.
“We will continue to reinvent the future, through our blood, and tears, and all this sadness,” Giovanni told the crowd, speaking with the cadences of a gospel preacher as she closed the ceremony: “We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech!” Students responded by leaping to their feet, pumping their fists in the air, and chanting “Let’s go, Hokies.”

It was a fitting end to the packed ceremony in Cassell Coliseum that was marked by memories of the day before, prayers to God, and tributes to the strength of the student and faculty community of this school, nestled between the mountains in southwestern Virginia. Kaine evoked that community, recalling how as he watched TV half a world away at a trade summit in Japan, he was impressed by composed students, many dressed in the blazing orange-and-crimson colors of the school they so love.

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Source: www.usnews.com

The fact that Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old senior who allegedly killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech on Monday, was mentally troubled sheds harsh new light on a sad truth: For many students, the college years are far from the best years of their lives.
Depression, anxiety, and other serious mental health problems are increasingly common among college and university students in the United States. Consider:

* About 10 percent of students have seriously considered committing suicide.
* Forty-five percent of students say they’ve been so depressed it was difficult to function.
* More than 30 percent of freshmen report feeling overwhelmed a great deal of the time.

Students are seeking help for these problems. Students’ use of campus mental health services has risen at almost all schools over the past three years, with 13 percent of students now using campus mental health services, according to a 2007 survey by the Anxiety Disorders Association of America. But they don’t always get the help they need.

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Source: www.usnews.com

After years in the political wilderness, Capitol Hill’s most vocal advocates for intensified gun control are expressing hope that–in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 dead, including the gunman–their cause will have increasing urgency.
“I believe this will reignite the dormant effort to pass common-sense gun regulation in this nation,” Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a statement.

But it has been a long time since gun control advocates held a position of strength, and experts are skeptical of new life for the movement. And since facts about the purchase of the guns and the manner in which they were used by student Cho Seung-Hui are still lacking, many activists on both sides of the issue have been circumspect about how they feel the tragedy will change the gun debate.

The gun control movement’s clout has been on the wane since 1994, when the passage of antigun legislation was widely blamed for sweeping Democratic losses in congressional elections. Al Gore’s loss of the White House in 2000 only cemented the sense that a publicly antigun stance was political suicide.

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Source: www.usnews.com

College officials nationwide reacted quickly to the tragedy at Virginia Tech this week, refreshing their own security plans, asking questions about what procedures to ramp up, and talking about new technologies.
As massacre investigators piece together what transpired as well as how and when those on campus were informed, some outside critics as well as Virginia Tech students argue that the university did not act fast enough in informing students of a violent crime on campus, particularly about the first round of shootings. Others are calling for better technology, whether text-messaging systems or audible alerts.
Ross Pinkett, a junior from Williamsburg, Va., said friends from the West Ambler Johnston dormitory, the site of the first shootings, were “just driving around” like nothing was wrong and “clearly not on lockdown” shortly after the shooting there.

“I felt angry yesterday,” he said on Tuesday. “That there was a shooting on campus and nobody took more dramatic measures to shut down our school. It’s pretty incomprehensible.”

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Source: www.usnews.com

Rambling communication, videos mailed between shootings, network says.
Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a rambling communication and videos about his grievances, the network said Wednesday.

Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.
NBC News President Steve Capus said the network received the package in Wednesday morning’s mail delivery and immediately turned the material over to FBI agents in New York. The FBI is assisting Virginia State Police in the investigation.

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Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Between his first and second bursts of gunfire, the Virginia Tech gunman mailed a package to NBC News containing what authorities said were images of him brandishing weapons and a video of him delivering a diatribe about getting even with rich people.

“This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation. We’re in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth,” said Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police. He gave no details on the material.
NBC said that a time stamp on the package indicated the material was mailed in the two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire in a high-rise dormitory and the second fusillade, at a classroom building. Thirty-three people died in the rampage, including the gunman, 23-year-old student Cho Seung-Hui, who committed suicide.

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Source: hosted.ap.org

BLACKSBURG, United States (AFP) – The South Korean student who went on a killing spree at a US university spent time in a mental health facility more than a year ago and was accused of stalking female students, police said Wednesday.

Police met with Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech University student blamed for the deadliest school shooting in US history, over the stalking claims but no charges were filed, Virginia Tech police chief Wendell Flinchum said.
The two women who reported Cho to the police were not victims of Monday’s massacre, during which the 23-year-old Cho, armed with two recently purchased handguns, gunned down at least 30 students and teachers, he said.

Ballistics tests have found one of the handguns was used to shoot dead two other students the same morning in another campus building but police declined again on Wednesday to confirm that Cho was responsible for those deaths.

Full article

Source: www.afp.com

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (Reuters) – The gunman who went on a rampage at Virginia Tech university sent a “rambling” and “disturbing” account of his grievances to NBC between the first killing, when two people died, and his slaughter of 30 others, the network said on Wednesday.

MSNBC, an affiliate of NBC, said the material included video and a multi-page statement. It said the broadcaster handed the material to the FBI.
In Monday’s rampage, the worst in modern U.S. history, a man and a woman were killed in a student dorm in the first shooting while the others were shot in a classroom building on the campus about two hours later.

Full article

Source: www.reuters.com

(AP) A preacher’s wife accused of murdering her husband testified Wednesday that she doesn’t remember picking up the shotgun or pointing it at her husband, but she said she did not pull the trigger. She heard a “boom” as the shotgun fired, she said.

“Something went off,” Mary Winkler said, crying on the witness stand.
She said she just wanted to talk to her husband, Matthew, when she went into their bedroom, but she was terrified. Her husband was physically and sexually abusive, she said.

That day, she said, she just wanted to stop him from being so mean.

She said she ran from the house after the gun fired. “I thought Matthew would be mad at me, and I didn’t know what he would do to me.”

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

Virginia Tech student, Marine recall events.
Virginia Tech graduate student Regina Rohde was putting away the dog and getting ready to head to campus when news broke that there had been a shooting on campus.

Her feeling might not have been so different from the tens of thousands of other students who experienced the shock and trauma of Monday’s shootings at the Blacksburg, Va. campus but for the fact that she has lived through this before.
Eight years ago almost to the day, Rohde was eating her lunch in the cafeteria at Columbine High School when the first shots were fired in what became one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, a nightmare she is now revisiting in Blacksburg.

“I was one of the extremely lucky ones [at Columbine],” Rohde said today in a phone interview from her off-campus home, which she shares with her fiance, Kenneth Elsner, who also attended Columbine. “I was able to exit the school prior to any of the mass casualties that happened.”

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Source: www.usnews.com

(CBS/AP) A day after the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, the campus of Virginia Tech came together to remember the victims and heal the wounds created by Monday’s massacre.

On Tuesday afternoon, thousands of people gathered in the Virginia Tech basketball arena, and when it filled up, thousands more filed into the football stadium, for a memorial service for the victims.
“We have come together today to remember the cherished and innocent members of the Virginia Tech family whose lives were so abruptly ended in the senseless act,” said Zenobia Hikes, vice president of student affairs.

“We will eventually recover, but we will never, ever forget.”

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Source: www.cbsnews.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) – More than 250,000 homes and businesses remained without power on Tuesday after a rare spring Nor’easter hit on Sunday and Monday, knocking out electric service to more than 1.3 million customers from the Carolinas to Maine and Quebec.

Duke Energy Corp. said about 93,000 customers still had no power in the Carolinas on Tuesday afternoon following the severe windstorm on Monday, down from more than 217,000 customers affected.
Duke said it could take until the end of the week to restore service to some customers in the hardest hit areas.

Energy East Corp.’s Central Maine Power Co. said crews continued to restore service to the remaining 104,000 customers without power following a strong coastal storm that blanketed that region with snow, ice and rain, the utility said in a release Tuesday afternoon.

Full article

Source: www.reuters.com

BLACKSBURG, Va. Apr 17, 2007 (AP)— On a day of shock and sorrow, President Bush ordered flags flown at half staff Tuesday in honor of those killed in the nation’s deadliest shooting spree.

“Our nation grieves with those who have lost loved ones at Virginia Tech,” Bush said in a proclamation before attending a convocation on the campus, where 32 people were gunned down in two separate attacks Monday. “We lift them up in our prayers and we ask a loving God to comfort those who are suffering.”
The convocation was in a somber basketball arena, packed with students and others, many of whom wore short-sleeved orange T-shirts with Virginia Tech on the front. When a color guard entered the stadium with flags, the entire building remained stone silent.

Before the service, Bush received a briefing on the shootings and their investigation from Virginia Tech President Charles Steger.

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Source: abcnews.go.com

Seung-Hui Cho, the student who killed 32 people and then himself yesterday, left a long and “disturbing” note in his dorm room at Virginia Tech, say law enforcement sources.

Sources have now described the note, which runs several pages, as beginning in the present tense and then shifting to the past tense. It contains rhetoric explaining Cho’s actions and says, “You caused me to do this,” the sources told ABC News.
Sources say Cho, 23, killed two people in a dorm room, returned to his own dorm room where he re-armed and left the note, then went to a classroom building on the other side of campus. There, he killed 30 more people in four classrooms before shooting himself in the head.

Full article

Source: abcnews.go.com

Seung-Hui Cho bought his first gun, a 9mm handgun, on March 13 at a Roanoke, Va. gun store, the owner tells ABC News.

John Markell, the owner of Roanoke Firearms, said today that he had been interviewed by three agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms about Cho’s purchase of a Glock 9 mm handgun.
“I feel terrible about this,” Markell told ABC News at his store today, which is part gun shop, part pawn shop on the outskirts of Roanoke.

Full article

Source: abcnews.com

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead was identified Tuesday as an English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service.

News reports also said that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic, and that he left a note in his dorm in which he railed against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus.

Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior, arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said. He was living on campus in a different dorm from the one where Monday’s bloodbath began.
Police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set him off on the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

“He was a loner, and we’re having difficulty finding information about him,” school spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university’s English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department’s director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as “troubled.”

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The South Korean gunman who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech university had lived legally in the United States with his parents for 14 years, a U.S. immigration official said on Tuesday.

Cho Seung-Hui, 23, moved to the United States in September 1992 and lived in Centreville, Virginia, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Cho, a student of English literature at the university, was identified by police as the gunman responsible for Monday’s killings — the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history.

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BLACKSBURG, Virginia (Reuters) – Amid the horror at Virginia Tech were tales of heroism during the rampage, including an older professor — himself a Holocaust survivor — who gave his life to protect his students.

Romanian-born Liviu Librescu, an Israeli citizen, moved two decades ago to the United States where he taught in the Engineering Science and Mechanics Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Although he was 76, long past the usual retirement age, he was still teaching at Virginia Tech on Monday when chaos erupted in Norris Hall, the campus building where a gunman identified as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, opened fire, killing 30 people before committing suicide.

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Va. Tech authorities initially believed that the threat was contained to one dormitory.
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — On a university campus of 2,600 acres, with more than 25,000 students, ironclad security is not a practical goal. Even so, tough questions swiftly surfaced as to how effectively Virginia Tech authorities responded to Monday’s horrific massacre.

Why were campus police so sure the threat was a “domestic dispute” contained in one dormitory, when most of the killings occurred two hours later in a classroom building?

Why were they interviewing a “person of interest” off campus in regard to the first shootings at the very time the classroom killings were unfolding?
Why was there a lag of more than two hours after the first shootings before an alarm was e-mailed campuswide – around the time the second, more deadly burst of carnage occurred? And more generally, some security experts wondered, was the school’s crisis planning and emergency communications system up to the task?

Clearly, something went terribly wrong.

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(CBS) The massacre at Virginia Tech, which left 33 people dead, has parents wondering just how safe their kid’s college campus really is. Meanwhile, college security departments around the country are re-examining their safety measures.

Campus security is often focused on assaults or break-ins. Now, the focus will shift to something much more horrific. The mass shooting at Virginia Tech illustrates a security challenge all campuses share: Their openness.
“If somebody wants to commit an act of crime or violence, our campuses are very open all across this country,” Dr. Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, told The Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffmann.

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Cho Seung-Hui, 23-Year-Old Student, Identified as Gunman.
We now know the identity of the killer at Virginia Tech.

He is Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old resident alien of the United States, as first reported by ABC News.
Cho is a South Korean national, a Virginia Tech senior majoring in English and the man who killed 33 people — including himself — on the Virginia Tech campus Monday.

Sources tell ABC News that Cho killed two people in a dorm room, returned to his own dorm room where he re-armed and left a “disturbing note,” then went to a classroom building on the other side of campus to continue his rampage.
Law enforcement sources have now described the note, which runs several pages, as beginning in the present tense and then shifting to the past tense. It contains rhetoric explaining Cho’s actions and says, “You caused me to do this,” the sources told ABC News.

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(CBS/AP) President Bush said Monday that the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, the deadliest campus violence ever in this country, affects every student across the nation.

“Schools should be places of safety, sanctuary and learning,” said President Bush, as the death toll from the campus shootings rose from just over 20 to more than 30. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom in every American community.”
President Bush spoke with Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and Virginia Tech President Charles Steger.

“I told them that Laura and I and many across our nation are praying for the victims and all the members of university community that have been devastated by this terrible tragedy,” said the president, in a late afternoon appearance in the Diplomatic Room of the White House.

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April 17, 2007 — According to Virginia Tech student newspaper’s Web site, collegiatetimes.com, the following is a list of confirmed fatalities in Monday’s shooting rampage on the Virginia Tech campus.
Ryan Clark Columbia County, Ga.
Senior, Biology, English, Psychology

Leslie Sherman
Sophomore, History and International Studies

Caitlin Hammaren
Sophomore, International Studies and French

Liviu Librescu
Professor, Engineering Science & Mechanics

Kevin Granata
Professor, Engineering Science & Mechanics

Reema Samaha
Centreville, Va.
Freshman

Emily Hilscher
Woodville, Va.
Freshman, Animal and Poultry Sciences, Equine Science

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BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) — Police identified the gunman who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus before turning the gun on himself as student Cho Seung-Hui, university police Chief Wendell Flinchum said Tuesday.

The 23-year-old South Korean and resident alien lived at the university’s Harper Hall, Flinchum said. He was an English major, the chief said.

Flinchum said ballistics tests showed that one of the two guns recovered at Norris Hall, where 30 people and the gunman died, was used in the Norris shooting and an earlier shooting at a dormitory that left two dead.
The university and police are still in the process of releasing the names of the 32 people killed in Monday’s shootings. (Watch how some are asking why warnings weren’t issued sooner Video)

A doctor at a Blacksburg hospital described the injuries he saw Monday as “amazing” and the shooter as “brutal.”

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We now know the identity of the killer at Virginia Tech.

He is Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old resident alien of the United States, as first reported by ABC News.

Cho is a South Korean national, a Virginia Tech senior and an English major and the man who killed 33 people, inlcuding himself, on the Virginia Tech campus Monday.

Sources tell ABC News that Cho killed two people in a dorm room, returned to his own dorm room where he re-armed and left a “disturbing note” before entering a classroom building on the other side of campus to continue his rampage.
Cho’s identity has been confirmed with a positive fingerprint match on the guns used in the rampage and with immigration materials.

“Lab results confirm that one of the two weapons seized in Norris Hall was used in both shootings,” Virigina Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said at a press conference this morning.

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Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the Pentagon was extending the tours of most active-duty Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Our forces are stretched, there’s no question about that,” he said. No kidding. More than five years after September 11, the United States is still fighting wars with a military little changed from September 10.

The extensions were necessary in order to give troops a full year between combat tours. But the military should not have confronted a choice between extending tours and giving troops less than a year at home.
President Bush has had half a decade to bring troop numbers to adequate levels. He hasn’t, and Gen. Barry McCaffrey offered a distressing summary of the consequences in his latest assessment of the security conditions in Iraq: “The U.S. Armed Forces cannot sustain the current deployment rate. We will leave [the U.S.] at risk to other threats from new hostile actors if we shatter the capabilities of our undersized and under-resourced Army, Marine, and special operations forces

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(AP) Allstate Insurance Co. must pay a Louisiana man who lost his home to Hurricane Katrina more than $2.8 million in damages and penalties, a federal jury decided Monday in a case that hinged largely on whether it was wind or storm surge that wiped out his house.

Allstate spokeswoman Kate Hollcraft said the company will appeal.

“Allstate is shocked with the jury verdict in favor of the plaintiff. Allstate believes it acted in good faith throughout the entire claims process with the Weiss family,” she said.
The jury found Allstate — which claimed most of the damage was due to storm surge, an event not covered in its policy — did not pay Robert Weiss enough money to cover wind damage to his home. The verdict included a $1.5 million penalty for the company’s failure to pay the claim quickly enough.

“Our intention was to get what we were owed and to send a message that we would not be intimidated,” Weiss said after the verdict was read.

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(AP) Families in India and Israel on Tuesday mourned two professors among the 32 people killed in a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, while the leader of Australia slammed U.S. gun culture.

Monday’s massacre was the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, with the unidentified gunmen cutting down his victims in two attacks before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life.
Liviu Librescu, 76, an engineering science and mathematics lecturer, tried to stop the gunman from entering his classroom by blocking the door before he was fatally shot, his son said Tuesday from Tel Aviv, Israel.

“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” said Joe Librescu. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”

Librescu immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1978 and then moved to Virginia in 1985 for his sabbatical, but had stayed since then, said Joe Librescu, who himself studied at the school from 1989 to 1994.

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(CBS/AP) Floodwaters swirled through low-lying communities and evacuated residents waited for rivers to crest early Tuesday as a spring storm blamed for at least 15 deaths nationwide lingered in the Northeast for a third day.

The storm left a huge swath of devastation, from the beaches of South Carolina to the mountains of Maine. It knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people.

The storm dumped up to 9 inches of rain on parts of New Jersey on Monday, and more than 8 inches fell on New York City’s Central Park, quadrupling the 101-year-old record for the date.
New Jersey was placed under a state of emergency and more than 1,400 residents were evacuated — many by boat.

“This is the worst situation since 1882,” Acting Gov. Richard Codey told WCBS-TV. “It’s going to take us quite a while to recover from this storm.”

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