Police: Student planned rampage
Police: Student planned rampage
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — A University of Maryland honor student who warned on websites he was going to “kill enough people to make it to national news” was arrested after several people reported the threat to police, perhaps thwarting a campus rampage apparently planned for Monday, authorities said.
While the threat was dismissed by some online as harmless, a former student who used to work with campus police took it seriously and first called authorities Saturday night. By Sunday, authorities had set up surveillance on Alexander Song and arrested him on campus.
“The best security we have is us looking after each other,” said university police chief David Mitchell. “And that’s exactly what happened. Three people saw online postings and called us.”
The 19-year-old Song was shaking and crying when he was taken into custody and appeared “emotionally distraught,” Mitchell said. He has admitted to feeling stressed out. Song was not armed at the time of his arrest, and police did not find any weapons in his dorm room or his parent’s home in Fulton, Md. Song was taken to a psychiatric hospital for an evaluation and suspended from the school. He faces a misdemeanor charge of disturbing school activities.
Sentence raised in L.A. bomb plot
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A terrorist who plotted to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium, now halfway through his 22-year sentence, will have to serve longer after an appeals court ruled Monday that the original punishment did not fit a crime that a judge said could have rivaled Sept. 11.
In a 7-4 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the government’s appeal and sent the case back to a federal judge in Seattle for resentencing for a third time.
The court, which contains some of the nation’s most liberal judges, said Ressam’s plot to blow up the airport on New Year’s Eve 1999, was “horrific” and intended to intimidate the nation and the world.
“Had Ressam succeeded, ‘LAX’ may well have entered our vocabulary as a term analogous to ‘the Oklahoma City bombing’ or ‘9/11,”’ Judge Richard R. Clifton wrote for the majority. “His clear intent was to intimidate this nation and the world, and he sought to influence world events and the conduct of the United States government through that intimidation.”
Ressam, an Algerian national who had attended training camps for Islamic terrorists, was arrested Dec. 14, 1999, in Port Angeles, Wash. He had a bogus Canadian passport but his nervousness after arriving on a ferry from Canada prompted a search of his rental car. Authorities found more than 100 pounds of chemicals, along with timing devices and other equipment, to make a fertilizer-derived nitrate bomb.
Old movie posters are found in attic
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A rowdy band of bloodsuckers, gunslingers, wily wise guys, jaded private eyes, hardboiled reporters and good girls gone bad, stuck in an attic together for 80 years, is going its separate ways.
Nearly three dozen movie theater posters from the Golden Age of Hollywood found in a Pennsylvania attic are expected to fetch $250,000 at auction in Texas this month. They were stuck together with wallpaper glue when they were purchased for around $30,000 at a country auction last fall in Berwick, near Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania.
The buyer, who chose to remain anonymous, consigned them to Heritage Auctions in Dallas, where the stack of 33 Depression-era posters was painstakingly steamed and gingerly separated over the course of several weeks.