Sources: Malvo admits role in some shootings

Sources: Malvo admitsrole in some shootings
WASHINGTON -- The teenager accused of participating in the sniper attacks that terrorized the Washington region has told investigators that he pulled the trigger in several of the shootings, three law enforcement sources said Saturday.
During an interrogation that lasted about seven hours, John Lee Malvo provided details about several of the slayings that authorities have linked to him and John Allen Muhammad, including killings in Fairfax and Prince William counties in Virginia and in Washington, D.C., the sources said.
One law enforcement source said Malvo said he fired the shot that killed FBI analyst Linda Franklin at a Home Depot store in Fairfax County, for which he has been charged with capital murder.
In the interviews after he was transferred to Fairfax County on Thursday, Malvo, 17, told investigators that the shootings were well-planned and involved scouting missions. Sources said that Malvo described himself and his partner as behaving like soldiers: One would be a lookout and communicate with the other on two-way radios.
If conditions, like traffic, were not right, they would not shoot, Malvo told investigators. They deliberately hopped from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to create confusion, and they watched the news coverage of their crimes, the sources said.
Authorities connectrapist to 31 assaults
LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Authorities believe a serial rapist has carried out at least 31 assaults on women in California and Washington over the past six years, and urged residents to report anything out of the ordinary, even as seemingly harmless as barking dogs.
Authorities said the latest assault -- the attempted rape of a Long Beach woman -- occurred Thursday morning, and added that the rapist's unpredictable behavior has hampered efforts to make an arrest.
"We don't see at all a specific pattern," Officer Jana Blair, a spokeswoman for the Long Beach Police Department, said Saturday. "We have in the past attempted to put out a sketch, but based on the varying descriptions the victims have given and especially the time that has gone by, we believe his appearance has changed."
Authorities have linked the unarmed sexual predator to 13 cases based on physical evidence such as fingerprints and DNA. They have tentatively linked him to 18 other cases based on the similarity of methods, Blair said.
The attacks began in May 1996, with two assaults in Seattle. The rapist then apparently moved to Southern California, where the rest of the incidents occurred beginning in January 1997.
Volunteers seek causefor high cancer rates
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- Women living in wealthy Marin County, set in the wooded hills just north of San Francisco, suffer one of the nation's highest breast cancer rates, a cluster that has confounded health officials.
On Saturday, about 2,000 volunteers went door-to-door through the county asking questions that could help point to an answer: How many residents have cancer, where do they live and do they have any idea why rates have climbed so high?
"My hope now is that everybody realizes that as a community we can change our statistics," said Judi Shils, founder of the Marin County Cancer Project.
According to the Berkeley-based Northern California Cancer Center, white women living in Marin County are 45 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than women elsewhere in the country. A study the center released in July found cancer rates in Marin increased 37 percent during the 1990s -- even as they remained flat in the rest of the San Francisco Bay area and California's other urban counties.
The researchers focused on white, non-Hispanic women because fewer than 10 cases of breast cancer are found each year in Hispanics, blacks or other populations in Marin County, which is 80 percent white.
6 killed in collision
ARLINGTON, Wyo. -- A tractor-trailer and a van collided on a snowy, slippery stretch of highway Saturday in south-central Wyoming, killing six people, authorities said.
It was among at least 28 crashes reported on about 300 miles of Interstate 80 during a nine-hour period, said Wyoming Department of Transportation spokesman Bruce Burrows.
The van apparently spun out of control, Burrows said.
"A tractor-trailer ... came over a hill and apparently trying to avoid the van, that truck jackknifes, and then the trailer hit the van," Burrows said.
All the deaths were in the van, which had Minnesota plates.