Friday, August 25, 2006
Killer can be executed,Ohio Supreme Court rules
COLUMBUS -- A religious cult leader convicted of killing a family of five in 1989, which he referred to as "pruning the vineyard," will be executed Oct. 10, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Thursday. Jeffrey Lundgren, 56, was convicted of shooting to death a man, his wife and his three daughters who had moved from Missouri in 1987 to follow Lundgren's teachings. Lundgren formed a religious cult after he was dismissed in 1987 as a lay minister of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had attracted a following, and several people moved with him to a rented farm house about 30 miles east of Cleveland, where they called him "Dad" and contributed money for group expenses. The victims were Dennis Avery, 49; his wife, Cheryl, 46; and daughters Trina, 15, Rebecca, 13, and Karen, 7.
Dress code, hotel policieschanged for air marshals
WASHINGTON -- Air marshals were told Thursday they will be allowed to dress the way they want and choose their own hotels to protect their anonymity while on missions. Federal Air Marshal Service chief Dana Brown, who has been in the job for five months, said he was changing the rules, starting Sept. 1, after listening to air marshals' concerns. In a memo to the air marshals, Brown said the dress code was changed to "allow you to blend in and not direct attention to yourself, as well as be sufficiently functional to enable you to conduct your law enforcement responsibilities." Air marshals had complained that Brown's predecessor, Thomas Quinn, insisted on a too-formal dress code that allowed people to pick them out. The marshals said, for example, that being forced to wear a jacket and collared shirt made them stand out on flights to Hawaii.
President Bush joinsfamily at Kennebunkport
KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine -- President Bush went fishing Thursday off the rocky coast of Maine where his great-grandfather built an oceanfront estate that has become entwined with American presidential history. Beginning a long family weekend, Bush first met privately at a local elementary school with the families of five soldiers killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Then he settled in at the more than 100-year-old family compound at Walker's Point, a craggy finger of rock that juts into the ocean. His father, former President George H.W. Bush, has summered at Walker's Point since boyhood, skipping it only while serving as a World War II Navy aviator.
Man charged with providingHezbollah TV broadcasts
NEW YORK -- A businessman was charged with providing satellite broadcasts of a Hezbollah television station to New York-area customers, authorities said Thursday. Javed Iqbal, 42, was arrested Wednesday on conspiracy charges of enabling the broadcasts of al-Manar, which was designated by the U.S. government this spring as a global terrorist entity, U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said in a statement. Garcia said Iqbal used satellite dishes at his Staten Island home to distribute the broadcasts through a Brooklyn company called HDTV Limited. Al-Manar, launched in 1991, features news programming that promotes Hezbollah's positions and shows statements from the terror group and speeches from its leader.
Astronomer's widowcomments on Pluto
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- The widow of the astronomer who discovered Pluto 76 years ago said Thursday she was frustrated by the decision to strip it of its planetary status, but she added that Clyde Tombaugh would have understood. "I'm not heartbroken. I'm just shook up," Patricia Tombaugh, 93, said in a telephone interview from her home in Las Cruces. Clyde Tombaugh was 24 when he discovered Pluto while working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1930. He spent months meticulously examining images of the sky, looking for a planet that observatory founder Percival Lowell theorized was affecting the orbit of Uranus. Lowell was wrong -- Pluto is too small to affect giant Neptune's orbit -- but Tombaugh found it anyway. Tombaugh, who died in 1997, was the only person in the Western Hemisphere to have discovered a planet in our solar system until Thursday, when the International Astronomical Union separated it from the eight "classical planets" and lumped it in with two similarly sized "dwarf planets." Tombaugh had fought off other attempts to relegate Pluto, but his widow said this time he probably would have endorsed the change, now that other planetary objects have been discovered in the Kuiper Belt, the belt of comets on the edge of the solar system where Pluto resides.
Associated Press