Man with guns made threats, authorities said

Man with guns made threats, authorities said

MIAMI — A 20-year-old with a weapons cache that included four AK-47s was arrested after threatening over the Internet to undertake a Virginia Tech-style massacre, authorities said Thursday.

Oregon authorities learned of a March 25 Internet message allegedly posted by Calin Chi Wong in which he threatened to re-enact the Virginia Tech killings. Two days later, Homestead Police searched the home Wong shares with his parents and found the weapons in stacked on shelves in plain view, Detective Antonio Aquino said.

Wong had 13 firearms in all, more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition, some that could pierce armor, and 100 rounds in a feeding clip with bullets “meant to take down aircraft or military machinery,” Aquino said. He had hidden two AK-47s in his parents’ closet, and his parents said the guns did not belong to them, Aquino said.

Bouncer acquitted

LAKE CHARLES, La. — A New Orleans bouncer was acquitted Thursday in the death on New Year’s Eve 2004 of a Georgia college student whose friends had been excluded from a karaoke bar.

A jury deliberated for about an hour before clearing Arthur Irons, the first of four bouncers to go to trial in the death of Levon Jones, who was in New Orleans for a flag football tournament.

A confrontation took place soon after two friends of Jones, a student at Georgia Southern University, were barred from entering Razzoo Bar Patio on Bourbon Street. They apparently didn’t meet the dress code.

Witnesses said Jones ended up facedown on the sidewalk with four bouncers pinning him down. The coroner ruled that Jones’ death was a homicide, finding that the student died of asphyxiation.

Canada to file charges

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — The Canadian government will file charges against a conservation group for allegedly getting too close to seal hunters as it protested the country’s annual hunt, Canada’s federal fisheries minister said Thursday.

Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn announced in parliament that he’s taking legal action action against the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society for allegedly breaking a law that requires them to maintain a specific distance from the hunt.

The annual hunt, the largest marine mammal hunt in the world, began last week.

Hearn said the activists’ vessel, the Farley Mowat, ventured too close to a group of fishermen as they hunted seals on ice floes north of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, on Sunday.

Gunman surrenders

VIOLA, Wis. — A landowner with “strong anti-government attitudes” surrendered after a daylong standoff with police Thursday that included a gunfire exchange, tear gas and a house fire, authorities said. No one was injured.

Officers who tried to contact 60-year-old Robert Bayliss in the afternoon were fired upon, then returned fire and deployed tear gas, according to Darin Gudgeon, emergency management director for Richland County in southwestern Wisconsin.

Then a fire started in the home; Bayliss surrendered soon afterward and was taken into the custody of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, said Gudgeon, a deputy with the department.

Bayliss faces a charge of intentionally pointing a firearm at a law enforcement officer, and sheriff’s Lt. Bob Frank said other charges could be filed.

Official vows crackdown

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s prime minister pledged Thursday to expand his crackdown on Shiite militias to Baghdad, despite a mixed performance so far against militants in the southern city of Basra.

The U.S. ambassador, meanwhile, said that despite a “boatload” of problems with the Basra operation, he was encouraged that the Shiite-led government was finally confronting extremists regardless of their religious affiliation.

Iraqi forces launched a major operation March 25 to rid Basra of Shiite militias and criminal gangs that had effectively ruled the city of 2 million people since 2005. But the offensive stalled in the face of fierce resistance from the militiamen and an uprising across the Shiite south spearheaded by the Mahdi Army of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Fighting eased Sunday when al-Sadr ordered his fighters to stand down under a deal brokered in Iran.

Associated Press