Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Reminder to re-enactors: no alcohol with guns
VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. — History re-enactors posing as Old West gunslingers here need to follow some modern rules, the sheriff says: Guns and alcohol don’t mix.
A Storey County ordinance prohibits alcohol consumption by history re-enactors wearing a gun, but Sheriff Jim Miller said he’s going to increase enforcement of the ordinance because some people have abused it.
“They want to drink and carry a gun and look like cowboys,” Miller said. “But you can see how easy that would be for someone drinking to accidentally put a live round in there and hurt someone.”
Under a program sponsored by the Virginia City Convention and Tourism Authority, volunteers dress in period costumes, including six-guns, and pose for photographs for tourists each summer.
Joe Curtis, a member of the authority board, said stricter enforcement comes after several people with felony convictions showed up in town dressed as gunslingers.
Suicide attack kills seven in Afghanistan
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A suicide car bomber attacked a group of international troops at a bazaar in southern Afghanistan on Monday, killing three NATO soldiers and four Afghans, officials said.
Two Danish troops, a Czech special forces soldier and an Afghan translator were killed in the attack in the Gereshk district of Helmand province.
Provincial Police Chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said the suicide car bomb killed three Afghan civilians and wounded seven others.
Four soldiers also were wounded in the attack, a NATO spokesman said on condition of anonymity, citing policy.
A Czech soldier was transported to an American hospital in Kandahar with serious injuries and was being kept in a medically induced coma, said Lt. Gen. Vlastimil Picek, Czech military chief of general staff.
Olmert: Israel to keep building in disputed areas
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday he will keep building in parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem that Israel wants to keep in a future peace deal, angering the chief Palestinian negotiator.
Olmert’s public stance on continuing construction in disputed areas threatened to further weaken moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is in a power struggle with the militant Islamic Hamas group that governs Gaza.
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks resumed Monday in Jerusalem after a break of several weeks because of a spike in violence, but the session ended in discord. Ahmed Qureia, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said he downgraded the meeting to unofficial to protest Israeli construction plans.
U.N. and NATO troops clash with Kosovo Serbs
KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Kosovo — Serb demonstrators attacked international peacekeepers with rocks, grenades and Molotov cocktails Monday, setting off the worst violence in Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia last month.
The Serbs traded gunfire with U.N. and NATO forces in hours of clashes that wounded at least 63 U.N. and NATO forces and 70 protesters outside a U.N. courthouse.
The clashes began when the U.N. stormed the courthouse in the divided northern town of Kosovska Mitrovica just before dawn to pull out protesters who had occupied it for three days to protest Kosovo’s independence.
Sexual predators getting federal grants for college
MADISON, Wis. — James Sturtz is not your ordinary college student struggling to pay tuition.
The 48-year-old rapist is one of Iowa’s most dangerous sex offenders, locked up in a state-run treatment center for fear he will attack again if released. Yet he has received thousands of dollars in federal aid to take college courses through the mail.
Across the nation, dozens of sexual predators have been taking higher education classes at taxpayer expense while confined by the courts to treatment centers. Critics say they are exploiting a loophole to receive Pell Grants, the nation’s premier financial aid program for low-income students.
Prison inmates are ineligible for Pell Grants under a 1994 law. Students convicted of certain drug offenses are also ineligible. But sexual predators qualify once they are transferred from prison to treatment centers.
“This is the most insane waste of taxpayer money that I have seen in my eight years in Congress,” said Rep. Ric Keller, R-Fla., who is pushing to stop the practice.
Associated Press