Saddam’s AK-47 being returned to Iraq

Saddam’s AK-47 being returned to Iraq

NEW YORK — Federal customs agents say a pearl-handled AK-47 that belonged to Saddam Hussein is being sent back to Iraq.

The firearm had been in the hands of the U.S. Army. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says the automatic rifle is chrome-plated and has a photo of Hussein near the sight.

ICE spokesman Lou Martinez said Friday that the Iraqi government had recently requested the return of the rifle. ICE traced it to Fort Lewis in Washington state.

Stimulus money used for volcano monitoring

WASHINGTON — Weeks after Mount Redoubt erupted in Alaska, the Interior Department is spending some of its first stimulus dollars to improve volcano monitoring.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Friday said the department will use $15.2 million to modernize volcano warning systems in one of its first projects to be funded by the stimulus measure. It was part of $140 million in spending announced Friday.

Salazar said the monitoring will do a better job of warning the public and airlines of eruptions, as it did months before Mount Redoubt blew in March. The Alaska Volcano Observatory first started issuing warnings in late January, Salazar said.

Salazar said the Alaska observatory’s top priority is to avoid a repeat of what happened during Redoubt’s eruption 19 years ago when a Boeing 747 strayed into an ash cloud and nearly crashed.

Obama miffs Chicago by ordering St. Louis pizza

CHICAGO — The news is hitting Chicago deep dish pizza makers’ eye like a big pizza pie.

President Barack Obama is having 140 people over to the White House Friday night for a some deep-dish pizza — St. Louis deep dish pizza.

It seems during his campaign he had pizza from a restaurant called Pi in St. Louis. That’s the story Pi assistant manager Lindsey Tornetto tells.

Whatever happened, the restaurant says the owner and his partner packed dough, cheese and pizza pans in their suitcases and flew to Washington.

It all has Marc Malnati — owner of 30 Lou Malnati’s Pizzarias in the Chicago area — shaking his head. He says he likes Obama’s economic policy but thinks the president’s pizza policy should change.

Murder-suicide at college

DEARBORN, Mich. — Two students were killed Friday in an apparent murder-suicide that prompted a lockdown at a community college west of Detroit, police said.

The bodies were discovered in a room at a Henry Ford Community College building after police responded to an emergency call of a gunshot on campus, said Dearborn Deputy Police Chief Gregg Brighton.

Officers found the bodies of Asia McGowan, 20, of Ecorse, and Anthony Powell, 28, of Detroit, police said. Powell apparently used a shotgun to kill McGowan and then turned the gun on himself, police said.

Earlier Friday, a 19-year-old gunman wounded three people at a vocational training college in Athens, Greece, before killing himself, authorities said.

The shootings came a week after a man walked into the American Civic Association center in Binghamton, N.Y., and killed 14 people before turning the gun on himself.

Building wing reopened

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Virginia Tech has reopened the section of the academic building where a student gunman killed 30 people nearly two years ago in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The university held a ceremony Friday to mark the reopening of the west wing of the second floor of Norris Hall. The 4,300-square-foot area has been converted into six new rooms and laboratories and will house the new Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.

Gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed 30 students and instructors in the building, then himself, on April 16, 2007. Earlier that day he killed 2 students in a dormitory.

Landslide amid allegations

ALGIERS, Algeria — President Abdelaziz Bouteflika hailed his landslide re-election for a third term as a “lesson in democracy” on Friday, but opposition politicians and independent media alleged fraud at the polls, and the U.S. government expressed concern.

Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said Bouteflika won 90.24 percent of votes in Thursday’s election. The voting was marred by six terror attacks.

Associated Press