Ex-cop charged in death

Ex-cop charged in death

LOCKPORT, Ill. — Authorities say former Illinois police sergeant Drew Peterson is being held on $20 million bond and faces two counts of murder in his third wife’s death.

Illinois State Police Captain Carl Dobrich says the 55-year-old Bolingbrook man was processed and transferred to the Will County Adult Detention Facility in Joliet.

Dobrich says officials have tracked more than 1,100 leads in Savio’s death and the disappearance of Stacy Peterson, Drew Peterson’s missing fourth wife.

The body of Peterson’s third wife, Kathleen Savio, was found in an empty bathtub. Her death originally was ruled an accidental drowning, but authorities later said it was a homicide staged to look like an accident.

Stacy Peterson disappeared in October 2007.

Wildfire rages in California

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Paradise is not lost, but it’s in flames — again.

The seasonal wildfires that menace this idyllic coastal city roared to life earlier than usual but with all-too-familiar ferocity, burning mansions to their foundations and forcing more than 13,000 to flee. Dozens of homes were destroyed, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said.

The 1,300-acre fire was just the latest to ravage the area known as the American Riviera, home to screen stars, former presidents and Oprah Winfrey. The blaze reached the burn area of another wildfire that just six months ago destroyed about 200 homes in Santa Barbara and Montecito.

The latest fire remained out of control and firefighters were on alert for a predicted return of a “sundowner” — fierce winds that sweep down late in the day from the Santa Ynez Mountains towering close behind Santa Barbara.

Holder testifies on Gitmo

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will not release terrorists from Guantanamo Bay into neighborhoods in the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Thursday as he sought to reassure worried lawmakers.

“We don’t have any plans to release terrorists,” Holder testified at a Senate hearing on the Obama administration’s budget for the Justice Department. The budget proposal released Thursday requests up to $160 million to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But he also said some of the detainees at the facility will be let go, indicating the administration believes some held there are not terrorists. Asked after the hearing if he believes some current Guantanamo detainees are innocent, Holder did not answer.

Official: Cuba won’t change government

KINGSTON, Ontario — A top Cuban official said Thursday that Cuba is willing to discuss everything with the Obama administration, but it won’t give up its form of government in talks to improve relations.

The comments by the director of Cuba’s Foreign Ministry’s North American Department echoed the sentiments of President Raul Castro, who has said repeatedly that officials would be willing to sit down for direct talks with U.S. leaders as long as his country’s sovereignty is not threatened.

President Barack Obama has suggested it may be time for a new beginning with Cuba, and the White House authorized unlimited travel and money transfer for Americans with relatives in Cuba. But his administration has said it would like Cuba to respond by making small political and social changes to its single-party communist system.

Castro has bristled at that suggestion.

Former Munchkin dies

ST. LOUIS — Mickey Carroll, one of the last surviving Munchkins from the beloved 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz,” died Thursday. He was 89.

He died in his sleep at the suburban Crestwood home of his caretaker, Linda Dodge, she said. He had heart problems and received a pacemaker in February.

Carroll was one of more than 100 adults and children who were recruited to play the movie natives of what author L. Frank Baum called Munchkin Country in his 1900 book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Manson hideout gutted

Barker Ranch, the old Death Valley, Calif., mining camp notorious as Charles Manson’s hideout, has been gutted in a suspicious fire, according to the National Park Service.

The homestead’s rock walls and tin roof were still intact, but its hand-hewn wooden interior beams and window and door frames were all reduced to ash, he said. An outbuilding, originally built as a garage or workroom, was destroyed, Baldino said.

Combined dispatches