Mexico subway shootings

Mexico subway shootings

MEXICO CITY — Police started randomly checking people for guns in the capital’s 175 subway stations Saturday after a man opened fire inside a crowded station, killing two people and wounding eight.

Mexico City Attorney General Miguel Angel Mancera said the gunman, Luis Felipe Hernandez, 38, who was wounded by police, was undergoing psychological exams to determine if he is mentally unstable. Authorities have 48 hours to decide whether to send him to a psychiatric ward or have him stand trial.

Mancera said eight of those injured by Hernandez had been released from hospitals, and two remained under treatment.

Hernandez was writing an anti- government statement on a wall at the packed Balderas subway station when a police officer confronted him. He fatally shot the officer and then continued firing as people got on and off a train during rush hour.

Warning from power plant spooks NYC-area residents

NEW CITY, N.Y. — A suburban New York City nuclear power plant’s siren system has mistakenly blared out the warning, “Emergency! Emergency! Emergency!”

The ominous message rattled some of the residents of New City, about 30 miles north of midtown Manhattan. Auto-shop worker Rudy Gaspari says the mechanical voice had an unsettling, post-apocalyptic overtone to it.

The voice came from an Indian Point plant siren located downtown during a test Friday.

Indian Point spokesman Jerry Nappi says the voice message “shouldn’t have happened.” He says plant officials have disabled the voice mechanism in the siren.

Jet leaks oil, turns around

FRANKFURT — A New York-bound Boeing 747 operated by German airline Deutsche Lufthansa AG turned back in mid-flight Saturday after the pilot reported that one if the plane’s four engines was leaking oil.

The airline said Saturday that the plane, carrying 334 passengers from Frankfurt to New York, was over Greenland when the pilot made the decision to turn back although the plane could have flown onward to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on three engines.

Ann Curry, an NBC television reporter, was aboard and provided public “tweets” — brief, instant Internet updates via Twitter — on the plane’s turnaround after it returned to Frankfurt International Airport.

Iraqis charged with trying to sell stolen antiquities

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Authorities in northern Iraq have arrested three men on charges they were trying to traffic stolen antiquities, including the bust of a Sumerian king, a local army commander said Saturday.

The three were arrested in a sting operation after attempting to sell one of the artifacts for $160,000 to an undercover intelligence officer of the Iraqi Army’s 12th division in a village southwest of Kirkuk, division commander Maj. Gen. Abdul Amir al-Zaidi told reporters.

The men had eight pieces from the Sumerian period, which dates from around 4000 B.C. to 2000 B.C., that they were trying to sell.

Arrested in slaying of four

FARMVILLE, Va. — A California man who recorded violent rap songs and posted them on his My- Space page was arrested Saturday by investigators who suspect him of killing four people in a central Virginia college town.

Richard Alden Samuel McCroskey III, 20, of Castro Valley, Calif., was taken into custody at Richmond International Airport, where authorities believe he tried to catch a flight back to California. Officers found McCroskey asleep in the baggage-claim area, Farmville police Capt. Wade Stimpson said.

McCroskey is being held in Farmville, where he faces charges of first-degree murder, grand larceny of an automobile and robbery, Stimpson said. McCroskey is scheduled to appear Monday in court.

Hormone replacement tied to higher cancer death risk

Hormone-replacement therapy, already linked to increases in breast cancer, heart disease and stroke, nearly doubles a woman’s risk of dying from lung cancer, researchers reported Saturday in a finding that may be the final nail in the coffin for a therapy that is already in rapidly declining use.

The findings “seriously question whether hormone-replacement therapy has any role in medicine today,” wrote Dr. Apar Kishor Ganti of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in an editorial accompanying the online publication of the report in the medical journal Lancet.

Combined dispatches