5 die when plane crashes on highway

5 die when plane crashes on highway

morris township, n.j.

A small plane heading for Georgia spiraled out of control and crashed Tuesday morning on a major New York-area highway, hitting a wooded median and scattering wreckage across the road. All five people aboard, including two investment bankers, were killed, but no one on the ground was injured.

The New York investment banking firm Greenhill & Co. said two of its managing directors, Jeffrey Buckalew, 45, and Rakesh Chawla, 36, as well as Buckalew’s wife and two children, were on the plane, which crashed on Interstate 287. Buckalew was the registered owner of the single-engine plane and had a pilot’s license.

MLK parade bomber sentenced to prison

spokane, wash.

An Army veteran with extensive ties to white supremacists was sentenced to 32 years in prison Tuesday for planting a poison-laced bomb along a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade route in what he said was meant to be an attack against the cultural diversity celebrated by the event.

Kevin Harpham tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his earlier guilty plea just before receiving the maximum punishment from U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush, who said the previously law-abiding Harpham seemed to be influenced by a “shrill and caustic and vitriolic” culture fueled by talk media.

The pipe bomb was loaded with lead fishing weights coated in rat poison, which can inhibit blood clotting in wounds, officials have said. The bomb was disabled before it could explode.

Iraq’s Sunni VP denies charges

baghdad

Iraq’s Sunni vice president denied Shiite accusations that he organized death squads, describing the charges Tuesday as a trumped-up case brought only after the departure of U.S. troops about assassinations reportedly committed five years ago.

The arrest warrant issued against the highest-ranking Sunni politician threatens to tear apart Iraq’s coalition government and perhaps kick-start another Sunni insurgency. It raised suspicions that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, ordered the arrest of Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi as part of a campaign to consolidate his hold on power out of a fear that Sunnis in and out of Iraq are plotting against him.

Demjanjuk is denied US citizenship

cleveland

Convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk’s bid to regain his U.S. citizenship was denied Tuesday by a judge who said he had lied about where he was during World War II.

U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster rejected the retired autoworker’s citizenship claim, which was based on newly discovered documents, including one suggesting an incriminating document was a Soviet fraud.

Demjanjuk was convicted by a German court that found he had served as a guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Demjanjuk, who’s in his 90s, has been in poor health for years and has been in and out of a hospital since his conviction.

$150B verdict in case

la grange, texas

An attorney says a Texas jury has awarded the largest verdict he’s ever heard of — $150 billion to the family of a man who died years after being set afire as an 8-year-old.

The family’s attorney, Craig Sico, says the punitive damage award is symbolic and the family expects none of it will be paid.

Associated Press