Jets flying over U.S. facing possible passenger check
The Bush administration is considering requiring foreign airlines to check the names of passengers on all flights over the United States against government watch lists.
The proposal would most affect airlines in Mexico and Canada because the majority of the hundreds of flights each day come from those countries.
Currently, foreign airlines planning to land in the United States must submit passenger and crew lists to the government within 15 minutes of departure. The names are checked against lists of people considered terrorists or who otherwise could present a danger.
Airlines must do the same for crew members on flights over the United States. Now the Transportation Security Administration is considering requiring airlines to check the names of passengers on those flights, agency spokesman Mark Hatfield said Thursday.
The goal would be to add one more level of protection against hijackings, the tactic used on Sept. 11, 2001.
Cliff Mackay, president of the Air Transport Association of Canada, said Canadian and U.S. officials are discussing the idea.
Shooting investigated as “mercy killing’
A 78-year-old stroke victim was shot to death in her hospital bed, apparently by her husband, who was killed by police at his home later in the day when he ignored warnings to drop his gun.
Inge Brown, who had Alzhei mer’s disease and was to be placed in a nursing home, was shot twice in the head Tuesday at Mount Carmel East Hospital, the Franklin County Coroner said. Authorities said her 76-year-old husband, Harry, was believed to be the shooter, and they were investigating it as a mercy killing.
When police went to the Browns’ apartment, they spoke with Harry Brown for several minutes outside before he pulled out a gun. He was shot after he ignored officers’ warnings to drop the weapon.
Nearly all samples of killer flu recovered
At least 99 percent of the killer flu samples mistakenly sent to laboratories around the world by a medical supply house have been recovered and destroyed, and there have been no infections, the government said Thursday.
Health officials have been scrambling since it was learned nearly two weeks ago that a dangerous strain was sent to 3,757 labs in the United States and 18 countries.
Only a “few stragglers’ – about three dozen labs – have not yet destroyed the samples, and health officials are working feverishly to make sure they do so, said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Man sent to prison for pit bull videos
A man was sentenced to more than three years in prison Thursday for selling videotapes of fighting pit bulls.
Robert Stevens, 64, of Pittsville, Va., became the first person sentenced under a 1999 federal animal-cruelty law. He was convicted in January of three counts of selling depictions of animal cruelty.
Stevens – tried in Pittsburgh because the tapes sold from his home were bought by the Pennsylvania state police and federal agents – sold two videos featuring dogfighting and a third showing pit bulls attacking hogs.
Gay-marriage bill passes lower house
The lower house of the Spanish Parliament approved the Socialist government’s gay-marriage bill Thursday, a major step toward making traditionally Roman Catholic Spain the third European country to legalize same-sex marriages.
The bill, which also will pave the way for gay couples to adopt children, will now go to the Senate – where the Socialists have ample support – for final approval in the coming weeks. Belgium and the Netherlands are the only other European countries that have legalized gay marriages.
The bill passed by a 183-136 vote, with six abstentions.
Funerary complex 56 centuries old
Archaeologists digging in a 5,600-year-old funeral site in southern Egypt unearthed seven corpses believed to date to the era, as well as an intact figure of a cow’s head carved from flint.
The American-Egyptian excavation team made the discoveries in what they said was the largest funerary complex ever found that dates to the elusive 5-millennia-old Predynastic era, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said Wednesday.
The team working for five years in the area of Kom El-Ahmar, known in antiquity as Hierakonpolis, excavated a complex thought to belong to a ruler of the ancient city who reigned around 3600 B.C.
U.S. quietly arming national police force
The United States has quietly given thousands of guns to the Haitian National Police and is moving to approve the sale of thousands more despite a 14-year arms embargo and allegations that the force is corrupt, brutal and responsible for unjustified killings, U.S., U.N. and Haitian officials said this week.
The officials said police are outgunned by gangsters and must be better armed.
The State Department is preparing to notify Congress that it wants to permit U.S. companies to sell the Haitian police $1.9 million worth of equipment, including 3,000 .38-caliber pistols, several hundred rifles and shotguns, and nonlethal equipment for crowd control, the spokesman said.
