Tulsa police shoot, kill hostage taker
TULSA, Okla. — A Tulsa police sniper fatally shot an armed man who authorities say forced his way into his estranged wife’s home and held her 2-year-old daughter hostage.
Tulsa police spokesman Leland Ashley said the man was shot and killed early Tuesday. Ashley said an officer shot the man as he stood in the doorway of a second-floor balcony.
Ashley told the Tulsa World that the man, who wasn’t immediately identified, had pointed his gun at officers and the child, and that the sniper opened fire out of concern for the girl’s safety.
Ashley said the officer who fired the fatal shot has been placed on paid leave. The shooting comes less than a month after a Tulsa officer was charged with manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man.
Kansan’s term 15 months in bomb plot
TOPEKA, Kan. — A Kansas man was sentenced Tuesday to 15 months in prison for helping a jihadi’s plot to plant what the two thought was a bomb at an Army base.
Alexander Blair, 29, also was sentenced to two years of supervised probation. He was accused of lending $100 to 21-year-old John Booker Jr. to store what they thought was an explosive device. Prosecutors said Booker intended to detonate it outside Fort Riley in northeast Kansas in support of the Islamic State militant group. The device was a fake bomb built by FBI informants.
Blair pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in May. U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree said from the bench that he regretted that federal anti-terrorism laws required him to treat Blair as if Blair had multiple criminal convictions despite Blair’s previously “spotless” record. The judge also said he concluded — as Blair’s attorney had argued — that an unusual genetic personality condition made Blair “susceptible” to manipulation by Booker.
Prosecutors had pushed for the maximum five-year prison sentence, but Crabtree said it would be too harsh for Blair’s relatively small role in the conspiracy. Yet the judge also rejected the defense’s request for five years of probation, saying it would not be enough punishment when Blair “understood the connection” between his loan and Booker’s attempt to bomb the Army base.
Booker, who is also from Topeka, pleaded guilty in February to two felonies under an agreement calling for him to serve 30 years in prison, but he hasn’t been sentenced. He was arrested in April 2015 outside Fort Riley, about 60 miles west of Topeka, as he was trying to arm what he thought was a 1,000-pound explosive device.
Candidate’s wife pleads in ‘pot’ case
SALT LAKE CITY — Donna Weinholtz, the wife of the Democratic candidate for governor in Utah, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor marijuana-possession charges in connection with 2 pounds of the drug found at their home.
Weinholtz, 61, was charged after postal workers found a small amount of marijuana she tried to mail to the couple’s home in California earlier this year.
Weinholtz pleaded guilty to two counts, possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. She agreed to serve one year of probation and pay a $3,800 fine in the plea deal.
She said marijuana was the best way for her to treat arthritis and degenerative spinal conditions that left her unable to get out of bed, sometimes for weeks.
“I, like many Utahns, made a deliberate and conscious decision to use cannabis knowing full well that it is against the law,” she said. “I have faith the law will change.”
Hours later, her husband, Mike Weinholtz, campaigned for the legalization of medical marijuana.
During an emotional news conference, he said current laws leave doctors with little choice but to prescribe powerful painkillers with a risk of addiction that have made opioid drugs an epidemic in Utah and elsewhere.
End seen to 16-month record-heat run
WASHINGTON — Earth’s 16-month streak of record-high temperatures is over, according to some federal meteorologists.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last month’s 60.6 degrees was merely the second-hottest September on record for the globe. That’s slightly cooler — a few hundredths of a degree — than the record set in 2015. But it was still warmer — 1.6 degrees — than the average for the 20th century.
Global average temperatures include both land and sea surface readings. And while oceans were cooling off a tad, global land temperatures in September still set a record high, administration climate scientist Jessica Blunden said. It was an unusually hot month in much of Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.