A threatening letter containing an unidentified white powder was sent to a campaign office for Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain in a south Denver suburb on Thursday, authorities said. No sicknesses were immediately reported.
A second letter sent to a McCain campaign office in New Hampshire initially was reported to contain threatening language and white powder.
Authorities said it was a false alarm and that there was no powder in the second envelope.
At least 19 people were examined at hospitals or were quarantined outside the Colorado office while authorities tried to determine whether the powder was hazardous, but everyone was sent home by late on Thursday, said Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson. He said the substance was not hazardous and not lethal, but that it would take days before they determined what it was.
Andy Lyon of the Parker South Metro Fire Rescue Authority said the return address on the envelope listed the Arapahoe Detention Center and the name of an inmate.
Sheriff’s officials said the inmate suspected of sending the letter with the substance was Marc Harold Ramsey, 39, who had been incarcerated since last September on investigation of felony menacing, harassment and second-degree assault on a peace officer. Ramsey may face federal felony charges for Thursday’s incident, sheriff’s officials said.
Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama on Thursday depicted John McCain as rich, out of touch and less a foreign-policy expert than he claims.
At a town hall meeting here, Obama was introduced by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine.
Speaking to supporters, Obama chided McCain for an interview he gave to the Politico Web site where he said he didn’t know how many homes he owns. McCain’s wife, Cindy, is an heiress to a large beer distributorship whose wealth is estimated to be at least US$100 million.
Property records reviewed by The Associated Press show McCain and his family appear to own at least eight homes in three states.
“If you’re like me and you’ve got one house, or you are like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective,” Obama said.
Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman, responded, saying: We’re delighted to have a debate on judgment with Barack Obama, who bought his own million-dollar mansion in a shady deal with a convicted felon.”
Rogers was referring to Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a businessman who has helped raise campaign money for Obama and many other Illinois politicians.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS