Sniper sentenced to six life terms
Sniper John Allen Muhammad was sentenced to six consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole Thursday and was expected to leave Montgomery County, Md., within 48 hours to return to Virginia, where he awaits execution.
Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge James L. Ryan imposed the sentence after a string of relatives spoke of their loss and devastation a few feet away from the man convicted of slaying six people in the county in October 2002 with a high-powered rifle.
“You chose the wrong county to stain with your acts of violence,” Ryan told him. “You, Mr. Muhammad, have no hope, no future.”
The trial in Maryland included the testimony of Muhammad’s accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, who said Muhammad pulled the trigger in most of the shootings and had sought to create far greater damage and carnage. Malvo has agreed to plead guilty in October.
DOERUN, Ga.
Army copter crash kills four soldiers
An Army helicopter clipped a wire on a television transmission tower and crashed Thursday, killing four members of an elite combat unit on a training mission, officials said.
A fifth soldier aboard the MH-47 Chinook helicopter suffered only minor injuries, said Lisa Eichhorn, a spokeswoman for Fort Rucker, Ala., home to an Army helicopter training school where the soldiers were headed.
The helicopter had left Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Ga., and went down in rural Colquitt County, about 170 miles west, said sheriff’s dispatcher Becky Perry.
It clipped a wire as it flew past a television station’s 1,000-foot tower, said Deborah Owens, station manager of WFXL.
The soldiers’ names were not immediately released.
CARACAS, Venezuela
OPEC maintaining production levels
OPEC countries, caught between soaring oil prices and rising crude inventories, took a pragmatic wait-and-see approach and left production quotas unchanged.
But members of the 11-country oil cartel also left their one-day meeting Thursday suggesting they might have to consider trimming output before long – an idea advanced most strongly by Venezuela.
Various members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said their hands were tied to do much about prices hovering above $70 a barrel because they were pumping nearly as much as currently feasible. They blamed high prices on bottlenecks at refineries, market speculation and tensions generated by the fighting in Iraq and the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
While high oil prices mean big profits for oil producers in the near term, the longer-term risk is that they could cause a drop-off in economic growth and energy consumption and spur the development of alternative energy sources.