British police thwarted a suspected plot to kill the king of Saudi Arabia during a state visit to Britain last year, a senior officer said Wednesday. Officers caught a courier at Heathrow Airport attempting to smuggle $330,000 in cash into Britain to pay a cell of dissident Saudi Arabians, said Detective Superintendent Mark Holmes, head of the National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit. They were plotting to assassinate King Abdullah during his official visit to Britain in late October and early November – the first trip by a Saudi monarch to see Queen Elizabeth II in 20 years, Holmes said.
A Palestinian rocket struck a college campus in southern Israel Wednesday, killing one person and injuring a second, Israeli medics said. The Hamas militant group said it had fired more than 20 rockets into southern Israel, including eight at Sderot, the town near Gaza where the deadly strike took place. The rocket barrage came hours after an Israeli airstrike killed five Hamas militants earlier in the day.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress that the nation is in for a period of sluggish business growth and sent a fresh signal Wednesday that interest rates will again be lowered to steady the teetering economy. “The economic situation has become distinctly less favorable” since the summer, the Fed chief told the House Financial Services Committee. Since Bernanke’s last such comprehensive assessment last summer, the housing slump has worsened, credit problems have intensified and the job market has deteriorated.
Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to sex charges stemming from arranged marriages between teen girls and older men. Jeffs made his first court appearance Wednesday in Arizona. He was convicted in Utah last year of rape as an accomplice for his role in the arranged marriage of a 14-year-old girl and her cousin. Jeffs is the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints based in Colorado City, Ariz. and nearby Hildale, Utah.
The Illinois governor’s office says the building where a gunman opened fire at Northern Illinois University will be demolished. A gunman fatally shot five students attending a lecture inside Cole Hall on the campus in DeKalb before turning a gun on himself Feb. 14. Gov. Rod Blagojevich plans a news conference to announce funding to allow NIU to demolish Cole Hall. A new state-of-the-art classroom building will be built on the site and named Memorial Hall.
Florida’s largest utility says equipment failure and a fire at a Miami substation led to power outages that affected up to 3 million people. Florida Power & Light is still trying to determine what caused the failure and fire. The company said such equipment failure should not have caused the widespread blackouts. Officials with the company said about 20,000 people remained without power by 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. Most of those were because of outages caused by storms.
