Virginia tribe plans burial for skull offered for sale on eBay

By: Associated Press Wire Reports | Monday, December 12, 2005 10:01 PM PST ∞

ROANOKE, Va. (AP) -- Virginia tribal leaders are planning a springtime burial for a possibly 300-year-old Indian skull that was turned over to them by a New York chiropractor, who found it in a closet and tried to sell it on eBay.

Kenneth Branham, chief of the Monacan tribe, believes the skull belonged to one of a group of American Indians whose remains were dug up in western Virginia in 1901.

New York City chiropractor Steven Mendola said he found the skull while cleaning out a closet in the office he took over from a chiropractor who had died. It had stickers bearing the words "Suponi" and "Roanoke, Va.," and the dates "1671-1701."

Mendola put the skull up for auction on eBay earlier this year, drawing bids of $150 and $152.50 and the attention of a Roanoke television news reporter.

WSLS-TV's Dan Reany figured out that "Suponi," which Mendola assumed was an Italian name, was actually a mangling of "Saponi," a tribe from the Roanoke area related to the Monacans who now live in the area.

That halted the eBay sale since federal law bans knowingly selling remains that could be those of American Indians.

Mendola talked to Branham and quickly turned the skull over to the tribe.

"It has a home," Mendola said. "It has to go back."

Branham is convinced the skull is of a Saponi from western Virginia. "That is our region," he said. Descendants of the Saponi now live in North Carolina.

The Virginia Council on Indians referred the Monacans to state archaeologist Joanna Wilson, who determined from the shape of the well-preserved skull's bones that it belonged to an American Indian, probably at least 50 years old.

Branham thinks it was among remains dating from the early 1700s that were dug up in Rockbridge County in 1901 and put on display in a museum in Richmond. The remains of more than 100 individuals were returned to the Monacans in 1999.

Branham said the Monacans plan to rebury the skull on the tribe's land on Bear Mountain in Amherst County, about 50 miles east of Roanoke.

Rapper Young Buck pleads no contest in Vibe Awards stabbing

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Nashville rapper David Darnell Brown, known as Young Buck, pleaded no contest Monday to a felony in the stabbing of a man during a melee at last year's Vibe Awards show.

Brown, 24, entered the plea to a charge of assault likely to produce great bodily harm and he was sentenced to three years of probation by Superior Court Judge James Brandlin.

The entertainer also was ordered to perform 80 hours of community service.

Brown was charged with stabbing show attendee Jimmy James Johnson, 27, after Johnson punched producer Dr. Dre during a melee at the Nov. 15, 2004, awards show at the Santa Monica Airport's Barker Hanger.

Johnson pleaded guilty Sept. 14 to felony assault and was sentenced to a year in jail. He also was placed on three years' probation.

Brown is signed to Dre's label as part of 50 Cent's G-Unit rap crew. His first solo album "Straight Outta Ca$hville," debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts last year. A collection of songs recorded before he signed with G-Unit was released last month as "T.I.P."

In August, the rapper pleaded not guilty to felony gun possession charges after he and fellow G-Unit member Lloyd Banks were arrested in a van after performing at New York's Madison Square Garden on the Anger Management 3 tour.

Brown is due in court in New York on Jan. 26.

In Appalachia, senior citizens charged with selling their prescription drugs

PRESTONSBURG, Ky. (AP) -- Dottie Neeley, 87, was fingerprinted, photographed and thrown in jail, imprisoned as much by the tubing from her oxygen tank as by the concrete and steel around her.

The woman -- who spent two days in jail after her arrest last December -- is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in a crackdown on a crime authorities say is rampant in Appalachia: Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts.

"When a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $10 apiece, they'll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries," Floyd County jailer Roger Webb said.

Since April 2004, Operation UNITE, a Kentucky anti-drug task force crated largely in response to rampant abuse of the powerful and sometimes lethal painkiller OxyContin, has charged more than 40 people 60 or older with selling primarily prescription drugs in the mountains.

"It used to be a rare occasion to have an elderly inmate," Webb said. "Five years ago it was a rarity."

Local jails are having to bear the increased cost of caring for old and often sickly inmates.

"You've got to give them more attention," Webb said. "It's putting a strain on my deputies. We're understaffed anyway. You've got to get them doctors, and meet their medical needs."

Researchers suspect the problem is not limited to Appalachia.

Elderly people "may be looking for a way to bring in a little extra money," said Erin Artigiani, deputy director of the University of Maryland Center for Substance Abuse Research. "We haven't heard a lot about senior citizens being a source of those drugs. We know college students do this. It's not much a stretch to think that seniors could do it, too."

Dr. Anita Cornett, a physician in Hyden, said one of her patients, a reformed drug addict, told her that he bought all his drugs not from a known dealer, but from elderly people.

Cornett said she does random drug screenings to make sure her patients are taking their prescription drugs instead of selling them. In addition, staffers routinely call patients and ask them to bring their prescription bottles in so that the pills can be counted.

The Rev. Doug Abner, pastor of Community Church in Manchester and an anti-drug activist, said senior citizens may not understand the seriousness of selling prescription drugs.

"They justify it because they're having a hard time financially," he said. "Left to ourselves, we can justify anything, but they're really part of the problem."

However, Dan Smoot, a former state police drug detective who heads the task force, said the elderly people being charged are not necessarily struggling to put food on the table.

"Most of the elderly we arrest are merely continuing a family tradition," he said. "It has been part of their culture for a long time."

Neeley, the old woman who was arrested along with her son and his girlfriend, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of trafficking in prescription drugs as well as marijuana.

However, a prosecutor has agreed not to oppose "shock probation" if Neeley enters a guilty plea at her next court appearance, Dec. 29. Under shock probation, a defendant who is unlikely to repeat the crime is released after getting a brief taste of life behind bars.

Her attorney, Terry Jacobs, said the plea bargain would be a gamble, because the judge could decide not to grant her shock probation, and "six months is a death sentence for her."

In a telephone interview, Neeley denied selling drugs. She said she suffers from emphysema and asthma and sometimes uses a wheelchair. She said she was shocked when police arrived to arrest her and made the 4-foot 8-inch, 120-pound woman walk from her house to a cruiser.

"I had to hold my hands up all the way," she said. "They wouldn't let me hold them down."

Her lawyer declined to discuss specifics of the charges. But speaking generally, he said: "You've got a depressed economy. You've got an opportunity for these folks to make money. If you're seeing a disproportionate number of elderly, it's because they are the people who are going to be prescribed most of the drugs."

Ex-Orange County judge pleads guilty child porn case

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A former Orange County judge who kept sexually explicit pictures of young boys on his home computer pleaded guilty Monday to four counts of having child pornography.

Ronald Kline, who served on the Superior Court bench, entered his plea in federal court in Los Angeles, the U.S. attorney's office said. Three other counts of child pornography were dropped as part of a plea agreement.

The deal recommends he face 27 to 33 months in federal prison, though the court will have discretion when he is sentenced on March 27. Kline faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years.

"We are pleased that he accepted responsibly after four years of litigation," said Deirdre Eliot, assistant U.S. attorney.

Kline's defense lawyer, Paul Meyer, said his client fully acknowledges his wrongdoing. He noted that the former judge has been on home confinement for four years and must forfeit state contributions to his pension as a result of the plea agreement.

"In many ways, he has already been punished for his conduct," Meyer said in a statement. "He looks forward to the day when he can once again return to a meaningful and productive life."

Kline, 65, of Irvine will be required to register as a sex offender once he is released from prison. Asked if authorities worried that Kline might pose a risk after prison, Eliot said "we have some concerns given the writings in his diary."

Prosecutors have said Kline's diary contained accounts of him following children in shopping malls and being attracted to boys when he worked as a volunteer baseball umpire.

Kline was originally charged with seven counts of possessing child pornography after a Canadian hacker used a computer program to download diary entries and other images from Kline's computers. The hacked information was turned over to Pedowatch, a Colorado watchdog group, which notified Irvine police.

In 2003, U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall said the hacker, Bradley Willman of British Columbia, was working as a government agent when he hacked Kline's computer, thus requiring a search warrant.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling last year, saying Irvine police had no advance knowledge that Willman was searching Kline's computer, so no warrant was needed.

Kline appealed to the state Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. It was sent back to federal court in March for trial.

Scientists discover frequent auroras on Mars

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Scientists studying bright auroras on Mars said they are surprised by the number of flashes the planet experiences.

Using six years of data from the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, researchers found evidence of about 13,000 auroras during that time. The larger the aurora, the higher the solar wind activity, researchers found.

"The fact that we see auroras as often as we do is amazing," said physicist David Brain of the University of California, Berkeley, who made the discovery.

The discovery came as a surprise because Mars lacks a widespread magnetic field that is the source of auroras on Earth. Auroras occur when charged particles streaming from the sun interact with different gases in Earth's atmosphere.

Martian auroras are probably linked to areas of strong magnetic fields in the crust in the southern hemisphere rather than a widespread field. Unlike Earth's colorful Northern Lights, the auroras on Mars are not as colorful and probably generate only ultraviolet light, researchers said.

Last year, the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft first detected a flash of UV light on Mars and another team identified it as an auroral flash.

Brain's discovery will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Millions of Mexicans journey to pay their respects to the Virgin of Guadalupe

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Wearing long feather headdresses, Aztec-style dancers spun in circles to beating drums Monday as millions of worshippers converged on Mexico's Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe to honor Latin America's patron saint.

Mexico City officials estimated more than 4 million pilgrims journeyed to the basilica in Mexico City to celebrate the appearance of the virgin before Indian peasant Juan Diego in 1531.

Police arrested 51 alleged gang members for rowdy behavior and disrupting the crowd, the Secretary of Public Security said in a news release. But the celebrations were generally peaceful. News reports initially said the detained were Central Americans, but police later said they were from Mexico.

Many of the worshippers came from remote villages, walking for days to reach the basilica and then crawling on their knees across its cement plaza to thank the virgin. Many credit the virgin with curing diseases, among other miracles.

The basilica, the most important Catholic shrine in the Americas, was built next to the hillside where the virgin is said to have appeared and where Indians had worshipped an Aztec mother goddess centuries ago.

In 2002, John Paul II canonized Juan Diego as the first Indian saint of the Americas, part of efforts by the church to counter Protestant gains in the traditionally Catholic region.

Attorneys for would-be millennium bomber appeal conviction

SEATTLE (AP) -- Lawyers for would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam asked a federal appeals court on Monday to overturn his conviction on one charge in the hopes of reducing his 22-year prison sentence.

Ressam, a 38-year-old Algerian, was convicted in 2001 of nine charges, most related to explosives and terrorism in what prosecutors alleged was a plot to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport.

The final charge alleged that he carried explosives during the commission of a felony, which was providing false information to customs agents. The count carried a mandatory 10 years in prison.

His attorneys, Thomas Hillier and Michael Filipovic, argued that prosecutors failed to prove Ressam had the explosives at the time he misidentified himself to authorities. They also argued the jury instructions on the charge were flawed.

Ressam was arrested on the eve of the millennium as he drove off a ferry from British Columbia with 124 pounds of bomb-making materials. Fears that he represented a potential terrorist attack prompted Seattle's mayor to cancel millennium celebrations at the Space Needle.

The U.S. attorney's office, which plans to appeal Ressam's sentence, saying it was too short, declined to comment. Federal prosecutors had asked for a 35-year sentence.

Ressam, facing up to 130 years in prison after being convicted, began cooperating with authorities in hopes of winning a reduced sentence. He told investigators from several countries about terrorist camps and disclosed the names of potential terrorists, the use of safe houses and other details.

Wisconsin radio station sells newsroom naming rights to bank

MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- A radio station has sold the naming rights to its newsroom, sparking some concern that advertisers had crossed a line that could influence news coverage.

The WIBA newsroom in Madison will be known as the Amcore Bank News Center beginning Jan. 1, a bank spokeswoman said.

"What listeners will hear on air is something like, 'Now from the Amcore Bank News Center, here's WIBA's Jennifer Miller,"' said Jeff Tyler, vice president of Clear Channel Radio-Madison, which owns WIBA-AM 1210 and FM 101.5.

The deal's financial terms weren't disclosed.

Tyler said there are many other examples of selling naming rights in broadcasting. Clear Channel Milwaukee's WISN-AM 1130 sold its newsroom naming rights to Pyramax Bank last year, he said.

Pyramax's senior vice president of marketing, Monica Baker, said the Milwaukee-area bank has sponsored the newscasts of six Clear Channel radio stations in Milwaukee since February 2004. She said the bank is not allowed to advertise any products during its on-air mention.

"We're not able to put a tag line in the actual sponsorship because they want to protect the integrity of the news," Baker said.

Tyler said producing news is getting expensive and the sale had to be done. He insisted it won't affect news content.

Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center, called it a bad move.

"The idea is that a newsroom is an advocate for the public," McBride said. "It's Madison's news, not Amcore's news. If you have corporate branding, that is going to taint the whole product."

Amcore Bank spokeswoman Katherine Taylor said the bank would not get preferential treatment.

"We don't go into it with that type of expectation and the media do not have that type of bias either," Taylor said.

Amcore regional president Jim Hartlieb said the deal will help build "brand awareness."

University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor James Baughman said he's not worried. Broadcasters often sold naming rights in the 1950s, he said.

"Clear Channel is trying to maximize its profits. Advertisers are trying to find new ways of getting their brand out there," he said. "We're going to be seeing more of this."

National Cathedral gets offspring of ancient 'Methuselah' tree

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The National Cathedral will celebrate the holidays this year with an unusual Christmas tree: a pine seedling whose parent is said to be the oldest known tree on earth.

The seedling is a gift from the Champion Tree Project International. It breeds and clones the world's oldest and largest trees in hopes of compiling a living archive of the genes that give them their longevity.

"It's older than the great pyramids, older than Stonehenge," project President David Milarch said of the 4,770-year-old "Methuselah" bristlecone pine whose cone bore the seedling the cathedral will receive. "When Christ walked the earth it was already 2,700 years old."

The Methuselah pine grows at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the White Mountains near the California-Nevada border. It gets its name from a Hebrew patriarch mentioned in Genesis who was supposed to have lived for 969 years, making him the embodiment of longevity.

Milarch said project participants got special permission from the U.S. Forest Service to collect cones from Methuselah, one of which yielded the National Cathedral's seedling.

"That's pretty good for a 5,000-year-old tree to be able to reproduce itself," Milarch said.

Cathedral staff hope to plant the seedling in a special grove of trees used by students at its elementary school. Those trees have biblical connections and other interesting horticultural features.

"It has a biblical reference and is therefore of educational and instructional value to the children," said Dede Petri, president of the All Hallow's Guild, the support group responsible for beautifying the cathedral's grounds.

The tree will be formally presented Wednesday at the Land Development Breakthrough Conference at the Washington Convention Center. Milarch's group will also announce that its scientists had successfully cloned the "Hippocrates tree" which since 1961 has been on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health in suburban Bethesda, Md.

That tree is said to be the offspring of the sycamore in Greece under which Hippocrates, the medical philosopher, lectured. It was a gift to the United States from the Greek ambassador, but has been sick lately. Its clone will join it on the NIH property, and hopefully fare better.

"Both trees are several thousand years old and their progeny will ensure that these trees live on in our nation's capital," Milarch said. "They're Christmas gifts."

Odds and Ends

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Looking for off-the-wall Christmas gift ideas? The Clark County coroner's office can help.

Tucked away in the office is a gift shop with items that walk a fine line between humor and morbidity. There's a coffee mug with the inscription "Playing for Keeps," a $10 fake jawbone that holds business cards and a T-shirt that reads "Coroner ... Cashed Out in Las Vegas."

"That's about as risque as we go," Assistant Coroner John Fudenberg told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "We certainly don't want to make a mockery of death."

Styled after a gift shop at the Los Angeles County coroner's office, the year-old Nevada store primarily benefits a coroner's youth program.

"The Jaw" cardholder has proven its best seller so far. The shop's "Coroner's Collection" also offers a faux Nevada license plate, patches, pens and other knickknacks.

"We're always looking for slogans or phrases that have a little bit of a dual meaning, because I think that is part of the hook," Coroner Mark Murphy said.

Fudenberg says television shows such as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" have increased demand in such items.

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URBANA, Ill. (AP) -- Physics Nobel Prize winner Tony Leggett didn't hesitate when he was asked to pose as Mr. January in a pinup calendar.

Not your typical pinup, Leggett's buff brain fronts a 2006 calendar from the University of Illinois that features some of the school's famous and not-so-famous gray matter.

The calendar uses MRIs to show the brains of a dozen people who work or study at the school's Urbana-Champaign campus, including Chancellor Richard Herman, women's basketball coach Theresa Grentz and Kai Nielsen, a carpenter in the campus maintenance shop.

The idea behind the calendar was to help raise the profile of the school's Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, known for its cutting-edge studies of intelligence, computers and nanotechnology.

"It's certainly not the usual way of us promoting our work," said Beckman director Pierre Wiltzius, whose own brain scan is part of the calendar.

The 2006 Big Brains on Campus calendar highlights a different brain function or ability each month. Leggett's brain, for example, depicts ingenuity and genius; Herman's shows arteries of the brain that provide it with energy.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- A man who tried to rob a grocery store might have gotten away with it had it not been for those meddling employees and customers.

The 40-year-old suspect left Russ' Market after stealing a cash drawer Saturday. But several customers and three managers followed him out the door and surrounded his pickup.

The man never brandished a weapon, Lincoln police Capt. Brian Jackson said.

"They were telling him, 'Put the cash drawer down. We've got your license number. You're not going anywhere,"' Jackson said.

The suspect got out of the vehicle and fled to a bank parking lot, where he tried unsuccessfully to steal a car.

The suspect fled again, but Russ' employees continued to follow him from a few yards behind. The man tried to hide behind a house, but employees told police his whereabouts when they arrived.

The man was arrested on suspicion of robbery.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Stop, like, trying to copy us, dude.

The City Council is trying to find ways to protect the name "Los Angeles" so other cities and organizations won't cash in on it.

Councilman Bernard Parks drafted a motion last year amid concerns the Anaheim Angels baseball team would benefit by changing its name to the Los Angeles Angels and thus erode the Los Angeles Dodgers' commercial appeal.

The Angels did indeed change the team's name to Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The city of Anaheim sued, but so far court rulings have gone in the team's favor.

The council's budget and finance committee heard briefly from staff last week on ways the city might protect the city's name.

"After a brief verbal briefing, we asked them to come back in six months and give us an update on the issue and also a report as to our legal standing," Parks said.

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