USA
For the second time in less than a year, officials at Virginia Tech ordered the campus closed after a shooting incident. Students were under lockdown Monday after a gunman killed 21 people and wounded 21 others before being shot to death himself. In August, an escaped inmate who allegedly killed a hospital guard fled to the campus. He faces murder charges.
Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student-loan provider, agreed Monday to sell the company for $25 billion to a group of investors led by private-equity firm J.C. Flowers & Co.
The fundraising prowess of the top three Democratic presidential candidates was laid out in first-quarter financial reports released Sunday. US Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois raised $24.8 million for the primary season, with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York next, at $19 million, followed by John Edwards, the Democrats' vice presidential nominee in 2004, with $13 million. Clinton led all candidates with $24 million in the bank.
A ceremony was held Sunday in Miami Beach, Fla., to add the name of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl to the 30,000 etched on the Holocaust Memorial Wall. Although Pearl was killed by Islamic militants after being abducted in Pakistan in 2002, his father, Judea Pearl, said there was a thread of hatred tying his son's death to those of Holocaust victims. Three of Pearl's captors are serving life sentences; a fourth was sentenced to death.
World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, the former No. 2 man at the Pentagon, said Sunday he intends to stay in his job despite a flap about the high-paying promotion of his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, who has left the bank to work at the State Department. The board of the international lending institution has voiced "great concern" over Wolfowitz's approval of Riza's promotion.
Global warming poses a national security threat by exacerbating frictions over water and other shortages, 11 high-ranking, retired military leaders said in a report released Sunday by The CNA Corp., a think tank. The authors called on the federal government to make major cuts in emissions that cause climate change.
More than 200 players, including every member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, wore No. 42 Sunday to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's integration of Major League Baseball in 1947.
