Cross Country
The Last Word in Long Sentences
He was called the 20th hijacker. After acting suspiciously at a Minnesota flight school, Zacarias Moussaoui was jailed weeks before 9/11 on immigration charges. The 37-year-old French-Moroccan ended up being the only person to be tried in the United States for those fateful crimes. In April, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the attacks, but last week, a jury in Alexandria, Va., spared him the death penalty, finding he had at best only tenuous ties to the plot. "America, you lost--I won," he taunted as he left the courtroom. But Judge Leonie Brinkema had the last word: "To paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot," she told him, "you will die with a whimper."
Meanwhile, another high-profile terrorism case concluded in Tampa, where former college professor Sami al-Arian had stood accused of secretly aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian agreed to a plea bargain, only to have a federal judge impose a sentence even tougher than that sought by prosecutors--57 months--followed by his deportation.
A New Way Out of New Orleans
You could call it an exit strategy, but this one may keep New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in the fight. With a May 20 election runoff against Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu looming, Nagin announced last week a new hurricane evacuation plan for the Big Easy. Declaring "there will be no shelter of last resort," Nagin is taking a tough line on moving people out of the city in order to avoid a repeat of the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when 100,000 people--many without automobiles--rode out the storm despite a mandatory evacuation order.
The new plan would make transport via bus and Amtrak rail more available to residents, who would no longer have the option of seeking shelter at public facilities like the Superdome. Landrieu criticized Nagin for not taking a tougher approach sooner. The hurricane season begins June 1.
Reliving a Tragic Mine Disaster
It was a week of despair and revelation in Buckhannon, W.Va., where the wrenching testimony of a dozen miners' families brought back the January night when their bodies were discovered in the Sago Mine. During hearings on what went wrong, survivors demanded to know why the mens' air packs failed to save them after an explosion trapped them 260 feet down. And the rescuer who first heard the moans of the lone survivor acknowledged that he mistakenly reported that the miners had survived. There were other twists, too: Federal investigators said lightning may have triggered the explosion, and they said tests show all the miners' air packs were activated and none used to full capacity--at odds with survivor Randal McCloy, who asserts that four packs failed. The miners'union is demanding testing on such equipment, and West Virginia now requires that extra air packs be stored underground.
Settlement in Schools Case
There are a few i's left to dot, and a few t's left to cross, but "the end is ... in sight," a federal judge said last week, for the 26-year-old court case over desegregating schools in Chicago. The school system and the U.S. Department of Justice reached a tentative agreement that would end federal oversight of the district by the 2007-08 school year. The school district has spent at least $2.5 billion on desegregation since the federal government filed suit in 1980, but most of the city's black and Hispanic students still attend class in racially isolated schools that mirror the city's housing patterns. School-system officials argue that it's nearly impossible to integrate the entire district, since only 9 percent of its students are white.
Righting Wrongs in Big Sky Country
Montana's sedition law made it a crime to publish or say anything "disloyal, profane, violent, scurrilous, contemptuous, or abusive" about the U.S. government, soldiers, or the American flag. It was unanimously passed by the state legislature in February 1918, during World War I. Over the next two years or so, 79 residents of the Big Sky State, many of them ethnic Germans, were convicted of violating the law, including 41 who were sent to prison. But last week, in a ceremony at the state capitol in Helena, Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a descendant of ethnic Germans, granted posthumous pardons to 78 of them (one was pardoned after the war). The gesture grew out of a book on sedition laws in the American West written by University of Montana journalism Prof. Clemens Work. Law students at the university then took up the cause of those convicted, leading to a petition for pardon being sent to the governor last month. In an earlier letter to Schweitzer, a group of more than three dozen professors, historians, and lawyers nationwide urged him to grant the pardons "to affirm Montana's commitment to free expression and to bring a measure of justice and redemption to these people and their living descendants."
With David E. Kaplan, Liz Halloran, Bret Schulte and Associated Press
This story appears in the May 15, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.