Cops: Remains may be those of missing UVa. student

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Police searchers found human remains on Saturday that could be those of a University of Virginia sophomore who has been missing since Sept. 13.

Further forensic tests are needed to confirm whether the remains are those of Hannah Graham, but Graham's parents were notified of the preliminary findings, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo told a news conference.

The Albemarle County Police Department also said a volunteer search for Graham that had been planned for Sunday has been canceled so law enforcement can turn their attention to the new evidence.

Longo said a search team from the Chesterfield County Sheriff's Office found the remains on an abandoned property in southern Albemarle County — the same region where police found the body of 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington three months after she vanished in 2009.

Last month, after arresting a suspect in Graham's disappearance, police said they found a "forensic link" between the two cases.

Thousands of volunteers had searched for the 18-year-old Graham in the weeks since her disappearance.

View galleryCharlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, right,  and …
Charlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, right, and Albermarle County police Col. Steve Sellers, lef …
"Countless hours, thousands of hours, have been spent by literally hundreds of law enforcement, civilian volunteers in an effort to find Hannah," Longo said. "We think perhaps today proved their worth."

Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., 32, has been charged with abduction with intent to defile Graham. A preliminary hearing is set for Dec. 4 on the charge. In the meantime, Matthew is being held in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.

Albermarle County Police are now taking over the investigation. County Police Chief Steve Sellers said anyone who may have seen suspicious activity in the area or may have seen someone who fits Matthew's description in the area after Graham's disappearance, should contact police.

"Today's discovery is a significant development and we have a great deal of work ahead of us," Sellers said. "We cannot and we will not jump to any conclusions regarding today's discovery, so I ask for the public's patience as we move forward and pursue what is now a new ongoing death investigation."

Police officials Saturday afternoon had blocked the road leading to the site where the remains were found.

View galleryPolice block the road leading to the scene of a death …
Police block the road leading to the scene of a death investigation in connection with the disappear …
Surveillance videos captured some of what Graham did the night she vanished. Authorities say she met friends at a restaurant for dinner Sept. 12 before stopping by two parties at off-campus housing units. She left the second party alone and eventually texted a friend saying she was lost, authorities said.

She can be seen walking unsteadily and even running at times, past a pub and a service station and then onto a seven-block pedestrian strip that includes the Tempo Restaurant.

Tempo Restaurant owner Brice Cunningham has said Graham appeared to be incapacitated as she walked away with Matthew. Police have said they have no reason to believe she and Matthew knew each other before their encounter.

Matthew, an operating room technician at the university's hospital who sometimes drives a taxi, had been drinking at the bar earlier that night before he encountered Graham, Cunningham has said.

A week after Graham went missing, Longo publicly described Matthew in detail without naming him, saying investigators wanted to talk to the "person of interest" and had searched his apartment because he was the last person to see her.

View galleryCharlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, wears a Find …
Charlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, wears a Find Hannah button as he and Albermarle County poli …
Matthew showed up at police headquarters, asked for a lawyer, and then sped away, according to a police account. His exit prompted a warrant for "reckless driving," a charge that Longo cited as he named the suspect and appealed for information from anyone who saw him with Graham the night she disappeared.

Matthew was arrested a few days later in Galveston, Texas.

While Matthew was a fugitive in Texas, Virginia police added a charge of abduction with intent to defile, a violent felony that under Virginia law compels suspects to submit to DNA testing.

Very quickly thereafter, Virginia State Police announced a "forensic link" to Harrington's killing. That case, in turn, has been linked by DNA evidence since 2012 to the rape of a woman in Fairfax, Virginia, who survived after a passer-by startled her attacker, the FBI has said.

Following Matthew's arrest, Christopher Newport University released a statement noting that he had been named in a police file involving a Sept. 7, 2003 sexual assault on the Newport News campus. Matthew was a student there from January 2003 through Oct. 15, 2003.

Matthew had transferred to CNU after three years at Liberty University, where he also was briefly on the football team.

When he was at Liberty University, he was accused of raping a student on campus. That charge was dropped when the person declined to move forward with prosecution, Lynchburg Commonwealth's Attorney Michael Doucette said.

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Associated Press Writer Brock Vergakis in Norfolk, Virginia, contributed to this report.

1st Dallas nurse with Ebola arrives in Maryland

FREDERICK, Maryland (AP) — The first nurse to be diagnosed with Ebola after treating an infected Liberian man at a Dallas hospital walked gingerly down the stairs of an executive jet into a waiting ambulance at a fog-shrouded airport Thursday.

Nina Pham was being transported to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center near Washington for treatment in a specialized isolation unit. The NIH campus is in Bethesda, about 35 miles from the Frederick Municipal Airport where she arrived shortly after 10:30 p.m. EDT.

The agency said staff specializing in infectious disease and critical care will treat the 26-year-old nurse at the isolation unit, one of four in the nation.

Reporters, who were kept more than 100 yards from the plane by police, watched the patient in protective clothing exit the aircraft, helped by similarly garbed workers on the ground. The process took about 30 minutes, from the plane's landing to the ambulance's departure, escorted by police cars with flashing lights.

The event in a remote corner of the airport attracted a small crowd of onlookers. Ashley King, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from nearby Walkersville, carried a large sign reading, "Get well soon, Nina."

King said she wanted to "get some positive thoughts going."

Officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas said Wednesday that Pham was in good condition.

Pham was seen for the first time since her diagnosis in a video shot in her Dallas hospital room and posted online by the hospital's parent company Thursday. In the video, she smiles as she sits upright in a hospital bed while a man identified as her treating physician can be heard thanking her for getting well and being part of the volunteer team that took care of Thomas Duncan, who died of Ebola last week.

"Come to Maryland. Everybody," Pham laughs into the camera before wiping away tears with a tissue handed to her by an attendant in full protective gear

How Ebola was discovered

With health officials around the world scrambling to stop the Ebola outbreak, it's worth taking a look back at how the deadly virus was first discovered.

In 1976, Peter Piot, then a 27-year-old microbiology student in Belgium, was studying infectious diseases when the lab he was working in received a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had died in Zaire.

"It came with a question mark, 'Yellow fever or not?'" Piot told the Wall Street Journal. "So we isolated the virus and to our big surprise, when we looked at the virus under our electron microscope, it was something completely different than what we had expected."

Piot sent the sample to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which confirmed it was indeed a new virus.

Piot and his colleagues then traveled to Zaire to study what he called "an epidemic of unknown origin and transmission."

"It was really frightening," Piot said. "You ask, 'Is this transmitted by mosquitoes? By food? By water?' ... you try to see, 'What is the pattern?'"

Those who died from the virus, the team discovered, were mostly pregnant women in their 20s and 30s who had been to the same antenatal clinic.

"It turned out that nearly everybody received an injection," Piot said. "The problem was that there were only five syringes and needles."

Those syringes and needles were reused over and over again, spreading the virus.

Piot, now director and professor of global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says he is shocked at the scale of the current outbreak — and fears that the isolation and contact tracing utilized by health workers won't be able to contain it.

According to the World Health Organization, there have been 9,216 reported cases of Ebola in seven nations since the outbreak began in West Africa, and 4,555 deaths associated with the disease.

“Something that is easy to control got completely out of hand," Piot told London's Guardian newspaper earlier this week. "It may be that we have to wait for a vaccine to stop the epidemic."

Sick woman at Dallas train station not on Ebola watchlist: official

A Dallas bus and train station was closed on Saturday after a report that a woman fell ill at the facility, but the transit authority denied an earlier report that the woman had been on a watchlist for possible exposure to Ebola.

The woman exited a northbound train at the White Rock Station and vomited, leading the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system to close the station as a precaution.

"The person being treated by Dallas Fire Rescue at White Rock Station is NOT on any Ebola watchlist," Morgan Lyons, a DART spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

"There are no indications of any biohazards or spills on any vehicle she has used," said Lyons. "We're inspecting the train and the platform and will clean the facility and vehicle as needed consistent with our protocol."

Earlier, a Dallas television station reported the woman had been one of the people in the area monitored for possible exposure to the often-fatal Ebola virus.

The incident highlights the heightened state of awareness of the dangers of spreading the disease, especially in Dallas, where a Liberian national became the first person infected with the virus to die in the United States. Two nurses who cared for him have also contracted the virus.

(Reporting By Frank McGurty and Grant McCool)

Ebola scare at Pentagon after woman vomits in parking lot

By Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon was gripped by an Ebola scare on Friday after a woman vomited in a parking lot, triggering authorities to send in a HazMat team and shut off part of the military complex before concluding she did not have the deadly virus.

The Pentagon initially said in a statement that the woman indicated she had "recently visited Africa."

But her employer told Reuters she had not traveled abroad recently and local county health authorities later acknowledged that her travel history had been uncertain.

"Based on the public health investigation, which included the travel history of a woman who became ill this morning in a Pentagon parking lot ... medical authorities are confident that she does not have Ebola," the local health authorities said in a statement.

The public health investigation also included questioning of the woman by medical staff, they said.

View galleryEmergency workers in hazmat suits work in a Pentagon …
Emergency workers in hazmat suits work in a Pentagon parking lot after a woman who recently traveled …
There has been mounting alarm in the United States about the risks from Ebola after two nurses who cared for an Ebola patient in Texas contracted the virus. Ebola has killed more than 4,500 people, mostly in West Africa.

The incident outside the Pentagon triggered emergency protocols. The Arlington County Fire Department sent emergency medical aid and a HazMat response team, and the Pentagon closed down part of the parking lot and one of its entrances.

Since the woman had briefly boarded a bus before falling ill, the vehicle and its passengers were stopped for about four hours, one passenger recounted to Reuters. The passengers included uniformed Marines headed to a Marine Corps ceremony attended by top brass and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

The Pentagon later said the passengers were being screened.

"An investigation of this person and her illness led investigators to believe at the time that they were potentially dealing with a person with an infectious disease," it said.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Mohammad Zargham, Frances Kerry and Ken Wills)

Goliath Encounter: Puppy-Sized Spider Surprises Scientist in Rainforest

Piotr Naskrecki was taking a nighttime walk in a rainforest in Guyana, when he heard rustling as if something were creeping underfoot. When he turned on his flashlight, he expected to see a small mammal, such as a possum or a rat.

"When I turned on the light, I couldn't quite understand what I was seeing," said Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

A moment later, he realized he was looking not at a brown, furry mammal, but an enormous, puppy-size spider.

Known as the South American Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), the colossal arachnid is the world's largest spider, according to Guinness World Records. Itsleg span can reach up to a foot (30 centimeters), or about the size of "a child's forearm," with a body the size of "a large fist," Naskrecki told Live Science. And the spider can weigh more than 6 oz. (170 grams) — about as much as a young puppy, the scientist wrote on his blog. [See Photos of the Goliath Birdeater Spider]

Some sources say the giant huntsman spider, which has a larger leg span, is bigger than the birdeater. But the huntsman is much more delicate than the hefty birdeater — comparing the two would be "like comparing a giraffe to an elephant," Naskrecki said.

The birdeater's enormity is evident from the sounds it makes. "Its feet have hardened tips and claws that produce a very distinct, clicking sound, not unlike that of a horse's hooves hitting the ground," he wrote, but "not as loud."

Prickly hairs and 2-inch fangs

When Naskrecki approached the imposing creature in the rainforest, it would rub its hind legs against its abdomen. At first, the scientist thought the behavior was "cute," he said, but then he realized the spider was sending out a cloud of hairs with microscopic barbs on them. When these hairs get in the eyes or other mucous membranes, they are "extremely painful and itchy," and can stay there for days, he said. [Creepy-Crawly Gallery: See Spooky Photos of Spiders]

But its prickly hairs aren't the birdeater's only line of defense; it also sports a pair of 2-inch-long (5 centimeters) fangs. Although the spider's bite is venomous, it's not deadly to humans. But it would still be extremely painful, "like driving a nail through your hand," Naskrecki said.

And the eight-legged beast has a third defense mechanism up its hairy sleeve. The hairs on the front of the spider's body have tiny hooks and barbs that make a hissing sound when they rub against each other, "sort of like pulling Velcro apart," Naskrecki said.

Yet despite all that, the spider doesn't pose a threat to humans. Even if it bites you, "a chicken can probably do more damage," Naskrecki said.

Bird eater or mostly harmless?

Despite its name, the birdeater doesn't usually eat birds, although it is certainly capable of killing small mammals. "They will essentially attack anything that they encounter," Naskrecki said.

The spider hunts in leaf litter on the ground at night, so the chances of it encountering a bird are very small, he said. However, if it found a nest, it could easily kill the parents and the chicks, he said, adding that the spider species has also been known to puncture and drink bird eggs.

The spider will eat frogs and insects, but its main prey is actually earthworms, which come out at night when it's humid. "Earthworms are very nutritious," Naskrecki said.

Birdeaters are not very common spiders. "I've been working in the tropics in South America for many, many years, and in the last 10 to 15 years, I only ran across the spider three times," Naskrecki.

After catching the specimen he found in Guyana, which was female, Naskrecki took her back to his lab to study. She's now deposited in a museum.

Editor's Note: If you have an amazing spider photo you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Jeanna Bryner at LSphotos@livescience.com.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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Disabled Russian container ship towed away from British Columbia coast

PRINCE RUPERT, British Columbia –  A large tug boat was pulling a disabled Russian cargo ship along British Columbia's coast, ending fears that the vessel carrying hundreds of tons of fuel would drift ashore, hit rocks and spill.

Lt. Paul Pendergast of the Canadian Forces' Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre said the Barbara Foss arrived Saturday evening and the tow of the Simushir was going well.

Pendergast said authorities will wait until the Simushir is comfortably north of Haida Gwaii before they make a decision on where it will be towed. Prince Rupert is the nearest container ship port, 93 nautical miles away.

The Simushir lost power late Thursday off Haida Gwaii, also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, as it made its way from Everett in Washington state to Russia.

The Coast Guard ship Gordon Reid earlier towed the disabled ship away from shore, but a towline got detached and the ship was adrift again for six hours Saturday.

The 10 crew members were trying to repair the broken oil heater that has left the vessel disabled, Royal Canadian Navy Lt. Greg Menzies said.

The fear of oil spills is especially acute in British Columbia, where residents remember the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. Such worries have fed fierce opposition -- particularly from environmentalists and Canada's native tribes -- to a proposal to build a pipeline that would carry oil from Canada's Alberta oil sands to a terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia, for shipment to Asia. Opponents say the proposed pipeline would bring about 220 large oil tankers a year to the province's coast.

The president of the Council of the Haida Nation warned Friday that a storm coming into the area was expected to push the ship onto the rocky shore, but President Pete Lantin later said their worst fears had subsided.

"If the weather picks up it could compromise that, but as of right now there is a little sense of relief that we might have averted catastrophe here," Lantin said.

About 5,000 people live on the islands and fish for food nearby, Lantin said.

The Simushir, which is about 440 feet long, was carrying a range of hydrocarbons, mining materials and other related chemicals. That included 400 tons of bunker oil and 50 tons of diesel.

The vessel is not a tanker but rather a container ship. In comparison, the tanker Exxon Valdez, spilled 35,000 metric tons of oil.

A spokesman for Russian shipping firm SASCO, the owners of the vessel, said it is carrying 298 containers of mining equipment in addition to heavy bunker fuel as well as diesel oil for the voyage.

The U.S. Coast Guard had a helicopter on standby in the event that the crew members need to be pulled off the ship.  Officials said the injured captain was evacuated by helicopter, but they were given no further medical details.

The Simushir is registered in Kholmsk, Russia, and owned by SASCO, also known as Sakhalin Shipping Company, according to the company's website. The SASCO website says the ship was built in the Netherlands in 1998.

Former Iraqi pilots training ISIS fighters to fly captured Syrian jets, rights group says

ISIS could be soon taking its terror fight to the sky, after a report that former Iraqi pilots are training Islamic militants to fly captured Syrian war planes.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group says some ex-Iraqi air force pilots are training members of ISIS to fly three warplanes—believed to be MiG-21 and MiG-23 jets-- captured from air bases in Syria.   

The rights group reported the planes flying over the Jarrah air base in the eastern countryside of the Syrian town of Aleppo this week.

Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Observatory, said the planes have been flying at a low altitude, apparently to avoid being detected by Syrian military radar in the area.

"People saw the flights, they went up many times from the airport and they are flying in the skies outside the airport and coming back," the BBC reportedAbdurrahman said.

The report, which could not be independently verified, comes as the U.S. and its allies are bombing Islamic State group bases in Syria and Iraq, where the extremists have seized large swaths of territory.

U.S. Central Command spokesman Col Patrick Ryder told reporters Friday the Pentagon was "not aware" of ISIS conducting any flight operations in Syria or elsewhere.

"We continue to keep a close eye on (ISIS) activity in Syria and Iraq and will continue to conduct strikes against their equipment, facilities, fighters and centers of gravity, wherever they may be," Ryder said.

"We don't have any operational reporting of (ISIS) flying jets in support of ISIS activity on the ground and so I cannot confirm that. And to the degree that pilots may have defected and joined the ranks of ISIS, I don't have any information on that either,"  General Lloyd Austin, head of the U.S. military's Central Command told a Pentagon news briefing Friday.

ISIS is known to have seized fighter jets from at least one air base it captured from the Syrian army in the eastern Raqqa province earlier this year. Militant websites had posted pictures of fighters with the aircraft, but it was unclear if they were operational.

ISIS has regularly used weaponry taken from the Syrian and Iraqi armies and has overrun several military bases but this would be the first time it has had the capability to pilot warplanes, Reuters reported.

Abdurrahman said Islamic State members were being trained by Iraqi officers who had joined the group and who were once pilots under former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

It’s unclear how many Iraqi pilots have defected.

The Jarrah air base was seized by Islamic groups including al Qaeda's Syrian branch, the Nusra Front, in early 2013. It was captured by ISIS militants in January this year.

The countryside east of Aleppo is one of the main bases of ISIS in Syria. The al Qaeda-linked group controls up to a third of the territory of Syria, where various rebel groups have been battling against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad for more than three years.

Meanwhile, Iraqi forces launched an attack on ISIS militants near Tikrit, the BBC reported Friday. The Iraqi city was among the areas seized by ISIS this year. The Iraqi government said its troops had gained ground to the north and west of Tikrit and cut off access to a significant ISIS supply route.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Giants fan who caught game-winning home run ball gives it back

SAN FRANCISCO –  A lifelong San Francisco fan had a piece of team history in his hands Thursday night: the home run ball that sent the Giants to the World Series.

Then he gave it back.

Frank Burke, who owns a transmission repair business in Oakdale told the San Jose Mercury News that he wanted the hitter, Travis Ishikawa, to have the ball.

"Ishikawa is the guy who hit the ball," Burke said. "I'm just the lucky guy who caught it."

So after having it authenticated by a Giants official and learning Ishikawa wanted it back, Burke went down to the clubhouse area and handed it over. Ishikawa gave him a signed bat in return.

Burke said he had asked for World Series tickets, but was told that might not be possible.

"So I said, 'All right. I was going to give the ball back either way,'" he said.

After doing a media interview the next morning, he got a call from the Giants. Burke now has four tickets to Game 3 of the World Series at San Francisco's AT&T Park on Friday night. It will be the Giants' first home game against the Kansas City Royals.

Burke was at Thursday's game with his friend, Greg Leutza, who is battling cancer. Burke wanted to do something special for Leutza and went searching for tickets after the Giants won the National League Division Series, he told another newspaper, The Modesto Bee.

Ishikawa's drive came their way as they sat above the stadium's right field wall in the ninth inning with two Giants on base.

"My main thought was to keep it in front of me and don't let it fall to the field," Burke told the Modesto paper.

The ball went off his left hand, but he was able to corral it. Burke posed triumphantly with the ball for photos and said he gave other fans a chance to touch it as well.

Police: Woman spotted suspected cop killer in woods with gun and mud on face

The search for a Pennsylvania state trooper’s accused killer took on new urgency Saturday after a woman told police she spotted the man in a wooded area with his face caked in mud and carrying a rifle.

State police said the new sighting appears to be highly credible because it took place near the Pocono Mountain East High School where survivalist Eric Frein attended classes.  The woman told authorities she saw Frein dressed all in black a little after 9 p.m. Friday and that the distance between them was only 15 or 20 feet.

“We’re still searching,” Lt. Col. George Bivens said during a briefing Saturday afternoon updating the media on the search, which is now entering its sixth week.

Hundreds of state police have been searching a heavily wooded area near the home of Frein’s parents in Canadensis in the state’s rural northeast. Based on the sighting, Bivens said it appears Frein has moved about six miles south. He said the search area was being expanded to include Paradise and Pocono townships, lehighvalleylive.com reports.

State police said Frein is the gunman who ambushed two state police troopers at a state police barracks in Pike County late at night on Sept. 12. The attack killed Cpl. Bryon Dickson and badly wounded Trooper Alex Douglass.

Douglass left the hospital Thursday. “He’s in good spirits and doing well,” Bivens said.

Bivens said state police are testing blood found at two homes for a link to Frein.

Frein is a self-described survivalist. During the manhunt state police recovered documents which show Frein has held a grudge against law enforcement and government for a long period of time.

“We’re not going to rest,” Gov. Tom Corbett said at the news briefing, according to lehighvalleylive.com. “Nobody’s going to stop until we find this individual and he’s apprehended.”'