The Communications Center received a 911 call from a resident in the 1300 block of North Pine Street at 4:29 a.m. Thursday reporting that someone was trying to force entry into his home, Police Spokeswoman Sherry Bowers said.

One dispatcher stayed on the line with the resident while the other dispatcher sent officers to the home. The resident updated the dispatcher with information as it occurred. Just before officers arrived at 4:30 a.m., the caller reported that the intruder made entry and was shot three times.

The Maine Department of Corrections is investigating to determine how the press obtained video and documents about a captain's treatment of an inmate last year.

The video and related documents recount how Capt. Shawn Welch, an official at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, used pepper spray on an inmate who was bound in a restraint chair, then left him in distress for more than 20 minutes. A story about the incident appeared in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram.

Scott Burnheimer, superintendent of the medium- and minimum-security prison, fired Welch over the incident, but that decision was overruled by Corrections Commissioner Joseph Ponte, who gave Welch a 30-day suspension, according to the documents and interviews.

The newspaper story and video posted on the paper's website led the chairmen of the Legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee to seek a review of the incident.

A vial containing a potentially harmful virus has gone missing from a laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, officials said.

The missing vial, which contains less than a quarter of a teaspoon of an infectious disease, had been stored in a locked freezer designed to handle biological material safely in the Galveston National Laboratory on UTMB's campus, officials said.

During a routine internal inspection last week, UTMB officials realized one vial of a virus called Guanarito was not accounted for at the facility.

Scott Weaver, the laboratory's scientific director, said Guanarito is an emerging disease that has caused deadly outbreaks in Venezuela.

In an extraordinarily emotive visit here aimed at rallying Israel’s current and future leaders to seize the chance for peace, U.S. President Barack Obama doubled down on U.S. security support with a new agreement to extend annual military aid through 2027.

The pending 10-year military aid package would commit Washington to provide up to $40 billion in additional Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grant assistance to Israel, sources here say. It would automatically kick in at the conclusion of the current 10-year, $30 billion agreement signed in 2007 under President George W. Bush and would bind Obama’s successor to continued military aid to Israel.

The current agreement elevated Israel’s annual grant aid from $2.4 billion to $3.1 billion, and Israeli officials expect the follow-on package to provide incremental boosts to nearly $4 billion per year.

At a joint March 20 news conference here with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama reiterated Washington’s “solemn obligation” to safeguard Israel’s “non-negotiable” security.

In what is believed to be the first time since the 1940s, the entire British defense staff will be here March 25 to discuss long-range strategy and the impact of budget cuts with their U.S. counterparts, according to U.S. and British sources.

The meeting is reminiscent of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, when British and American military leaders joined forces during World War II. Both nations are undergoing significant budgetary reductions and will continue to rely on each other in future years for support. Understanding what capabilities will survive and won’t is essential to long-term strategic planning.

“The relationship military to military is very strong. We have common interest in how we meet the financial constraints placed on both nations, but also on issues like how we manage the drawdown in Afghanistan and also how we reconfigure post Afghanistan,” said Sir Gerald Howarth, a member of parliament and the ex-defense minister responsible for international security affairs from 2010 to 2012.

U.S. and British military leaders regularly discuss ongoing issues. What’s different about this series of meetings is they will focus not on immediate budget, program or operational issues, but the strategic future of the Anglo-American alliance, including deepening cooperation.

Republican strategist Karl Rove said Sunday it’s conceivable that the next Republican presidential candidate might support gay marriage.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Rove was asked if he could “imagine the next presidential campaign, a Republican candidate saying flat out, I am for gay marriage.”

“I could,” Rove responded.

Support for same-sex marriage has since picked up steam in some quarters of the Republican Party. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who was, at one time, viewed as a potential vice presidential candidate to Mitt Romney, publicly endorsed gay marriage this month after learning two years ago his son was gay.

Kingdom’s state oil giant Aramco inked a deal Saturday with China’s Sinopec to build an oil refinery in Yanbu that will process 400,000 barrels per day, state news agency SPA said.

The project, named Yasref, aims to be operational in 2014, SPA reported.

The deal “represents a strategic partnership in the refining industry between one of the main energy producers in Saudi Arabia and one of the world’s most important consumers,” said Aramco president and CEO Khalid Al-Falih.

The Kingdom is China’s top oil provider.

Saudi Aramco and Sinopec have a long and successful history of forming joint ventures that develop and execute world-class mega-projects.

Saudi Aramco and Sinopec are partners (along with ExxonMobil) in the Fujian Refining and Petrochemical Company Limited in Fujian Province.

Saudi Aramco and Sinopec are also partners in Sino Saudi Gas Limited, one of the Kingdom’s gas exploration joint venture companies.

YASREF is Sinopec’s first international downstream investment and ushers a new chapter of partnership with Saudi Aramco.

YASREF possesses the location advantage to effectively and efficiently supply both international and domestic markets.

Sinopec is Saudi Aramco’s largest crude oil buyer.

Remember when Speaker John Boehner lamented that President Obama wanted to shove the Republican Party to the “dustbin of history”? Turns out, it’s not Obama who’s killing the GOP; it’s more of a suicide.

For those who pay attention, this should come as no surprise, but rather a “what took so long” response. Yes, America is on to the GOP. The Republican Party’s ratings now stand at a 20-year low.

Andrew Kohut, founding director and former president of the Pew Research Center and president of the Gallup Organization from 1979 to 1989, is a polling expert, so when he writes a column titled “The numbers prove it: The GOP is estranged from America”, it means something.

Writing in the Washington Post, Kohut compares the radical image problem of today’s GOP with that of the Democratic Party of the 1960s and early 1970s.

A herd of wild horses removed from an area off of Deer Run Road last month were purchased Saturday at a Bureau of Land Management adoption in Carson City.

The BLM-sanctioned silent bid adoption was held at Silver Saddle Ranch. The horses were bought for $850 by the Deer Run Preservation Group in a collaborative effort with the American Wildhorse Preservation Campaign.

About 100 people attended the auction, many of whom were supporting the group and its efforts to save the horses.

The horses will go to a 2,000-acre ranch in Northern California where they will live wild and free forever, said Annie Jantzen, spokeswoman for the group. Among the horses adopted are five adult mares, two males and two foals born recently at the Stewart Ranch.

"They will never see a pen, a saddle nor will they have to worry about their families being stripped away ever again," Jantzen said. "This is a huge victory for the horses."

When the president of Ohio's state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler. When a well-known conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust.

In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.

But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.
Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn't fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler's unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews' very tenuous odds of survival.

"Objectively, it might have made things worse" if the Jews who fought the Nazis in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland had more and better guns, said historian Steve Paulsson, an expert on the period whose Jewish family survived the city's destruction.