Biden speaks to nuke summit attendees
WASHINGTON, April 12 (UPI) -- U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told foreign leaders and dignitaries assembled in Washington Monday a nuclear weapons-free world is an achievable goal.
The vice president told the luncheon gathering the United States "is committed to reducing the number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal and reducing their role in our defense." He cited the START treaty signed by the United States and Russia last week as a concrete step toward that commitment.
Biden went on to say President Barack Obama "has committed our country to seek peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."
"We believe that is ultimately an achievable goal, and that is our goal," he said, while acknowledging "some of the countries here and elsewhere believe that we have not been moving fast enough or that we can do more."
Biden said he hopes all nations can agree that adding more nuclear weapons or more nuclear-weapon states "is the exact wrong approach at this moment in the world's history, one that endangers the entire community of nations were we allow to happen."
He also said he hoped the representatives of more than 40 nations assembled for the nuclear summit can agree "controlling all nuclear materials that can produce a bomb is in the interest of every one of us gathered around this table and everyone in the world."
"As world leaders, we all know that there are extremist groups and non-state actors seeking that capability right now, seeking to gain access to nuclear materials to make a nuclear bomb," Biden said.
Obama spent the day conducting separate bilateral meetings with the leaders of several countries Monday, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, before officially kicking off the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.
Forty-six countries, the United Nations, the European Council and the International Atomic Energy Commission gathered in Washington to discuss ways to secure vulnerable nuclear material worldwide, the White House said.
Kaczynski plane crash probe find recorder
MOSCOW, April 12 (UPI) -- Investigators examining the weekend crash of the Polish president's plane recovered the voice recorder, and were considering the pilot's state of mind.
Specifically, they were focusing on why the pilot disregarded air traffic controllers' instructions to give up trying to land in bad weather in western Russia, The New York Times reported. All 96 people on board, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, were killed.
A transcript of cockpit conversations hasn't been released, but attention has been drawn to the pilot's state of mind because of a previous disagreement involving Kaczynski about whether to land in dangerous conditions.
Russian and Polish investigators said evidence initially indicated the plane didn't have any technical malfunctions, The New York Times reported.
On Monday, Russian specialists began building a road to help remove the plane wreckage, Russian news agency RIA Novosti said.
"Today work has begun to build a road on the territory of the military aerodrome. Otherwise, the fragments of the plane wreckage cannot be removed from boggy terrain," a spokesperson for the Smolensk regional administration said.
The road-building operation was expected to take several days, the regional administration spokesman said.
Kennedy cousin denied new homicide trial
HARTFORD, Conn., April 12 (UPI) -- The Connecticut Supreme Court Monday refused to grant a new trial for Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, convicted of murdering his 15-year-old neighbor.
Skakel's neighbor in Greenwich, Conn., Martha Moxley, was bludgeoned to death, probably with a broken 7-iron golf club found near her body, in 1975. But Skakel, the nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was not charged until 2000. He was convicted by a Connecticut jury in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years to life.
The Connecticut Supreme Court first affirmed his conviction in 2006, and his petition to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected the same year.
Skakel's lawyers filed a new state appeal, arguing there was prosecutor misconduct.
Monday, the Connecticut Supreme Court rejected the request for a new trial, saying Skakel's "claims are to a large degree resolved by our decision in his prior appeal from the judgment of conviction. In (the case, Skakel) claimed that he was entitled to a new trial because the state improperly had withheld certain exculpatory evidence," evidence, which tended to show his innocence.
The opinion said Skakel could still pursue habeas, or constitutional, review.
Mass grave halts road-building project
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia, April 12 (UPI) -- Discovery of a mass grave possibly dating to Stalin-era purges has interrupted construction of a road near Vladivostok, Russia, a contractor says.
Construction company owner Viktor Grebnov said human bones were first found at the road-building project in eastern Russian late last fall and work to remove them will resume this spring, RIA Novosti reported Monday.
"Construction at the site has stopped," the Russian news agency quoted Grebnov as saying. "The uncovered remains have been transferred to special containers. Now we are waiting for the earth to thaw so the remaining fragments can be carefully removed from the ground."
A company spokesman said the scale of the grave site, where witnesses said skulls and bones could be seen on the ground, was hard to determine and would be left to experts to investigate.
The site is not far from a memorial to victims of Josef Stalin's Communist regime from 1941 to 1953 and a local historian noted there had been a barracks for political prisoners a few miles away.
Millions of people were executed in political purges during Stalin's reign.
Poll finds fear of domestic terrorism
NEW YORK, April 12 (UPI) -- A strong majority of Americans thinks American-on-American terrorism is likely in the next year, poll results released Monday indicate.
The Angus Reid Public Opinion poll found 58 percent of the 1,005 people it surveyed April 6-7 think a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, carried out by Americans, is "very likely" or "moderately likely" to happen in the next year.
Even more Americans, 69 percent, think it is very likely foreigners will attack in the United States within 12 months, the poll indicates.
The poll also found 51 percent consider the anti-government groups Hutaree and Guardians of the Free Republics to be "terrorists" and 8 percent think of them as "freedom fighters." Hutaree members have been arrested in Michigan for allegedly plotting to kill law enforcement officers and the Guardian group recently sent letters to state governors across the country demanding they resign within three days or be removed.
The survey's margin of error is 3.1 percentage points.
