Bombs, blood, dozens of gunshots, billowing smoke, screaming teenagers, bodies sprawled on the gym floor – all of it fake – were part of the first school shooting exercise at Marine Corps Base Quantico, known as “the Crossroads of the Marine Corps.”

The exercise on Thursday gave a glimpse of training that has become a fact of life at schools, civilian and military, across the United States. Pete Russett, who ran the drill, said its planning had been spurred in part by the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre in December that claimed 26 lives.

“When that came it reiterated the importance of good planning for us, that it could happen at a school, that somebody would be crazy enough to shoot kids,” Russett, who oversees police and fire services at the sprawling base, told Reuters.

The exercise at Quantico, about 40 miles south of Washington, had been in the works for about a year but a double murder-suicide at the base’s Officer Candidates School in March gave it extra impetus, he said.

A burst of seven blank gunshots launched the exercise as two shooters in black T-shirts stormed through the main doors at Quantico Middle/High School, which was closed during the drill.

Two “students” – actually Marines chosen for their youthful appearance – fell inside the entrance. An exercise coordinator poured stage blood over them, a plastic drop cloth protecting the lobby floor.

AK-47 AND HANDGUNS

Armed with an AK-47 rifle and handguns, the gunmen – Marine Captain Josephy Reilly and Rick Scott, a private security contractor – methodically moved through the school trailed by yellow-vested coordinators.

The pair played the role of fictional student brothers, the Bushes, whose father’s death in Afghanistan had driven them over the edge. Like many participants, they wore body-mounted video cameras whose images could be analyzed later for training purposes.

A teacher was shot in a hallway and a bomb was placed in front of the library. In the gymnasium, Scott shot a school guard and gunned down 10 students, who lay writhing and groaning.

“Look at all that blood. I got you guys,” Scott taunted the men, waving the AK-47. Smoke filled the main hall from a second bomb and a fire alarm went off.

About five minutes after the attack began, Marine police entered the gym and shot down Scott. Reilly holed up in the cafeteria with hostages and began negotiating with police.

The exercise, which involved about 200 people from 12 agencies, came to an abrupt halt when a sniffer dog found the library bomb. Shouting “avalanche,” all the officers, including a tactical squad wearing body armor, left the building.

The tactical squad regrouped to assault Reilly in a shouting rush. They handcuffed him and freed the hostages, then checked the rest of the school, turning up real-life teachers who had locked themselves in classrooms and “students” hiding in restrooms.

Mike Gould, superintendent for Quantico’s school district, which reaches from Puerto Rico to New York, called the exercise “critically important.”

“We’ll learn from this drill and plan another one,” he said. The Quantico district is part of the Department of Defense’s Education Activity (DODEA) unit, which oversees dozens of U.S. military base schools for the children of military personnel.

A DODEA spokeswoman said there had never been a shooting incident at one of its schools.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

The Dalai Lama, a foremost Buddhist leader, told an audience at the University of Maryland at the start of a U.S. tour that the root of seemingly sectarian conflict was political, not spiritual.

“Really, killing people in the name of religion is unthinkable, very sad. Nowadays even Buddhists are involved in Burma,” another name for Myanmar, with monks attacking Muslim mosques, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said after delivering the Anwar Sadat Lecture for Peace at the university.

“I think it is very sad,” he said, adding, “I pray for them (the monks) to think of the face of Buddha,” who had been a protector of Muslims.

A wave of sectarian violence erupted in March in the central Myanmar town of Meikhtila, causing 44 deaths and displacing an estimated 13,000 people, mostly Muslims.

A Reuters investigation found that radical Buddhist monks had been actively involved in the violence and in spreading anti-Muslim material around the country.

Sectarian clashes between Buddhists and Muslims, who make up about 5 percent of Myanmar’s population, have erupted on several occasions since a quasi-civilian government took power in March 2011 after five decades of military dictatorship.

The 77-year-old Dalai Lama, whose name is Tenzin Gyatso, also urged his largely student audience of 15,000 to create a new world in the 21st century, saying that he was a man of the last century.

“That group of individuals of the 20th century are ready to say bye-bye,” Tibet’s most revered spiritual leader said. “You have the responsibility to create a new world based on the concept of one humanity.”

China brands the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile to India in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule of Tibet, as a separatist. The Dalai Lama says he is merely seeking more autonomy for his Himalayan homeland.

The address in College Park, Maryland, was the start of a U.S. visit that includes stops in Oregon, Wisconsin, Kentucky and New Orleans, Louisiana.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Scott Malone and Kenneth Barry)

(Reuters) – A fierce wildfire threatening 4,000 homes northwest of Los Angeles was about 30 percent contained on Saturday as higher humidity and cooler temperatures helped firefighters, fire department spokesmen said.

The fire in coastal Ventura County has blackened about 28,000 acres of rugged brush land since starting on Thursday. There is no forecast for containment and the fire was not expected to be under control until May 13, Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Tom Kruschke said.

A drop from record-high temperatures on Friday and slowing, cooler winds off the Pacific Ocean were aiding the almost 1,000 firefighters brought in from across California, he said.

“We’re getting much more favorable weather conditions here. We don’t have the high winds and the high temperatures,” Kruschke said.

Light rain forecast for Sunday and heavier precipitation expected for Monday and Tuesday also could help firefighters battling what authorities are calling the Springs Fire.

A second spokesman, Bill Nash, said firefighters were concentrating on the Newbury Park area, with the eastern end in mop-up phase.

About 4,000 homes have been threatened by the fire and 15 damaged. No injuries have been reported.

The Springs Fire and a flurry of smaller blazes around the state this week marked a sudden start to the California fire season. Some weather forecasters have predicted the season will be worsened by a summer of high temperatures and drought throughout much of the U.S. West.

The fire forced the closure of California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, where the high temperature was a record 96 degrees Fahrenheit (36 Celsius). It is tentatively scheduled to reopen on Sunday, the school said on its website.

The blaze has sent thick smoke drifting over the beach community of Malibu and farther inland across Los Angeles County.

The Point Mugu U.S. Naval Air Station has lifted its order that all non-essential personnel stay home because of the fire. A base housing unit that is home to 118 families was evacuated on Friday because of heavy smoke, a base spokeswoman said.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Genetics and poor nutrition are also hurting the species, which help farmers produce crops worth some $20 billion to $30 billion a year.

Honey bee colonies have been dying and the number of colonies has more than halved since 1947, said the report by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture Department.

The decline raises doubt about whether honey bees can fulfill their crucial role in pollinating crops that play a role in about one-third of all food and beverages sold in the United States, the report said.

“Overall losses continue to be high and pose a serious threat to meeting the pollination service demands for several commercial crops,” the report said.

Pollination demands have increased so much in recent years that California’s almond crop alone requires 60 percent of all managed colonies devoted to pollination — rather than honey or beeswax production.

The United States is not alone in facing this concern: The European Union moved on Monday to protect its own falling bee population by banning three of the world’s most widely used pesticides for two years.

The Varroa mite, a parasite first found in the United States in 1987, is the single biggest cause of colony loss in the United States and other countries, the report said.

Another main concern is the effect of pesticides on bee colonies. More research is needed to find out how much pesticide exposure bees get and their effects, the U.S. report said.

U.S. honey bees also lack genetic diversity, the result of many colonies being descended from fewer than 600 queens. That lack of diversity limits bees’ ability to develop resistance to new diseases and to develop productive worker bees.

The report also found modern weed control methods, which result in large fields with a single crop, has hurt bees by limiting the range of nutrients in their diet, compared with past decades when bees had access to a wider array of plant foods in a smaller range.

The report is the result of a conference the EPA and Agriculture Department held in October 2012. Its findings will be the basis for a revision of a federal plan to combat the decline in honey bees.

(Editing by Scott Malone and Bob Burgdorfer)

O’Malley, a Democrat mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 2016, had pledged to sign the bill, which the Democrat-controlled legislature passed in March. The law replaces capital punishment with a sentence of life without parole.

“With the legislation signed today, Maryland has effectively eliminated a policy that is proven not to work,” O’Malley’s office said in a statement.

The governor’s office said the death penalty does not deter crime, cannot be administered without racial bias and costs three times as much as life without parole. A mistake cannot be reversed if an innocent person is put to death, the statement added.

Five other states – Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York and New Jersey – have repealed capital punishment since 2007, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

“That’s six states in six years,” said Richard Dieter, the Center’s executive director.

Since Maryland reinstated the death penalty in 1978, 58 people have been sentenced to death in the state, but only five sentences have been carried out. Maryland has five men on death row, and its last execution took place in 2005.

EXECUTIONS IN DECLINE

The number of U.S. executions has fallen from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 43 each in 2011 and 2012, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The pace has slowed even more in 2013, with 10 so far this year.

Texas has by far the highest number of executions since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, at 496, according to the center. It is trailed by Virginia at 110.

Dieter said the death penalty had fallen out of favor largely because lawmakers and the public more and more feared that innocent people could be executed. He noted that lengthy legal appeals made it an expensive proposition.

“It all adds up (as) a costly and rarely used punishment,” he said.

Kent Scheidegger, a death penalty advocate and legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California, said some crimes, such as last month’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, justified the punishment.

“The main reason is just simple justice,” said Scheidegger. “There are some crimes where a lesser penalty is insufficient.”

He added that capital punishment could act as a deterrent to crime when correctly applied.

Multiple states had bills pending to abolish the death penalty but it was unclear which might be the next to overturn it, Dieter said. Among possible contenders is Nebraska, where the single-chamber legislature turned down a repeal bill in March by one vote.

The Florida Senate this week moved to speed up executions by sending to Governor Rick Scott reforms designed to keep condemned inmates from spending decades on death row.

O’Malley, a former Baltimore mayor and prosecutor, succeeded in his second attempt since 2009 to overturn capital punishment. It is part of a series of socially liberal measures he has championed in Maryland, including gun control, same-sex marriage and letting undocumented immigrants pay in-state tuition at state colleges.

Ted Sheckels, a political analyst at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College, said O’Malley’s progressive stance, including the death penalty repeal, could help him if he decides to run for president in 2016.

“There have been a number of things that position him on the liberal side of things, which in a Democratic primary is where you want to be,” he said.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Barbara Goldberg, Scott Malone, Lisa Von Ahn and Dan Grebler)

Genetics and poor nutrition are also hurting the species,
which help farmers produce crops worth some $20 billion to $30
billion a year.

Honey bee colonies have been dying and the number of
colonies has more than halved since 1947, said the report by the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture Department.

The decline raises doubt about whether honey bees can
fulfill their crucial role in pollinating crops that play a role
in about one-third of all food and beverages sold in the United
States, the report said.

“Overall losses continue to be high and pose a serious
threat to meeting the pollination service demands for several
commercial crops,” the report said.

Pollination demands have increased so much in recent years
that California’s almond crop alone requires 60 percent of all
managed colonies devoted to pollination — rather than honey or
beeswax production.

The Varroa mite, a parasite first found in the United States
in 1987, is the single biggest cause of colony loss in the
United States and other countries, the report said.

Another main concern is the effect of pesticides on bee
colonies. More research is needed to find out how much pesticide
exposure bees get and their effects, the report said.

U.S. honey bees also lack genetic diversity, the result of
many colonies being descended from fewer than 600 queens. That
lack of diversity limits bees’ ability to develop resistance to
new diseases and to develop productive worker bees.

The report also found modern weed control methods, which
result in large fields with a single crop, has hurt bees by
limiting the range of nutrients in their diet, compared with
past decades when bees had access to a wider array of plant
foods in a smaller range.

The report is the result of a conference the EPA and
Agriculture Department held in October 2012. Its findings will
be the basis for a revision of a federal plan to combat the
decline in honey bees.

(Editing by Scott Malone and Bob Burgdorfer)

Few prisoners are released early on compassionate grounds. An average of 24 gravely ill prisoners were freed each year from 2006 to 2011, but another 28 died in custody during that time while waiting for the Bureau of Prisons to make a decision on their cases, the department’s inspector general said in a report.

The report recommended 11 ways to improve the program, including taking a look at how much it costs to keep seriously ill prisoners in custody.

“We concluded that an effectively managed compassionate release program would result in cost savings … as well as assist the (bureau) in managing its continually growing inmate population,” the inspector general’s report said.

The way the program has been run “has likely resulted in potentially eligible inmates not being considered for release,” it added.

The compassionate release program allows prisoners to be freed on extraordinary grounds, including terminal illness and severe medical conditions. To gain release, a prisoner must initiate a request through the Bureau of Prisons and a judge must approve the release.

The report found that inmates at some prisons were eligible for release only if they had a life expectancy of six months or less. At other prisons, eligibility was set at 12 months or less.

NO NON-MEDICAL RELEASES

Although bureau rules provide for compassionate release on non-medical grounds, those requests were routinely rejected. None were approved in the six years examined by the inspector general’s report.

Prison agency officials are revising rules on compassionate release to include inmates with up to 18 months of life expectancy, the report said.

The Bureau of Prisons also lacks standards on how much time it should take to review requests, taking from five to 65 days. Appeals of denied requests can take up to five months.

It also does not have a procedure to tell inmates about the program. Only eight of 111 handbooks that prisons give to inmates had information about it, the report said.

Even though the prisons agency has told Congress it could save $3.2 million by expanding the release program, it has not studied medical cost benefits from freeing inmates. It also lacks a system to track all requests, it said.

Amy Fettig, senior staff counsel for the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, welcomed the report as a “hard-hitting” response to the Bureau of Prisons’ contention that it needed more beds for a growing number of inmates.

“It’s really nice seeing the IG office taking a hard look at that premise and pushing back at it,” she said.

Federal prisons are at 130 percent of capacity, with 30 percent of inmates in for immigration violations, Fettig said.

Among inmates released on compassionate grounds, 3.5 percent were rearrested. The overall recidivism rate for federal prisoners has been estimated at up to 41 percent, the report said.

The inspector general recommended expanding the release program to include non-medical conditions and updating written criteria. It also called for setting time limits for the release process, informing inmates of the program and examining the savings from releasing ill prisoners.

The Bureau of Prisons said it agreed with nine of the 11 recommendations and partly accepted that it should assess the costs of healthcare for ill inmates and set time limits for processing requests.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Jackie Frank)

The city has hired consultants to conduct the review, part of a congressionally requested plan that could revise building limits that have largely banned high-rise structures, Mayor Vincent Gray said on Tuesday.

Under a 1910 federal law, building heights in the 68-square-mile (176-square-km) U.S. capital are determined by the width of the street on which a building fronts. The maximum height is 130 feet, with some exceptions.

The result is a distinctive low-lying skyline with no skyscrapers to block the view of landmarks such as the National Cathedral and the Old Post Office. The tallest structure is the Washington Monument, which rises more 555 feet, 5-1/8 inches into the air.

Partners for Economic Solutions, a Washington consulting firm, will head a team analyzing the economic impact of raising the limits, Gray said in a statement.

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLC, a U.S. architecture firm, will be in charge of studying the impact of building heights on the District of Columbia’s character, it said.

The city is working with the National Capital Planning Commission on the height review.

The House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee, headed by California Republican Darrell Issa, last year requested a study of the height limits to see if they were still needed. The capital is self-governing but Congress has overriding authority.

The study by the NCPC and Washington teams will aim to ensure the prominence of federal landmarks and maintain “the horizontality of the monumental city skyline,” Gray’s statement said.

It also will seek to minimize harm to the original 18th century plan for the city, and consider such issues as economic development and security.

The National Capital Planning Commission has hired AECOM Technology Corp, a design services company, to work on the study. The panel will vote on the plan’s recommendations and they will go to Congress in the fall, the mayor said.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Scott Malone and Tim Dobbyn)

Long and Ooton were among the former concentration camp prisoners, their families, and the U.S. soldiers who liberated them gathered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Monday at what may be one of the last big gatherings of those who survived the Nazi genocide.

“I just met the man who liberated my mother,” said Long, wiping away tears after hugging Ooton, the veteran from Effingham, Illinois, still trim enough to fit in his World War II uniform, hung with medals.

“They were just kids, those soldiers,” said Long, a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, resident who had been trying since 1984 to find someone from Ooton’s unit, the 84th Infantry Division.

Troops from the unit freed the camp at Salzwedel, Germany, where her ill mother was a prisoner, having survived four concentration camps. The GIs then saved her mother’s life by taking her to a hospital for treatment, she said.

Ooton, a retired barber and real estate agent, said the Salzwedel prisoners he took to a hospital were “just filthy, half starved. It was very shocking to see those people in the street.”

After a hug from Long, he said: “I made my day for coming here. That was worth it all, for her hug and a cry.”

The ceremony marking the holocaust museum’s 20th anniversary drew about 4,000 people, including some 800 survivors and 130 World War II U.S. veterans who had freed labor camps in 1945.

SURVIVORS, LIBERATORS NOW IN 80s, 90s

Steven Luckert, curator of the museum’s permanent exhibitions, said the celebration had more urgency given the advanced age of the former GIs and the survivors of the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews. Many are in their 80s and 90s.

“The challenge for us is that we’re battling the clock. With the age of the survivors and the World War II veterans, this will probably be one of the last major gatherings,” he told Reuters.

The ceremony at the museum, one of Washington’s top tourist draws, began with the presentation of flags of three dozen U.S. Army divisions that had liberated Nazi camps.

After speeches by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel and former President Bill Clinton, survivors, American veterans and family members ate lunch and chatted at tables labeled with concentration camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt, ghettos like Lodz and Warsaw and regions such as Carpathia and Italy.

Celia Feldman, an 89-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, said the gathering would be the last that she would attend.

“The next will be (held), but I don’t know how many survivors will be alive, or veterans, you know,” said Feldman, who lives in Queens, New York.

Now it will be up to her children and grandchildren to keep alive awareness of the Holocaust, said Feldman, who was carrying a copy of her memoir, “Bittersweet Memories.”

Luckert, the curator, said the gathering was valuable for giving survivors and veterans the chance to be interviewed and to donate artifacts and documents.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Richard Chang)

While the United States has sharply tightened security
around airlines since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, trains are
far harder to police, with masses of passengers getting on and
off and stops at many stations on a single line. Thousands of
miles (km) of track, bridges and tunnels present a major
challenge to monitor.

Even though the United States has largely been immune from
attacks, extremists around the world have frequently exploited
rail transport’s vulnerability, said Brian Michael Jenkins, a
security expert with the Mineta Transportation Center at
California’s San Jose State University.

“Surface transportation really has become the terrorists’
killing fields,” he said.

Two suspects were arrested in Canada on Monday charged with
conspiring to blow up a trestle on the Canadian side of the
border as the Maple Leaf, the daily Amtrak connection between
Toronto and New York, passed over it. Amtrak is the U.S.
passenger rail service.

The two men charged in the plot made their first court
appearances on Tuesday. A lawyer for one said his client would
fight the charges vigorously.

Jenkins and Steve Kulm, an Amtrak spokesman, said trains
presented a unique security challenge, different from airports
with their screening process for passengers.

Amtrak coordinates security with local law enforcement, does
counterterrorism exercises and patrols its tracks and stations,
Kulm said. It also is reconfiguring stations to make them safer
from potential attack.

“It’s no surprise and no secret that overseas terrorists
have targeted rail transportation, and so we have, as I say,
many seen and unseen measures that we have put in place and
continue to improve upon,” Kulm said.

MORE FATALITIES IN RAIL ATTACKS

Although popular attention has tended to focus on airliner
attacks, far more people have died worldwide from surface rail
assaults, Jenkins said.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, militant attacks on the United
States, there have been 75 assaults on airliners, with 157
fatalities, he said.

During the same period, there were 1,800 attacks on surface
transport, with nearly 4,000 people killed. Among them were
attacks on Madrid in 2004 and on Mumbai in 2006 that each killed
about 200 people, and a 2005 London bombing that claimed 52
lives.

In the United States, only one person has died from an
extremist rail attack in recent decades, when Amtrak’s Sunset
Limited was derailed in Arizona in 1995. Responsibility was
claimed by a group calling itself Sons of the Gestapo and the
saboteurs have not been found.

The United States has more than 200,000 miles (320,000 km)
of railroad, with about 21,000 miles (33,000 km)used by Amtrak.
Amtrak carried 31.2 million passengers in the last fiscal year,
its ninth record year in the last 10, Kulm said.

Elliot G. Sander, a former chief executive of the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York, which runs
two of the biggest U.S. commuter railroads, said public
awareness was critical to countering potential attacks.

“One cannot understate the importance of the participation
of the public, in terms of eyes and ears,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security spent $136 million in
the 2013 fiscal year on surface transportation security, with
775 personnel. Aviation security received $5.3 billion and has
53,000 personnel.

Special Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR)
teams have the job of carrying out random baggage and security
checks at train, subway and bus stations as well as truck
weighing stations.

Created after the Madrid railway bombing, the VIPR teams
carried out more than 9,300 operations in fiscal 2011, according
to the Department of Homeland Security’s 2013 budget request.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was
criticized last year by the Government Accountability Office
(GAO), an investigative arm of Congress, for failing to carry
out analysis of railroad security information.

The GAO also criticized the TSA for inconsistent reporting
requirements from rail agencies and failure to inspect a rail
service the GAO did not name. The TSA concurred with the GAO’s
recommendations for improvement.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson and Hilary Russ; Editing by Cynthia
Osterman)