West Virginia: ‘Turner Diaries’ author dies at 68

White supremacist leader William Pierce, whose book “The Turner Diaries” is believed to have inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, died Tuesday. He was 68.

Pierce died at his compound near Hillsboro, about 140 miles northeast of Charleston, said his business manager, Bob DeMarias. He became ill about three weeks ago from cancer, though he was never diagnosed, DeMarias said.

Pierce’s novel, published in 1978, depicts a violent overthrow of the government by a small band of white supremacists who finance themselves through counterfeiting and bank robbery.

One chapter, titled the “Day of the Rope,” describes white corpses hung from every street corner with placards reading, “I defiled my race.”

FBI investigators have said McVeigh was a fan of Pierce’s book and used it as a blueprint for bombing the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. The book includes a truck-bombing of FBI headquarters.

Florida: Salvadorans ordered to pay torture victims

A federal jury on Tuesday in West Palm Beach ordered two retired Salvadoran generals to pay $54.6 million to three torture victims the first time a U.S. court has held anyone from that nation liable for atrocities committed during the bloody civil war two decades ago.

Legal experts say the verdict is likely to encourage an estimated 500,000 victims of human rights abuses abroad to sue their torturers or their bosses who are now living in the United States.

“This is an historic victory that shows that American juries can grasp the concept that foreign commanders who condone atrocities by their men can be held accountable,” said Joshua N. Sondheimer of the Center for Justice and Accountability, a San Francisco-based consortium of pro bono lawyers that represented the three plaintiffs in the 1999 lawsuit.

North Carolina: University sued for reading requirement

A Christian organization in Mississippi is suing the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, claiming a requirement that freshmen read a book on the Islamic faith violates the students’ first amendment rights.

The suit, filed Monday, asks a federal court in Greensboro to order the school to drop the requirement.

“We believe that the University of North Carolina overstepped its bounds … ,” said Michael DePrimo, a lawyer with the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, the organization that filed the suit on behalf of three students, an alumnus and a taxpayer.

“Our understanding is that there have been numerous objections to the forced reading of the book ‘Approaching the Qur’an’ as well as mandatory participation in discussion groups about the book.”

The university declined to comment, which is how it generally responds to pending lawsuits.

Illinois: Chemical release kills 80,000 fish

At least 80,000 fish were killed when workers cleaning a boiler at the University of Illinois flushed toxic levels of ammonia into the Urbana sewer system.

The fish were found along a 10-mile stretch of a Salt Fork River tributary in central Illinois. It took more than a week to count the bodies of the smallmouth bass, sunfish and other fish; about half were minnows.

Employees at a university power plant were cleaning the boiler on July 11 when they flushed the chemical into the sewer system.

The Urbana sewage plant was expecting the release but was not equipped to handle the high levels of ammonia, officials said. An attempt to divert the chemical failed.