St. Louis

Oak trees studied for pollution link

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is spending $715,000 to set up monitors to determine whether oak trees in the Ozarks are contributing to high levels of formaldehyde in the air over St. Louis.

EPA officials were installing air monitors Wednesday, two in St. Louis and a third in a forest about 60 miles southwest of the city.

The EPA study will focus primarily on oak trees, which give off isoprene, a gas that reacts with sunlight and water to create formaldehyde, a suspected cancer-causing agent, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday. Researchers want to see whether the chemicals emitted by the Ozark forests could affect St. Louis air quality.

Trees have been blamed for up to 65 percent of ozone-forming chemicals in cities such as Houston.

New York City

Old ships considered to house homeless

Desperate for ways to combat a surge in homelessness as winter nears, New York City is looking into whether retired cruise ships could be converted into shelters.

The city’s commissioner of homeless services and other officials flew to the Bahamas on the mayor’s private jet Wednesday to inspect retired ships.

City officials stressed it is too early to speculate on how the cruise-ship idea might be applied in New York, what it would cost or how long it would take to enact.

Last month, a record 37,100 homeless people were sleeping in city shelters each night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, which compiles statistics for the city. The number was 21,000 as recently as 1998.

New York

Report: Abortion foe admits he killed doctor

An anti-abortion extremist awaiting trial on charges of murdering an abortion doctor admitted carrying out the sniper attack but said he meant only to wound the man, and “the bullet took a crazy ricochet.”

“The truth is not that I regret shooting Dr. Slepian. I regret that he died,” James Kopp, a militant known as “Atomic Dog” in anti-abortion circles, said in a jailhouse interview in Wednesday’s Buffalo News. “I aimed at his shoulder.”

Kopp, 47, said he shot Dr. Barnett Slepian with a rifle on Oct. 23, 1998, because of his outrage over abortions. The 52-year-old obstetrician was heating soup at his home in this Buffalo suburb when he was killed by a bullet that came through a window.

Kopp told the newspaper he was “horrified” when he later learned that the bullet glanced off a bone and caused internal injuries that killed the doctor.

Kopp became one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives and was captured in France in 2001.

New Jersey

Rabbi convicted in wife’s murder

A rabbi was convicted Wednesday in Freehold of having his wife murdered so he could carry on an affair.

Rabbi Fred J. Neulander, 61, could get the death penalty for hiring two hit men to bludgeon Carol Neulander to death in their suburban Philadelphia home in 1994. The verdict came nearly a year after his first trial ended in a hung jury.

The jury took 27 hours to find Neulander guilty of capital murder, felony murder and murder conspiracy.

Prosecutors said Neulander, a founder of Cherry Hill’s large Congregation M’kor Shalom, had his wife killed so he could continue an affair with a Philadelphia radio personality.

Two men said they killed Carol Neulander at the rabbi’s asking for $30,000 and tried to make it look like a robbery.