Arizona

Tucson police find 3 tons of marijuana

Police investigating a traffic accident found three tons of marijuana in one of the vehicles involved.

The drugs had an estimated street value of $10 million, Tucson police said.

Police said a truck hauling a white cargo trailer ran a red light and hit another truck Friday on Tucson’s east side. The truck’s driver jumped out and took off in another car — probably a designated getaway vehicle, said police spokeswoman Officer Kathy Wendling.

Police investigating the accident discovered 63 large boxes containing marijuana inside the trailer.

Wendling said that if the driver had not fled, police might not have searched the trailer because it isn’t part of a routine traffic collision investigation.

Texas

Tropical Storm Erika loses strength on land

Tropical Storm Erika petered out as it made landfall short of hurricane strength Saturday, shaving palm trees and shattering a few car windows but doing little significant damage.

The storm struck about 30 miles south of Brownsville, on the edge of the Mexican border city of Matamoros.

Downed trees and roof damage were reported in Mexico, but after bringing high winds and heavy rain in the pre-dawn hours Saturday, Erika was expected to break up over Mexico’s high inland terrain by this morning.

All hurricane and tropical storm warnings were discontinued, and most Rio Grande Valley residents awakened to mostly dry skies rather than the predicted daylong torrents.

Washington

Human remains found in Green River search

Human skeletal remains were found Saturday during a search that officials said was part of the investigation into the deaths of at least 49 women in the 1980s.

Detective Kathleen Larson said it was too early to tell whether the bones were linked to the Green River serial killings.

About 60 volunteers, along with detectives, were searching a wooded area east of Enumclaw when the remains were found, she said. Enumclaw is about 34 miles southeast of Seattle.

She said the medical examiner would work to identify the remains, but offered no further details on the bones.

“We are actively investigating all 49 cases in the Green River killer case and this is part of that investigation,” she said.

Gary Ridgway has pleaded not guilty of aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of seven young women in south King County in the early 1980s.

Those seven were among at least 49 women, mainly prostitutes and runaways, who are considered to be victims of the Green River killer.

Ridgway, 54, is scheduled to go on trial in July 2004.

Montana

Wildfires threaten electric lines in cities

Wildfires threatened power transmission lines across the state Saturday, and residents of four cities were warned to prepare for the possibility of blackouts.

Workers for NorthWestern Energy hauled 95-foot power poles into a burned area that was still smoldering west of Billings to rebuild torched lines that caused a brief outage earlier in the week.

Fires were also threatening other major lines on the western side of the state, where some of the power has been rerouted from lines that burned.

NorthWestern Energy officials said Friday that more damage could lead to major blackouts this weekend and warned customers in Missoula, Butte, Bozeman and Hamilton to be prepared.

Two dozen major fires burning in Montana on Saturday, most of them started by lightning and still uncontrolled, had covered almost 200,000 acres.

Seattle

Microsoft says ‘worm’ doing little damage

The second wave of an Internet attack by the “blaster” worm barely caused a ripple Saturday.

Microsoft Corp. said it had no major problems from the worm’s attempt to turn thousands of infected computers into instruments targeting the software company’s Web site and network.

“So far we have seen no impact on our Web sites or any other Web sites due to the ‘blaster’ worm,” spokesman Sean Sundwall said.

Still, he urged people to take precautions to protect their computers.

The virus-like infection exploits a flaw in most current versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system for personal computers, laptops and server computers. Although Microsoft posted a software patch to fix the flaw July 16, many users failed to download it, leaving them vulnerable.

As of Saturday afternoon, the worm had infected more than 423,000 computers around the world since Monday, according to security firm Symantec Corp.