Manning enters Md. Senate race

Compiled from news services

Chelsea Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to Wikileaks, has filed to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, according to federal election filings.

Ms. Manning, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, would be challenging Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat who has served two terms in the Senate. He was first elected in 2007.

Ms. Manning, 30, who was formerly known as Bradley Manning, was convicted in 2013 of the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Last year, thenPresident Barack Obama commuted Ms. Manning’s sentence, and she was released from a military prison.

Man’s fit ends in shooting

A 28-year-old man playing a video game in his bedroom threw a fit, broke his headset, then picked up a gun and killed his mother, according to police in Ceres, Calif.

Matthew Nicholson stayed with his parents in a powder blue house with a basketball hoop over the garage door. It was a loving and open home, and 68year-old Lydia Nicholson was the sort of mother who “wanted to see the best in people at all times,” her daughter told television station Fox 40.

But a police spokesman told the station that officers had visited the home after a fight between Mr. Nicholson and his parents once in the past six months, before Thursday, when they would arrive too late.

Hijacking suspect held

Authorities have arrested a man who they say held 50 people hostage while aboard a Greyhound bus late Friday night.

Theincident began just before11 p.m. as the bus was headedfrom Milwaukee to Chicago.A passenger called 911and said a man armed witha gun had threatened tokill people on the bus, according to the sheriff’s office inRacine County, Wisconsin,several miles north of the Illinois border.

Authorities found the bus on southbound Interstate 94 and tried to stop it but did not until after it crossed into Illinois, the sheriff’s office said. Authorities said the bus stopped in Wadsworth, Ill., just south of the border.

Lt. Rory Zuerlein, of the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office, told the Daily Herald that passengers left the bus after it stopped and officers placed them in squad cars to keep them warm.

No one was injured.

Wahlberg’s donation

Mark Wahlberg announced Saturday via Twitter that he will donate the $1.5 million salary he earned reshooting scenes from “All the Money in the World,” a drama based on the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, to the Times Up Legal Defense Fund.

Mr. Wahlberg became the center of controversy when it was revealed last year that his co-star, Michelle Williams, earned only $1,000 for reshooting the movie’s scenes.

The 10-day reshoot was required when director Ridley Scott decided to replace the actor who played Getty’s grandfather, billionaire oilman J. Paul Getty. Scenes with Kevin Spacey — the subject of multiple abuse allegations — as the elder Getty were edited out, and replaced by scenes featuring Christopher Plummer in the role.

William Morris Endeavor, the talent agency that represents both Mr. Wahlberg and Ms. Williams, said it also will donate $500,000 to the fund. occurred during a shiftchange drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency.

“Someone clicked the wrong thing on the computer,” he said. “It was erroneous.”

Mr. Rapoza said a new procedure was put in place hours after the mistake requiring two-step authentication before any such alert is sent out.

At no time, officials said, was there any indication that a nuclear attack had been launched on the United States.

The Federal Communications Commission announced Saturday afternoon it had begun “a full investigation into the FALSE missile alert in Hawaii.”

The alert went out at about 8:10 a.m., lighting up phones of people still in bed, having coffee by the beach at a Waikiki resort, or up for an early surf. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” it read.

Hawaii has been on high emotional alert — it began staging monthly air-raid drills, complete with sirens, in December — since President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, began exchanging nuclear threats. Hawaii is about 4,600 miles from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Estimates vary, but the flight time for a missile would likelybe around 37 minutes.

Within moments of the alert, people flocked to shelters, crowding highways in scenes of terror and helplessness. “I was running through all the scenarios in my head, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to pull over to,” said Mike Staskow, a retired military captain.

Ray Gerst was vacationing on Oahu with his wife to celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary. Just as they pulled up for their tour of Kualoa Ranch, they received the alert.

“All the buses stopped, and people came running out of the ranch and said, ‘Just sit still for a minute, nobody get off the bus, nobody get off the bus,’” he said.

They were taken into the mountains, Mr. Gerst said, and dropped off at a concrete bunker. They sheltered in place for about 15 minutes, he said, during which time they had no cell signal.

“It was scary,” Mr. Gerst said. “I mean, there was no intel.”

At Konawaena High School on the Island of Hawaii, where a high school wrestling championship was taking place, school officials, more accustomed to responding to alerts of high surf or tsunamis, moved people to the center of the gym as they tried to figure out how to take shelter from a missile.

“Everyone cooperated,” said Kellye Krug, the athletic director at the school. “Once they were gathered, we let them use cellphones to reach loved ones. There were a couple kids who were emotional, the coaches were right there to console kids. After the retraction was issued, we gave kids time to reach out again.”

Matt LoPresti, a state representative, told CNN that he and his family headed for a bathroom. “I was sitting in the bathtub with my children, saying our prayers,” he said.

In Washington, Lindsay Walters, a deputy press secretary, said that Mr. Trump had been informed of the events. “The president has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise,” she said. “This was purely a state exercise.”

“What happened today is totally inexcusable,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said. “The whole state was terrified. There needs to be tough and quick accountability and a fixed process.”

The false alert was a stark reminder of what happens when the old realities of the nuclear age collide with the speed — and the potential for error — inherent in the internet age.

The alert came at one of the worst possible moments: when tension with North Korea has been at one of the highest points in decades, and when the government of Mr. Kim has promised more missile tests and threatened the possibility of an atmospheric nuclear test.

But the cellphone alerting system was in the hands of state authorities; the detection of missile launches is the responsibility of the United States Strategic Command and Northern Command. It was the military — not Hawaiian officials — who were the first to come out and declare that there was no evidenceof a missile launch.

During the Cold War there were many false alarms. William J. Perry, the defense secretary during the Clinton administration, recalled in his memoir “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” a moment in 1979 when, as an undersecretary of defense, he was awakened by a watch officer who reported that his computer system was showing 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to the United States. “For one heart-stopping second I thought my worst nuclear nightmare had cometrue,” Mr. Perry wrote.

It turned out that a training tape had been mistakenly inserted in an earlywarning system computer. No one woke up the president. But Mr. Perry went on to speculate what might have happened if such a warning had come “during the Cuban Missile Crisis or a Mideast war?”

The United States faces an especially difficult problem today, not just because of tense relations with North Korea but also because of growing fears inside the military about the cyber vulnerability of both the nuclear warning system and nuclear control systems.

Because of its location, Hawaii — more than any other part of the United States — has been threatened by escalating tensions and the risks of war.

Preparations had already begun, including an air-raid siren alert on Dec. 1, the start of what officials said would be monthly drills.