OWNER OF 3D GUN COMPANY RESIGNS AFTER BEING ARRESTED

An activist who garnered national attention for running a Texas company that sells blueprints for making untraceable 3Dprinted guns has resigned from the firm he founded after being arrested on charges of having sex with an underage girl.

Cody Wilson tendered his resignation Friday night to tend to “personal matters,” Paloma Heindorff, director of development for Austinbased Defense Distributed, said at a news conference Tuesday. The company is at the center of a federal case in which several states sued to block it from posting plans to build 3Dprinted guns online.

Heindroff said she would be taking over Wilson’s duties as director and was a strong believer in the Second Amendment.

Investigators allege that the 30yearold Wilson met a 16yearold girl through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com. According to an affidavit, the girl said they met in the parking lot of an Austin coffee shop in August and then drove to a hotel.

FBI: Baltimore homicide rate topped big U.S. cities.

BALTI-

MORE» New crime statistics released by the FBI place Baltimore’s homicide rate last year well above that of any other large American metropolis, making it an anomaly in the national crime landscape for U.S. cities with populations over 500,000 people.

The 342 homicides notched last year in Maryland’s biggest city yielded a punishing homicide rate of 56 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States report released Monday. Earlier this year, Baltimore had announced 343 slayings for the year, but three deaths were reclassified, eventually bringing the total to 342 in the city of roughly 615,000 inhabitants. The per capita rate was a record high for the city.

Among major U.S. cities, Baltimore was followed in the FBI’s annual tally by Detroit, which last year recorded a homicide rate of 40 per 100,000 people; Memphis, Tenn., with a rate of 28 per 100,000; and Chicago, with a rate of 24 per 100,000.

But some smaller cities reported a higher homicide rate than Baltimore’s. St. Louis, with a population slightly over 300,000, had a rate of 66 murders per 100,000 people.

Mattis: Jury is out on women succeeding in combat jobs.

WASHINGTON» The jury is still out on whether women can be successful in infantry jobs, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Tuesday.

Mattis, a retired Marine, said there are too few women in the infantry ranks to provide enough data to determine how they’re doing. And he said he has asked Army and Marine Corps leaders for information to determine if having women in a “closequarters fight” is a strength or a weakness.

“There are a few stalwart young ladies who are charging into this, but they are too few,” Mattis said during a visit to VMI, which is in Lexington, Va. “Clearly the jury is out on it, but what we’re trying to do is give it every opportunity to succeed if it can.”

ExNSA worker sentenced for taking secret documents home.

A former National Security Agency employee has been sentenced to 5½ years in prison for taking top secret U.S. defense materials back to his Maryland home.

Nghia Hoang Pho of Ellicott City, Md., had earlier pleaded guilty to willful retention of national defense information.

At his Tuesday sentencing, Pho explained in faltering English that he took copies of U.S. government documents and writings containing national defense information so that he could work from home.