PACKAGES WITH SUSPECTED RICIN SENT TO PENTAGON

WASHINGTON» Authorities at a Pentagon mail screening facility found two envelopes suspected of containing ricin, a poison made from castor beans, and turned them over to the FBI for further analysis, officials said Tuesday.

One envelope was addressed to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who is traveling in Europe this week, and the other to the Navy’s top officer, Adm. John Richardson, a defense official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly ahead of FBI release of its findings.

Neither envelope entered the Pentagon. The mail screening facility is on the Pentagon grounds but separate from the main building.

Desperation grows as death toll soars from Indonesia quake.

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» Trucks carrying food for desperate survivors of the earthquake on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island rolled in with a police escort Tuesday to guard against looters, while the death toll from the disaster soared past 1,200.

Four days after the magnitude 7.5 earthquake and tsunami struck, supplies of food, water, fuel and medicine had yet to reach the hardesthit areas outside Palu, the largest city that was heavily damaged. Many roads in the earthquake zone are blocked and communications lines are down.

U.S. secretary of state heads to North Korea for nuclear talks.

WASHINGTON» U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is heading back to North Korea for another round of talks aimed at getting Kim Jong Un to give up nuclear weapons.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters on Tuesday that Pompeo will meet with Kim on Sunday, following a daylong visit to Japan.

This will be Pompeo’s fourth visit to North Korea since he became secretary of state. He made an earlier trip there, in April, when he was director of the CIA.

Nurse attacked at Washington psychiatric ward.

TTLE» A patient at

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Washington state’s largest psychiatric hospital vaulted over a nurse’s station last weekend, knocked a nurse to the floor, choked her and bit part of her ear off.

The assault Sunday night was the latest in a series of attacks on health care workers at Western State Hospital. Hospital spokeswoman Kathy Spears told staff in an email.

Four men arrested in connection with violent Virginia rally.

VA.» Four C H A RLOTTES V ILLE, members of a militant white supremacist group from California were arrested on charges they traveled to Virginia last year to incite a riot and attack counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally that turned deadly, federal authorities said Tuesday.

The defendants — Benjamin Drake Daley, Michael Paul Miselis, Thomas Walter Gillen and Cole Evan White — are part of the Rise Above Movement, which espouses antiSemitic views and meets regularly in public parks to train in boxing and other fighting techniques, according to an affidavit written by an FBI agent. — Denver Post wire services