In the Nation

RICHMOND, Va. - Virginia Tech will have to pay the maximum $55,000 fine for violating federal law by waiting too long to notify students during the April 2007 shooting rampage, the U.S. Education Department said Tuesday.

Department officials said in a letter to the school that the sanction should have been greater for Virginia Tech's slow response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The $55,000 fine was the most the department could levy for Tech's two violations of the federal Clery Act, which requires timely reporting of crimes on campus.

A university spokesman said Virginia Tech would appeal the decision. The university sent an e-mail to the Blacksburg campus more than two hours after student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed two students in a dorm, about the time Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty and then himself. - AP

FLORENCE, Ariz. - A man convicted of killing two people in a 1989 Phoenix robbery was executed Tuesday despite last-minute arguments by his attorneys who raised questions over one of the lethal-injection drugs and cited "substantial doubt" about his guilt.

Eric John King, 47, was the first person executed in Arizona since October and one of the last expected to use a three-drug execution method. He had maintained since his arrest that he was innocent.

Defense attorney Michael Burke said there was no way to know if King experienced pain afterbeing injected with sodium thiopental, a sedative that Burke has argued could be ineffective. A second drug paralyzes the inmate before potassium chloride is injected to stop his heart, so if the sedative doesn't work through the entire procedure, King could have been in pain with no way to show it.

Corrections Director Charles Ryan said Friday that Arizona would switch to using just one drug to try to allay any "perceived concerns" that sodium thiopental is ineffective, but only after King's execution and another one April 5. - AP

WASHINGTON - Federal appeals judges Tuesday rejected what they described as a Guantanamo detainee's "Forrest Gump" defense, finding it unlikely the Yemeni was an innocent who repeatedly just happened to find himself at hot spots in the antiterror effort.

Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman had won a lower court decision granting his release after more than nine years at the U.S. naval prison in Cuba. But the three-judge appeals panel overturned that ruling.

Uthman says he was mistaken as an al-Qaeda fighter fleeing U.S. bombardment of Tora Bora when he was captured at the Afghan-Pakistani border in December 2001. The U.S. government says he was one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards and fought against anti-Taliban forces. - AP

The U.S. government said applications for immigration benefits for same-sex couples would no longer be automatically denied but instead be put on hold pending legal advice after the administration's decision to stop defending the law that bars same-sex marriage.