Anthrax

A security camera recorded the man wearing dark sunglasses and a hooded sweat shirt as he walked by Boston's Symphony Hall on Feb. 9 and dropped a cardboard tube marked "Anthrax Beware" at the door. Emergency medical crews raced to the site, firefighters cordoned off the area, police halted traffic, and life came to an anxious halt until a hazmat team signaled the all-clear: The tube was empty.

A former nuclear plant engineer accused of dispatching more than 50 hoax anthrax letters to businesses, the media and government officials, including President Bush, has been sentenced to more than four years in prison, authorities announced Friday. Michael Lee Braun, 53, a retired engineer at the mothballed Rancho Seco nuclear facility in southern Sacramento County, pleaded guilty to sending letters containing threats and white powder that he claimed was "poison" and a "death powder."

Upping the ante in the fight between the press and the courts over confidential sources, a judge here has imposed daily fines on a former reporter for USA Today that could quickly bankrupt her unless she reveals all of her sources at the Justice Department and the FBI. Toni Locy, who now teaches journalism at West Virginia University, faces a $500 daily fine beginning at midnight. Next week, the fines will go up to $1,000 per day, then to $5,000 a day the week after.

Death, it seemed, was coming through the mail. It arrived in a plain white prepaid-postage envelope, one that looked normal except for the eccentric lettering -- a block letter "R" that looked like an "A" -- and the cellophane tape that sealed it. Inside were deadly spores that drifted into the air as soon as the envelope was opened.

There are times, especially when he's struggling to walk uphill, that Leroy Richmond still can almost feel the anthrax that nearly killed him in 2001. He senses how it saps his 64-year-old body of strength, how it forces him to rest for two or three minutes. And now with reports that government scientist Bruce E. Ivins, who died last week in an apparent suicide, has been linked by authorities to the anthrax attacks, Richmond has another feeling. He feels like this is the end of the mystery.

. -- Bruce E. Ivins, the late microbiologist suspected in the 2001 anthrax attacks, had attempted to poison people and his therapist said she was "scared to death" of him, according to court testimony that emerged Saturday. Social worker Jean Duley testified at a court hearing in Frederick on July 24 in a successful bid for a protective order against Ivins -- who died five days later in an apparent suicide -- that he "actually attempted to murder several other people."

Federal investigators cinched their case against alleged anthrax mailer Bruce E. Ivins after sophisticated genetic tests by a California firm helped them trace a signature mixture of anthrax spores, the Los Angeles Times has learned. Well before the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings, Ivins, through his work as a government scientist, had combined anthrax spores obtained from at least one outside laboratory, people familiar with the evidence said.

Bruce E. Ivins, the chief suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, was a "sociopathic, homicidal killer" who planned to kill his co-workers "because he was about to be indicted on capital murder charges," a Maryland court was warned shortly before Ivins committed suicide last week. Jean Carol Duley, a psychotherapist who had treated Ivins for six months, told the court July 24 that the microbiologist had purchased a bulletproof vest and gun and boasted of roaming the streets hoping to stab someone.

After nearly seven years of investigating, FBI officials plan to present evidence today to the surviving victims of the 2001 anthrax attacks that they believe proves a Maryland scientist launched the deadly mailings that gripped the nation in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Justice Department couldn't prosecute the man it believes was responsible for the anthrax attacks that spread fear across the nation in 2001. So on Wednesday, federal officials took the risky and virtually unprecedented step of trying their top-secret case in the court of public opinion. And though the verdict was mixed, many of those privy to mountains of new details released by federal authorities said they were convinced that the government had found the culprit in Bruce E.