Hoaxes

The Colorado father who admitted to staging the balloon hoax now says he genuinely believed his son was in danger but pleaded guilty to prevent his wife's deportation. Richard Heene, an aspiring reality television star who has said he is descended from space aliens, told CNN's "Larry King Live" in an interview airing Friday that he believed 6-year-old Falcon was in a homemade balloon that took off from the family's Fort Collins backyard Oct. 15. "We had searched the house, high and low," Heene said in the new interview with Larry King.

The Van Nuys courthouses remained closed Tuesday as health officials worked to confirm that no anthrax biotoxins had been released in either of the buildings. Authorities said earlier that a threat received Monday was a hoax. The scare put dozens of court cases on hold for a week and scattered court staff and lawyers across the county. Court officials said the courthouses will remain closed today but are expected to reopen Thursday. It was the fourth local anthrax scare in a week.

A San Fernando Valley accountant who telephoned an anthrax threat to avoid appearing at a Bankruptcy Court hearing was ordered Wednesday to pay more than $600,000 restitution to cover the costs incurred by the police and fire departments. Harvey Craig Spelkin, 53, of Calabasas was also sentenced to one day in jail and placed on five years of supervised release by U.S. District Judge George H. King.

After a six-month investigation, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday took limited, largely symbolic action in regard to a phony murder confession broadcast by radio station KROQ-FM (106.7) last year, issuing a four-page letter admonishing the management for its "deliberate distortion of programming."

The Social Security Administration is to issue a special alert today to senior citizens to beware of hoax solicitations promising additional federal benefits and/or $5,000 in slave reparations in exchange for sensitive private information. The alert comes from the agency's Office of the Inspector General, which recently completed an investigation that found that more than 29,000 people around the country were duped by anonymous fliers posted in churches, nursing homes and senior centers.

A bomb hoax led to the evacuation of several government buildings in Bell Gardens on Thursday morning. Police evacuated a school, a post office and City Hall after a briefcase addressed to President Bush was discovered near the entrance of City Hall, said Phil Wagner, a city spokesman. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department bomb squad eventually blew up the package, which contained documents and notebooks, said Wagner. The Secret Service is investigating, he said.

A man accused of conspiring to bomb London's public transport system told a court that he deliberately made fake devices that were not meant to explode but would spread fear, in protest against the invasion of Iraq. Muktar Said Ibrahim, 29, said he learned online how to make explosives using hydrogen peroxide. Ibrahim and five others are charged with conspiring to bomb the British capital's transport system on July 21, 2005. The bombs did not explode.

A reported assassination attempt in March that left a Mexican state governor in the hospital was a hoax, the attorney general's office said Friday. Records show that a policeman died of bullet wounds as a result of the incident and most of the bullets came from the gun of the governor's bodyguard, the prosecutor's office said. Oaxaca Gov.

Orange County prosecutors will not charge a man who tried to cover up his girlfriend's pregnancy by claiming to have purchased a newborn boy from a man who wanted $10 for drugs, police said Tuesday. Robert Garcia, 18, of Tustin, concocted the story as a way to make sure the child received the proper care, without having to reveal that his girlfriend had had a baby, said Tustin Police Lt. Chuck Crane. "I really don't think there was any criminal intent," Crane said.

A man who allegedly demanded $10,000 in exchange for the return of Polly Klaas apparently had nothing to do with the kidnaping of the 12-year-old girl, authorities said Tuesday. James Arthur Heard Jr. of Petaluma was arrested Monday night and booked for investigation of attempted extortion and posing as a kidnaper, said FBI spokesman Rick Smith. Both crimes are felonies.