Santa Monica College Shooting: 4 Victims Hospitalized

Santa Monica College was put on lockdown this afternoon after a gunman opened fire on the campus.

At least four victims have been hospitalized, according to UCLA Medical Center.

A suspect was in custody, California Highway Patrol Sgt. Denise Josline said. She could not provide a name or description of the suspect.

The college campus remained on lockdown as of 2:30 p.m. PT.

Santa Monica College student Sam Luster was preparing for a presentation in the school's library when he heard gunfire.

"We didn't know what was happening until all the students at the entrance of the library started running down towards the bottom of the library," Luster told ABC News Los Angeles station KABC.

Luster took cover under a desk before moving towards an exit. He said he heard multiple gunshots near the exit.

Authorities were searching for a possible second shooter out of an abundance of caution. This was part of protocol in active shooter situations, but authorities also received a call that an armed subject was seen on campus after police had a suspect in custody.

Police were investigating whether a nearby arson incident was related to the shooting. Two people were found dead in that house fire, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

In 911 calls, the shooter was described as armed with several weapons and possibly a long gun or shotgun.

Three female victims from the shooting were transported to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Two of the women were in critical condition and one was listed in serious condition.

A fourth female victim was taken to UCLA Medical Center Santa Monica and was listed as in good condition.

Authorities said that one of the wounded people was on a bus that was fired upon.

Also Read

Dissecting Big Tech's Denial of Involvement in NSA's PRISM Spying Program

The National Security Agency and the FBI have been tapping into the servers of nine technology companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Google and Yahoo, to collect audio, video, photographs, e-mails and other documents under a program code-named PRISM, according to a report in the Washington Post.

The tech companies have responded to questions about the story with statements that may leave out as much as they say.

All the major technology companies named in the Post's report have adamantly denied that they gave the government full access to their servers in similar prepared statements.

President Obama said today that members of Congress have repeatedly been informed of the programs.

"The relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs," he said. "These are programs that have been authorized by broad, bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. And so, I think, at the outset, it's important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we're doing."

Obama added that data being collected on emails and Internet activity targeted foreign nationals and not U.S. citizens.

The tech companies released the following prepared statements to the media denying involvement in the program.

The Statements

Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."

Microsoft: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it."

Google: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."

Google's CEO Larry Page released a blog post on Friday again denying knowledge of the program.

"We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law," said Page.

Facebook: "Protecting the privacy of our users and their data is a top priority for Facebook. We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released an additional statement on Friday, saying Facebook "hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."

Yahoo: "Yahoo takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."

Paltalk: "We have not heard of PRISM. Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users' data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers."

AOL: "We do not have any knowledge of the Prism program. We do not disclose user information to government agencies without a court order, subpoena or formal legal process, nor do we provide any government agency with access to our servers."

Dissecting The Wording and What They Can't Say

The similarity in all the statements was clear. All mentioned that they would only comply with orders for requests to access information if forced to do so under the law and that they did not provide "back door" or "direct" access to their servers and to user account information.

Experts believe that commonality in statements could mean a few things. The first is that the companies simply can't talk about it.

"If these companies received an order under the FISA amendments act, they are forbidden by law from disclosing having received the order and disclosing any information about the order at all,"Mark Rumold, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told ABC News.

Rumold is involved with lawsuits with the NSA and the Department of Justice about other wiretapping cases.

John Black, an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, shared a similar opinion.

"Many times these laws say they have to comply and they can't disclose their compliance," Black said.

However, the companies are talking about it, not simply saying "no comment." Apple, Facebook and Paltalk even specifically said they had never heard of PRISM.

Rumold said that could be a technicality.

"Apple might have had no idea of the government's code name for the program, which was PRISM," Rumold said. "What Apple didn't say is that, 'We have never given the NSA access to our data.'"

Google, on the other hand, said there was no back door to its servers.

"Back door at Google might have one meaning, but what they didn't say is they aren't giving the NSA widespread access to data, which they could potentially say if they had not received an order and given the NSA access to their data," Rumold said.

Black echoed a similar thought about the wording "direct access" and the "back door" phrase.

"They seem consistently careful in saying we don't give back-door access to the government servers," Black said. "That's not the same thing as saying the government has no way to access any of our data."

Black suggested that maybe the NSA doesn't have far-reaching or direct access to the servers, but the companies don't deny that the government can get information through some sort of shared servers when they have a court order.

Marc Ambinder, author of "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry," told ABC News something similar.

PRISM is, in part, a software system that allows the government to sift through large amounts of data in different formats, he said. When the Internet companies came on board, as the leaked document showed, it required them to make their data compatible with the system.

That doesn't mean all data coming from, say, Apple or Google would be readable through the PRISM system. It just means that when a court order was granted, there was a system already in existence that allowed the government to intake and immediately use the data Apple or Google provided in compliance with a FISA court order.

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a written statement that the Post report and another on phone surveillance by The Guardian contained "numerous inaccuracies," and that the data collection only targeted non-Americans outside the United States.

President Obama today stressed that members of Congress repeatedly have been informed of the programs.

"The programs that have been discussed over the last couple days in the press are secret in the sense that they're classified, but they're not secret in the sense that when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program," he said.

Still, both Black and Rumold said it was highly unlikely that the technology companies wouldn't have been informed of the programs.

"Google is probably the biggest collection of information on Earth. It would be shocking to me that the NSA wasn't attempting with all its power to get access to Google," Rumold said. "Google might have very well fought a valiant and difficult fight to keep the NSA away from it, but there is only so much it can do as an American company if you get a valid United States court order."

And that's where Google CEO Page makes the point about making these programs more transparent.

"Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed -- there needs to be a more transparent approach," he said in the blog post released Friday. "Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive."

ABC News' Abby Phillip contributed to this report.

Also Read

Police: Suspect identified for China bus fire

Smoke billows from the scene of a bus that caught fire in Xiamen, southeast China's Fujian Province on Friday, June 7, 2013. A express bus burst into flames on an elevated road in southeastern China on Friday, killing at least 47 people, state media reported. (AP Photo) CHINA OUT

This image made with a mobile phone camera released by China's Xinhua News Agency shows the remains of an express bus that burst into flames in Xiamen, southeast China's Fujian Province on Friday, June 7, 2013. The express bus burst into flames on an elevated road in southeastern China on Friday, killing at least 30 people and injuring more than 30, state media reported. (AP Photo/Xinhua) NO SALES

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese police said Saturday that they had identified a suspect who might be responsible for the fire that gutted a commuter bus, killing 47 and injuring dozens more during rush hour in a port city in southeastern China.

Xiamen police did not provide further details in making the announcement online.

The fire ripped through the bus during the Friday evening commute while it traveled on an enclosed and elevated road in the city. A local fire official said emergency responders found bodies piled inside the charred, skeletal bus. The official Xinhua News Agencysaid Saturday that in addition to the 47 dead, 34 people remained hospitalized.

Investigators said early Saturday that the fire appeared to be intentionally set, and not an accident, Xinhua reported. Among the clues, Xinhua said, was that investigators found traces of gasoline on the wreckage, though the bus ran on diesel fuel and its oil tank and tires remained intact.

"It's a serious criminal case," the Ministry of Public Security, the national police agency, said in a statement on its website. Xiamen police declined further comment.

China has seen bombings and arson of buses and public buildings in recent years, sometimes by people trying to settle personal scores and also by people with overtly political grievances. In 2009, an unemployed man set fire to a packed bus in the central city of Chengdu, killing himself and 26 others.

Xiamen, a prosperous trading port known for centuries in the West as Amoy, was rattled by Friday's fire. The city immediately suspended service of the entire express bus system, known as Bus Rapid Transit, but operations resumed Saturday morning.

Witnesses quoted by Xiamen's official news site said they heard sounds of explosions after the fire had been burning for 10 minutes. Photos posed online showed heavy black smoke curling from the burning bus on the elevated road.

FBI: Wife tried to frame husband for ricin letters

Shannon Richardson is placed into a Titus County Sheriff's car after an initial appearance Friday, June 7, 2013 at the federal building Texarkana, Texas. The FBI says Shannon Richardson admitted sending ricin-tainted letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but only after trying to pin it on her husband. ((AP Photo/The Texarkana Gazette, Curt Youngblood) MANDATORY CREDIT

TEXARKANA, Texas (AP) — Shannon Richardson had been married to her husband less than two years when she went toauthorities and told them her suspicions: He was the one who had mailed ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg threatening violence against gun-control advocates.

When investigators looked closer, they reached a different conclusion: It was the 35-year-old pregnant actress who had sent the letters, and she tried to frame her estranged husband in a bizarre case of marital conflict crossing with bioterrorism.

Those allegations are detailed in court documents filed Friday as Richardson was arrested and charged with mailing a threatening communication to the president. The federal charge carries up to 10 years in prison, U.S. attorney's office spokeswoman Davilyn Walston said.

Richardson, a mother of five who has played bit roles on television and in movies, is accused of mailing the ricin-laced letters to the White House, to Bloomberg and to the mayor's Washington gun-control group last month.

Richardson's court-appointed attorney, Tonda Curry, said there was no intention to harm anyone and noted that it's common knowledge that mail is checked before it reaches the person to whom these letters were addressed.

"From what I can say, based on what evidence I've seen, whoever did this crime never intended for ricin to reach the people to which the letters were addressed," Curry said.

According to an FBI affidavit, Richardson contacted authorities on May 30 and implicated her husband, Nathaniel Richardson. She described finding small, brown beans with white speckles — a description matching the key ingredient in ricin, castor beans — at the couple's home in New Boston, Texas. She also told investigators that she had found a sticky note on her husband's desk with addresses for Bloomberg and Obama, the affidavit said.

But she later failed a polygraph test, the document said, and investigators looking into her story found numerous inconsistencies. Among them: Nathaniel Richardson would have been at work when Internet searches tied to the letters were made on the couple's laptop and when the envelopes containing the letters were postmarked.

Finally, the affidavit says, in an interview with authorities on Thursday, Shannon Richardson admitted that she had received syringes and lye — a caustic chemical used in making ricin — in the mail; that she had printed the labels for the letters; and that she mailed them. However, she insisted her husband typed them and "made her" print and send them, the affidavit says.

No charges have been filed against her husband. His attorney, John Delk, told The Associated Press on Friday that his client was pleased with his wife's arrest and was working with authorities to prove his innocence.

Delk previously told the AP that the couple is going through a divorce and that the 33-year-old Army veteran may have been "set up" by his wife. In divorce papers filed Thursday, Nathanial Richardsonsaid the marriage had become "insupportable because of discord or conflict of personalities."

FBI agents wearing hazardous material suits were seen going in and out of the Richardsons' house on Wednesday in nearby New Boston, about 150 miles northeast of Dallas near the Arkansas and Oklahoma borders. Authorities conducted a similar search on May 31.

The house is now under quarantine for "environmental or toxic agents," according to a posting at the residence. Multiple samples taken from the couples' home tested positive for ricin, according to the affidavit. Federal agents also found castor beans along with syringes and other items that could be used to extract the lethal poison, the affidavit says.

Bloomberg issued a statement Friday thanking local and federal law enforcement agencies "for their outstanding work in apprehending a suspect," saying they worked collaboratively from the outset "and will continue to do so as the investigation continues."

Shannon Richardson appears in movies and on TV under the name Shannon Guess. Her resume on the Internet movie database IMDb said she has had small television roles in "The Vampire Diaries" and "The Walking Dead." She had a minor role in the movie "The Blind Side" and appeared in an Avis commercial, according to the resume.

Delk said the Richardsons were expecting their first child in October. Shannon Richardson also has five children ranging in age from 4 to 19 from other relationships, four of whom had been living with the couple in the New Boston home, the attorney said.

Nathaniel Richardson works as a mechanic at the Red River Army Depot near Texarkana, Texas, a facility that repairs tanks, Humvees and other mobile military equipment. He and Shannon were married in October 2011.

A detention hearing for Shannon Richardson is scheduled for next Friday, court records show, and the government is requesting that she be held without bond.

The FBI is investigating at least three cases over the past two months in which ricin was mailed to Obama and other public figures. Ricin has been sent to officials sporadically over the years, but experts say that there seems to be a recent uptick and that copycat attacks — made possible by the relative ease of extracting the poison — may be the reason.

If inhaled, ricin can cause respiratory failure, among other symptoms. If swallowed, it can shut down the liver and other organs, resulting in death. The amount of ricin that can fit on the head of a pin is said to be enough to kill an adult if properly prepared. No antidote is available, though researchers are trying to develop one.

___

Danny Robbins reported from Dallas. Associated Press writer Adam Goldman contributed to this report from Washington.

Andrea's rain spawns flood watches on East Coast

A woman and child walk through heavy rain in Boston, Friday, June 7, 2013. The National Weather Service has issued flood warnings for much of Central and Western Massachusetts as the remnants of tropical storm Andrea move through the region. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

NEW YORK (AP) — Soaking rains that spawned numerous flood watches pushed some streams and creeks over their banks throughout the Northeast, yet the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season sped up the Eastern Seaboard without causing major damage.

After bringing rain, strong winds and even tornadoes to Florida,Andrea lost most of its tropical characteristics late Friday into Saturday. The storm was packing winds that gusted between 20 to 30 mph, and officials warned of winds near gale force from New Jersey to Canada through Sunday.

The storm was blamed for one traffic-related death in Virginia.

Late Friday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami discontinued all tropical storm warnings, but cautioned about possible coastal and localized flooding from New Jersey to New England. As of 3 a.m. Saturday, the remnants of Tropical Storm Andrea were located near Cape May, N.J., headed northeast at about 35 mph (56 kph)

Dean Iovino, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Laurel, N.J., said Saturday the storm was expected to pick up speed through the overnight hours, and could drop from 3 to 5 inches of rain in areas from New Jersey into New England before tapering off.

Officials in the Mid-Atlantic region and Northeast had prepared for the storm Friday night. New York City activated its flash flooding plan, and heavy rainfall resulted in a number of flash floods, causing some sections of roadways to be closed throughout Long Island.

A number of roads were flooded in the Boston area. A flight that left Boston on Friday night headed to Palm Beach was diverted to Newark International Airport in New Jersey after being struck by lightning. There were no injuries.

The weather service reported that small streams and creeks in southeastern Pennsylvania were going over their banks Friday night. New York City's airports experienced flight delays, and Connecticut reported numerous lane closures on highway as cars spun out amidheavy rain.

The rainy weather washed out events such as NASCAR's Sprint Cup qualifying in Pennsylvania's Poconos, and MLB games in Washington, New York and Boston.

The heavy rain from the storm's outer bands was being blamed by authorities in Virginia for a fatal accident on Interstate 77 in the state's western mountains. William Petty, 57, of Lexington, S.C., died when a car in which he was a passenger hydroplaned while passing a tractor-trailer. He survived the crash, only to be killed moments later when the car was struck by second tractor-trailer, authorities said.

During Friday's morning rush in Charleston, S.C., there was little evidence — beyond a few downed tree branches, gusty winds and some puddles in the street — that the center of the storm was passing nearby. The sun occasionally peeked through.

Derrec Becker with the South Carolina Emergency Management Division said the storm brought only a severe thunderstorm Friday. No injuries were reported, and there had been no reports of significant damage.

Mike Sprayberry of North Carolina Emergency Management told the Weather Channel that there had been some flash flooding and local road closures in the state but that "so far we have been quite fortunate."

Thousands of power outages were also reported.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott had warned Thursday of the risk of tornadoes, and officials said that eight were confirmed across the state.

There were no major problems along the most vulnerable parts of the coast such as North Carolina's Outer Banks.

David Tweedie, 41, of Ocracoke, said an early-morning burst of rain and the forecast of another three hours or so of rain and wind on the Outer Banks island has done little to alter the day's routine for the roughly 1,000 year-round residents.

The Friday fish fry that kicks off the island's annual folk music and arts festival was moved indoors to the island's only public school, and a musical performance of the three-day event was shifted to the community center. But the tropical system was otherwise forcing no changes to the Ocrafolk Festival that normally draws more than 2,000 visitors, Tweedie said.

Authorities in coastal Bertie County, N.C., said a school bus with 32 elementary students on board slid off the road and into a ditch about 8 a.m. No injuries were reported.

A Coast Guard cutter and HC-130 Hercules airplane were called to rescue four adults aboard a 35-foot sailboat about 65 miles off Charleston, S.C. The sailboat's engine was disabled during the storm and left rocking in 15-foot seas and 35-mph winds.

Farther east in Chapel Hill, heavy rains forced the forced the postponement of Friday's NCAA super regional baseball series opener between No. 1 seeded North Carolina and South Carolina until Saturday. A second game between N.C. State and Rice in Raleigh was also postponed.

While the storm departed Florida early Friday, the Sunshine State was still feeling the effects into the day. The weather service estimated that feeder bands from Andrea's remnants dropped more than 9 inches of rain on eastern Miami-Dade County and more than 6 inches of rain on eastern Broward County on Friday.

In Cuba, days of torrential rains associated with Andrea caused rivers to jump their banks in the western province of Pinar del Rio. More than 3,300 people evacuated endangered homes, and nearly 1,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of croplands suffered "serious damage," state-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde said Friday. Rain was forecast to continue falling on already waterlogged areas through Saturday.

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Kiley Armstrong in New York; Michael Rubinkam in Allentown, Pa., Lisa Rathke in Montpelier, Vt., Samatha Henry in Newark, N.J., Michael Melia in Hartford, Conn., Michael Felberbaum in Richmond, Va., Michael Biesecker, Emery P. Dalesio, Aaron Beard in Raleigh, N.C.; Bruce Smith in Charleston, S.C.; Jack Jones in Columbia, S.C.; Jennifer Kay and Kelli Kennedy in Miami; Gary Fineout and Brent Kallestad in Tallahassee, Fla.; and Peter Orsi in Havana.