American Scene

ARIZONA

Small plane lands on playground

PHOENIX | A small plane made an emergency landing Wednesday on a school playground, but no one was hurt.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said a single-engine Cessna 152 with a flight instructor and student on board left nearby Glendale Municipal Airport for a practice flight in the morning. The instructor reported a rough-running engine and said he didn’t think the plane could make it back to the airport.

Mr. Gregor said the plane apparently hit a chain-link fence at Villa de Paz Elementary School while trying to land on the empty playground about 9:30 a.m. Television images showed the plane’s nose stuck into the grass just feet from a jungle gym and classrooms.

ILLINOIS

Fish trait raises risk of being caught

CHAMPAIGN | A lengthy University of Illinois study shows that some largemouth bass inherit a vulnerability to being caught. The research was reported in the journal Transactions of the American Fisheries Society.

The study started in 1975 at a state park. Researchers said anglers had to put each fish that was caught into a live well on their boat. The fish were tagged to keep track of how many times each was caught, and all fish were then released.

“We kept track over four years of all of the angling that went on, and we have a total record - there were thousands of captures,” said David Philipp, an ecology and conservation researcher. “Many fish were caught more than once.”

Subsequent testing designed to identify fish as having a low or high vulnerability to being caught continued for several generations during the course of the 20-year experiment.

“As we had predicted, vulnerability was a heritable trait,” said Mr. Philipp, noting that with each generation, the difference between lines in angling vulnerability grew even larger.

MICHIGAN

Mother arrested in kidnapping case

DETROIT | A Michigan woman accused of kidnapping her daughter and fleeing the country in 2007 has been arrested in Austria.

Federal prosecutor Leonid Feller told the Detroit Free Press that Andrea Morrison and her 6-year-old daughter were found Wednesday in an apartment in Bad Ischl, Austria. The girl is now back with her father, Adam Morrison of Willis, Va., who flew to Austria to pick her up. The Morrisons divorced in 2003.

Mr. Feller said Mrs. Morrison, formerly of Chelsea, Mich., will be returned to Detroit to face a kidnapping charge and a fraud charge related to her passport. Extradition could take two months.

Mrs. Morrison’s father has accused her in a lawsuit of stealing more than $1 million from him.

OHIO

Corrections chief handcuffed youths

COLUMBUS | Beth Oprisch, 47, as superintendent of the Indian River Juvenile Correctional Facility in the northeastern part of the state, twice handcuffed herself briefly to out-of-control youths to help calm them. Those actions - as well as failing to have one of the youths checked for injuries from the handcuffs - put her and the youths in danger, the Department of Youth Services said.

Ms. Oprisch said in her defense that no policy specifically prohibited her from taking such action, records showed.

She was reassigned Wednesday to a job in the agency’s parole division in Columbus, and her salary dropped from $76,003 to $72,259. The state reprimanded four other Indian River administrators for not properly documenting what happened.

TEXAS

$2 million predicted for Lincoln stamps

DALLAS | A collection of about 10,000 stamps featuring Abraham Lincoln may bring more than $2 million at auction Friday by Spink Shreves Galleries of Dallas.

The owner of the collection, William J. Ainsworth, 67, of Roswell, Ga., said that as a child he would watch his father work on his stamp collection. He was 12 when his father died; his mother later gave him the collection.

The stamps, some from as far back as the 1860s, come from the U.S. and its current or former possessions, including Guam and the Philippines. It includes a range of collectibles from preproduction items, like proofs, to stamps that were affixed to envelopes and sent around the world.

WISCONSIN

No perjury charge in toilet drowning

MADISON | Assistant Attorney General Paul Barnett said in a letter released Wednesday that he cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Saami Shaibani committed perjury at the 2002 trial of Douglas Plude, accused of drowning his wife in a toilet.

Mr. Barnett has decided not to charge Mr. Shaibani, who as an expert witness misrepresented his credentials during the trial.

Prosecutors called Mr. Shaibani to bolster their case that Mr. Plude drowned his wife in the toilet at their home in 1999. Mr. Plude maintained that his wife committed suicide.

Mr. Shaibani falsely told jurors that he was a clinical associate professor at Temple University. The Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded last year that he lied and it overturned Mr. Plude’s conviction. A new trial is expected to begin in October.

From wire dispatches and staff reports