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Pa. shooter shares threats with other mass murderers

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Before opening fire on an aerobics class, George Sodini wrote about feeling lonely and rejected - yet those very characteristics put him in the company of other mass killers whose isolation helped create a murderous cocktail.

Sodini's deadly rampage at a suburban Pittsburgh health club shares threads with other massacres analyzed by psychiatrists and legal experts, who say the line between lonely and homicidal remains hard to place.

"These people get into a very self-centered, sometimes self-aggrandizing, often psychotic path that enables them, in their mind, to finally get the attention they crave," New York attorney Carolyn Wolf, whose firm specializes in mental health issues.

The 48-year-old Sodini fatally shot himself after killing three women and wounding nine others attending a weekly Latin dance aerobics class in Collier Township on Tuesday night.

Hughes recalled as 'a quintessential filmmaker'

NEW YORK (AP) - The actors made famous by writer-director John Hughes are extolling his talents after his death, calling him influential and "one of the giants" for capturing the youth market in the 1980s and '90s with such favorites as "The Breakfast Club," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Home Alone."

Hughes died of a heart attack during a Thursday morning walk in Manhattan, spokeswoman Michelle Bega said. The 59-year-old was in New York to visit family.

A native of Lansing, Mich., who moved to suburban Chicago and set much of his work there, Hughes rose from comedy writer to ad writer to silver screen champ with his affectionate and idealized portraits of teens, whether the romantic and sexual insecurity of "Sixteen Candles," or the J.D. Salinger-esque rebellion against conformity in "The Breakfast Club."

Hughes' ensemble comedies helped make stars out of Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy and many other young performers. He also scripted the phenomenally popular "Home Alone," which made little-known Macaulay Culkin a sensation.