The U.S. attorney's office for Eastern Washington had no comment on whether additional charges might be sought.

Matthew Ryan Buquet, 37, was arrested Wednesday.

A grand jury indictment accused him of mailing a death threat to U.S. District Judge Fred Van Sickle in Spokane on May 14.

The indictment did not mention ricin, but the FBI made the link in a news release late Wednesday, saying analysis showed the letter sent to the judge contained "active ricin toxin."

"Our coordinated team acted swiftly to resolve a potentially dangerous situation, and continues working tirelessly around the clock to investigate the origin of the letters and to address any remaining, potential risks," Laura Laughlin, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Seattle office, said in a statement.

The U.S. Postal Service said last week that two letters were intercepted — one addressed to the courthouse and the other to the downtown post office — and they contained ricin in a crude form that did not immediately pose a threat to workers.

Buquet appeared in federal court in Spokane after the FBI said agents arrested him Wednesday afternoon. He pleaded not guilty to mailing a threatening communication.

The short, balding Buquet wore dark-tinted glasses and was shackled in court. He gave brief "yes" and "no" answers to questions from U.S. Magistrate Judge Cynthia Imbrogno.

A search of federal court records turned up no indication that Buquet had ever appeared before Van Sickle or had any connection to the judge.

Imbrogno ordered Buquet held until a bail hearing scheduled for Tuesday. A public defender was appointed to represent him.

If convicted of mailing a threatening communication, he could face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

U.S. Attorney Michael Ormsby declined to comment after the hearing, and little information about Buquet was immediately available.

Ricin is a highly toxic substance made from castor beans. As little as 500 micrograms, the size of the head of a pin, can kill an adult if inhaled or ingested.

There were no reports of illness connected to the Spokane letters.

Investigators in hazardous materials suits spent most of Saturday executing a search warrant at a three-story apartment building in downtown Spokane. Witnesses reported that agents escorted a man from the building.

The Spokane investigation comes a month after letters containing ricin were addressed to President Barack Obama, a U.S. senator and a Mississippi judge. A Mississippi man was arrested in that case.

The message saying "Let this boy be discharged," and signed A. Lincoln was written on a telegram from Col. Thomas W. Harris about his son, Perry. It had been in a private collection and was valued at $15,000 by Nathan Raab of the Raab Collection, which offered the previously unknown document for sale.

The letter is considered rare because there are few Lincoln documents relating to children.

Lincoln's order came just two months before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 15, 1865. Ironically, Perry Harris was discharged from the Army the same day.

"It shows the type of person [Lincoln] was and how he was defined by clemency," Raab told FoxNews.com. "When you see it's involving a father and his son, it strikes a personal chord and likely did for Lincoln. He was a father of four who lost all but one of his sons."

Harris sent his telegram on Feb. 6, 1865, to Illinois Sen. Lyman Trumbull and Gen. John M. Palmer, pleading, "My son Perry Harris 14 years old insane crippled has been mustered in 55th Kentucky regiment. Please have Secretary of War order him discharged. Col. Thos. W. Harris of Shelbyville, Ill."

Perry had enlisted in the Union Army one month earlier without his parents' blessing. The nature of his disability was not clear, but the minimum enlistment age during the Civil War was 18. Many boys, however, lied about their ages to join the army.

Harris' request wound up on Palmer's desk, and he passed it along to Lincoln with his personal endorsement, writing on the telegram, "I have no doubt of the truth of this statement. John M. Palmer."

Lincoln responded by writing on the telegram, "Let this boy be discharged."

"Compassion in a leader is a rare quality, especially during a horrific war," Edward Steers Jr., a historian who has written extensively on Lincoln and his assassination, told Fox News.

"Lincoln had lost his mother when he was 9 years old, his only sister and close friend when he was 20, his son Eddie in 1850, and his son Willie within a year of occupying the White House. Feeling grief so many times, Lincoln came to understand it better than most people."

"Lincoln's compassion during the Civil War is legendary, as are stories about him showing it toward soldiers, many of whom were little more than children," Raab said.  "This stems from his great empathy, but also from his own experience. Nowhere is Lincoln's character on more vivid display than in his leniency toward the boys who had enlisted in the war."

While today there seems little chance of getting a letter directly to the president's desk, Lincoln made himself available to constituents.

 "It's hard to imagine sending a letter to the offices of Bush or Obama," Raab said. "But letters often reached Lincoln's desk. He also had office hours and the people could go right in and see him. They were different times."

FoxNews.com's Jana Winter contributed to this story.

Alt, who owns the small Eight is Enough poultry farm in the town of Old Fields, was hit with the fines after EPA officials claimed high levels of nitrogen in her chickens' waste were fouling waterways. She fought back by filing a lawsuit of her own in federal court of the Northern District of West Virginia, and although the EPA dropped the fines, a judge has kept the case on the docket. Alt's lawyers argue the EPA is wrong to deny small operations like hers the Clean Water Act's statutory exemption for "agricultural stormwater," which big farms get and believe the massive agency has to change its rules - and use better science.

"[T]his Court's ultimate decision on the merits will benefit all parties, including EPA and many thousands of farmers, by clarifying the extent of federal CWA 'discharge' liability and permit requirements for ordinary precipitation runoff from a typical farmyard," the court ruled in rejecting the EPA's bid to have the case dismissed.

Alt's case could get a boost from a new University of Delaware study, which shows the EPA has been overestimating the environmental effect of runoff from feedlots and small farms like Alt's for years. The study found that the level of nitrogen found in chicken manure is 55 percent lower than the decades-old standards set by the EPA. Those findings could give Alt and her legal team powerful ammunition when they go to court on behalf of small farmers everywhere.

"Ms. Alt has courageously taken on EPA not just for her own benefit, but for the benefit of other farmers," said American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman. "She refused to back down from her principles despite the best efforts of EPA and environmental groups."

The Delaware study raises the possibility of many farmers having been wrongly fined for polluting the ecosystem in the past, a prospect that would only confirm the suspicions of farming advocates.

"For me, it is not surprising, because the way in which the EPA works…it does not have a whole lot of credibility," Don Parrish, the American Farm Bureau Federation's senior director of regulatory relations, told FoxNews.com. "They do have positive goals, but there's a real disconnect in the nature of interpreting science in modern agriculture.

"It's a systematic application that is putting farmers in a negative light," he added.

The EPA did not return requests for comment.

The study, which looked at farms in Delaware, Virginia and West Virginia, found that the EPA standards did not reflect genetic modifications and improved farming techniques that have had a dramatic effect on the farm industry's environmental footprint. One case study showed that poultry plants in Sussex County, Delaware, generated 261,723 tons of manure in a single year, yet the EPA models assumed they produced 1.5 million tons.

"[The] findings are significant because they represent the most current data available, based on tests of thousands of samples of actual manure, not estimates," Dan Shortridge, spokesman for Delaware Department of Agriculture, which participated in the study, told FoxNews.com. "When making decisions and forming policies and goals -- especially about our environment -- it is important to have the most accurate data, and that's what this represents. What this provides policymakers is a detailed look at the actual effects of manure, and it appears to be less than everyone had thought."

The inflated numbers could indicate small farmers have faced unjustified fines for years, if not decades. Alt was threatened with daily fines in 2011 unless she obtained a Clean Water Act discharge permit for rainwater runoff that made its way from her coops to local waterways. With the backing of the West Virginia Farm Bureau and the AFBF, she sued to challenge the permit order. The EPA backed off, but Alt's lawsuit is still pending.

"The EPA seems to have believed if it withdrew the order against Ms. Alt, the court would dismiss her lawsuit," said Stallman. "The tactic failed because the court recognized EPA wasn't changing its underlying legal position, but just trying to avoid having to defend that position."

The court denied a motion by the EPA to dismiss the lawsuit and scheduled a hearing for June 1.

The 43-year-old Manchester lawyer didn't testify at her trial but said at Thursday's sentencing her world crashed and her life fell apart after her husband left her.

The woman's two-day trial featured a series of sexually explicit videos prosecutors say she made of her 14-year-old daughter.

She was convicted in January of transporting her daughter across state lines to produce child porn, possessing child porn and sexually exploiting her daughter to produce child porn. She had faced up to 100 years in prison at her sentencing hearing.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who could be victims of sexual assault and is not naming the woman to avoid identifying her daughter.

Nushawn Williams' lawyer says Williams' blood was recently examined by the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Attorney John Nuchereno says Williams may have been the victim of a false positive when tested 16 years ago.

Williams has been in prison since pleading guilty in 1999 to statutory rape and reckless endangerment. His sentence ended in 2010, but he remains in prison under a state law that allows confinement of dangerous sex offenders.

A civil trial is scheduled for next month to determine whether he will remain locked up.

State officials have questioned the validity of the new results.

Lincoln County Sheriff Murray Blackwelder announced on Thursday that 36-year-old Henry Burrell, of Fayetteville, Tenn., and 35-year-old Zakkawanda Moss, of New Market, Ala., are charged with six counts each of first-degree murder. The two men are jailed in Alabama on unrelated charges.

Officials say three women, a man, toddler and unborn baby were slain last October.

According to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Burrell and Moss were drug dealers who worked with one of the victims, Warren Crutcher. Officials believe the pair decided Crutcher was ripping them off, and the killings occurred while Burrell and Moss were looking for drugs and money.

Illinois State Police have refused to publicly identify the driver ticketed for improper lane usage and driving with a suspended license Monday's wreck on Interstate 70, citing an ongoing investigation a spokeswoman said could take weeks. However, The Associated Press obtained that citation, which was issued to 45-year-old Malcolm Purnell of Paterson, N.J. Public records suggest Purnell now lives in Camden, N.J.

The state's attorney in Illinois' Fayette County, Joshua Morrison, said no criminal charges have been filed in the wreck, which killed five Baltimore men near Vandalia, Ill., about 70 miles east of St. Louis.

The 11 occupants of the 15-passenger van were members of an evangelical Christian church returning from a weeklong international conference in Ontario, Calif., near Los Angeles, when the vehicle inexplicably careened off of the interstate and flipped several times, ejecting nine of the men.

At least two of the men, including Purnell, apparently had criminal backgrounds, possibly making the ministry work redemptive. Purnell has done prison time in New Jersey on a robbery conviction, and one of those killed in the wreck — Emerson Baldwin, 54 — had a criminal past stretching from a disorderly conduct conviction in 1986 to a drug possession one in March of last year, court records show. Baldwin was sentenced to 10 months in prison after being convicted in a 2009 drug-possession case, according to Jane Loving, the Baltimore attorney who represented him.

"Maybe he had turned his life around," Loving said this week of Baldwin, who in 2009 had two children and was working as a demolition company's steel cutter. "If he was with a church group, maybe that's a good sign."

Purnell, among the six passengers who survived, was released Wednesday from the hospital and has not responded to repeated AP requests for an interview. Messages left with his relatives also were not returned Thursday.

Purnell's driver's license was suspended last year by a court after he failed to resolve insurance issues and did not make three required payments to get his driving privileges restored, New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission records show. Purnell tried to fix the problem by frequently calling, writing and faxing the commission, according to the records.

Purnell's license also was suspended briefly in 2002 after falling behind on child support, though he has had no actual driving-related violations over the past decade or so, the driving records show.

Purnell and others in the van were members of Victory Outreach International of San Dimas, Calif., which works largely in inner cities and provides residential alcohol and drug rehabilitation in many locations, the church's overseer for Christian recovery said this week. Philip LaCrue added that the victims were returning from the yearly Mighty Men of Valor convention, which the church's website says helps men find spiritual direction and their role in the church.

Calls and emails Thursday to the Victory Outreach church and pastor in Baltimore were not immediately returned.

Purnell was sentenced in 1993 to a 20-year sentence for robbery and was paroled in 1998 before being returned to lockup eight years later after violating conditions of his release, New Jersey Department of Corrections spokeswoman Deirdre Fedkenheuer said. Purnell eventually was released for good behavior in early 2007, she said.

Purnell's criminal record also includes earlier convictions of theft and forgery, Fedkenheuer said.

Jurors took less than 10 minutes to convict Naim Rasool Muhammad last week after hearing testimony from the mother of the two drowned boys, 5-year-old Naim and 3-year-old Elijah. They also watched a video of Muhammad, 34, describing the killings to a police detective.

Muhammad killed Naim and Elijah in August 2011. Authorities say he forced the boys and their mother, Kametra Sampson, into a car and started driving. It was supposed to be Naim's first day of school.

Sampson was able to jump out of the car and alert a nearby county constable, who did not chase Muhammad but called police.

As officers launched a manhunt, Muhammad took the boys to a creek in Glenn Heights, outside Dallas. He described what happened next in a videotaped interview played in court and quoted by The Dallas Morning News.

He described the last moments with the boys near the creek. Naim said, "I love you, Daddy."

Then, he told his sons to sit down. "Play like y'all swimming," he said, before pushing their faces into the water.

Muhammad was seen crying in court. Some jurors stared at him, while others focused on the video screens showing the interview.

According to the video, Muhammad was angry at Sampson for breaking up with him. Sampson testified that he "started getting all sweet" when they spotted the constable after he had forced her and the boys into the car.

She ended up getting out and running toward the constable, yelling, "He's going to kill my kids," according to the Morning News.

Muhammad's mother later called 911 to say her son had drowned the boys and that she had their unresponsive bodies.

Court records show Muhammad had a history of violence. Sampson told jurors that Muhammad routinely beat her, often for things as small as burning rice. Texas Child Protective Services officials said they were monitoring Sampson and the couple's three children after receiving a report of family violence.

Paul Johnson, Muhammad's attorney, said his client believed in his "deranged mind" that his boys would grow up like him — with a mother addicted to drugs and without a father. He argued that Muhammad deserved to be found guilty, but said he should be given life in prison instead of a death sentence.

Muslim-majority Indonesia has emerged as Southeast Asia's most robust democracy since the fall of longtime dictator Suharto 15 years ago. But recent years have seen increased reports of violence and discrimination against Christians, minority Shiite Muslims and the Ahmadiyah Islamic sect.

Senior State Department official Dan Baer voiced concern Thursday over such attacks, and ineffective Indonesian government responses, saying they threaten to tarnish the nation's reputation for religious tolerance.

But Human Rights Watch criticized the Obama administration's moderate response, saying it was refusing to acknowledge in public what officials admit in private — that religious persecution is worsening.

WFMZ-TV reports (http://bit.ly/16WbDOj ) a jury in Allentown found Na Cola Franklin guilty on Thursday.

Prosecutors say Franklin and 36-year-old Billy Brewster got into an argument early in the morning on Aug. 11, the day they were to be married.

Defense attorney John Waldron says Brewster went home to their Whitehall Township apartment drunk after an impromptu bachelor party. He says Brewster attacked Franklin and then tried to leave with the couple's 9-month-old son.

Waldron argued Franklin grabbed a knife to protect her child.

Prosecutors say the child was not in danger.

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Information from: WFMZ-TV, http://www.wfmz.com