Small Town Baffled by Islamist Weatherman

To their neighbors in the tiny town of King Salmon, Alaska, Paul and Nadia Rockwood were a normal, social, cheerful couple—he a weatherman and she a cheery mom—but behind closed doors, Paul Rockwood was frequenting radical Islamist websites and compiling an assassination list. The pair was planning to move back to Nadia’s mother’s hometown in England and got a teary goodbye ceremony before flying to Anchorage, where the FBI was waiting for them. The Rockwoods pleaded guilty to willfully making false statements to the FBI this week. Paul had researched ways to kill the people on his list, and Nadia had taken a list of assassination targets—she initially claimed she thought she was merely carrying an innocent litter—to a person she thought was a fellow radical in Anchorage. Their old neighbors are baffled by the development, saying they never saw a sign of radicalism (Nadia even sang Christian songs in the community play). “If all terrorists were this harmless, we'd all be living in a much less complicated world,” one local said.