WORLD NEWS BRIEFS FOR APRIL 2, 2009

GANJA GRANNY TO BE SENTENCED ON FRIDAY

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Police say a 71-year-old Canadian woman has pleaded guilty to drug smuggling charges after customs officials found 8 pounds of marijuana hidden in her luggage at a Jamaican airport. Montego Bay Police Constable Ulet Lewis-Green on Wednesday identified the woman as Margueritta Lancaster-Reid of Ontario. Authorities did not disclose a hometown for the Canadian dubbed "ganja granny" by local media.
Lewis-Green says the elderly woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to concealing the marijuana in her luggage at Donald Sangster International Airport. The Jamaica Observer says she told police officers it was "herbs" when the drug stash was found March 28.
She is scheduled to be sentenced Friday and could face up to a year in prison.

More Octu Drama For Octu Mama

Baby seat thrown through octuplet mom's van window
LA HABRA, Calif. — Someone has thrown a baby's car seat through the rear window of octuplet mother Nadya Suleman's minivan.
Police in La Habra, Calif., say the octuplets' nannies saw the seat lodged in the shattered window of the family's van when they arrived to work Wednesday morning at Suleman's home.
Lt. Fred Wiste says a night nanny heard a noise, looked out a window and saw a cargo van speeding away around 3 a.m., but did not call police or go outside to investigate.
Officers have no suspects.
Suleman, an unemployed single mother of 14 children, has endured much public scorn in the weeks since giving birth to octuplets on Jan. 26.
Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center says the seventh octuplet was discharged Wednesday. Josiah weighed 4 pounds, 8 ounces when he went home.

Man collapses in shock after guilty verdict in La.
NEW ORLEANS — A former Army Corps of Engineers consultant is recovering after he collapsed in a New Orleans courtroom following a guilty verdict in his federal bribery case.
His co-defendant, a registered nurse who was also convicted, tended to him after courthouse staff said no one with medical training was on duty.
Former consultant Kern Wilson and subcontractor Durwanda Elizabeth Heinrich were accused of conspiring to bribe another consultant for confidential information about bids to rebuild a levee. The project was part of an effort to better protect the region after Hurricane Katrina.
Heinrich comforted Wilson, told him an ambulance was coming and had started using a defibrillator when paramedics arrived. A friend says Wilson checked himself out of the hospital later Wednesday.

MADOFF BOATS SIEZED BY FEDERAL AUTHORITIES
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Federal authorities seized disgraced financier Bernard Madoff's Palm Beach mansion, his vintage yacht and a smaller boat Wednesday, part of an effort to recoup assets to pay back investors he swindled.
Barry Golden, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said about five marshals arrived at the 8,753-square-foot, five-bedroom mansion late Wednesday afternoon, hours after the boats were seized. Authorities spent about three hours securing the mansion, changing the locks and conducting an inventory of the property, which Palm Beach County records show had a taxable value of $9.3 million last year.
Golden said marshals filmed and photographed items in the house that might be removed at some point. "It's not an April Fools' joke," he said.
The mansion was unoccupied when federal authorities arrived, and the inspection took longer than expected because so many locks needed to be changed. They left around 9 p.m. after setting the alarm and posting a "no trespassing" sign on a window.
Palm Beach County property records show the Madoff mansion was purchased in 1994 under his wife Ruth's name for $3.8 million. The 2008 property tax bill was $157,298.
Golden said the estate would be "monitored and maintained" and is no longer considered Madoff's property.
"Once the judge signed the order, it stopped being Bernie Madoff's home," Golden said.
Earlier in the day, Golden said Madoff's 55-foot yacht named "Bull" and a 24-foot motor boat were taken from marinas on Florida's east coast. The yacht, a 1969 Rybovich, is worth $2.2 million.
"A lot of money was put into maintaining this boat," Golden said. "This boat was extremely well kept, extremely clean. Engine compartment was spotless. It looked like somebody took a bottle of 409 and scrubbed it every day."
Madoff, 70, is in jail in New York awaiting sentencing after he pleaded guilty to swindling billions from investors in what could be the biggest scam in Wall Street history. He faces up to 150 years behind bars.
Prosecutors are seizing as much as they can of Madoff's personal fortune, and have begun demanding millions of dollars in payments from his relatives. Roughly 6,700 people have filed claims for a share of whatever is recovered. Thousands more — some who lost in excess of $1 million — are expected to come forward.
Court documents filed by Madoff's attorneys indicate Madoff and his wife had up to $826 million in assets — including the boats — at the end of last year.

FORMER TEXAS NURSE CHARGED WITH KILLING FIVE PATIENTS
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A former nurse has been charged with injecting 10 patients with bleach, killing five of them, at a Texas dialysis clinic that temporarily closed last year after deaths mysteriously spiked.
Since the deaths over a four-week span last April, Kimberly Saenz (pronounced SINES) had been the focus of the investigation at the DaVita Inc. clinic in Lufkin. She was charged in May with aggravated assault involving bleach injections in two patients who survived, but she had not been charged in any deaths until late Tuesday.
The grand jury in Angelina County handed up indictments on one count of capital murder, which includes all five patient deaths, and five counts of aggravated assault, which replace the two charges filed last year and allege that three other patients were injected and survived.
Saenz, 35, was being held Wednesday at the county jail without bond. Her attorney, John Henry Tatum, hasn't returned numerous calls seeking comment, including one Wednesday, since her initial arrest last year.
Lufkin police have said two patients witnessed Saenz draw bleach into syringes and inject them into patients. Authorities say tests showed traces of bleach on the syringes and dialysis lines.
DaVita, which operates about 1,300 dialysis centers nationally, has painted Saenz as a rogue nurse. She worked as a licensed nurse for nearly four years in Texas and spent eight months at DaVita before being fired on April 29.
The previous day, the clinic had closed because of the spate of deaths. It reopened under heavy state oversight after being instructed to follow the most serious plan of correction that health officials have at their disposal.

BATTERED WOMAN RELEASED AFTER 29 YEARS IN PRISON
CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) — A battered wife who sat in a car as her husband robbed and killed a Santa Clara County liquor store owner was reunited Wednesday with her family after serving 29 years in state prison.
Connie Keel, 52, fiercely hugged her daughter, son, grandchildren and other relatives after she was freed from prison and driven to a halfway house in Claremont where she will live temporarily.
"Well, for 29 years I've had to have freedom from within and having freedom from without, to be physically free, is a new experience for me and I need (to) adjust," she told KCAL-TV.
Keel said she was "a scared, abused, uneducated, illiterate woman" when she went to prison but had "the opportunity to heal myself" through programs she took while incarcerated.
KCAL said she was expected to remain at the halfway house for about six months.
Keel was 21 when her then-husband, Ricky Keel, and his cousin, Jeffrey Taylor, killed a man in the town of Campbell in 1980.Authorities said the three were driving around when they stopped at a liquor store to buy cigarettes.

Keel's husband and his cousin decided to hold up the store. They robbed and shot to death the owner, Frank Gummer, 41.Both men were later convicted of first-degree murder and are serving life sentences.Keel also was convicted of first-degree murder as an accomplice and sentenced to 25 years to life. She was sent to the state women's prison in Chino and since 1996 was repeatedly denied parole.
Her case was taken up by Adam Reich, a law student at the University of Southern California, as part of the USC Gould School of Law's Post-Conviction Justice Project.

At her sixth parole hearing last fall, he argued that Keel's husband had raped and battered her, and that as an abused wife she was unable to disobey when he pointed a gun at her and ordered her to wait in the car during the killing.

NORTH CAROLINA POLICEMAN CITED FOR SPEEDING IN FATAL WRECK

CHARLOTTE — A North Carolina police officer who was driving more than 90 mph when his cruiser hit another vehicle and killed its driver has been cited in recent years for speeding.
The Charlotte Observer reported Wednesday that 24-year-old Officer Martray Proctor of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department was charged in 2005 with driving 86 mph in a 60 mph zone, and in 2007 with driving 63 mph in a 35 mph zone in neighboring counties.
Proctor was driving a cruiser Sunday night with its lights and siren off when he collided with a 1991 Ford Escort. The 20-year-old female driver was killed and three passengers were injured.

PAKISTANI MILITANT POSES THREAT TO U.S.
ISLAMABAD — The son of a poor potato farmer who once worked as a fitness instructor has grown into one of the most powerful militant leaders along the Pakistan-Afghan border, his rise fueled by alliances with al-Qaida and fellow Pakistani militants.
A day after Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud threatened to attack the White House, a U.S. drone fired two missiles at the alleged hide-out of one of his commanders Wednesday in a remote area of northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border, killing 14 people, intelligence and local officials said.
Mehsud is now seen as posing one of the greatest threats to President Barack Obama’s push to stem Pakistan’s slide toward instability and turn around the war in Afghanistan, analysts and officials said.
For years, the U.S. had considered him a lesser threat than some of the other Pakistani Taliban, their Afghan counterparts and al-Qaida, because most of his attacks were focused inside Pakistan, not against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials said the U.S. has changed its view in recent months as Mehsud’s power has grown and concerns mounted that increasing violence in Pakistan could destabilize the nuclear-armed ally. The FBI said it was not aware of any imminent or specific threat to Washington, and Mehsud has not carried out any attacks outside the region. Even so, Pakistani officials said the U.S. has stepped up strikes targeting the Pakistani Taliban leader and his supporters in recent weeks. The State Department authorized a reward of up to $5 million for Mehsud on March 25, the same day a suspected U.S. missile strike killed eight militants near his hometown in South Waziristan.

CONGO: PRODUCERS MUST NOT USE 'BLOOD MINERALS'

DAKAR, Senegal — Consumers buying iPods, Blackberries and cell phones should use their buying power to pressure electronics manufacturers to stop buying the minerals fueling one of Africa’s deadliest wars, activists said Wednesday.
The Washington-based Enough Project argued, in a paper released Wednesday, that the militias responsible for systematically raping women in Congo are funding their war through the illicit sale of minerals used to make the world’s most popular electronic products.
"The electronic devices used by almost every American provide unique leverage to help end the scourge of violence" in Congo, wrote John Prendergast, the author of the report and the founder of the Enough Project, a group aimed at ending crimes against humanity.
Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, has some of the world’s largest deposits of minerals, including tin, which is used as solder in circuit boards. It also has vast reserves of tungsten, used to make cell phones and Blackberries vibrate, and tantalum, an ore used to store electricity in capacitors in iPods.
Armed groups in Congo’s lawless east control many of the mines, as well as taxation points along highways and at border posts through which the ores are shipped on their way to the global market. U.N. investigators in reports released in recent months have identified the trade in minerals as one of the main economic forces supporting the conflict, which has caused a quarter-of-a-million people to flee their homes since last fall.

HONDURAN JOURNALIST KILLED
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Two unidentified gunmen killed a journalist who reported on the wave of violent crime in Honduras, police said Wednesday.
Assailants stopped Rafael Munguia, 36, as he was driving Tuesday night in the city of San Pedro Sula, dragged him from his vehicle and shot him at least eight times, according to a news release from the San Pedro Sula police department.
It was not immediately clear if the shooting was tied to Munguia’s work.
Munguia worked for Cadena Voces radio station. The station’s news coordinator, Denis Cano, said the slain journalist had recently been reporting on the country’s violent crime wave.
Munguia’s colleague, Carlos Salgado, was shot to death outside the station in October 2007. A month later, the station’s director, Dagoberto Rodriguez, left Honduras for two months after receiving death threats.
Cadena Voces went on the air in 2006. The radio station is often critical of President Manuel Zelaya’s leftist administration.
Meanwhile Wednesday, Zelaya’s government announced a series of measures to crack down on crime, including allowing the state telephone company to obtain court orders to record cellular phone conversations and read e-mails sent from computers at Internet cafes or hotels. The government also is banning tinted windows on public buses.
Last year, violent crime claimed 7,235 lives in this Central American nation of nearly 8 million people. That represented a 25 percent increase over 2007.

U.N.: "Drug-resistant TB may spiral out of control"

BEIJING — The world is on the cusp of an explosion of drug-resistant tuberculosis cases that could deluge hospitals and leave physicians fighting a nearly untreatable malady with little help from modern drugs, global experts said Wednesday.
"The situation is already alarming, and poised to grow much worse very quickly," said Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization.
With Bill Gates at her side, Chan urged health officials from 27 countries at a three-day forum in Beijing on drug-resistant TB to recognize the warning signs of what looms ahead, saying that traditional drugs are useless against some strains of tuberculosis and health-care costs for treating those strains can be 100 to 200 times more than for regular tuberculosis.
"This is a situation set to spiral out of control. Call it what you may: a time bomb or a powder keg. Any way you look at it, this is a potentially explosive situation," Chan warned.
Gates, the software magnate turned philanthropist, said scientific overconfidence had led to a lack of innovation and urgency in fighting tuberculosis, which affects 9 million people each year, killing nearly 2 million of them.
"The most commonly used diagnostic test is today more than 125 years old," Gates said. "The vaccine was developed more than 80 years ago, and drugs have not changed in 50 years."
Tuberculosis is a highly contagious bacterial infection that attacks the lungs and can affect other organs as well. Coughing, sneezing and even talking can spread the bacteria. If untreated, a person with TB can infect 10 to 15 other people in a year.

WANDA SYKES TO HOST SATURDAY NITE SERIES
LOS ANGELES — Tart-tongued Wanda Sykes is returning to Fox TV with a late-night series offering a comedic look at current events.
The program, as yet untitled, will air on Saturdays and is scheduled to premiere this fall, the network said Wednesday.
While the airtime for Sykes’ show was not announced, it likely will fill the 11 p.m. to midnight EDT slot now held by the sketch comedy series "MadTV," which wraps its 14-season run in May. Fox says Sykes’ show will include "biting" commentary, out-of-studio segments and panel discussions. Her short-lived comedy series "Wanda At Large" aired on Fox in 2003.
The Emmy-winning actress-comedian, who is set to host the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in May, co-stars in the CBS sitcom "The New Adventures of Old Christine."

GAY RIGHTS BATTLE PUTS STRAIN ON PARTIES

CHICAGO — They’ve become a familiar sight in gay bars: women holding bachelorette parties.
The bride-to-be is often easily identifiable. She’s the one wearing either a veil or tiara or feather boa or phallic-shaped blow-up hat, and is surrounded by women who begin the night somewhat reserved but metamorphose into pelvis-thrusting vamps as their blood-alcohol levels rise.
The women come to celebrate without having to worry about straight men pawing them. The gay men are there because, well, they don’t want to be around a lot of women.
For years, some bar owners have tried to accommodate both groups, but that’s becoming increasingly difficult. With California’s vote last November in favor of the gay-marriage ban known as Proposition 8, some gays are saying that bachelorette parties at their bars are becoming more than a minor nuisance. They’re a constant reminder that gays don’t have equal marriage rights.
"The women are a hoot, and some can be just delightful," said Geno Zaharakis, the owner of Cocktail, a gay bar in Chicago. "But because not everybody can get married, watching them celebrate, it’s such a slap in the face. Prop 8 just reopened the wound."
Zaharakis told me Cocktail stopped hosting bachelorette parties a couple of years ago when he noticed his gay patrons weren’t just complaining about the women being minor irritants but about them "flaunting" their right to marry. So Zaharakis hung a sign on the front door of his establishment that says, "Bachelorette Parties Are Not Allowed."
If that message isn’t resonant enough, he offers a written statement: "Until same-sex marriage is legal everywhere and same-sex couples are allowed the rights as every heterosexual couple worldwide, we simply do not think it’s fair or just for a female bride-to-be to celebrate her upcoming nuptials here at Cocktail. We are entitled to an opinion, this is ours."
Indeed some gay men and straight women have a friendship that’s reminiscent of the old television show "Will & Grace." And many men make the distinction between their "girlfriends" who frequent gay bars and are sensitive to the marriage issue and other women who are merely seeking good music and "go-go boys" (translation: nearly naked male dancers) for a bachelorette party. "We appreciate that these women are not homophobic and ... want to party with us," said Jens Hussey, a gay man.