IRVING ( Mother arrested for D.U.I and killing 2 sons )

IRVING — An Irving woman faces intoxication manslaughter charges after a Saturday night car crash that killed two of her children and injured two others.

Irving police said Crystal Suniga, 30, lost control of her sport utility vehicle and slammed into two parked cars across from Gilbert Elementary School in the 1500 block of East Pioneer Drive at around 8 p.m.

Police spokesman James McLellan said Suniga's two sons — identified by family members as 14-year-old Angel Reyes and 10-year-old Ricardo Hernandez — were dead at the scene.

Police said two other juveniles in the vehicle — a boy and a girl — were injured. Their names and ages were not available.

Adan Osuna, his brother Jose and their 11-year-old sister Lizmar witnessed the crash. Adan said the images of one of the deceased still haunts him.

"His body was under the car. I didn't see his face... I only saw his legs," he said.

Moments earlier, Jose Osuna said he heard tires screeching and then witnessed Suniga's out-of-control SUV jump the curb, flip over, and crash in a neighbor's yard — taking out three cars and a fence along the way.

"It was very loud," Jose said. "Our whole house shook. I thought it was an earthquake or something."

Suniga suffered minor injuries and was hospitalized at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.

McLellan said Suniga's blood alcohol level tested at 0.18, more than twice the legal limit.

She has been charged with two counts of intoxication manslaughter, two counts of injury to a child and one count of intoxication assault. No bond was set.

It was not clear when Suniga would be transferred from the hospital to jail.

Adnan, who lives down the street from Suniga, said she was trying to catch up with her boyfriend with whom she had been fighting.

Suniga's mother declined to speak on camera, but said her daughter wasn't drunk and denied that she had been fighting.

Francisco Garcia saw his sister's car damaged in the crash. He was furious about what happened.

"It pisses me off... drunk driving with kids inside! They're innocent," he said. "They didn't do nothing.

Venezuela ( Torture victim tells story of abuse )

"They battered us while we lay stacked up like pancakes"

The nephew of a Supreme Court justice is among those denouncing torture in Carabobo state. "An officer ordered to place the motorcycles up front to shield themselves from view. That's when they ran the motorcycle over me." "Instead of an officer saying ‘you're under arrest,' I was struck in the face by the butt end of a weapon. My glasses were smashed and I went blind in the left eye"

Montana ( Bride gets 30 years in prison for killing her husband )

MISSOULA, Montana: A Montana bride who shoved her husband off a cliff at Glacier National Park has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after a federal judge denied her request to withdraw her guilty plea to a charge of second-degree murder.

Attorneys for Jordan Graham, 22, had sought to rescind a guilty plea she entered in December, saying prosecutors were overreaching by seeking a life sentence and reneging on an agreement that they expected would involve less prison time.
But US District Judge Donald Molloy denied the request at a hearing in Missoula, and later sentenced Graham to 30 years in prison with no chance for early parole, followed by five years of supervised release.
“Jordan Linn Graham didn’t have the human capacity to feel the wrongfulness of what she’d done, to seek help or even tell his (her husband’s) mother,” Molloy said.
Graham has admitted in court to pushing her husband of eight days off the edge of a cliff last July. She said that on the day he died, the newlyweds had driven to the Montana park and walked down to an embankment on the cliff face, where she told him she wasn’t happy and “wasn’t sure we should be married.”
Her husband, 25-year-old Cody Johnson, responded by grabbing her hand, she said. “I told him to let go and I pushed his hand off,” Graham said. “I just pushed his hand off and just pushed away.”
In exchange for Graham pleading guilty to second-degree murder in a deal struck just as closing arguments were due to begin in the high profile case, prosecutors dropped a first-degree murder charge, which carries a mandatory life sentence.
Before sentence was pronounced, Johnson’s mother, two uncles and an aunt called on the judge to put Graham behind bars for life

Iran ( Charshanbeh Suri "the last Wednesday of the year" 2 killed )

Tehran, YJC. Tuesday evening’s bonfire (Chaharshanbe Suri) has taken its toll of the year as all previous years.Head of the Public Relations of the Health Ministry’s Treatment Department said that 148 have been injured playing with fire on Tuesday evening.

Every year Iranians celebrate the last Wednesday of the year. The bonfire starts late Tuesday and is pursued the following day by firing firecrackers, setting up fire, and flying sky lanterns. The occasion is called Charshanbeh Suri.

Arezoo Dehghani in interview with Mehr News Agency added "By 22:30 tonight the Charshanbeh Suri wounded 148 people, 51 of which were released with outpatient treatment and 97 were transferred to hospitals.”

She further stated that hospitals and emergency services are kept on duty.

More recent reports say that two people have died from wounds inflicted during the bonfire.

Copenhagen Zoo ( Kills four lions " to make way for new one" ? )

The Danish zoo that drew so much criticism for killing a healthy young giraffe named Marius and inviting schoolchildren to watch as he was dismembered and fed to lions is at it again.

This time, the zoo announced that it euthanized four healthy lions Monday to make way for a young male lion.

It did not say what it did with their carcasses, nor whether they were among those who ate Marius.

Of course it’s tempting for any older person to anthropomorphize the situation (four old guys equals one young guy), but it turns out that only two of the lions were older -- 16 and 14 years old -- and one of them was a female. The other two were 18-month-old male cubs.

Having checked its humanity at the door in February when it so publicly killed and disposed of Marius, the zoo has a perfectly cold-eyed scientific rationale for the slaughter:

“The change in the lion pride had to happen now because Copenhagen Zoo currently has two young females from the 2012 litter and it is ideal to keep these as part of the new pride and then find a suitable male,” officials said in a statement on the zoo's website. “If the Zoo had not made the change in the pride now then we would have risked that the old male would mate with these two females -- his own offspring -- and thereby give rise to inbreeding.

“Furthermore, we couldn’t risk that the male lion mated with the old female as she was too old to be mated with again due to the fact that she would have difficulties with birth and parental care of another litter.”

(As an old female myself, I’m straining against the temptation to apply any evolutionary biology comparisons to human beings here.)

There were other exigencies outlined by the zoo in its explanation for why four perfectly healthy creatures had to be put down instead of moved.

The older male and older female would have killed the new male lion, officials said. And the new male lion would have killed the two sexually immature younger males.

Also, they said, had the new male not arrived quickly, the remaining females of the pride might have ganged up on him and killed him.

But none of that explains why the animals could not have gone off to some preserve and lived out their lives in peace.

Zoo spokesman Tobias Stenbaek Bro told CNN that the zoo tried to place them, “but unfortunately, there wasn’t any interest.”

How hard did they try?

You may recall that even when there was a great deal of interest in saving the life of Marius, the zoo refused to let him go, citing regulations of its governing organization, the European Assn. of Zoos and Aquaria. Yet two zoos that offered to take Marius, the Krakow Zoo and the Yorkshire Wildlife Park, are members of the association.

You could argue, correctly, that captive animals enjoy longer life spans than those in the wild, and in that sense a zoo animal’s life is often extended, perhaps even pleasurably, as it no longer has to deal with predators. (Well, non-human predators.)

But it is also true that these life-and-death decisions have nothing to do with an individual animal’s welfare, and in fact only serve the zoo’s needs and its higher goals of maintaining genetic diversity.

Maybe this is naive, but it seems to me that we humans owe a debt to these magnificent creatures. They entertain us, educate us and enlighten us. They deserve more than regular feedings and an untimely death.

 

CAIRO ( Protest at University " Over 520 death senttences " )

CAIRO: Hundreds of largely university students in a number of universities protested Wednesday against the mass death sentences issued against more than 520 suspected supporters of President Muhammad Mursi in a cursory trial, setting off clashes that left dozens injured.
One person was killed near the university when protesters clashed with security forces, a Health Ministry official told Reuters. The official said eight were wounded.


At Cairo University, hundreds of students who attempted to take their protest outside the campus were met with volleys of tear gas from police. Khadiga El-Kholy, a student participating in the protest, said the police force gave no warnings before firing the tear gas, sending the students rushing back on campus.
Students responded by throwing stones and fireworks and hurling tear gas canisters back at the security forces in pitched street battles. TV footage showed security in civilian clothes detaining protesters and taking them away in blindfolds. There were also images of the security seizing firebombs from young protesters. El-Kholy said police fired birdshot at the protesters.
“We wanted to escalate our protest because of those death sentences, which included university students,” she said, adding that the protesters had sought to move into a nearby public square outside the campus. “We want to break the barriers that the security forces have imposed on all the squares.”
In the Nile Delta city of Zagazig, police said students damaged the facade of an administrative building in the local university and clashed with rival students, prompting to security forces to enter the campus and arrest eight rioters.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s state news agency says the country’s chief prosecutor has ordered two new mass trials for 919 suspects on charges that include murder.

Amnesty News ( Amnesty slams Iran over the " Death Penalty ") Video