Click here to subscribe today or Login.
Old mill goes up in flames Firefighters battle a blaze at the former Union Wadding Mill early Thursday morning in Pawtucket, R.I. The mill was mostly unoccupied, but several apartments were evacuated as a precaution. There were no reports of injuries.
AP PHOTO
BAGHDAD
U.S., Iraqi death tolls differ
In its most extensive death tally of the Iraq war, the U.S. military says nearly 77,000 Iraqi civilians and security officials were killed from early 2004 to mid-2008 — a toll that falls well below Iraqi government figures.
The military’s count, which spans the bloodiest chapter of Iraq’s sectarian warfare and the U.S. troop surge to quell it, is short of the 85,694 figure released last year by the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry that covers early 2004 to Oct. 31, 2008.
Casualty figures in the U.S.-led war in Iraq have been hotly disputed because of the high political stakes in a conflict opposed by many countries and a large portion of the American public. Critics on each side of the divide accuse the other of manipulating the death toll to sway opinion.
MINEOLA, N.Y.
Cops: Boy gets gay taunts
Three teenagers beat and slapped a younger boy during bus rides to and from school this week because they suspected he was gay, and two of them taunted him about it, police on New York’s Long Island said Thursday.
David Spencer, 18, and Roy Wilson, 16, were arraigned Thursday in Nassau County Court in Hempstead. A third co-defendant, 16-year-old Chase Morrison, will be arraigned today.
Morrison and Spencer were charged with felony assault and aggravated harassment, the latter charge stemming from alleged anti-gay epithets, police said. Wilson was charged only with assault because police said there was no evidence that he made any anti-gay slurs.
NEW CASTLE, Pa.
Mom: Bagel a false positive
The American Civil Liberties Union is representing a western Pennsylvania woman who says her newborn baby was seized by county welfare workers after she failed a drug test because she ate a poppy seed bagel.
ACLU attorney Sara Rose said Lawrence County Children and Youth Services officials came to Elizabeth Mort’s home three days after she gave birth at Jameson Hospital in New Castle last month. A state law allows hospitals to give blood tests to protect newborns from mothers who may be abusing drugs.
Rose says the hospital and welfare workers rushed to judgment without thoroughly investigating.
Heroin is made from poppies and eating the seeds has been known to cause false positive drug results.
The hospital says it is comparing its procedures to other hospitals. The baby has since been returned.
FARMINGVILLE, N.Y.
Registry for animal abusers
You’ve heard of Megan’s Laws, designed to keep sex offenders from striking again. Now there’s a law created in the hope of preventing animal abusers from inflicting more cruelty — or moving on to human victims.
Suffolk County, on the eastern half of Long Island, moved to create the nation’s first animal abuse registry this week, requiring people convicted of cruelty to animals to register or face jail time and fines.
The online list will be open to the public so that pet owners can find out whether someone living near them is on it.