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Bugs not part of Valentine gift U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialist Albert Coronel shakes a bunch of red carnations to see if any insects fall out during inspections of Valentine’s flowers imported from around the world at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday. Dozens of customs inspectors are checking the millions of flowers in shipments coming from Colombia, Ecuador and other South America countries.
AP photo
DUBLIN, Ireland
Plane crash kills 6 people
A small commuter aircraft carrying 12 people crashed and flipped on its back Thursday while trying to land in heavy fog at Cork Airport in southwest Ireland, killing six people in the first crash of its kind in Irish history, the police and government said.
Police Superintendent Charlie Barry said four of the six survivors were hospitalized in serious condition, chiefly with broken ribs and limbs, while two others escaped with minor cuts and scrapes.
“Two actually walked out, miraculously,” he said.
Thursday’s crash was the deadliest in Irish aviation since 1968, when an Aer Lingus flight from Cork to London crashed into the Irish Sea, killing all 61 on board.
ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo.
Busch girlfriend used drugs
Adrienne Martin, the girlfriend of former Anheuser-Busch Chief Executive August Busch IV, had lethal levels of both cocaine and oxycodone in her blood when she died at his Huntleigh mansion, Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch announced Thursday afternoon.
He said she had used cocaine within about an hour of her death in December and the oxycodone within five or six hours of death. He said neither she nor Busch had a prescription for oxycodone, a powerful painkiller.
The prosecutor said an investigation looked at how she got the drugs and whether the case might be manslaughter, but he said the evidence is that she took the drugs voluntarily.
“It was clearly an accidental overdose,” McCulloch said.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan
Bomber kills 31 troops
A suicide bomber linked to the Pakistani Taliban attacked soldiers during morning exercises at an army training camp in the northwest Thursday, killing 31 troops and wounding 42 others.
There were conflicting accounts about the identity of the bomber. The army and police said he was a teenager in a school uniform, but the Pakistani Taliban claimed he was a soldier at the camp in Mardan town who volunteered for the attack.
The bombing showed that despite years of army operations against their hideouts along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, Taliban and al-Qaida-linked fighters retain the ability to strike back. It was one of the worst attacks on security forces in recent months.
LOUISVILLE, Ky.
Crash family gets $8million
A judge on Thursday ordered the family of a victim of the 2006 Comair crash to divide nearly $8 million in damages in the last lawsuit from the Kentucky crash.
U.S. District Judge Karl Forester ordered the wife and two daughters of Bryan Keith Woodward to split $7.1 million in compensatory damages. Forester also granted $750,000 for pain and suffering Woodward’s wife.
The Louisiana man was among 49 people killed when the plane crashed.
Dozens of other lawsuits from the crash have already been settled, the amounts confidential.