Patrick Kennedy ordered to undergo drug treatment
Washington – Rep. Patrick Kennedy pleaded guilty Tuesday to driving under the influence of prescription drugs and was sentenced to undergo court-ordered drug treatment and a year’s probation.
Kennedy, D-R.I., also was ordered to pay at least $350 in connection with his middle-of-the-night car crash last month near the Capitol.
Two other charges against Kennedy were dismissed: reckless driving and failure to exhibit a driving permit.
Accompanied by his lawyer, Kennedy entered his plea Tuesday afternoon before Superior Court Magistrate Judge Aida Melendez.
“I am pleading guilty to driving under the influence,” Kennedy said.
Melendez ordered Kennedy to undergo court-monitored drug treatment and pay $350 – $250 of which would go to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington, and $100 to a crime victims’ fund.
She also gave Kennedy a 10-day jail sentence that he would serve if he violated the terms of his probation, and she ordered him to serve 50 hours of community service with the Boys and Girls Club.
“Today in court, I suffered the consequences of my actions,” Kennedy told reporters outside the courthouse. “I look forward today to moving on to the next chapter in my life.”
The accident raised questions about whether Kennedy, 38, had been drinking and had received special treatment by police, who did not conduct field sobriety tests. He has denied consuming alcohol before the crash.
TOKYO
Court to rule soon
on visit to war shrine
Japan’s Supreme Court will rule next week on a suit challenging the constitutionality of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to a Tokyo war shrine, court officials said Tuesday.
The June 23 ruling on a suit filed by relatives of Japanese, Chinese and South Korean war dead would be the first time that Japan’s top court has ruled on whether the visits violate the division between religion and the state, according to a court official.
In the suit, filed in 2001, the 338 plaintiffs argued that Koizumi’s visit that year to Yasukuni Shrine – which honors Japan’s 2.5 million war dead, including criminals executed for war crimes after World War II – violated the constitution. The plaintiffs also sought $90 each in compensation.
The trips have outraged China and South Korea, who consider the shrine a glorification of Japan’s militarist policies in the first half of the 20th century.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands
Bosnian gets delay
to plead to war crimes
A former Bosnian Serb police officer who hid in a Siberian village for 10 years to evade arrest declined to enter a plea Tuesday on charges of torturing and raping Bosnian Muslims.
Dragan Zelenovic, who was deported from Russia last week, told the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal he needed more time to find a lawyer, and was given 30 days to enter a plea on multiple counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. U.N. prosecutors allege Zelenovic, 45, was a paramilitary leader in Foca, a town in southeastern Bosnia that was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in April 1992 as part of the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.
WASHINGTON
Blushing foreign brides
still without visas
True love waits for no one – except maybe the Homeland Security Department.
Red tape has put wedding bells on hold for about 10,000 U.S. citizens seeking visas for their foreign brides and grooms as the department works on new paperwork for their applications.
The form change was required as part of a law, enacted in March, to protect foreign mail-order brides from abusive American spouses. But Homeland Security missed its deadline three months ago, putting the visa applications of thousands of law-abiding lovers in limbo.
LAKE HARMONY, Pa.
Mom sentenced after daughter takes $1.85
A judge sentenced a woman to prison for making her 6-year-old daughter steal a volunteer fire company’s fundraising jar, a crime that netted the family $1.85.
Judith Weidner, 42, had told police she needed the change for gasoline, but in court she blamed a heroin addiction.
Judge David Addy sentenced Weidner on Monday to one to three years in prison for the January 2005 theft.
Security films show Weidner distracting a convenience store clerk while her daughter took a small firefighter’s boot used to collect change for a volunteer fire company effort.
