Washington – A senior Justice Department aide refused Wednesday to submit to a private interview with a House committee investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.
Her lawyers accused Democrats of behaving like the notorious Sen. Joseph McCarthy to intimidate her.
Lawyers for Monica Goodling, who has said she would assert her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid appearing at congressional hearings, told the House Judiciary Committee she would neither testify publicly nor submit to private questioning about the firings.
Goodling was senior counsel to embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the department’s White House liaison before she took a leave last month amid the uproar over the prosecutors’ ousters. A Senate panel has authorized a subpoena for her, but none has been issued.
Additional nation/world news briefs:
JERUSALEM
Bull elephant kills park herd’s matriarch
A seven-ton bull elephant charged and killed a female elephant half his weight as visitors to an Israeli nature park looked on in horror.
Officials at the Safari park near Tel Aviv said they were unable to stop Yossi, a 33-year-old male, from attacking Atari, the 46-year-old matriarch of the captive herd, and trampling her to death Monday.
“What happened to Yossi, who grew up all his life with Atari, and they always got along?” Yigal Horowitz, a veterinarian at the park, told Israel Radio. “Here and there were small fights, but they never had a fight like this one.”
Elephants observe hierarchies and visit places where others of their herd are buried. But scientists have recently become increasingly concerned with what they say is a rising level of violent activity among the large mammals.
LONDON
Guitarist “joked” he snorted father’s ashes
Off the cuff or up the nose? That was the question Wednesday as Keith Richards said he was joking when he described snorting his father’s ashes along with a hit of cocaine.
“It was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke, and it is not true. File under April Fool’s joke,” said Bernard Doherty, a Rolling Stones spokesman, about Richards’ quote in NME magazine.
But the magazine said on its website that the remark was “no quip, but came about after much thinking” by the 63-year-old guitarist.
In the interview, Richards was quoted as saying: “The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father.”
“He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.”
SYLVANIA, Ala.
Midnight ride of horse rams cop car
A woman used a horse to ram a police car during a midnight ride through town and was charged with driving under the influence, police said.
DUI charges can apply even if the vehicle has four legs instead of wheels, Chief Brad Gregg said Tuesday.
Police in the northeast Alabama town received a call around midnight Saturday about someone riding a horse on a street, Gregg said.
An officer found Melissa Byrum York, 40, on horseback and tried to stop her, Gregg said.
“She wouldn’t stop,” he said. “She kept riding the horse and going on.”
After ramming the police car with the horse and riding away, York tried to jump off but caught her foot in a stirrup, Gregg said.
