Mother reaches out to families of two killed by daughter
BATON ROUGE, La. — A woman whose daughter killed two fellow students in a college classroom before killing herself said Saturday she’ll be “haunted to the end of my days for what my child has done.”
Jennie Williams issued a statement through police offering sympathy to the families of the women who police said were killed by her daughter Friday at Louisiana Technical College.
Williams said she could not explain why 23-year-old Latina Williams killed the two women, then turned the .357-caliber revolver on herself and committed suicide. “In this tragedy, just like you, we have many questions but no answers. As Latina’s mother, I will not try to rationalize or make excuses for her action,” said Williams, of Centreville, Miss.
Police said they have not determined the motive for the shootings that killed Karsheika Graves, 21, and Taneshia Butler, 26, both of Baton Rouge.
Light shed on investigation of CIA tapes
The prosecutor investigating the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes has begun a broad review of whether government officials broke the law by concealing or destroying the tapes or violated court orders requiring the preservation of evidence, according to court papers filed late Friday.
The seven-page declaration by the prosecutor, John H. Durham, gives the most detailed account to date of plans for his month-old criminal investigation, involving hundreds of hours of video recordings of harsh interrogations of two al-Qaeda suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
It gives no indication that his team of FBI agents and lawyers intends, at least for now, to go beyond the tapes to examine whether the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, violated the law.
“The investigation team is actively reviewing whether any person or persons obstructed justice, made false statements, or acted in contempt of courts or Congress in connection with the destruction of the videotapes,” Durham wrote.
PETA in heated fight on fried-chicken bill
FRANKFORT, Ky. — Animal-rights advocates are squawking at a measure that would make fried chicken Kentucky’s official picnic food.
State Rep. Charles Siler is sponsoring a bill to assign the designation to KFC’s “finger lickin’ good” chicken, first served by Colonel Harland Sanders in 1940.
The late colonel’s fried chicken deserves the title because of the worldwide attention and economic benefit it has brought to the state, Siler said. KFC, a subsidiary of Louisville-based Yum Brands Inc., has 11,000 restaurants in more than 80 countries.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals bristles at the idea. The animal- rights group claims that the chickens KFC serves are abused, even tortured.
EBay agrees to buy back stolen documents sold online
ALBANY, N.Y. — Documents dating from the Civil War and others to and from Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt are among hundreds of stolen documents sold online that eBay is agreeing to buy back and return to New York’s archives, a state official said Saturday.
The online auction giant has no liability in the sale of the stolen artifacts but agreed voluntarily to offer buyers the amount that they paid, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all details of the investigation have been announced.
In January, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s investigation found that about 200 documents had been stolen from the archives and sold in the past two years. Checking through the buyer and seller comments in those eBay sales revealed that 200 other documents had been sold since 2001, according to the official.
