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July 2008
Arrest made in transgender slaying
GREELEY, Colo. (AP) — A Colorado man suspected of killing a man who had been living as a woman told investigators his victim survived two blows to the head with a fire extinguisher and was struggling to sit up when he struck her again.
Allen Ray Andrade, 31, faces several charges, including second-degree murder in the death of Justin Zapata, 20, who was known as Angie Zapata. Her bloodied, battered body was discovered in her apartment by her sister on July 17.
Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck said he was considering filing first-degree murder charges and may prosecute the death as a hate crime, which adds another felony charge. Hate crimes are those committed based on a person’s race, religion or sexual orientation.
“Angie, she was a fun-loving young woman who was taken from us far too early,” said Crystal Middlestadt, director of training and education for the Colorado Anti-Violence Program. Middlestadt is working with Zapata’s family.
Zapata’s sister, Monica, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday’s arrest of Andrade. She told Denver’s KDVR-TV that Andrade deserved to remain behind bars forever.
“He took a part of our heart, he did, when he killed her,” she said after reading the disturbing details in the arrest affidavit released by Greeley police.
Andrade was arrested in the Denver suburb of Thornton, where he lives. Police responding to a noise complaint found him in Zapata’s 2003 PT Cruiser, which had been missing.
A guard at the jail said information about whether he had an attorney was not available. There was no telephone listing for Andrade in Thornton.
Andrade told investigators that he met Zapata through MocoSpace, a social networking Web site, and that they agreed to get together after exchanging contact over several days, according to the affidavit. The two met July 15 and spent the day together.
Andrade told investigators that Zapata performed oral sex on him but wouldn’t let him touch her, according to the affidavit.
He said he also spent the night at Zapata’s apartment, but in separate beds. The next day, Zapata left Andrade alone in her apartment, and Andrade noticed several photographs that led him to question Zapata’s gender.
Andrade confronted Zapata when she got back. Zapata answered: “I am all woman.” He grabbed Zapata’s crotch area, felt male genitalia and became angry, the affidavit states. He took a fire extinguisher off a shelf and struck Zapata twice in the head, telling investigators he thought he “killed it.”
“It’s disgusting,” Greeley Police Chief Jerry Garner said of Andrade’s reference to Zapata. “It’s a horrible thing to say.”
Added Middlestadt: “He could be speaking to the fact that he couldn’t see Angie as a person.”
Andrade told investigators he covered Zapata with a blanket and started gathering evidence he thought might link him to the crime when he heard gurgling sounds and noticed Zapata was sitting up. That’s when he picked up the fire extinguisher and hit her again, police said. He left the scene in her car.
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Man dies after trying to save wife
ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Authorities in Aspen say a Miami attorney died Wednesday after trying to rescue his wife from the Roaring Fork River.
Melissa Chaykin slipped on a wet rock while taking a photograph of a series of waterfalls along the Cascades section of the river. Steven Chaykin went in after her, hit his head and was swept down the river through two waterfalls. He was stuck under a boulder and was pulled out by bystanders using a 20-foot-long dead, branchless pine tree.
One started performing CPR and rescue personnel continued after they arrived. They pronounced him dead at the scene.
About a chain of about half-dozen people on the river’s bank held on to the dead tree as Benjamin “Benjy” Susswein held on to the end. While holding on to the tree, Susswein, 21, of Yonkers, N.Y., witnesses said he grasped Steven Chaykin by putting him in a scissors’ hold with his legs.
Melissa Chaykin was stranded on a rock near one of the waterfalls during the ordeal. Swiftwater rescue technicians climbed out to her and helped her get back to the bank.
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Teen drowns in lake north of Boulder
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Sheriff’s officials say an 18-year-old man has drowned while swimming in a lake north of Boulder.
Boulder County sheriff’s officials say the teen was swimming with friends between floating lake docks in the Lake Valley Golf Club subdivision Wednesday evening.
Witnesses say the man’s friends called for help when they turned around and didn’t see him between the docks, which are about 100 feet apart.
Rescue crews found his body in about 14 feet of water after searching for more than 90 minutes.
The teen’s name wasn’t immediately released.
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Obama phone bank biggest ever
DENVER (AP) — Those 75,000 Democrats who will pack a football stadium for Barack Obama’s convention speech won’t be there just to whoop and holler on television.
They’ll form the world’s largest phone bank to boost voter registration — fired-up supporters using computer targeting the campaign has spent months putting together.
The move to the Invesco Field at Mile High stadium for the convention’s final night next month — at an additional cost of $5 million — will capture a huge crowd the Obama campaign plans to put to work. They’ll be armed with data gleaned through “microtargeting” unregistered voters the campaign believes are ripe to back Obama if pressed to get on board.
“If we do this right, we’ll be unbeatable,” said Steve Hildebrand, the Obama adviser overseeing the effort.
One key to Obama’s victory plan is to expand the electorate, bringing in more young voters, minorities, suburban women, seniors on fixed incomes and people who have been disaffected by politics and might respond to the freshman Illinois senator’s message of change over the more experienced Republican John McCain.
President Bush used microtargeting techniques effectively in 2004, but his target was regular voters who were likely to vote for him. Obama’s focus is more on finding people who are not registered to vote and figuring out how to persuade them to sign up and back him.
Hildebrand said the campaign has identified 55 million unregistered voters across the country, by comparing registration lists with lists of potential voters gleaned by mining consumer databases the same way credit card companies track people’s spending. They say their research estimates more than two-thirds would vote for Obama if they were registered and motivated.
The campaign is already holding voter registration efforts across the country, and the convention will be followed by a big drive on the following Labor Day weekend.
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Congress aims to help pay for college
Congress wants to blow the whistle on colleges that raise tuition sharply, while helping students pay less for textbooks and making Pell grants available year-round — part of a wide-ranging bill designed to address concerns about rising college costs.
Under the legislation, students could get earlier warning about which textbooks they’ll need for class, giving them more time to shop around, while professors would see more information on prices when they’re choosing which books to assign.
Colleges that impose severe tuition increases, meanwhile, could be shamed on a government watch list.
The sprawling Higher Education Act that the House is considering today contains mostly small and midsize steps aimed at addressing college costs. Lawmakers refrained from bigger steps like price controls, instead hoping more transparency will lead to lower prices.
Will it do much good? Depends on whom you ask.
Experts say students probably will benefit more overall from the steps Congress took last year — cutting interest rates on student loans, raising Pell Grants for low-income students and redirecting billions of dollars from lender subsidies to programs targeting students more directly.
Still, when lawmakers finally got around to reauthorizing the main federal law overseeing higher education — it was first due for renewal in 2003 — they seemed determined to go beyond simply boosting student aid dollars. Among a range of measures affecting everything from training teachers and nurses to fire safety, the bill includes rewards for colleges that keep prices down.
House and Senate negotiators agreed on a final compromise Wednesday, with final votes from both chambers expected within days.
The provisions most likely to affect students directly include:
—Making Pell Grants, the government’s main support program for low-income students, available year-round, not just for fall and spring semester. That would enable students to finish coursework more quickly by using summer term.
—Expanding requirements for textbook publishers to share pricing information with professors. Publishers also face the first federal limits on their ability to “bundle” textbooks with supplementary materials, such as CDs, that students may not want or need. Critics say the practice is a big reason textbooks cost so much — about $900 per student per year, according to a 2005 government study.
—Forcing colleges to report more information about their own costs and prices. The Education Department will publish lists of some that raise tuition sharply.
—Providing more protections and disclosure for students taking out private loans. The bill also begins streamlining the complicated process of applying for federal student aid.
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Titan’s got the juice
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn’s moon Titan studied by the international Cassini spacecraft contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.
Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the Cassini mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.
Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.
Cassini has made more than 40 close flybys of Titan, a giant planet-sized satellite of the ringed world.
Scientists had theorized that Titan might have oceans of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons, but Cassini found hundreds of dark, lake-like features instead, and it wasn’t known at first whether they were liquid or dark, solid material, JPL’s statement said.
“This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid,” Bob Brown, team leader of Cassini’s visual and mapping instrument, said in the statement.
The instrument was used during a December flyby to observe a feature dubbed Ontario Lacus, in the south polar region, that is about 7,800 square miles, slightly larger than North America’s Lake Ontario.
Cassini reached Saturn in mid-2004 and at the end of that year launched a probe named Huygens that parachuted to the surface of Titan the following January.
The mission is a project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
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JFK baggage delays continue
NEW YORK (AP) — A software glitch that snarled air traffic and caused baggage pileups at John F. Kennedy International Airport are stretching into today, with more flight cancellations expected.
American Airlines planned to cancel at least five flights scheduled to depart from Kennedy and said others could be delayed, a day after the malfunction led to headaches and angry passengers.
Technicians had diagnosed the problem by Wednesday evening. However, the system was still being tested early today and wasn’t yet up and running again, said airline spokeswoman Andrea Huguely. She said she couldn’t estimate when the system would be working again or how many passengers had been affected.
The glitch on Wednesday led to the delay of 48 flights and the cancellation of five more. Thousands of customers had to leave their luggage behind and hope it would be delivered later. Hundreds of bags accumulated in the lobby of Terminal 8, one of the newer buildings at the airport.
The breakdown was galling to some passengers already steamed over the airline’s recent decision to start charging fees for checked bags on flights within the U.S. and Canada.
“I’m just not happy. I think it’s crazy,” said Mike Howell, who was en route to San Diego after visiting New York City. “If they do charge people $15 per bag, they should get it right.”
The problem began when a piece of software failed in the computer that reads the bar code on each piece of tagged luggage and then whisks the bag via conveyor belt to the proper gate. With the automated system down, airline employees had to sort each bag by hand, an overwhelming task.
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Bush: Terrorists ‘are on the run’
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush declared significant progress in the Iraq war today, saying terrorists “are on the run” and that generally improved security likely will permit further U.S. troop reductions.
Standing on the Colonnade outside the Oval Office of the White House, Bush also announced that effective today, the duration of troop tours in Iraq will be cut from 15 months to 12 months.
Bush said this reduction “will relieve the burden on our forces and it will make life easier for our wonderful military families.”
The president’s updated report on Iraq was delivered on short notice to the White House press corps and it came with the war in its sixth year and violence on the ground substantially decreased in recent weeks.
He said that commanding Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, however, “caution that the progress is still reversible, and they report that there now appears to be a degree of durability to the gains that we have made.”
“We are now in our third consecutive month with reduced violence levels holding steady,” Bush said.
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Video cams, power points curb Mid-East violence
NAALIN, West Bank (AP) — A Palestinian teen tracks Israeli troops with a video camera to document abuse of demonstrators.
A community organizer tours West Bank villages with a PowerPoint presentation teaching the art of creative protest.
These are just two examples of the increasingly savvy methods Palestinians are using to fight Israel’s West Bank separation barrier — a campaign whose danger was driven home this week by the death of a 10-year-old Palestinian boy.
Six years after Israel began building the barrier, Palestinian villagers march almost daily in an attempt to halt construction work that threatens to swallow up thousands more acres of West Bank land. Many protests turn into confrontations between youths hurling rocks and Israeli troops responding with tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and at times live fire.
The aim is to slow construction, draw media attention and ensure that Israeli high court judges hearing challenges to the barrier’s route “will think twice before deciding such a high-profile case,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer representing Palestinian villages. Israel’s separation barrier — a mix of towering concrete walls topped with barbed wire and electronic fences — is two-thirds complete, and is expected to stretch about 500 miles when finished.
Israel says the barrier is a temporary defense against Palestinian attackers. However, at points it extends into the West Bank, incorporating Jewish settlement blocs and seizing land from Palestinian villages, prompting Palestinian claims of a land grab.
Naalin, which stands to lose thousands of acres of olive groves to the barrier, is a new focal point of protests. On Tuesday, 10-year-old Ahmed Moussa was killed there in a confrontation between Israeli soldiers and boys hurling stones at Israeli forces, witnesses said.
A Palestinian autopsy found he was shot through the head by live fire — a charge the Israeli military was investigating. The boy was buried in Naalin on Wednesday. Protests in Naalin began three months ago when bulldozers started clearing village land for the barrier.
On July 7, Salam Kanaan trained her video camera on a group of Israeli soldiers during a protest there, capturing them as they shot a bound, blindfolded Palestinian in the foot with a battalion commander holding his arm.
The Israeli military denounced the shooting as “grave,” put the officer on forced leave and launched an investigation.
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Olympics opening ceremonies no secret
BEIJING (AP) — The secret’s out about next week’s Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Be ready for a dramatic countdown, giant whales, an illuminated globe and performers flying through the air like Peter Pan.
A South Korean television crew filmed a rehearsal of the show earlier this week at the massive Bird’s Nest national stadium, leaking the first video from a show so closely guarded that practice sessions have been protected by three rings of checkpoints. Cast and crew were required to sign confidentiality agreements.
A Beijing Olympics official said today the report by South Korean broadcaster SBS, which was then circulated online, was “disappointing.” Sun Weide, spokesman for Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, would not say whether SBS would be punished, only that officials were “checking into the situation.”
“But the fragments cannot demonstrate the full picture of the spectacular opening ceremony,” Sun said in a statement.
There were no huge surprises from the footage shot in the darkened stadium, though it gave a glimpse of the lavishness of the 3-hour opening ceremony next Friday with an expected cast of 10,000.
China’s most famous film director, Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “House of Flying Daggers”), spent the last three years designing the spectacle, trying to boil 5,000 years of Chinese history into a 50-minute show.
Undulating white columns apparently simulated a waterfall, and giant blue whales were projected onto the strips of roof bordering the opening of the top of the stadium. The video showed a giant blue-and-green illuminated globe on the floor of the stadium at one point.
The rehearsal included contemporary dancers dressed in black and others twirling ribbons, dozens of drummers, martial arts experts, and several colorfully dressed performers suspended by wires and floating above the audience.
One segment featured a half-dozen actors on a raised platform surrounded by hundreds of other performers, while cymbals clanged noisily in the tradition of Beijing opera.
The most impressive part of the show was a countdown accompanied by drums, the SBS report said. Footage showed rows of hundreds of people, flashing cards to form the number two, then one, while chanting lustily in Chinese. Strobe lights flashed.
An SBS crew filmed the rehearsal without having to sneak in, a network official said. SBS, one of South Korea’s major TV networks, shares Olympic broadcasting rights in Korea with two other networks.
“Nobody stopped us when we entered the main stadium on Monday. Chinese officials let us in after we showed our ID cards and we shot the rehearsal,” the official from SBS told The Associated Press from Beijing by telephone. He asked not to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to media.
SBS spokesman Park Jae-man said it was regrettable if Beijing Olympics organizers felt offended by the broadcast.
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Karadzic appears before U.N. war crimes tribunal
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The world gets its first look today at war-crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, shorn of the bushy beard and long hair that disguised him as a new-age guru during at least part of his nearly 13 years on the run.
The former Bosnian Serb leader is scheduled to appear before Dutch judge Alphons Orie at the U.N.’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, the first step in a legal process that could take several years.
From prison, Karadzic told court officials that he would represent himself at the initial hearing, and declined the offer of a court-appointed attorney.
Karadzic will be asked to enter pleas on 11 charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for allegedly masterminding atrocities throughout Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.
Prosecutors say he was responsible for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, a deadly 44-month siege of Sarajevo and establishment of internment camps where non-Serbs were tortured, raped and murdered.
If convicted, the 63-year-old Karadzic faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. It is the first public appearance for Karadzic since his arrest July 21 on a Belgrade bus. At the time, he was virtually unrecognizable, his face hidden behind a heavy white beard.
A photo reportedly taken while he was in custody in Belgrade and published in Serbian newspaper Blic shows him with a shave and haircut. The years since the Bosnian conflict ended has turned his hair from salt and pepper to silvery gray.
At today’s hearing in a packed courtroom, Orie is expected to ask Karadzic to confirm his identity and offer to read him his 11-count indictment before asking him if he wishes to enter pleas.
Orie will try to rein in any other statements from Karadzic.
“This is not a trial, this is his initial appearance,” court spokeswoman Nerma Jelacic said.
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