Iraqi lawmakers fail to agree on election law

Iraqi lawmakers fail to agree on election law

BAGHDAD — Iraqi lawmakers failed Wednesday to agree on a provincial election law and adjourned for the month, casting doubt on whether U.S.-backed balloting can take place this year in the country’s 18 provinces.

Parliament did manage to sign off on a $21 billion supplemental budget, a move the Iraqis hope will ease U.S. congressional criticism that they aren’t paying their fair share of Iraq’s reconstruction at a time of economic hardship in the United States.

But the inability to approve the election bill dealt a setback to U.S. hopes for reconciliation among Iraq’s rival communities despite the decline in violence.

Venezuelans protest

CARACAS, Venezuela — Riot police used tear gas Wednesday to block hundreds of Venezuelans protesting the latest moves by President Hugo Chavez to concentrate his power.

The demonstrators said a blacklist of opposition candidates and a series of socialist decrees are destroying what’s left of their democracy.

Though the protest of about 1,000 people chanting “freedom!” was small compared with past marches, there is a growing public outcry over the sidelining of key government opponents ahead of state and local elections in November.

Chavez’s opponents also are outraged by 26 laws the president just decreed, some of them mirroring the socialist measures voters rejected in a December referendum.

Dogs take over school

ARECIBO, Puerto Rico — A pack of about 30 wild dogs has invaded an elementary school in Puerto Rico and forced it to shut down.

School director Jose Mejias says a pit bull almost attacked a student before employees chased it away, and the school was temporarily closed as a safety precaution. Most of the dogs that had entered the school were caught by Wednesday afternoon.

Charged in sexual attack

SMITHTOWN, N.Y. — Prosecutors say a “Girls Gone Wild” employee has pleaded innocent to sexually attacking a woman aboard a bus outside a New York bar.

Thirty-seven-year-old Matthew O’Sullivan of Los Angeles was arraigned Wednesday and ordered held on $100,000 cash bail. He does not yet have a lawyer.

A 20-year-old woman told police she was invited onto a “Girls Gone Wild” bus after an event held by the company Tuesday night on Long Island. She says she was forcibly groped and subjected to unwanted sexual contact.

3 indicted in bombings

SAN DIEGO — Three people have been indicted on federal charges of using a weapon of mass destruction in the bombings of a federal courthouse and a FedEx building, authorities said Wednesday.

A grand jury returned the indictment Tuesday, alleging Rachelle Carlock, Ella Louise Sanders and Eric Reginald Robinson planted bombs at the downtown courthouse and a FedEx distribution center in San Diego.

The courthouse explosion on May 4 spread nails and shrapnel as far as two blocks, and authorities almost immediately began looking into whether it was related to the April 25 FedEx bombing. No one was injured in either bombing.

Gunman had bigger plan

MARINETTE, Wis. — The lone gunman charged Wednesday with killing three teenagers in a river ambush planned to use the victims as bait to lure emergency responders to the scene for him to kill as well, according to a criminal complaint.

Scott J. Johnson, 38, of Kingsford, Mich., had thought about committing a random shooting for the past four or five years and prepared by stashing weapons in the woods, according to prosecutors.

Johnson went to the Menominee River in northern Wisconsin on July 31 and opened fire with an Armalite 7.62 mm military-type rifle on a group of about eight swimmers, killing three and injuring one, prosecutors say.

All four victims were from Michigan.

Smuggling-scam arrests

UPPER MARLBORO, Md. — Police said Wednesday they have arrested two men in a smuggling scheme that included the sending of a 32-pound package of marijuana to a Washington, D.C.-area mayor’s wife.

The home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, was raided July 29 by a SWAT team and county narcotics officers after authorities intercepted the FedEx package.

Officers shot and killed the family’s two Labrador retrievers during the raid.

Associated Press