Mideast truce reported

Mideast truce reported

CAIRO — The deputy leader of Hamas said Thursday night that the Islamic militant group agreed to an 18-month truce with Israel for the Gaza Strip, the official Egyptian news agency reported.

Moussa Abu Marzouk told MENA that Egypt’s government, which has been mediating between Hamas and Israel, would announce the truce in two days after consulting with other Palestinian factions.

$3.44M for Lincoln speech

NEW YORK — A handwritten manuscript of an 1864 Abraham Lincoln speech sold for $3.44 million on the bicentennial of his birthday Thursday, setting a new auction record for any American historical manuscript.

The manuscript was sold to an anonymous phone bidder after spirited bidding in a crowded Christie’s auction house room. Proceeds from the sale will go toward a new wing for a library in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where the document has been since 1926.

Thursday’s price was just slightly higher than the previous record of $3.40 million set last year at Sotheby’s, also for a Lincoln document — an 1864 letter the 16th president wrote to a group of youngsters who asked him to free America’s “little slave children.”

The manuscript that sold Thursday is a speech Lincoln delivered at the White House after he was re-elected in the midst of an unpopular Civil War.

Death threats probed

LOS ANGELES — Police said Thursday they will investigate death threats against octuplet mother Nadya Suleman and advise her publicist on how to handle a torrent of other nasty messages that have flooded his office.

Word that the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother is receiving public assistance to care for the 14 children she conceived through in vitro fertilization has stoked furor among many people.

Police Lt. John Romero said officers were meeting with Suleman’s publicist Mike Furtney about the flood of angry phone calls and e-mail messages against Suleman, her children and Furtney.

Support for Hugo Chavez

CARACAS, Venezuela — Tens of thousands of Venezuelans clad in red flooded the streets of the capital Thursday, saying a referendum that would end term limits is the only way President Hugo Chavez can complete what he calls a socialist revolution.

Nearby, a few hundred opponents rallied in a square after the government denied their request to mount a giant march across the city, as they did last weekend. They have fought Chavez in a bitter struggle that culminates in Sunday’s vote, which is expected to be close.

Supporters jumped and screamed as Chavez rode through the crowd atop a red truck.

“I have four years left in government,” Chavez said to boos. But if the amendment is approved, he said, “the horizon will change for the rest of the century.”

Teens’ choice: Marlboro

CHICAGO — Marlboro, the cigarette favored by adults, is also the runaway favorite of teens who regularly smoke, according to a new federal report released Thursday.

The results led anti-smoking advocates to complain that the same advertising that’s supposed to target adults is also influencing teens, even though smoking rates for that age group have dropped in recent years.

The report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 81 percent of established teen smokers preferred the same three brands favored by adults: Marlboro was the choice for 52 percent of high school students; Newport by 21 percent and Camel by 13 percent.

Taser inventor dies at 88

Jack Cover, an aerospace scientist who invented the Taser stun gun — a device used by thousands of law enforcement agencies to subdue unruly offenders with electrical shocks — has died. He was 88.

Cover had Alzheimer’s disease and died of pneumonia Saturday at the Golden West Retirement Home in Mission Viejo, Calif., said his wife, Ginny.

Trained as a nuclear physicist, Cover spent most of his career working in aerospace and defense industries. He was also a born inventor who in the 1940s was already building gadgets, including cooked-food testers, voice-activated switches and an electric toothbrush. One of his last brainstorms was an alternative-energy generator.

But he Taser was his most successful invention, credited with preventing deadly police encounters and spurring improvements in the tactics used to take violent offenders into custody.

The Taser has come into widespread use, adopted by more than 13,000 military and law enforcement agencies around the world.

Combined dispatches