Thursday, March 18, 2010
Detroit to close 44 district schools
DETROIT
Doors are expected to shut on more than a quarter of Detroit’s 172 public schools in June as the district fights through steadily declining enrollment and a budget deficit of more than $219 million, an emergency financial manager said Wednesday.
Three aging, traditional and underpopulated high schools would be among the 44 closures. Six more schools are to be closed in June 2011, followed by seven more a year later, emergency financial manager Robert Bobb said.
Detroit already closed 29 schools before the start of classes last fall and shuttered 35 buildings about three years ago.
Haitian children returned to parents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti
Joyful parents on Wednesday recovered the children that they gave to American missionaries about six weeks ago.
The 33 children had been living at the SOS Orphanage on Port-au-Prince’s outskirts since police stopped a group of 10 U.S. Baptist missionaries from taking them across the Dominican border Jan. 29 after Haiti’s devastating earthquake.
Police: Web used to disable cars
DALLAS
A man fired from a Texas auto dealership used an Internet service to remotely disable ignitions and set off car horns of more than 100 vehicles sold at his old workplace, police said Wednesday.
Austin police arrested Omar Ramos-Lopez, 20, on Wednesday, charging him with felony breach of computer security.
Ramos-Lopez used a former colleague’s password to deactivate starters and set off car horns, police said. Several car owners said they had to call tow trucks and were left stranded at work or home.
Man surrenders in poker-tourney heist
BERLIN
A man who admits he took part in a brazen daylight raid on a poker tournament in Berlin surrendered to authorities and identified three suspected accomplices, one of whom was later arrested, officials said Wednesday.
Authorities had been hunting since March 6 for four suspects who, armed with a revolver and a machete, stormed into the tournament at a downtown Berlin hotel and made off with $332,000 in jackpot money.
Images of the masked men were captured on surveillance cameras.
Acting president dissolves Cabinet
ABUJA, Nigeria
Nigeria’s acting president dissolved the Cabinet on Wednesday, purging top officials loyal to the nation’s ill president in his first major act since taking over the young democracy’s highest office more than a month ago.
Information Minister Dora Akunyili announced the decision by acting President Goodluck Jonathan at the same time that the state-run broadcaster broke the news to citizens long confused about who remained in charge of the oil-rich nation.
German leader addresses scandal
BERLIN
Chancellor Angela Merkel called the sex-abuse scandal rocking the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI a major challenge to German society and warned the only way to come to terms with it was to “find out everything that has happened.”
Merkel’s comments to parliament Wednesday came amid growing impatience from Germany’s Roman Catholics for the pontiff to address the scandal in his homeland, where some 300 former Catholic students have come forward with claims of physical or sexual abuse.
Associated Press