Obamas attend Sunday services

September 20, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama and his family attended an hourlong service Sunday morning at a church just across the street from the White House.

Accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, Obama strolled across Lafayette Square to attend St. John’s Church. Sasha held her father’s hand as they crossed the park.

A pew nine rows back from the altar at St. John’s carries a small brass plaque designating it as “The President’s Pew.” Church history claims that every president since the nation’s fourth chief executive, James Madison, has visited.

3 children found shot dead in Texas

HOUSTON

Three children were found shot dead in their beds Sunday at a suburban Houston apartment building, and their father was charged with their murders after surviving an apparent suicide attempt, authorities said.

Muhammed Goher, 47, was charged with three counts of capital murder in the Sunday morning shootings, said Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Jamie Wagner.

Goher was in stable condition Sunday afternoon at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston, where he was being treated for what investigators say was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head, Wagner said. A sheriff’s office statement said he was expected to survive.

Goher’s two daughters, ages 14 and 7, and a 12-year-old son were killed in the shootings, which were reported around 9:45 a.m. The apartment is attached to a convenience store where Goher worked, about three miles south of Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Police seek missing Vt. grandmother

SHEFFIELD, Vt.

State police probing the disappearance of a 78-year-old grandmother are appealing for help from anyone who took photographs or video at a Labor Day event her son says she attended in her tiny town.

Pat O’Hagan worked as a volunteer at the Sept. 6 event in Sheffield, a town so small it has no stores and no stoplights, her son Shawn O’Hagan said Sunday. Police are following up on all avenues in their investigation, he said.

Pat O’Hagan, a widow and grandmother of nine, was reported missing from her home Sept. 11, just days after the Sheffield event, when a friend arrived to pick her up for a rug-hooking meeting and she wasn’t there.

Police believe she was abducted from her home. Authorities say she’s mentally alert and there’s no reason to believe she wandered off.

Remorseful US vet returns French flag

PARIS

On the day Paris was liberated from the Nazis in 1944, a young American soldier nabbed a souvenir of epic proportions: He took home the French flag that hung from the Arc de Triomphe, a symbol of the end of four years of struggle and shame.

Six and a half decades later, the aging veteran has given the flag back to the city of Paris.

Officials from Paris City Hall took possession of the 13-yard tricolor flag Saturday in a ceremony in southern France, a step in its unusual journey from New York state back home to Paris. The American veteran remains anonymous, too ashamed to come forward.

French officials have no intention of scolding him: They have only thanks and kind words for him, pointing out that he once risked his life for France.

“I’m infinitely grateful,” Catherine Vieu-Charier, deputy to the mayor of Paris, told The Associated Press.

Associated Press