Anthony reports to begin probation

Anthony reports to begin probation

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.

Florida authorities said Thursday that Casey Anthony was polite and cooperative during a meeting with her probation officer and pledged to meet the conditions of her one-year probation for check fraud.

The 25-year-old Anthony, who has remained hidden since a jury acquitted her of killing her daughter, met with the officer for more than an hour Wednesday evening at an undisclosed location as she begin her probation. But citing death threats against her, state officials said they will not reveal her location, including the county where she will serve her probation for the unrelated charge.

32 die in attack on Mexican casino

MONTERREY, Mexico

Two dozen gunmen burst into a casino in northern Mexico on Thursday, doused it with a flammable liquid and started a fire that trapped gamblers inside, killing at least 32 people and injuring a dozen more, authorities said.

The fire at the Casino Royale in Monterrey, a city that has seen a surge in violence this year, represented one of the deadliest attacks on an entertainment center in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006.

Underwear-bomb suspect seeks release

DETROIT’

The so-called underwear bombing suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas 2009, has a new request: Let me out of here.

In a court filing Thursday, Abdulmutallab asked a federal judge to release him from prison, claiming he’s being “unjustly detained” by the American government.

“[A]ll Muslims should only be ruled by the law of the Quran,” Abdulmutallab wrote.

In a separate, handwritten court filing, the Nigerian national also wrote that “excessive force” was used to restrain him Wednesday after he assaulted several officers from his cell “in defense of Muhammad.”

Court records bound for shredder

CHICAGO

Wrestling with the challenges of documents in the digital age, U.S. officials are destroying millions of paper federal-court records to save storage costs — and raising the ire of some historians, private detectives and others who heavily rely on the files.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration says at least 10 million bankruptcy case files and several million district-court files from 1970 through 1995 will be shredded, pounded to pulp and recycled. Files designated as historically valuable, however, will be kept in storage.

Federal archivists spent years consulting legal scholars, historians and others about which files to purge after realizing that sorting and digitizing just the bankruptcy cases would cost tens of millions of dollars.

Syrian gunman break artist’s hands

BEIRUT

A renowned political cartoonist whose drawings expressed Syrians’ frustrated hopes for change was grabbed after he left his studio early Thursday and beaten by masked gunmen who broke his hands and dumped him on a road outside Damascus.

One of Syria’s most famous artists, Ali Ferzat, 60, earned international recognition and the respect of many Arabs with stinging caricatures that infuriated dictators including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and, particularly in recent months, Syria’s autocratic Assad family.

He lay badly bruised in a hospital bed Thursday evening with his hands swathed in bandages, a stark reminder that no Syrian remains immune to a brutal crackdown on a five-month anti-government uprising.

Combined dispatches