Civil-rights leader Shuttlesworth dies

Civil-rights leader Shuttlesworth dies

birmingham, ala.

The Rev. Fred L. Shuttles- worth, a blunt-talking preacher who braved beatings, bombings and fire- hosings to push Birmingham, Ala., to the forefront of the civil-rights movement and advanced the historic fight with a confrontational strategy that often put him at odds with its most charismatic leader, died Wednesday. He was 89.

He was the last of the civil-rights movement’s “Big Three,” who, along with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.

Man kills 3, injures 6 at Calif. quarry

CUPERTINO, Calif.

The search for a disgruntled employee accused of killing three co-workers and injuring six others at a Northern California limestone quarry brought SWAT teams in armored vehicles to the normally quiet streets of Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

The hunt for Shareef Allman of San Jose began after authorities said he opened fire at a routine safety meeting at Permanente Quarry around 4:15 a.m. and later wounded a woman in a failed carjacking.

Syrian military defectors rise up

BEIRUT

A group of military defectors known as the Free Syrian Army is emerging as the first armed challenge to President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian regime after seven months of largely nonviolent resistance.

Riad al-Asaad, the group’s leader and an air-force colonel who recently fled to Turkey, boasted in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that he now has more than 10,000 members and called on fellow soldiers to join him in overthrowing the “murderous” regime.

Though analysts said those numbers might be inflated, al-Asaad was confident more soldiers would soon join his ranks.

A.C. Nielsen Jr., of ratings fame, dies

CHICAGO

Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., whose family company has been the final word on whether television shows are hot or not for more than a half-century, has died in the suburban Chicago community where he lived most of his life. He was 92.

Nielsen, who died Monday in Winnetka, suffered from Parkinson’s disease, his son said.

It was the company founded by his father and then run by Nielsen that created the measurement system under which the entire multibillion-dollar television industry is based and, from the late 1950s on, the name synonymous with U.S. television viewing habits.

Pregnancy drug puts daughters at risk

A drug that millions of pregnant women took decades ago to prevent miscarriage and complications has put their daughters at higher risk for breast cancer and other health problems that are showing up now, a new federal study finds.

Many of these daughters, now over 40, may not even know of their risk if their mothers never realized or told them they had used the drug, a synthetic estrogen called DES.

Officials: Plot to kill Karzai foiled

KABUL

Afghan intelligence officials said Wednesday that they had broken up a cell that plotted to kill President Hamid Karzai, arresting six people in Kabul whom they claimed were affiliated with al-Qaida and the Haqqani militant group.

Intelligence service spokesman Latifullah Mashal said that that the cell included one of Karzai’s bodyguards, as well as a professor at Kabul university and three college students.

Combined dispatches