House votes to stop health-law abortions

House votes to stop health-law abortions

WASHINGTON

The House on Thursday returned to an abortion issue that nearly sank President Barack Obama’s health-care law last year with legislation that bars an insurance plan regulated under the new law from covering abortion if any of its customers receive federal subsidies. Providers that offer abortion coverage would have to set up identical plans without abortion coverage to participate in the health-insurance exchanges to be set up under the new law.

The legislation, which passed 251-172, is unlikely to be considered by the Democratic-led Senate and faces a veto threat from Obama.

Telemundo to host GOP primary debate

MIAMI

Spanish-language Tele-mundo network announced Thursday it will host its first presidential primary debate in December.

The Republican primary debate will be in Las Vegas and comes weeks before the early primaries begin.

The locale is key, as Nevada is one of two early primary states with a growing number of Latino voters. Florida is the other.

Top Telemundo news anchor Jose Diaz-Balart will host the debate, which will be broadcast in Spanish.

2 blasts in Baghdad kill 17, wound 50

BAGHDAD

Two explosions in a Shiite neighborhood of eastern Baghdad killed 17 people and wounded around 50 others Thursday night, Iraqi officials said.

The blasts in the Sadr City neighborhood, coming a day after attacks across the capital killed 25 people, served as a reminder of the lengths to which Sunni militants are trying to go in order to re-ignite sectarian tensions as American forces prepare to go home.

Man convicted in deaths of mom, girls

NEW HAVEN, Conn.

A paroled burglar was convicted Thursday of murdering a woman and her two daughters in a gruesome 2007 home invasion in an affluent Connecticut suburb in which family members were tied up, molested, doused in gas and left to die in a fire. He now faces a possible death sentence. Joshua Komisarjevsky, whose accomplice already is on Connecticut’s death row, stood as jurors declared him guilty of all 17 charges he faced, including capital felony killing, kidnapping, arson and sexual assault. He then sat back in his chair and rocked slightly back and forth. He yawned as he was led out of the courtroom.

5 children, deputy die in traffic crash

KIT CARSON, Colo.

A van driven by a deputy sheriff who ran a group home for adopted and foster children collided with an empty cattle trailer Thursday in a highway construction zone, killing him and five children and injuring seven other children.

The children who died ranged in age from 4 to 17 and lived in the home for adopted and foster children, said Kiowa County Sheriff’s office spokesman Chris Sorensen. Seven other children in the van were hospitalized. The truck driver, of Cheyenne, Wyo., was treated at a hospital and released.

French prosecutor drops DSK case

PARIS

French prosecutors say Dominique Strauss-Kahn did something to a writer that qualifies as sexual assault, but they can’t send him to trial because it happened too long ago, and they are dropping the case.

Thursday’s announcement is a legal victory, but a moral embarrassment for the suave, assured, and married economist who earlier this year led the International Monetary Fund and was on track to seek the French presidency.

Associated Press