Obama meets with Bush and son, Jeb

Obama meets with Bush and son, Jeb

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama met with former President George H.W. Bush and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the Oval Office on Friday, joining in a bipartisan gathering in an election year.

The White House said the three men enjoyed a personal visit in the Oval Office as they have in the past when the former president is visiting Washington.

Obama is scheduled to speak today at the Alfalfa Club dinner, an annual event for Washington’s movers and shakers. The former president and his son planned to attend the dinner.

The 87-year-old former president used a wheelchair during the meeting. Bush spokesman Jim McGrath said Bush is in “fine health and he’s not in any pain” but has become increasingly reliant upon using a wheelchair and a scooter. “His legs don’t work the way he wants them to,” McGrath said.

Home-invasion killer is sentenced to death

NEW HAVEN, Conn.

A Connecticut man expressed regret but steadfastly blamed his accomplice as he was sentenced to die Friday for a deadly home invasion that unsettled suburbia and halted momentum to abolish the state’s death penalty. The sole survivor of the attack called the loss of his wife and two daughters a “personal holocaust” as the final chapter closed on the case.

Joshua Komisarjevsky, 31, described his regrets and the devastating consequences of his decisions as he spoke in court, but also denied having any part in the killings. He said he has family and supporters who don’t want him to die. He also said being sentenced to death was a “surreal experience.”

‘Barefoot Bandit’ gets 61/2 years

SEATTLE

After a two-year international crime spree in which he survived a handful of crash landings, Colton Harris-Moore — the infamous “Barefoot Bandit” — says he’s lucky to be alive.

Harris-Moore spoke publicly in court Friday for the first time since his 2010 arrest. A short while later, he was sentenced to 61/2 years in federal prison, which will be served concurrently with state prison time.

“What I did could be called daring, but it is no stretch of the imagination to say that I am lucky to be alive ... absolutely lucky,” he said. “I should have died years ago.”

Children among 74 dead in Syria

BEIRUT

Two days of bloody turmoil in Syria killed at least 74 people, including small children, as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad shelled residential buildings and fired on crowds in a dramatic escalation of violence, activists said Friday.

Video posted online showed the bodies of five small children, five women and a man, all bloodied and piled on beds in what appeared to be an apartment after a building was hit in the city of Homs. A narrator said an entire family had been “slaughtered.”

Much of the violence was focused in Homs, where heavy gunfire hammered the city Friday in a second day of chaos. A day earlier, the city saw a flare-up of sectarian kidnappings and killings between its Sunni and Alawite communities, and pro-regime forces blasted residential buildings with mortars and gunfire, according to activists.

Associated Press