WORLD DIGEST || Funeral takes place for football player

Funeral takes place for football player

BOSTON

Hundreds of relatives, friends and teammates wept together and hugged Saturday at the funeral of a semi-pro football player whose killing led to murder and weapons charges against former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez.

The body of Odin Lloyd was found June 17 near Hernandez’s home. Police arrested Hernandez on Wednesday and charged him with orchestrating the execution-style shooting.

Lloyd played for the Boston Bandits and was dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancee. Members of Lloyd’s team showed up for the funeral in their uniforms and chanted his name as pallbearers placed his coffin in a hearse outside Church of the Holy Spirit in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. The crowd of mourners was so large that some could not find room inside the church for the two-hour service.

Hernandez has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail. Two other men also are in custody.

Pulling ads from racy, violent pages

MENLO PARK, Calif.

Facebook is pulling ads from pages that contain violence or sexual content.

The social network says that on Monday it will expand its definition of pages and groups that are too controversial to carry advertisements.

Facebook has sought to strike a balance between giving its 1.1 billion monthly users the freedom to post what they want and providing advertisers with space to sell their products.

In May, Facebook Inc. lost more than a dozen advertisers, at least temporarily, after the activist group Women, Action and the Media urged an advertising boycott to protest hate speech on the Facebook site. The controversial content included grisly photos and mottos that encouraged rape, abuse and other violence against women.

Syrian troops launch attack

BEIRUT

Government troops launched a series of attacks in central Syria on Saturday, striking with artillery, tanks and warplanes in a drive to capture rebel-held neighborhoods in the country’s third-largest city of Homs, with activists said.

The army of President Bashar Assad has been on the offensive in Homs province in recent weeks, reclaiming some of the territory it has lost to the rebels since Syria’s crisis began 27 months ago.

FDA to detain import of seeds

WASHINGTON

The Food and Drug Administration plans to detain shipments of pomegranate seeds from a Turkish company when they are offered for import into the U.S. because of a multistate outbreak of hepatitis A illnesses associated with a frozen-food blend containing pomegranate seed mix. Products linked to the illnesses already have been recalled.

The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have determined that the most likely vehicle for the hepatitis A virus appears to be a common shipment of pomegranate seeds from the Turkish company, Goknur Foodstuffs Import Export Trading, the FDA said in a statement Saturday.

Associated Press