Ukraine president taking sick leave

Ukraine president taking sick leave

KIEV, Ukraine

Amid the deepest turmoil since the Orange Revolution, President Viktor Yanukovych’s announcement Thursday that he was taking indefinite sick leave prompted a guessing game among Ukrainians about what was happening to their country.

Debate raged on whether he was just sick or whether he was leaving the limelight in preparation for something, possibly either cracking down or stepping down.

Yanukovych has faced two months of major protests that sometimes paralyze central Kiev and have spread to other cities. The protests started after he backed out of a long-awaited agreement to deepen ties with the European Union in favor of Russia, but quickly came to encompass a wide array of discontent over corruption, heavy-handed police and dubious courts.

US judge upholds Conn. gun law

HARTFORD, Conn.

A federal judge upheld Connecticut’s gun-control law Thursday, saying the sweeping measure is constitutional even as he acknowledged the Second Amendment rights of gun owners who sued to block it.

The law, which Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed last April after months of negotiations in the Legislature, was not entirely written “with the utmost clarity,” U.S. District Judge Alfred Covello said in his 47-page decision. Still, several provisions are “not impermissibly vague in all of their applications and, therefore, the challenged portions of the legislation are not unconstitutionally vague.”

Lawmakers, responding to the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 20 children and six educators Dec. 14, 2012, banned the sale of large-capacity magazines and made more weapons illegal under the state’s assault-weapons ban.

Militants attack government facility

BAGHDAD

Gunmen and suicide bombers staged a brazen assault on a government building in Baghdad on Thursday, officials said, killing two people in the latest such attack in the heart of the Iraqi capital by militants trying to undermine further the Shiite-led government’s shaky authority.

The firefight at a state-run transportation company was one of several attacks that left 11 dead across the city, and came as Iraq grapples with a stubborn insurgency in the country’s western Anbar province.

Woman strangled by scarf on escalator

MONTREAL

A Canadian woman was strangled after her scarf and then her hair got caught in the mechanism of a Montreal subway escalator as the moving staircase rolled toward the platform.

Bob Lamle, a spokesman for Montreal’s ambulance service, said Thursday he’s never seen anything like it in his 30-year career.

Lamle said emergency officials found a trapped woman lying on her back at the bottom of the escalator. A doctor declared her dead at the scene. The accident happened about 9:15 a.m., during the morning rush hour. He says a lot of people saw it and tried to help.

20-term lawmaker Waxman to retire

WASHINGTON

Rep. Henry Waxman, one of Congress’ fiercest negotiators and a policy expert on everything from clean air to health care, will retire at the end of the year after four decades in the House.

“It’s time for someone else to have the chance to make his or her mark,” the liberal California Democrat said Thursday in a statement announcing he won’t seek re-election.

Democrats and some Republicans saluted Waxman for the breadth of his work, from policy to good government and more.

Associated Press