Bill to address vets’ suicides to be signed

Bill to address vets’ suicides to be signed

WASHINGTON

A bill aimed at reducing a suicide epidemic among military veterans is on its way to the president for his signature.

The Senate unanimously approved a bill Tuesday named for Clay Hunt, a 26-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who killed himself in 2011. The bill comes in response to suicides that on average claim the lives of 22 military veterans every day.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama strongly supports the bill and will sign it.

Slain archbishop declared a martyr

VATICAN CITY

Thirty-five years after he was gunned down by a right-wing death squad as he celebrated Mass, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero moved a step closer to possible sainthood Tuesday when Pope Francis declared he was a martyr killed out of hatred for his Catholic faith.

The decree by the first Latin American pope ended decades of debate over whether Romero — a hero of the liberation-theology movement — was slain for his politics or his preaching. It opens the way for Romero to be beatified as early as this year, though no date has been set.

2nd appeal to move bombing trial

BOSTON

Lawyers for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev asked a federal appeals court again Tuesday to order the judge to move his trial outside of Massachusetts, arguing he cannot get a fair trial here.

The request was the second time the defense has asked the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to step in and take the decision on whether to move the trial out of the hands of Judge George O’Toole Jr.

Prosecutor mulled president’s arrest

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina

Investigators examining the death of a prosecutor who accused Argentine President Cristina Fernandez of agreeing to shield the alleged masterminds of a 1994 terror bombing said Tuesday they have found a draft document he wrote requesting her arrest.

Chief investigator Viviana Fein said the draft detention request was found in a trash bin of the apartment where Alberto Nisman’s body was discovered Jan. 18. It was not included in a complaint Nisman had filed in federal court days earlier.

Nisman was found dead of a gunshot wound in his bathroom hours before he was to appear in Congress to detail his allegations that Fernandez agreed to protect those responsible for the 1994 bombing of Buenos Aires’ largest Jewish community center. The attack, which killed 85 people, remains unsolved.

Plane crashes into river in Taiwan

TAIPEI, Taiwan

Taiwan’s aviation authority say at least two people have been killed when a commercial flight with 58 people aboard clipped a bridge shortly after takeoff and crashed into a river in the island’s capital of Taipei.

Aviation authority director Lin Chi-ming told a news conference that two people were killed. The country’s Central News Agency said three people were killed.

Taiwanese media posted pictures of the plane in the water several dozen yards from the shore in the Keelung River.

Associated Press