Kentucky: Sheriff candidate linked to slaying of incumbent

A candidate for sheriff was charged Monday in connection with the sniper-style assassination of the incumbent his chief rival in next month’s primary and his former boss.

The candidate, Jeff Morris, 34, and a campaign worker, Kenneth White, were charged with complicity to murder. A third man, also tied to the Morris campaign, Danny Shelley, has been charged with actually shooting Sheriff Sam Catron at a weekend fish fry and political rally in front of more than 300 people.

The three suspects were being held without bond. All could face the death penalty, prosecutor Eddy Montgomery said.

California: Shooting at clinic leaves three dead

Three people at a medical clinic were shot to death Monday in what investigators described as a murder-suicide.

A fourth person was wounded and was hospitalized in grave condition, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Rick Varela said.

Authorities said they believe the gunman worked at the clinic in Commerce. Few other details were released.

The clinic is about seven miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

North Carolina: Supreme Court rejects desegregation appeal

The fight over one of the nation’s longest-running school busing programs ended Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a plea from black parents to keep Charlotte’s schools under federal oversight.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system became in 1970 the first major urban district in the nation to use court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance. The high court upheld the plan in 1971.

The high court’s refusal to hear the dispute this time marked the official end of the program that bused inner-city students to mostly white suburban schools and suburban students to the inner city.

A lower court ruled in September that the 109,000-student school system no longer practices discrimination and can go forward with a new student-assignment plan that does not use race as a factor.

Los Angeles: Condor chick hatches

Biologists celebrated a milestone in the recovery of the once nearly extinct California condor the survival of a chick conceived and hatched in the wild.

The chick in the Los Padres National Forest about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles is the first conceived, hatched and raised in the wild to survive more than a day. It was 4 days old on Monday.

The birds, the largest in North America, nearly disappeared in the 1980s because of habitat loss and toxins. Captive breeding programs have helped its numbers rebound to 185, and about 60 of those birds are in the wild in California and Arizona.

Washington, D.C.: Wrinkle drug approved

Botox, the popular drug that temporarily removes “frown lines” and other wrinkles, was formally approved Monday by the Food and Drug Administration for cosmetic use. The ruling will allow its manufacturer to start an advertising campaign to convince Americans they can look younger and less worried with a few injections.

Botox is a purified form of the toxin that causes botulism, and has been on the market as a drug to treat several muscle disorders of the face since 1989. But in recent years, cosmetic surgeons have also been commonly using the drug to remove frown and wrinkle lines by temporarily paralyzing thus relaxing facial muscles.

The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery listed Botox injections as the fastest growing cosmetic treatment performed by surgeons in the United States in its 2001 national statistics.

Florida: Railcar hits snag at space station

Astronauts sent the international space station’s new railcar rolling down a short stretch of track Monday, but it quickly hit a snag that interrupted the inaugural run of the first permanent railroad in orbit.

NASA blamed it on weightlessness.

Engineers in Cape Canaveral suspect the 1-ton car floated ever so slightly off the rail, causing the magnetic sensors on the bottom of the car to lose contact with a pair of iron strips in the aluminum tracks.

The railcar will eventually be used during the next stages of the space station’s construction.