Florida: Teen couple abducted; five arrested in slaying

Five men were arrested Monday in the armed abduction of a teen-age couple celebrating five months together on South Beach that left the girlfriend dead and the boyfriend with stab wounds, authorities said.

Miami Beach police said the body was found Monday after the five men all from the Orlando area were arrested.

The body of Ana Maria Angel, 18, of Miami, was found 40 miles north in Boca Raton.

Angel and her boyfriend, Eddy Portobanco, also 18, were returning from a night beach stroll early Sunday morning when five armed men forced them into a white Ford pickup truck, police said.

Portobanco, 18, was beaten and stabbed before he was dumped about two hours later in suburban Fort Lauderdale, about 35 miles north of South Beach. He flagged down a car for help and was treated and released from a hospital.

Authorities said the charges against the five men had not yet been completed but said murder and kidnapping would be among them.

New Jersey: Lottery officials settle dispute over jackpot

The big hassle about the Big Game jackpot is over.

New Jersey lottery officials said Monday in Lawrenceville that the person due one-third of the $331 million prize will be revealed today and it won’t be anyone from an office pool that claimed to have the winning ticket. They ended up with $2 after a dispute that involved two lawyers and a lottery review.

The winning ticket was one of three from the April 16 drawing for the second-biggest jackpot in U.S. history. The other tickets were sold in Georgia, where 20-year-old Erika Greene claimed her share of the prize, and Illinois, where the winner hasn’t come forward.

Los Angeles: Poll find progress on race relations

A decade after the city’s worst riots, half of residents say race relations have gotten better, but trust in the police is still shaky in minority communities, according to a Los Angeles Times poll released Monday.

A survey of 1,288 adults, 262 of them black, showed that 50 percent overall found race relations better, with higher marks in the white and Hispanic communities. Just 36 percent of blacks, however, found race relations better.

The rioting began 10 years ago Monday, after four white police officers were acquitted of the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King.

Although a majority of those surveyed said the Los Angeles Police Department is doing an impressive job of holding down crime, 66 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent of blacks believe that police brutality is common. Only 28 percent of whites thought so.

The poll was conducted through random telephone calls from April 18-22, and the sample was weighted to conform with Census Bureau figures for the city. The margin of error was 3 percentage points overall and 6 points for blacks.

Minnesota: Snowstorm kills 4, causes power outages

An April snowstorm dumped up to 20 inches over Wisconsin and Minnesota, knocking out power to thousands of homes and contributing to several fatal traffic accidents.

At least four deaths were blamed on snowy roads in Minnesota, including a 17-year-old boy who was killed when the car he was driving to his prom slid into a ditch and overturned.

At the height of the weekend storms, some 57,000 electricity customers in Minnesota and some 40,000 customers in Wisconsin lost power.

The most snow fell in the northeast Wisconsin town of Elcho, which received 20 inches.

About 10,000 homes and businesses were still blacked out Monday in northern Wisconsin, and Wisconsin Public Service Corp. said some 4,000 customers might not be restored until today.

Florida: Settlement reached in false accusation

The family of a 17-year-old boy wrongly accused in the slaying of a tourist settled a lawsuit with the city for $775,000, the family’s lawyer said Monday.

Brenton Butler’s family sued the Jacksonville police department in October for $8.5 million, claiming he was beaten, intimidated into a false confession and wrongly jailed for six months before trial in the May 2000 robbery-slaying of Georgia tourist Mary Ann Stephens. He was acquitted.

The lawsuit also alleged that racial profiling and inadequate training and supervision of detectives at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office led to the arrest and false imprisonment. Brenton is black; three of the officers are white and one is black.

The boy’s trial was subject of a documentary, “Murder on a Sunday Morning,” which won an Oscar this year.