Salt Lake City: Ex-con denies knowing missing girl’s location

A man who police say tops their list of potential suspects in the disappearance of Elizabeth Smart said Friday night he knew nothing about the girl’s whereabouts.

In a statement released by his lawyer Richard Albert Ricci, said he had “cooperated fully” with the FBI, police and probation officers.

Ricci, an ex-convict who worked as a handyman in the Smart home more than a year ago, is in police custody on an unrelated parole violation. He has not been charged in the Smart case.

Police say the 14-year-old girl was taken at gunpoint from her bedroom in the early morning hours of June 5.

Atlanta: Lawsuit claims student punished in pledge case

A federal appeals court heard arguments Friday on whether an Alabama school system had the right to discipline a student who stood silently with his fist raised rather than recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

The student, Michael Holloman, a high school senior who has since graduated, was spanked three times with a wooden paddle and given a written reprimand.

The case was argued before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta only days after another federal appeals court ruled that the pledge was unconstitutional because of the words “under God.”

The attorney for the school board in Walker County, Ala., told the judges that Holloman was punished two years ago for disrupting class, not for refusing to say the pledge.

Holloman’s lawyer, Charles Tatum, said his client had not disrupted the class and raising a fist was a form of speech.

A federal judge dismissed Holloman’s lawsuit last year.

New Jersey: Pig’s heart prank leads to assault charges

Three students accused of putting a preserved pig’s heart in a teacher’s coffee cup as a prank have been charged with assault.

The Bergenfield, N.J., High School students two 16-year-olds and a 17-year-old allegedly got the heart from a biology class and put it in the substitute English teacher’s cup June 13.

The teacher drank from the cup but did not consume the heart. The woman later left school when she began to feel ill, unaware that she had ingested formaldehyde. She was not seriously injured.

The boys were suspended through the beginning of next school year and will appear before a family court judge on the charges, filed last week.

Bergenfield Police Chief Ed Carroll said Friday that the boys had been charged with aggravated assault, which as juveniles, translates to juvenile delinquency. He declined to say what the penalties could be but said none of the boys had a prior record.

Boston: Bombing halt requested after whale found dead

The Humane Society has asked the Navy to stop bombing exercises off Cape Cod after the headless corpse of an endangered whale calf was found near a firing range.

A preliminary investigation found no evidence that the North Atlantic right whale died during an exercise, Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter said. It was found June 10 by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The Humane Society sent letters to the Navy and fisheries service Thursday asking for a halt to the bombing.

“Surely there is a better place than right in the middle of a whale feeding habitat,” Sharon Young of the Humane Society said in Friday’s Cape Cod Times.

The firing range is in the Gulf of Maine, about 60 miles northeast of Cape Cod.