Ohio

Police link highway shootings

Authorities have linked 12 shootings along a five-mile stretch of interstate around Columbus, including one that killed a woman and another that broke a window at an elementary school.

The shootings began in May along Interstate 270, the freeway that circles Columbus.

Many were not reported until after Nov. 25, when 62-year-old Gail Knisley was killed by a bullet that pierced the side of a car driven by a friend.

Florida

Brain-damaged woman deemed unlikely to improve

An independent guardian concluded there is “no reasonable medical hope” that a severely brain-damaged woman at the center of a right-to-die legal battle will improve, according to a report released Tuesday in Clearwater.

Guardian Jay Wolfson also recommended that swallowing tests be conducted on Terri Schiavo, to see whether she would be able to eat on her own.

The University of South Florida professor was appointed by a judge last month to investigate whether Schiavo’s husband, Michael, should be allowed to have a stay lifted and remove her feeding tube. Michael Schiavo had the feeding tube removed in October, but a hastily passed law allowed Gov. Jeb Bush to have it reinserted six days later as her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had requested.

Washington, D.C.

Poverty rate falls for single mothers

The number of mothers with custody of their children and living in poverty fell by almost a third between 1993 and 2001, the Census Bureau said in a report Tuesday.

Roughly 25 percent of all mothers with custody — about 2.8 million women — lived in poverty in 2001, down from nearly 37 percent, or 4.2 million women, eight years earlier.

Experts cite changes implemented in the welfare overhaul of 1996 as the main reason for the decrease, as states cracked down on deadbeat fathers while nudging single mothers off public assistance rolls and into jobs. More than 45 percent of women due child support in 2001 received the full amount they were owed, about the same proportion as two years earlier.

Denver

Fatal mauling blamed on pack of pit bulls

A woman was killed in a gruesome attack by a pack of pit bull dogs that residents say had been a roaming menace for months. Two other men were attacked after Sunday’s mauling; the son of one of those victims shot and injured the three dogs to allow his father to escape.

Officials said the dogs were well known in the rolling ranch land near Kiowa, southeast of Denver.

“The people in the area had their own sort of emergency phone network to warn each other if the dogs were loose before they would go out,” Rattlesnake Fire District Chief Dale Goetz said.

The dogs’ owners, one of whom was identified as Jacqueline McCuen, could face charges ranging from a misdemeanor to negligent homicide, said Mike Knight, spokesman for the district attorney.