North Carolina

One pedestrian killed in hit-and-run spree

Police said a man in a white T-shirt and boxer shorts mowed down five pedestrians with a stolen van in separate hit-and-run incidents Wednesday, leaving a dying man pinned under the vehicle and another victim critically injured.

Police said the driver was arrested in central North Carolina after crashing another stolen vehicle. Abdullah El-Amin Shareef, 25, was charged with murder and taken to a state mental hospital.

Authorities said they had no information about a motive in the assaults, including one attack in which the driver beat a pedestrian after failing to run him over a second time.

The attacks took place in several towns in Cumberland and Hartnett counties.

Washington, D.C.

Parents alerted to two toy recalls

Hundreds of thousands of Batman Batmobiles by Mattel are being recalled after reports that more than a dozen children have been hurt by the toys, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said Wednesday.

Mattel, based in El Segundo, Calif., agreed to recall 314,000 of the blue-and-gray toy cars. The rear tail wings of the Batmobile are made of a hard plastic that rises to a sharp point and poses a hazard to young children, the safety commission said.

The CPSC also is recalling some 70,000 ride-on toy trucks by Tek Nek Toys International of Grapevine, Texas. CPSC said the screw and nut assembly attaching the steering wheel to the toy can come loose, posing a potential choking hazard.

The company has received a report that an 18-month-old boy died after ingesting a screw that became caught in his lungs.

Chicago

Colonoscopy method’s accuracy questioned

Virtual colonoscopy — a cancer-detecting procedure that gives doctors a computer-generated 3-D view of the colon — is less reliable than previously thought and not ready for widespread use, researchers say.

Its accuracy varies considerably, according to a study of 600 patients.

In conventional colonoscopy, a long, flexible viewing tube about the thickness of a garden hose is inserted in the rectum and threaded several feet into the colon. A device on the end of the tube is used to remove suspicious growths, which are later tested for cancer.

In virtual colonoscopy, a narrower catheter is inserted, and a CT scanner produces images of the colon.

In the latest study, the patients underwent virtual colonoscopy first, then traditional colonoscopy on the same day. The virtual method detected 55 percent of patients with at least one suspicious polyp at least 10 millimeters in diameter, compared with a 100 percent success rate for traditional colonoscopy. For smaller tumors, at least 6 millimeters in diameter, the results were worse: 39 percent for virtual colonoscopy versus 99 percent for the traditional method.