South Carolina

Three killed in crash of military buses

A bus carrying Navy personnel to a wreath-laying ceremony Friday lost control on a two-lane highway and crashed head-on into a tractor-trailer, killing three sailors.

A second Navy bus veered off U.S. Highway 17 to avoid the wreck about 60 miles southwest of Charleston. Seventy people were taken to hospitals, including 38 who were expected to be checked and released.

The sailors were from the guided missile destroyer William Pinckney, said Susan Piedfort, a spokeswoman for the Charleston Naval Weapons Station. About 100 people were aboard the two buses that crashed, she said.

One bus swerved onto the right shoulder of the highway, then overcorrected and crossed the center line, hitting a tractor-trailer, said Highway Patrol Lance Cpl. Paul Brouthers.

Three sailors on that bus, including the driver, were ejected and killed, Brouthers said, and the truck driver was seriously injured.

Washington, D.C.

Bird flu testing to be expanded

Government and poultry industry officials intend to expand testing for bird flu to cover most of the poultry raised in the United States, possibly this month, an Agriculture Department official said Friday.

The $12.5 million program would focus on the most dangerous forms of the most common variety, low pathogenic avian influenza. These forms can be no worse than the chicken equivalent of the common cold. If left to spread, however, they can mutate into highly pathogenic varieties that can kill entire flocks in a day.

The new testing system could take effect March 29, assuming it gets final Bush administration approval, said Andrew Rhorer, senior coordinator of the Agriculture Department’s Poultry Improvement Plan. The plan was approved March 5 by a committee of federal, state and industry officials that oversees the program, he said.

Virginia

Parents plead guilty to abuse charges

The parents of two young children pleaded guilty to multiple abuse counts, and prosecutors said the youngsters were whipped with dog chains, choked until they lost consciousness and left barefoot in the snow.

Robert Lee Thomas and Tammy Lynn Thomas entered their pleas to felony cruelty and neglect charges as their trial was about to begin Thursday in King George Circuit Court. The boy and girl are both 7 years old and are from previous relationships.

Tammy Thomas faces up to of 35 years in prison and her husband faces up to 30 years when they are sentenced May 20. The children are in foster care, Britton said.

The abuse had taken place for at least a year until it was discovered last summer, Britton said. The father regularly pressed heated lighters into the boy’s skin and burned the girl with plates that had been heated in a microwave oven, investigators said.

The children attended school, but apparently no one noticed the abuse because clothes covered the injuries.

California

Qualifying teams ready for first robot race

A driverless Humvee converted by Carnegie Mellon University students snagged the pole position Friday in a first-of-its-kind competition that pits 15 self-navigating robots against one another in a $1 million race across the Mojave Desert.

The Pentagon’s research and development agency will award the prize to the first team whose microcircuit-and-sensor-studded vehicle can cover a rugged, twisty desert course of at least 150 miles in less than 10 hours today.

Race sponsors said it was unclear if any one of the competitors would be able to claim the taxpayer-funded prize.

Of the 21 teams that attempted to qualify over four days of trials, just seven completed a flat, 1.36-mile obstacle course at the California Speedway in Fontana, east of Los Angeles.

The agency is sponsoring the Grand Challenge to foster development of autonomous vehicles that could be used in combat.

Philadelphia

Dentist faces lawsuits for unneeded surgery

Angry patients lined up this week at a northeast Pennsylvania courthouse to accuse their former dentist of lining his pockets by subjecting them to painful drilling and oral surgeries they did not need.

For four years, prosecutors said, Dr. Alireza Asgari falsely told dozens of patients at his Wilkes-Barre clinic that their healthy teeth were in dire straits, then gave them unnecessary root canals and filled nonexistent cavities.

In one case, the dentist allegedly told a boy’s parents that he needed braces, then charged them $3,750 to put metal brackets on his teeth that another dentist said were “clinically worthless.”

In others, Asgari left slivers of broken surgical instruments or miniature glass beads embedded in patients’ mouths, prosecutors said.