Texas

Seven soldiers killed in helicopter crash

An Army helicopter carrying seven soldiers crashed and burned in the fog Monday after hitting a web of support wires on a TV transmission tower whose warning lights had been knocked out in a storm last week, officials said. Everyone aboard was killed.

The UH-60 Black Hawk, bound for the Red River Army Depot in Texarkana, went down in a field about 30 miles northeast of Fort Hood. The fog was so thick when emergency crews arrived that they could not see more than halfway up the tower, authorities said.

The helicopter was headed to check out equipment being readied for use in Iraq, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, spokesman for the Fort Hood-based 4th Infantry Division. The names of the victims, all from Fort Hood, were not immediately released.

Wisconsin

Murder charges filed in hunting deaths

A Hmong immigrant accused of gunning down eight fellow deer hunters in the Wisconsin woods was charged Monday in Hayward with six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder.

Chai Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minn., could get life in prison if convicted in the shootings, which left six people dead and two wounded. Wisconsin does not have a death penalty.

The gunfire broke out Nov. 21 after Vang, an immigrant from Laos, was caught trespassing on a hunting platform on some of the victims’ land.

Vang is jailed on $2.5 million bail.

Chicago

Brain scan technology able to detect lies

Because lying is more work for the brain than telling the truth, scanning the organ that holds our deepest, darkest secrets could be the ultimate way to separate fact from fiction, researchers said Monday.

Using a brain scanning technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers said, they were able to determine when individuals were not telling the truth as well as with a conventional polygraph.

Ultimately, they say, the technology should prove to be even more accurate than the decades-old method, which generally is correct about 90 percent of the time and remains inadmissible in most court proceedings.

“We believe fMRI has the potential down the road to replace polygraph,” said lead author Scott Faro, a professor of radiology at the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

One potential problem with using the technology is the fact that fMRI must be done while the person is lying still inside a large magnetic tube.

Washington, D.C.

Zoo heralds litter of four cheetah cubs

Four rare cheetahs were born last week at the National Zoo, the first litter of the world’s fastest land animal in the zoo’s 115-year history, officials announced Monday.

Tumai, who came to the zoo this year and was bred in August with a male cheetah, Amadi, gave birth to the cubs Nov. 23 inside a den at the zoo’s Cheetah Conservation Station. It was her first litter.

Zoo veterinarians won’t examine the litter for about a month, and the cubs will not go on public exhibit until next year.

There are 266 cheetahs in captivity in North America and about 1,200 in captivity worldwide.

California

Supreme Court refuses new Peterson jury

The California Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request from Scott Peterson’s lawyers that a new jury be selected to decide whether he should get the death penalty.

The ruling clears the way for the penalty phase to start today.

The same six-man, six-woman jury that convicted Peterson on Nov. 12 of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and the fetus she carried will decide whether he should get life in prison or death.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos had argued that the jurors were tainted by the public’s reaction to the verdict. When the verdict was announced in Redwood City, a big cheer went up from a crowd outside the courthouse, and spectators pumped their fists approvingly.

Geragos wanted the case moved, perhaps to Los Angeles County, and a new jury selected.