New Jersey

Wife charged in murder, dismemberment

Authorities charged a New Jersey woman Thursday in the slaying of her husband, whose body was hacked up, placed in three suitcases and dumped in the ocean last year.

Melanie McGuire, 32, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder at her arraignment. Bail was set at $750,000.

Authorities said they thought she shot William McGuire, 39, in the couple’s Woodbridge apartment in April 2004 and likely had help dismembering his body and transporting the suitcases to Virginia.

Assistant Atty. Gen. Patricia Prezioso said during the arraignment that Melanie McGuire was having an affair at the time of the murder.

Washington, D.C.

Army links dog handlers to Abu Ghraib abuse

Army officials named two military dog handlers at Abu Ghraib prison in criminal charges Thursday, alleging that they used their unmuzzled animals to “threaten and harass detainees” and scare them into cooperating with interrogators.

The two sergeants are the first dog handlers to be named as criminal defendants in the abuses at the prison outside Baghdad.

According to Army charge sheets, Sgt. Santos A. Cardona and Sgt. Michael Smith “intentionally scared detainees to make them urinate on themselves as part of a game” at the prison between November 2003 and January 2004, during the height of the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.

North Carolina

CIA contractor charged in assault on girlfriend

A former CIA contractor accused of beating an Afghan prisoner who later died in custody was charged Thursday with allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, authorities said.

David Passaro – the first civilian to be prosecuted on charges of mistreating a military detainee in the U.S. war on terrorism – was arrested after his girlfriend told authorities he pushed her into a door, causing her to fall down stairs.

He was charged with assault, injury to personal property and misdemeanor larceny.

Passaro, a former Special Forces soldier recruited by the CIA, also faces four counts of assault in Afghanistan. He is accused of beating prisoner Abdul Wali with his hands, feet and a large flashlight while Wali was interrogated for two days at an American base in Afghanistan in June 2003.

Passaro, 38, was released from jail in August after a federal judge said prosecutors failed to show he was a flight risk or a threat to the community.

Passaro faces a maximum 40 years in prison and $1 million in fines if convicted. The trial is scheduled for July.

California

Some Laguna residents return after landslide

Hundreds of evacuated residents were allowed to return to their homes Thursday, a day after multimillion-dollar houses with vistas of the Southern California coastline went slipping down a canyon in a landslide.

Though 48 homes remained at least temporarily off-limits, people were allowed back to about 310 undamaged homes as crews worked to restore gas and phone service to the area, City Manager Ken Frank said. Electricity was back on in most homes Thursday.

City officials said seven homes were destroyed and eight more suffered significant damage.

Twenty-two of the affected homes were considered uninhabitable because of damage or their proximity to the slide; access was limited to 26 because of damage or their proximity to the slide.

Five people suffered minor injuries in the slide.

The cause of the disaster was under investigation, but geologists said it was almost certainly related to the winter storms that drenched Southern California.

Washington, D.C.

Hemingway’s Cuban home on endangered list

For the first time, a site outside the United States – novelist Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban hideaway – has won a place on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of most endangered places.

Hemingway spent more than 20 years at the home near Havana, where he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea.” Time and the elements have severely damaged the hacienda, called Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm.

The list of 11 endangered sites released Thursday includes the Catholic churches of Boston, historic buildings in downtown Detroit and Alaska’s King Island, once home to the Inupiat Eskimos.

New Hampshire

Rare nickel sells for more than $4 million

Not many people can retire on a nickel – unless it’s a rare 1913 Liberty Head like the one below that sold Thursday for $4.15 million.

It is the second-highest price ever reported paid for a rare coin.

Legend Numismatics, a coin dealership in Lincroft, N.J., bought it from collector Ed Lee of Merrimack, N.H. It is one of only five such nickels known to exist.

The nickel will be on display through Saturday at a coin show in Long Beach, Calif. “We are going to display it and enjoy the hell out of it,” said Laura Sperber, co-president of Legend Numismatics.

Liberty Head nickels were minted from 1883 to 1912. “Miss Liberty” was replaced the following year by the Indian, or Buffalo, nickel.

But five 1913 nickels depicting “Miss Liberty” were minted illegally, possibly by a mint official.

Washington, D.C.

Edwards says freedom a universal ideal

John Edwards told liberal activists Thursday that despite President Bush’s frequent speeches about fighting for freedom they should remember that “freedom does not belong to one political party.”

The Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2004 also said the idea of America standing for freedom was not new.

Edwards made the comments to the annual “Take Back America” gathering of liberal activists sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future. The group gave Edwards its top award, named after Thomas Paine, the writer and activist from the Revolutionary War era who wrote about economic injustice among many topics.

“While we’re working on democracy over there (in Iraq), we’ve got more work to do on democracy right here,” said Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina.

New York

Study: Adult whooping cough shot deemed safe

An experimental booster shot designed to protect adults and adolescents from whooping cough proved safe and effective in a study released Thursday, offering a vital new tool for fighting a dangerous resurgence of the disease over the past few years.

The vaccine, developed by Sanofi Pasteur and already widely given to teenagers in Canada, appears likely to win U.S. government approval later this month.

The vaccine is needed “to prevent the disease in teenagers and adults themselves and, secondly, take away their ability to be contagious,” said Dr. Michael E. Pichichero, a professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has headed clinical trials into the vaccine since 2001. “We’re trying to stop an epidemic.”

Cases of whooping cough, an ancient scourge that effective vaccination of babies and toddlers was meant to wipe out, have quadrupled in the United States over the past three years to 18,957 in 2004, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers have learned the vaccine that babies receive starts wearing off by adolescence.

Chicago

School, parents settle in girl’s choking death

The parents of a sixth-grader who choked to death on marshmallows while playing a classroom game settled their lawsuit against the suburban school district Thursday for $2 million.

The settlement came in the second week of a trial over the 1999 death of 12-year-old Catherine “Casey” Fish. Her parents had been seeking unspecified damages.

Casey’s parents had argued that Glenview school district and teacher Kevin Dorken were responsible for the girl’s death because Dorken, who had been supervising the game, was out of the room while the children were stuffing marshmallows in their mouths to see who could hold the most and still say the words “chubby bunny.”