LITTLE ROCK — Evo Morales, the Bolivian president who has clashed with Washington over his efforts to allow some coca growing, said he wants to make it legal for his country’s farmers to grow small parcels of the plants, whose leaves are the key ingredient of cocaine.
Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office, said in discussing a human skull containing a bullet hole found in the Angeles National Forest that detectives don’t yet know how long the skull was there but that it “appears to be burned.”
Fredy Hernandez, 30, of East Los Angeles has been charged with murder after police say he stabbed his exgirlfriend Doris Salguero, 24, to death with an ice pick because she wouldn’t get back together with him.
Abdel Kareem Nabil, 24, an Egyptian blogger who was convicted of insulting Islam and Egypt’s president for calling Islam a brutal religion in 2005 after Muslim worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church, saw Egypt’s High Appeal Court reject his appeal of a fouryear prison sentence.
Michael Plank
of Lomita, Calif., who is accused of strapping 15 live lizards to his chest to get through customs at Los Angeles International Airport after returning from Australia, has pleaded innocent to federal charges.
Jim Doyle, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, signed a bill that stiffens the state’s drunken-driving laws, with the changes including making a fourth drunken-driving offense a felony if it occurs within five years of the previous offense.
Ann Veneman, appointed in 2005 to head UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, will not seek a second term after her first expires on April 30, 2010, Secretary-General Ban Kimoon said.
Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, lost a pair of backers in his bid for the U.S. Senate as brothers and U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart and Lincoln Diaz-Balart rescinded their endorsement, with Mario saying only that they notified Crist weeks ago and that he “left them no choice.”
John Kroger, Oregon’s attorney general, said someone broke into his car in the driveway of his Portland home and stole a briefcase containing his badge and law-enforcement credentials, and a book of phone numbers he uses to reach various sheriffs and prosecutors in the state “at a moment’s notice.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/27/2009