The nation in brief

— QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The administration is taking the next step in providing women across the nation with coverage of recommended preventive care at no cost, while respecting religious concerns.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Article, 1A

Alabama bunker standoff drags on

MIDLAND CITY, Ala. - The standoff between police and a man accused of holding a kindergartner hostage in an underground bunker dragged into a fourth day Friday as authorities sought to continue delicate conversations with the man through a pipe and worked to safely end the tense situation.

Police said Jimmy Lee Dykes shot a school-bus driver to death, grabbed a 5-year-old boy off the bus and slipped into an underground bunker on his property in rural Alabama, where the two have been since Tuesday. There were signs the standoff could go on: The shelter has electricity, food and TV, and police have delivered the boy’s medication through a 4-inch-wide ventilation pipe which hostage negotiators have used to talk to the suspect.

Authorities said the gunman boarded a stopped school bus filled with children on Tuesday afternoon. When the driver, Charles Albert Poland Jr., tried to block his way, the gunman fatally shot him and took the boy.

The yellow Dale County school bus was processed for evidence, and authorities drove it Friday down the dirt road, away from the bunker, before a wrecker hauled it away.

Police see gang ties in school gunfire

ATLANTA - Two groups of students apparently were arguing before a 15-year-old opened fire on a classmate at an Atlanta middle school, and investigators believe that the shooting was gang-related, police said Friday.

The suspect has been charged with aggravated assault and firearms counts, though it will be up to prosecutors to decide whether he is charged as an adult, Atlanta Police Chief George Turner said during a news conference.

Police have not named the suspect or the 14-year-old who was shot because they are minors, and to protect them from retaliation.

While police believe that the shooting is gang-related, they have not confirmed whether the boy who was wounded is a gang member or whether he was even the intended target.

The 14-year-old athlete is doing well despite being shot in the back of the neck and is looking forward to watching Sunday’s Super Bowl, Mayor Kasim Reed said.

It is not known how the suspect obtained the gun or got it onto campus, which does have metal detectors, Turner said. An off-duty police officer was working as a school resource officer when the teen was shot, and arrested the suspect.

Dozens punished in Harvard cheating

BOSTON - Harvard University said Friday that it issued academic sanctions against approximately 60 students who were forced to withdraw from school for a period of time in a cheating scandal that concerned the final exam in a class on Congress.

The school implicated as many as 125 students in the scandal when officials first addressed the matter last year.

The inquiry started after a teaching assistant in a spring semester undergraduate-level government class detected problems, including that students may have shared answers.

In a campus wide e-mail Friday, Michael Smith, the arts and sciences dean, said the school’s academic-integrity board had resolved all the cases related to the cheating inquiry.

He said “somewhat more than half” the cases involved students who had to withdraw from the college for a period of time.

Kentucky says new execution rules set

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Kentucky officials said the state is ready to resume executions with new rules that change the drug concoction used in lethal injections.

The Kentucky attorney general’s office told Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd in documents filed Friday that the new method uses one or two drugs instead of three. That new method also addresses legal challenges raised by inmates.

Shepherd had stopped executions in 2010 and ordered officials to switch to a single-drug or two-drug method.

The state’s latest filing asks him to lift the order.

Defense attorneys said the new execution rules that took effect Friday only end the argument over the validity of the state’s former lethal injection procedure.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/02/2013

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