Iraq to step up security for defense lawyers in Saddam’s trial
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s interim government said Saturday it will step up security for defense lawyers in Saddam Hussein’s trial, after one was abducted and killed by gunmen disguised as security forces.
The body of the Sunni Arab defense lawyer, Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, was found dumped on a street in Baghdad Friday just hours after gunmen dragged him out of his office. He had been shot twice in the head.
Shaken by their colleague’s death, the 12 other defense lawyers demanded the government provide them protection.
“We have decided to take some measures to protect the lawyers,” Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, a deputy minister in the Interior Ministry, said Saturday. “We cannot give any details regarding those measures for security reasons,” Kamal told The Associated Press.
Kamal and other government officials met until late Friday night to consider the attorneys’ demands.
Saddam and his seven co-defendants face possible death sentences if convicted on charges of murder and torture for the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad. The defendants have pleaded innocent. After the opening day of their trial on Wednesday, it was adjourned until Nov. 28.
Hurricane Wilma slams into Mexico
CANCUN, Mexico – Hurricane Wilma came to a virtual standstill over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula early Saturday, giving Florida a reprieve but prolonging the misery of tens of thousands of tourists riding out the storm in hot and sweaty shelters with little food and water.
Packing winds of 140 mph, Wilma slammed into the Mexican mainland late Friday about seven hours after the eye hit the island of Cozumel, a popular cruise-ship stop about 11 miles off the country’s Caribbean coastline.
Huge waves crashed over the narrow strip of land that holds Cancun’s resort hotels, washing away tiki huts. Shop windows were shattered, cars were crushed under fallen trees and pay phones jutted from waist-deep floodwaters.
The fearsome storm, which killed 13 people in Haiti and Jamaica, was expected to pummel the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula for two days, raising fears of catastrophic damage. It is forecast to sideswipe Cuba before bearing down on Florida.
Kansas high court rejects harsher treatment of illegal gay sex in case involving teens
TOPEKA, Kan. – The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday unanimously struck down a state law that punished underage sex more severely if it involved homosexual acts, saying “moral disapproval” of such conduct is not enough to justify the different treatment.
In a case closely watched by national groups on all sides of the gay rights debate, the high court said the law “suggests animus toward teenagers who engage in homosexual sex.”
Gay rights groups praised the ruling, while conservatives bitterly complained that the court intruded on the Legislature’s authority to make the laws.
The case involved an 18-year-old man, Matthew R. Limon, who was found guilty in 2000 of performing a sex act on a 14-year-old boy and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Had one of them been a girl, state law would have dictated a maximum sentence of 15 months.
The high court ordered that Limon be resentenced as if the law treated illegal gay sex and illegal straight sex the same. He has already served more than five years.