HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania emergency officials say there still are about 1,100 customers without power and more than 200 roads remain closed in the state as the region works to recover from the powerful impact of Tropical Storm Lee.
The tentative statewide death toll dropped Monday from 13 to 11, a change the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency hasn’t explained. The total may be revised again as death certificates are issued.
High waters are receding, but the deluge remains a problem from New York to Maryland.
In hard-hit Binghamton, N.Y., some residents were being allowed to return home during daylight to begin cleaning up. Schools and businesses were reopening Monday, and classes were resuming at Binghamton University, the Press and Sun-Bulletin reported.
Vegan couple’s life sentence holds in baby’s death
ATLANTA — An Atlanta vegan couple whose malnourished 6-week-old son starved to death after they fed him a too-limited diet of soy milk and apple juice will have to serve their life sentences for murder, Georgia’s top court ruled on Monday.
The Georgia Supreme Court’s unanimous decision rejected appeals by Jade Sanders and Lamont Thomas.
The two first-time parents in their 20s at the time lived in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. They rushed their infant, Crown Shakur, to the hospital in April 2004 after he began to have trouble breathing. Doctors who couldn’t resuscitate him determined he died because of extreme malnourishment or starvation.
Police searching the couple’s apartment found a soy milk bottle, an apple juice bottle and a rancid-smelling baby bottle caked with debris.
At the 2007 trial, prosecutors said the soy milk cartons in their apartment stated that it wasn’t to be used as a substitute for baby formula. They also contended that the couple intentionally neglected their child and refused to take him to the doctor even as his body wasted away. He was just 3.5 pounds when he died, about as much as a baby weighs at 7 months into a normal pregnancy.
A jury convicted them of malice murder, felony murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children.
Explosion at French nuclear facility kills one
PARIS — An explosion and fire Monday at a French nuclear-waste processing site killed one person and injured four, heightening concern of safety risks from atomic energy following the disaster in Japan six months ago.
There was no chemical or radioactive discharge from the Centraco plant in the town of Codolet in southern France, Carole Trivi, a spokeswoman for the owner Electricite de France, said by telephone.
Europe’s biggest power producer, which also operates France’s 58 nuclear reactors, treats low-level radioactive waste at the plant about 80 miles northwest of Marseilles, the country’s second-biggest city. France depends on nuclear reactors for about three-quarters of its power needs, the most of any country.
Gadhafi loyalists kill 17 guards at oil refinery
TRIPOLI, Libya — Gunmen loyal to Moammar Gadhafi pulled off a daring attack Monday at a major oil refinery inside what was supposedly rebel-held terrain in eastern Libya, killing 17 guards.
The strike at the facility near Ras Lanuf, on the Mediterranean coast, underscored warnings from Libya’s transitional rulers that the nation remains insecure as long as Gadhafi is free and publicly urging his followers to carry out a guerrilla war.
There were conflicting reports from Libya’s southern neighbor, Niger, about whether authorities there had detained Gadhafi’s son, Saadi, who crossed the desert border into the poor, landlocked nation over the weekend. Some accounts indicated that Saadi had been detained, while Reuters quoted a government official as saying he was “under surveillance.”
The fate of Gadhafi’s inner circle seems increasingly entwined with Niger, a Sahara cross-roads and former French colony