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The girlfriend of a Miami police officer shot dead in the Pembroke Pines home they shared said Carl Patrick pulled the trigger himself as the two tussled over his service pistol. "I did my best to hold on and struggle with him," Tiniko Thompson, 45, said in an interview with WTVJ-Ch. 6. "He fell, he slipped, and we're still tussling with the gun...and it went 'pow.' That's it." Patrick, 52, a Miami cop for 25 years, was found dead in the Rainbow Lakes community home on Friday, two days after Thompson said he was killed.

BOSTON (CBS) – A Connecticut couple sobbed outside a Boston courtroom after a legal setback in their yearlong battle to regain custody of their daughter. The state of Massachusetts took charge of Justina Pelletier as her parents and doctors at Children’s Hospital continue to clash over her diagnosis and treatment. The teen’s mom broke down in court. Paramedics wheeled Linda Pelletier from the courthouse Monday afternoon minutes after she collapsed upon hearing a judge order her embattled teenaged daughter into foster care. “This child has been ripped away from this family,” Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition said....

Washington - The Tennis Channel has taken its carriage complaint against Comcast to the Supreme Court. “We are seeking Supreme Court review of the D.C. Circuit’s decision in our case because the lower court strayed from longstanding federal discrimination law to invent an arbitrary and unfair standard for deciding cable carriage complaints," Tennis Channel said in a statement. "The ruling ignores Congress’ intent to ensure a diverse, competitive media marketplace and eviscerates the FCC’s congressionally assigned responsibility to regulate program network competition in the public interest. "“In doing so, the lower court reversed two-and-a-half years of repeated conclusions by the...

Japan said Tuesday it is considering stationing government officials on disputed East China Sea islands to back its territorial claim. … In Beijing, China’s Foreign Ministry warned that such a move would not be tolerated. … Japan also summoned China’s ambassador in Tokyo on Tuesday to lodge a protest after eight Chinese coast guard vessels entered waters near the islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. …

Great Britain on Monday sent warships to the Mediterranean and weighed legal action against Spain in a territorial dispute over the Gibraltar peninsula, as Madrid threatened to join with Argentina in a U.N. effort to strip Britain of the last remnants of its empire. In London, Ministry of Defense officials told the BBC that the Royal Navy deployments are part of a long-planned military exercise and not connected to the three-centuries old dispute over the Gibraltar enclave. The feud between the European allies has erupted anew in recent weeks amid Spanish protests over an effort to create an artificial reef...

Iran said Monday it is ready to resolve all issues concerning its nuclear program "quickly and easily" in a second round of talks with the P5+1 slated for Baghdad on 23 May. Tehran's foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi told the semiofficial ISNA news agency that Iran "might be more flexible" if it could be guaranteed an external supply of enriched uranium – an apparent endorsement of a US compromise proposal. Salehi's remarks come as US President Barak Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu traded fire over whether allowing Tehran to push the next round of talks off for almost five...

General Secretary Nobutero Ishihara of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, 2nd highest ranking official and possibly a future Prime Minister of Japan, asserted in Washington that Japan should position military forces, an armed forces bases for troops on the Senkaku's or Diaoyu's or Diaoyutai Islands. He is son to Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara one who denies Japanese responsibility in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 a particularly heart wrenching part of history etched in many a Chinese psyche- whether ROC (Taiwan), PROC (China), or Chinese worldwide (indicative in the recent wide distribution reading and interest in Iris Chang's 'Rape of Nanjing')....

Amid rising tensions over gas reserves, Israel to submit proposal to UN on where maritime economic border with Lebanon should be over next few days; U.S. endorsed Lebanon's proposal submitted to UN in August. In the next few days Israel will submit to the United Nations its take on where its maritime economic border with Lebanon should be, as the two countries scramble for gas reserves estimated to be worth billions of dollars. Israel's position is due to be approved by the cabinet on Sunday; Jerusalem argues that Lebanon's proposal includes major areas belonging to Israel.

Vietnam's foreign ministry has accused China of increasing regional tensions in an escalating territorial dispute. A rare weekend news briefing followed a confrontation in the South China Sea between a Vietnamese oil and gas survey ship and Chinese patrol boats. Vietnam says the boats deliberately cut the survey ship's cables in Vietnamese waters. China denies the allegation. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all claim territories in the South China Sea.

BEIJING - The Chinese fishermen detained by South Korean authorities are likely to return home on Saturday, after the charges against them were dropped a day before. Three Chinese fishermen were booked on a charge of "obstructing the duty of civil servants" after a collision between their trawler and a patrolling South Korean vessel in the Yellow Sea on Dec 18. However, South Korean coast guard officials decided to drop the charges on Friday, citing their "lack of direct involvement in the incident" and "active cooperation in the investigation", according to the Yonhap News Agency. The report said the coast...

China will permanently deploy large fisheries patrol vessels in waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands, a senior Chinese official told The Asahi Shimbun. The official with the Ministry of Agriculture's Bureau of Fisheries took the unusual step of granting an interview concerning the Senkaku issue to a foreign media outlet on Saturday, saying that China was planning measures to challenge Japan's control of the islands off Okinawa Prefecture. The official said fisheries patrol vessels of more than 1,000 tons would maintain continuous patrols near the islands, which are known as the Diaoyu Islands in China. "It is a legitimate right...

July 23, 2010 Offering to Aid Talks, U.S. Challenges China on Disputed Islands By MARK LANDLER HANOI, Vietnam — Opening a new source of potential friction with China, the Obama administration said Friday that it would step into a tangled dispute between China and its smaller Asian neighbors over a string of strategically significant islands in the South China Sea. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at an Asian regional security meeting in Vietnam, stressed that the United States remained neutral on which regional countries had stronger territorial claims to the islands. But she said that the United States...

Gordon Fleming is, by his own account, an environmentally sensitive guy. He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store. Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough. Ms. Cobb chides him for running the water too long while he shaves or showers. And she finds it “depressing,” she tells him, that he continues to buy a steady stream of items online when her aim is for them to lead a less materialistic...

European and Asian markets fell Monday, shaken by news of a trade dispute between the U.S. and China over tariffs on tires. Germany's DAX fell 1.4 percent to 5,544.71 and Britain's FTSE 100 lost 1.0 percent at 4,962.90. France's CAC-40 shed 1.4 percent to 3,683.72. Asian indexes lost as much as 2 percent and Wall Street was expected to fall later. Dow industrials futures were down 81 points at 9,450.00 and Standard & Poor's 500 futures slipped 9.90 points to 1,027.40. The U.S. decision to impose trade penalties on Chinese tires infuriated Beijing, which condemned the move as protectionist and...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - In yet another fissure within radical Islamist networks, one of the world's most influential jihadi theologians is coming under fire from some former followers for allegedly moderating his views – a claim he denies. The attacks on Jordanian cleric Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who was spiritual adviser for the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, are significant because of Mr. Maqdisi's longtime stature as a revered spiritual mentor who legitimizes violence with his religious interpretations of Islamic sacred texts.

Ebensburg, Pa. (AP) -- A western Pennsylvania Amish farmer was sentenced Tuesday to 90 days in jail after refusing to bring a pair of outhouses into compliance with state sewage laws. Andy Swartzentruber, of Ebensburg, cited his conservative religious beliefs in refusing to abide by a court order to make the privies used by schoolchildren compliant and pay a $500 fine. Cambria County Judge Norman Krumenacker said he respected the Amish's religious beliefs but had no choice but to sentence Swartzentruber to jail and fine him $1,000 for being in contempt of court. "Quite frankly, this is not a religious...

President Certified After Objection Delay Thursday, January 06, 2005 WASHINGTON — A joint session of Congress resumed meeting Thursday evening and quickly finalized certification of President Bush's (search) 286 Electoral College votes to Democrat John Kerry's 251. A candidate needs 270 votes to win the presidential election. Kerry running mate John Edwards received one Electoral vote. The certification was delayed for several hours after Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, stopped the formal declaration of Bush's second term to protest voting irregularities. The joint session had met earlier in the day but quickly recessed per congressional...

Defense officials are criticizing what they say is the failure to capture or kill top al Qaeda leaders because of timidity on the part of policy officials in the Pentagon, diplomats at the State Department and risk-averse bureaucrats within the intelligence community. Military special operations forces (SOF) commandos are frustrated by the lack of aggressiveness on the part of several policy and intelligence leaders in pursuing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his top henchmen, who are thought to have hidden inside the tribal areas of Pakistan for the past 6½ years. The focus of the commandos' ire, the...

LOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles Times fired its top editor after he rejected a management order to cut $4 million from the newsroom budget, 14 months after his predecessor was also ousted over a budget dispute, the newspaper said Sunday. James O'Shea was fired following a confrontation with Publisher David D. Hiller, the Times reported on its Web site. The story didn't say when the confrontation took place. Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the newspaper would have no comment. O'Shea's departure comes just a month after the Times' parent, Chicago-based Tribune Co., was taken private in an $8.2 billion...

SAN DIEGO – A conflict between passengers at Lindbergh Field Tuesday night caused the overnight delay of an American Airlines flight headed to Chicago. Flight 590 was scheduled to depart at 11 p.m. for Chicago O'Hare International Airport but was rescheduled for Wednesday at 10:15 a.m. after some kind of dispute among customers started at the gate and continued onto the plane, said American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner. While Wagner said it is the airlines policy not to disclose any information about their passengers, televised reports claimed that the incident involved a group of six to seven Iraqi Americans and...