A 41-year-old man who was arrested after border officials found two dying Mexican men in the trunk of his car at the U.S.-Mexican border wept in court on Wednesday as he was arraigned on a federal smuggling charge.

Nicholas George Zakov appeared distraught as his court-appointed attorney entered a plea of innocent on his behalf during a brief hearing in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

Following the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Wheat said federal investigators were still probing the incident and plan to take the evidence, including the as-yet unfinished autopsy results, to a grand jury for an indictment in the next week.

The New York Daily News reports that a paraprofessional at a Brooklyn public school has been arrested on felony assault charges for striking an 11-year-old autistic boy.

Anatoly Veltman, Jr. - who has the cognitive and social skills of a 6-year-old - had spilled some water on the cafeteria floor during a summer school session, and Milton Parker, a paraprofessional who is supposed to be trained to handle children like Anatoly, told him to clean it up. The boy failed to understand Parker's command, and after a brief exchange of words, Parker grabbed the boy and struck him in the face.

Anatoly's father told The Daily News that "the police officer told me Parker said my son said 'something racial' to him," but that when he spoke to his son, "all he could say was that he told [Parker] to 'keep your hands to yourself.'"

An upstate New York man was accused on Tuesday of threatening to kill President Barack Obama and other political leaders just days after he was arraigned on charges that he had made previous online death threats against them, authorities said.

Brandon Correa, 30, of Rochester, faces a seven-count indictment charging him with threatening the president, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York Lieutenant Governor Robert Duffy and Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren, according to a statement by the office of William Hochul, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York. Each count carries the possibility of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Correa had been indicted earlier for posting threats on Twitter to kill Obama, Cuomo and Duffy in June, and he posted the new threats after his arraignment last week, according to Hochul's statement. He was first arrested in June. He had been free after his arraignment last Tuesday, but was arrested a second time two days later after authorities said he had made threats again. In an interview with a Secret Service agent in June, Correa said Obama had to "die," the statement said.
Correa has claimed to get messages from Jehovah and his Tweets made references to passages in the Bible, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported.

Authorities are seeking a psychiatric evaluation for Correa, the newspaper reported.

A California man allegedly stabbed to death his parents, his two young sons and the family's dog at a home in a coastal community before telling police who arrested him it was his "destiny" to kill them, authorities said on Tuesday.

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office said 45-year-old Nicolas Holzer was booked into jail on four counts of murder and is being held without bail.

Sheriff's deputies responded to the house in Goleta, a town of about 30,000 residents some 10 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, just after 11 p.m. on Monday, Kelly Hoover, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office, said in a statement. Holzer had phoned 911, she said, "and in a calm and matter of fact manner told a dispatcher that he had killed his family, which included his parents, two sons and the family dog." He was taken into custody without incident, after which officers found the four victims and an Australian Shepherd-type dog, all deceased, each suffering from multiple stab wounds.

"Sheriff's deputies recovered two large kitchen knives that are believed to be the murder weapons," Hoover added.

Audio recordings taken by an undercover activist reveal that a network of anti-abortion activists in Texas are photographing the license plates of patients who use women's clinics in order to track and monitor them. Furthermore, the group is using tax records to identify and locate physicians and staff of the clinics.

Watch video about this story, embedded below via Progress Texas:


The Austin Chronicle reported Tuesday that two groups, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas and Progress Texas released the tapes, which were recorded at the Capitol in Austin. Multiple anti-choice groups were on hand offering instructions to new recruits on how to more effectively stalk and harass abortion providers and their patients.

The recording features excerpts from "Keeping Abortion Facilities Closed," a seminar held by the anti-choice groups - united under the banner Texas Alliance for Life - on August 4.

Karen Garnett of the Catholic Pro-Life Committee of North Texas instructed her fellow protesters and activists to flood the streets around women's clinics so that "prayer chains" can be on site "in front of every abortion facility during all hours that abortions are being performed."

"Part of that," Garnett said, "is so that we can track. We can track the number of women who choose life and we can also track who works there, who is your abortionist. You can do that, it's totally legal. You can track license plates."

She went on to detail how her group has a "very sophisticated spread sheet" so that they can track and monitor every person who arrives and leaves women's health centers.

"You have license plates, the car make and model and a description of the person," she said.

A veteran Florida teacher could be reinstated to the job she lost in February after students accused her of using racial slurs and profanity in the classroom.

Joyce Quiller was terminated after students complained in January that the math teacher called them stupid and ignorant, reported WJXT-TV, along with other derogatory names. "You are all some lazy n*ggers for coming to class late," one student accused Quiller - who is black - of saying.Another student said Quiller berated him for forgetting to bring a pencil to class. "What is the point in coming to the mother*cking class if you do not bring materials?" the student claimed the teacher asked him.

Quiller's attorney denied she used the racial slur, and he said the school board did not follow proper procedure for terminating the 21-year veteran teacher."The School Board skipped step three and went directly to termination even though, if the allegations were true, they would have amounted to what is considered a minor offense," said attorney Reginald Luster. "Not some type of severe misconduct on behalf of Ms. Quiller. It does not warrant the termination."

The leader of an anti-LGBT group who has joined with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to ban same-sex marriage had his own marriage end after his wife began a romantic relationship with another woman.

According to court documents obtained by Lone Star Q, Corrine Morris Rodriguez Saenz was dating another woman when she filed for divorce from Jonathan Saenz in 2011. Less than six months later, Jonathan Saenz took over as the president of the state's top anti-gay group, Texas Values.

Corrine Saenz told the court that she wanted to end her marriage on the grounds that it was "insupportable due to discord or conflict of personalities ... that destroys the legitimate ends of marriage and prevents reasonable expectations of reconciliation."

Jonathan Saenz initially asked the court to refuse to grant the divorce, and to bar "any unrelated adult, with whom the parent has an intimate, romantic, emotional, and/or dating relationship to remain in the presence of the children, including but not limited to Ercimin Paredes, a/k/a Ercilia M. Paredes."

More than three weeks after a violent bank robbery and chase left one victim dead and shook the Stockton region, police confirmed Monday that hostage Misty Holt-Singh was killed by police gunfire that struck her repeatedly while she was being used as a human shield.

The 41-year-old mother of two, who had stopped into a Bank of the West branch to get cash for a hair appointment July 16, was struck by about 10 bullets during the shootout between police and the robbery suspects, all of them from police weapons, Stockton Police Chief Eric Jones said in a somber news conference Monday afternoon.

The victim died "from gunshots fired by police officers as they confronted bank robbers who used her as a human shield," Jones told reporters in videotaped remarks that were posted on the department's website. "Every member of our department is deeply saddened that this event ended with the tragic death of an innocent victim."

Jones met with Holt-Singh's husband, Paul, over the weekend to inform him of the department's findings and to tell him they would be publicly announced Monday, department spokesman Joseph Silva said.

Murderers should face the death penalty in the UK, say 45 percent of Brits in a poll taken to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the country's last legal executions. Support for reintroduction was highest among the over 60s and UKIP voters.

The YouGov poll of almost 2,000 people showed a significant number would like to see the return of capital punishment. While support for the practice is high, the figures show it fell by 6 percent on 2010 figures, down from 51 percent in a similar poll.

Figures also show strong opposition to the death penalty, with 52 percent polling against. Overall, 39 percent were against the death penalty, while 17 percent were undecided. The group most resistant to reintroduction were 18 to 24 year olds, while older respondents and those from a lower social class tended to be in favor.

When asked if Britain's abolition of the death penalty was a good or a bad thing, there was an equal split of 42 percent each, while 16 percent did not know. Meanwhile, 57 percent of 18 to 24 year olds thought abolition was a good thing.

Asked if the execution of murderers deterred others from committing murder, 45 percent agreed, while 41 percent disagreed and the remaining 13 percent answering that they did not know. Life imprisonment without possibility of parole was thought to be a harsher punishment than death by 42 percent against 40 percent.

The poll also asked whether respondents approved of particular methods of execution, with 51 percent either strongly approved or tended to approve of lethal injection, 25 percent of the electric chair, 23 percent of hanging, 19 percent by gas chamber, 17 percent by firing squad, and 9 percent by beheading.

Moscow: A four-year-old girl was recovering in hospital on Wednesday after being lost for nearly two weeks in a bear-infested forest in the Russian far north with only her puppy to defend her.

Karina Chikitova was found emaciated but alive at the weekend, having survived 11 days in the Siberian wilderness in freezing night-time temperatures with only berries to sustain her in what rescuers said was nothing short of a miracle.

The little girl had left her tiny village in the Sakha republic with her dog on July 29 to go and stay with her father who lived in a neighbouring hamlet.

But her father had gone to fight a wildfire and the girl apparently set off by herself into the forest to find him.

With no mobile phone signal in the sparsely populated region where native Yakut people live from hunting and reindeer herding, her mother only realised after four days that her daughter had set off on her own into the dense forest.