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Negotiators talking through ventilation pipe to Ala. captor in bunker; standoff enters 3rd day
• MIDLAND CITY, Ala. (AP) -- More than three days after he allegedly shot a school bus driver dead, grabbed a kindergartner and slipped into an underground bunker, Jimmy Lee Dykes was showing no signs of turning himself over to police.
• Speaking into a 4-inch-wide ventilation pipe leading to the bunker, hostage negotiators tried again Thursday to talk the 65-year-old retired truck driver into freeing the 5-year-old boy. One local official said the child had been crying for his parents.
• Dykes is accused of pulling the boy from a school bus Tuesday and killing the driver who tried to protect the 21 youngsters aboard. The gunman and the boy were holed up in a small room on his property that authorities likened to a tornado shelter, something common to this area of the South.
• "The three past days have not been easy on anybody," Dale County Sheriff Wally Olson said at a news briefing late Thursday. He said authorities were communicating with the suspect, and their primary goal was to get the boy home safely.
• "There's no reason to believe the child has been harmed," he added.
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Retired LA cardinal relieved of some church duties in fallout from sex abuse scandal
• LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Cardinal Roger Mahony, who retired with a tainted career after dodging criminal charges over how he handled pedophile priests, was stripped of duties by his successor as a judge ordered confidential church personnel files released.
• The unprecedented move by Archbishop Jose Gomez came less than two weeks after other long-secret priest personnel records showed how Mahony worked with top aides to protect the Roman Catholic church from the engulfing scandal.
• One of those aides, Monsignor Thomas Curry stepped down Thursday as auxiliary bishop in the Los Angeles archdiocese's Santa Barbara region. Gomez said Mahony, 76, would no longer have administrative or public duties in the diocese.
• "I find these files to be brutal and painful reading," Gomez said in a statement, referring to 12,000 pages of files posted online by the church Thursday night just hours after a judge's order. "The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children."
• The fallout was highly unusual and marks a dramatic shift from the days when (Continued on page 27)
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