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• BLAHODATNE, Ukraine (AP) -- At least 11 Ukrainian troops were killed and about 30 others were wounded Thursday when pro-Russian insurgents attacked a military checkpoint, the deadliest raid in the weeks of fighting in eastern Ukraine.
• AP journalists saw 11 bodies scattered around the checkpoint on the edge of the village of Blahodatne, near the town of Volnovakha in the Donetsk region. Witnesses said that more than 30 Ukrainian troops were wounded when the insurgents attacked the checkpoint, and some of them were in grave condition.
• Three charred Ukrainian armored infantry vehicles, their turrets blown away by powerful explosions, and several burned trucks stood at the site of the combat.
• In the town of Horlivka, a group of rebels claimed responsibility for the raid and produced an array of weapons they said they had seized. Their claims couldn't be independently confirmed.
• A military helicopter landed on the site, carrying officials who inspected the area. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry confirmed the attack, but wouldn't comment on casualties.
• ___

• NEW YORK (AP) -- After a mentally ill Bradley Ballard made a lewd gesture to a female guard at the Rikers Island jail, he was locked in his cell alone for seven increasingly agitated days in which he was denied some of his medication, clogged his toilet so that it overflowed, stripped off his clothes and tied a rubber band tightly around his genitals.
• During that period, guards passed Ballard's cell in the mental observation unit dozens of times, peering through the window in the steel door but never venturing inside -- until it was too late.
• The 39-year-old Ballard was eventually found naked and unresponsive on the floor, covered in feces, his genitals swollen and badly infected. He was rushed to a hospital but died hours later.
• "He didn't have to leave this world like that. They could have put him in a mental hospital, got him some treatment," Ballard's mother, Beverly Ann Griffin, said from

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