LILLINGTON, N.C. — Alonzo Lunsford has trouble getting out of chairs and warns his family to wake him gently. Kathy Platoni can’t shake the image of the man who died in a pool of blood at her knees. Fort Hood
Fort Hood shooting survivors prepare
to face gunman
LILLINGTON, N.C. — Alonzo Lunsford has trouble getting out of chairs and warns his family to wake him gently. Kathy Platoni can’t shake the image of the man who died in a pool of blood at her knees.
Shawn Manning still has two bullets in his body and gets easily unnerved by crowds.
Survivors of the 2009 shooting rampage that claimed the lives of 13 people at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas fight these demons daily.
Now after years of delay, they will come face to face with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who goes on trial in the attack starting Tuesday.
After dismissing his attorneys, Hasan got permission to represent himself, putting him in the unusual position of asking questions of the very people he admits targeting.
Hasan, a Muslim who argues he was protecting the Taliban from American aggression, was shot by a civilian police officer and is now in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the abdomen down.
RNC tries to stop NBC, CNN from airing Hillary Clinton programs
WASHINGTON — The Republican National Committee charged Monday that NBC and CNN are promoting a potential presidential candidacy by Hillary Rodham Clinton, threatening to blackball them from future GOP primary debates if they air upcoming programs on the former secretary of state.
RNC chairman Reince Priebus called a planned NBC miniseries on Clinton and a CNN documentary on the first lady an “extended commercial” for a future Clinton presidential campaign. In separate letters to the networks, he urged them to cancel “this political ad masquerading as an unbiased production.”
Clinton has not yet said whether she’ll run for president again in 2016 but her future remains the subject of wide speculation in political circles and beyond.
The primary debates typically provide a ratings boost for the networks and are highly-coveted as the presidential campaign unfolds.
In making the charge, the RNC was raising a common complaint among Republican activists that news and entertainment industries favor Democratic candidates.
Republicans have also used a potential Clinton campaign as a fundraising tool in recent months as both parties begin to assess the crop of candidates to succeed President Barack Obama.
CNN Films is planning a feature-length documentary film on the former first lady, looking at her professional and personal life.
It will be led by Oscar-winning director and producer Charles Ferguson and is expected to air in 2014.
Family grieves tourist killed at Venice Beach
LOS ANGELES — The man suspected of being behind the wheel of a sedan that careened down the crowded Venice Beach boardwalk last weekend, killing an Italian newlywed on her honeymoon and injuring 16, is a transient who served brief stints in jail in Colorado, authorities said Monday.
Nathan Louis Campbell, 38, had been in the Los Angeles area a short time but had no fixed address, and police have been unable to find any evidence he was working.
Investigators believe Campbell, who was arrested for investigation of murder after he walked into a police station several hours after the rampage on Saturday, was driving his own car, Los Angeles police Cmdr. Andrew Smith said.
“I think we can safely say, when he turned himself in … he implicated himself in the Venice incident,” Smith said.
Investigators have yet to provide an explanation why the driver maneuvered around a vehicle barrier early that evening and plowed into tourists and vendors along the fabled walkway bordering the Pacific, killing Alice Gruppioni, 32.
By wire sources
