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PAKISTAN
MURDER TRIAL
141 die at school Taliban gunmen massacre children, teachers By RIAZ KHAN AND REBECCA SANTANA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Photo by Vernon Bryant/pool The Dallas Morning News | AP
Kim Williams, the estranged wife of Eric Williams, testifies during the punishment phase of Eric Williams’ capital murder trial on Tuesday.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — In the deadliest slaughter of innocents in Pakistan in years, Taliban gunmen attacked a military-run school Tuesday and killed 141 people — almost all of them students — before government troops
Jurors consider ex-judge’s sentence
ended the siege. The massacre of innocent children horrified a country already weary of unending terrorist attacks. Pakistan’s teenage Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai — herself a survivor of a Taliban shooting — said she was “heartbroken” by the bloodshed. Even Taliban militants in
neighboring Afghanistan decried the killing spree, calling it “un-Islamic.” If the Pakistani Taliban extremists had hoped the attack would cause the government to ease off its military offensive that began in June in the country’s tribal region, it appeared to have the opposite effect. Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif pledged to step up the campaign that — along with U.S. drone strikes — has targeted the militants. “The fight will continue. No one should have any doubt about it,” Sharif said. “We will take account of each and every drop of our chil-
See PAKISTAN PAGE 12A
KEMP’S RIDLEY SEA TURTLE
SEA TURTLE DECLINE
Convicted of killing official’s wife in revenge plot ASSOCIATED PRESS
ROCKWALL — Jurors began deliberating Tuesday whether to send a former North Texas justice of the peace to death row for killing a North Texas district attorney’s wife in a revenge plot. The Rockwall County jury deliberated for about 2 1/2 hours on punishment for Eric Williams before being sequestered for the night. Jurors are to resume deliberations Wednesday. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, but jurors could opt for life imprisonment without parole. Williams was found guilty Dec. 4 in the shooting death of Cynthia McLelland. He is also charged, but has not been tried, in the deaths of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and assistant prosecutor Mark Hasse. Prosecutors say the deaths were retribution after Hasse and McLelland prosecuted Williams for the theft of county equipment. He lost his job and law license as a result. The jury began deliberations after hearing Tuesday from Williams’ estranged wife, Kim Williams, who also is charged in the slayings. She testified for more than two hours about her role in the plot, saying she was a “willing participant” in her husband’s revenge killings. “His anger was my anger,” she said. Her testimony indicated she drove the getaway car in Hasse’s slaying and helped to dispose of the weapons used in the killing of the McLellands at their home east of Dallas. After killing the McLellands, the couple’s mood, she said, was “happy, joyous.” She said Eric Williams had a hit list that
See TRIAL
PAGE 12A
Photo by Brad Doherty/The Brownsville Herald | AP
Andrea Hance, Texas Shrimp Association executive director, poses with a TED, or turtle excluder device, on board a shrimp boat at the Brownsville Shrimp Basin in Brownsville. A review has found the shrimping industry’s impact on Kemp’s ridley sea turtles is at an all-time low.
Shrimping industry impact low on the creatures ASSOCIATED PRESS
B
ROWNSVILLE — A review has found the shrimping industry’s impact on Kemp’s ridley sea turtles is at an all-time low, but an expert said nesting numbers for the rare reptiles have declined.
Researchers are still puzzled as to why there’s been a decline in turtle nesting numbers, which began to decrease after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But fisheries management expert Benny Gallaway, who studied possible reasons behind the drop, said the good
news for the shrimping industry is that the decline isn’t its fault. Gallaway, president of LGL Ecological Research Associates Inc., recently spoke at the International Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Symposium held in Brownsville.
See TURTLES
PAGE 12A
NATURAL RESOURCES
Denton: City that banned hydraulic fracturing By JIM MALEWITZ THE TEXAS TRIBUNE
Photo by Tony Gutierrez/file | AP
Topher Jones, of Denton, Edward Hartmann, of Dallas and Angie Holliday of Denton, hold a campaign sign outside city hall, in Denton, on July 1.
DENTON — Cathy McMullen taps the brakes of her Toyota Prius after driving through a neighborhood of mostly one-story homes in Denton, about an hour northwest of Dallas. “There,” she says, nodding toward a limestone wall shielding from view a pad of gas wells. McMullen, a 56-year-old home health nurse, cruised past a stretch of yellowed grass and weeds. “They could have put that pad site on that far corner right there,” she says, pointing ahead. “The land’s all vacant.” Instead, the wells sit on the corner of Bonnie Brae and Scripture Street. Across the way: Texas
Health Presbyterian Hospital. Across another street: the basketball court, picnic tables and purple playground of McKenna Park. That was where Range Resources, a company based in Fort Worth, wanted to start drilling and fracking in 2009. McMullen, who at that time had just moved into a house about 1,500 feet away from the proposed site, joined others in raising concerns about bringing the gas industry and hydraulic fracturing — widely known as fracking — so close to where kids play. Fracking, which involves blasting apart underground rock with millions of gallons of chemical-laced water to free up oil and gas, “is a brutal, brutal process for people living around it,” McMullen says.
Their efforts in city hall failed. If McMullen felt invisible five years ago, she doesn’t anymore. Today, state lawmakers, the oil and gas industry and national environmental groups have become acutely aware of Denton, home to two universities, 277 gas wells and now, thanks to a rag-tag group of local activists, Texas’ first ban on fracking. Thrust into the saga is George P. Bush, who in January will take the helm of the Texas General Land Office, an otherwise obscure office that manages mineral rights on millions of acres of state-owned property. In his first political office, Jeb’s eldest son and George W.’s nephew will inherit one of
See FRACKING
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