World Nation Briefs March 17, 2013

Tour bus crashes, killing pregnant coach and driver

CARLISLE, Pa. - A road trip by a college women's lacrosse team came to a horrifying end Saturday when the team bus veered off the Pennsylvania Turnpike and crashed into a tree, killing a pregnant coach, her unborn child, and the driver, and injuring numerous others, authorities said.

Seton Hill University team players and coaches were among the 23 people aboard when the bus crashed just before 9 a.m. No other vehicle was involved, and police could not immediately say what caused the accident.

Coach Kristina Quigley, 30, of Greensburg was flown to a hospital but died there of injuries she suffered in the crash, Cumberland County authorities said. Quigley was about six months pregnant and her unborn child did not survive, authorities said. The bus driver, Anthony Guaetta, 61, of Johnstown, died at the scene.

The other passengers were removed from the bus within an hour and taken to hospitals as a precaution. The collision appeared to have shorn away the front left side of the bus, which rested upright about 70 yards from the road at the bottom of a grassy slope.

A decade after shock and awe, signs of progress

BAGHDAD - It's been more than six years since a bomb ripped away the eyes from Shams Karim, killed her mother and left the little girl, now 7, blind and disfigured for life. Psychiatric drugs help control her outbursts of crying and screaming.

Throughout Iraq there are tens of thousands of victims like her whose lives are forever scarred by the violence of war. Their wounds - and those of tens of thousands of U.S. and other foreign service members - may never entirely heal.

In Baghdad, life goes on much as it has since the Ottoman sultan ruled these parts. Porters force loaded carts through narrow bazaars as amateur breeders' beloved pigeons swoop overhead. The calls to prayer from turquoise-domed mosques provide a rhythm to the day.

Yet the legacy of a war that began a decade ago remains very much a part of life here too. Bullet holes still pockmark buildings, and towers wrecked by American missiles and tank shells have not fully been rebuilt. Iraqi soldiers in body armor corral cars into road-clogging checkpoints, their fingers close to the trigger, ever wary of the next attack. At 1 a.m., a curfew shuts down the capital's streets, many still lined with blast walls.

It's hard nowadays to find anybody in much of the country who hasn't lost a friend or relative to the bloodletting that followed the U.S.-led invasion. Shams' mother is buried among the densely packed graves in Najaf, where an ancient cemetery is at least 40 percent larger than it was before the war. Each new bombing sends more coffin-topped cars south to the hot, dusty city of the dead.

Republicans audition far ahead of 2016 election

OXON HILL, Md. - The auditions have begun.

Just two months into President Barack Obama's second term, Republican leaders are lining up to diagnose the GOP's ills while courting party activists - all with an eye on greater political ambitions. They have danced around questions about their White House aspirations, but the die-hard conservatives are already picking favorites in what could be a crowded Republican presidential primary in 2016.

Thousands of activists who packed into suburban Washington's Conservative Political Action Conference gave Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul a narrow victory over Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in their unscientific presidential preference poll. Paul had 25 percent of the vote and Rubio 23 percent. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum was third with 8 percent.

The freshman senators topped a pool of nearly two dozen governors and elected officials who paraded through the same ballroom stage over three days. There were passionate calls for party unity, as the party's old guard and a new generation of leaders clashed over the future of the wayward Republican Party.

First-term Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who placed sixth in the straw poll, on Saturday encouraged Republicans to be aggressive but warned them to focus on middle-class concerns: "We need to be relevant."

Argentina served as political boot camp for a pope

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Pope Francis has honed his leadership skills in one of the most difficult classrooms on the planet: Argentina, where politics has long been a blood sport practiced only by the brave.

Rising through Argentina's Roman Catholic hierarchy in times of dictatorship, capitalist excess, economic crisis and populist fervor, Francis has sought to secure a place for his church in an increasingly modern, secular society.

It might be just the training a pope needs before taking on the problems of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics and helping them recover from scandals over sex abuse and feuding and corruption at the highest levels of the church's hierarchy.

"Buenos Aires is a microcosm of the world's problems. He's going to have to deal with political crises and we have political crises here. This is a scale model of the world's inequality," his former spokesman, Guillermo Marco, told The Associated Press. "But we also have wonderful people, we're passionate, we're prone to fighting .... Bergoglio is all that!"

Swiss tourist gang-raped in central India

NEW DELHI - A Swiss woman who was on a cycling trip in central India with her husband was gang-raped by eight men, police said Saturday. The attack comes three months after the fatal gang-rape of a woman aboard a New Delhi bus outraged Indians.

Authorities detained and questioned 13 men in connection with the latest attack, which occurred Friday night as the couple camped out in a forest in Madhya Pradesh state after bicycling from the temple town of Orchha, local police officer R.K. Gurjar said.

The men beat the couple and gang-raped the woman, he said.

- The Associated Press