World/Nation

Pugnacious Sen. Harry Reid retiring, endorses Schumer

WASHINGTON - Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a pugnacious and glamour-averse tactician who united Democrats to help deliver tough victories for President Barack Obama, said Friday he's retiring next year. He immediately endorsed brash New York Sen. Chuck Schumer to succeed him as leader of a party desperate to regain the Senate majority.

Reid, 75, rose from hardscrabble beginnings in Nevada, and brought his amateur boxer's tenacity to the pinnacle of congressional politics.

Friends said his doggedness and indifference to popularity helped rebuff Republicans who fiercely oppose Obama on health care, spending, immigration and other issues. But critics say Reid added to Washington's poisonous partisanship, particularly by changing Senate filibuster rules in 2013 to enable Obama to appoint more judges.

On Friday, Schumer seized the inside track to succeed Reid as the Democratic Senate leader after next year's elections. Potential rival Dick Durbin of Illinois said he would back Schumer.

2 Russians, 1 American dock with space station

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan - The capsule carrying a Russian and an American who are to spend a year away from Earth has docked with the International Space Station.

Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly are to spend 342 days aboard the orbiting laboratory, about twice as long as a standard mission on the station.

The stay is aimed at measuring the effects of a prolonged period of weightlessness on the human body, a step toward possible missions to Mars or beyond.

The Soyuz space capsule, also carrying Russia's Gennady Padalka for a six-month stay, docked about six hours after launching Saturday from Russia's manned space facility in Kazakhstan.

Co-pilot may have hidden illness, torn-up sick notes to fly

MONTABAUR, Germany - Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz appeared happy and healthy to acquaintances, but a picture emerged Friday of a man who hid evidence of an illness from his employers - including a torn-up doctor's note that would have kept him off work the day authorities say he crashed Flight 9525 into an Alpine mountainside.

As German prosecutors sought to piece together the puzzle of why Lubitz locked his captain out of the cockpit and crashed the Airbus A320, police in the French Alps toiled to retrieve the shattered remains of the 150 people killed in Tuesday's crash.

Searches conducted at Lubitz's homes in Duesseldorf and in the town of Montabaur turned up documents pointing to "an existing illness and appropriate medical treatment," but no suicide note was found, said Ralf Herrenbrueck, a spokesman for the Duesseldorf prosecutors' office.

They included ripped-up sick notes covering the day of the crash, which "support the current preliminary assessment that the deceased hid his illness from his employer and colleagues," Herrenbrueck said in a statement.

Doctors commonly issue employees in Germany with such notes excusing them from work, even for minor illnesses, and workers hand them to their employers. Doctors are obliged to abide by medical secrecy unless their patient explicitly tells them he or she plans to commit an act of violence.

Autopsies determine children found in freezer were slain

DETROIT - A brother and sister whose bodies were found in a deep freezer in their Detroit home had been beaten to death, autopsies determined Friday, painting a more complete picture of the horrors that unfolded inside the home for years but that apparently went unnoticed by the outside world.

The Wayne County medical examiner's office classified the deaths of Stoni Ann Blair and Stephen Gage Berry as homicides, saying both were killed by multiple blows and that the young boy also had "thermal injuries."

Their older sister, who is 17, told child welfare officials that their mother, Mitchelle Blair, tortured Stephen "for approximately two weeks prior to his death by tying a belt around his neck, throwing hot water on him while in the shower and putting a plastic bag over his head." The girl and Blair's other surviving child, an 8-year-old boy, have been placed in the care of a relative.

Blair, 35, is jailed on first-degree child abuse charges, but prosecutors said Thursday that she could face murder charges depending on what the autopsies found. The prosecutor's office said Friday that there would be no changes in the charges over the weekend.

Investigators believe Stoni was 13 when she died and Stephen was 9. They think Stephen died in August 2012 and that Stoni died the following May.

About 4,000 men stranded on Indonesian islands

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The number of foreign fishermen stranded on several remote eastern Indonesian islands has spiraled to 4,000, including some revealed in an Associated Press investigation to have been enslaved.

Many are migrant workers abandoned by their boat captains after the government passed a moratorium on foreign fishing five months ago, according to the International Organization for Migration in Indonesia, which released the figure Friday. However, others have been trapped on the islands for years, after being dumped by fishing boats or escaping into the jungle.

"This is the worst moment in our life right now," one former slave told the AP, which is not releasing the names of the men for their safety. "It is even worse than being in hell. We have to work every day to survive. ... There is no hope for us any more."

- The Associated Press