Freed Google executive helped spark Egypt revolt on Facebook
CAIRO (AP) — The young Google Inc. executive detained by Egyptian authorities for 12 days said Monday he was behind the Facebook page that helped spark what he called “the revolution of the youth of the Internet.”
Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager for the Internet company, sobbed throughout an emotional television interview just hours after he was freed as he described how he spent 12 days in detention blindfolded while his worried parents didn’t know where he was.
 
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Southern Sudan prepares to become world’s newest country
JUBA, Sudan (AP) — The mud-hut town of Juba has earned a promotion to world capital later this year. Only Southern Sudan needs far more than its own currency and a national anthem: Most of the roads here are dirt, and even aid workers live in shipping containers.
In a little more than five months, Southern Sudan is slated to become the world’s newest country. Final results from last month’s independence referendum announced on Monday show that 98.8 percent of the ballots cast were for secession from Sudan’s north.
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Chilean woman calls in bomb threat to keep boyfriend at home
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — People are capable of doing many things for love. What Grace Guajardo did forced the evacuation of more than 300 people from a plane moments before takeoff.
Authorities say she phoned in a false bomb threat to keep her boyfriend from flying off to a new job.
Freed pending trial, Guajardo faces up to 61 days in jail if convicted. Prosecutors decided not to invoke the more severe anti-terrorism law after hearing the couple’s story.
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Victims of deadly LA train crash to meet with transportation executives
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — Victims of a Southern California commuter train crash that killed 25 people and injured more than 150 others were set Monday to confront executives from the transportation company that accepted liability for the 2008 disaster.
Executives from Veolia Transportation agreed to attend the closed-door meeting to hear from those who were injured or lost their loved ones when a Metrolink train collided head-on with a freight train, said Rep. Elton Gallegly.
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US authorities never searched key yacht in ex-CIA agent’s case
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — U.S. authorities never searched the yacht they say carried an ex-CIA agent illegally from Mexico to Miami in 2005, and they have no evidence that he was ever aboard, a federal investigator acknowledged Monday.
Steven Ussher, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement special criminal investor, told a jury he was in charge of the case against anti-communist militant Luis Posada Carriles beginning in April 2006. He said investigators never thought to obtain a search warrant so the vessel could undergo forensic analysis.
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Man convicted of selling Dow Chemical Co. secrets to China
(AP) — A former research scientist was convicted Monday of charges he stole trade secrets from Dow Chemical Company and sold them to companies in China.
After a three-week trial, a federal jury in Baton Rouge convicted Wen Chyu Liu, 74, also known as David Liou, of conspiracy to commit trade secret theft and perjury.
Liu worked at Dow’s Plaquemine facility before retiring in 1992. Prosecutors said he conspired with at least four other Dow employees in Louisiana and Germany to sell confidential information about the company’s production of a polymer called chlorinated polyethylene.
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‘Legally dead’ man faces hearing Friday in abduction, slaying case
ALEXANDRIA (AP) — An arraignment hearing is scheduled Friday for a man declared dead nearly 17 years ago in Mississippi, who resurfaced last year as a suspect in the abduction and killing of a Las Vegas woman and her daughter. Thomas Steven Sanders pleaded not guilty to a federal kidnapping charge in November in the death of 12-year-old Lexis Roberts. He’s charged with shooting Roberts and dumping her body in Catahoula Parish.
 
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