Around the world
HIJACKED: A Brazilian commercial plane was hijacked by two men in midflight in the Amazon, Globo television reported Friday in Rio de Janeiro. The plane set out from Catauari Thursday afternoon with seven passengers and two crew but failed to make a scheduled stop in Tefe. According to Globo, two men, later identified by authorities in Manaus as Colombian, forced the pilot to land to release the five remaining passengers. The hijackers then forced the crew to take off again. Representatives from the airline said they had had no word of the pilot and co-pilot, Globo reported.CONCEALED: Iraq is continuing to conceal weapons from U.N. inspectors, who found an unreported Chinese-built radar system, U.N. officials said Friday. The Security Council resolution that ended the 1991 gulf war requires Iraq to cooperate in the dismantling of its missiles and chemical, nuclear and biological weapons. The latest account of Iraq's failure to report all of its weapons comes in a report to be released next week by the commission to oversee the disarmament, the officials said.
FATAL ENCOUNTER: A suspected Haitian thief was fatally shot and another wounded in an encounter with a patrol of U.S. and Bangladeshi soldiers in Port-au-Prince, a U.S. military spokeswoman said Friday. The incident happened at about 11 p.m. EST Wednesday near a U.S. military base on the outskirts of the capital, said Army Major Regina Largent. "A multinational-force patrol consisting of Bangladeshi and U.S. soldiers encountered a group of Haitian thieves robbing Haitian citizens. The patrol intervened. A suspected thief died and another was wounded," Largent said, reading from a U.S. Defense Department statement.
Across the nation
THE WINNER: Connecticut's highest court Friday declared Democratic Rep. Sam Gejden-son the winner of a contested congressional race by a scant 21 votes. After a review of 73 disputed ballots, the state Supreme Court ruled that Gejdenson had 79,188 votes to Republican Ed Munster's 79,167. The court gave 52 of the disputed ballots to Gejdenson and 19 to Munster. The remaining two were rejected. Both Munster and Gejdenson, who is serving his seventh term, had asked the court to review the Nov. 8 election and the recount by the state secretary of state that showed Gejdenson with a four-vote advantage.
AWARD: A Pittsburgh jury awarded more than $272,000 Friday to a couple and their teenage daughter who sued a psychiatrist for allegedly failing to evaluate the girl's sensational claims of sexual abuse by her parents. Richard and Cheryl Althaus, who were arrested and charged with sex abuse before their daughter Nicole recanted, won $213,899 in their malpractice lawsuit against Dr. Judith Cohen and the University of Pittsburgh's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. The jury awarded $58,333 to the 19-year-old daughter.