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FRESNO, Calif. - A man accused of killing nine of his children pleaded innocent Thursday and his attorney asked a judge to lift an order barring surviving relatives from visiting his client.
"He's still cloaked in a presumption of innocence," Marcus Wesson's attorney, Peter Jones, said.
Judge Brant Bramer scheduled a hearing Tuesday on the motion.
Wesson has been kept in isolation at the Fresno County Jail, unable to receive visits or phone calls from relatives. Officials based the decision on a phone call from a woman who called the jail March 14, two days after the bodies were found.
"We were told (relatives) would request his permission to commit suicide," said Wes Merritt, a chief deputy in Fresno County's Counsel's Office.
At Thursday's hearing, Wesson did not look at four relatives who appeared in court.
Scientists will help attempt to save whaleRALEIGH, N.C. - A team of scientists is joining the effort to free an endangered right whale that is entangled in a web of fishing gear and buoys, officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.
The group planned to go to sea Friday to track and locate the North Atlantic right whale as it moves up the East Coast, assess the situation and make another attempt to disentangle it.
The team includes the crew of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington's 70-foot research vessel Cape Fear, and scientists from NOAA and its National Marine Fisheries Service.
NOAA spokesman Kent Laborde said Thursday evening the whale was three miles offshore between Wilmington and Morehead City.
"It's very severely entangled right now," Laborde said. "The biologist with NOAA says it's the worst right whale entanglement that they've seen so far."
Michigan abortion files don't include procedureDETROIT - The University of Michigan Health System, ordered by a federal judge to turn over records in a legal fight over the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, said Thursday none of its records fall under the court mandate.
The statement came on the deadline set by U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn for the university to produce the documents so they could be passed on to a judge in New York who is hearing a lawsuit challenging the ban.
The Justice Department, which is defending the ban, says the records are central to answering the plaintiffs' claims that the procedure - known medically as "intact dilation and extraction" and called partial-birth abortion by its foes - is medically necessary.
Among the plaintiffs is University of Michigan doctor Timothy Johnson.
The university initially objected to producing the records because of privacy concerns, but in a compromise brokered by the judge, it agreed to have Johnson review the records to see if any pertained to the Justice Department's queries about various types of late-term abortions.
"He has now done a diligent search and has determined that he neither performed nor supervised any of the type of cases the government asked about," the university said in a statement.
The government has also sought records from other health care providers around the country. In two cases, judges have blocked the requests.