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Federal courts put 2nd Tenn. execution on hold

NASHVILLE - The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday put on hold Tennessee's plans to carry out an execution just hours after it put an inmate to death for only the second time in more than 45 years.

The court denied a request from the state attorney general to allow the execution of convicted murderer Paul Dennis Reid. His execution had been delayed by a federal judge who said a hearing was needed to determine whether the inmate was mentally competent to give up appeals of his seven death sentences.

The state had scheduled back-to-back executions for Sedley Alley, convicted of raping and killing a jogger, and Reid.

Reid, 48, was convicted of murdering seven people at three Tennessee restaurants in 1997 after he was fired from his job as a dishwasher at Shoney's.

In Tennessee's earlier execution Wednesday, Alley, 50, confessed to killing 19-year-old Marine Suzanne Collins in 1985 while she jogged near a Navy base north of Memphis.

On Tuesday, Texas put to death Angel Maturino Resendiz, known as the Railroad Killer. Claudia Benton, 39, was stabbed, bludgeoned and raped in her Houston home in 1998.

Coast Guard cadet sentenced to 6 months

NEW LONDON, Conn. - A military jury sentenced a Coast Guard cadet to six months in prison and kicked him out of the service Wednesday for extorting sexual favors from a classmate.

Cadet Webster M. Smith, the first student court-martialed in the academy's 130-year history, was acquitted of rape but had faced as much as five years and seven months for extortion, sodomy, indecent assault and other charges.

The primary charges on which he was convicted stemmed from a series of sexual encounters with a classmate in her dorm room. The classmate said she was too afraid to protest because she feared Smith would reveal a secret that could have jeopardized her Coast Guard career. Smith, who testified in his own defense, said the sex was consensual.

New leukemia drug wins FDA approval

WASHINGTON - A Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. drug received accelerated federal approval Wednesday to treat some leukemias where other drugs have failed.

The drug dasatinib, being sold under the brand-name Sprycel, won Food and Drug Administration approval to treat all phases of chronic myeloid leukemia in patients with either resistance or intolerance to the drug Gleevec. Gleevec, made by Novartis AG, is used as a first-line therapy as well as when standard interferon-alpha therapy has failed.

Chronic myeloid leukemia accounts for 14 percent of adult leukemia cases, according to the FDA.

Obama: Democrats must reach out to Christians

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people" and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans.

"Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," the Illinois Democrat said in remarks to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty.

Obama coupled his advice with a warning. "Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith: the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps - off rhythm - to the gospel choir."

Elsewhere ...

BODY FOUND: The remains of a British tourist missing since April were found in a wildlife preserve, and police say the body is linked to a suicide in New Hampshire. Adrian Exley, 32, of London was last seen in Swampscott, Mass. Authorities say Exley's disappearance is connected to the suicide of Gary Leblanc, who killed himself last week in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Claremont, N.H. Police did not say if a suicide note Leblanc left had directions to Exley's body.

[Last modified June 29, 2006, 07:01:32]