Trials

The Menendez family estate, once valued at up to $14 million, is virtually depleted, it was disclosed Tuesday at Lyle and Erik Menendez's murder trial. Shrunken by taxes, legal fees and other costs, Jose and Kitty Menendez's estate is worth no more than $800,000--and has debts at least that high, defense lawyer Leslie Abramson said in court. Probate records are sealed and the defense had kept financial figures secret throughout the trial.

CAIRO -- The only candidate running for president against Egypt's former military chief, Abdel Fattah Sisi, has reportedly said that if elected he would put Sisi on trial in connection with the deaths of hundreds of protesters. "I don't treat Sisi as a criminal, but I plan to bring him to court …. When I do this, I aim to heal wounds without opening up new confrontations," candidate Hamdeen Sabahi was quoted as saying by the Egyptian news outlet Youm7 on Friday. Sabahi's campaign denied the comments were his. But Youm7 posted an audio recording of a voice that sounded much like the candidate.

Prosecutors on Tuesday displayed a series of graphic autopsy photos for jurors in the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez that appeared to reduce the brothers to tears. The color pictures show that their father, Jose Menendez, was hit six times and their mother, Kitty Menendez, 10 times with shotgun blasts. Jose Menendez suffered a fatal shot to the back of his head, a coroner's deputy testified as prosecutors posted a picture of the wound.

Daniel Anker, an award-winning documentarian who used film to reexamine complex historical events, including Hollywood's portrayal of the Holocaust and a life-saving sled-dog run in Alaska, died Monday in New York. He was 50. The cause was pneumonia, a complication of his lymphoma, said his wife, Donna Santman. Anker made more than a dozen films during a 25-year career, including "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust" (2004), "Music from the Inside Out" (2004) and "Scottsboro, An American Tragedy" (2000)

Lyle Menendez testified Monday that his mother was "very strange" and frequently violent and that she--like his father--sexually abused him. Until he was 13, his mother would wash his body "everywhere," he said. She also would invite him into bed with her and he would touch her "everywhere," he testified. "I took it to be love," Lyle Menendez said, adding, "She was enjoying it." But he was not enjoying it, he said, so he stopped the activities, which enraged her.

Kitty Menendez, who over the years was needy, pathetic, athletic, disorganized, suspicious and spacey, "all kinds of contradictory things," simply seemed strange three weeks before her sons killed her, a former neighbor testified Monday. Called by the defense as Lyle and Erik Menendez's murder trial resumed after a four-day recess, Alicia Hercz said Kitty Menendez "kept staring" into space when they met Aug. 1, 1989, at the Menendez home in Beverly Hills.

At age 13, Erik Menendez confided that his father was molesting him, a cousin testified Tuesday. With the defense in the Menendez brothers' murder trial seeking to corroborate controversial claims of abuse, cousin Andres (Andy) Cano testified that Erik Menendez told him that his father gave him genital "massages."

Reputed underworld figure Robert (Fat Bobby) Paduano, accused of trying to take over the Newport Beach drug trade, pleaded guilty Monday to 43 felony counts of residential robberies, extortion, conspiracy to sell cocaine and false imprisonment. As part of an agreement with county prosecutors, Paduano was sentenced to eight years in state prison. Paduano's guilty plea came after a lively and unusual exchange between the defendant and Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans.

James Newman Hood sits in a quaint, ornate courtroom, rocking slowly in his wooden chair, as lawyers and witnesses chart his descent from the golden existence and happy family life he once knew to the prospect of financial ruin and a life behind bars.

A videotape played Monday in a Los Angeles courtroom showed that Latasha Harlins had turned away from a scuffle with a Korean grocer when the black teen-ager was shot in the back of the head. "This is not television. This is not the movies. This is real life," Deputy District Attorney Roxane Carvajal had warned the jury. "You will see Latasha being killed. She will die in front of your eyes."

America's Test Kitchen, the outfit that produces books, magazines, television programs and more, all about cooking, has trained its persnickety palate on gluten-free food. "We were really surprised how hard this was," says Jack Bishop, America's Test Kitchen editorial director. "We thought we would just figure out which flour to plug into existing recipes. " Not even close, as it turned out. Eight people spent almost a year in the kitchen near Boston working on the recent "The How Can It Be Gluten Free Cookbook.

SAN DIEGO -- A former San Diego police officer was ordered Wednesday to stand trial on five counts of mistreating women while on duty. Christopher Hays, an officer for four years before resigning after his arrest in February, was ordered by Superior Court Judge Charles Rogers to stand trial on two counts of felony false imprisonment and three counts of misdemeanor battery. Rogers' decision came after a preliminary hearing in which three women testified that Hays touched them inappropriately.

DEYARB BOQTARES, Egypt - By all accounts, Soheir Bataa was a bright and lively girl. At 13, she was diligent in her schoolwork, with her math teacher recalling an eager pupil. On her run-down street in this Nile Delta village, she could often be seen hoisting a neighborhood toddler onto a skinny hip. Until her parents decided that Soheir would be taken to a nearby clinic - really just the upper floor of a house on a dead-end dirt lane - where a doctor who doubled as a mosque preacher was known for performing a procedure called thara . The term, alluding to cleansing or purifying, means the cutting away of a girl's external genitalia.

Chris Brown's Washington, D.C., trial on an allegation of assault has been delayed until Wednesday after a guilty verdict for bodyguard Christopher Hollosy complicated defense-attorney plans. It was thought that Hollosy might testify that only he, not Brown, threw a punch in October at a man who told authorities he was only trying to get into a picture two women were taking with the singer, according to the Associated Press. However, Hollosy's attorney now intends to appeal his client's Monday verdict, and any testimony by the bodyguard without a promise of immunity granted by prosecutors could affect that appeal.  The accused both maintain that 20-year-old Parker Adams was trying to get on Brown's tour bus, and that any punches thrown were to defend the celeb.

Last year, Los Angeles entertainment giant AEG weathered a major corporate shake-up, endured a six-month trial spotlighting its role in the last days of Michael Jackson and fell short in its efforts to bring L.A. a pro football team. Even so, the company - owner of Staples Center, L.A. Live and the Los Angeles Kings hockey team - seems to be on the rebound. Although AEG has taken a decidedly low profile in Southern California in recent months, the company has seen most of its worldwide operations surge.

SHREVEPORT, La. - A woodsy stretch of Willow Lake Farm, just outside this city, has been painstakingly built to look like a 17 t h century New England village, filled with shops and houses with steep-pitched roofs and drab clapboard exteriors. Milling about nearby are women in elaborate capes and cinched dresses, and men clad in peasant shirts and heavy coats. It's all textbook quaint - until you see the towering gallows at the center of town. This is the setting for "Salem," the new TV series from Tribune Co.'s WGN America set in the Massachusetts village that was the scene of notorious Colonial witch trials.

In a case that has captured the lurid fascination of a nation, a 24-year-old manicurist from Venezuela went on trial in a small Virginia courthouse Monday for cutting off her husband's penis to avenge what her lawyers say was years of abuse and rape. Looking tired but composed, Lorena Bobbitt was whisked through a phalanx of TV cameras and reporters in Manassas, Va.

Investigators served a search warrant Monday night on the Lakewood home of Bruce Koklich, who faces a second trial next month on charges that he murdered his wife, the daughter of the late state Sen. Paul Carpenter. Koklich, 44, who is free on $1-million bail, allowed sheriff's homicide and crime-scene investigators inside the home on Fairway Drive, Lt. Ray Peavy said. They planned to look for potential evidence in the case, Peavy said, but he did not specify what.

Twenty-five years after scientists first identified the hepatitis C virus, doctors are declaring victory over an infection that afflicts more than 3 million Americans and kills more of them than HIV. In a series of clinical trial results, a new generation of antiviral medications was able to clear the liver-ravaging virus from virtually all patients' bloodstreams in as little as eight weeks. Even in patients with the most stubborn infections, the new drugs were capable of suppressing the virus completely at rates well over 90%. The treatments, however, come with a steep price tag. The "sustained virologic responses" reported in the trials typically mean an infection has been permanently cleared.

Van Vlahakis Ecology-minded entrepreneur founded Earth Friendly Products Van Vlahakis, 79, an ecology-minded entrepreneur who manufactured and marketed environmentally safe cleaning products, including the best-selling ECOS laundry detergent, died Sunday at his home in Key Largo, Fla., his family said. The cause of death was not known. The Greek-born Vlahakis founded Venus Laboratories in the garage of his Chicago home in 1967. A decade later he changed the name to Earth Friendly Products and opened a headquarters and factory in Garden Grove.