Florida beating caught on video

Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Police say they will seek murder charges against the attackers who beat a homeless man to death and are suspected in two similar attacks the same day.

The first attack was caught on a university surveillance video before dawn Thursday. Police were looking for two to four young men.

Norris Gaynor, 45, was attacked later as he slept near the Broward Center for Performing Arts and died from his injuries at a hospital Thursday, police said. The other victims, both hospitalized in serious condition, have not been identified.

The video from Florida Atlantic University shows two men chasing and beating a man who had been sleeping on a bench. The 58-year-old man found a security guard, who called for help, and the victim was hospitalized with head trauma and defensive fractures, authorities said.

Gaynor was beaten about 90 minutes later in a chillingly similar attack. He had been sleeping on a secluded park bench near the performing arts center, police said.

Another 90 minutes after that, a third homeless man flagged down a fire crew passing a church and said he had been attacked while he slept.

First lady predicts female president

Washington First lady Laura Bush predicted on Friday that the United States soon will have a female president – a Republican, and maybe even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“I think it will happen for sure,” Bush said about a woman in the Oval Office.

She made the comment in a CNN interview broadcast on Friday, the day before she leaves for Liberia to attend the inauguration of the first female president in Africa.

“I think it will happen probably in the next few terms of the presidency in the United States,” Bush said.

Gonzalez to testify in spying probe

Washington Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday he will testify publicly at a Senate hearing on the Bush administration’s domestic spying program, in the face of questions from lawmakers and legal analysts about whether it is lawful.

Gonzales said he reached an agreement with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to answer questions about the legal basis for the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping on telephone conversations between suspected terrorists and people in the United States.

Skakel conviction upheld in Connecticut

Stamford, Conn. The Connecticut Supreme Court unanimously upheld Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel’s murder conviction Friday, more than 30 years after a killing that sparked decades of intrigue.

Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was convicted in 2002 of bludgeoning his neighbor, Martha Moxley, to death with a golf club in 1975 in wealthy Greenwich. Skakel, who along with the victim was 15 at the time, is serving 20 years to life in prison.

He appealed his conviction to the Connecticut Supreme Court last year, arguing among other things that the statute of limitations had expired when he was charged in 2000.

Skakel’s attorney Hope Seeley issued a statement saying she will ask the high court to reconsider and that the decision overturned a 25-year-old precedent on the statute of limitations.

Boston’s Big Dig nearly finished

Boston After more than a decade of ever-shifting traffic detours, the last major piece of roadway in Boston’s Big Dig opened Friday, officials said.

The opening of an off-ramp from Interstate 93 south means the $14.6 billion project to ease congestion in downtown Boston is substantially finished, said Matt Amorello, Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman. Heavy construction began in 1991.

The dig has been plagued by soaring costs and long delays. The cost ballooned from $2.6 billion to $14.6 billion.

Formally called the Central Artery and Third Harbor Tunnel project, the Big Dig buried Interstate 93 in tunnels beneath downtown and connected the Massachusetts Turnpike to Logan Airport with a third tunnel beneath Boston Harbor.

Reiner’s initiative will go before voters

Sacramento, Calif. An initiative sponsored by director and Democratic activist Rob Reiner that would fund preschool for all California children has qualified for the June primary election ballot, the secretary of state’s office said Friday.

The Preschool for All Act would pay for a year of preschool for all 4-year-olds by increasing income taxes by 1.7 percent for individuals who earn at least $400,000 a year, or couples earning at least $800,000. The taxes would produce an estimated $2.4 billion a year for the program, which also would increase training and pay for preschool teachers.