Suleman employs security force

Octuplet-mother Nadya Suleman has hired security guards, her attorney said Wednesday, a day after someone hurled a car seat through the window of her minivan that was parked outside her home.

La Habra police said a nanny heard the sound of a crash about 3 a.m. When the day-shift nannies arrived about 7 a.m., they saw the van’s window had been smashed.

Police have no suspects.

Suleman has complained about the crush of paparazzi and onlookers since she moved to La Habra last month.

New York

Medicare patients often repeat visits

One in five Medicare patients ends up back in the hospital within a month of discharge, a large study found, and that practice costs billions of dollars a year.

The findings suggest patients aren’t told enough about how to take care of themselves and stay healthy before they go home, the researchers said. A few simple things – like making a doctor’s appointment for departing patients – can help, they said.

The study found that a surprising half of the non-surgery patients who returned within a month hadn’t even seen a doctor between hospital stays.

“Hospitals put more effort into the admission process than they do into the discharge process,” said Dr. Eric Coleman, one of the study’s authors from the University of Colorado in Denver.

Coleman, who runs a program to improve “hand-offs” between health care systems, said patients often have a honeymoon notion about how things will be once they’re home. Then when they become confused about how to take their medicine or run into other problems, they head back to the hospital because they don’t know where to turn, he said.

Boston

Obama aunt sets asylum court date

President Barack Obama’s aunt will remain in the United States until at least next year as she awaits a chance to make her case before an immigration judge in her bid for asylum from her native Kenya.

Zeituni Onyango had an initial appearance in U.S. Immigration Court in Boston on Wednesday. At the brief hearing, a judge set her case to be heard Feb. 4, 2010.

Onyango wore a curly red wig to the hearing and declined to comment to reporters as she was led away from court by her attorneys and police from the Federal Protective Service.

Onyango, 56, first applied for asylum in 2002, but her request was rejected and she was ordered deported in 2004. She did not leave the country and continued to live in public housing in Boston.

Her lawyer, Cleveland immigration attorney Margaret Wong, said in a statement Wednesday that Onyango first applied for asylum “due to violence in Kenya,” but she did not reveal what grounds she has cited in her renewed bid for asylum. The court hearing was closed at her lawyer’s request.

From wire reports