In brief: Smart testifies to her ‘nightmare’

SALT LAKE CITY – Elizabeth Smart remembers not being able to make out the threat, only the feel of a cold knife at her neck.

As the then-14-year-old lay in bed alongside her sister, the man repeated: “Don’t make a sound. Get out of bed and come with me, or I will kill you and your family.” She was his hostage, he told her.

“I was shocked. I thought I was having a nightmare. It was just indescribable fear,” Smart, now 23, told jurors Monday on the first day of testimony in the federal trial of Brian David Mitchell, the man accused of kidnapping her in June 2002.

His attorneys did not dispute the facts of the abduction. But during opening statements, they said the prosecution’s allegation that he was a calculating person who planned the kidnapping was wrong.

Mitchell was again removed from the courtroom Monday for singing hymns, so he’s watching and listening from a holding cell.

Jury orders death for family’s killer

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – A man was condemned to death Monday for a night of terror inside a suburban home where a woman was strangled and her two daughters were tied to their beds and left to die in a gasoline-fueled fire.

Jurors in New Haven Superior Court voted unanimously to send Steven Hayes to death row after deliberating over four days. Judge Jon Blue will impose the sentence on Dec. 2.

The judge, in thanking the jurors for their service, said, “You have been exposed to images of depravity and horror that no human being should have to see.”

Agency discloses nuclear fuel move

SAN DIEGO – Nearly 132 pounds of spent nuclear fuel was moved this summer from a shuttered San Diego-area research reactor and taken in convoys to a secure federal facility nearly 1,000 miles away, the National Nuclear Security Administration disclosed Monday.

The operation involved packing the enriched uranium in special shipping casks and was part of federal effort to secure nuclear material around the world within four years, the NNSA said in a press release.

Woman charged with slander in Italy

PERUGIA, Italy – An Italian judge on Monday ordered Amanda Knox to stand trial on slander charges for claiming she was beaten by police when questioned in 2007 about her roommate’s slaying.

The 23-year-old American maintains she was just trying to defend herself and never meant to offend or slander anybody, her lawyers said.

Knox had claimed she was beaten and put under pressure by police during questioning over the slaying of Meredith Kercher three years ago.