In brief: Father abandons boy, 4, on highway

Sweetwater, Texas – A father abandoned his 4-year-old son along a West Texas highway, and the injured boy spent several hours alone in the dark before a passing motorist picked him up, police said.

Carlos Rico, 22, stopped his car along a cactus-lined stretch of Interstate 20 near Sweetwater at about 3 a.m. Tuesday and “threw the boy out of the car like a bag of garbage,” Sweetwater police Chief Jim Kelley told the Abilene Reporter-News.

The boy was picked up about three hours later by the local high school basketball coach and taken to a hospital, where doctors removed at least 500 cactus spines from the child’s body, Kelley said. The boy was in the state’s custody on Wednesday.

Rico was driving from Lubbock to Saginaw when he abandoned his son, and he was taken into custody Tuesday by police in the Fort Worth suburb, Saginaw police spokesman Damon Ing said. He has been charged with child endangerment.

Rico told Saginaw investigators that God told him to choke the boy and expel him from the car, Kelley said. There was bruising on the boy’s throat, he said.

Judge: Loughner can be medicated

San Diego – A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Tucson shooting rampage suspect can be forced to continue taking anti-psychotic drugs, rejecting a plea by defense attorneys that the decision by prison doctors merited more scrutiny.

U.S. District Judge Larry Burns’ decision came after Jared Lee Loughner’s attorneys filed an emergency request last week to prevent their client’s forced medication without a judge’s approval. Burns said he did not want to second-guess doctors at the federal prison in Springfield, Mo., who determined that Loughner was a danger.

Defense attorneys said Loughner had been forcibly medicated since June 21.

“I have no reason to disagree with the doctors here,” Burns said. “They labor in this vineyard every day.”

Prosecutors said in court papers that Loughner spit on his own attorney, lunged at her and had to be restrained by prison staff April 4. They mentioned an outburst during a March 28 interview with a mental health expert in which Loughner became enraged, cursed at her and threw a plastic chair at her twice.