In brief: 11 killed, 12 injured in pickup crash

GOLIAD, Texas – At least 11 people died Sunday and another 12 were injured after their pickup truck left the highway and crashed into trees in a rural South Texas community, authorities said.

State troopers and Goliad County sheriff’s investigators were investigating what prompted the crash and have not released names of the victims. The Ford F-250 pickup was heading north on U.S. 59 when it struck two large trees Sunday evening in the unincorporated community of Berclair, about 100 miles southeast of San Antonio, said Gerald Bryant, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The agency said 23 people, including some children, were in the vehicle.

Crash investigators were still at the scene late Sunday night assessing the crash, which halted traffic on U.S. 59.

Nation columnist Cockburn dies

Alexander Cockburn, the radical and acerbic journalist who had written columns in both the conservative Wall Street Journal and the leftist Nation, died Friday in Germany. He was 71.

Cockburn had cancer, according to his editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel.

For 28 years, Cockburn wrote the Beat the Devil column in the Nation. His last column for the publication will appear July 30.

“Alexander reveled in being a troublemaker,” Vanden Heuvel, the Nation’s editor and publisher, said in an email to the Los Angeles Times. “I often felt I wasn’t doing my job right if we didn’t get a dozen or so subscription cancellations as a result of some Cockburn column.”