Shorts (right)
Boston Police Will Destroy Pepper-Spray Guns
More than two years after a pepper-spray pellet fired from a police officer's gun killed a college student as a crowd gathered outside Fenway Park to celebrate a Red Sox victory, the Boston Police Department has said it will destroy the pellet weapons.
The police department stopped using its 13 pepper-spray guns immediately after a shot fired from one of them killed the Emerson College student, Victoria Snelgrove, 21, of East Bridgewater, Mass., in October 2004. The police were using the weapons to disperse a crowd that formed outside Fenway Park after the Red Sox won the American League Championship. Snelgrove was struck in the eye with a pellet while standing on the sidewalk and waiting for the crowd to clear so that she could get her car from a garage.
Elaine Driscoll, a Boston police spokeswoman, said the weapons, FN303 pellet guns, will be shipped to a facility where they will be melted down and fashioned into sewer caps.
"The FN303s have basically been sitting in a locker collecting dust," Driscoll said. "The guns were touted as nonlethal, but for us that certainly was not the case. We have no intention of using those in a large crowd situation or any situation for that matter."
Britain's Prince Harry Will Go on Active Duty in Iraq
Britain made headlines on Wednesday by saying it would bring some troops home from southern Iraq. On Thursday, it made even more waves here by saying it would send one soldier in the opposite direction: Prince Harry, second son of Prince Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and third in line to the throne.
Apart from being known as something of a playboy prince, Harry, 22, is a soldier, a second lieutenant in the upper-crust Blues and Royals Regiment of the Household Cavalry, who graduated from the Sandhurst military academy last year. Despite fears among his official handlers that he would be a "bullet magnet" in Iraq, he has long insisted that he would not countenance the idea of the soldiers under his command in an armored reconnaissance unit going without him.
"There's no way I'm going to put myself through Sandhurst, and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country," he once told a television interviewer.
On Thursday, he got his wish.
"His Royal Highness Prince Harry will deploy to Iraq later this year," the Defense Ministry and the prince's own office announced jointly in a statement that clearly reflected his superiors' worries that his presence could draw fire on him and those serving with him.