OMAHA, Neb. - A police officer and his family won $40,000 in their lawsuit against a restaurant that served them food tainted by an employee's spit and urine.

A jury on Friday ruled in favor of Sidney police Officer Keith Andrew, whose two sons, then 4 and 7, were sickened by the food they ate at a KFC/Taco Bell in October 2005. Sidney is a town of about 6,000 in western Nebraska.

The younger boy became violently ill with gastroenteritis and dehydration, vomited for hours and was forced to spend time in a hospital, the family's lawsuit said.

The lawsuit, filed last year in Cheyenne County District Court, named the restaurant's owner, North Platte-based Mid Plains Food and Lodging.

The jury found the restaurant negligent, said the family's attorney Andy Snyder. He

ATLANTA - Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue said Monday that guns should be allowed in public areas of the nation's busiest airport.

And he suggested his own wife might want to pack a firearm for long walks between the parking lot and the terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International.

"If my wife wanted to carry a gun, if she was going from the parking lot, walking from one of those far parking lots to pick up a grandchild or something like that, I think that's a good idea, yes," he said Monday.

Earlier this year, Perdue, a Republican, signed legislation that allows Georgians who have passed criminal background checks to carry concealed weapons onto mass transit, as well as into state parks and restaurants that serve alcohol. The new law took effect July 1.

A lega

NEW YORK - A former Haitian paramilitary leader once widely feared in his own country was accused at trial Monday of becoming a common white-collar criminal once he fled to the United States.

Emmanuel "Toto" Constant helped hatch a mortgage fraud scheme that cheated lenders out of $1.7 million, prosecutors alleged at the trial in Brooklyn. He faces five to 15 years in prison if convicted of second-degree grand larceny.

The case will show that Constant, 51, was "a crook as well as human rights violator," said Jennie Green, a senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil rights group monitoring the trial.

In opening statements, defense attorney Samuel Karlinger told jurors his client was framed by others who took plea deals and whose "motivation is t

PHILADELPHIA - A 22-year-old woman will probably face six years in prison after admitting Monday that she and her boyfriend pulled off a brazen identity-theft scheme that funded trips, fancy dinners and expensive salon visits.

Travel photos show Jocelyn Kirsch and ex-beau Edward Anderton, a onetime Ivy League swimmer, posing in matching red swimsuits by a luxury hotel pool and kissing near the Eiffel Tower. But in court Monday, the petite Kirsch sported a rumpled green prison uniform as she pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft and other federal crimes.

The counts carry a two-year minimum sentence, but prosecutors expect her to get about six years under federal guidelines.

Counseling and medication
Kirsch, speaking barely above a whisper, declined the judge's

ALBEMARLE, N.C. - Jeff Carstensen was spooked when he learned his grandmother planned to buy him a $100,000 life insurance policy — and name herself the beneficiary.

"She told me that people of our stature have insurance policies on each other," he said. "That way, if something happens to you, you take care of me, and if something happens to me, I take care of you. It was all too suspicious. So I got out of there any way I could, as soon as I could."

As he and many others who came into Betty Neumar's orbit have learned, bad things tend to happen to the people around her.

The 76-year-old Georgia woman sits in a North Carolina jail, accused of hiring a hit man to kill fourth husband Harold Gentry. Authorities are re-examining the deaths of her first child and four of t