New home sales jump to highest level in 4 years
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. new-home sales jumped in January from the previous month to the highest level since July 2008, a sign that the housing recovery is accelerating.
The Commerce Department says new-home sales rose nearly 16 percent in January to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 437,000. The percentage increase was the largest in nearly 20 years. And December’s sales were revised higher to 378,000 from 369,000.
Steady job creation and near-record-low mortgage rates are spurring more Americans to buy houses. Sales of previously occupied homes rose to the highest level in five years last year.
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Challenge of damage award will be heard
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The state Supreme Court will hear the state’s appeal of a jury’s awarding of damages to the parents of two Virginia Tech students who were slain in an April 2007 campus massacre.
A panel of three justices also rejected a bid by attorneys for the parents who want to sue Tech’s president, Charles Steger.
A judge excluded him from a trial in which the state was found negligent for failing to alert the Blacksburg campus of the first shootings.
A jury ruled last March that the university botched its response to the shootings.
A lone gunman and 32 students and faculty were slain in the shooting rampage — the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
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Judge fires lawyer who skipped court
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An Orleans Parish Criminal District Court judge fired an attorney for two murder defendants when the lawyer failed to show up to court for their trials.
The Times-Picayune reports attorney Martin Regan represented two accused killers, both scheduled for trial Tuesday on charges of second-degree murder. But neither Regan nor his associates appeared before Judge Ben Willard.
Assistant District Attorney John Alford asked the judge to hold Regan in contempt of court. Willard declined, and instead ordered that Regan be terminated as the attorney for both defendants. He postponed the trials, and appointed the Orleans Parish Public Defenders office to represent them.
Regan filed motions Tuesday morning with the clerk of court, requesting that the judge postpone the trials. But he did not show up in the courtroom.
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Man gets six years in school meth case
PRINCETON, Ind. (AP) — A former school custodian has been sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to making methamphetamine inside a school.
Michael C. Shafer, 43, pleaded guilty last month to a felony charge of manufacturing meth. A Gibson County judge also sentenced Shafer to six years of probation.
Shafer was arrested in 2011 after authorities found an explosion-prone “one-pot” method of making meth in a storage area on the main campus of the East Gibson School Corporation in Oakland City.
The Princeton Daily Clarion reports Shafer’s attorney told the court his client has struggled with addiction for years.
Attorney Jon Brinson told the judge that Shafer is “stable, regular, one of those decent people ... who happens to be addicted to methamphetamine.”
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