Florida Sentinel Bulletin

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who skipped an overseas trip this past week because of a stomach virus, sustained a concussion after fainting, the State Department said Saturday.

The 65-year-old Clinton, who’s expected to leave her job soon after serving as America’s top diplomat during President Barack Obama’s first term, is recovering at home after the incident last week and is being monitored by doctors, according to a statement by aide Philippe Reines.

No further details were immediately available.

Attorney General Eric Holder said America’s election system needs to be made “stronger and more accessible,” and defended the Justice Department’s challenges to restrictive voting laws.

In a speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Holder criticized the country’s “antiquated registration system,” calling it the “single largest barrier” to American voters. He proposed that modern technology could help alleviate many problems, suggesting an updated voter registration system, coordinated between states, could rely on government databases and be portable, allowing voters to remain registered to vote even when they move.

JOHANNESBURG  — Nelson Mandela on Saturday morning underwent endoscopic surgery to have gall stones removed, President Jacob Zuma’s office said in a statement.

The procedure was successful and Mandela, who has been hospitalized since last weekend due to a recurring lung infection, is recovering, the statement said.

Mandela has not appeared in public since the 2010 World Cup hosted by South Africa. The former president gets round-the-clock care since abdominal surgery this year and an acute respiratory infection in 2011.

SOUTHBURY, Conn. — At Newtown High School, Adam Lanza had trouble relating to fellow students and teachers, but that was only part of his problem. He seemed not to feel physical or emotional pain in the same way as classmates.

Lanza is the gunman that killed 20 children and 6 adults before killing himself at a Connecticut elementary school on Friday.

Richard Novia, the school district’s head of security until 2008, who also served as adviser for the school technology club, said Lanza clearly “had some disabilities.”

“If that boy would’ve burned himself, he would not have known it or felt it physically,” Novia said. “It was my job to pay close attention to that.”

Novia was responsible for monitoring students as they used soldering tools and other potentially dangerous electrical equipment.

He recalled meeting with school guidance counselors, administrators and with the boy’s mother, Nancy Lanza, to understand his problems and find ways to ensure his safety. But there were other crises only a mother could solve.

“He would have an episode, and she’d have to return or come to the high school and deal with it,” Novia said, describing how the young man would sometimes withdraw completely “from whatever he was supposed to be doing,” whether it was sitting in class or reading a book.

Adam Lanza “could take flight, which I think was the big issue, and it wasn’t a rebellious or defiant thing,” Novia said. “It was withdrawal.”

A North Carolina judge voided the death sentences of three convicted murderers yesterday, two of whom were African-American, citing that race played a significant role in their trial and sentencing.

Death row inmates Tilmon Golphin, Christina Walters and Quintel Augustine had their cases reviewed under the Racial Justice Act of 2009, a policy that allows death row cases to be reconsidered if relevant evidence suggests racism was a factor in the original trial. The act specifies that if race was found to be a factor in the trial, inmates’ sentences would be reduced to life in prison without parole.

Lawyers for the three convicted felons, whose cases are all unrelated, found statistical evidence along with anecdotal and documentary evidence such as handwritten notes and race-based jury selection processes, that proved that racist methods were used in deciding their fate.

The Michigan judge that made headlines this past Spring for texting a topless photo of himself to a married bailiff is back in the news after accusations that he got a witness pregnant while presiding over her child support case.

Judge Wade McCree, who is married, allegedly had an affair with Geniene La’Shoy Mott after she brought her ex-boyfriend into McCree’s court for failing to pay child support.

McCree and Mott allegedly shared text messages discussing potential punishments for her former boyfriend, Robert King, and a fling following the case turned into something more.

Mott has now come forward because she was promised certain things she says have not been carried out.

“I met him as a litigant, a complaining witness in his courtroom, and he stayed around after the case was over and that’s when… our relationship picked up,” Mott said. “It went from being a summer fling and just something to do… to falling in love, promises of marriage, me getting pregnant, us buying a house together, name it.”

After McCree’s wife found out about the baby, the couple separated. Mott said she was still going to keep the baby, despite McCree offering her “anything she wanted” to have an abortion, Mott said.

McCree has since gone to the authorities and accused Mott of stalking, but investigators found his complaints baseless.

“I believed him with everything,” Mott said. “His actions showed me that he was leaving. He filed for divorce. I mean, there was nothing to say that we weren’t moving forward.”

Saturday evening it took seven minutes and three Cal State San Bernardino police officers before their struggle with 38-year-old graduate student Bartholomew Williams was over, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Williams was shot and killed by the San Bernadino police after officers responded to a complaint of disturbance.

During the struggle with police, Williams grabbed an officer’s baton after he showed no effect from the officers’ hits to his body and used the officers’ pepper spray against them, said a spokesman for the San Bernadino Police Department.

Williams exhibited ”super-human-type strength” during this whole ordeal, according to police.

Two of the officers fired at Williams after he wrestled the third officer to the ground and began kicking him in the head and torso, said spokesman Lt. Paul Williams.

“This became a prolonged, violent struggle,” the spokesman said.

The officers were responding to a dorm staff member complaint that Williams was allegedly behaving irrationally. Upon confronting Williams in the hallway upon their arrival, officers determined that he was a threat to himself and others. The officers tried to arrest Williams, but were unsuccessful.

Family members of Williams told police he suffered from a mental disorder and had stopped taking his medication.

After a man approached an unidentified woman and apparently spits on her during a bus ride in Grand Rapids, Mich., she fired back with some “spit” of her own. Wood 8-TV reports that the woman immediately got up and sprayed the man in the face with pepper spray. The altercation began at the back of the bus where the man’s head movement suggests that he spit on her, though that has not been confirmed.

It is not known what exactly started the fight.

The attack forced the man backwards, making him guard his face with his hands. But he quickly charged back, punching the woman repeatedly. Others on the bus moved away from the fight. No one tried to break it up, based on the released video recording. A 2-year-old boy sitting nearly by was hit with some of the pepper spray the woman used on the male attacker. He was not seriously injured and was treated in a local hospital.

The male suspect got off the bus and ran down a city street. Michigan Live reports that the sparring pair may have been in a relationship.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti  — Haitians have suffered widespread hunger following an unusually active storm season this year and are likely to experience more, according to a study released Friday.

The report, backed by a Rio de Janeiro, Brazil-based think tank, found that rural households in the heavily hit areas of Haiti’s west, north and Grand-Anse departments experienced what it termed “severe food shortages” after Hurricane Sandy and an unnamed storm that followed. The two merely brushed the Caribbean nation in October and November but caused major flooding and killed as many as 66 people.

Nearly 70 percent of the more than 1,000 households interviewed said they experienced moderate or severe hunger, according to the study, “After the Storm: Haiti’s Coming Food Crisis.”

Pictured: A man returns empty-handed after early morning crabbing in a body of water near the Cite Soleil slum, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.