Texas
Spence pleads guilty to DWI in 2019 Ferrari crash
DALLAS (AP) — Welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr. has pleaded guilty to a charge of driving while intoxicated after crashing his speeding Ferrari in 2019, prosecutors said.
Spence, 32, pleaded guilty and was convicted last week in Dallas County Court of Criminal Appeals No. 2, the Dallas County district attorney’s office said Monday.
Prosecutors said that after visiting multiple bars, Spence was speeding when his Ferrari veered over the median and flipped several times at about 3 a.m. on Oct. 10, 2019. Spence, who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, was ejected from the vehicle but didn’t sustain any broken bones or fractures and was treated for facial lacerations.
Spence’s attorneys released a statement on his behalf in which he said that after having some drinks with friends he “ended up wrecking my car and nearly killing myself.”
“Fortunately, no one else was involved in the accident and I am most grateful for that,” he said in the statement. “It was an incident that would profoundly change my life.”
He said that during his recovery he thought about “how much I could have lost and how blessed I was to have a second chance at life.”
“Don’t drink and drive. Not one drink. It’s not worth it,” he said.
With the conviction, his driver’s license was suspended and he was sentenced to three days in jail but was given credit for time served, according to a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.
The boxer, based in the Dallas suburb of DeSoto, became a three-belt welterweight champion in April by defending his WBC and IBF titles in a unification bout in front of a home crowd in Texas.
Nation
U.S. abortions rise: 1 in 5 pregnancies terminated in 2020
The number and rate of U.S. abortions increased from 2017 to 2020 after a long decline, according to figures released Wednesday.
The report from the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, counted more than 930,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2020. That’s up from about 862,000 abortions in 2017, when national abortion figures reached their lowest point since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized the procedure nationwide.
About one in five pregnancies ended in abortion in 2020, according to the report, which comes as the Supreme Court appears ready to overturn that decision.
The number of women obtaining abortions illustrates a need and “underscores just how devastating a Supreme Court decision is going to be for access to an absolutely vital service,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a George Washington University health law and policy professor.
Medication abortions, the two-drug combination sometimes called the “abortion pill,” accounted for 54% of U.S. abortions in 2020, the first time they made up more than half of abortions, Guttmacher said.
The COVID-19 pandemic may have pushed down the numbers in some states, according to the report. In New York, abortions increased from 2017 to 2019, then fell 6% between 2019 and 2020. One in 10 clinics in New York paused or stopped abortion care in 2020.
Texas saw a 2% decrease between 2019 and 2020, coinciding with pandemic-related abortion restrictions in the state.
Elsewhere, the pandemic may have limited access to contraception, some experts said, or discouraged women from undertaking all the health care visits involved in a pregnancy.
Yet, abortions already were inching upward before the coronavirus upended people’s lives. One contributing factor: Some states expanded Medicaid access to abortion.
Illinois, for example, began allowing state Medicaid funds to pay for abortions starting in January 2018. The state saw abortions increase 25% between 2017 and 2020.
In neighboring Missouri, abortions decreased substantially, but the number of Missouri residents traveling to Illinois for abortions increased to more than 6,500.
“If states are paying for abortions I hope they are also looking at how to support childbirth, so a woman doesn’t think abortion is the best or only option,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion.
Guttmacher conducts the nation’s most comprehensive survey of abortion providers every three years. The tally is considered more complete than data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that omits several states including California, the nation’s most populous state.
In 2020, fewer women were getting pregnant and a larger share of them chose abortion, the researchers found. There were 3.6 million births, a decline since 2017.
The abortion rate in 2020 was 14.4 per 1,000 women aged 15-44, an increase from 13.5 per 1,000 women in 2017.
Abortions increased by 12% in the West, 10% in the Midwest, 8% in the South and 2% in the Northeast.
Connecticut
Bus driver says he didn’t know his gummy snacks included THC
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP) — A commercial bus driver has been charged with 38 counts of reckless endangerment after blacking out behind the steering wheel while snacking on gummies he says he didn’t know were infused with THC.
Jinhuan Chen appeared Tuesday in Bridgeport Superior Court after being arrested at his home in Boston.
Chen was driving 38 passengers from the Mohegan Sun Casino on March 13 when he stopped the bus on the side of Interstate 95 in Stratford. Police said they found Chen slumped unconscious in the driver’s seat, next to an open package of Smokies Edibles Cannabis Infused Fruit Chews.
Toxicology tests showed Chen had a high level of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, in his bloodstream, prosecutors said.
Chen told Judge Ndidi Moses on Tuesday that he had no idea he had been snacking on anything but regular candy.
“I didn’t know it was marijuana,” Chen said through a Chinese interpreter, according to Hearst Connecticut Media. “I didn’t know.”
Moses ordered Chen held in lieu of $25,000 bond and set his next court date for Aug. 25.
Victor Chen, the manager of Go Go Sun Tour, the bus company, told Hearst that Jinhuan Chen had been driving for the Boston-based company for 10 years and has an exemplary record.
“He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, but he has a sweet tooth and likes candy,” Victor Chen said.
“This would never have happened a couple of years ago. but now there’s marijuana everywhere here,” he added.
