Secret Service retirement — Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan announced his retirement Friday, bringing to a close a turbulent period for the law enforcement agency that included a South American prostitution scandal and a pair of White House gate-crashers. Sullivan spent seven years in the post.
Alabama abduction — Authorities have released a photo of a man they say killed a school bus driver and abducted a 5-year-old boy before taking refuge in an underground bunker in Midland City, Ala. Jimmy Lee Dykes and the kindergartner have been in the bunker since the shooting Tuesday. Authorities say they have been talking to Dykes through a pipe leading to the bunker, but they have not revealed what the conversations have been about. There are signs the standoff could go on for some time.
Mourning Cambodia’s king — Thousands of mourners accompanied a gilded chariot carrying the body of former King Norodom Sihanouk — a controversial monarch who helped build the young nation after French rule before cozying up to the homicidal Khmer Rouge regime — in a funeral procession Friday to a cremation ground next to the palace where he was crowned more than 70 years ago. He died at 89 of a heart attack in Beijing on Oct. 15. The cremation, the climax of seven days of mourning, will take place Monday.
Turmoil at Morsi’s doorstep — Protesters denouncing Egypt’s Islamist president hurled stones and firebombs through the gates of his palace gates Friday, clashing with security forces who fired tear gas and water cannons, as more than a week of political violence came to Mohammed Morsi’s symbolic doorstep for the first time. In a statement issued amid the clashes, Morsi said “political forces involved in incitement" are responsible for the violence and spoke of an investigation.
3 CIA convictions in Italy — A Milan appeals court on Friday vacated acquittals for a former CIA station chief and two other Americans and instead convicted them in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street as part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The decision means that all 26 Americans tried in absentia for the abduction now have been found guilty. The trials brought the first convictions anywhere in the world against CIA agents involved in a practice alleged to have led to torture.
Phone-hacking conviction — A senior police officer in Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command was sentenced to a 15-month prison term Friday for seeking cash payments from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid in return for information about a Scotland Yard investigation into phone-hacking at the paper. April Casburn, 53, is the first to be convicted of a criminal offense in the scandal.
Mexico City explosion — A blast that collapsed the lower floors of a building in the headquarters of Mexico’s state-owned oil company, crushing at least 33 people beneath tons of rubble and injuring 121, is being looked at as an accident.
