A Florida mother says she’s savoring every day of her busy life after doctors believed she had died less than a month ago.

The Boca Raton mother of two told The Associated Press on Monday she has a deep appreciation for each new day, no matter how routine.

The woman went without a pulse for 45 minutes following complications from a routine cesarean section after she gave birth to healthy baby girl.

Doctors told her family she had not survived and to say their final farewells before they officially pronounced her dead. Moments later, her heart began beating again.

Medical officials called her survival a double miracle because she has no brain damage despite going for so long without a pulse.

SPANISH FORK, Utah (AP) — Authorities say a 5-year-old boy reportedly playing on railroad track near his Utah home has died after being hit by a freight train.

Police spokesman Lt. Matt Johnson says three young children were playing at the tracks in Spanish Fork late Sunday afternoon when freight train passed at about 40 mph.

He says the boy’s 7-year-old sister and a 7-year-old male cousin managed to jump to safety, but the younger child was struck.

The engineer of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotive says the youngster appeared to have “froze.” The officer says the train didn’t have time to stop.

He says that the child was rushed to a local hospital and then flown to one in Salt Lake City, 50 miles north, but he died from his injuries.

The children had been playing at their nearby apartment complex playground before moving on to the tracks.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — State referendums that have legalized medicinal or recreational marijuana have encouraged an Oklahoma-based electronic cigarette retailer to try to build a national franchise.

Voters in Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C., approved ballot measures Tuesday for recreational pot use. They join more than a dozen states where marijuana already use is legal in some form.

Chip Paul, CEO and co-founder of Tulsa-based Palm Beach, says the growing legalization opens the door for his company to market a method for producing a cannabis oil vapor product that can be inhaled through an e-cigarette. He is seeking to patent the method.

An Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs spokesman says the agency is concerned about the inhalation of cannabis oils via e-cigarettes and says it’s a way to disguise illegal marijuana use.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Officials say a 21-year-old Army veteran was shot to death after a dispute at a party to celebrate his return from Afghanistan.

Los Angeles police Lt. Paul Vernon told City News Service that Francisco Garcia had left his party and was on a sidewalk in the San Fernando Valley when a man pulled up and yelled at him before shooting him early Sunday.

Authorities say Garcia died at the scene.

Vernon says police believe the suspect targeted Garcia following a dispute Saturday. No arrests have been made.

Detectives say they do not believe those involved had been at the party.

 

By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press

A prosecutor in suburban Philadelphia says a 3-year-old boy endured weeks of escalating abuse before he was systematically tortured over three days, ending in his death.

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says what happened to the boy, Scott McMillan, was “just evilness.”

The boy’s mother, 31-year-old Jillian Tait, and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Gary Lee Fellenbaum, were charged Thursday with murder in the boy’s death. They also were charged with aggravated assault in the beating of his older brother.

Police say the younger boy was struck with a frying pan, whipped, punched and hung upside down and beaten.

The prosecutor said late Thursday he hadn’t heard the couple had obtained lawyers.

Fellenbaum’s estranged wife lived with the couple in a mobile home in Coatesville, about 35 miles northwest of Philadelphia. She was charged with reckless endangerment.

FAIRFIELD, Ohio (AP) — Officials in southwest Ohio say a 53-year-old man performing maintenance work at a bowling alley became trapped in the pin-setting machinery and died.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports the worker at Northwest Bowling Alley in Fairfield died when his clothes became tangled. The man’s name was not immediately released.

Police say it wasn’t clear if the man had been strangled or crushed by the machinery.

The Hamilton-Middletown Journal-News reports the Butler County Coroner had been called to the scene on reports the man had suffered major trauma.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sent an investigator. Agency officials said they haven’t had any previous investigations at the bowling alley, which has been in operation since 1976.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — It’s mission accomplished for little green army men.

The molded plastic must-haves for generations of pretend soldiers were announced as the newest additions to the National Toy Hall of Fame on Thursday, along with the Rubik’s Cube and bubbles.

The toys enter the Rochester museum after being selected by a panel of expert judges from among a dozen finalists.

The other contenders were: American Girl dolls, Fisher-Price Little People, Hess toy trucks, My Little Pony, the skill game Operation, paper airplanes, pots and pans, Slip ‘N Slide and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Anyone can nominate a toy, but to become a finalist a toy must have achieved icon status, survived through generations, foster learning, creativity or discovery and have profoundly changed play or toy design.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The quest for a drug to treat Ebola is speeding up. Federal officials have settled on a plan to test multiple experimental drugs at once, in an umbrella study using a single comparison group. They say this will give more Ebola patients a chance to try a treatment and provide quicker answers on which ones work.

Federal Food and Drug Administration officials described the plan Wednesday at a conference of several thousand tropical disease experts in New Orleans.

There is no treatment for Ebola, but several experimental ones have been tried on a few patients, and scientists are eyeing some others that were developed for different conditions and also might fight Ebola.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican’s top bioethics official calls “reprehensible” the suicide of an American woman suffering terminal brain cancer who stated she wanted to die with dignity.

Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told the ANSA news agency on Tuesday that “dignity is something other than putting an end to one’s own life.”

Brittany Maynard’s suicide in Oregon on Saturday, following a public declaration of her motives aimed at sparking political action on the issue, has stirred debate over assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

Carrasco de Paula said “Brittany Maynard’s act is in itself reprehensible, but what happened in the consciousness we do not know.”

He cautioned that he was not judging individuals “but the gesture in and of itself should be condemned.”

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Police say a Pittsburgh man told them he was making moonshine when he started a small fire that burned his legs.

The man was standing outside his North Side home when crews arrived about 2:45 a.m. Tuesday.

Police have yet to release the man’s name or say whether he may face charges.

Firefighters quickly extinguished the small blaze in the basement, where the man allegedly told police he had been making the illegal booze.

The man was being treated at UPMC Mercy hospital’s burn unit.