FACEBOOK TO MAKE IT EASIER TO BECOME ORGAN DONOR: NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook wants to help you share your organs.
Users in the United States and the U.K. can enroll as organ donors via links to official registries on the world's biggest social networking site, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The links should make it easier for people who want to donate their organs to sign up.
Facebook users who are already organ donors can add that information to their profile page, now known as their timeline.
Zuckerberg said his friendship with Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who had received a liver transplant before he died last year, helped spur the idea, as did talks with his girlfriend Priscilla Chan, a medical student.
More than 112,000 Americans are waiting for organs and 18 people die every day from the lack of available organs, according to Donate Life America, a nonprofit that is teaming with Facebook.
Zuckerberg announced the organ donor update to Facebook on "Good Morning America" Tuesday.
Facebook Inc., based in Menlo Park is busy readying an initial public stock offering said to be pegged at $5 billion. Facebook's IPO could place the company's value at $100 billion.
OFFICER SHOOTS, WOUNDS TEEN OUTSIDE TEXAS SCHOOL: PASADENA, Texas (AP) — A police officer told investigators Tuesday that he shot a 14-year-old boy suspected in the overnight break-in of a Houston-area classroom after believing the teenager was reaching for a gun.
The boy was in critical but stable condition at a Houston hospital and was expected to survive, authorities said. The officer was placed on leave pending the investigation.
Pasadena Police Assistant Chief Bud Corbett said the officer, a 17-year law enforcement veteran, told investigators he did not know how old the suspected burglar was when he shot him. The names of the boy and the officer were not released.
The boy, an eighth-grader at the school, was shot in the chest by the district police officer, who was investigating a broken window in a portable classroom containing computers after an alarm went off, Pasadena Independent School District Superintendent Kirk Lewis said.
SUSPECT IN ATTEMPTED MURDER HAD BEEN FREED EARLY: SACRAMENTO (AP) — Authorities say a man charged with the attempted murder of his girlfriend was a parole violator who had been released early from county jail because of overcrowding.
Raoul Leyva, who is 33, was in county custody because of the state's realignment plan, which sends lower-level offenders to jails instead of state prison.
San Joaquin County Sheriff's Deputy Les Garcia says Leyva was released by a county judge two days after he was ordered to serve a 100-day jail term for the parole violation. He said Tuesday that the judge acted under a court order dating from the 1980s that caps the jail's population.
Leyva is charged with beating his 20-year-old girlfriend in her Stockton apartment 12 days after the judge released him early. Brandy Arreola remains hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.
