Girl, 11, dies after fight with classmate

LONG BEACH, Calif. – After getting her nose bloodied in a fight with another girl near their Southern California elementary school, 11-year-old Joanna Ramos told her mother on the way home she felt sick. Hours later, she was dead.

“My daughter started complaining, saying she doesn’t feel good, let’s go home, so we went to home and I changed her clothes and she go to sleep, that’s the only thing that I know,” Joanna’s mother, Cecilia Villanueva told KNBC-TV. “We took her to the hospital, but it was too late. She was in a coma.”

Ramos died at a Long Beach hospital at 9 p.m. Friday, about six hours after the fight in an alley, police said Saturday. Authorities have not released the girl’s name but Villanueva told KNBC the girl who died was her daughter, Joanna.

“I want to know what happened,” she said through tears.

Gulf oil-spill trial may see settlement

NEW ORLEANS – A judge has delayed the federal trial over the nation’s worst offshore oil disaster by a week, saying Sunday that BP PLC was making some progress in settlement talks with a committee overseeing scores of lawsuits, said to people close to the case.

Two people close to the case told The Associated Press that the decision was made Sunday during a conference call between parties in the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill case and U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the call.

They said the judge told those on the call that BP and the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee were “making some progress” in their settlement talks.

Spying on Muslims enters N.Y. mayoral race

NEW YORK – Potential candidates for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office are taking stands on the Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim students, ranging from cautious support to a warning about curtailing civil liberties.

Bloomberg, who leaves office after the 2013 election, has said that he finds “worrisome” the idea that his successor might abandon NYPD policies that have kept New Yorkers safe.

The NYPD used undercover officers and informants to infiltrate Muslim student groups at a dozen colleges in New York City, upstate New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, documents obtained by The Associated Press show. The monitoring was part of the department’s anti-terrorism efforts.

Associated Press