INDIANAPOLIS

Hurt by gunfire, Girl Scout looks to online cookie sales

A 9-year-old Indianapolis girl wounded by gunfire as she was heading off to her weekly Girl Scouts meeting to pick up cookies she planned to sell door-to-door is now racking up sales in an online cookie drive intended to send her troop on a trip.

Sinai Miller was standing outside her family’s apartment Tuesday afternoon when gunshots rang out. Her mother, 29-year-old Shanita Miller, raced outside and found blood gushing from her eldest daughter’s left calf.

Doctors treated her leg wound and sent her home. On Thursday, she sat teary-eyed and wordless on a living room couch, her left leg propped up on a pillow.

While Sinai is on the mend, her mother said she is crushed that plans for selling cookies door-to-door for the second year in a row have been sidetracked.

“She woke up early that morning, right before she went to school, and said,`Mommy, today’s Girl Scouts. We’re getting our cookies today!’ And I told her, ‘Wonderful, but we’ll do that this afternoon,’ ” Miller said.

LOUISVILLE, Ky.

Noah’s Ark theme park sues over denial of tax incentive

The Christian ministry building a Noah’s Ark theme park sued Kentucky tourism officials Thursday, saying they violated the group’s free-speech rights by denying them an $18 million tax incentive.

The incentive was meant for the Ark Encounter, a theme park plan that will be built in phases around a 500-foot-long wooden ark modeled after the Bible’s story of Noah. State officials said in December that the project’s mission had changed from tourist attraction to ministry, and denied the benefit.

In the lawsuit, the Answers in Genesis ministry said religious beliefs should not prohibit the group from participating in the tax incentive plan. The suit names the tourism cabinet and Gov. Steve Beshear.

– From news service reports

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