WASHINGTON

Taliban abducted couple, media learns from videos

The family of a pregnant American woman who went missing in Afghanistan in late 2012 with her Canadian husband received two videos last year in which the couple asked the U.S. government to help free them and their child from Taliban captors, The Associated Press has learned.

The videos offer the first and only clues about what happened to Caitlan Coleman and Joshua Boyle after they lost touch with their families 20 months ago while traveling in a mountainous region near the capital, Kabul. U.S. law enforcement officials investigating the couple’s disappearance consider the videos authentic but say they hold limited investigative value since it’s not clear when or where they were made.

NEW YORK

Police identify suspect in stabbing that killed boy

The New York Police Department has identified a suspect in a knife attack that left a 6-year-old boy dead and a 7-year-old girl critically injured in a public housing building that didn’t have security cameras.

Police say they’re looking for 27-year-old Daniel St. Hubert.

Police say Prince Joshua Avitto and his friend Mikayla Capers were riding in an elevator in Brooklyn’s Boulevard Houses to get ice cream Sunday when they were randomly attacked.

DOVER, Del.

Dumping of dirt forces closure of busy I-495 bridge

A contractor dumped a mountain of dirt about two stories high and 100 yards long next to an interstate bridge over several years, so much that it may have moved the ground and caused the bridge to tilt, state officials said Wednesday.

The Interstate 495 bridge, a major East Coast thoroughfare traveled by 90,000 vehicles daily, was closed Monday when engineers determined that bridge support columns were leaning.

The contractor said he was working with state officials to remove the dirt from the site, which he was allowed to use under an arrangement with a company that leases land.

Officials aren’t sure when the bridge will reopen to traffic, which has been detoured to Interstate 95.

LOS ANGELES

Brewery agrees to rename Mechahopzilla beer after suit

A New Orleans brewery has agreed to change the name of one of its beers after it was sued by the company that owns the rights to the movie monster Godzilla.

Attorneys for Toho Co. Ltd. announced Wednesday that it had settled a trademark infringement lawsuit with the New Orleans Lager & Ale Brewing Co.

The deal requires the brewery to change the name of its Mechahopzilla beer by the end of the year.

Chad Grand, an attorney for the brewery, said it would shorten the name to Mecha and continue to use a lizard-like creature to market it.

Toho sued the brewery in September, claiming the name and logo of the beer were copycats of Godzilla’s mechanical doppelganger, Mechagodzilla, which has appeared in five films since its debut in 1974.

— From news service reports