ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.

3-year-old shoots parents with handgun from purse

A 3-year-old boy found a handgun in his mother’s purse and fired just one shot that wounded both his parents at an Albuquerque motel on Saturday, police said.

According to investigators, the toddler apparently reached for an iPod but found the loaded weapon. Police called the shooting accidental.

The bullet first struck his father in the buttock and then hit the right shoulder of his mother, who is eight months pregnant, police said. His 2-year-old sister was unhurt.

Both injuries are non-life threatening, authorities said.

PARK CITY, Utah

Sundance picks tearjerker for two of biggest prizes

Sundance breakout “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” a quirky, heartfelt story about a pair of high school film-lovers who befriend a girl with cancer, won both the U.S. dramatic audience award and the grand jury prize at the 31st Sundance Film Festival awards, announced Saturday.

Thomas Mann, R.J. Cyler and Olivia Cooke lead the cast of the idiosyncratic tearjerker from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who dedicated the audience award to all the filmmakers and artists in his hometown of Laredo, Texas. Nick Offerman, Connie Britton, and Molly Shannon also star.

“The Wolfpack,” a film about six movie-loving teenage boys picked up the grand jury prize for best documentary.

SAN FRANCISCO

Chemist who discovered birth control dies at 91

Carl Djerassi, the chemist widely considered the father of the birth control pill, has died.

Djerrasi died of complications of cancer Friday in his San Francisco home, Stanford University spokesman Dan Stober said. He was 91.

Djerassi, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Stanford, was most famous for leading a research team in Mexico City that in 1951 developed norethindrone, a synthetic molecule that became a key component of the first birth control pill.

“The pill,” as it came to be known, radically transformed sexual practices and women’s lives. The pill gave women more control over their fertility than they had ever had before and put doctors – who previously didn’t see contraceptives as part of their job – in the birth control picture.

– From news service reports

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