Maricruz Martinez, 31, a textile worker, was shot in the head, and her boyfriend Lorenzo Fonseca, age unknown, was shot in the back. Both were shot by her ex husband with her two children in the next room.

Cassandra Fulton, 38, worker in a disability rights organization was tied up and stabbed in the throat by her husband.

Ann Strickland, 49, mother of two children, a grandmother, and a textile worker was set on fire in her sleep by her boyfriend.

These three cases are not fictional plots for an episode of “Law and Order.” They are excerpts from the Georgia Fatality Review Project, Annual Report 2005 and represent only three of the 107 domestic violence homicides recorded during 2004 in the state.

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ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)—A federal appeals court on Friday sided with 14 states including Rhode Island and stopped the Environmental Protection Agency from going forward with new regulations opponents say would lead to more air pollution from the nation's power plants and factories.

The new rules would have allowed older power plants, refineries and factories to modernize without having to install expensive pollution controls.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington ruled the EPA's changes violated the language of the federal Clean Air Act, and that any such change can only be authorized by Congress. Fourteen states and a number of cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., sued to block the change in October 2003.

"Public health wins,” said Peter Lehner, the top environmental lawyer for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who led the suit for the states. “This is a major health issue in the United States.”

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