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May 19, 2012 | | Chen Guangcheng Weeks after a dramatic escape from house arrest, a perilous race across hundreds of miles, and an international donnybrook that strained relations between America and China, a United Airlines flight carrying activist Chen Guangcheng took off from Beijing bound for the U.S. on Saturday. Dan Levin reports on the blind dissident’s sudden departure. MAFIA? One 16-year-old girl is dead Saturday after a bombing at an Italian girls’ school that some say bears signs of a Mafia strike. Two explosive devices seem to have gone off in garbage bins as students lined up to start their day. The school in the south of Italy is named for the wife of a slain anti-Mafia judge. The bombing comes soon after the 20-year anniversary of the murder of judge Giovanni Falcone and his wife. “You can understand the symbolism of this and what it all signifies,” Mimmo Consales, mayor of the town of Brindisi, told reporters. Schools in the area were closed after the attack and investigators, including a top anti-Mafia prosecutor, were meeting Saturday. THE SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook made the second-largest stock-market debut in history on Friday, but its new stock ended the day exactly where it began. David Kirkpatrick on the roller-coaster IPO. BALLOT New Republican laws are trying to block the vote, say Obama advisers. The president’s reelection campaign has launched a massive, months-long effort to help voters ensure their votes are counted come November. Republican-led legislatures across the country have passed a series of law that make it more difficult to organize registration drives, as well as imposing stringent requirements on the forms of identification allowed. Obama’s campaign was able to energize young voters and minorities in 2008, and hopes to do so again—but these are precisely the groups that the GOP-backed laws are designed to target, Democratic strategists have said. A dozen states passed stricter voter-ID laws in 2011, four of which were struck down by Democratic governors. TRAYVON “I know he was scared,” said a young Miami girl who was speaking to Trayvon Martin not long before the Florida teen was shot by George Zimmerman. In an interview with a state prosecutor, the girl, who has not been identified because she is a minor, said that Martin described a “crazy and creepy” man following him and that she heard Martin say what sounded like “get off, get off” before the call was dropped. “He was breathing hard,” said the girl in the interview recorded April 2. “His voice kind of changed. I know he was scared. His voice was getting kind of low.” | | 
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