Pedro Castro: ‘If I knew, I would have reported it—brother or no brother’

Onil and Pedro Castro (CNN)

The brothers of accused kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro broken their public silence, giving CNN what's billed as an exclusive sit-down interview about the case.

Pedro, 54, and Onil Casto, 50, told CNN's Martin Savidge that they had no knowledge of their 52-year-old brother's alleged crimes.

"It’s going to haunt me down because people going to think, 'Yeah, Pedro got something to do with this,'" Pedro Castro said in an excerpt from the interview released Sunday. "And Pedro don’t have nothing to do with this. If I knew, I would have reported it—brother or no brother.”

The full interview with the brothers will air Monday, one week after three women—Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus—were freed from Ariel Castro's west Cleveland home where they were beaten and raped over a decade of captivity, police say. A six-year-old girl, believed to be Berry and Ariel Castro's, was also rescued.

The women had several miscarriages during their captivity, police said.

Pedro, Onil and Ariel Castro were arrested on Monday. Pedro and Onil were questioned and held on on outstanding misdemeanors. They were released on Thursday. Ariel Castro was charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape. He is being held on $8 million bail and is currently on suicide watch.

In 2012, as excavating crews dug through an empty lot in the neighborhood looking for Berry's remains, Pedro Castro told a local news crew that the search for the missing girl was "a waste of money."

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Bill would allow La. colleges to set tuition

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- Two measures that would take lawmakers out of setting college tuition rates started advancing Tuesday in the Louisiana House.

The House Education Committee approved a bill that would allow boards for the state's four public college systems to increase tuition and fee amounts under a policy that would be established by the Board of Regents, which oversees higher education in the state.

The policy would include an outcome-based performance standard that schools would have to meet before they are allowed to raise tuition.

The proposal, by Rep. Walt Leger, D-New Orleans, was approved 13-4.

Currently, the power to increase tuition and mandatory fees lies with the Legislature. It takes a two-thirds vote of lawmakers to boost tuition, and Louisiana is the only state in the nation with such a requirement.

Leger said higher education officials needed the flexibility to govern their budgets and that lawmakers needed to get out of the "tuition business."

The proposal "seeks to put us in line with 49 other states and take us out of the business of having to vote by a two-thirds majority to deal with tuition issues, instead give it to the experts who work in higher education."

The bill would set a tuition cap equal to the Southern regional average.

Backers of the bill said higher education officials need the flexibility to set tuition that would give them a predictable revenue stream. The bill was amended to include a caveat that state funding for higher education would not be decreased if tuition were to be raised.

While agreeing that higher education has taken financial hits, Rep. John Bel Edwards, D-Amite, said tuition has steadily increased over the last five years. However, money from the state's general fund for higher education has consistently decreased, he said.

"That's not the component that's broken," he said. "We used to fund higher education from the general fund at 70 percent, now it's at 35 percent. Will we go to zero?"

Edwards voted against the bill.

A second bill approved Tuesday by the House and Governmental Affairs Committee without objection would take a different approach.

That measure by Rep. Thomas Carmody, R-Shreveport, would spell out in the Louisiana Constitution that college tuition and fee increases don't require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature like other fee hikes.

"We do believe this is a sound concept, one that has been repeatedly recommended by policy groups," said Commissioner of Higher Education Jim Purcell, who said Louisiana's tuition rates are among the lowest in the South.

James Caillier, executive director of the Taylor Foundation which works on higher education issues, raised objections to Carmody's bill, saying it could make college out of reach for some students.

"We should try to make higher education as affordable as possible," Caillier said.

He said tuition shouldn't continue to be raised without the schools showing improved graduation rates and other performance measures.

The constitutional amendment would need support from two-thirds of lawmakers in the House and Senate, along with voters at a statewide election before it could take effect.

Both bills head to the full House for debate.

The education committee also approved a college tuition bill sponsored by its chairman, Rep. Stephen Carter, R-Baton Rouge, that would authorize a one-time tuition and fee increase by college boards in 2016.

However, the increase would have to be less than the average tuition and fees of Southern Regional Education Board peer schools and would come only if the school's graduation and retention rates were on par with its peer institutions.

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AP reporter Melinda Deslatte contributed to this story.

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Venezuela's opposition denies it would scrap Chavez welfare aid

By Andrew Cawthorne and Mario Naranjo

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan opposition candidate Henrique Capriles denied on Wednesday accusations from acting President Nicolas Maduro that he would scrap popular welfare policies if he wins Sunday's election.

Social "missions" in poor areas, from subsidized groceries to Cuban-staffed medical clinics, were a mainstay of the late Hugo Chavez's 14-year socialist rule and kept his popularity high.

His chosen successor, Maduro, 50, says he is the guarantor of their continuation and accuses Capriles of planning to disband the missions and also privatize state oil company PDVSA, whose export revenues fund the projects.

That, said Capriles at a dawn campaign event, was nonsense and scaremongering. The 40-year-old state governor likes to show off his social record in Miranda state and describes himself as a "progressive," but he is depicted by Maduro as a right-wing puppet of Venezuela's wealthy elite and U.S. interests.

Rather than end the missions, Capriles said he would improve, expand and de-politicize them.

"Simply being Venezuelan will give people the right to free education, quality healthcare, social security and housing," he said. "In our plans there will be no blackmailing ... People will not have to be members of a political party to get aid."

Capriles, who has shown plenty of Chavez-style populist traits himself, listed his social policy plans from a 40 percent rise in the minimum wage to subsidized medicines.

"The government elite get annoyed because they want total control over the missions as if they belonged to them. They don't understand they belong to Venezuelans, not those who put the red shirt on," he added, referring to the color of the ruling Socialist Party.

"Don't be deceived, the missions are not going to be ended. The government says that to cheat people and have control."

FRENETIC CAMPAIGN

Accusations and insults have been flying between both camps in the frantic run-up to Sunday's vote for leadership of the South American OPEC nation of 29 million people.

Most polls have shown Maduro comfortably ahead, but a couple of the latest weekly surveys put the gap at below 10 points and Capriles' camp believes the opposition is on a late surge as emotion over Chavez's March 5 death from cancer wanes.

Maduro, a former bus driver who rose to be Chavez's vice-president, has been playing up his working-class roots in contrast to Capriles' wealthy family background. His former boss successfully played Venezuela's class politics for years to guarantee passionate support among the poor.

"The little bourgeois doesn't know what it's like to get up at four in the morning, have a coffee and half a piece of bread, then go to work early to keep a family," Maduro told a rally late on Tuesday.

"The only thing he knows is how to count the money gained from exploiting consumers."

Maduro also received a celebrity boost from former Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona, an avowed supporter of Latin American leftists, including Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Chavez.

Maradona was to appear at Maduro's closing campaign rally in Caracas on Thursday, the acting president said.

Venezuela's election will not only determine the future of "Chavismo" socialism in Venezuela but also who controls the world's largest oil reserves and whether aid to a clutch of left-leaning nations around the region will continue.

Maduro is campaigning on Chavez's legacy, while Capriles wants to implement a Brazilian-style political model.

The winner faces a complicated set of problems, including strained state coffers after last year's heavy election spending, the highest inflation in the Americas, crime rates among the world's highest, and stuttering services.

(Editing by Eric Beech and Paul Simao)

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Bill would boost private-college Cal Grant awards

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Students at some private colleges and trade schools could receive more state grant money under one of several financial aid measures that passed a legislative committee Tuesday.

The Assembly Higher Education Committee approved a bill to restore the maximum Cal Grant award to $9,708. The amounts students could receive from the financial aid program were reduced in last year's state budget.

Grants to students at certain private, for-profit colleges were cut to $4,000 for the upcoming year. Students at private, nonprofit colleges saw a smaller decrease to $9,084 this fall and $8,056 next year.

The Republican-sponsored bill from Assemblywoman Beth Gaines, of Rocklin, and Assemblyman Mike Morrell, of Rancho Cucamonga, would increase the maximum grants beginning with the 2013-14 school year.

Supporters said their measure, AB1085, will prevent students from dropping out or transferring to public institutions.

"We need to keep college affordable so students can obtain a college degree and succeed in whatever career path they choose," Gaines said in a news release.

During the 2012-13 school year, about 269,000 higher education students in California received Cal Grant awards totaling $1.6 billion, according to legislative staff. The grants cover four years of full tuition at public universities and pay partial tuition costs at other colleges.

The bill would not alter standards approved last year preventing students from using Cal Grants at institutions with low graduation and high loan default rates.

Other bills approved by the committee Tuesday would give high-school graduates an additional two years to apply for a Cal Grant and prevent students whose income rises during their enrollment from becoming ineligible for future grants.

Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, said the number of Cal Grant bills shows that the program needs updating.

"Evidently, there are a lot of things that are not working," she said.

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