Midday Roundup: Police hunt accomplices of captured Paris attacker

Co-conspirators. Police are searching for an accomplice of Salah Abdeslam, the Paris terror suspect captured in Belgium on Friday. Najim Laachraoui used an alias to rent safe houses in Belgium for the Paris terrorists, police say, and he had contact with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the Paris attack. Abdeslam was a childhood friend of Abaaoud and is thought to have driven one group of gunmen and bombers to the scene of the Paris attack. Police are questioning him now; he could have valuable information about possible Islamic State (ISIS) terror plots in Europe. ISIS claimed responsibility for the Nov. 13 attack in Paris.

More water woes. Parents in Newark, N.J., are upset over reports that 30 of the city’s schools have unsafe levels of lead in their water. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a former high school principal, said the school district didn’t deliberately hide the problem, but it was a mistake not to inform parents. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the lead problem in Newark schools would be corrected. “There’s nothing more important than the safety, the health, the livelihood of your child,” Christie said. The Newark school district is offering lead testing for 17,000 students at the affected schools.

Illegal shots. Limited access to medications is creating demand for black-market vaccines in China. In a case publicized today, a mother and daughter in the province of Shandong illegally bought about $88 million worth of vaccines from traders and sold them to buyers around the country. The vaccines were not properly chilled or transported so they now pose health risks to anyone who gets them.

Angry rabbit. A man in an Easter bunny suit tangled with an irate dad over the weekend at a New Jersey mall. A video posted on Twitter shows the bunny—sans costume head—exchanging blows with another man in the center court of Newport Centre in Jersey City. The fight started after the man’s 1-year-old daughter fell out of the chair while posing for a photo with the Easter bunny, police said.

WORLD Radio’s Jim Henry contributed to this report.