NATION/WORLD
SUNDAY AUGUST 24, 2014
10
THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT
HERALD/REVIEW
FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
News, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:
BOMBINGS KILL 1 42 IN IRAQ AFTER SUNNI MOSQUE ATTACK Bombings in Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk killed at least 42 people in Iraq on Saturday as the government investigated a deadly attack on a Sunni mosque the day before that has heightened sectarian tensions amid a fragile political transition. The attacks came after parliament speaker Salim alJabouri said that a committee of security officials and lawmakers were probing Friday’s attack against a village mosque in Diyala province, northeast of the capital, which killed more than 60 people.
2
Bush chief of staff touts Perry in New Hampshire BY RIK STEVENS
The Associated Press
SIERRA LEONE MAKES HIDING EBOLA PATIENTS ILLEGAL
Sierra Leone has passed a new law imposing possible jail time for anyone caught hiding an Ebola patient — a common practice that the World Health Organization believes has contributed to a major underestimation of the current outbreak. A total of 2,615 infections and 1,427 deaths have been recorded in the Ebola outbreak now hitting West Africa, according to figures released Friday by the World Health Organization. Sierra Leone has been hard-hit, with at least 910 cases and 392 deaths. In Liberia on Saturday, hundreds of people lined up outside the capital’s largest slum to bring food to relatives stuck inside after officials slapped a blockade on it this week.
EUROPE NAVIGATION SATELLITES 3 TWO IN THE WRONG ORBITS European space officials say they’re investigating whether the inaccurate deployment of two satellites will complicate their efforts to develop a new Galileo satellite navigation system that would rival America’s GPS network. The European Space Agency and launch company Arianespace say the satellites ended up in off-target orbits after being launched Friday from Kourou, French Guiana, aboard a Soyuz rocket. Saturday’s agency statement did not explain whether their orbital paths could be corrected. Arianespace said the satellites settled into a lower, elliptical orbit instead of the circular one intended, and initial analyses suggested the mishap occurred during the flight phase and involved the Fregat upper stage of Soyuz.
4
A3
WOMAN TACKLES MAN FLEEING POLICE, THEN TAUNTS HIM
A 40-year-old woman tackled a 20-year-old man fleeing from police in Washington state, then taunted him about being taken down by a grandmother. Richland police Capt. Mike Cobb tells the Tri-City Herald that Becky Powell was driving by Wednesday when she saw the man run from officers. She told her husband to speed ahead of the fleeing man, and got out to confront him. Powell says the man tried to stiff-arm her, but she felled him, pulling down his shorts in the process. She says she got help pinning the man down and asked him how it felt to be taken down by a mother of five and a grandmother of three.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, second from right, walks with former New York Gov. David Paterson, second from left, and Gwen Carr, right, mother of Eric Garner, as they arrive before a march to protest the death of Eric Garner on Saturday in the Staten Island borough of New York.
ARRESTS AS THOUSANDS RALLY 5 NO OVER CHOKEHOLD DEATH Thousands of people expressing grief, anger and hope for a better future marched peacefully through Staten Island on Saturday to protest the chokehold death of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. Police reported no arrests after the afternoon rally and march that drew well over 2,500 people to the streets where Eric Garner was taken to the ground on July 17 by a New York Police Department officer using a prohibited martial arts maneuver.
AIRLINES ON ALERT AS 6 ERUPTION BEGINS IN ICELAND Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano burst forth with a small eruption Saturday under the ice of Europe’s largest glacier, scientists said, prompting the country to close airspace over the area. Thousands of small earthquakes have rattled the volcano, located deep beneath the Vatnajokull glacier, in the last week. Icelandic Meteorological Office vulcanologist Melissa Pfeffer said Saturday that seismic data indicated that an eruption had begun, with magma from the volcano melting ice within the glacier’s Dyngjujokull icecap.
AP PHOTO
This is May 8, 2010, file image, taken from video of a column of ash rising from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokul volcano. It was reported Tuesday Aug. 19, 2014 that thousands of small intense earthquakes are rocking Iceland amid concerns that one of the country’s volcanoes may be close to erupting.
AID TRUCKS LEAVE; HIGHLIGHT 7 RUSSIAN DIRE NEEDS Hundreds of Russian aid trucks returned home from rebelheld eastern Ukraine on Saturday, highlighting a dire need for long-term assistance to the region where homes and livelihoods have been destroyed by months of fighting. Ahead of a much-anticipated meeting on Tuesday between the presidents of Russia and Ukraine, German Chancellor Angela Merkel held talks in Kiev with Ukrainian officials and expressed hope for a peaceful solution to the conflict that has claimed more than 2,000 lives. Russia unilaterally sent hundreds of aid trucks into Ukraine through a rebel-held border point Friday, saying it had lost patience with Ukraine’s delaying tactics, a move that Ukraine promptly described as an invasion.
AIRSTRIKE COLLAPSES GAZA 8 ISRAELI APARTMENT TOWER Israel bombed an apartment tower in downtown Gaza City on Saturday, collapsing the 12-story building in an unprecedented strike, while Hamas kept up heavy rocket fire that sent more Israelis fleeing border areas close to Gaza. The violence signaled that a speedy resumption of truce talks is unlikely, despite another appeal by mediator Egypt. Gaps between Israel and Hamas on a border deal for blockaded Gaza remain vast, and repeated rounds of talks have ended in failure. The Israeli military said the missiles targeted a Hamas operations room in the building, but did not explain why the entire tower with 44 apartments was brought down.
CHARGED IN HOT-CAR DEATH OF 9 OFFICER POLICE DOG A Wyoming police officer has pleaded not guilty to an animalcruelty charge that alleges a police dog died after he left it in a hot patrol car for several hours. According to an investigator’s statement filed in Natrona County Circuit Court, Mills police officer Zachary Miller left the dog, a 10-yearold female black lab named Nyx, in his patrol car for over six hours July 9.
PLANT’S TOUR OFFERS 10 HOT-SAUCE WHIFF OF EXCITEMENT A Southern California hot sauce plant that came under fire for its spicy odors is throwing open its doors to the public, offering a whiff of excitement and perhaps a breath of fresh air in its relations with its neighbors. As many as 3,000 people are expected to visit the factory that makes Sriracha hot sauce over the weekend in this eastern Los Angeles suburb. The factory is holding its first open houses to kick off the chili harvest season. During a 20-minute walk through the 650,000-square-foot facility, visitors can watch chili grinding; sample Srirachaflavored ice cream, popcorn and chocolate caramels; visit the new gift shop; and take photos with a cardboard cutout of David Tran, CEO of plant owner Huy Fong Foods.
STRATHAM, N.H. — Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry’s swing through a key early presidential voting state continued Saturday with a boost from a Republican with direct ties to the Oval Office. John H. Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor who was President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, told a crowd of party faithful in Stratham that President Barack Obama and the Democrat-led Senate have put the country in danger. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as worried about what is going on in this country as I am now,” Sununu said. “We have an absolutely incompetent president who is not even smart enough to know how bad the problems are. We have got to make a change. “There’s a handful or two of Republican governors and former governors who are great candidates,” Sununu said. Perry “is someone I suspect is going to be a very frequent visitor to the state of New Hampshire.” Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign ended badly after a much-publicized stumble during a televised debate when he froze and couldn’t name the third of three federal agencies he said he would work to eliminate. With that as a backdrop, this visit follows an indictment last week on charges that he abused his power when he vetoed funding for an ethics unit run by a prosecutor who had been arrested for drunken driving. Perry called the indictment political payback. He said he hasn’t decided to run again but is making visits to important early states including New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina. In his last event, Perry went to the home of former U.S. Sen. Gordon Humphrey where he continued to hear cheers from the crowd at the hilltop farmhouse. Dozens gathered around Perry as he spoke on the lawn that affords scenic views of verdant rolling hills. At the end of his talk, Perry brought a cheer with a Texas-tough closer about what he says is the federal government’s failure to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. “If Washington, D.C., won’t secure the border, Texas will,” Perry said.
China shuts down Beijing Independent Film Festival BY DIDI TANG
The Associated Press
BEI J I NG — Chi nese aut horities blocked an annual independent film festival from opening Saturday, seizing documents and films from organizers and hauling away two event officials in a sign that Beijing is stepping up its already tight ideological controls. Li Xianting, a film critic and founder of the Li Xianting Film Fund, the organizer of the Beijing Independent Film Festival, said police searched his office and confiscated materials he had gathered over more than 10 years. Li and the festival’s artistic director, Wang Hongwei, were later detained by police, according to their supporters. The festival, which began in 2006, has seen severe police obstruction over the past few years, but this year’s crackdown is far more serious, Wang said. “In the past few years, when they forced us to cancel the festival, we just moved it to other places, or delayed the screenings,” he said. “But this year, we cannot carry on with the festival. It is completely forbidden.” Over the past week, Li posted memos saying government security personnel were pressuring him to cancel the festival, and that he had come under police surveillance.
Ferguson residents struggling with daily life after stirring the nation BY RYAN J. FOLEY
The Associated Press
FERGUSON, Mo. — Life in this working-class St. Louis suburb of modest brick homes and low-rise apartments hasn’t been the same since Angelia Dickens’ son tearfully told her, “The police shot a boy.” Since that news two weeks ago, she has been afraid to leave her apartment at night as protesters clash with police in sometimes violent confrontations. She’s stopped going to her job at a call center after it took two hours to navigate police barricades and street closings to get home.
Walking down Canfield Drive, Dickens looks right and sees Missou ri state troopers assembled outside a boarded-up barbecue joint. She looks left and sees media satellite trucks. Ahead, volunteers pick up trash along t he com mercia l dist rict where throngs gather nightly to protest the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white officer. For the rest of the nation, this is the setting for seeing the angry tensions between young African-Americans and white police officers in predominantly black neighborhoods. Protesters and reporters have flocked here from around the nation.
But for residents, it’s also the place they live. They’re struggling over how to do that, no matter how strongly they feel about the issues being fought over. “Hopefully I can get up Monday and start a fresh week at work,” said Dickens, 55, who’s turning to charities for help paying her rent and utilities this month. “I’m hoping all this can die down and I can go back on with my life.” The protests have been peaceful for the last three nights, trading confrontations with police for oneon-one talks with officers about Brown’s death and tactics used during previous demonstrations.
But there’s no question that the lives of the people who live near where Brown was shot on Aug. 9 have been upended by the protesters and the police, and they wonder how much of the disruption will be temporary. Their closest gas station was burned down during looting. Several stores were damaged. Many of the barber shops and restaurants along West Florissant Avenue commercial strip are boarded up to prevent looting. Dellena Jones hasn’t seen customers at her hair salon shop, where the glass door was shattered by a concrete block. “If we keep doing this, we
are part of the terror,” said Jones, 35. But elsewhere in Ferguson, a suburb of 21,000 where “I Love Ferguson” yard signs are common, signs of unrest are rare. The city is the “small, relatively quiet community” about 10 miles from downtown St. Louis where 69-yearold retired social worker Carolyn Jennings moved 30 years ago. Her neighborhood was mostly white then. Now, it’s almost all black, with only a few elderly whites left. Amid the closing of manufacturing plants and decline of property values, white residents moved to more distant suburbs.