Monday, June 18, 2012
In Alaska, search ends for Japanese climbers
anchorage, alaska
A shallow avalanche on Alaska’s Mount McKinley may not have killed four Japanese climbers, but the slide pushed them into a crevasse more than 100 feet deep, the National Park Service said Sunday.
Spokeswoman Kris Fister said Sunday that the search for the climbers was permanently suspended after a mountaineering ranger found the climbing rope in debris at the bottom of the crevasse.
Yoshiaki Kato, 64, Masako Suda, 50, Michiko Suzuki 56, and 63-year-old Tamao Suzuki, 63, are missing and presumed dead.
The avalanche early Wednesday also pushed Hitoshi Ogi, 69, into the crevasse. Ogi climbed 60 feet out of the crevasse and reached a base camp Thursday.
Socialists sweep power
paris
Francois Hollande is the man in charge after his Socialist Party swept France’s parliamentary election. Voters welcomed the French president’s vision of injecting government money into Europe’s economies in hopes of helping the joint euro currency stave off disaster.
Socialists now have an unprecedented lock on politics in France, and plan to use it to raise taxes on big banks and oil companies, levy a 75-percent tax on incomes higher than $1.26 million a year, and hire 60,000 teachers.
Marchers protest stop-and-frisk tactics
new york
Thousands of protesters from civil-rights groups walked down New York City’s Fifth Avenue in total silence Sunday, marching in defiance of “stop-and-frisk” tactics employed by city police.
Protesters strode along Central Park from Harlem to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s town house on the Upper East Side.
Tensions rose between police officers and a group of protesters who tried to keep walking down Fifth Avenue below East 77th Street.
Several scuffles broke out between screaming protesters and officers who pushed them behind barricades on the sidewalk.Police officers were seen making a handful of arrests.
21 are killed in attacks
kaduna, nigeria
Suicide bombers killed 21 people in attacks on three churches in Nigeria during Sunday services, exacerbating religious tensions in a West African nation that is almost evenly divided between Muslims and Christians.
Authorities arrested one of the bombers who survived, said Kaduna State police chief Mohammed Abubakar Jinjiri, but he declined to say who police suspect was responsible for the bombings.
It was the third Sunday in a row that deadly attacks have been carried out against Christian churches in northern Nigeria.
UN official: Evacuate civilians from Syria
beirut
The head of the U.N. observers’ mission in Syria demanded Sunday that warring parties allow the evacuation of women, children, elderly and sick people endangered by fighting in the besieged city of Homs and other combat zones.
Maj. Gen. Robert Mood said the observers had been trying for the past week to bring out families and wounded trapped in Homs by heavily shelling of rebel-held areas. The offensive is part of a broader push by President Bashar Assad’s forces to regain rebel-held villages and towns throughout the country.
“The parties must reconsider their position and allow women, children, the elderly and the injured to leave conflict zones without any preconditions and ensure their safety,” Mood said in a statement.
Associated Press