Officials: 6 bodies recovered from sea

Officials: 6 bodies recovered from sea

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia

A massive hunt for the 162 victims of AirAsia Flight 8501 resumed in the Java Sea today, with six bodies, including a flight attendant identified by her trademark red uniform, recovered. But wind, strong currents and high surf hampered recovery efforts as distraught family members anxiously waited to identify their loved ones.

Three bodies were retrieved Tuesday, while the others were found after the search resumed this morning, said Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo.

Putin foe conviction sparks rare protest

MOSCOW

President Vladimir Putin’s chief political foe was convicted along with his brother Tuesday in a fraud case widely seen as a vendetta by the Kremlin, triggering one of Russia’s boldest anti- government demonstrations in years.

Police allowed a few thousand protesters to gather just outside Red Square for about two hours — a show of relative restraint for Russian authorities, who have little tolerance for dissent — before moving in to break up the unsanctioned rally by pushing the demonstrators toward subway entrances.

KKK robe sells at auction for $350

DOVER, N.H.

Tucked between children’s Victorian-era button-down shoes and a World War I collar bag, one item stood out on an auctioneer’s website touting an end-of-the-year sale: a Ku Klux Klan robe dating to the 1920s.

The white robe, discovered in an attic by a New Hampshire woman in her 80s, bore the KKK’s distinctive round, scarlet patch with a white cross. For years, it sat in a bag, assumed by family members to be an innocuous garment and not a feared symbol of the white- supremacist group.

The robe sold for $350 Tuesday night after four people bid on it.

Auctioneer Scott Morrill said when the woman considered selling the robe, she went to wash it and removed the patch. On the back of the patch was her father’s name. Nobody in the family knew he was affiliated with the Klan. The woman asked Morrill not to reveal her name.

Police: 9 dead at 3 crime scenes

EDMONTON, Alberta

Nine people, including seven adults and two young children, were found dead at three separate crime scenes in what Edmonton’s police chief on Tuesday called the city’s worst mass murder.

Chief Rod Knecht told a news conference the killings were the result of domestic violence. The victims included a middle-age woman found Monday night by officers who were responding to a report of a man entering the south-side home, opening fire and fleeing. Seven bodies were found in another house in the northeast Monday, and a man matching the description of the suicidal male was found dead Tuesday morning in an Asian restaurant in Fort Saskatchewan, Knecht said.

Court orders more education spending

TOPEKA, Kan.

Kansas isn’t spending enough money on its public schools to provide a suitable education for every child, a state district court panel ruled Tuesday in an order that could mean the state has to boost its aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

An attempt by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and the GOP-dominated Legislature to comply with the order would complicate their efforts to close state budget shortfalls and preserve aggressive personal income-tax cuts enacted at Brownback’s urging to boost the economy.

Associated Press