Attempt to lift jet’s fuselage fails

Attempt to lift jet’s fuselage fails

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia

Indonesian rescuers lifted the fuselage of the crashed AirAsia jetliner nearly to the water’s surface before it sank to the ocean floor again when the lifting balloons deflated Saturday, a setback in the effort to recover more of the victims’ remains.

Four bodies were discovered, though, around the area where dozens of divers were struggling with strong current and poor visibility to prepare to retrieve the 30-meter-long wreckage, said Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi, the operations chief at the National Search and Rescue Agency.

Divers reached the fuselage section for the first time Friday and retrieved six bodies. A total of 69 bodies have been recovered from AirAsia Flight 8501, which crashed Dec. 28 with 162 people on board while flying from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, to Singapore.

Measles outbreak climbs to 78 cases

LOS ANGELES

A measles outbreak that originated in Disneyland has climbed to 78 cases as the virus continues to spread.

California health officials reported Friday that nearly 90 percent of the infections are in California. Forty-eight cases in the state are directly linked to visits to Disney parks or contact with someone who went there.

Measles also has been confirmed in six other states — Utah, Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Nebraska and Arizona — and Mexico.

No injuries in fall of NJ parking deck

SECAUCUS, N.J.

The top deck of a New Jersey parking garage being cleared by a snowplow has collapsed, but the snowplow operator has escaped serious injury.

Authorities say he was “shaken up” by the collapse Saturday morning in Secaucus, a short drive west of New York City.

A sport utility vehicle parked in the garage was destroyed, but no one was in it at the time. Other people who had parked there were able to safely remove their vehicles later.

Leftists lead polls

ATHENS, Greece

Syriza, the radical left-wing party that has vowed to rewrite the terms of the country’s international bailout and end harsh austerity measures, held the lead in the last polls released ahead of today’s national election.

The last nine polls published Friday — the last day of campaigning — showed Syriza’s lead over the ruling New Democracy conservatives trending upward.

Terror arrests

MADRID

Spanish National Police arrested four suspected jihadis Saturday in the country’s North African enclave of Ceuta who purportedly had formed a terror cell and were ready to carry out an attack, the Interior Ministry said.

Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said investigators, working with their Moroccan counterparts, were struck by the similarities between the suspected cell members and the two French brothers who killed 12 people in an attack upon the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris.

Northeast storm

BOSTON

Parts of the Northeast got their first real taste of winter Saturday as a storm crawling up the coast left a slushy, snowy coating from Pennsylvania to New England, but forecasters are watching a possible second shot of snow that could affect the region early in the work week.

By midday, the storm had dropped 9 inches of snow in parts of Pennsylvania and 8 inches in parts of New York, northern New Jersey and northwestern Connecticut.

Associated Press