Police open substation at Monroeville Mall

Police open substation at Monroeville Mall

MONROEVILLE, PA.

A suburban Pittsburgh police department is opening a substation at a mall where three people were shot last month and hundreds of teens fought in December.

The Post-Gazette reported that the Monroeville Police Department will open the Monroeville Mall substation at 3 p.m. Friday.

The department says the substation will be open Friday and Saturday nights. The department closed its previous mall substation two years ago.

After the fights in December, the mall said it would increase security patrols from one hour to four hours Fridays and Saturdays.

Black Hawk chopper crashes, killing 11

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla.

Searchers struggled Wednesday to find the seven Marines and four soldiers killed when a helicopter crashed, hampered by the same fog that plagued a nighttime training mission.

A second helicopter turned back safely shortly before the wreck, which left debris washing ashore along the Florida coast, officials said.

Military officials haven’t said what caused the crash of the UH-60 Black Hawk, but the weather was bad enough for the other crew to return to land, said Maj. Gen. Glenn H. Curtis, adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard.

The helicopter that crashed had a veteran crew from Hammond, La., that served multiple tours in Iraq and helped humanitarian missions after Gulf Coast hurricanes and the BP oil spill.

They were carrying unconventional warriors from the Marines Special Operations Command.

Steinem, other women to walk Korean DMZ

UNITED NATIONS

Making a dramatic statement in Korean relations, Gloria Steinem and other prominent women on Wednesday announced their intention to walk across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea to call for reunification.

The DMZ is the world’s most-fortified border, with the two countries still technically at war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers face off across the heavily mined zone.

Organizers of the effort called WomenCrossDMZ.org on Wednesday said they hope for 30 women, including two Nobel Peace laureates, to cross from North Korea to South Korea on May 24, which is International Women’s Day for Disarmament.

France IDs man, boy in IS video as citizens

PARIS

A man and a boy featured in an Islamic State group propaganda video that threatens Jews and shows the killing of a Palestinian have been identified as French citizens, and investigators are looking into whether the man is related to an extremist who attacked a Jewish school in southern France in 2012, an official told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The extremist group claimed the Palestinian was an agent for the Mossad and the adult in the video made reference to the targeting of Jews both in Europe and ultimately in Israel. But the man’s father told The Associated Press he had simply regretted his decision to join IS and was killed because he wanted to go home.

Meanwhile, Iraqi soldiers and allied Shiite militiamen swept into the IS-held city of Tikrit on Wednesday, launching a two-front offensive to squeeze the extremists out of Saddam Hussein’s hometown.

6 months after ambush, trooper works to recover

BLOOMING GROVE, Pa.

Alex Douglass ran a 50-mile ultra-marathon last year. Now he’s learning to get around on an artificial hip. Six months after a sniper’s bullet tore into his body, the Pennsylvania State Police trooper has undergone 15 surgeries to repair the damage — and No. 16 is on the horizon.

“He’s doing as well as can be expected,” said his boss at the Blooming Grove barracks, Lt. Christopher Paris.

Eric Frein, 31, is charged with opening fire outside the barracks on Sept. 12, hitting Douglass in the pelvis and killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson.

The accused gunman led police on a tense 48-day manhunt through the northeastern Pennsylvania woods before U.S. marshals caught him outside an abandoned airplane hangar about 30 miles from the shooting scene.

Douglass has said little about his rehabilitation, but he did post a Facebook message ahead of his late-January hip-replacement surgery.

Associated Press