Search for missing Indonesian plane heads to mountains after villagers report seeing crash
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — An airliner carrying 54 people went missing Sunday during a short flight in bad weather in Indonesia’s mountainous easternmost province of Papua, and rescuers were heading to an area where villagers reported seeing a plane crash into a mountain, officials said.
The Trigana Air Service plane was flying from Papua’s provincial capital, Jayapura, to the Papua city of Oksibil when it lost contact with Oksibil’s airport, said Transportation Ministry spokesman Julius Barata. There was no indication that the pilot had made a distress call, he said.
The ATR42-300 twin turboprop plane was carrying 49 passengers and five crew members on the scheduled 42-minute journey, Barata said. Five children, including two infants, were among the passengers.
Local media reports said all the passengers are Indonesians. The airline did not immediately release a passenger manifest.
Oksibil, which is about 280 kilometers (175 miles) south of Jayapura, was experiencing heavy rain, strong winds and fog when the plane lost contact with the airport minutes before it was scheduled to land, said Susanto, the head of Papua’s search and rescue agency.
Former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond dies at 75; life’s work traced arc of civil rights movement
ATLANTA (AP) — Julian Bond’s life traced the arc of the civil rights movement, from his efforts as a militant young man to start a student protest group all the way to the top leadership post at the NAACP.
Year after year, the calm, telegenic Bond was one of the nation’s most poetic voices for equality, inspiring fellow activists with his words in the 1960s and sharing the movement’s vision with succeeding generations as a speaker and academic. He died Saturday at 75.
Former Ambassador Andrew Young said Bond’s legacy would be as a “lifetime struggler.”
“He started when he was about 17 and he went to 75,” Young said. “And I don’t know a single time when he was not involved in some phase of the civil rights movement.”
Bond died in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, after a brief illness, according to a statement issued Sunday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that he founded in 1971 and helped oversee for the rest of his life. His wife, Pamela Horowitz, said Bond suffered from vascular disease.
Government air raids on suburbs of Syrian capital kill more than 80, wound hundreds
BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian airstrikes on a Damascus suburb killed more than 80 people on Sunday in one of the deadliest such raids of the four-year civil war, as fighting escalated in and around President Bashar Assad’s seat of power at a time when his overstretched forces have been losing ground elsewhere in the country.
The air raids struck the main market in Douma during rush hour, when hundreds of people were out shopping on the first working day of the week in Syria, activists said. The strikes appeared to have been launched in retaliation for the capture of an army base in a nearby suburb a day earlier by the Islamic Army rebel group, which enjoys strong support in Douma.
“This is an official massacre that was carried out deliberately,” said Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. He said warplanes fired a missile at the market and then launched another after people rushed in to retrieve the wounded.
Abdurrahman, whose group relies on a network of activists around the country, said a total of four missiles were fired on the market, killing 82 people and wounding more than 200. He said the death toll is expected to rise because many of the wounded are in critical condition.
The Local Coordination Committees, another activist group, said the air raids killed at least 100 and wounded about 300, adding that rescue workers are digging through the rubble in search of survivors. Discrepancies in death tolls immediately after an attack are common in Syria.
US Army skydiver dies from injuries suffered in Chicago air show accident
CHICAGO (AP) — A U.S. Army skydiver who had served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan died Sunday from injuries suffered in a midair collision with another jumper during a stunt at the Chicago Air & Water Show, authorities said.
Corey Hood of Cincinnati, Ohio, who had just turned 32 on Aug. 2, was pronounced dead Sunday afternoon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said Mario Johnson, a Cook County medical examiner’s investigator.
Hood had logged more than 200 free fall jumps and 75 military static line jumps during his career, according to his Army biography.
The Army Golden Knights and Navy Leap Frogs parachute teams were performing what is known as a “bomb burst” Saturday when the collision occurred, a Golden Knights spokeswoman Donna Dixon said. During the stunt, parachutists fall with red smoke trailing from packs and then separate, creating a colorful visual in the sky.
Dixon said Hood collided with a member of the Navy’s precision skydiving team.
After decades, Guardian Angels resume Central Park patrols amid concern, debate over NYC crime
NEW YORK (AP) — The squad in stop-sign-red jackets and berets strode through Central Park, on guard for signs of crime.
It was a familiar sight a generation ago, when New York was plagued by lawlessness that police have worked for years to dispel. Yet Guardian Angels volunteers made a pointed return this month to Central Park for the first time in over two decades, citing a 26 percent rise in crime there so far this year.
“We realize things are much better than they were” in the crime peak of the 1980s and early ’90s, founder Curtis Sliwa says, but “we want it to stay that way.”
City officials stress that crime is down citywide, and the park is far safer than it once was. Still, the renewed patrols by the Guardian Angels — known for both crime-fighting and controversy over their 35 years — are bright-red signals of unease about whether New York, touted for years as the nation’s safest big city, is slipping.
Sliwa and eight other Guardian Angels, ranging from graying long timers to a 20-year-old woman, trooped along roadways, paths and rocky, dark trails for hours one night this week, shining flashlights into thickets, asking people whether they’d had any trouble and eyeballing a quartet of teenagers who quickly took off on bicycles.
Migrants looking for short and relatively safe route to Europe gather in Turkish tourist town
BODRUM, Turkey (AP) — Suddenly, almost silently, a group of young men carrying a small plastic dinghy emerges from the darkness, dashes across a road and a dirty strip of sand and plunges into the crystal-clear waters of the Aegean Sea.
With the lights of the Greek island of Kos twinkling through the darkness — beacons of hope for a new and better life — another group of migrants has set off to make a risky — but less risky than most — sea crossing and apply for asylum in Europe.
The city of Bodrum, a magnet for wealthy tourists from Turkey and around the world, is these days drawing plenty of other visitors— migrants fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and Africa and seeking a better life in Europe, a continent so close they can almost reach out and touch it from the Bodrum peninsula’s many beaches. At its closest point, Kos is only 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from Turkey.
Migrants, mostly from Syria, but also from Afghanistan, Iran and African nations often try to cross from the secluded beaches of Bodrum peninsula in groups upward of eight people in inflatable plastic boats meant for a maximum of four, powered by tiny electric outboard motors and plastic paddles.
Mohammad Ali, a 36-year-old Syrian law graduate who was a merchant in the town of Idlib before fleeing, is waiting in the park with his wife, two young sons and other family members for a second attempt to flee to Europe.
‘Straight Outta Compton’ goes straight to the top of the box office; ‘U.N.C.L.E.’ struggles
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The boys from Compton smashed opening weekend expectations, while the stylish “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” struggled to find its footing.
Universal’s N.W.A. biopic earned an astonishing $56.1 million in its debut, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Director F. Gary Gray’s well-received film charts the formation and rise of the influential rap group. It cost just $29 million to produce.
N.W.A. members Dr. Dre and Ice Cube served as producers on the film, which has Ice Cube’s real son O’Shea Jackson Jr. playing his father. Dr. Dre also released the companion piece “Compton,” — his first new album in 16 years.
