Gusty, hot winds an Arizona blaze blew out of control in a forest northwest of Phoenix killing 19 firefighters

Gusty, hot winds blew an Arizona blaze out of control Sunday in a forest northwest of Phoenix, overtaking and killing 19 members of an elite fire crew in the deadliest wildfire involving firefighters in the U.S. for at least 30 years.
The "hotshot" firefighters were forced to deploy their emergency fire shelters — tent-like structures meant to shield firefighters from flames and heat — when they were caught near the central Arizona town of Yarnell, state forestry spokesman Art Morrison told The Associated Press.
The fire also destroyed an estimated 200 homes, Morrison said. Dry grass near the communities of Yarnell and Glen Isla fed the fast-moving blaze, which was whipped up by wind and raced through the homes, he said.
The fire still burned late Sunday, with flames lighting up the night sky in the forest above Yarnell, a town of about 700 residents about 85 miles northwest of Phoenix. Most people had evacuated from the town, and no injuries or other deaths were reported.
The fire started after a lightning strike on Friday and spread to at least 2,000 acres on Sunday amid triple-digit temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions.
Prescott Fire Chief Dan Fraijo said that the 19 dead firefighters were a part of the city's fire department.
"We grieve for the family. We grieve for the department. We grieve for the city," he said at a news conference Sunday evening. "We're devastated. We just lost 19 of the finest people you'll ever meet."
Hot shot crews are elite firefighters who often hike for miles into the wilderness with chain saws and backpacks filled with heavy gear to build lines of protection between people and fires. They remove brush, trees and anything that might burn in the direction of homes and cities.
The crew killed in the blaze had worked other wildfires in recent weeks in New Mexico and Arizona, Fraijo said.
"By the time they got there, it was moving very quickly," he told the AP of Sunday's fire.
He added that the firefighters had to deploy the emergency shelters when "something drastic" occurred.
"One of the last fail safe methods that a firefighter can do under those conditions is literally to dig as much as they can down and cover themselves with a protective — kinda looks like a foil type — fire-resistant material — with the desire, the hope at least, is that the fire will burn over the top of them and they can survive it," Fraijo said.
"Under certain conditions there's usually only sometimes a 50 percent chance that they survive," he said. "It's an extreme measure that's taken under the absolute worst conditions."
The National Fire Protection Association had previously listed the deadliest wildland fire involving firefighters as the 1994 Storm King Fire near Glenwood Springs, Colo., which killed 14 firefighters who were overtaken by a sudden explosion of flames.
U.S. wildfire disasters date back more than two centuries and include tragedies like the 1949 Mann Gulch fire near Helena, Mont., that killed 13, or the Rattlesnake blaze four years later that claimed 15 firefighters in Southern California.
President Barack Obama called the 19 firefighters heroes and said in a statement that the federal government was assisting state and local officials.
"This is as dark a day as I can remember," Gov. Jan Brewer said in a statement. "It may be days or longer before an investigation reveals how this tragedy occurred, but the essence we already know in our hearts: fighting fires is dangerous work."
Brewer said she would travel to the area on Monday.
Chuck Overmyer and his wife, Ninabill, said they lost their, 1,800-square-foot home in the blaze.
They were helping friends flee when the blaze switched directions and moved toward his property. They loaded up what belongings they could, including three dogs and a 1930 model hot rod on a trailer. As he looked out his rear view mirror he could see embers on the roof of his garage.
"We knew it was gone," he said.
He later gathered at the Arrowhead Bar and Grill in nearby Congress along with locals and watched on TV as he saw the fire destroy his house.
"That was when we knew it was really gone," he said.
He later fielded a phone call from a friend in which he said, "Lost it all, man. Yep, it's all gone."
Morrison said the fire grew in intensity when winds began gusting at up to 24 mph in the late afternoon.
"You get some winds, and it can take off on you," he said.
Two hundred firefighters were working on the fire Sunday, but several hundred more were expected to arrive Monday when a new fire management team takes over.
The fire has forced the closure of parts of state Route 89. It was zero percent contained late Sunday.
The Red Cross has opened two shelters in the area — at Yavapai College in Prescott and at the Wickenburg High School gym.
Prescott, which is more than 30 miles northeast of Yarnell, is one of the only cities in the United States that has a hot shot fire crew, Fraijo said. The unit was established in 2002, and the city also has 75 suppression team members.

The Murder of American of Andrew Driscoll Pochter in Egypt

This undated photo provided by the Pochter family shows Andrew Driscoll Pochter. The U.S. State Department confirmed Saturday, June 29, 2013, that Kenyon College student, Andrew Pochter, 21, of Chevy Chase, Md. died Friday, June 28, while photographing clashes between opponents and supporters of President Mohamed Morsi in Alexandria, Egypt. The Pochter family said Pochter went to Alexandria for the summer to teach English to 7 and 8 year old Egyptian children and to improve his Arabic.

GRIEFING MOTHER FROM Chechnya Her Sons Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Committed Murder Crimes

The father of the two Boston bombing suspects said Thursday that he is soon leaving Russia for the United States, to visit one son and lay the other to rest. Their mother said she was still thinking over whether to make the journey.

"I am going there to see my son and bury my older one," Anzor Tsarnaev said in an emotional meeting with journalists. "I have no bad thoughts, I'm not planning any bombings, I don't want to do anything. I'm not offended by anyone. I want to know the truth, what happened. I want to work it out."

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a gun battle with police, while his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, remains hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

Their parents returned last year to Dagestan, one of several predominantly Muslim provinces in southern Russia, where the family lived briefly before moving to the U.S. a decade ago.

The elder suspect spent the first half of 2012 in Russia's Caucasus, which has been ravaged for years by an insurgency led by religious extremists. Anzor Tsarnaev said his son stayed with him for at least three months in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, and spent one month with relatives, but he was unclear on where his son was for the remaining time.

U.S. investigators have been trying to determine whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev was radicalized during his stay in the Caucasus, where he regularly prayed at a Makhachkala mosque.
A team of investigators from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has questioned both parents in Makhachkala this week, spending many hours with the mother in particular over the course of two days. Tsarnaev said the questions were mostly about their sons' activities and interests.
The father, who wore dark aviator sunglasses during Thursday's news conference, said he was leaving "today or tomorrow" for the United States. But the family later said his travel may be delayed because he was not feeling well.
The suspects' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who was charged with shoplifting in the U.S. last summer, said she has been assured by lawyers that she would not be arrested, but said she was still deciding whether to go.
Tsarnaeva, wearing a headscarf and dressed all in black, said she now regrets moving her family to the U.S. and believes they would have been better off in a village in her native Dagestan.
"You know, my kids would be with us, and we would be, like, fine," she said. "So, yes, I would prefer not to live in America now! Why did I even go there? Why? I thought America is going to, like, protect us, our kids, it's going to be safe."

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the Boston bombings should spur stronger security cooperation between Moscow and Washington, adding that they also show that the West was wrong in supporting militants in Chechnya.

"This tragedy should push us closer in fending off common threats, including terrorism, which is one of the biggest and most dangerous of them all," Putin said during his annual call-in show on state television.
The Russian government contacted first the FBI and then the CIA in 2011 with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, U.S. officials said. The FBI said it had asked for more information from Russia, but none was provided.
Putin said Thursday that the Russian special services had no information to give because the Tsarnaevs had spent so little time in Russia.
Putin warned against trying to find the roots for the Boston tragedy in the suffering endured by the Chechen people, particularly in mass deportations of Chechens to Siberia and Central Asia on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's orders. "The cause isn't in their ethnicity or religion, it's in their extremist sentiments," he said.
The suspects are ethnic Chechens and their father's family was deported to Central Asia in the 1940s. The Tsarnaev family moved back to Chechnya in the early 1990s, but soon fled back to Kyrgyzstan after fighting broke out between Chechen separatists and Russian troops, whose bombs and artillery pummeled Chechen cities and town.
Putin criticized the West for refusing to declare Chechen militants terrorists and for offering them political and financial assistance in the past.
"I always felt indignation when our Western partners and Western media were referring to terrorists who conducted brutal and bloody crimes on the territory of Russia as rebels," Putin said.
The U.S. urged the Kremlin to seek a political settlement in Chechnya and criticized rights abuses by Russian troops during the two separatist wars. It also provided humanitarian aid to the region during the fighting in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Russian officials have claimed that rebels in Chechnya have close links with al-Qaida.
Putin said the West should have cooperated more actively with Russia in combatting terror.
"We always have said that we shouldn't limit ourselves to declarations about terrorism being a common threat and engage in closer cooperation," he said. "Now these two criminals have proven the correctness of our thesis."
___

Bloody Iraq is the Capital of Murder and executions in the World

(BAGHDAD) — Iraq’s Justice Ministry says authorities have executed 21 prisoners convicted on terrorism charges and links to al-Qaeda.

The ministry said Wednesday the executions were carried out on Tuesday by hanging. It says all the men were Iraqi al-Qaida operatives who were involved in bombings, car bomb attacks and assassinations.

The hangings brought the number of prisoners executed in Iraq so far this year to 50.

Iraq has dismissed calls from international human rights organizations to reconsider capital punishment. Executions are usually carried out by hanging.

Last year, Iraq executed 129 people, triggering concerns among rights groups on whether defendants received a fair trial.

According to the London-based Amnesty International, Iraq was ranked fourth among the top five executioners in the world in 2011, after China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and U.S.

On August 8, 2004, capital punishment was reinstated in Iraq. Iraqi law states that no person over the age of 70 can be executed, despite people like Tariq Aziz, sentenced to death at the age of 74.There is an automatic right to appeal on all such sentences. Iraqi Law requires execution within 30 days of all legal avenues being exhausted. The last legal step, before the execution proceeds, is for the condemned to be handed a red card. This is completed by an official of the court with details of the judgment and a notice that execution is imminent.

http://world.time.com/2013/04/17/iraq-executes-21-men-convicted-of-terrorism/#ixzz2QjVKR4we


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Iraq

Explosions at the Boston Marathon

Horrible Crime

Anne Smedinghoff Slain diplomat in Afghanistan April-08-2013

Members of Anne Smedinghoff's family consoled themselves Sunday with the thought that the young U.S. diplomat died in the service of a cause that mattered deeply to her. "She was doing what she loved," her father said, "and she was doing great things."

Still, Tom Smedinghoff said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, "we're just in total shock."
Smedinghoff, 25, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of River Forest, Ill., was delivering books for schoolchildren in Afghanistan's Zabol province on Saturday when she was killed, along with four other Americans. The vehicle they were riding in was attacked by a suicide car bomber, officials said. She was the first U.S. diplomat killed since the attacks last fall on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and was among six Americans killed in two attacks in Afghanistan the same day.
Another of those attacks prompted a North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrike on Taliban militants that also killed 11 Afghan civilians, at least 10 of them children, according to Afghan authorities.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who said he had met Smedinghoff during a recent trip to Afghanistan, spoke movingly about her Sunday at a news conference in Istanbul, Turkey. "I think that in this tragedy, there is a stark contrast for all of the world to see between two very different sets of values," he said.
"On the one hand, you have Anne, a selfless, idealistic young woman who woke up yesterday morning and set out to bring textbooks to schoolchildren, to bring them knowledge, children she had never met, to help them to be able to build a future. And Anne and those with her were attacked by Taliban terrorists who woke up that day not with a mission to educate or to help, but with a mission to destroy."
Tom Smedinghoff said his daughter had been in Afghanistan since July and was working with the local population to improve opportunities for women and to assist schools and businesses.
"She really felt she was making a difference," he said.
Smedinghoff said his daughter went into the Foreign Service directly after graduation from Johns Hopkins University. Her first post was in Venezuela, and she eventually volunteered to go to Afghanistan. He said she loved her work there.
"She was living in a compound that was heavily fortified and she was always trying to get out and do things for the population," he said.
Smedinghoff's family used to chide her about her job as a diplomat in Afghanistan, asking why she didn't get posted to someplace more comfortable, like London or Paris.
"She said, 'What would I do in London or Paris? It would be so boring,'" her father recalled in an interview with the Associated Press.
Anne Smedinghoff was to finish her Afghanistan assignment in July. Already fluent in Spanish, she was reportedly planning to learn Arabic in preparation for assignments in the Middle East.
Her family issued a statement about her, which said, in part: "The world lost a truly beautiful soul today. Our daughter, Anne, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, died in the service of her country.... We are consoled knowing that she was doing what she loved, and that she was serving her country by helping to make a positive difference in the world. She was such a wonderful woman — strong, intelligent, independent and loving. Annie, you left us too soon.

"http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-diplomat-20130408,0,224323.story?track=lat-email-topofthetimes

Five people died Wednesday in an attack by a U.S. unmanned aircraft April-05-2013 in northwest Pakistan

Five people died Wednesday in an attack by a U.S. unmanned aircraft in northwest Pakistan, regional officials told EFE.

The drone strike took place shortly after midday in the tribal region of North Waziristan, near the Afghan border. The aircraft launched six missiles, a liaison official for the tribal regions told EFE from the nearby city of Peshawar.

It was at least the seventh U.S. drone attack this year in Pakistan and the cumulative death toll from the strikes has already topped 40.

The U.S. military mounted fewer than 50 drone strikes in Pakistan during all of 2012.

The use of drones escalated dramatically after U.S. President Barack Obama took office in January 2009 and reached a peak in 2010 before declining slightly in subsequent years.

North and South Waziristan are bastions of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.

U.S. officials insist most of those killed by drones are militants, using the term “militant” to designate any military-age male who is not proven to be a non-combatant.

Pakistani activists and Western analysts say hundreds of civilians have died in drone strikes.
EFE

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=673489&CategoryId=12395

http://www.laht.com/index.asp