Global Tributes to Muhammad Ali

Global Tributes to Muhammad Ali, 'Champion' and 20th Century 'Titan'

From rival sportsmen to world leaders, the world paused Saturday to remember Muhammad Ali — hailing him not only as a "giant" of the boxing ring but also "a true champion for all."

The 74-year-old boxer and civil rights champion died Friday from respiratory complications after a three-decade battle with Parkinson's disease.

Ali's "Rumble in the Jungle" opponent, George Foreman, described the former heavyweight champion as "one of the greatest human beings I have ever met."

He said: "No doubt he was one of the best people to have lived in this day and age. To put him as a boxer is an injustice."

The New York Times described Ali as a "Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century."

President Barack Obama held the champion prizefighter up as a man of integrity and said in his private study he keeps a pair of Ali's gloves on display just under an iconic photograph of when he beat Sonny Liston in 1964.

"Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period," Obama said in a statement Saturday. "If you just asked him, he'd tell you. He'd tell you he was the double greatest; that he'd 'handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail.'"

killing 5 soldiers

Fort Hood was closing roads at time truck overturned, killing 5 soldiers

Fort Hood commanders were closing some roads on the Army base in Texas at the time floodwaters overturned a truck on a training mission, killing at least five soldiers and leaving four more missing, Christopher Haug, spokesman for the post, said Friday.

But Haug said the troops learning to operate the Light Medium Tactical Vehicle were not sent out in conditions too dangerous for training.
"It was a situation where the rain had come and the water was rising quickly," he said. "They regularly pass through these weather conditions like this. This was a tactical vehicle, and at the time they were in proper place. Just an unfortunate accident that occurred quickly."

The Army -- with help from civilian agencies -- is using ground, air and dog teams in the search for the missing soldiers, who were swept away by the rising waters of Owl Creek.
"There is a very large effort to try and find them," Haug said. "This is a remote area. It's difficult to see; as you know weather conditions are not helping us out right now."
Owl Creek regularly experiences flash floods, said Michael Harmon, emergency management coordinator for Bell County, Texas.
Twelve soldiers were on the training mission before floodwaters overturned their vehicle after it became stuck in the flooded creek on a road in a remote section of the base, Maj. Gen. John Uberti said Friday. Soldiers in a following vehicle rescued three of their comrades, he said.
The three soldiers are in stable condition in a hospital and are to be released soon, Uberti said.

He thanked the surrounding communities for their outpouring of prayers and emotional support.
"They will be needed in the tough days ahead," he said at a news conference.
Rescuers recovered some of the soldiers' bodies from the water downstream from the vehicle.
Uberti declined to take questions about the incident. Haug also declined to go into detail about the training mission except to describe it as "routine."
Retired Col. Robert Morgan, however, told CNN affiliate KXXV-TV that the Light Medium Tactical Vehicle may not operate well in high waters. The truck, which is used to transport troops and cargo, sits from 6 to 8 feet off the ground.
Severe storms have pummeled Texas, leading to a record rainfall total in May. Gov. Greg Abbott has declared a state of disaster across 31 counties as more rain is expected.

CNN meteorologist Chad Myers warned that saturated ground and swollen creeks, bayous and rivers cannot absorb the downpour.


source: CNN

3 Somali-Americans Found Guilty

3 Somali-Americans Found Guilty of Trying to Join Islamic State

Haqhawo Qaasim held a photo on May 9 of Guled Omar, one of three defendants who pleaded not guilty to conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State. Credit Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune, via Associated Press

MINNEAPOLIS — Three Somali-Americans were found guilty by a federal jury on Friday on charges of trying to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State.

The verdict against the three men — Guled Omar, 21; Abdirahman Daud, 22; and Mohamed Farah, 22 — came after about two days of deliberation and about a year after the men were arrested. All three men had pleaded not guilty.

The men were convicted of several charges, the most serious of which was conspiracy to commit murder overseas.

While the young men sat impassively as the verdicts of guilty were read, family members and supporters began to weep and held their hands to their faces. One woman, sobbing, rushed from the courtroom.

Helicopter Rescue Launched for 11 Green Berets on Colorado Peak

Helicopter Rescue Launched for 11 Green Berets on Colorado Peak

A helicopter rescue was launched for 11 Army Special Forces soldiers on the summit of Longs Peak in Colorado after two of them suffered altitude sickness that extended a one-day mountain exercise into a two-day affair, military officials said today.

Helicopters were requested to remove them from the mountain peak after it was determined it would be easier for the soldiers to complete scaling the mountain rather than going down the mountain, officials said.

The 11 Green Berets, who belong to the 10th Special Forces Group based at Fort Carson, Colorado, were conducting a mountain training exercise Thursday at Longs Peak that was only supposed to last the day, according to Lt. Col. Sean Ryan, a spokesman for the 10th Special Forces Group,

But two of the soldiers got altitude sickness and the rest of the group decided to stay on the mountain overnight to tend to their colleagues, Ryan said.

"Late last night, Rocky Mountain National Park staff were notified that a group of ten people were requesting assistance on Kiener’s Route on Longs Peak," said Kyle Patterson, a spokesperson for the park. It was unclear why park officials said 10 people while military officials said 11 people.

"A few members reported having some degree of distress and were having difficulty continuing up the route," Patterson said. "The group continues to self-rescue by assisting each other to climb to the summit of Longs Peak."

The soldiers determined it would be easier to proceed to the mountain's summit rather than to climb down to a lower elevation, Ryan said.

"Rocky Mountain Park rangers are planning evacuation efforts from the summit of Longs Peak via helicopter, weather and conditions permitting," Patterson said. One helicopter has begun to conduct reconnaissance efforts for the best way to proceed.

Forty-three park personnel have been involved in helping to resolve the incident, Patterson said.

Ryan stressed that none of the soldiers was missing as had been indicated in early social media descriptions of the incident.

“No one is lost, missing or injured,” Ryan said.

Altitude sickness can be a factor in mountain training, he said, even for highly-trained and fit special operations forces like the Green Berets.


source: abcnews

UCLA gunman had kill list

UCLA gunman had 'kill list' and is linked to second slaying in Minnesota

Police respond to the UCLA campus after a shooting Wednesday.

The gunman who killed a UCLA professor before committing suicide on campus Wednesday left behind a “kill list” and is suspected in the shooting death of a woman in Minnesota, authorities said.

Mainak Sarkar, 38, a former doctoral student and Minnesota resident, left a list at his home in that state that included the names of the woman, UCLA professor William Klug and a second professor who is safe, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said Thursday. Sarkar shot Klug multiple times in a small office in UCLA Engineering Building 4 before taking his own life, authorities said.

Sarkar had accused the victim of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, according to police.

When detectives arrived at Klug’s office on Wednesday morning and found both bodies, they also found a note from Sarkar listing his home address in Minnesota and asking someone to “check on my cat.”

“Immediately we were highly suspicious,” Beck told The Times. “That made me uneasy about what we would find when we got to Minnesota.”

The LAPD worked with the FBI and Minnesota authorities and served a search warrant at Sarkar’s home, Beck said. Inside, they found extra ammunition and a box for one of two pistols found at UCLA, as well as the “kill list” with the three names, the chief said.

Authorities went to the woman’s home in Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, and found her body just after midnight Thursday, police said.

It appeared she had been dead of a gunshot wound for “maybe a couple of days,” Beck said.

Beck declined to name the woman but said Sarkar was suspected in her death.

“We would physically arrest him were he still alive,” the chief said.

Sarkar drove from Minnesota to Los Angeles, according to Beck, but it was unclear how long he was in L.A. before Wednesday’s shooting. Detectives don’t think it was “more than a couple of days,” the chief said.

On Wednesday, Sarkar carried a backpack, two semiautomatic pistols and extra magazines to Klug’s fourth-floor office, where he fatally shot the professor before turning the gun on himself, Beck said.

Klug, 39, was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Sarkar had accused him of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, according to police. A source called the gunman’s accusations “absolutely untrue.”

Klug had been the target of Sarkar’s anger on social media for months. On March 10, Sarkar called the professor a “very sick person” who could not be trusted.

“William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor,” Sarkar wrote. “He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy,” Sarkar wrote. “He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.”

Klug, who was described by friends as a kind and caring man, worked diligently to help Sarkar finish his dissertation and graduate, even though the quality of Sarkar’s work was not stellar, one source said.

“Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student,” the person said.

In his doctoral dissertation, submitted in 2013, Sarkar expressed gratitude to Klug for his help and support. A syllabus from 2010 lists Sarkar as one of two teaching assistant s in a mechanical and aerospace engineering course, MAE: 101: Statics and Strength of Materials. Sarkar was listed in the 2014 doctoral commencement booklet with Klug as his advisor.

It is not immediately clear, Beck said, whether Sarkar tried to find the other professor on his list. The second professor, whom Beck did not name, was not on campus at the time of the shooting. Police have been in contact with that person, who “is fine,” the chief said.

Investigators are trying to determine Sarkar’s actions in recent days, particularly his drive from Minnesota, Beck said. Police are searching for Sarkar’s car, a 2003 gray Nissan Sentra, with Minnesota license plate 720KTW.

Beck said police don’t expect the vehicle to be “any significant danger,” but officials have asked anyone who sees it to call police.

Before enrolling at UCLA, Sarkar earned a master’s degree at Stanford University following an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, according to his LinkedIn page. In the U.S., he also had a stint as a research assistant at the University of Texas and worked as a software developer.

After UCLA, Sarkar worked remotely as an engineering analyst for an Ohio-based rubber company, Endurica LLC. Will Mars, the company’s president, confirmed to The Times that Sarkar worked for Endurica until August 2014. He declined to provide more details.

On Sarkar’s LinkedIn page, however, Mars offered a more specific recommendation in a post published Aug. 1, 2014: “Mainak is a steady contributor with solid technical skills in FEA and software development. I appreciate the quality of his work, and his careful approach to new problems. He has worked for Endurica in an off-site situation requiring great trust and independence, and he has performed well under those conditions.”

Matthew Uy, who provided many “endorsements” of Sarkar on LinkedIn, said that he worked in a lab at UCLA that “collaborated” with Sarkar, then a graduate student. Uy said he had not spoken with or seen Sarkar in about five years and felt “pretty disconnected” from him in general.

On Wednesday, thousands of students and UCLA staff found themselves racing to barricade classroom doors with desks, projectors and anything else they could find after cellphones buzzed across campus with alerts of a possible shooting.

By 12:05 p.m., police confirmed that two men had been killed in an engineering building.

The campus was declared safe, and UCLA officials lifted a lockdown that had canceled classes for the day.

source: LA times

EgyptAir Flight 804: 'Black box' signals detected,

EgyptAir Flight 804: 'Black box' signals detected, French investigators say

Cairo (CNN)A French naval vessel has detected underwater signals from one of EgyptAir Flight 804's so-called black boxes, investigators said Wednesday.

Specialized locator equipment on board the French vessel La Place detected signals from the seabed in the Mediterranean Sea, the Egyptian investigative committee said in a statement.
The director of the BEA, France's air accident investigation agency, later said it had confirmed the signals were from one of the recorders on the plane.
"The signal of a beacon from a flight recorder could be detected. ... The detection of this signal is a first step," BEA Director Remy Jouty said in a statement, according to an agency spokesman.
The Airbus A320, which had 66 people aboard, crashed in the Mediterranean on May 19 on a flight from Paris to Cairo.
Since then, authorities have been searching for wreckage and the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders, which could reveal evidence about what caused the crash.
Authorities hope to locate the data recorders, so a specialized vessel managed by the Deep Ocean Search company can then retrieve them. That vessel is set to join the search team within a week, the investigative committee said.
So far, search teams have found small pieces of debris, victims' remains and personal effects from the plane. They haven't found the aircraft's fuselage.
Analyst: Searchers are nearing wreckage
Detecting the beacon is a sign that searchers are closing in, CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo said.
"That means they're probably within one to three miles (of the black boxes)," she said. "That is the distance that these beacons can broadcast, so they are literally almost on top of them."
And it's likely, Schiavo said, that the recorders will be with the bulk of the wreckage from the plane.
"Hopefully they have finally got the right beacon, the right location, and soon we'll have answers," she said.
Conflicting reports over final moments
This isn't the first time investigators have said they detected a signal from the plane.
Last week a lead investigator in the search said airplane manufacturer Airbus had detected signals from the plane's Emergency Locator Transmitter, a device that can manually or automatically activate at impact and will usually send a distress signal.
Time critical
The signals gave investigators a more specific location to detect pings from the black boxes, state media reported.
Time is of the essence: The batteries powering the flight recorders' locator beacons are certified to emit high-pitched signals for about 30 days after they get wet.
Once they're found, the black boxes will be brought to Egypt, a civil aviation ministry official told CNN. That's standard procedure, the official said, similar to what happened in November with the recorders from Metrojet Flight 9268, which crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
The data recorders have been fixtures on commercial flights around the world for decades.
The flight data recorder gathers 25 hours of technical data from the airplane's sensors, recording several thousand distinct pieces of information. Among the details investigators could uncover: information about the plane's air speed, altitude, engine performance and wing positions.
The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds on the flight deck that can include conversations between pilots, warning alarms from the aircraft and background noise. By listening to the ambient sounds in a cockpit before a crash, experts can determine if a stall took place and the speed at which the plane was traveling.
But black boxes aren't perfect. In several cases -- such as the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 or the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11, 2001 -- authorities had hoped to find clues in the recorders, only to discover that the data inside had been damaged or the recordings had stopped suddenly.

source: www.cnn.com

Two dead in murder-suicide at UCLA

Two dead in murder-suicide at UCLA; LAPD says 'campus is now safe'

A campus shooting at UCLA Wednesday morning left two men dead in a murder-suicide that sent thousands of students running for safety and barricading themselves in classrooms, authorities said.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck confirmed that the shooter was one of the two men killed in a small office in a building in the campus’ engineering complex.

”The campus is now safe,” Beck told reporters in a news conference shortly after noon. At 12:05 p.m. UCLA officials lifted the campus lockdown and canceled classes for the remainder of the day.

The shooting, which happened just after 10 a.m. prompted massive response from local and federal law enforcement.

Authorities did not identify the victims and a motive was not immediately clear.

Helicopter news footage showed students walking in a line with their hands above their heads as armed police officers scoured the campus.

Students hid in buildings across campus after the shooting. Some secured doors with belts or created makeshift barricades in classrooms as word of the incident spread.

Graduate student Jason La, 33, was sitting in Boelter Hall taking a test about 9:40 a.m. when an officer walked in and told the class to lock the door and barricade it.

About a minute later the class was told to leave. Students began to move out of the building, then began running when an officer yelled at them to get away from the building, La said.

Sean Lynch, the son of a professor who works in the engineering building, was exchanging text messages with his father as the campus was placed on lockdown. Lynch said his father was in a colleague’s office and heard three gunshots but did not see the shooter.

Student Mehwish Khan, 21, said she ran to the Charles E. Young Research Library, where many other students were hiding. At around 10:45 a.m., she said, she and others had barricaded themselves in a restroom where they texted family and friends who were all giving different information about possible shooters.

"We are getting messages from all over," she told a Times reporter in a text message.

Asked how she was doing, Khan said, "Okay. Just scared. And scared for all of my friends."

Many students spoke with reporters only via text to adhere to UCLA protocol that asks students not to speak on their phones in such situations, they said.

Rafi Sands, vice president of UCLA’s student government, said he and about 30 other students used their belts to secure their classroom door after news of the shooter spread.

Sands, 20, of Oakland, said several different accounts of the shooting were funneling across campus through text messages and social media, and it took several minutes for the campus community to realize the seriousness of the situation.

“We get a lot of Bruin Alerts for small things,” he said. “It took a while for everyone to realize this is serious.”

Nick Terry drove to his architecture class from Silver Lake expecting to take a final at 11 and give a presentation at noon.

His vision for the day was quickly shattered when he arrived to find there was an active shooting situation on campus.

Terry, 29, said he felt more anger than fear.

"It just seems so pointless," he said. "Two days left of school and it's going to end on this note?"

source: LA Times