hot lubuk ku

ANCHORAGE, Alaska  — A mother on board a plane that crashed in remote southwest Alaska made a frantic phone call for help resuscitating her 5-month-old baby, then left the fatally injured boy to lead searchers hampered by cold and fog to the crash site.

"I believe she's the real hero in this," said Saint Marys Village Police Officer Fred Lamont Jr., one of the dozens from his community and surrounding villages who responded to the crash that killed four and injured six.

The Hageland Aviation Cessna 208 turboprop left Bethel at 5:40 p.m. on a scheduled flight for Mountain Village and eventually Saint Marys.

Saint Marys, like scores of other Alaska villages, is off the state road system. People routinely use small aircraft to reach regional hubs where they can catch another plane to complete trips to Anchorage or other cities.

Megan Peters, a spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers, said the airplane would have been flying in freezing rain with a mile of visibility and a 300-foot ceiling. Lamont described conditions as ice fog with moisture that stuck to vehicles.

The airplane never reached Mountain Village. It crashed around 6:30 p.m. four miles from Saint Marys, said Clint Johnson, head of the National Transportation Safety Board in Alaska.

Pilot Terry Hansen, 68, passengers Rose Polty, 57, Richard Polty, 65, and the infant, Wyatt Coffee, died in the crash.

The survivors included Melanie Coffee, Pauline Johnson, 37, Kylan Johnson, 14, Tanya Lawrence, 35, Garrett Moses, 30, and Shannon Lawrence. All were seriously injured and four were in critical condition, Lamont said. All but Hansen and Shannon Lawrence are from Mountain Village, troopers said. Hansen was from Bethel, according to troopers. Information wasn't available about where Lawrence lived.

Lamont, the village police officer, is also trained as a health aide and was working with an ambulance driver Friday. At about 7 p.m., he said, Melanie Coffee called another on-duty health aide to say the airplane had crashed and she needed assistance.

"She was trying to do CPR to her newborn baby," Lamont said. "She called for help."

Lamont and the driver headed out in the ambulance to look for the crash. Other health officials put out the call for responders. Two state troopers assigned to the community joined the effort. People from Mountain Village and Pitka's Point, which are connected to Saint Marys by local roads, helped search by car and snowmobile.

"Whoever had a vehicle was out there looking," Lamont said

Fog hampered the search and responders could not immediately locate the crash site despite speaking to the injured.

"We had no clue," Lamont said.

Coffee, who suffered chest trauma, tried whistling to alert searchers, Lamont said. She considered starting a fire to get their attention but eventually decided to start walking toward village lights. A GCI communications tower with a red strobe led her three-quarters of a mile to the village landfill.

"That's where everyone found her," Lamont said.

She led searchers back to the crash site. It was not accessible by snowmobile. Rescuers put the injured on stretchers and carried them out on foot to the landfill where they could be transported by ambulance to the village and then flown out.

A Coast Guard C-130 could not land because of fog but the injured were transported by a LifeMed Alaska flight and two other aircraft.

NTSB Investigator Clint Johnson said the cause of the crash has not been determined.

"It's very much in the preliminary stages at this point," he said.

Two investigators were on their way to Bethel on Saturday to meet troopers for transportation to the crash site. Reaching the wreckage would depend on weather and safety considerations, Peters said. No one was at the crash site Saturday morning.

"There's no rush to get there," Peters said. "There's no reason to risk anyone's life because no one's life is in jeopardy."

Hageland Aviation is part of the Era Group that includes Era Aviation. Hageland President Jim Hickerson said in a statement that the crash is "an unspeakable tragedy for us."

"Hageland is working to gather information to answer questions and do what we can to ease the suffering of those involved in the accident," he said.

BANGKOK — Gunshots were fired Sunday morning in the Thai capital as authorities braced for more violence a day after aggressive political protests erupted in street fighting between supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

Police Col. Narongrit Promsawat told there were "sporadic shootings" Sunday in the northeastern neighborhood of Bangkok where the clashes broke out the day before near a stadium holding a large pro-government rally.The nighttime clashes left at least one man dead and 35 wounded. It was not clear if the latest gunshots caused more injuries.

Demonstrators took to the streets a week ago seeking to topple Yingluck's government, which they believe serves the interests of her brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 military coup after being accused of corruption and abuse of power.

The violence in the short run may stir fears of further instability like what plagued the country during related political conflicts in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Any escalation is likely to scare away tourists who come to Thailand by the millions and contribute a huge chunk to the economy. But it may help the government by undermining the claims of its opponents to be carrying out a nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience.

The nighttime clashes involved opponents of the government, led by university students, who tried to block government supporters from entering the rally, which drew more than 50,000 people.

At least some of Sunday's gunshots appeared to have been fired into the nearby university, according to Wutthisak Larpcharoensap, rector of Ramkhamhaeng University.

"Rght now there are sporadic shootings into the campus," said Wutthisak. "Now there are about 2,000 students inside the campus and I'm very worried about the safety of my students."

"We are locking down the campus right now for safety concerns," he said.

Bangkok Emergency Medical Services reported on its website that at least one person was killed and 35 people were wounded. The rector said that another body with apparent gunshot wounds was found Sunday morning.

Matters were feared to come to a head Sunday, when the protesters vowed to seize the well-guarded prime minister's offices.

"I am confident we will declare victory today," said Akanat Promphan, a spokesman for the anti-government protesters. "We will not retreat out of fear, we will move forward."

Thousands of riot police backed by soldiers guarded Thailand's Government House and other key sites, including the Parliament and police headquarters.

A special police-led peacekeeping agency said that the military agreed to send 2,730 personnel to help with security on the streets. Although the army has declared itself neutral in the current crisis, it deposed Thaksin in 2006 and shows little sympathy for him.

LONDON  - The publisher of a controversial and much-criticized study suggesting genetically modified corn caused tumors in rats has withdrawn the paper after a yearlong investigation found it did not meet scientific standards.

Reed Elsevier's Food and Chemical Toxicology journal, which published the study by the French researcher Gilles-Eric Seralini in September 2012, said on Thursday the retraction was because the study's small sample size meant no definitive conclusions could be reached.

"This retraction comes after a thorough and time-consuming analysis of the published article and the data it reports, along with an investigation into the peer-review behind the article," the journal said in statement.

At the time of its original publication, hundreds of scientists across the world questioned Seralini's research, which said rats fed Monsanto's GM corn suffered tumors and multiple organ failure.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) issued a statement in November 2012 saying the study by Seralini, who was based at France's University of Caen, had serious defects in design and methodology and did not meet acceptable scientific standards.

Within weeks of its appearance in the peer-reviewed journal, more than 700 scientists had signed an online petition calling on Seralini to release all the data from his research.

In its retraction statement, the Food and Chemical Toxicology journal said that in light of these concerns, it too had requested to view the raw data from the study.

Seralini "agreed and supplied all material that was requested by the editor-in-chief," it said.

The journal said that while it received many letters expressing concerns about the validity of the findings, the proper use of animals and even allegations of fraud, its own investigation found "no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data."

"However, there is a legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected," it said.

Other scientists welcomed the journal's decision to retract the paper, although some said it had come too late.

"The major flaws in this paper make its retraction the right thing to do," said Cathie Martin, a professor at John Innes Centre. "The strain of rats used is highly susceptible to tumors after 18 months with or without GMO (genetically modified organisms) in their diets."

David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, said it was "clear from even a superficial reading that this paper was not fit for publication." In this instance, he said, "The peer review process did not work properly.

"But at least this has now been remedied and the journal has recognized that no conclusions can be drawn from this study, so I suppose it is better late than never," Spiegelhalter said.

ROME — An Italian court has accused ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi and his lawyers of tampering with evidence by paying off witnesses in a trial related to his notorious "bunga bunga" parties.

Citing testimony and telephone wiretaps, the Milan court said Berlusconi convened about a dozen young women to his Milan mansion on Jan. 15, 2011 to meet with his lawyers after the women's homes were searched as part of the police investigation into the parties.

From then on, the judges wrote, the women began receiving 2,500 euros each month from Berlusconi and subsequently they offered unusually identical testimony in court denying that the parties had sexual overtones.

The court made the accusation in explaining its decision to convict three of Berlusconi's former associates of procuring girls to prostitute themselves at the parties.

The holiday shopping season started as a marathon, not a sprint.

About 15,000 people were waiting for the flagship Macy's in New York City's Herald Square when it opened at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Long checkout lines formed at the Target in Colma, Calif., on Black Friday morning. And at North Point Mall in Alpharetta, Ga., Jessica Astalos, 20, had already been shopping for six hours starting on Thanksgiving night as another wave of shoppers made their way into the mall around 5:30 a.m. on Black Friday.More than a dozen major retailers from Target to Toys R Us opened for 24 hours or more on Thanksgiving Day through Black Friday, the traditional start to the holiday shopping period. As a result, crowds formed early and often throughout the two days.

"I like being around crowds of people all doing the same thing," said Dalton Mason, 22, of Stockbridge, Ga.

The start of the holiday shopping season has transformed into a two-day event. For nearly a decade, Black Friday had been the official start to the busy buying binge sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was named Black Friday because that was traditionally when retailers turned a profit, or moved out of the red and into the black.

But in the past few years, retailers have pushed opening times into Thanksgiving night. Some like Macy's opened on Thanksgiving for the first time this year. Others like Gap Inc., which owns Banana Republic, Gap and Old Navy, opened some stores earlier on Thanksgiving than the year before. And many pushed up the discounting that used to be reserved for Black Friday into early November.

The earlier openings and sales were met with some resistance. Some workers' rights groups had planned protests on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday because they opposed having retail employees miss family meals at home. But as of Thursday afternoon, there weren't reports of widespread protests.

Some shoppers even had said they would not venture out on Thanksgiving because they believe it's a sacred holiday meant to spend with family and friends. And at least one who did venture out regretted the decision. By 5 a.m. Friday, Curtis Akins, 51, was sitting on a bench - looking slightly exhausted -- inside a mall in Atlanta's northern suburbs as his wife looked for deals. "I think it's going to end because it's taking away from the traditional Thanksgiving," he said of the Black Friday tradition.

But that sentiment didn't stop others from taking advantage of the earlier openings and sales. "We like to shop this time of night ... We're having a ball," said Rosanne Scrom as she left the Target store in Clifton Park, N.Y., at 5 a.m. Friday.

The reception to the double-day holiday shopping start has led some retail experts to question how much further Black Friday will creep into Thanksgiving. Some now even refer to the holiday as Black Thanksgiving or Gray Thursday. "Black Friday is now Gray Friday," said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consultancy.

It's unclear whether or not the early openings will lead shoppers to spend more over the two days or simply spread sales between the two days. Last year, sales on Thanksgiving were $810 million last year, an increase of 55 percent from the previous year as more stores opened on the holiday, according to Chicago research firm ShopperTrak. But sales dropped 1.8 percent to $11.2 billion on Black Friday, though it still was the biggest shopping day last year.

Sales figures for this year's Thanksgiving and Black Friday will trickle out in the next couple days, but some big chains already are proclaiming early Friday morning that the start to the holiday shopping season had gotten off to a successful start.

Most Wal-Mart stores are open 24 hours, but the world's largest retailer started its holiday shopping sales events at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving, two hours earlier than last year. Wal-Mart said that customers bought 2.8 million towels, two million TVs, 1.4 million tablets, 300,000 bicycles and 1.9 million dolls.

Rival Target, which opened at an hour earlier this year at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, also said that traffic starting in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving on Target.com and at its stores later in the day was "strong."

Terry Lundgren, Macy's CEO, said "so far, so good" referring to the overall holiday shopping season. The 15,000 people who showed up for the opening of the flagship store was the most ever, up from 11,000 last year.

"It's unbelievable," he said. "Clearly people are in the shopping mood."

SETELAH beberapa waktu namanya dikaitkan bercinta dengan penyanyi popular, Shila Amzah, akhirnya pelakon, Johan As’ari dikhabarkan sudah melamar pelakon seksi, Lana Nordin untuk menjadi suri hidupnya.

Berita itu sudah tentu mengejutkan ramai pihak termasuk peminat-peminatnya bahkan mungkin ada yang menyifatkan ia hanya sebahagian promosi filem atau drama.

Berkata kepada Berita Harian, Johan melamar Lana selepas tiga hari berjumpa.

Johan turut mengakui mengalami cinta pandang pertama apabila bertemu Lana ketika menjayakan sebuah program, bulan lalu.

Tiga hari kemudian, Johan nekad melamar Lana untuk dijadikan isteri.

“Jodoh pertemuan, ajal maut adalah ketentuan-NYA. Kita tidak tahu bila ia datang. Perasaan saya cukup kuat bagai ada suis yang mendorong saya merapatinya.

“Kami berborak panjang pada majlis itu. Selepas bertukar nombor, kami keluar makan tiga hari berturut-turut sebelum saya tekad membuka mulut mahu menyuntingnya,” katanya.

Akui tempoh tiga hari itu terlalu awal, Johan yakin cinta bakal disemai selepas berkahwin.

Pelakon filem Paku itu juga akui sudah bersedia memikul tanggungjawab sebagai suami dan memimpin keluarga.

“Ketika melamarnya, Lana beritahu dia mahu mencari lelaki yang boleh membimbingnya menjaid insan lebih baik. Kalau ikutkan, kami tidak mahu menangguhkan perkara baik dan mahu bertunang sempena tarikh pertemuan.

“Cuma tempohnya terlalu dekat, mungkin lebih sesuai awal tahun depan supaya persiapan dapat dilakukan tanpa tergesa-gesa,” katanya yang enggan berkongsi tarikh pernikahan.

Sejak bercinta, Johan memberitahu bahawa Lana sudah mengelak memakai skirt pendek.

“Saya nampak ketulusan hatinya, walaupun terkejut saya sebak apabila dia menyatakan alasan mahu menjadikan saya isteri. Doa saya dimakbulkan apabila dipertemukan dengan Johan.

“Ketika dia meluahkan perasaan, saya hanya minta dia bertemu terus dengan keluarga andai benar-benar serius,” katanya.

Ketika nama Shila Amzah dibangkitkan, Johan berkata sudah menjelaskan bahawa keakraban mereka sebatas abang dan adik.

Kata Johan, hubungannya dengan Lana sudah dimaklumkan kepada ibu Shila dan mereka merestuinya. 

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry warned Congress Wednesday against scuttling a historic opportunity for a nuclear pact with Iran by pressing ahead with new sanctions while international negotiators seek to prevent Tehran from being able to assemble an atomic weapons arsenal.

Kerry, who as a senator joined the effort to impose crippling oil, trade and investment restrictions on Iran, said the United States and other world powers are united behind an offer they presented to Iranian negotiators in Geneva last week. But he said new action now from U.S. lawmakers could shatter an international coalition made up of countries with interests as divergent as France, Russia and China, endangering hopes for a peaceful end to the decade-long nuclear standoff with the Islamic republic.

"We put these sanctions in place in order to be able to put us in the strongest position possible to be able to negotiate. We now are negotiating," Kerry told reporters ahead of testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. "And the risk is that if Congress were to unilaterally move to raise sanctions, it could break faith in those negotiations, and actually stop them and break them apart."

With nuclear negotiations set to resume in Switzerland next week, the Obama administration dispatched Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to seek more time for diplomacy. They faced skepticism from members of Congress determined to further squeeze the Iranian economy and wary of yielding any ground to Iran in the talks.

At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday, Democratic and Republican lawmakers sharply criticized Kerry and other senior U.S. officials for their offer during last week's inconclusive negotiations.

"The Iranian regime hasn't paused its nuclear program," lamented Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman. "Why should we pause our sanctions efforts as the administration is pressuring Congress to do?"

Positions are more mixed in the Senate. After briefing the Banking Committee, Kerry and Biden gathered behind closed doors with Senate Democratic leaders to explain the administration's strategy. No Democratic leader left the meeting contradicting the administration's call for caution on sanctions.

Kerry said the potential accord with Iran stems from a "tough proposal," adding: "If it weren't strong, why wouldn't Iran have accepted it yet?"

But the former Massachusetts senator said moving the goalposts during the current lull in talks by adding new sanctions against Iran's oil and other industrial sectors would cause America's negotiating partners to see the U.S. as "dealing in bad faith."

"They would bolt and they will say, 'That's not the deal,'" he said. "And then the sanctions do fall apart."

"What we're asking everyone to do is calm down, look hard at what can be achieved and what the realities are," Kerry added. "If this doesn't work, we reserve the right to dial back up the sanctions. I will be up here on the Hill asking for increased sanctions and we always reserve the military option. So we lose absolutely nothing, except for the possibility of getting in the way of diplomacy and letting it work."

Kerry said negotiators should have a "few weeks" more to see if they can reach an agreement. The State Department's nuclear negotiator, Wendy Sherman, and the Treasury Department's sanctions chief, David Cohen, also joined him at the Capitol.

President Barack Obama is under pressure at home and abroad to resolve the Iran nuclear standoff, having stated that Iran could reach nuclear weapons capacity by sometime next year. Obama has reached out in an unprecedented manner to Iran's new President Hassan Rouhani, with the two men holding the first direct conversation between U.S. and Iranian leaders in more than three decades.

Yet at the same time, Obama has angered wary U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, which see an Iranian nuclear arsenal as existential threats. Iran insists its program is solely for peaceful energy production and medical research purposes, but until recently had offered little to assuage Western and regional fears that it was secretly trying to develop atomic bombs.

Both Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have repeatedly warned Iran about the potential for military action if negotiations fail. The allies differ, however, over how any diplomatic solution should look.

Some in Congress are gearing up for a fight with the administration over the new sanctions, which were overwhelmingly approved by the GOP-led House in July. The legislation blacklisted Iran's mining and construction sectors and committed the U.S. to the goal of eliminating all Iranian oil exports worldwide by 2015. If the Senate Banking Committee pushes off its parallel bill any longer, lawmakers could attach it to a Senate defense bill which could come up for debate as early as Thursday.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2-ranked Senate Democrat, he supported delaying action on further sanctions as long as diplomatic progress was being made.

Sen. Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's top Republican, also sounded conciliatory. He said his focus was on maintaining existing restrictions on Iran's economy so the U.S. keeps its negotiating leverage. But Chairman Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., has called this week for tougher sanctions as an incentive for negotiations. And many Republicans back him.

"We ought to be actually ratcheting up the sanctions against Iran," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. "What the administration was promoting is something the Israelis think is a bad deal for them. It's pretty clear the Sunni Arab allies of ours also think it's a bad deal. Looking at it strictly from an American point of view, I think it's a bad deal as well."

Last week's talks came tantalizingly close to an accord. They broke down as Iran demanded formal recognition of what it calls its right to enrich uranium, and as France sought stricter limits on Iran's ability to make nuclear fuel and on its heavy water reactor to produce plutonium, diplomats said.

Obama spoke Wednesday by telephone with French President Francois Hollande. The two countries "are in full agreement" on Iran, the White House said in a statement.

Quito  - US oil giant Chevron Wednesday rejected as "illegitimate and unenforceable" an Ecuadoran court ruling upholding an order for it to pay billions of dollars for environmental damages to the Amazon.

The ruling is "as illegitimate and unenforceable today as it was when it was issued," company spokesman James Craig said in an email.

Ecuador's Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a lower court decision against Chevron but dramatically reduced the amount to be paid in damages from $19 billion to $9.51 billion.

Chevron has never worked directly in Ecuador but inherited the pollution lawsuit when it acquired former rival Texaco in 2001. Texaco operated in the South American nation from 1964-1990.

The original ruling against Chevron was made in 2011, with a fine of $9 billion imposed. That amount was later doubled when the US oil giant did not apologize.

While Ecuador's high court invalidated the latter ruling, it ordered Chevron to pay the group that is representing the Ecuadoran farmers and activists who originally launched the suit.

Chevron insists that Ecuador's state oil company Petroecuador is to blame.

Juan Pablo Saenz, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said the decision would help their cases in other countries where they are seeking restitution from Chevron.

The oil giant has almost no assets in Ecuador, which is why the plaintiffs are pursuing it in other countries.

Just last month, Chevron was in court in New York trying to keep the plaintiffs from using the US courts to force Chevron to pay from its US operation.

The case could have implications for lawsuits in Canada and Brazil, where the plaintiffs are going after Chevron's assets.

In November 2012, a judge in Argentina ordered a freezing of Chevron's assets, but a higher court overturned the decision.

Thousands of Ecuadoran villagers say they were sickened and many have cancer as a result of the oil pollution of their water supply.

Commentators say the case could help to determine the extent to which US courts can pass judgment on alleged misconduct of American multinationals abroad.

In the US District Court in New York, Chevron is alleging fraud and violations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Even reduced by half, the fine imposed on Chevron would be one of the largest ever levied in the history of environmental law.

British energy giant BP reached a record $4.5 billion deal with the US government to settle criminal charges linked to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and a $7.8 billion settlement with people and businesses affected.

In September, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, who is often critical of the United States, called for a global boycott of Chevron, accusing the company of being behind "one of the biggest environmental disasters in the world."