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First Posted: 10/1/2013
NEW YORK
Police charge biker
in highway assault
New York police have detained a second suspect in an encounter in which a man driving with his family was chased and beaten by a group of motorcyclists, and at one point ran over one of the bikers.
On Tuesday morning, police filed reckless endangerment charges against a motorcyclist accused of instigating the Sunday encounter. Police say the second person in custody hasn’t been charged yet with any crime.
An Internet video shows the bikers surrounding and stopping the SUV on Manhattan’s West Side highway.
Some of the motorcyclists then attacked the SUV, police say. The panicked driver drove through the blockade, crushing the legs of one biker.
UNITED NATIONS
Israeli leader sees
‘wolf’ at the gate
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded an alarm Tuesday over Iran’s recent claims to want a nuclear accord with the West, accusing the Islamic Republic’s moderate new president of waging a “charm offensive” to get sanctions lifted while still actively pursuing atomic bombs.
Netanyahu’s address to the U.N. General Assembly sought to dispel a mood of cautious optimism created last week when Iranian President Hasan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif vowed to put the nuclear dispute to rest and ease more than 30 years of hostility in U.S.-Iranian relations.
The Israeli prime minister called Rouhani “a wolf in sheep’s clothing, who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the international community.” When it comes to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, Netanyahu said, Rouhani only differs from his confrontational predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in that “Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing.”
BUENA VISTA, Colo.
Teen in rock slide
credits dad’s heroics
A 13-year-old girl said her father shielded her as boulders crashed down on them on a Colorado hiking trail — an action that authorities say probably saved her life even as her father and four other family members were killed.
Rescuers dug Gracie Johnson out of the rubble after Monday’s slide, and she was airlifted to a Denver-area hospital with a broken leg, the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.
“She told me at the last second when the boulders were coming down on top of them that he covered her up and protected her, which I believe it saved her life,” said sheriff’s Deputy Nick Tolsma.
Gracie’s parents and sister from nearby Buena Vista were killed, as were two of her cousins from Missouri.
All five bodies were recovered Tuesday afternoon and identified by a family member, Sheriff Pete Palmer said.
OSKARSHAMN, Sweden
Jellyfish force
reactor shutdown
It wasn’t a tsunami but it had the same effect: A huge cluster of jellyfish forced one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors to shut down — a phenomenon that marine biologists say could become more common.
Operators of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden had to scramble reactor number three on Sunday after tons of jellyfish clogged the pipes that bring in cool water to the plant’s turbines.
By Tuesday, the pipes had been cleaned of the jellyfish and engineers were preparing to restart the reactor, which at 1,400 megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator.
Jellyfish are not a new problem for nuclear power plants. Last year the California-based Diablo Canyon facility had to shut its reactor two after gobs of sea salp — a gelatinous, jellyfish-like organism — clogged intake pipes. In 2005, the first unit at Oskarshamn was temporarily turned off due to a sudden jellyfish influx.