Legion of Angels News Archive

CHRISTIANSTED, U.S. Virgin Islands - St. Croix authorities were trying to contain oil spills after more than 40 boats sank or washed ashore during Hurricane Omar.

About half the vessels lost their anchors, including houseboats, catamarans and pricey yachts and sailboats owned by tourists. The other half were tied at marinas but broke loose, Carlos Fachette, enforcement director for the Department of Planning and Natural Resources, said Friday.

The hurricane caught many local boaters off-guard because they did not take the storm seriously, according to Kim Jones of the St. Croix Yacht Club.

“It’s devastating,” she said of the damage. “That puts a brake into people getting into boating, which is such a way of life in the Caribbean. It’s going to take a lot to rebound.”

Roughly 400 boats are registered in St. Croix, she said.

Omar became a tropical storm again Friday night, far from land in the Atlantic Ocean.

Police on Friday also had to rescue three people from a 35-foot catamaran when it hit a reef and ran aground near Salt River Bay, Fachette said.

All St. Croix beaches have been deemed unsafe because of high pollution levels, and the Schooner Channel area of the Christiansted Harbor remained closed.

Power outages, crop damage
Omar passed overnight Wednesday between St. Martin and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the government has spent more than $1 million in cleanup costs.

The storm caused more than $700,000 in damages to roads in St. Croix and destroyed more than 100 utility poles in the eastern region. About half of the island’s 55,000 people remained with power on Friday, said Cassandra Dunn, Water and Power Authority spokeswoman.

“Restoring power to some areas is going to take time,” she said.

St. Croix also reported heavy crop damage, as did Antigua, where Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer warned of a produce shortage, saying the farming community “appears to have suffered an extensive loss of crops.”

“No one is reported to have perished in this disaster,” Spencer said late Thursday, hours after Omar blew past the Lesser Antilles islands as a Category 3 hurricane. “We are, nonetheless, faced with a natural disaster of serious proportions.”

The crop damage comes amid spiraling food prices in the Caribbean and around the world.

On Saturday morning, Omar was located about 775 miles east of Bermuda and had weakened to a tropical storm with top winds of 60 mph. It posed no threat to land and forecasters say it should keep weakening as it heads farther out into energy-sapping cold waters.

Source — MSNBC

XIANGFEN, China - A landslide that unleashed a three-story wave of mud and iron ore waste at an illegal mining operation has killed at least 151 people and authorities fear the death toll could climb by hundreds more, state media said Thursday.

In a matter of minutes, the mud and waste on Monday inundated an entire village of and an outdoor market with hundreds of customers in Shanxi province’s Xiangfen county, the China Daily newspaper reported, citing witnesses.

State media put the official death toll at 151 people.

Authorities have declined to state a figure on the number of missing, saying an investigation is continuing. But news reports said hundreds may be buried in the mud.

“There’s almost no hope of their survival … they have been buried for three days under two meters (6 1/2 feet) of slush,” Wang Jun, head of the State Administration of Work Safety, said in the China Daily report.

Wang said there could be several hundred people buried under the sludge, according to the report.

But Huang Yi, a spokesman of the administration, later told The Associated Press that Wang had not commented on the possible number of people buried.

Calculating that number is made particularly difficult because most of the mine workers were migrants from elsewhere in Shanxi, or from Chongqing and central Hubei province.

Village inundated
One of the worst-hit areas was Yunhe, the village where the market was located. Yunhe sits in a valley at the foot of Tashan, the hill on which the iron ore mine was operating.

Yunhe’s 1,300 residents were mainly farmers of wheat, corn and other crops, but also supplemented their wages by providing transport to the nearby mines, according to a local government Web site’s official description of the place.

Most of the patrons of the outdoor market were migrant workers from the mine and residents of neighboring villages, with many buying food to prepare for the upcoming mid-autumn festival holiday, state media reported.

All that was left after the mudslide were a handful of two-story buildings that remained standing on the fringe of the sludge, which spanned an area the size of four football fields.

More than 2,000 police, firefighters and villagers were mobilized in the search for the missing, while police sealed off the village with checkpoints on all roads leading to it, blocking access to unauthorized vehicles.

Officers were still visiting various households in the area and interviewing residents for a final tally on the number of people missing or buried, state news broadcaster CCTV said in its midday bulletin.

A deadly history
A preliminary investigation showed the landslide was triggered by heavy rains that brought down a retaining wall at a waste dump operated by an illegal mine, said Wang Dexue, deputy head of the State Administration of Work Safety.

The wall’s collapse sent a wave of mud and iron waste over the town, located just below the waste site. Gray sludge also flooded the valley, washing out homes, cars, and buildings, including one where more than 100 people from a local mining company were holding a weekly meeting, the Shanghai Morning Post said.

The disaster underscores two major public safety concerns in China: the failure to enforce protective measures in the country’s notoriously deadly mines, and the unsound state of many of its bridges, dams and other aging infrastructure.

There are more than 9,000 mine waste dumps throughout China, and more than half of them operate without work safety permits, the CCTV report said.

Source — MSNBC

OCEANSIDE, California (AP) – An actor who appeared in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” has been arrested for investigation of attempted murder after his former girlfriend was stabbed more than 20 times, leaving her critically injured, authorities said Tuesday.

Shelley Malil, 43, was arrested Monday in Oceanside when he got off a train from Los Angeles, Lt. Phil Brust of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. Malil had come to Oceanside to meet his attorney, who along with family and friends had persuaded him to turn himself in, police said.

On Sunday night, about 15 miles east in San Marcos, deputies answering reports of screams for help and breaking glass found a woman with multiple stab wounds and cuts on her face.

She was listed in critical condition Monday morning, but authorities did not know her condition early Tuesday.

“Malil and the victim had apparently been in a dating relationship which recently ended,” the statement said.

Malil was arrested for investigation of attempted murder, mayhem and burglary, the statement said.

A deputy on duty early Tuesday did not know the name of Malil’s lawyer and attempts to identify a lawyer and reach him for comment were unsuccessful.

Malil played one of star Steve Carell’s co-workers in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” and has appeared in dozens of TV shows including “NYPD Blue” and “Scrubs.”

Source — CNN

(CNN) – Authorities told the father of a missing female Fort Bragg soldier that she is dead, the father told a Raleigh, North Carolina, television station Monday.

The women’s Marine husband and another Marine have been arrested in connection with the crime, authorities said.

Army 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc, 24, had been missing since a fire torched her apartment on July 10.

“It is with profound sadness that our family just received the news from authorities that our beloved daughter Holley is dead,” Wimunc’s father said in a statement released to CNN affiliate WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Since last Thursday’s shocking news about Holley’s burned apartment and her missing person status, our family through the country has nonetheless been holding on to a thin thread of hope that she would be found alive.”

A Fayetteville police official said that Marine Cpl. John Wimunc was arrested and charged with arson in connection with the case. Jail officials said another suspect, Lance Cpl. Kyle Alden, was also charged with arson in the case.

They have not been charged with the death of Wimunc.

Military officials said both men were stationed at Camp Lejeune, which is about two hours away from Wimunc’s Fayetteville home.

Wimunc and her husband were estranged and lived apart, Joe Lenczyk, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives resident agent-in-charge, said.

Wimunc is the second female soldier from Fort Bragg to die under suspicious circumstances in a month.

Spc. Megan Lynn Touma, 23, was seven months pregnant at the time of her death in June, authorities said. Investigators say they are treating that death as a homicide.

Camp Lejeune also has had a suspicious death of a female soldier this year. Twenty-year-old pregnant Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach’s charred body was found January in the back yard of another Marine stationed at the base.

That suspect, U.S. Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean, is being pursued by prosecutors.

Source — CNN

GEORGETOWN, Guyana - Authorities in Guyana said a first-class airline passenger was so angry at seeing economy passengers leave a jetliner before him that he yanked open an emergency hatch and slid down the chute.

Police say the Guyanese man appeared to be intoxicated after the Delta Airlines flight from New York. Local police arrested the man, but he was quickly released on bail after the Friday incident.

A spokesman for Delta says the carrier plans to file charges against the man for interfering with flight crew members.

Source — MSNBC