Washington, D.C.
U.S. to reopen 18 diplomatic missions after threat
WASHINGTON – Eighteen of the 19 U.S. embassies and consulates that were closed in the Middle East and Africa because of a terrorist threat will reopen today, the State Department says.
The U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, will remain closed. The U.S. Consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, which was closed Thursday because of what officials say was a separate credible threat, also was not scheduled to reopen.
In the statement Friday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki did not cite a reason for the decision to reopen the 18 missions. She cited “ongoing concerns about a threat stream indicating the potential for terrorist attacks emanating from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula,” or AQAP, for keeping the embassy in Sanaa closed.
“We will continue to evaluate the threats to Sanaa and Lahore and make subsequent decisions about the reopening of those facilities based on that information,” Psaki said.
Connecticut
Pilot in deadly wreck survived earlier crash
HARTFORD, Conn. – The plane accident that killed four people in a Connecticut neighborhood was not the first crash for the pilot, a former Microsoft executive who was taking his teenage son on a tour of East Coast colleges.
The pilot, Bill Henningsgaard, was killed along with his son, Maxwell, and two children who were in a house struck by the small propeller-driven plane on Friday. Four bodies were recovered from the wreckage and sent to the Connecticut medical examiner’s office for identification.
Henningsgaard, a highly regarded philanthropist, was flying a small plane to Seattle in 2009 with his mother when the engine quit. He crash-landed on Washington’s Columbia River.
East Haven police on Saturday released the names of the crash victims, including Henningsgaard, 54, of Medina, Wash.; his 17-year-old son; 13-year-old Sade Brantley and 1-year-old Madisyn Mitchell, who lived in the East Haven home hit by the plane.
South Carolina
Authorities issue warrant in adoption case
CHARLESTON, S.C. – The father of a Cherokee Indian girl at the center of an adoption dispute that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court faces arrest because he hasn’t turned over his 3-year-old daughter to the South Carolina adoptive parents as ordered by a family court this week.
Dusten Brown faces a charge of custodial interference, according to a statement from the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office on Saturday.
Cherokee Nation spokeswoman Amanda Clinton called the action “morally reprehensible” and “legally questionable.”
Brown, who is Cherokee, is training with the National Guard in Iowa. The sheriff’s office said he is expected to turn himself in to military authorities today when he returns for duty. The statement said extradition proceedings will begin when he is taken into custody.
California
Popular singer Eydie Gorme dies at 84
LOS ANGELES – Eydie Gorme, a popular nightclub and television singer as a solo act and as a team with her husband, Steve Lawrence, has died. She was 84.
Gorme, who also had a huge solo hit in 1963 with “Blame it on the Bossa Nova,” died Saturday at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas after a brief, undisclosed illness, said her publicist, Howard Bragman.
Gorme was a successful band singer and nightclub entertainer when she was invited to join the cast of Steve Allen’s local New York television show in 1953.
She sang solos and also did duets and comedy skits with Lawrence, a rising young singer who had joined the show a year earlier. When the program became NBC’s “Tonight Show” in 1954, the young couple went with it.
They married in Las Vegas in 1957 and later performed for audiences there.
Utah
Beauty queen charged with possessing bombs
SALT LAKE CITY – Prosecutors filed charges of bomb possession Friday against a recently crowned Utah beauty pageant winner.
Kendra McKenzie Gill was arrested last weekend with three accomplices for what one described as a prank. All four face the same set of four felony charges, prosecutor Blake Nakamura said Friday.
The 18-year-olds were arrested Aug. 3 after driving around neighborhoods and allegedly tossing plastic bottles filled with caustic chemicals at people they knew. Nobody was injured.
Felony bomb possession is punishable by 1 to 15 years in prison.
Gill was crowned Miss Riverton, topping a slate of nine beauty contestants earlier this summer in the Salt Lake City suburb. She showed off years of piano training with a Scott Joplin number and took home a $2,000 scholarship.
Associated Press
