2 dead, 5 missing in Ala. boat mishap

DAUPHIN ISLAND, Ala. – Coast Guard crews searched for five people missing Sunday after recovering two bodies following a powerful weekend storm that capsized several sailboats competing in a regatta near Mobile Bay.

One body was discovered after Saturday’s storm and another Sunday morning, said Major Steve Thompson, director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety’s Marine Patrol Division.

Authorities said crews used boats and planes to search the Alabama waters, including areas near Dauphin Island where anxious family members have gathered at a Coast Guard station awaiting updates. Red Cross volunteers and an ambulance also were at the site.

Names of the missing and deceased were not immediately released Sunday. One person was rescued Saturday evening.

Family, friends mourn Baltimore man

BALTIMORE – A night of violence gave way to a day of mourning Sunday for a man who died after sustaining serious injuries while in the custody of Baltimore police.

Pastor Jamal Bryant told the congregation at Empowerment Temple AME Church that “somebody is going to have to pay” for the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died a week after an encounter with police left him with serious injuries.

Bryant told churchgoers, almost all of them black, that if “you’re black in America, your life is always under threat.” He also addressed the violence that erupted Saturday night during what began as a peaceful demonstration attended by more than a thousand people.

Some 34 people were arrested, according to Baltimore Police Department, and six police officers sustained minor injuries. After services were over, Bryant, whose church will pay for Gray’s funeral, met with the family. He said after the meeting that they are “holding on” and that they don’t want violence.

NBC: Williams often embellished

A months-long internal investigation of Brian Williams by NBC News has turned up 11 instances in which the anchorman publicly embellished details of his reporting exploits, according to a person familiar with details of the probe.

NBC undertook the examination of Williams’ statement after he apologized in early February for saying on “NBC Nightly News” that a military helicopter in which he was traveling at the start of the Iraq War had been damaged by rocket fire. His account was challenged by soldiers who were on the flight, leading to a furor that prompted NBC to suspend Williams for six months without pay and to investigate other statements he’s made.

The Iraq claim was one of the 11 suspect statements that a team of NBC News journalists has identified during the inquiry, said an individual, who asked not to be identified.

The investigators, led by NBC News senior executive producer Richard Esposito, have also raised doubts about Williams’ comments about his experiences covering Israel’s military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. In an interview with a student-run television station at Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2007, Williams said he saw rockets passing “just beneath” the Israel helicopter in which he was traveling. But Williams gave a less harrowing account of the same trip in an NBC News blog a year earlier.

34 reported dead in Syrian air raid

BEIRUT – Syrian government aircraft pounded opposition-held areas in the country’s northwest on Sunday, killing at least 34 in one strike on a town near the Turkish border, activists said.

The air raid on Darkoush was the deadliest of dozens launched across Syria’s Idlib province, where an opposition offensive has left government forces in the area reeling. President Bashar Assad’s troops have been unable to wrest back any of the ground lost, despite talk of a counteroffensive.

The Syrian military has been relying heavily on its airpower to try to stanch the opposition campaign, which captured the provincial capital, Idlib city, last month and the strategic town of Jisr al-Shughour on Saturday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordinating Committees activist collective both reported the air raids Sunday on Darkoush, which is located 1 mile from the Turkish frontier. They said 34 people were killed.

Associated Press & The Washington Post