Stolen passports probed in plane mystery
PATTAYA, Thailand – Authorities questioned travel agents Monday at a beach resort in Thailand about two men who boarded the vanished Malaysia Airlines plane with stolen passports, part of a growing international investigation into what they were doing on the flight.
Nearly three days after the Boeing 777 with 239 people on board disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, no debris has been seen in Southeast Asian waters.
Five passengers who checked in for Flight MH370 didn’t board the plane, and their luggage was removed from it, Malaysian authorities said. Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said this also was being investigated, but he didn’t say whether this was suspicious.
The search effort, involving at least 34 aircraft and 40 ships from several countries, was being widened to a 100-nautical mile radius from the point the plane vanished from radar screens between Malaysia and Vietnam early Saturday with no distress signal.
Pistorius vomits during graphic testimony
PRETORIA, South Africa – Hunched over, vomiting into a bucket by his feet and retching loudly, Oscar Pistorius was vividly reminded at his murder trial Monday of the gruesome injuries he inflicted on his girlfriend when a pathologist described how the Olympian fatally shot her multiple times with bullets designed to cause maximum damage.
The testimony by Prof. Gert Saayman, who performed the autopsy on Reeva Steenkamp’s body, was so graphic that it was not broadcast or reported live on social media by journalists under an order from Judge Thokozile Masipa.
Saayman methodically listed the extent of the three main gunshot wounds Steenkamp suffered on Valentine’s Day last year when she was shot by the double-amputee runner in the right side of the head, the right hip and the right arm through a toilet cubicle door.
The pathologist said Steenkamp, 29, was hit by special Black Talon bullets and that the head shot from Pistorius’ 9 mm pistol was probably almost instantly fatal, causing brain damage and multiple fractures to her skull.
Health reform cited as uninsured rate drops
WASHINGTON – The share of Americans without health insurance is dropping to the lowest levels since President Barack Obama took office, but sign-ups under his health-care law lag among Hispanics – a big pool of potential beneficiaries.
With just three weeks left to enroll on the new insurance exchanges, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, finds that 15.9 percent of U.S. adults are uninsured thus far in 2014, down from 17.1 percent for the last three months – or calendar quarter– of 2013.
Released Monday, the survey based on more than 28,000 interviews is a major independent effort to track the health-care rollout. The drop of 1.2 percentage points in the uninsured rate translates to about 3 million people gaining coverage.
Gallup said the proportion of Americans who are uninsured is on track to drop to the lowest quarterly level it measured since 2008, before Obama took office.
Senate OKs bill to combat military sex assault
WASHINGTON – The Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill late Monday making big changes in the military justice system to deal with sexual assault, including scrapping the nearly century-old practice of using a “good soldier defense” to raise doubts that a crime has been committed.
On a vote of 97-0, the Senate rallied behind a bipartisan plan crafted by three female senators – Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Republicans Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Deb Fischer of Nebraska – that would impose a half-dozen changes to combat the pervasive problem of rape and sexual offenses that Pentagon leaders have likened to a cancer within the ranks.
“Unanimous agreement in the U.S. Senate is pretty rare – but rarer still is the kind of sweeping, historic change we’ve achieved over the past year in the military justice system,” McCaskill said after the vote.
Associated Press
