Connecticut school shooting...[ 3019 ]

Photos: Connecticut school shooting

CNN /16 Dec  2012

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Firefighters attach black bunting to a fire truck as a memorial at the fire station down the street from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Saturday, December 15. A gunman killed 26 people at the school, including 20 children, before taking his own life on Friday.
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Connecticut school shooting...[ 3018 ]

Connecticut school shooting: Heroes emerge in aftermath of tragedy

Published 1 hours, 17 minutes ago// The Star.com

ROBERT MACPHERSON/AFP/Getty Images Mary Ann Jacob, a library clerk at Sandy Hook, tells reporters how she calmed down 18 crying and confused fourth-graders squeezed into a storage room a lie for the sake of survival. "We told them it was a drill, so they knew what to do," she said. 

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Laura Kane
Staff Reporter

Amid the horror of the Newtown elementary school massacre, stories of heroism are emerging.
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Victoria Soto, 27, teacher
The young teacher died trying to protect her Grade 1 students.
“In our eyes, she’s a hero,” her cousin Jim Wiltsie told ABC News. She reportedly hid students in a closet and cabinets before telling the gunman the children were in the gym.
“She was trying to shield, getting her children into a closet and protect them from harm. And by doing that put herself between the gunman and the children and that is when she was tragically shot and killed.”
Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal, and Mary Sherlach, 56, psychologist
Hochsprung and Sherlach were in a meeting with school therapist Diane Day when they heard gunshots. The two women leapt out of their seats and ran toward the shooter, recalled Day.
“They didn’t think twice about confronting or seeing what was going on,” she said. Both were shot and killed as they lunged towards the gunman.
Hochsprung charged the gunman “in order to protect her students,” said superintendent Janet Robinson.
According to a friend of Sherlach’s husband, she had been preparing to retire at the end of the year.
Kaitlin Roig, 29, teacher
Kaitlin Roig, a Grade 4 teacher, protected her students by barricading them in the class bathroom.
She helped some climb onto the toilet so they could all fit and pushed a storage unit in front of the door.
“I don’t know if (the gunman) came in the room … I just told them we have to be absolutely quiet,” she told ABC News. “If they started crying, I would take their face and say it’s going to be OK. Show me your smile.”
Maryrose Kristopik, music teacher
Maryrose Kristopik, a music teacher for all grade levels, barricaded herself and 20 students in a closet. She used instruments like xylophones to block the door, according to a report in the Daily Mail.
“I told them that I loved them. I said there was a bad person in the school. I didn’t want to tell them anything past that,” she said.
The group said a prayer at the suggestion of a student and remained safely in the closet until exiting together a short time later. “I did what any other teacher would have done,” Kristopik said.
Abbey Clements, library clerk
The gunshots reverberating outside the library sounded as though the chairs set up for a school concert were falling over, recalled Clements. But a glance out the door revealed the horror unfolding.
“When I poked my head out the door and saw the custodian running to the front of the building I realized they were shots,” she told a reporter from The Independent. 
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She and two teachers grabbed two children from the hall and pulled them into the room. “We went into lockdown, which meant that I ran to get the keys and told the kids to sit in the place where we practised for emergencies.
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It turned out that locking the door — part of the lockdown procedure — had an inherent risk: the door could only be locked from the outside. For a “scary” moment she had to reopen the door and stick her hand back out to lock it.
With files from Star wire services

The first Apollo 17...[ 3017 ]

Driving on the Moon

Forty years ago today on Dec. 11, 1972, astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, commander, makes a short checkout of the lunar rover during the early part of the first Apollo 17 extravehicular activity at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. This view of the "stripped down" rover is prior to loading up. Equipment later loaded onto the rover included the ground-controlled television assembly, the lunar communications relay unit, hi-gain antenna, low-gain antenna, aft tool pallet, lunar tools and scientific gear.

This photograph was taken by scientist-astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, lunar module pilot. The mountain in the right background is the east end of South Massif. While astronauts Cernan and Schmitt descended in the Lunar Module "Challenger" to explore the moon, astronaut Ronald E. Evans, command module pilot, remained with the Command and Service Modules "America" in lunar orbit.

Image Credit: NASA

Nobel Peace Prize to EU...[ 3016 ]

European Union officials accept Nobel Peace Prize at Oslo ceremony

 

Published on Dec 10, 2012

 

Hailing the European Union as "the most dramatic example in history that shows that war and conflict can be turned into peace and cooperation," Nobel committee chairman Thorborn Jagland presented the Nobel Peace Prize to top EU officials at a ceremony Monday in Oslo.

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This year's prize comes against a backdrop of protests as the debt crisis for countries using the euro currency triggers tensions within the union, causing soaring unemployment and requiring massive austerity measures.

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The EU's institutions, and the member countries, have been criticized for reacting too slowly to the crisis, which has continued for three years. The EU, and the 17 members that use the euro in particular, have struggled over too much government debt that has resulted in the eurozone's economy being mired in recession.

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Three Peace Prize laureates — South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Adolfo Perez Esquivel from Argentina — have demanded that the prize money of $1.2 million not be paid this year. They said the bloc contradicts the values associated with the prize because it relies on military force to ensure security.

 

U.S. denies reports of captured drone...[ 3015 ]

U.S. denies Iran's reports of captured drone

Related News

• U.S. Navy says has not lost drone over Gulf
  10:01am EST

By Yeganeh Torbati and Daniel Fineren

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DUBAI | Tue Dec 4, 2012 10:01am EST
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(Reuters) - Iran said on Tuesday it had captured a U.S. intelligence drone in its airspace over the Gulf in the last few days, but the U.S. military quickly denied having lost any unmanned aircraft in the Middle East.
The incident highlighted tensions in the Gulf as the Islamic Republic and the United States demonstrate their military capabilities in the vital oil exporting region in a standoff over Iran's disputed nuclear program.
Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz - through which about 40 percent of the world's seaborne crude oil is shipped - if it comes under attack. U.S. commanders have said they will not let that happen.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said on its website that the ScanEagle drone had been flying over the Gulf in the last few days and was "captured" when it strayed into Iranian airspace.
A spokesman for U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain said no U.S. drone had gone missing in the region recently.
"The U.S. Navy has fully accounted for all unmanned air vehicles (UAV) operating in the Middle East region. Our operations in the Gulf are confined to internationally recognized water and air space," Commander Jason Salata said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Iran had warned the U.S. over its violations and the drone was evidence of American incursions which it would use it to pursue its complaint "via international bodies", IRIB News reported.
The IRGC statement did not specify when or where the drone was caught, or whether the unmanned spy plane was shot down or crashed. But it released what it said was video of an apparently undamaged ScanEagle being examined by uniformed officers beneath a sign reading "We shall trample on the U.S." in English.
The incident is the latest in a string of complaints by Iran over what it says are U.S. violations of its territory in an often clandestine conflict over Tehran's nuclear program that has featured assassinations, espionage and cyber sabotage.
The ScanEagle is a 4-ft (1.25-metre) long "off the shelf" spy plane manufactured by U.S.-based Boeing. The company also supplies and operates drones for customers in several Middle Eastern countries, including to help ensure oil platform security in the Gulf, according to its website.
Iran and OPEC rival Saudi Arabia have also accused each other of violating each other's territory near oil and gas fields in the Gulf over the past year.
VIOLATIONS
In November, the United States said Iranian warplanes shot at a U.S. surveillance drone flying in international airspace. Iran said the aircraft had entered its airspace to spy on Iranian oil platforms and said it would respond "decisively" to any incursions.
Days later Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, wrote to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to complain about alleged repeated U.S. violations of Iranian airspace, describing them as "illegal and provocative acts".
Khazaee said that U.S. craft had entered southern Iran seven times in October around Bushehr where Iran's only nuclear power station is situated.
A year ago to the day, Iranian forces announced they had captured a U.S. RQ-170 reconnaissance drone in eastern Iran which was reported lost by U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan.
Iranian commanders have since announced they have extracted valuable technology from the aircraft and were in the process of reverse-engineering it for their own defense industry.
The United States and its allies believe Tehran is trying to develop nuclear weapons and have imposed tough economic and financial sanctions. Iran says its program is purely peaceful.
Israel has threatened to bomb Iranian nuclear sites if diplomacy and sanctions fail to stop its nuclear activities. In October, Israel shot down an Iranian-made drone launched into the Jewish state by Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah.
According to Boeing's publicity material, the ScanEagle drone can be launched by a catapult from mobile vehicles or small ships, making it independent of runways.
It can fly pre-programmed or operator-run missions guided by the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) and its onboard flight control system.
It is retrieved using a "Skyhook" system in which the drone catches a rope hanging from a 50-ft (16-metre) high pole.
(Writing by Marcus George and Daniel Fineren; Editing by Anna Willard and Paul Taylor)