By wire sources
Police use tear gas on Occupy Oakland protesters
OAKLAND, Calif. — Oakland police used tear gas and “flash” grenades Saturday to break up hundreds of Occupy protesters after some demonstrators started throwing rocks and flares at officers and tearing down fencing.
Three officers were hurt and 19 people were arrested, the Oakland Police Department said. No details on the officers’ injuries were released.
The protest continued into Saturday evening; a large police contingent monitored the situation, but there were no additional clashes.
Police said the group started assembling at a downtown plaza Saturday morning, with demonstrators threatening to take over the vacant Henry Kaiser Convention Center. The group then marched through the streets, disrupting traffic.
The crowd grew as the day wore on, with afternoon estimates ranging from about 1,000 to 2,000 people.
The protesters walked to the vacant convention center, where some started tearing down perimeter fencing and “destroying construction equipment” shortly before 3 p.m., police said.
Police said they issued a dispersal order and used smoke and tear gas after some protesters pelted them with bottles, rocks, burning flares and other objects.
Most of the arrests were made when protesters ignored orders to leave and assaulted officers, police said. By 4 p.m., the bulk of the crowd had left the convention center and headed back downtown.
Students find man stuck for days in Rio Grande mud
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A homeless man who told authorities he was stuck in the mud at the Rio Grande river in New Mexico for three days has been rescued after a group of high school students heard him yelling for help.
An Albuquerque Fire Department spokesman said the students and their biology teacher heard the man yelling from a marshy wetlands area Saturday morning.
It took swift-water and technical rescue teams about two hours to pull the unidentified man to safety.
The man told the students he’d spent three days stuck in the mud about two miles north of Interstate 40 in Albuquerque.
Police identified the man as Clayton Senn, a transient who’d been living near the river.
Police said they had a warrant for Senn’s arrest for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He was taken to an Albuquerque hospital for treatment and was to be booked on the warrant upon his release.
Yemen president in U.S. for treatment
NEW YORK — The embattled president of Yemen arrived Saturday in the United States for medical treatment for burns he suffered during an assassination attempt in June.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh arrived at an unspecified location in the United States, according to the country’s foreign press office. His journey had taken him from Oman, through London.
The one-line Yemeni statement said Saleh was in the U.S. for a “short-term private medical visit.” His staff has said he is in the United States to be treated for injuries suffered during the assassination attempt. He was burned over much of his body and had shards of wood embedded into his chest by the explosion that ripped through his palace mosque as he prayed.
After months of unrest, Saleh agreed in November to end his 33-year-rule of the Arabian state.
His trip to the U.S. comes as Yemen, a key counterterrorism partner, prepares for an election on Feb. 21 to select his successor.
Rough seas stall removal of cruise ship’s fuel
GIGLIO, Italy— Rough seas off Italy’s Tuscan coast forced a delay in the planned Saturday start of the operation to remove a half-million gallons of fuel from the grounded Costa Concordia, and officials said pumping may now not begin until midweek.
Recovery operations continued, however, and on Saturday yielded a 17th body: The woman who wasn’t wearing a life jacket was found by divers on the submerged sixth floor deck, civil protection officials said.
The Concordia ran aground on Jan. 13 off the port of the island of Giglio port after the captain deviated from his planned route and gashed the hull of the ship on a reef. Some 4,200 passengers and crew endured a panicked evacuation after the abandon ship alarm didn’t sound until the ship had capsized so much that some life boats couldn’t be lowered.
Some 16 people remain unaccounted for and are presumed dead.
News Corp. workers arrested as bribery probe spreads to The Sun
LONDON — Four current and former employees of News Corp.’s tabloid The Sun were arrested Saturday on bribery allegations as a year-long police investigation spread to Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper.
Officers searched company offices and made the arrests with the help of a News Corp. committee set up to assist Operation Elveden, a probe into inappropriate payments to police, the company said in a statement. The arrests were the result of News Corp. “proactively” providing information to a British bribery investigation, the media company said.
The arrests were made one day after James Murdoch, News Corp.’s deputy chief operating officer, indicated he’s preparing to move to the company’s headquarters in New York, a plan that was delayed last year by the bribery and phone-hacking scandal. More than 20 people have been arrested and no one has been charged.
The four arrested employees are The Sun’s head of news Chris Pharo, crime editor Mike Sullivan, former deputy editor Fergus Shanahan and former managing editor Graham Dudman, according to two people familiar with the matter, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public.
By wire sources