By wire sources
Photo leads police to bank robbery arrest
SPOKANE, Wash. — Armed with a good surveillance photo and a little help from the neighbors, police in Spokane, Wash., made an arrest in a downtown bank robbery less than an hour after the crime.
Police arrested 49-year-old David Thometz across the street from the Washington Trust Bank branch — in his room at a hotel.
After the Friday-morning robbery, police started showing a surveillance photo of the robber to people in the area. Those nearby pointed them to the hotel.
Records show Thometz was convicted of robbing a Sterling Savings Bank branch in downtown Spokane several years ago.
Mandela, 93, hospitalized with stomach ailment
JOHANNESBURG — Former South African President Nelson Mandela was hospitalized for a test to determine what is behind an undisclosed stomach ailment, and the country’s current leader said the much beloved 93-year-old icon was in no danger.
Mandela, a Nobel peace laureate who spent 27 years in prison for fighting racist white rule, has officially retired and last appeared in public in July 2010. He became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 and served one five-year term.
Mandela “has had a long-standing abdominal complaint and doctors feel it needs proper specialist medical attention,” President Jacob Zuma said in a statement Saturday morning, asking that Mandela’s privacy be respected.
Zuma said Mandela was expected to be discharged from the hospital today or Monday.
Car bomb kills 25 after Yemen presidential inauguration
SANA, Yemen — The inauguration of Yemen’s president was barely over Saturday when a car bomb exploded at a presidential palace, killing at least 25 people and highlighting the dangers the new leader faces in trying to bring stability to the long-troubled Arabian Peninsula.
The brazen attack was a taunting welcome to President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, who was sworn in to end the 33-year despotic rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The country’s rising chaos took another twist when Saleh, who had been undergoing medical treatment in the U.S., returned home before Hadi addressed the nation. Saleh’s reappearance and the palace bloodshed indicated tribal and political unrest that has gripped Yemen for more than a year will probably not be calmed by the election of a new president.
Shortly after Hadi vowed in his televised speech to the parliament to defeat an emboldened al-Qaida network, a suicide bomber raced toward a palace in the southern town of Mukalla, more than 300 miles west of the capital, Sana, where Hadi was inaugurated. No one claimed immediate responsibility for the blast, but a security official said it bore the imprints of al-Qaida.
Pakistan begins demolishing bin Laden compound
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani authorities late Saturday began demolishing the house where Osama bin Laden had lived in a town in the north of the country, local residents said, in a move that will remove the physical symbol of the al-Qaida leader’s presence in the country.
The destruction of the home in Abbottabad, which began suddenly after darkness fell Saturday night, could help Pakistan bury the bin Laden issue, which caused the country acute embarrassment after a U.S. special forces squad found and killed him at the site in May 2011.
Residents said heavy machinery, including bulldozing equipment and searchlights, was moved in and the area cordoned off by police.
By wire sources