World Nation Briefs April 22, 2013
Parents of Boston suspect say he traveled to Russia
MAKHACHKALA, Russia - The parents of Tamerlan Tsarnaev insisted on Sunday that he came to Dagestan and Chechnya last year to visit relatives and had nothing to do with the militants operating in this volatile part of Russia. But the Boston bombing suspect could not have been immune to the attacks that savaged the region during his six-month stay.
Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, are accused of setting off the two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 that killed three people and wounding more than 180 others.
Three days later, investigators say they killed a university police officer, carjacked a man and led police on a chase that resulted in a shootout that left Tamerlan Tsarnaev dead. His younger brother escaped, but was captured the next day, alive but badly wounded.
When the two ethnic Chechen suspects were identified, the FBI said it reviewed its records and found that in early 2011, a foreign government - which law enforcement officials confirmed was Russia - had asked for information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The FBI said it was told that Tsarnaev was a "follower of radical Islam" and was preparing to travel to this foreign country to join unspecified underground groups.
The FBI said that it responded by interviewing Tsarnaev and family members, but found no terrorism activity.
Rescuers push into remote Chinese villages
LUSHAN, China - Luo Shiqiang sat near chunks of concrete, bricks and a ripped orange sofa and told how his grandfather was just returning from feeding chickens when their house collapsed and crushed him to death in this weekend's powerful earthquake in southwestern China.
"We lost everything in such a short time," the 20-year-old college student said Sunday. He said his cousin also was injured in the collapse, but that other members of his family were spared because they were out working in the fields of hard-hit Longmen village in Lushan county.
Saturday's earthquake in Sichuan province killed at least 186 people, injured more than 11,000 and left nearly two dozen missing, mostly in the rural communities around Ya'an city, along the same fault line where a devastating quake to the north killed more than 90,000 people in Sichuan and neighboring areas five years ago in one of China's worst natural disasters.
The Lushan and Baoxing counties hardest-hit on Saturday had escaped the worst of the damage in the 2008 quake, and residents there said they benefited little from the region's rebuilding after the disaster, with no special reinforcements made or new evacuation procedures introduced in their remote communities.
Air traffic controllers furloughs kick in
Commercial airline flights moved smoothly throughout most of the country on Sunday, the first day air traffic controllers were subject to furloughs resulting from government spending cuts, though some delays appeared in the late evening in and around New York. And even though the nightmarish flight delays and cancellations that the airline industry predicted would result from the furloughs did not materialize yet, the real test will come today, when traffic ramps up.
Information from the FAA and others showed that flying Sunday was largely uneventful, with most flights on time. There were delays in parts of Florida, but those were caused by thunderstorms.
Mark Duell at the flight tracking website FlightAware said that John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York indicated delays due to lower staffing starting late Sunday evening. JFK averaged 70-minute delays for inbound flights, but no detectable departure delays. LaGuardia averaged 74-minute delays for inbound flights, and departure delays of 37 minutes.
- The Associated Press