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Miami, Florida -- A South Florida woman claims a security guard forced her to exit the Metrorail last month for refusing to stop singing religious hymns.
The incident involving 82-year-old Emma Anderson and the guard occurred Feb. 20 at the Brickell Metrorail station, was caught on cell phone video. The footage shows the guard approaching Anderson, who was singing loudly on a corner seat and tapping her thigh with a rolled-up piece of paper to keep time with the music.
The guard asked Anderson several times to stop singing before grabbing her cart and escorting her off the train. "You're getting off here, let's go," the guard is heard telling Anderson, who was heading to the Brownsville station.
"It was not right for them to drag her off the train," said Donal Anderson, the rider's son, "Not by the way I've seen in the video." As the footage shows, a tug of war between the devout woman and the guard ensued after he grabbed her bag.
Anderson's efforts were no match for the guard's strength as she was dragged toward the exit. It was at this point, once the guard had forced Anderson off the train and onto the platform, that she fell down.
© Reuters
"George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, told NBC News that 'concerns brought up in the Madigan matter will be addressed' in a separate forthcoming report by the Army's Task Force on Behavioral Health," reports NBC News's Rebecca Ruiz. ("Madigan" is the Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington.) According the same report, three Seattle-based news agencies have been denied Freedom of Information Act requests on the inquiry.
That's troubling because the Madigan inquiry was an internal probe into whether forensic psychiatrists at Madigan Army Medical Center were reversing PTSD diagnoses to save the federal government money. This group of forensic psychiatrists had reversed more than 300 diagnoses, suggesting these were more than just cautious second opinions. The evidence:
The operation against the Mafia money laundering scheme
A British man, said to be involved with the republican terrorist organisation, is being sought by detectives investigating the £390m fraud which was based around a development on the beautiful coast of Calabria in Southern Italy.
Italian authorities arrested 16 people in dawn raids and issued a warrant for the arrest of Henry James Fitzsimons, 63, from Belfast, saying he was "a subject considered by the British authorities to be close to the IRA, the Irish terrorist organisation."
Nicola Gratteri, a veteran anti-mafia prosecutor based in the southern port city of Reggio Calabria, described Mr Fitzsimons as someone "delegated by the IRA to recycle the proceeds of terrorist activities and to reinvest the financial resources of the movement."
The wanted man is understood to be the same person as Henry James Fitzsimmons, now 63, who once served 15 years in jail for an attack on a Belfast hotel.
He was jailed in 1973 for blowing up the Woodburn House Hotel in Suffolk, Belfast in November 1971 when he was described as "one of the most active officers in the Provisional IRA during their 1971 bombing campaign."
© Lindsey Parnaby/PAHugo Chávez died of a heart attack after great suffering, the general said.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez died of a massive heart attack after great suffering and inaudibly mouthed his desire to live, the head of the country's presidential guard said.
"He couldn't speak but he said it with his lips ... 'I don't want to die. Please don't let me die,' because he loved his country, he sacrificed himself for his country," General Jose Ornella said.
The general said he had spent the past two years with Chávez, including his final moments, as Venezuela's president of 14 years battled an unspecified cancer in the pelvic region.
Ornella spoke to Associated Press outside the military academy where Chávez's body lay in state. He said Chávez's cancer was very advanced. He did not respond when asked if the cancer had spread to Chávez's lungs.
The government announced on the eve of Chávez's death that he had suffered a severe respiratory infection, the second since he underwent his fourth cancer surgery in Cuba on 11 December.
© SHAWN HEINRICHS FOR THE PEW ENVIRONMENT GROUPShark fins drying in the sun in Kaohsiung before processing. 30 percent of the world’s shark species are threatened or near threatened with extinction.
"Our analysis shows that about one in 15 sharks gets killed by fisheries every year," study leader Boris Worm, a professor of biology at Canada's Dalhousie University, said in a statement. "With an increasing demand for their fins, sharks are more vulnerable today than ever before."
Based on available data for shark deaths and estimates of unreported illegal catches, the researchers estimated that 100 million sharks were killed in 2000 and 97 million in 2010. But since scientists lack sufficient data on shark catches, they say the real number of annual shark deaths could possibly be between 63 million and 273 million.
Sharks are fished for their meat, liver oil, cartilage and valuable fins, which are hacked off, often from live sharks, to be used in shark fin soup, an ancient and prized delicacy in East Asia. Since sharks have slow growth and reproductive rates, it can be tough for their populations to bounce back from big losses.
© Dar Yasin/APIndian women protest in New Delhi after the gang rape and murder of a student in December.
Two women are reported to have been raped by multiple attackers in moving cars in separate incidents in recent days. A third woman was robbed and then raped by two men after taking a motorised rickshaw in the satellite city of Ghaziabad at the weekend.
Four victims under 18 were also assaulted in incidents reported to the police over the past four days, according to local media. Only a fraction of such attacks are ever reported in India.
The gang rape and murder in December shocked the nation. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in India calling for widespread legal and policing reforms as well as a wholesale shift in cultural attitudes towards women.
A series of measures - such as fast-track courts for sex crimes, harsher punishments for convicted offenders and gender training for policemen - have been introduced since the attack by authorities. The government was heavily criticised for its early lack of sympathy for protesters.
Lisa Epsteen, 35, and her husband, Rick, 35, are expecting their fifth child. They already have a daughter and three sons, ages 10, 8, 5, 2. Lisa received an email from her USF doctor Wednesday threatening to have police bring her to the hospital for a caesarean. Courtesy of Epsteen family.
But Wednesday morning, she opened her email to find the well-known expert threatening to send police to her Spring Hill home unless she immediately reported to Tampa General Hospital for a caesarean delivery.
Epsteen, 35, was more than a week past the due date for her baby boy. Despite an ultrasound that alarmed her doctors, she wanted to wait until Friday to schedule the caesarean surgery, which would be her fifth.
"I am deeply concerned that you are contributing to a very high probability that your fetus will die or your child will incur brain damage if born alive. At this time, you must come in for delivery," Yankowitz wrote.
"I would hate to move to the most extreme option, which is having law enforcement pick you up at your home and bring you in, but you are leaving the providers of USF/TGH no choice," he continued.
Epsteen said she panicked.
© Photo: KFSN-TV/APCous Cous in 2012 at Cat Haven, a 100-acre refuge in the Sierra Nevada foothills with about two dozen large cats from four continents.
An African lion killed a 26-year-old female intern who entered his enclosure Wednesday at a California sanctuary for rare big cats, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office said.
A deputy shot and killed the 4-year-old male lion after he attacked the woman about 12:30 p.m. PT at Project Survival's Cat Haven in Dunlap, 45 miles east of Fresno.
The sanctuary's founder, Dale Anderson, described the victim as an intern-volunteer but did not identify her. An autopsy will be conducted Thursday.
The lion, named Cous Cous, had been at the preserve since he was 8 weeks old, said Project Survival spokeswoman Tanya Osegueda.
A sheriff's sergeant told the Associated Press that only one other worker was around at the time of the mauling. The non-profit preserve is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays between Oct. 1 and April 30.
Investigators are trying to determine why the woman entered the lion's space.
Two days past 18
He was waiting for the bus in his Army green ...
Those are the first two lines from one of the most powerful songs I have ever heard, . If you don't know it, I encourage you to look it up -- unless you're one of those folks who still hates the group that made the song popular, in which case, its beauty might be lost on you.
It was 10 years ago this week -- as the country was barreling toward war with Iraq -- that Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, stood in front of a packed house in London and said:
"Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."It didn't matter that the evidence to invade Iraq was questionable or that Maines later apologized. The damage was done, and one of the most popular acts in the country became its most hated. Its music was banned from radio, CDs were trashed by bulldozers, and one band member's home was vandalized. Maines introduced "Soldier" with a call for peace, but she would soon find that the group needed metal detectors installed at entrances to shows on its stateside tour because of death threats.
It was a classic case of freedom of speech meeting the irrational repercussions of that speech. "Soldier" is not only their last No. 1, it's still their last single to chart in the top 30. Officially, they've been on hiatus since 2006, but Maines, who is planning on releasing a solo CD in May, recently said, "I just don't feel like it's the Dixie Chicks' time."
A woman says she owes her life to a pod of dolphins after slipping off a cliff and into the sea while trying to rescue her dog.
She says she thought she was going to die before the dolphins nudged her and her dog to safety.
Karyn Gitsham walks her dogs Buddy and Ramsay along the beach at Carrickalinga, on South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula, every morning.
Four-year-old Cocker Spaniel Ramsay often runs into the water chasing seagulls, but this morning he got into trouble when he couldn't swim back.
Ms Gitsham says she climbed up the cliff face to follow the distressed pooch from the shore when the unthinkable happened.
"I just remember falling and I'm in the water and the waves were just pounding me up against the rocks and I could see him out there trying to get back in," Ms Gitsham told 7News.
It was then that her unlikely saviours came to the rescue.
