Boston gangster killed in prison
BOSTON — James (Whitey) Bulger, the murderous Boston gangster who benefited from a corrupt relationship with the FBI before spending 16 years as one of America’s most wanted men, was slain in federal prison. He was 89.
Bulger was found unresponsive Tuesday morning at the U.S. penitentiary in West Virginia, where he’d just been transferred, and a medical examiner declared him dead shortly afterward, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Authorities did not immediately release a cause of death, but Justin Tarovisky, a prison union official, told The Associated Press it was being investigated as a homicide.
Bulger, the model for Jack Nicholson’s ruthless crime boss in the 2006 Martin Scorsese movie, “The Departed,” led a largely Irish mob that ran loan-sharking, gambling and drug rackets. He also was an FBI informant who ratted on the New England mob, his gang’s main rival, in an era when bringing down the Mafia was a top national priority for the FBI.
Space telescope declared dead
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary.
Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday.
Already well past its expected lifetime, the 9 1/2-year-old Kepler had been running low on fuel for months. Its ability to point at distant stars and identify possible alien worlds worsened dramatically at the beginning of October, but flight controllers still managed to retrieve its latest observations. The telescope has now gone silent, its fuel tank empty.
“Kepler opened the gate for mankind’s exploration of the cosmos,” said retired NASA scientist William Borucki, who led the original Kepler science team.
Kepler discovered 2,681 planets outside our solar system and even more potential candidates. It showed us rocky worlds the size of Earth that, like Earth, might harbour life. It also unveiled incredible super Earths: planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.
Storms in Italy kill at least 11
MILAN — Heavy rains and high winds buffeting much of Italy have killed 11 people over two days, officials said Tuesday.
Many of the deaths were due to falling trees crashing down on cars or passersby, but they also included a woman who was buried by mud when a landslide invaded her home near Trento in northern Italy, and a man who was slammed against rocks while windsurfing in EmiliaRomagna. The other fatalities occurred in Naples, Liguria, Lazio and Veneto, where authorities found a 61-year-old man whose body had been swept more than a kilometre from his running car.
High winds created an exceptional tide in Venice on Monday, covering three-quarters of the city for the first time in a decade. Water levels were forecast Tuesday at 105 centimetres, flooding eight per cent of the famed lagoon city.
“It was the perfect storm during which adverse meteorological conditions contributed to the situation in the sea and winds,” civil protection chief Angelo Borrelli said.
Selfie couple fall to their deaths
NEW DELHI — An Indian husband and wife who fell to their deaths from a popular overlook at Yosemite National Park in the western U.S. were apparently taking a selfie, the man’s brother said Tuesday.
Park rangers recovered the bodies of 29-year-old Vishnu Viswanath and 30-year-old Meenakshi Moorthy on Thursday about 245 metres below Taft Point, where visitors can walk to the edge of a vertigo-inducing granite ledge that doesn’t have a railing.
Viswanath, who Cisco India said was a software engineer at the company’s San Jose, Calif., headquarters, and Moorthy had set up their tripod near the ledge on Tuesday evening, Viswanath’s brother, Jishnu Viswanath, told The Associated Press.
Park visitors the next morning saw the camera and alerted rangers, who “used high-powered binoculars to find them and used helicopters to airlift the bodies,” he said.
In an eerie coincidence, a man who had hiked to the same spot with his girlfriend captured pictures of Meenakshi prior to her fall, saying she accidentally appears in the background of two of their selfie photos.