2 climbers believed dead on Alaska mountain
Compiled from news services
ANCHORAGE,Alaska — Two experienced mountain climbers trying to tackle a new route in Alaska were presumed dead after climbing ropes that matched their gear were found in a crevasse, authorities said Wednesday.
George “Ryan” Johnson, 34, of Juneau, and Marc-Andre Leclerc, 25, of Squamish, British Columbia, were reported missing after they failed to return from a climb March 7 on a seven-peaked mountain not far from Alaska’s capital city.
Rescuers had to wait until Tuesday for the weather to clear to fly to Mendenhall Towers, a mountain that rises nearly 7,000 feet over the Juneau Ice Field, about 12 miles north of Juneau.
Officials won’t be able to recover the bodies right away because of avalanche danger. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Leclerc had been flown to the mountain and planned to ski out to an area to be picked up.
Ohio abortion law blocked
COLUMBUS— Afederal judge in Cincinnati on Wednesday temporarily blocked enforcement of a new Ohio law criminalizing an abortion if the patient seeks it at least partially because the fetus has or might have Down syndrome.
“Federal law is the law of the land,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black, a Democrat appointed by President Barack Obama.
“And federal law is crystal clear: ‘a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability’,” he wrote. “Here, Ohio’s new law wrongfully does just that: it violates the right to privacy of every woman in Ohio and is unconstitutional on its face.”
He issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law, which was set to take effect on March 23. Among other things, he said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that it would interfere with a woman’s right under the law to seek an abortion prior to the viability of the fetus.
Under Ohio law, viability is considered 20 weeks of gestation.
Oklahoma executions
Thestate of Oklahoma will usenitrogen gas to execute deathrow inmates going forward,officials said Wednesday,an unprecedented response to the inability of statesnationwide to obtain lethal injection drugs.
Oklahoma has not carried out an execution in more than three years following high-profile mistakes involving lethal injections, including one that a grand jury described as an “inexcusable failure.”
The announcement by Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh is still somewhat preliminary, as no execution protocol for using nitrogen gas has been created. Still, at a time when states have struggled to obtain lethal injection drugs, Oklahoma’s move is the latest in a series of efforts some officials have made to continue carrying out death sentences.
Oklahoma adopted nitrogen gas inhalation as its backup method of execution in April 2015 while the state was awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling over the way lethal injections were carried out there.
Also in the nation ...
A call of shots fired that sent scores of heavily armed officers to a Northwestern University graduate dorm in Illinois Wednesday afternoon was apparently a case of “swatting,” a false emergency designed to draw a large police response.