South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Virginia man with gun, 500 rounds arrested at checkpoint in DC
Police arrested a man with a handgun and 500 rounds of ammunition at a checkpoint in Washington set up ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Wesley Allen Beeler was charged with carrying a pistol without a license after being stopped at the checkpoint Friday near the U.S. Capitol.
Court documents say Beeler approached the checkpoint but did not have a valid credential for that area. An officer noticed he had “firearms-related stickers” on his vehicle and asked him if he had any weapons inside.
The papers say Beeler told the officers he had a handgun under the armrest and police detained him at the scene. They searched his car and found a high-capacity magazine in the 9mm handgun, along with more than 500 rounds of ammunition in the vehicle. Authorities said he didn’t have a license to carry the gun in Washington.
His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Indonesia earthquake:
Damaged roads and bridges, power blackouts and lack of heavy equipment on Saturday hampered rescuers after a strong earthquake left at least 49 people dead and hundreds injured on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.
Operations were focused on about eight locations in the hardest-hit city of Mamuju, where people were still believed trapped following the magnitude 6.2 quake that struck early Friday, said Saidar Rahmanjaya, who heads the local search and rescue agency.
Cargo planes carrying food, tents, blankets and other supplies from Jakarta landed late Friday for distribution in temporary shelters. Still, thousands of people spent the night in the open fearing aftershocks and a possible tsunami.
The National Search and Rescue Agency’s operations director, Bambang Suryo Aji, said rescuers recovered three more bodies in the rubble of collapsed homes and buildings in Mamuju late Saturday, raising the death toll to 49.
A total of 40 people were killed in Mamuju, while nine bodies were retrieved in neighboring Majene district.
Sailor at Pearl Harbor honored: An 18-year-old U.S. Navy sailor from Arizona who died at Pearl Harbor was buried with full military honors on Friday after his remains were identified last year, almost 80 years after the Japanese attack.
Carl Johnson, a U.S. Navy seaman 1st Class and a Purple Heart recipient, was aboard the USS West Virginia near Hawaii when multiple torpedoes hit the side of the battleship to which he was assigned in 1941. About 100 crewmen on the vessel died.
Johnson was buried in Phoenix with a 21-gun salute and the folding and presentation of the U.S. flag to the family.
Clashes between Arabs and non-Arabs in Sudan’s West Darfur have killed at least 32 people, according to a local medical official, as Sudanese authorities imposed a round-theclock curfew on the province.
Darfur remains scarred by war after a rebellion in the early 2000s was brutally suppressed. The most recent violence comes two weeks after the U.N. Security Council ended the joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force’s mandate in the region.
Salah Saleh, a doctor and former medical director at the main hospital in the provincial capital of Genena, said the clashes wounded at
Sudan violence:
least 79 others.
The violence erupted Friday in Genena, when an Arab man was stabbed to death at a market in the Krinding camp for internally displaced people, aid worker al-Shafei Abdalla told The Associated Press. He said the suspect was arrested.
On Saturday, the dead man’s family — from the Arab Rizeigat tribe — attacked the Krinding camp, burning most of its houses, said Abdalla.
Gov. Mohammed Abdalla al-Douma said that the government would impose a curfew beginning Saturday that would include the closure of all markets and a ban on gatherings across the province.
Uganda turmoil: Ugandan opposition presidential candidate Bobi Wine said Friday the military had entered his home and “we are in serious trouble,“while the country waited for election results amid a government-ordered internet blackout and official results
showed President Yoweri Museveni in the lead.
Wine tweeted just hours after he alleged that Thursday’s election was rigged and said “every legal option is on the table” to challenge the official results, including peaceful protests. He referred to himself as the “president-elect.”
Uganda’s electoral commission said Saturday that Museveni won a sixth five-year term, extending his rule to four decades, while Wine dismissed “cooked-up, fraudulent results” and officials struggled to explain how polling results were compiled amid an internet blackout.
Oldest living Marine dies:
Dorothy Schmidt Cole, recognized last year as the oldest living U.S. Marine, has died at 107.
Beth Kluttz, Cole’s only child, confirmed Friday that her mother died of a heart attack Jan. 7 in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
The Charlotte Observer reports Cole enlisted as one
of the earliest female Marine reservists following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She had left her Ohio home to head to Pittsburgh, where she hoped to volunteer for the Navy, but because she was only 4 feet, 11 inches tall, she was deemed too short to meet Navy standards.
Undaunted, Cole decided to learn how to fly an airplane and persuaded the Marine Corps to let her be a pilot. In July 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve into law, giving women the chance to fill positions left open by men headed to combat. The Corps delayed formation of the branch until February 1943, and Cole enlisted five months later at age 29, becoming one of the earliest volunteers.
In Afghanistan: At least two members of an Afghan militia opened fire on their fellow militiamen in western Herat province, killing 12, in what provincial police on Saturday described as an insider attack.
Herat police spokesman Abdul Ahad Walizada said the attackers fled with the slain militiamen’s weapons and ammunition, adding that Afghan government forces had regained control of the area.
A Taliban spokesman Yousaf Ahmadi in a tweet claimed responsibility for the insider attack, which took place late Friday.
Meanwhile, a sticky bomb attached to an armored police Land Cruiser SUV exploded Saturday in the western part of Kabul, killing two policemen and wounding another, Kabul police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz said.
Faramarz did not specify the identities of the casualties. However, two members of the Afghan police force, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, said Kabul’s deputy police chief Mawlana Bayan was wounded in the attack.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing in Kabul.