Nation & World Glance
DANNEMORA, N.Y. — A woman charged with helping two murderers escape from a maximum-security prison by providing them hacksaw blades, chisels and other tools made another court appearance Monday as a manhunt in far northern New York marked its 10th day.
The local schools reopened with added police patrols and more than 800 law enforcement officers continued their search for Richard Matt and David Sweat, who escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border June 6. The main road leading into the community remained closed.
Prosecutors say Joyce Mitchell, a prison tailoring shop instructor who had befriended the inmates, had agreed to be the getaway driver but backed out because she still loved her husband and felt guilty for participating.
Mitchell, 51, made her second court appearance in Plattsburgh wearing a striped prison jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest. She waived a preliminary hearing, and the case headed to a county court.
Minn. archbishop’s downfall
follows claims he didn’t protect children from abuse
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Archbishop John Nienstedt’s leadership of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis unraveled over a painful two years.
A church archivist accused him of leaving abusive clergy in parishes and church jobs without warning parents or police. A task force he appointed to investigate confirmed the archdiocese had been negligent. Around the same time, he faced allegations of his own inappropriate sexual conduct, but he didn’t reveal specifics.
Through it all, Nienstedt rejected calls for his resig- nation. Then, less than two weeks ago, a prosecutor brought child-endangerment charges against the archdiocese, and on Monday, he stepped down.
“I leave with a clear conscience knowing that my team and I have put in place solid protocols to ensure the protection of minors and vulnerable adults,” Nienstedt wrote in the announcement.
But the Rev. Michael Tegeder, a Minneapolis priest and frequent Nienstedt critic, said the archbishop “came into this diocese without really any empathy” and “undermined so many of the good things that were going on here.”
Tbilisi searchers look for
people, dangerous zoo animals still missing in flood
TBILISI, Georgia — Workers and volunteers labored Monday in a floodravaged area of the Georgian capital to help victims while nervously watching for traces of dangerous animals that may have escaped the city zoo when it was inundated by the surging waters. Officials in the ex-Soviet republic said 14 people were confirmed dead.
Ten people were thought to be missing after an intense downpour and high winds on Sunday turned a stream that runs through a section of Tbilisi into a sweeping torrent that destroyed houses, tore up roads and tossed vehicles into heaps of uprooted trees and rubbish.
The devastated zoo was still trying to determine what had happened to four lions, three tigers and one jaguar whose enclosures were flooded, zoo spokeswoman Khatia Basilashvili said.
Kurdish militias seize large parts of strategic IS-held
Syrian border city
BEIRUT — U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters captured large sections of a strategic town on the Syria-Turkish border on Monday, dealing the biggest setback yet to the Islamic State group, which lost a key supply line for their nearby self-proclaimed capital.
The seizure of Tal Abyad threatened to flare tensions between Kurds and ethnic Arabs, who accused the Kurdish militia of deliberately displacing thousands of people from the town, which has a mixed population.
Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the main Kurdish fighting force, known as the YPG, said Kurdish fighters entered from the east and were advancing west toward the town’s center amid fierce clashes with pockets of IS resistance.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the Kurdish fighters had “almost full control” of Tal Abyad by Monday evening, and had taken command of the border crossing with Turkey.
U.S. officials say strike in Libya hit target, but uncertainty on fate of wanted
al-Qaida leader
CAIRO — Pentagon officials say they believe they hit their target — the oneeyed, al-Qaida-linked commander who led a deadly attack on an Algerian gas facility in 2013. But uncertainty still surrounds the U.S. airstrike in eastern Libya, and whether Mokhtar Belmokhtar was actually among the militants said to have been killed in the bombing.
Libyan officials say Sun- day’s airstrike hit a gathering of militants on a farm outside Ajdabiya, a coastal city about 850 kilometers (530 miles) east of the capital, Tripoli, but there were conflicting reports on how many died.
An initial assessment shows the bombing that targeted Belmokhtar was successful, and “post-strike assessments” were still underway Monday to determine whether the Algerian militant was killed, said Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.
Beachgoers lose limbs in shallow-water shark attacks
OAK ISLAND, N.C. — Beachgoers cautiously returned to the ocean Monday after two young people lost limbs in separate, lifethreatening shark attacks in the same town in North Carolina.
A 12-year-old girl lost her left arm below the elbow and suffered a leg injury Sunday afternoon; then about an hour and 20 minutes later and 2 miles away, a shark bit off the left arm above the elbow of a 16-year-old boy.
Both had been swimming about 20 yards offshore, in waist-deep water.