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Bandits seize city, loot bank

RIO DE JANEIRO — Dozens of gunmen armed with assault rifles invaded a city in southern Brazil overnight Tuesday and took control of the streets as they assaulted a local bank. Video broadcast on the Globo television network showed hooded men dressed in black walking the streets of Criciuma in the state of Santa Catarina, and local residents being held hostage during the takeover, which began around midnight and lasted almost two hours. Shots echoed across the city of some 220,000 people. At least 30 assailants and 10 cars were involved in the well-planned operation, Anselmo Cruz, head of the state police’s robbery and kidnapping department, told a news conference, speaking alongside the governor and the mayor. They blocked access to the city — including with burning vehicles — to prevent police reinforcements from responding swiftly, and deployed explosives in the robbery. The gunmen traded fire with officers in the city center and at a police station, Santa Catarina’s military police said on their official Twitter account. Two people were wounded in the firefight: a security guard and a police officer, who was shot in the abdomen and remained hospitalized in serious condition Tuesday. “It was an unprecedented action for the state. There was never anything with this scope, this violence,” Cruz said in a separate interview with Globo News. The television network quoted him as saying the robbers fired bullets with calibers capable of downing a helicopter. Images on Globo showed a bank vault with a square-shaped hole in it and a convoy of criminals’ vehicles as they made their escape. Bills were scattered across the ground in one area of the city, and newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that police arrested several people who collected 810,000 reais ($150,000) worth of the notes. Police later located the attackers’ vehicles in a cornfield of a neighboring municipality. Some of the cars’ interiors were stained with blood, indicating some of the gunmen had been hit by police bullets.

Mountain pine tree threatened

BILLINGS, Mont. — Climate change, voracious beetles and disease are imperiling the long-term survival of a high-elevation pine tree that’s a key source of food for some grizzly bears and found across the West, U.S. officials said Tuesday. A Fish and Wildlife Service proposal scheduled to be published Wednesday would protect the whitebark pine tree as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, according to documents posted by the Office of the Federal Register. The move marks a belated acknowledgement of the tree’s severe declines in recent decades and sets the stage for restoration work. But government officials said they do not plan to designate which forest habitats are critical to the tree’s survival, stopping short of what some environmentalists argue is needed. Whitebark pines can live up to 1,000 years and are found at elevations up to 12,000 feet (3,600 meters) — conditions too harsh for most tress to survive. Environmentalists had petitioned the government in 1991 and again in 2008 to protect the trees, which occur across 126,000 square miles of land in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada and western Canada. A nonnative fungus has been killing whitebark pines for a century.

Baby goat missing from ‘Fish’ set

MILLBROOK, Ala. — The owners of an outdoor recreation destination in Alabama fear a days-old baby goat has been stolen from a free-ranging herd near a former movie set and tourist attraction. Two newborn goats from the herd on Jackson Lake Island in Milbrook have disappeared since November, according to the owners. The property has public access for fishing and camping, as well as the fictional town of Spectre, where scenes for the 2003 Tim Burton film “Big Fish” were shot. There are about 55 grown goats on the property and they sometimes sleep under the church on the set. One of the goats, Bambi, was taken in early November but was returned about a day later, said Lynn Bright, who owns the property and goats and is the former first lady of Montgomery. Bambi died after being away from his mother, she added. Bluebell, who was born Friday, has since gone missing. “We know who took Bambi,” Bright said. “We have addressed that with the young man’s family, and we are still considering taking legal action. We can’t be certain if Bluebell wasn’t carried off by an animal. But we had reports of a family passing her around before she went missing.”

Huge radio telescope collapses

ARECIBO, Puerto Rico — A huge, already damaged radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century completely collapsed on Tuesday. The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform and the Gregorian dome — a structure as tall as a four-story building that houses secondary reflectors — fell onto the northern portion of the vast reflector dish more than 400 feet below. The U.S. National Science Foundation had earlier announced that it would close the radio telescope. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100-foot gash on the 1,000-foot-wide dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November. The collapse stunned many scientists who had relied on what was until recently the largest radio telescope in the world. “It sounded like a rumble. I knew exactly what it was,” said Jonathan Friedman, who worked for 26 years as a senior research associate at the observatory and still lives near it. “I was screaming. Personally, I was out of control…. I don’t have words to express it. It’s a very deep, terrible feeling.” Friedman ran up a small hill near his home and confirmed his suspicions: A cloud of dust hung in the air where the structure once stood, demolishing hopes held by some scientists that the telescope could somehow be repaired. The collapse at 7:56 a.m. on Tuesday wasn’t a surprise because many of the wires in the thick cables holding the structure snapped over the weekend, Angel Vazquez, the telescope’s director of operations, said. “It was a snowball effect,” he said. “There was no way to stop it…. It was too much for the old girl to take.” He said that it was extremely difficult to say whether anything could have been done to prevent the damage that occurred after the first cable snapped in August. “The maintenance was kept up as best as we could,” he said. “(The National Science Foundation) did the best that they could with what they have.”

Group said ‘leave no trace’

SALT LAKE CITY — New clues have surfaced in the disappearance of a gleaming monolith in Utah that seemed to melt away as mysteriously as it appeared in the red-rock desert — though it’s no longer the only place where a strange structure has come and gone. A Colorado photographer told KSTU-TV that he saw four men come to the remote Utah site Friday night and push over the hollow, stainless steel object. “Right after it had fallen over and made a loud thud, one of them said, ‘This is why you don’t leave trash in the desert,'” Ross Bernards told the Salt Lake City TV station. The group broke down the structure into pieces, loaded it into a wheelbarrow and left. “As they were loading it up and walking away, they just said, ‘Leave no trace,'” he said. The sheriff’s office in San Juan County, Utah, has said it’s not planning an investigation into the disappearance of the monolith, which had been placed without permission on public land. But authorities also said they would accept tips from any of the hundreds of visitors who trekked out to see the otherworldly gleaming object deep in the desert. Visitors have left behind a mess of human waste, cars parked on vegetation and other debris, the land agency said. The mysterious structure that evoked the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” generated international attention and drew plenty of speculation about otherworldly origins, though officials said it was an earthly creation of riveted plates of stainless steel. Utah isn’t the only place a monolith emerged. A similar metal structure was found on a hill in northern Romania, in the city of Piatra Neamt — but has since disappeared, according to Robert Iosub, a journalist with the local publication ziarpiatraneamt.ro. Like the Utah structure, whoever placed the object didn’t follow the proper steps and get a building permit, Mayor Andrei Carabelea said in a Facebook post over the weekend. Still, he took it in stride, joking that some “cheeky and terrible” alien teenagers were likely putting them up around the world. “I am honored they chose our city.”

Man drives car into crowd

BERLIN — A man zig-zagged an SUV at high speed through a pedestrian zone in the southwestern German city of Trier on Tuesday, killing four people, including a 9-month-old child, and seriously injuring 15. The driver, identified as a 51-year-old German man born in Trier, was arrested at the scene and the vehicle was impounded, Trier police said. The suspect, whose name was not released in line with German privacy laws, had no fixed address and had been living in recent days in the Land Rover that a friend had loaned him, which was used in the attack, said prosecutor Peter Fritzen, who was heading the investigation. He was being interrogated by police and was to undergo a psychiatric examination, Fritzen said, adding that a doctor had recently reached the preliminary conclusion the man could be suffering from mental illness. “We have no indication that there was any kind of a terrorist, political or religious motive that could have played a role,” he told reporters. The suspect had also consumed a “not insignificant” quantity of alcohol before the incident and was well above the legal limit, he added. Mayor Wolfram Leibe, who was brought to tears during the day talking about the horrific scene, said it was difficult to come to grips with what had happened. “I can’t understand how someone gets the idea to drive through the city center with an SUV to kill people,” he said. “Kill people — a baby, 9 months old to a woman 72 years old; what did these people do? They just wanted to go to the city, shop, and now they are dead.” Four people were still in life-threatening danger in the hospital and five others suffered serious injuries.

Spanier’s conviction restored

HARRISBURG, Pa. — A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated former Penn State President Graham Spanier’s conviction for child endangerment over his handling of a report that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused a boy in a team shower. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled a lower-court judge had improperly vacated Spanier’s misdemeanor jury conviction for the 2001 incident. A federal magistrate judge in April 2019 threw out Spanier’s conviction a day before he was to turn himself in to begin serving a jail sentence of two months.

Actor comes out as transgender

NEW YORK — Oscar-nominated actor Elliot Page, the star of “Juno,” “Inception” and “The Umbrella Academy,” came out as transgender Tuesday in an announcement greeted as a watershed moment for the trans community in Hollywood. “I love that I am trans. And I love that I am queer,” Page said in a statement on social media. Page, the 33-year-old actor from Nova Scotia, said his decision to come out as trans, which also involved changing his first name, came after a long journey and with much support from the LGBTQ community. “I can’t begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self,” Page wrote. “I’ve been endlessly inspired by so many in the trans community. Thank you for your courage, your generosity and ceaselessly working to make this world a more inclusive and compassionate place.” “The more I hold myself close and fully embrace who I am, the more I dream, the more my heart grows and the more I thrive,” added Page, who said his pronouns are “he” and “they.” Page signed his statement with the words, “All my love, Elliot.” The announcement was celebrated widely on social media by LGBTQ rights advocates and many in the film industry. Netflix, maker of the comic book series “The Umbrella Academy,” said, “So proud of our superhero! We love you Elliot!”

Six years in adoption scheme

PHOENIX — A former Arizona politician who admitted running an illegal adoption scheme in three states involving women from the Marshall Islands was sentenced in Arkansas to six years in federal prison. It was the first of three punishments he’ll face for arranging adoptions prohibited by an international compact. Paul Petersen, a Republican who served as metro Phoenix’s assessor for six years and also worked as an adoption attorney, illegally paid women from the Pacific island nation to come to the U.S. to give up their babies in at least 70 adoptions cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas, prosecutors said. Marshall Islands citizens have been prohibited from traveling to the U.S. for adoption purposes since 2003 and prosecutors said Petersen’s scheme lasted three years. Judge Timothy Brooks, who imposed the sentence from Fayetteville, Arkansas, said Petersen abused his position as an attorney by misleading or instructing others to lie to courts in adoptions that wouldn’t have been approved had the truth been told to them. The judge said Petersen turned what should be joyous adoption occasions into “a baby-selling enterprise.” He also described Petersen’s adoption practice as a “criminal livelihood” and said he ripped off taxpayers at the same time he was elected to serve them.

$24K snatched from Pa. casino

CHESTER, Pa. — A man who asked to use a phone made off with approximately $24,000 from a Pennsylvania casino early Tuesday. The heist unfolded around 12:15 a.m. in the area where customers bet on horse races at Harrah’s Casino here. According to police, the suspect asked an employee who was counting cash from a money drawer if he could use the phone. The employee turned away for a moment and the suspect grabbed the cash and took off.

Chinese craft lands on moon

BEIJING — A Chinese spacecraft landed on the moon Tuesday to bring back lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s, the government announced. The Chang’e 5 probe “successfully landed” at its planned site, state TV and news agencies reported, citing the China National Space Administration. They didn’t immediately announce any more details. The lander was launched Nov. 24 from the tropical southern island of Hainan. It is the latest venture by a Chinese space program that sent its first astronaut into orbit in 2003, has a spacecraft en route to Mars and aims eventually to land a human on the moon. Plans call for the lander to spend about two days drilling into the lunar surface and collecting 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of rocks and debris. The sample will be lifted up into orbit and transferred to a return capsule for the trip to Earth. If it succeeds, it will be the first time scientists have obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks since a Soviet probe in the 1970s. U.S. astronauts with NASA’s Apollo space program brought back 842 pounds of lunar samples from 1969 to 1972. The Chang’e 5 flight is China’s third successful lunar landing. Its predecessor, Chang’e 4, was the first probe to land on the moon’s little-explored far side. The latest flight includes collaboration with the European Space Agency.

Cops search office of 2nd doctor

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — The investigation into Diego Maradona’s death continued Tuesday with police raids on the office and home of the psychiatrist who cared for the soccer star and is being investigated for possible medical negligence. By order of the attorney general’s office of San Isidro, officers entered an apartment used by Agustina Cosachov for consultations in Buenos Aires, while another group of police searched her private home. “The prosecutor let me know that her medical behaviors are being investigated,” psychiatrist Vadim Mischanchuk told reporters. “These are routine measures, as is the case in all the causes of a patient’s death, to reconstruct his medical history.” Cosachov was part of a medical team that treated Maradona after he underwent surgery for bleeding on the brain in early November. The 60-year-old former player died last Wednesday of heart attack at a house in a gated community of Buenos Aires where he was living during his rehabilitation. Investigators determined no violence was involved in the case, but the prosecutor initiated an investigation into possible medical negligence that have led to Maradona’s death, which caused an outpouring of emotion across Argentina and among soccer fans around the globe.

Advocates sue to protect Canada lynx

BILLINGS, Mont. — Wildlife advocates sued the federal government Tuesday in a bid to force officials to do more to conserve Canada lynx, a snow-loving cat that has struggled to survive in parts of the U.S. West. Attorneys for Friends of the Wild Swan, Rocky Mountain Wild and other groups filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in Montana. The move comes almost three years after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it planned to strip lynx in the U.S. of their threatened species status. Canada lynx are about the size of bobcats, but with huge paws to help them navigate deep snow. There’s no reliable estimate of their population, leaving officials to rely on information about habitat and hare populations to gauge the species’ status.

Salesforce buying Slack

SAN RAMON, Calif. — Business software pioneer Salesforce.com is buying work-chatting service Slack for $27.7 billion in a deal aimed at giving the two companies a better shot at competing against longtime industry powerhouse Microsoft. The acquisition announced Tuesday is by far the largest in the 21-year history of Salesforce. The San Francisco company was one of the first to begin selling software as a subscription service that could be used on any internet-connected device instead of the more cumbersome process of installing the programs on individual computers. Salesforce’s flamboyant founder and CEO Marc Benioff hailed the “cloud computing” concept as the wave of the future to much derision initially. But software as a service has become an industry standard that has turned into a gold mine for longtime software makers. Microsoft for one has developed its own thriving online suite of services, known as Office 365, which includes a Teams chatting service that includes many of the same features as Slack’s 6-year-old application.

First vaccine paths mapped out

NEW YORK — Health care workers and nursing home residents should be at the front of the line when the first coronavirus vaccine shots become available, an influential government advisory panel said Tuesday. The panel voted 13-1 to recommend those groups get priority in the first days of any coming vaccination program, when doses are expected to be very limited. The two groups encompass about 24 million people out of a U.S. population of about 330 million. Later this month, the Food and Drug Administration will consider authorizing emergency use of two vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. Current estimates project that no more than 20 million doses of each vaccine will be available by the end of 2020. And each product requires two doses. As a result, the shots will be rationed in the early stages.

37,000 deaths last month

Nearly 37,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in November, the most in any month since the dark early days of the pandemic, engulfing families in grief, filling newspaper obituary pages and testing the capacity of morgues, funeral homes and hospitals. Amid the resurgence, states have begun reopening field hospitals to handle an influx of patients that is pushing health care systems — and their workers — to the breaking point. Hospitals are bringing in mobile morgues. And funerals are being livestreamed or performed as drive-by affairs. November’s toll was far lower than the 60,699 recorded in April but perilously close to the next-highest total of almost 42,000 in May, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths had dropped to just over 20,000 in June after states closed many businesses and ordered people to stay at home.

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