N. Korea: American sentenced to 8 years

An American man has been sentenced to eight years hard labor for illegally entering North Korea, the reclusive country's official press agency said in a release monitored in Seoul Wednesday.
The American is Aijalon Mahli Gomes, 30, who was arrested after crossing the North Korea-China border on January 25. The American was, according to South Korean press reports, an English language teacher with strong Christian convictions, who had taken part in anti-North Korean protests in the South.
It is the third recent case of Americans being held in North Korea.
Two American journalists -- Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had crossed the border last March and were arrested and sentenced to 12 years hard labor -- were released in August after an intervention former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Robert Park, a Korean-American Christian evangelist who was arrested after entering the country on Christmas Day, had given a media interview in which he stated his aim to force change in North Korean human rights conditions. He was released in February after telling North Korean state media that he had been wrong about human rights conditions there.
A statement attributed to Park and released by one of his associates -- high-profile anti-North Korean activist Norbert Vollertsen -- on March 24, stated: "Robert Park begs the American government to intervene on Mr. Aijalon Gomes' behalf...Mr. Gomes is one of the most kind, gentle, beautiful and good persons Mr. Robert Park has ever met."
The United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea -- U.S. interests there are represented by Sweden. In an e-mail to CNN, Swedish ambassador to Pyongyang Mats Foyer referred questions on Gomes' welfare to the U.S. State Department.
In recent years, no Americans have been incarcerated in North Korea's harsh labor camp system. Lee and Ling were held in isolation in a guest house in Pyongyang, as was Evan Hunziger, who was held in the country for three months in 1996 after swimming across the Yalu River border. He was released after a diplomatic intervention by former U.S. Congressman Bill Richardson, who maintains high level contacts in Pyongyang.
"The North Koreans don't want anyone to see inside their camps," said Choi Jin-wook of the Seoul-based Korean Institute of National Unification. "He [Gomes] is going to be used by North Korea as a bargaining chip."
North Korean survivors of the camps who have defected to South Korea paint a grim portrait of institutionalized brutality. The most significant peril, however, is death by starvation. With large portions of North Korea's general population routinely suffering malnutrition, occupants of the gulag are at highest risk.

7.7-magnitude quake strikes Indonesia

A 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia early Wednesday, triggering two tsunamis and injuring several people, officials said.
Six people on Simeulue island were injured when the quake hit, and two houses collapsed under the violent shaking, said Dadik, the head of Simeulue police, who goes by only one name.
The island is just off the coast of Banda Aceh, a city at the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island where residents lost power after the temblor.
"The quake was felt quite strong, maybe about three to four minutes," said Dadik, the head of Simeulue police who goes by only one name. "I've ordered my staff to check if there's any damage or casualties, but apparently no damage reported so far."
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Residents in coastal towns fled inland to higher ground just after the quake, according to a local radio station.
The temblor struck 125 miles from Sibolga, situated on Sumatra, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The quake hit at a depth of 19.3 miles at 5:15 a.m. (6:15 p.m. ET, Tuesday) said USGS, which downgraded the quake from an earlier magnitude of 7.8.
Measurements of sea levels indicated that tsunami waves "may have been destructive along coasts near the earthquake epicenter," the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.
Scientists said they do not expect a tsunami to affect the west coast of North America.
The tsunamis, in Banyak Island and Teluk Dalam, were small and not dangerous, measuring just under a foot high, said Fauzi, chief of the Indonesian Meteorological and Geophysics Agency. Fauzi also goes by only one name, which is common in Indonesia.
Indonesian officials acted quickly to announce the tsunami warning, said geophysicist Gerard Fryer with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Indonesia's Meteorological and Geophysics Agency lifted it about two hours later, as did the warning center.
In 2004, a 9.1-magnitude underwater earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in 14 countries.
The tsunami, which washed away entire communities, caused nearly $10 billion in damage and more casualties than any other tsunami in history, according to the United Nations. Indonesia was among the hardest hit nations.
Indonesia is on the so-called Ring of Fire, an arc of fault lines circling the Pacific Basin that is prone to frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Man pleads no contest in slaying of his alleged molester

A California man pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter with the use of a gun Tuesday in the shooting death of a man who he claimed sexually abused him as a teen, a prosecutor said.
The plea comes less than a week before Aaron Vargas' first-degree murder trial was supposed to start for the slaying of Darrell McNeill, a neighbor from his childhood and a family friend whom Vargas claims began molesting him when he was 11 years old.
Under the terms of a plea deal, Vargas, now 32, faces anywhere from probation to 10 years in prison for shooting the former Boy Scout leader and local businessman last year in his home in the Northern California community of Fort Bragg.
Lawyers will return to court April 20 to place a statement of facts on the record before Judge Ronald Brown decides on the final sentence. "There's some relief that we know we won't lose him for the rest of his life, but there's also a lot of anxiety about what the judge is going to do," said Vargas' sister, Mindy Galliani.
"I won't have closure until he's home," she added. "But even when he's home, it's still not going to be closure. We need to get him into treatment so he can get help. I feel like this is only the beginning."
Since his arrest, Vargas' family has waged a tireless campaign to reduce the charges and raise awareness over child sex abuse, earning support from members of the community and giving rise to more sex abuse allegations against McNeill.
McNeill used his position as a Boy Scout troop leader and as active neighborhood father to win the trust of Vargas and other young boys, Galliani said. He took the boys on camping trips or hikes, gave them alcohol or drugs and molested them, Galliani alleged.
The alleged sexual abuse waned as Vargas grew into adulthood, but McNeill continued to call him and visit the home where Vargas lived with his wife and infant daughter. The continued contact drove Vargas to the breaking point, his sister said.
Vargas was under the influence of alcohol the night of February 8, 2009, when he drove to McNeill's mobile home with a loaded gun and shot him in front of his wife, Mendocino County Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Norman said.
The prosecutor said she consulted with the victim's family and reached what they thought a jury may have found -- that his level of intoxication placed the crime more along the lines of an "emotional decision rather than an intentional first-degree murder."
Norman said she has received four reports of sexual abuse involving McNeill, which factored into the decision to strike a plea deal even though she could not prove they were true.
"When you have other victims coming forward, that does lend credibility to that scenario," she said. "These people have written me letters and said this has happened, and I have no way of showing this has happened, but it has been put out there."
The slaying victim's wife, who lived next door to Vargas' family and has known the defendant since he was a child, said she had no reason to doubt his claims of abuse. "I love this young man and feel he needs counseling more than anything," McNeill's wife said in an e-mail. She requested that her name not be published.
"I cannot condone what Aaron has done, but I do understand it. I believe he took the wrong avenue by taking the law into his own hands. Like most of this community, I do not feel he deserves 50 years in prison. Unlike most of this community, I feel he should serve some time, but not much."
The case, with its suggestions of long-buried secrets, has rocked Fort Bragg, a former logging community that has become a coastal tourist destination. Another longtime Fort Bragg resident has come out publicly with allegations of abuse against McNeill.
"I was a reserved kid, some considered me a loner; I just kind of kept to myself as a kid, and he would play on that," Todd Rowan said in an interview in March. "He'd give me pot and beer, and he'd get me stoned and a little drunk, and he took advantage of me that way."
Rowan said the abuse began when he was 15 and continued on and off until he was 19, but the emotional trauma lingered for years, driving him to substance abuse and suicide attempts. He said he brought the allegations to Fort Bragg Police in 2001 but nothing happened.
"All those years, I wanted to forget about and push it away with alcohol because you're supposed to be a man. And then, when police didn't do anything, that pushed me even further down the hole."
Repeated calls for comment to the Fort Bragg Police Department and the Mendocino Sheriff, which handled the investigation of McNeill's death, were not returned. Since then, Rowan said his ability to stay sober for more than two years braced him for news of McNeill's death.
"When I got news that he'd been shot, the first thing I thought was, 'who got him? Somebody got him. Who else did he do it to?'"
McNeill's second wife, Jenny Cotila, who divorced him in 1980, said she also went to Fort Bragg Police in the 1990s after she was told that her ex-husband had sexually abused her son years ago.
"It could've been stopped a long time ago but the police didn't take me seriously when I reported it because they said the statute of limitations was up by the time I found out what happened to my son," Cotila said in a phone interview Tuesday.
Cotila said she has long felt indifference toward her ex-husband but worried about the effects of his death and the abuse allegations were having on their children, now adults.
"It's hard for them to cope because they're friends with Aaron, they knew him," said Cotila. "Darrell's their father and he's their friend. They're having a hard time separating their father from the pedophile."
Members of the community also expressed shock that a "normal" guy like McNeill, a small business owner who installed the blinds in your home after you bought them at his furniture store, was capable of such horrific acts right under their noses.
"Here we have this man, and he's being the normal, small-town businessman, and he's following all the cultural paths available and all the norms, so when you have people coming forward and saying this man is doing something to me that's outside the norm, there's a tendency to not listen closely or to ignore it," said Jeff Edwards, a hospital employee who has lived in Fort Bragg most of his life.
"I guess we are to blame in a way, for thinking that this could never happen in our town."

Shuttle Discovery docks with space station

Space shuttle Discovery docked with the international space station early Wednesday despite a broken antenna that knocked out radar tracking aboard the shuttle.
The shuttle docked with the space station at 3:44 a.m. ET. At the time of docking, both spacecraft were traveling 225 miles over the Caribbean sea near Caracas, Venezuela, NASA said.
Commander Alan Poindexter and his crew completed the rendezvous without the use of the shuttle's Ku-band radar, relying instead on other navigation tools to precisely track the space station, NASA said.
The Discovery's seven-person crew now joins the six-person space station crew for more than a week of work together.
It will mark the first time four women have been in space at one time.
Three women -- mission specialists Stephanie Wilson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger and Naoko Yamazaki -- comprise part of the Discovery's crew. NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson is already at the space station.
Discovery launched Monday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The shuttle's 13-day mission includes three planned spacewalks, replacing an ammonia tank assembly and retrieving a Japanese experiment from the station's exterior.
It is scheduled to return to Earth on April 18 at 8:35 a.m. ET.
There are only three shuttle missions remaining before the space shuttle fleet is retired.

Remains of 2 people found in trash bags in New Jersey, officials say

Authorities in Linden, New Jersey, have launched a homicide investigation after the discovery Monday of a pair of trash bags containing the dismembered remains of two people, officials said.
The medical examiner has confirmed the body parts are "indeed human," the Union County Prosecutor's Office said in a news release.
"There were two bodies found inside trash bags near the intersection of Essex Avenue and Cranford Avenue," spokesman John Holl said in the release, adding that the remains are from adults, one male and one female.
Yellow police tape surrounded the scene Monday afternoon, tied to the tree trunks lining the quiet residential street where the black trash bags were discovered earlier in the morning.
Linden Mayor Richard J. Gerbounka, who was at the site, called the shocking discovery "very unusual for this area."
"We've got the homicide investigative team out and they're in the process of culling the area for evidence," he said.
Along with the Linden Police Department, investigators from the county prosecutor's office and the city fire department also were at the site. Officials spread a white sheet around the trash bags before loading the remains onto two stretchers and taking them away for further study.
Autopsies were scheduled for Monday afternoon, according to the prosecutor's office.

Destroyer nears oil tanker seized by Somali pirates

A South Korean navy destroyer Tuesday caught up with a South Korean oil tanker that was seized earlier by pirates off the coast of Somalia, official Korean media reported.
The 4,500-ton destroyer was keeping a close watch on the hijacked vessel about 30 miles away, South Korean defense officials told Yonhap news agency.
Pirates captured the South Korean tanker Sunday about 690 miles (1,111 km) north of the Somali coast. News of the attack came as the Combined Maritime Forces -- a cooperative effort by several countries to patrol international waters -- warned that pirates in the Somali basin and Gulf of Aden are venturing farther from home waters to target commercial vessels.
The 300,000-ton supertanker, Samho Dream, was seized while on its way to Louisiana in the United States.
Twenty-four crew members -- five South Koreans and 19 Filipinos -- were aboard.
"Ships operating in Somali waters are often accompanied by private or government escorts because of rampant pirate activity in the area, but the ship did not have any guards on board as it was operating in areas where piracy is not frequent," the Yonhap report said.
Valero Energy Corp., the U.S. company that owns the cargo, did not say how much oil was on the ship. But ships of that size generally carry around 2 million barrels of oil, company spokesman Bill Day said.
At current prices, that cargo could be worth about $170 million.

Explosions near U.S. Consulate in Peshawar kill at least 8

A terrorist attack near the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, killed two consulate security guards and at least six others Monday, authorities said.
The two consulate employees who died were Pakistani, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad said, and "a number of others were seriously wounded."
At least eight people were killed in all, a government official said.
All U.S. citizens were accounted for, and some had minor injuries, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.
The coordinated attack involved a vehicle suicide bomb and attackers who tried to enter the consulate by using grenades and weapons fire, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

The blasts in the capital of the North West Frontier Province came hours after a suicide attack killed at least 30 people and wounded 50 others in another part of the province.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks. In a phone call to CNN, Azam Tariq, spokesman for Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, said the group was behind the attacks in Peshawar and Dir.
The U.S. Embassy, in its statement, said the two attacks reflect "the terrorists' desperation as they are rejected by people throughout Pakistan."
Peshawar is about 75 miles (120 kilometers) from Islamabad, the country's capital.
Bashir Ahmad Bilour, a senior provincial minister, told reporters at the scene that several militants came in two vehicles. The first vehicle exploded near a security checkpoint, and gunmen in the second car opened fire.
The dead included two Pakistani security personnel working for the U.S. Consulate, one policeman, two civilians and three unidentified bodies, said Karim Khan, a senior police official in Peshawar.
"They were well-organized. They were well-equipped," he said of the attackers.
The three explosions went off within a span of 15 minutes in the area of Saddar and Hayatabad Avenue, near the American consulate and the Peshawar headquarters of Pakistan's intelligence agency, which was the target of a deadly car bomb attack in November.
The North West Frontier Province is rife with Islamic extremists and has been the site of recent clashes between Pakistani security forces and militants.
Monday's earlier suicide attack took place at a rally for the province's ruling Awami National Party in Timargarah in the lower Dir district, said lawmaker Mehmood Zeb Khan.
Hundreds of the participants had gathered for a rally to change the name of the province to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The bomber walked into the government building where the meeting was going on and blew himself up, said provincial spokesman Mian Iftikhar Hussain.
The province was given its current name during the British colonial rule. The party, which heads a coalition government in the province, wants the area's name to reflect its majority Pashtun population.
A bill to amend the constitution in support of the name change was expected to be introduced in parliament on Monday.