At War: South Africa Assails Libya Over Photographer's Death

  The colleagues and friends of Sultan Munadi, who was slain during a rescue operation in Afghanistan, would like to thank readers for the many generous donations they made to help his family. Sultan’s family is extraordinarily grateful to them as well.

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Mystery Remains in Death of Marathon Champion

“The body is coming,” Wanjiru said.

He was the reigning Olympic champion. Hard as it was to believe in a country of great distance runners, Wanjiru was the only man from Kenya to have won a gold medal in the marathon. He was one of the favorites to win again next year at the London Games.

And then came the horrific news Sunday night. At 24, Wanjiru was dead. Reports from the Kenyan police were conflicting. Both involved a troubled marriage. One police report said he jumped from a balcony after his wife came home and found him with another woman.

“The fact of the matter is that Wanjiru committed suicide,” Eric Kiraithe, a national police spokesman, told The Associated Press.

A police official from Nyahururu, Wanjiru’s hometown, in the Rift Valley north of Nairobi, offered an account different from The A.P.’s. Wanjiru came home Sunday about 11:30 p.m. with a woman, his wife arrived soon after and an argument broke out, Jasper Ombati, the police chief of the area where Wanjiru lived, told The A.P.

“They got into an argument,” Ombati said. “His wife locked them in the bedroom and ran off. He then jumped from the bedroom balcony. He is not here to tell us what he was thinking when he jumped. We do not suspect foul play. In our estimation, he wanted to stop his wife from leaving the compound.”

Reached in Italy on Monday morning, Federico Rosa, Wanjiru’s agent, said he, too, could not believe that Wanjiru had killed himself.

“I am 100 percent sure there was no suicide,” Rosa said. “That’s completely out of the question.”

In any case, Wanjiru’s life had grown complicated since he won the Chicago Marathon last fall. In late December, he was charged with threatening his wife and a maid with an illegally obtained AK-47. He was also charged with hitting a security guard at his estate with the butt of the firearm.

According to The Daily Nation newspaper of Kenya, an angry Wanjiru broke windows in his house using the muzzle of the rifle early in the morning on Dec. 29 and threatened to kill his wife, Triza Njeri. A security guard said he saw Wanjiru emerge from the house with an unidentified woman, the paper reported.

Wanjiru denied the charges, saying he was framed, and was released from jail on bail. Assault charges were dropped in March, when his wife and the security guard reconsidered, The Daily Nation reported. But Wanjiru still faced the charge of illegal possession of a firearm. The case was scheduled to begin May 23.

Wanjiru had been twice attacked at his home by bandits, probably because of his wealth earned from running, and might have felt he needed a firearm for protection, Rosa, his agent, said.

Wanjiru was not divorced and was still living with his wife, Rosa said, but the marriage “was not going well.”

Rosa added: “I never understand clear the story. He wasn’t involved with his wife. She wasn’t happy.”

In recent weeks, Wanjiru had been training in Eldoret, Kenya’s running capital, and planned to run the San Diego Marathon next month, Rosa said. The agent said that he had spoken to Wanjiru on Saturday, and that the runner was planning to travel home to pay some bills and meet with his lawyer Monday regarding the firearm case.

“There was no depression,” Rosa said. “We got him out of this environment. He was happy and focused and relaxed.”

Runners from around the world, and the International Olympic Committee, offered their condolences Monday. Gebrselassie, who holds the marathon world record at 2 hours 3 minutes 59 seconds, said on his Twitter account that he was “totally shocked” by the news.

“Of course one wonders if we as an athletics family could have avoided this tragedy,” Gebrselassie wrote.

At the 2008 Beijing Games, Wanjiru set an Olympic record in winning the marathon in 2:06:32 on a blistering day that reached 86 degrees. Given the brutal conditions, many considered it the greatest marathon ever run, even though it was not a world record.

By winning in Chicago last fall at 23, Wanjiru became the youngest man to win four major marathons: the Olympics, Chicago in 2009 and 2010, and London in 2009. It would be his last marathon, but it showed Wanjiru at his determined best as he made a remarkable surge in the final half-mile to fend off Tsegaye Kebede of Ethiopia.

“He had the special gift of the champion,” Rosa said. “Besides a big talent, champions have what I could call an arrogance. They know they are stronger than the others. He was so focused on winning, not to be famous or get a lot of money, but just to show that he was the best.”

Legal problems disrupted Wanjiru’s training, however, Rosa said. He developed a hamstring injury in the spring and withdrew from the London Marathon. As a comeback, he was planning to run in Chicago or New York in the fall as he prepared for the London Olympics in the summer of 2012, Rosa said.

“He wanted to show the world who is Sammy Wanjiru,” Rosa said.

Mary Wittenberg, director of the New York City Marathon, said in a statement: “It is with shock and great sadness that we mourn the loss of one of our sport’s greatest and brightest stars. Sammy was a megastar in a sport where it’s hard to rise above the deep and broad talent.

“Sammy’s talent was undeniable, combined with a huge heart, drive and a fearless nature. He flew through heat and humidity in Beijing like they were inch-high hurdles.”

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Japanese Worker’s Death Not Linked to Radiation

The operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the contract worker, who was in his 60s, died after carrying heavy equipment in a waste disposal building of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The company said that he was wearing radiation-protection clothing and a mask when he collapsed, and that his body did not show high levels of radioactive contamination.

Japanese news media reports later quoted a doctor at the plant as saying the man had apparently suffered a heart attack. The death is the first by one of the workers struggling to bring the Fukushima Daiichi plant under control since it lost power and cooling functions after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Contractors who work at nuclear power plants in Japan have traditionally labored in some of the most hazardous conditions, battling intense heat and braving radiation exposure to do such jobs as cleaning radioactive materials from surfaces in the plants.

The waste disposal building the contract worker had been in has been used to store radiation-contaminated runoff taken from the plant’s damaged reactor buildings, where the water is obstructing workers’ efforts to bring the reactors under better control.

On Saturday, nuclear officials said they had found more than 12 feet of water in the basement of Reactor No. 1.

Another power company announced on Saturday that it had completed the shutdown of a nuclear plant elsewhere in Japan, honoring a request by the prime minister to suspend operations at the plant for safety reasons.

The company, Chubu Electric Power, said it had halted operations of the last active reactor at the Hamaoka plant, which sits atop a major earthquake fault line.

 

News Analysis: Bin Laden’s Death and the New Unknown in Afghanistan

For the Taliban, the jury is still out: they say their insurgency was never solely dependent on Bin Laden, and they could survive his demise, but the American raid that killed him has raised the possibility that even the movement’s top leaders may not be safe in Pakistan.

Many leaders in Europe, though, see Bin Laden’s death as another reason to pull out of a war they have promised to quit anyway in the next three years. And in Washington, administration officials say they believe that Bin Laden’s death offers them a unique opportunity to unnerve the Taliban leadership and engage them in a political negotiation they have so far resisted.

“If you are Mullah Omar,” one of President Obama’s top advisers said of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Afghan Taliban’s spiritual leader, who operates from Pakistan, “you’ve got to wonder whether the next set of helicopters is coming for you.”

The mystery now is whether the removal of Bin Laden as the central, mesmerizing figure in the battle between fundamentalists and the West is truly a tipping point, as the White House is betting, or whether it will prove more consequential to the debate in the United States about the pace of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, set to begin this summer.

That may depend on a series of events that have yet to unfold: whether Al Qaeda strikes back for the killing of its leader, whether the American military force in Afghanistan remains at its current strength and whether Afghanistan’s own military proves more capable than it has been so far in taking the lead in contested areas of the country.

All last week, Mr. Obama and his aides emphasized that their goal was to defeat Al Qaeda — the Taliban, officials have argued since 2009, simply need to be “degraded” as a force, so that Afghans can fight them and the United States can leave. The president made the distinction clear on Friday during his visit to Fort Campbell, Ky., where he met the Navy Seal team that killed Bin Laden.

“We’re making progress in our major goal, our central goal, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is disrupting and dismantling — and we are going to ultimately defeat Al Qaeda,” he said. “We have cut off their head, and we will ultimately defeat them.”

The Taliban’s refusal to hand over Bin Laden led to the American invasion in 2001, of course. And separating Al Qaeda from the Taliban has always been an American requirement for any negotiation.

But there is an alternative possibility heard in Kabul: the Taliban may take heart from the death of Bin Laden if they sense that his demise — and Al Qaeda’s infighting — is likely to accelerate an American withdrawal from the region.

The mood in the Taliban’s main leadership organization in Pakistan, the Quetta shura, is calm, according to people who have spoken to some of the members there. Taliban members were passing around a message from Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2 and Bin Laden’s possible successor, saying that “killing Osama bin Laden is just like taking a single grape from a bunch of grapes.”

A Taliban commander in Kunar Province, Zar Mohammed Ghairat, projected a similarly resolute air. “He was a leader and a man, but there are hundreds of other Osama bin Ladens left behind,” he said.

Though the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been entwined, their aims are believed to have differed. The Taliban’s primary goal has been to control Afghanistan, whereas Al Qaeda has wanted to establish a global terrorist network.

The question for the United States, then, is how many resources — and how many American casualties — should be devoted to dealing with what is essentially a local insurgency, now that Bin Laden is gone?

Most important to the future of that insurgency may be the choices made by Pakistan’s military and its top intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, which have been the Taliban’s prime sponsors.

Pakistani officials were angered and humiliated by the American raid that killed Bin Laden, and Pakistan is likely to remain a difficult partner, reluctant to eliminate the financing and sanctuaries it has provided to the Taliban.

Pakistan’s support, the survival of Mullah Omar and the reluctance so far of Taliban fighters to join the Afghan government make it unlikely that the movement’s energy will be sapped overnight. Similarly, the Taliban’s leaders have not been free to sit down with President Hamid Karzai and work out a deal without running afoul of their Pakistani hosts.

“It is very early,” said Rangin Spanta, the national security adviser to Mr. Karzai. “On the one hand, losing a charismatic leader is good, but we have to think forward and bring a corrective to our strategy in addressing the sanctuaries and choosing our allies.”

Moreover, Al Qaeda’s importance to an insurgency that is far from uniform across Afghanistan, particularly in terms of financing, has waned, Western and Afghan intelligence analysts said.

Alissa J. Rubin reported from Kabul, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall from Islamabad, Pakistan; Ruhullah Khapalwak and Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul; Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; and an employee of The New York Times from southern Afghanistan.

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With Death Outpacing Birth, a County Slows to a Shuffle

In fact, this community in West Virginia’s northern panhandle holds an unwelcome distinction. With just 71 babies born on average for every 100 residents who die, Brooke County, in which Weirton is partly located, has the largest such gap in the nation among counties in metropolitan areas, save for a handful of places that are magnets for retirees. (Hancock County, which contains the other part of Weirton, is in similar demographic straits.)

The main reason Brooke County is so far off the national number — which is 171 births to 100 deaths — is that it has missed out on one of the dominant demographic trends to emerge from the recent census: the influx of young immigrants into communities across the United States. The median age for Hispanics, by far the largest immigrant group, is just 27, far lower than the median age for whites of 41.

Without immigrants or economic opportunities to keep its younger residents close to home, Brooke County and others like it are showing their age. At St. Paul Catholic Church in Weirton, the Rev. Larry Dorsch has buried 15 people this year and baptized one. The American Legion in Wellsburg has closed because of a lack of young supporters. Volunteer fire departments are so understaffed that people come from other towns to fight fires.

“You can declare a person dead, but you can’t declare a town dead,” said Daniel Guida, a lawyer in Weirton. “Some towns have energy, that spring in your collective step. We’re missing that. We need to get on with Act 2. But how?”

According to Kenneth Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, there are now 853 counties with similar population trends — “more coffins than cradles,” as he calls it — including parts of the Great Plains, the Midwest and New England. (The problem is even more acute across the Atlantic — countries in the European Union collectively will cross the threshold for having fewer births than deaths by 2015, and would experience population growth only through immigration, according to a 2009 report on aging published by the European Commission.)

West Virginia is the only state in the country with more deaths than births, but other states, like Maine, are not far behind. Mr. Johnson estimates that many white areas will tip into natural decrease in the next 10 to 15 years.

“This is the story of what’s happening to white America,” Mr. Johnson said. “America is built by young people. They are the backbone. But what if they are not there?”

If Brooke County is a postcard from the future, it ended up there because it never adapted from its past.

For decades, it was a steel manufacturing powerhouse, employing thousands of workers in mills along the Ohio River. Weirton Steel, a hulking plant that straddles Weirton’s main street (it was recently used as a set for a science fiction movie, “Super 8,” and in the 1970s for “The Deer Hunter”), was once the largest single private employer in the state.

Now Wal-Mart holds that distinction, and Weirton Steel, now owned by Arcelor Mittal, a Luxembourg company run by an Indian billionaire, is a small fraction of its former size. Grass grows through cracks in the vast, empty parking lots.

Manufacturing jobs, long the lifeblood of the area, shrank by 38 percent statewide since 1990. Now health care is the state’s second-largest employer after government. The number of young people here sagged with the economy. The population under 35 is about half of what it was in 1980, while the number of residents 55 or older has jumped by 23 percent, according to 2010 census data released Thursday.

Now walkers and wheelchairs are more common than strollers. Sunday school classrooms at the United Methodist Church downtown are ghostly quiet, and Brooke High School has just half the number of students it did when it opened in 1969.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Weirton, W.Va., and Robert Gebeloff from New York.

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Inquest Faults London Officer in 2009 Death During Protests

 

Now, two years later, a jury in an official inquest has reached a damning conclusion. After hearing five weeks of evidence contradicting the original account, it determined on Tuesday that Mr. Tomlinson had in fact been “unlawfully killed” by the “excessive and unreasonable” behavior of the police officer who hit him, Police Constable Simon Harwood.

As a result of Constable Harwood’s attack, the jury said, “Mr. Tomlinson suffered internal bleeding, which led to his collapse within a few minutes and his subsequent death.”

The case has been a cause célèbre since the death of Mr. Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor whose fatal encounter with an angry army of police officers took place as he tried to make his way home during the sometimes-violent protests against a Group of 20 meeting on April 1, 2009. The verdict was a huge embarrassment for the police, which have been repeatedly accused of using excessive force against peaceful demonstrators and of being unable to control violent protesters, and who seemed to be doing their best to avoid taking responsibility for Mr. Tomlinson’s death.

Mr. Tomlinson, an alcoholic who had liver disease, had a number of peaceful encounters that evening with the police, who stopped him repeatedly as he walked, slowly and not very steadily, through London’s financial district.

One officer, Police Constable Andrew Brown, said that he encountered Mr. Tomlinson “shuffling” toward a police cordon against a backdrop of fires, smoke and rocks being thrown by the protesters. “He was staring vacantly towards the demonstration,” Constable Brown told the inquest. “I explained why he could not get through. He said he needed to get to West Smithfield where he lived — he needed to work in the morning.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Tomlinson was standing with his hands in his pockets when a line of police officers clearing the area of protesters told him to get back. It was then that Constable Harwood, who told the inquest that he was panicking at the mounting violence and who had already had several altercations with people in the crowd, ran forward.

Mr. Tomlinson had already begun to move away when Constable Harwood hit him in the left thigh with his baton and then pushed him hard on his shoulder. Mr. Tomlinson fell to the ground. He got up and wandered unsteadily for a short time before collapsing again, unconscious. He died soon afterward.

The police at first said that their only contact with Mr. Tomlinson involved trying to help him. But the push was captured on video by a bystander, Chris La Jaunie, an investment banker in New York. Six days later, he released the video to The Guardian, which posted it online.

A police pathologist — who has been suspended twice for failings in other postmortem examinations — concluded that Mr. Tomlinson had had a fatal heart attack. But several experts testified at the inquest that he had in fact died from internal bleeding.

Rose Fitzpatrick, deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, called the verdict a “matter of deep regret” and said the department would begin misconduct proceedings against Constable Harwood. But Mr. Tomlinson’s family said the officer should face criminal prosecution.

“We’ve been let down for two years,” Paul King, one of Mr. Tomlinson’s nine children, said after the verdict. He said that the verdict was “a bit of closure,” but that “we’d like to go to court and continue with the manslaughter charges.”

The Crown Prosecution Service, which originally declined to prosecute anyone in the case, said Tuesday that it would review its decision in light of the inquest.

Constable Harwood denied that he had intended to harm Mr. Tomlinson. The officer “did not intend, or foresee at the time, that his push would cause Mr. Tomlinson to fall over, let alone that it would result in any injury,” Constable Harwood’s lawyer said in a statement.

Jenny Jones, a member of the London Assembly from the Green Party, referred to several cases in which unarmed civilians were killed by police officers, including that of Jean Charles de Menezes. Mr. Menezes, a Brazilian man, was shot dead days after the subway bombings of July 2005 by officers who mistook him for a terrorist after a series of blunders. No officer was prosecuted in the case.

“Ian Tomlinson’s death must not join that list,” she said.

 

Gold and Oil Dip on News of Bin Laden's Death

HONG KONG — U.S. stock futures rose modestly Monday and the price of oil and gold fell as news of Osama bin Laden’s death eased global security concerns, at least for the moment.

Markets were generally higher in Asia and in early trading in Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, rose 0.2 percent. The CAC 40 in Paris rose 0.3 percent and the DAX in Frankfurt rose 0.7 percent. London markets were closed for a bank holiday.

Standard & Poor’s 500 index futures rose 0.4 percent, suggesting Wall Street would gain at the opening.

The dollar was mixed. The euro rose to $1.4815 from $1.4806 late Friday, while the British pound slipped to $1.6693 from $1.6706. The dollar rose to 81.47 yen from 81.20 yen

The Japanese and South Korean markets were already 1 percent higher before the U.S. President Barack Obama announced that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden in Pakistan.

By the close the Nikkei 225 index had gained 1.6 percent and the Kospi by 1.7 percent. This took the Nikkei to 10,004,20 points, the first time it closed above the 10,000-point mark since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck the country on March 11.

Still, compared to the enormous political and psychological significance of bin Laden’s death, the stock market reaction was relatively muted.

“News of the death of Osama bin Laden has had a limited impact on regional asset prices,” analysts at Royal Bank of Canada summed up in a note on Monday.

Some of the sharpest reactions to the news of bin Laden’s death were in the commodities markets.

Oil prices slipped, with benchmark U.S. crude for June delivery falling $1.62 to $112.31 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Many analysts cautioned, however, that bin Laden’s death could stoke, rather than ease, worries about oil supplies and global security in the longer run if it led to retaliatory attacks.

“This is a positive development in the campaign against terrorism,” Jonathan Ravelas, chief market strategist at Banco de Oro Unibank in Manila told Bloomberg News. “In the last 10 years, bin Laden’s presence has been a serious threat to global stability. The flip side is this could be followed by retaliation activities from his supporters.”

Gold, which had hit a new record of $1,575.79 an ounce earlier on Monday, fell to $1,551.80 in European morning trading. The precious metal, which is seen as a safer investment and tends to rise during times of rising inflation and global unrest, has been hitting successive record highs in recent weeks.

In India, the Sensex index was 0.6 percent lower by midafternoon amid widespread expectations that the Indian central bank will once again raise interest rates on Tuesday in a bid to tame rising inflation. Most other stock markets in the region, including Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China, were closed for a public holiday.

David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris.

 

Bahrain Sentences 4 Protesters to Death

 

Three other activists who were also on trial in the same case received sentences of life in prison.

Human rights activists in Bahrain voiced fears that the verdicts could generate a new wave of protests in the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom. They also argued that the trial was rendered unfair by a series of legal abuses, including the arrest of one of the defendants’ lawyers, Mohammed al-Tajer, one of Bahrain’s most prominent attorneys. The suspects were also barred from meeting with their families, and the news media were not allowed to cover the trial.

“These verdicts will have a huge negative impact on the Bahraini society,” said Mohamed Maskati, who heads a human rights group in the kingdom. “We fear brutal violence in the days ahead. I am not optimistic at all — especially that there could be more similar verdicts in the near future.”

Other activists refused to talk, citing the wave of arrests that has swept the country in the past two months.

Amnesty International urged Bahrain to not carry out the verdict.

“They must uphold the right to fair trial and they must not use the death penalty under any circumstances,” it said in a statement issued Thursday.

Bahraini authorities said that the defendants had the right to appeal, though Amnesty International and local human rights groups said that the appeal would be insignificant at this point.

“The defendants received all legal rights in line with human rights international laws,” the Bahraini government said in a statement issued Thursday. “The verdict is a clear indication of the community’s utter condemnation of barbarous crimes and a profound commitment to the protection of precious lives.”

Bahrain’s Shiite majority, which has long complained of marginalization by the Sunni ruling elite, took to the streets last month in mass protests and sit-ins demanding reforms, freedoms and equal rights. The king declared martial law and sought the help of Saudi troops to crack down on protests and crush dissent.

At least 30 people were reported killed since the protests started in March, among them four in custody. Human rights activists said they died after they were severely tortured. Bahraini authorities have acknowledged the deaths but have not explained them.

The demonstrations in Bahrain were inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, in which both countries’ presidents stepped down under great popular pressure after only a few weeks.

The seven opposition figures in Bahrain were charged in the premeditated murder of government employees. Military prosecutors presented a video that suggested that the protesters had run the policemen over with a car. Lawyers for the accused denied the charges.

 

After Storms, a Widespread Path of Death and Damage

 

The worker had been washing kitchen equipment behind Golden Corral, a popular restaurant in Sanford, N.C., when he spotted a giant black funnel cloud bearing down. It was one of more than 90 tornadoes — what one meteorologist described as a “family” of them — that hit the state on Saturday.

He ran to Ms. Rodriguez, who walked out the back door. She dodged a piece of flying wood, and then she saw it: a dark funnel cloud thick with wood and metal only a couple of blocks away.

About 140 people were eating in her restaurant, many of them in front of the thick plate-glass windows that run the length of the place.

“All I could think is that I have to get them away from the glass because I knew it would just cut them in half,” she said in an interview on Sunday. “I thought, where can I put them? Then I yelled: ‘Tornado! Everyone to my kitchen!’?”

People packed into the meat cooler and behind the stoves. Others jammed into the restrooms. Then they waited. After five minutes, Ms. Rodriguez said, the darkness lifted and she peeked out the back door.

The tornado, she said, had bounced up, skipped the Golden Corral and made a sharp turn, setting down on top of a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center a few hundred feet away.

“I could see the roof was just gone and all of the Lowe’s stuff flying up in the air,” Ms. Rodriguez said.

The Lowe’s store in Sanford, a town of about 29,000 in the center of the state, was essentially demolished. But an estimated 70 customers were saved when another fast-thinking manager herded customers and his staff into a windowless storeroom.

The storm killed at least two people in the Sanford area and injured several more, according to Sheriff Tracy Carter of Lee County.

A string of tornadoes that began Thursday night in Oklahoma left of a trail of death and millions of dollars in damage from the middle of America to the Eastern Seaboard. But they reached their zenith on Saturday night in North Carolina.

Officials said the storms killed at least 43 people and injured hundreds more. No damage estimates were immediately available, but they will most certainly run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Although April and May are the worst time for tornadoes in the South, this storm system, which had its roots in the Pacific Ocean, was unusual for its size and duration, officials said. The storm would calm itself a bit at night and then gain renewed strength with the day’s heat, said Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It brought flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms laced with giant balls of hail to Oklahoma on Thursday, killing two elderly sisters, before moving east through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Virginia.

The effects from the storms could be felt as far as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the New York City area on Saturday night, when furious wind-driven rains covered roadways and produced isolated flooding.

When the system hit North Carolina on Saturday night, it spawned a record 92 tornadoes in the state, killing at least 22 people and injuring more than 80 others. At least 14 deaths were in Bertie and Hertford Counties, in a rural northeast corner of the state where cotton, tobacco, peanuts, corn and soybeans anchor the economy.

“Normally the storms that hit here are pretty severe but smaller in size,” said Cal Bryant, the editor of The Roanoke-Chowan News Herald, which serves a part of North Carolina that was most severely hit. “Now they are thinking it may have been one big tornado. They’re trying to find where it stopped, and they haven’t got there yet.”

Mr. Bryant, who spent Sunday with survivors in Bertie County, said rescue crews were going house to house looking for dead or injured residents and assessing damage. At least 60 houses, some of them mobile homes, were destroyed, and he expected the count to go higher.

Kim Severson reported from Atlanta. Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, Tarini Parti from Raleigh, N.C., and Joseph Berger from New York.

 

Life term for bridge death father

 10 April 2011 Last updated at 23:46 ET The girl was thrown from the bridge in full view of rush-hour commuters An Australian man who killed his four-year-old daughter by throwing her from a bridge in full view of rush-hour commuters has been jailed for life.

Arthur Freeman killed Darcey in a fit of rage, amid a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife.

His two sons, then aged two and six, witnessed the murder.

Judge Paul Coghlan ordered that Freeman would not be eligible for parole for 32 years, but said the 37-year-old was not beyond redemption.

The day before the murder, in January 2009, Freeman had been told his visiting rights to his children were being reduced.

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In delivering the life sentence, Judge Justice Paul Coghlan said that Freeman had tried to hurt his former wife as profoundly as possible, and had chosen a remarkably public place to have the most dramatic impact.

What particularly rankled the judge was that Freeman had never said sorry for his actions, and that others had somehow felt culpable for his actions.

Then he put four-year-old Darcey front and centre. "What Darcey's last thoughts might have been does not bear thinking about," he said.

He had telephoned his ex-wife and told her to say good-bye to her children because she would never see them again.

Dozens of motorists stuck in rush-hour traffic saw Darcey plunge to her death, and one eyewitness described how Freeman had returned to his car as if he had just posted a letter.

The jury heard that Darcey's elder brother, Ben, had begged his father to return because he knew the girl could not swim.

She sustained massive injuries in the fall and eventually drowned.

Judge Coghlan said Freeman had acted out of revenge.

"What Darcey's last thoughts might have been does not bear thinking about and her death must have been a painful and protracted one," he said.

"It can only be concluded that you used your daughter in an attempt to hurt your former wife as profoundly as possible"

Freeman's defence team claimed that he had been mentally impaired at the time of the incident, but the court rejected the argument.