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It's not a headline you would expect to read, but a man did indeed survive an attempted suicide by jumping from New York City landmark the Empire State Building!
Nathaniel Simone from Hamilton, Massachusetts, was visiting the observation deck on the 86th floor of the 102 story iconic Manhattan skyscraper popular with tourists from around the globe. He climbed over a security fence at about 11:30 on Wednesday evening and decide to leap off in an apparent suicide attempt. Fortunately for Simone, he didn't get quite enough lift-off from his jump and he ended up landing hard...but only one floor down! The 33-year-old was taken to Bellevue Hospital to be treated for a broken ankle from the fall and also for psychiatric evaluation.
Simone faces charges of reckless endangerment, trespassing, and disorderly conduct. Since the skyscraper was constructed in 1929, there have been at least thirty people who have jumped from the building. In 1979, a 29-year-old woman named Elvita Adams jumped from the observation deck as well, but high winds blew her down to the 85th floor, where she suffered a shattered pelvis.
The small town of West, Texas, is struggling valiantly to rebuild after a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant virtually decimated the entire community on Wednesday, a struggle that has been almost over-looked and forgotten by the nation at large as the focus has been on the equally horrific Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent death and capture of two suspects connected to the attack this week.
The powerful blast—which measured as a small earthquake on seismographs across the country—leveled the fertilizer plant and destroyed or damaged homes and businesses in a two mile radius and was felt and heard over fifty miles away. The official death toll in the explosion is now at 14, with at least 60 people still unaccounted for or missing. The number of people injured in the blast is well over two hundred, while 24 of those remain in critical condition. At least five of the people listed as missing were volunteer firefighters responding to calls of an emergency situation at the plant, which was cited in 2006 for not obtaining proper permits.
Witnesses at the scene describe the area as looking as if it were a war zone and extremely chaotic in the first hours after the explosion. Nearby communities were evacuated while the danger of toxic smoke coming from the explosion was assessed, with fear that yet more of the fertilizer stored in the factory could ignite another massive blast. One of the casualties was an elderly man who died while being evacuated from a nearby nursing home. Amateur video taken by local residents show the incredible force of the detonation, which emitted a deafening roar. A large mushroom-shaped cloud was photographed rising from the blast zone, prompting many residents to believe the area was under a nuclear attack.
While details of what precisely caused the blast remain sketchy, an undoubtedly lengthy investigation of the disaster has already begun in earnest. In the meantime, the 2,800 residents of the tight-knit community are pulling together as best they can to recover from the tragedy, virtually out of the national spotlight, as the US and world media feverishly reported on the terrorist attack in Boston and the sensational capture and killing of the prime suspects Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Watertown, Massachusetts, on Friday.
Texas governor Rick Perry has toured the scene and declared the area a disaster zone, which immediately releases government funding and federal assistance to local citizens and businesses to rebuild and help cope with the aftermath and enormous clean-up effort. The
tragedy raised fears of another U.S. terror attack just days after the
Boston bombs that killed three people, and ahead of the 20th
anniversary of the Waco siege of the Branch Davidian sect that ended with the death of David Koresh and 85 other people in 1995. Waco is only nineteen miles from the town of West, Texas. Public officials and authorities are assuring that there is no connection between the plant explosion and the anniversaries of both the Waco, Texas, siege and the Oklahoma City bombing, which were both on April 19:
A man in Belarus has died after being bitten by a beaver while trying to photograph the normally docile creature. The man was fishing at Lake Shestakov in Belarus with two friends when they happened upon the toothy rodent minding its own business on the side of the road. One member of the group decided to get up close and personal with the beaver in order to take a photograph. This did not sit well with the animal, apparently, and it lunged at the unsuspecting shutterbug, sinking its razor-sharp teeth into the man's thigh. (If those buck teeth can manage to saw through wood, it's not difficult to imagine what they can do to human flesh!)
The beaver actually managed to sever a main artery in the man's thigh. His companions tried desperately to stem the flow of blood, but were unable to do so. The man bled out before he could be taken for emergency treatment. Beaver attacks are a rare occurrence, but are certainly not unheard of, especially in recent years. Last year, two young girls in the United States were mauled by a beaver while swimming near its nest, suffering serious bite and scratch injuries to the face and body. Another beaver attack was recorded in Belarus in 2003, when two farmers were bitten by a rabid beaver as they tried to chase it away from a barn.
People should definitely avoid any and all contact with beavers, especially after viewing this footage from Russia of a man recording one of the woodland creatures as it attacks him from this past week!
Residents of the Pacific island nation of Guam remain undaunted after North Korea's leader Kim Jung Un listed it recently as a possible target for "nuclear annihilation" after the rouge dictatorship ratcheted up the war drums and rhetoric against Washington this week. (North Korea also listed Hawaii and the Japanese island of Okinawa as possible targets.)
Most of the island's 180,000 residents are not taking the threats very seriously, although some have made plans to seek shelter should the unthinkable happen. Most of the citizens are accustomed to the sound of fighter jets and the sight of war maneuvers, as the islands have held an American military installation since World War II when Guam officially became a US territory.
The island has since had a rather sleepy, quiet reputation. Until the brouhaha surrounding the threats from Pyongyang, the biggest threat to the island's populace has been typhoon season and an overpopulation of non-indigenous snakes introduced to the area via large cargo ships from other countries.
The White House, however, is not taking the North Korean threat quite as lightly as the laid-back citizens of Guam. Naval battleships have been dispatched to the area and an anti-missile system capable of knocking any rockets out of the sky before they reach their targets will also be installed.
Buenos Aires, Argentina, is still reeling after an epic rain storm dumped an unimaginable amount of water on the metropolis of almost three million people more than two days ago.
The catastrophic rainstorm swept over the Argentine capital and the neighboring city of La Plata, releasing a "deluge without historical precedent" according to Daniel Scioli, the governor of Buenos Aires Province, who has surveyed the damage. As of now, there are 54 confirmed fatalities directly related to the storm, which also brought extremely high winds along with heavy rains to the region. Streets and boulevards across the capital of Buenos Aires quickly turned into raging rivers, which swept away cars, people and anything else in their paths. A worker trying to make repairs to the city's Metro system was electrocuted.
More than six inches of rain fell upon the area in less than two hours, which rapidly overtook all drainage systems throughout the area. More rain fell on the area in one day than would normally fall for more than one month, local meteorologists are reporting. People became trapped in their cars as flood waters traveled at lightning speeds down streets. Some of the dead were elderly people who became trapped in their homes, unable to escape the flood waters.
Power was still out to over 250,000 homes in the capital as of Wednesday afternoon.
Around 2,200 victims have been evacuated from La Plata, a city of
750,000 residents. Some families reported to local media that they had spent Tuesday night on the
roofs of their houses waiting to be rescued.
Addendum: Could the Argentina flooding, along with the recent "unprecedented" floods that have taken place in Italy, Greece, Kenya and Mauritius over the past few weeks be a part of what the Webbot Project has predicted regarding "biblical flooding events"? The data regarding the intense "deluges" has initially been interpreted to be caused (at least in part) by anticipated comet or asteroid impacts in the oceans this year, which would perhaps create a "forty days and forty nights" of rain as written about in the biblical story of Noah and the Arc. Could "unknown energies" be creating the "atmospheric rivers of moisture" spoken about in previous ALTA reports?
