Erupting Alaska volcano spews ash, disrupts air travel

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - One of Alaska's most active volcanoes, which has been belching ash and spewing lava since last week, has forced regional flight cancellations and dusted some nearby communities with ash, scientists and local officials said on Monday.

Pavlof Volcano has sent up ash as high as 22,000 feet, with the cloud blowing eastward and the eruption showing no signs of abating, according to the federal-state Alaska Volcano Observatory.

The lava from its 8,261-foot (2,518-metre) peak has also created huge steam clouds on meeting the mountain's snow.

While the ash plume was still too low on Monday to affect commercial airliners flying at least 30,000 feet above sea level between Asia and North America, it was scrambling schedules for regional carriers serving rural fishing towns and native villages that lack outside road access.

PenAir, an Anchorage-based Alaska company specializing in travel in southwestern Alaska, briefly stopped flights to four destinations to wait for ash to dissipate, said Danny Seybert, the carrier's chief executive. "We've had about a dozen cancellations due to the volcano," he said.

PenAir's planes fly at altitudes between 15,000 and 20,000 feet, exactly where they could encounter ash, depending on wind direction, Seybert said.

Among the cancellations were flights in and out of Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, the top-volume seafood port in the United States, he said.

Ash plumes could go higher, as Pavlof's eruption could intensify with little warning, the Alaska Volcano Observatory said.

Trace amounts of ash fell overnight on Nelson Lagoon, a tiny Aleut village of 50 residents located 48 miles northeast of Pavlof. The volcano had earlier sprinkled ash on Sand Point, a fishing town of about 1,000 people, when the wind was blowing in a slightly different direction, according to the observatory.

Along with potential aviation hazards, the ash poses possible health risks, said Rick Wessels, a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist at the observatory.

"It's dangerous for the people downwind of it, because you don't really want to breathe in that fine ash that long," Wessels said of the eruption taking place on the Alaska Peninsula, 590 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Pavlof is one of Alaska's most restless volcanoes and had its last major eruption in 2007. The Alaska Volcano Observatory estimates it has erupted about two dozen times between 1901 and 2007.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and David Brunnstrom)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/erupting-alaska-volcano-spews-ash-disrupts-air-travel-040452393.html

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CA-NEWS Summary

Hezbollah steps up Syria battle, Israel threatens more strikes

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TUNIS (Reuters) - One protester died and several were injured when Tunisian Islamists defied a ban on their demonstration and clashed with police on Sunday. The 27-year-old man was killed in the violence in the capital Tunis which continued into the evening, the state news agency said. A Reuters witness saw several others injured at the protest in support of the Islamist Ansar al-Sharia group.

Protesting Egyptian police block Israel border crossing

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ca-news-summary-005241860.html

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Suspected US drone in Yemen kills 4 militants

SANAA, Yemen (AP) ? A suspected U.S. drone strike killed four al-Qaida militants Saturday in a southern Yemeni province once overrun by the group, according to security officials.

The officials said the attack took place around dawn in an area called Deyqa in Abyan province. Officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to brief the media.

Yemeni forces battled al-Qaida in Abyan province last year, routing militants from major cities that al-Qaida had briefly ruled during the country's 2011 political turmoil. The militants fled to surrounding mountainous areas after Yemen's military, assisted by the United States, forced them to retreat.

According to several research groups and The Associated Press's own reporting, there has been a dramatic rise in such drone strikes in Yemen since the country's new U.S.-backed president assumed power early last year.

Washington says al-Qaida in Yemen is among the group's most dangerous and active branches worldwide.

The U.S. Ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein, met Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi on Saturday. Earlier this week, President Barack Obama extended an executive decision warning supporters of the country's former longtime ruler ? ousted after more than three decades in power by protests ? to stop hampering the political process or face having their assets frozen.

Hadi also told Yemeni state TV Saturday that tampering of the country's military jets over the past year is the work of either al-Qaida or those wanting to sabotage the army, a reference to supporters of Saleh still in government and security posts.

He vowed an investigation into the incidents.

Seven military aircraft have been sabotaged while still on the ground, including at least two that were torched.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suspected-us-drone-yemen-kills-4-militants-193326334.html

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Justice Department's seizure of phone records for journalists at the Associated Press is hurting the agency's ability to gather news, the wire service's Chief Executive and President Gary Pruitt said on Sunday.

"Officials that would normally talk to us and people we talk to in the normal course of news gathering are already saying to us that they're a little reluctant to talk to us," Pruitt said on CBS's "Face The Nation" program. "They fear that they will be monitored by the government."

The Justice Department told the AP on May 10 that it had earlier seized records of more than 20 of its phone lines for April and May 2012. The seizure was part of an investigation of media leaks about a foiled terrorism plot.

"Approximately a hundred journalists use these telephone lines as part of news gathering," Pruitt said. "And over the course of the two months of the records that they swept up, thousands upon thousands of news-gathering calls were made."

The White House has said that President Barack Obama learned about the Justice Department's record seizure from press reports and had no prior knowledge of the action. Obama's administration is fielding concerns on several incidents that raise questions about its transparency.

Pruitt said the Justice Department claimed an exception to its own rules that required them to notify the AP of such a record seizure by saying that such a disclosure would have posed a substantial threat to the investigation.

"But they have not explained why it would and we can't understand why it would," Pruitt said. "We never even had possession of these records, they were in the possession of our telephone service company and they couldn't be tampered with."

Government officials have told Reuters that the AP phone records were just one element in an ongoing sweeping U.S. government investigation into media leaks about a Yemen-based plot to bomb a U.S. airliner, prompted by a May 7, 2012 AP story about the operation to foil the plot.

"We don't question their right to conduct these sort of investigations," Pruitt said. "We think they went about it the wrong way, so sweeping, so secretively, so abusively and harassingly."

Pruitt said the AP would have sought to narrow the scope of the record seizure through courts had it been notified, instead of "the Justice Department acting on its own, being the judge, jury and executioner, in secret."

Reuters was one of nearly 50 news organizations that signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder complaining about the AP phone record seizures.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-chief-says-phone-probe-makes-news-sources-173716388.html

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/O6rHh0E_jlI/

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