Brazil businessman among flight deaths
Advertiser News Services
SAO PAULO — A British-born Brazilian businessman and nine family members were among the 14 people killed when their twin-engine plane crashed and exploded near a coastal resort in northeastern Brazil, a spokesman for his company said yesterday.
Roger Ian Wright, a founding partner at Sao Paulo financial consulting firm Arsenal Investimentos, died along with his second wife, son and daughter from a previous marriage and their spouses, two grandsons and one granddaughter and a great aunt, the spokesman said.
MOGADISHU FIGHTING KILLS 3, WOUNDS 30
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Heavy shelling and gunfire in Mogadishu killed three people and wounded about 30 yesterday in the battle between government and rebel forces for Somalia's capital, witnesses said.
It was the second day of an offensive by the U.N.-backed government trying to regain neighborhoods won by the Islamic insurgents in recent weeks.
GAMBINO MAFIA BOSS DEPORTED TO ITALY
ROME — Italian authorities took into custody yesterday a top boss from the Gambino Mafia clan who was deported from the United States after spending more than two decades in prison for drug trafficking.
The 67-year-old Rosario Gambino arrived at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport on a flight from Miami.
Gambino, an Italian-born New Jersey resident, was considered a top mobster in the New York-based crime family led by his late cousin Carlo Gambino.
In 1984, he was convicted in a multimillion-dollar conspiracy to sell heroin in southern New Jersey and sentenced to 45 years in jail.
WOMAN WITH MS CONQUERS EVEREST
BAYFIELD, Wis. — A retired school teacher with multiple sclerosis has now climbed the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents.
A dispatch from the expedition company Alpine Ascents International reported that Lori Schneider reached the 29,035-foot-high peak of Mount Everest at about 2:30 p.m. Friday Hawai'i time. It's the tallest point in the world.
The 52-year-old from northwestern Wisconsin climbed six of the other peaks after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999.
Schneider is reported to be the first woman afflicted with the neurological disease to reach the Everest summit and the first person with MS to complete the Seven Summits.
