The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 3A

The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 3A

NEWS BRIEFS
DETROIT
Delta passenger
held for disruptive
behavior on flight
Delta Air Lines says fedefal
officials detained a man who
became disruptive on an Amster-
dam-to-Detroit flight.
Airline spokeswoman Susan
Elliott says the man "was quickly
restrained" and taken into cus-
tody when the flight landed at
Detroit Metropolitan Airport
about 4 p.m. yesterday.
Elliott says Flight 235 contin-
ued to Detroit without further
incident. Her statement didn't
describe how the man was dis-
ruptive, how he was restrained
or who restrained him.
The incident occurred on the
same day jury selection began
in Detroit in the federal trial of
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a
Nigerian man accused of trying
to bring down an Amsterdam-to-
Detroit flight with a bomb in his
underwear on Christmas 2009.
PHOENIX, Ariz.
Dust storms cause
three highway
pileups, 15 injuries
A blinding dust storm has
. caused three different pileups
along a major interstate in Ari-
zona yesterday, killing one man
and injuring more than 15 other
people.
The Arizona Department of
Public Safety says 24 vehicles
" were involved in the three crash-
es along Interstate 10.
The first two crashes occurred
just after noon near Picacho,
about midway between Phoenix
and Tucson. Those collisions
involved 16 vehicles, including
tractor-trailers.
SANTA ANA, Calif.
Suspect in three
murders to be
returned to Calif.
A former U.S. Marine who was
convicted of three murders in
Illinois will be returned to Cali-
fornia to be tried in five other
murder cases, prosecutors said
yesterday.
Andrew Urdiales, 47, will
arrive Thursday to be pros-
ecuted in killings committed in
Orange, Riverside and San Diego
counties from 1986 to 1995, the
Orange County district attorney
said.
Urdiales was convicted in
2002 in Illinois for killing two
women and again in 2004 for
killing a third.
He is accused of killing four of
the Southern California women
while stationed at various
military facilities in the three-
county region and of killing the
fifth while on vacation in Palm

Springs in 1995.
UNITED NATIONS
Russia, China
vetoes sanctions
against Syria
Russia and China vetoed a
i European-backed U.N. Security
Council resolution yesterday that
threatened sanctions against
Syria if it didn't immediately halt
its military crackdown against
'civilians.
It would have been the first
legally binding resolution adopt-
ed by the Security Council since
President Bashar Assad's military
began using tanks and soldiers
against protesters in mid-March.
Its defeat reflects the deep divi-
sions in the U.N's most power-
ful body over how to address the
ongoing violence in Syria, which
the U.N. estimates has led to more
than 2,700 deaths.
The European sponsors of the
resolution tried to avoid a veto by
9 watering down the language on
sanctions three times, to the point
where the word "sanctions" was
taken out, but they failed.
The vote was 9-2 with four
abstentions - India, SouthAfrica,
Brazil and Lebanon.
-Compiled from
Daily wire reports

Private chopper
crashes into East
River yesterday

President Barack Obama urges Congress to pass the American Jobs Act at Eastfield College in Mesquite, Texas,
yesterday.
Obam a criticizes GOP
for inaction on jobs bill1

President blames
Republicans for
tabling vote
Mesquite, Tex (AP) - Presi-
dent Barack Obama is naming
names.
First he singled out House
Speaker John Boehner and Sen-
ate Republican leader Mitch
McConnell.
Yesterday, Rep. Eric Cantor,
R-Va., came in for a presiden-
tial scolding as Obama used an
economic sales pitch in Texas
to criticize the House majority
leader for refusing to take up
the president's jobs bill.
"Eric Cantor said that right
now, he won't even let this jobs
bill have a vote in the House of
Representatives. That's whathe
said. Won't even let it be debat-
ed," Obama said in a speech at
a community college in Mes-
quite, a Dallas suburb. "Think
about that. What's the prob-
lem? Do they not have the time?
They just had a week off. Is it
inconvenient?"
"At least put this jobs bill
up for a vote so that the entire
country knows exactly where

members of Congress stand,"
the president said. "Put your
cards on the table."
Even as Obama spoke, McCo-
nnell was attempting to call his
bluff by pushing for a quick
Senate vote on the jobs bill,
which Senate Democrats have
acknowledged doesn't have the
support to pass.
White House press secretary
Jay Carney called that a "politi-
cal ploy," and Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid objected,
arguing that the bill should
not be acted on without Senate
debate.
It underscored Obama's
dilemma as he travels the coun-
try seeking to isolate Repub-
licans to take the blame if his
jobs bill doesn't pass - without
a clear strategy for ensuring it
does.
The approach puts the,
Obama administration at risk
of appearing to use the presi-
dent's $447 billion jobs bill as
a political weapon rather than
as a means of fixing the nation's
economic woes and putting
Americans back to work.
And it relies heavily on the
assumption that the public
won't also hold Obama account-

able if he can't get Congress to
act.
Obama spoke a day after
Cantor said that while the plan
contained elements thatRepub-
licans could support, "this all
or nothing approach is unrea-
sonable."
Cantor's spokesman, Brad
Dayspring, disputed Obama's
criticism.
"If House Republicans sent
our plan for America's job cre-
ators to the president, would
he promise not to veto it in its
entirety? Would he travel dis-
trict to district and explain why
he'd block such common-sense
ideas to create jobs?" Dayspring
said. "House Republicans have
different ideas on how to grow
the economy and create jobs,
but that shouldn't prevent us
from trying to find areas of
common ground with the presi-
dent."
The president charges that
it's Republicans who won't
work with him.
"I realize that some Repub-
licans in Washington are resis-
tant, partly because I proposed
it. If I took the party platform
and proposed it, they'd sud-
denly be against it," he said.

Passenger killed,
three wounded in
helicopter crash
NEW YORK (AP) - A heli-
copter on a private tour with
five people aboard sputtered and
crashed into the East River yes-
terday afternoon shortly after
takeoff from a riverbank heli-
port, killing one passenger and
injuring three others.
The 40-year-old victim appar-
ently was trapped inside as
the chopper sank about 50 feet
below the surface of the swift-
moving water, police said. New
York Police Department divers
pulled her from the water about
90 minutes after the Bell 206 Jet
Ranger went down at around 3
p.m. She was pronounced dead at
the scene.
Emergency crews arrived
within seconds of the crash to
find the helicopter upside-down
in the murky water with just its
skids showing on the surface.
The pilot, Paul Dudley, and three
passengers were bobbing, and
witnesses reported a man diving
down, possibly in an attempt to
rescue the remaining passenger.
The passengers were friends of
the pilot's family: a husband and
wife who were British and living
in Portugal; the wife's daugh-
ter, also British, who died at the
scene; and the daughter's Aus-
tralian friend. The daughter and
friend were living in Australia.
The pilot's wife, Sunhe Dud-
ley, told The Associated Press
that she had spoken to her hus-
band briefly after the crash.
"I think that he's OK," she
said. "These were actually very
dear friends of ours that were in
the helicopter."
The passengers were pulled
from the water shortly after
emergency crews arrived on the
scene, police spokesman Paul
Browne said. Fire department
rescue paramedics revived both
women, who were in critical
condition; the man was stable.
All were hospitalized. The pilot
swam to shore and was unin-
jured.
The private chopper appar-
ently had run into trouble and
was trying to return to the heli-
port when it went into the river
off 34th Street in midtown Man-
hattan, a few blocks south of the
United Nations headquarters. It's
unclear what happened, but wit-
nesses reported it was sputtering
and appeared to be in some type
of mechanical distress.
Joy Garnett and her husband
were on the dock waiting to take
the East River ferry to Brooklyn
when they heard the blades of a
helicopter and saw it start to take
off from the nearby helipad. She
said she saw it do "a funny curli-
cue."
"I thought,'Is that some dare-
devil move?' she said. "But it
was obviously out of control. The
body spun around at least two
or three times, and then it went
down."
She said the chopper had lift-
ed about 25 feet off the ground
before it dropped into the water
without much of a splash. It
flipped over, and the blades were

sticking up out of the river.

Joseph Belez was watching
helicopters from a boardwalk
and saw the crash.
"It was going up, and then all
of a sudden it just spun itself and
went down to the water," he said.
"I was just watching it take off,
and it was just all of a sudden
spinning. It just went down. It
was a shock. It really was."
A massive rescue effort was
under way within minutes of
the crash, with a dozen boats
and divers down into the cold,
grey water. Police officers doing
a counterterrorism drill nearby
jumped into the water wearing
their uniforms, and without any
rescue equipmentcthey pulled the
three passengers to shore.
"The pilot did indicate that
there was somebody still in the
helicopter," Lt. Larry Serras said.
"By the time we swam to the
helicopter it was completely sub-
merged."
Officer Jason Gregory, one of
the divers who brought the wom-
an's body to the surface, said the
helicopter was upside down in
the sediment. He said the woman
was in the back seat and wasn't
buckled in by any seat belt.
The helicopter was from
Linden, N.J., near the Statue
of Liberty and the Newark,
N.J., international airport and
a popular base and refueling
stop for helicopters operating in
New York. The pilot apparently
reported problems in the heli-
copter and said he was turning
around, Mayor Michael Bloom-
berg said.
Paul Dudley is a commercial
pilot and owns Linden Airport
Services, the company that man-
ages the Linden municipal air-
port under a 20-year contract
with the city, Linden Mayor
Richard Gerbounka said.
"He flies light aircraft, he flies
helicopters," Gerbounka said.
"He's an accomplished pilot."
In November 2006, Dudley
landed a Cessna 172 light plane
in a park near Coney Island in
Brooklyn after the engine failed.
No one was hurt during the emer-
gency landing, and the plane
was taken back to Linden after
mechanics removed the wings.
The National Transporta-
tion Safety Board was on scene
yesterday, and crews pulled the
wreckage from the water about
four hours after it went down.
The chopper would be taken to
the police department's Floyd
Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The
airport in Linden was locked
down briefly pending the arrival
of Federal Aviation Administra-
tion and NTSB investigators.
The Bell 206 Jet Ranger is
one of the world's most popular
helicopter models and was first
flown in January 1966. They are
light and highly maneuverable,
making them popular with tele-
vision stations and air taxi com-
panies. A new one costs between
$700,000 and $1.2 million.
The East River has been par-
ticularly tricky for pilots because
of its many bridges and its prox-
imity to LaGuardia, one of the
nation's busiest airports. In 2006,
New York Yankees pitcher Cory
Lidle died when the Cirrus light
plane he was flying crashed into a
residential building while trying
to make a turn over the river.

Banks, mortgage companies
on trial for defrauding veterans

Atlanta court
unseals lawsuit
against bank
lenders
ATLANTA (AP) - A whistle-
blower lawsuit launched in 2006
and unsealed yesterday in fed-
eral court in Atlanta claims sev-
eral large banks and mortgage
companies defrauded military
veterans and taxpayers out of
hundreds of millions of dollars
in a"brazen scheme" to hide ille-
gal fees.
The lawsuit, brought under
the Federal Claims Act by two
mortgage brokers, claims the 13
banks and mortgage firms over-
charged veterans who were
applying for special home loans
guaranteed by the Department
of Veterans Affairs.
Federal rules allow the lend-
ers to charge "reasonable and
customary" fees and taxes, the
lawsuitsaid,but they are barred
from charging them attorneys'
fees and settlement closing
costs for the loans. The firms
skirted the rules by charging
attorneys' fees by hiding them
as "title examination" or "title
search" fees, it said.
Veterans were ultimately
saddled with "excessive and
illegal fees at closing," the com-
plaint said.
The lawsuit targets several
firms, including Wells Fargo,
JPMorgan Chase & Co. and
Bank of America. Several of
the firms did not immediately
return messages late Tues-
day seeking comment on the
lawsuit. A Bank of America

spokesman and a Wells Fargo
Home Mortgage spokeswoman
declined to comment. The banks
have denied the allegations in
related court documents.
The lawsuit was initially filed
in 2006, but attorneys say it's
common for these types of com-
plaintsto remain sealed for years
while they are being investigat-
ed. It seeks to recover damages
and penalties on behalf of the
federal government, which said
in court records that it wouldn't
intervene.
The fees weren't necessarily
linked tothe global
More than 1.2 million of the
refinanced loans have been
made to veterans and their fami-
lies over the past decade, and up

to 90 percent of them were taint-
ed with the alleged fraud, plain-
tiff's attorneys said. The firms
collected $300 to $1,000 with
each deal, which could amount
to "massive damages" to the fed-
eral government, the complaint
said.
"This is a massive fraud onthe
American taxpayers and Ameri-
canveterans," said James E. But-
ler, Jr., one of the attorneys who
brought the case.
"Knowing they weren't
allowed to charge the fees, the
banks and mortgage companies
inflated allowable charges to
hide these illegal fees without
telling the veterans who were
the borrowers or the VA they
were doing so."

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