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Charles and Camilla’s Helicopter Makes Emergency Landing
Maarten Holl - Pool/Getty Images(LONDON) -- Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, had a mid-air scare Thursday when their helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing.
Charles and Camilla were 15 minutes into their flight from London to the Hay Literary Festival in Powys when a “technical fault” aboard the chopper forced the pilot to divert the flight to Denham Aerodrome in Buckinghamshire, according to the Press Association.
“The pilot carried out a controlled emergency landing after diverting to the airport,” a spokesman for the royal couple said.
An investigation has been opened into what caused the mid-air problem aboard the helicopter, which had as many as five people, in addition to Charles and Camilla, aboard.
Once safely on the ground, the prince and the duchess boarded cars to continue on to Hay-on-Wye as scheduled.
Despite arriving three hours late, Charles and Camilla were greeted by a crowd of several hundred people at the festival, an annual gathering of authors, politicians and celebrities.
“They were unflappable despite what they went through. If anyone else had gone through what they did they would have canceled their day,” one attendee told the Press Association.
Prince Charles was later scheduled to attend the Welsh National Opera’s opening night of Lohengrin at the Wales Millennium Center in Cardiff, according to the BBC.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio
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Picnicking US Tourists Stranded on Iceberg
File photo. iStockphoto/Thinkstock(Fjallsárlón, Iceland) -- American tourists dining on a glacier in eastern Iceland found themselves floating away from shore earlier this week, an Icelandic newspaper reported.
Four people were rescued from Fjallsárlón glacial lagoon. They had set up a table and chairs with plans for dinner when a gust of wind pushed the ice from the land. They were stranded about 30 feet from shore. One of the diners managed to jump to shore before the ice drifted too far and call for help.
The tourists have not been identified, but a photo captured three of the diners sitting in chairs, floating on a piece of ice that appears to be hardly larger than the table at which they were seated.
"When we arrived it was quite comical to see them sitting on chairs and with a table on an iceberg ...Yes, the dinner was over," Páll Sigurður Vignisson told Iceland Review. He did not notice what they had been eating.
However, Vignisson later told Iceland news service RUV, "They could have been in danger. We never know how ice will behave, if it rolls over and when -- we just don't know."
Fjallsárlón glacial lagoon is an isolated glacial lagoon in the realm of Vatnajökull, according to a local tour company. Vatnajökull is Europe's largest glacier.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio
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Putin Responds to Obama's Missile Defense Letter
Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images(LONDON) -- A top Kremlin aide, Nikolai Patrushev, who is in Washington this week, is carrying a letter from President Vladimir Putin to President Obama, according to the Russian Embassy in D.C.
In a statement on its website, the embassy did not disclose the contents of the letter, but Russian officials said last week it would respond to Obama’s letter from a month ago discussing missile defense, among other things.
This is all in preparation for the Obama-Putin meeting next month on the sidelines of the G8 summit. Both sides have been trying to come to an agreement on American-led plans to install a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. NATO insists it’s meant to counter a threat from Iran. Russia says it degrades their own nuclear deterrent capabilities.
Patrushev is also expected to meet with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio
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British Mother Confronted Suspects After London Attack
Hemera/Thinkstock(LONDON) -- Anyone looking for a sign of British bravery in the face of terror should look no further than Ingrid Loyau-Kennett.
A British soldier had been hacked to death on the streets of southeast London Wednesday afternoon. His alleged killers carried butcher knives dripping with blood, stalking the scene.
Loyau-Kennett's bus had just stopped in front of the killing. Some people might have shielded their eyes and fled. Instead, the mother of two and Cub Scout leader got off the bus and walked straight for the man whose hands were stained a deep red.
"I just talked to him. He looked like a normal guy. He wasn't high, he wasn't on drugs. A normal guy pissed off with the fact, [as he said], 'Muslim women and children are dying in their countries by the hand of white men,'" she told Daybreak, a morning news program on the British channel ITV. "He was very, very close to me. He was almost touching me... I asked him, what's the point. [He said] 'war in London.'"
The man was Michael Adebolajo, a Briton who converted to Islam in 2003 and changed his name to Mujahid, according to Anjem Choudary, the former leader of a banned Islamist Organization whose rallies Adebolajo attended.
Loyau-Kennett, 48, talked with him before police arrived, hoping to keep his focus on her and off the other eyewitnesses. Nearby, a school was just about to let out, and she hoped to shield the children.
Loyau-Kennett admitted she wasn't trained for anything like this, but said her former teacher instincts kicked in.
"Were you scared?" ITV presenter Lorraine Kelly asked.
"No," Loyau-Kennett replied. "Better me than a child. Because, unfortunately, there were more and more mothers with children stopping around. So it was even more and more important that I talk to him and then ask him what he wanted."
British Prime Minister David Cameron praised Loyau-Kennett by name as he spoke to reporters outside 10 Downing Street. He hailed her as a hero, and said she represented the nation.
Loyau-Kennett, who was in London to celebrate her son's birthday, kept speaking with Adebolajo until she noticed her bus was about to leave.
"So I asked the guy last time, is there anything more I could do for him?
"He said no, 'I just want to shoot the police.'"
Loyau-Kennett got on her bus, assured that the police could handle him. Minutes later, Adebolajo lay on the ground, bleeding after being shot multiple times by a police officer.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio
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London Attack: British Intel Knew of Suspects in Hacking Death
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images(LONDON) -- The two men who allegedly hacked a British soldier to death were known to intelligence services before the Wednesday incident, a British security official admitted Thursday. Still, the men weren't deemed enough of a threat to arrest or monitor.
British intelligence will likely face questions about whether they should have been able to stop the assault near an army barracks as police have now widened their investigation, raiding a suspect's father's home and combing, inch-by-inch, the area around the attack that raised fears of terrorism's return to London.
The soldier who died in southeast London has been identified as Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. "Drummer" is the equivalent of "private" in the Fusiliers, an infantry regiment in the British Army.
He was a veteran of Afghanistan, having served in Helmand in 2009. Before deploying to Afghanistan, he had served as part of the Queen's Guard, standing duty outside London's royal palaces.
One of the alleged attackers was a British Christian who converted to Islam, according to Anjem Choudary, the former leader of the group Al Muhajiroun, a banned Islamist Organization.
He is Michael Adebolajo, who converted to Islam in 2003 and changed his name to Mujahid, meaning one who wages jihad, Choudary told ABC News.
Choudary said Adebolajo was never a member of Al Muhajiroun but he knew him because he attended the group's rallies from about 2005 to 2011.
After 2011, Choudary said, Adebolajo stopped attending rallies. Choudary said he has no idea what Adebolajo has been doing since, and he said that Adebolajo never suggested any antipathy to British soldiers or any willingness to commit violence.
"He was a very peaceful man," Choudary said. "Never saw any kind of violence streak in him. Very quiet, timid man, in fact."
Adebolajo is under arrest in the hospital, recovering from bullet wounds he suffered when police shot him after he allegedly killed the British soldier.
He apparently had no intention of getting away, asking passersby to call the police and inviting them to interview him on their camera phones. He spoke holding two bloody knives and his hands stained deep red, using rhetoric similar to that expressed in martyrdom videos.
"We swear by almighty Allah, we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone, your people will never be safe," Abedolajo said calmly, according to ITV News, which first obtained the video. "Tell them to bring our troops back so we -- so you -- can all live in peace."
British police and politicians are concerned about blowback attacks, especially in the London district of Woolwich, the scene of Wednesday's attack, which has had a past history of racial tensions. A few hundred members of the anti-immigrant and right-wing party, the English Defense League, poured into Woolwich Wednesday night, wearing masks and throwing rocks at police. And police reported two separate attacks on Muslim centers in southern and eastern England.
In response, an additional 1,200 cops are patrolling London on Thursday, according to Scotland Yard, focusing on mosques and religious centers, as well as outside army barracks.
And British Prime Minister David Cameron took pains to appeal to all Britons, emphasizing that the attack wasn't only on a single soldier.
"This was not just an attack on Britain and the British way of life. It was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country," Cameron told reporters.
Police in Essex, east of London, arrested a 43-year-old who was holding a knife outside of a Muslim prayer center Wednesday night. They charged him with attempted arson as well as suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon, Essex police told ABC News.
And in Gillingham, Kent, which is south of London, another man was arrested Wednesday night outside a mosque on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage, Kent police told ABC News.
British Muslim organizations were quick to condemn the attack.
"We must come together, isolate those who believe that extremism and violence are acceptable, and work to ensure that they meet the full force of the law," Fiyaz Mughal, the director of Faith Matters, said in a statement. "We as the Muslim community will work against anyone who promotes such hatred."
Still, at a moment when much of the country was upset by a crime clearly designed to shock, there were signs of bravery.
After the attack, a mother of two named Ingrid Loyau-Kennett approached one of the attackers and engaged him in conversation. Loyau-Kennet can be seen in a photograph calmly talking to the man. He was holding a bloody knife, and she appeared unafraid.
"I just talked to him. He looked like a normal guy. He wasn't high, he wasn't on drugs. A normal guy pissed off with the fact [as he said], 'Muslim women and children are dying in their countries by the hand of white men,'" she told ITV's Daybreak. " He was very, very close to me. He was almost touching me ... I asked him, what's the point. [He said] 'war in London.'"
An ITV presenter asked her why she wasn't scared. "Better me than a child," Loyau-Kennet said. "Because, unfortunately, there were more and more mothers with children stopping around. So it was even more and more important that I talk to him and then ask him what he wanted."
Cameron called Loyau-Kennet a hero.
"When told by the attacker he wanted to start a war in London, she replied, 'You are going to lose. It is only you against many,'" Cameron said. "She spoke for us all."
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio
