This Nov. 2009 photo courtesy of Dan Suski shows Kate Suski, right, and her brother Dan while on vacation in San Diego, Ca. The brother and sister are recovering in the eastern Caribbean island of St. Lucia after their ship sank on April 21 during a fishing trip, forcing them to swim almost 14 hours to reach land, according to the siblings. The Suskis said they are recovering after being hospitalized with severe dehydration and tendinitis. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Dan Suski)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The fishing trip off the rugged north coast of St. Lucia was supposed to last all day, but about four hours into the journey, the boat’s electric system crackled and popped.

Dan Suski, a 30-year-old business owner and information technology expert from San Francisco, had been wrestling a 200-pound marlin in rough seas with help from his sister, Kate Suski, a 39-year-old architect from Seattle. It was around noon April 21.

He was still trying to reel in the fish when water rushed into the cabin and flooded the engine room, prompting the captain to radio for help as he yelled out their coordinates.

It would be nearly 14 hours and a long, long swim before what was supposed to be a highlight of their sunny vacation would come to an end. As the waves pounded the boat they had chartered from the local company “Reel Irie,” more water flooded in. The captain threw life preservers to the Suskis.

“He said, ‘Jump out! Jump out!’” Kate Suski recalled in a telephone interview Thursday with The Associated Press.

The Suskis obeyed and jumped into the water with the captain and first mate. Less than five minutes later, the boat sank. The group was at least eight miles (13 kilometers) from shore, and waves more than twice their size tossed them.

“The captain was telling us to stay together, and that help was on its way and that we needed to wait,” Kate Suski said.

The group waited for about an hour, but no one came. “I was saying, ‘Let’s swim, let’s swim. If they’re coming, they will find us. We can’t just stay here,’” she recalled. As they began to swim, the Suskis lost sight of the captain and first mate amid the burgeoning swells. Soon after, they also lost sight of land amid the rain.

“We would just see swells and gray,” Dan Suski said. A plane and a helicopter appeared in the distance and hovered over the area, but no one spotted the siblings. Several hours went by, and the sun began to set.

“There’s this very real understanding that the situation is dire,” Kate Suski said. “You come face-to-face with understanding your own mortality … We both processed the possible ways we might die. Would we drown? Be eaten by a shark?”

“Hypothermia?” Dan Suski asked. “Would our legs cramp up and make it impossible to swim?” the sister continued.

They swam for 12 to 14 hours, talking as they pushed and shivered their way through the ocean. Dan Suski tried to ignore images of the movie “Open Water” that kept popping into his head and its story of a scuba-diving couple left behind by their group and attacked by sharks. His sister said she also couldn’t stop thinking about sharks.

“I thought I was going to vomit I was so scared,” she said. When they finally came within 30 feet (9 meters) of land, they realized they couldn’t get out of the water.

“There were sheer cliffs coming into the ocean,” she said. “We knew we would get crushed.”

Dan Suski thought they should try to reach the rocks anyway, but his sister disagreed.

“We won’t survive that,” she told him. They swam until they noticed a spit of sand nearby. When they got to land, they collapsed, barely able to walk. It was past midnight, and they didn’t notice any homes in the area.

“Dan said the first priority was to stay warm,” she recalled. They hiked inland and lay side by side, pulling up grass and brush to cover themselves and stay warm. Kate Suski had only her bikini on, having shed her sundress to swim better. Dan Suski had gotten rid of his shorts, having recalled a saying when he was a kid that “the best-dressed corpses wear cotton.”

They heard a stream nearby but decided to wait until daylight to determine whether the water was safe to drink.

As the sun came up, they began to hike through thick brush, picking up bitter mangoes along the way and stopping to eat green bananas. “It was probably the best and worst banana I’ve ever had,” Dan Suski recalled.

The Suskis were hospitalized and received IV fluids, with doctors concerned they couldn’t draw blood from Kate Suski’s arm because she was so dehydrated.

They also learned that the captain and mate were rescued after spending nearly 23 hours in the water, noting that their relatives called and took care of them after the ordeal.

People and rescuers gather after an eight-story building housing several garment factories collapsed in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, Wednesday, April 24, 2013. Dozens were killed and many more are feared trapped in the rubble. (AP Photo/ A.M. Ahad)

SAVAR, Bangladesh — An eight-story building housing several garment factories collapsed near Bangladesh’s capital on Wednesday, killing at least 87 people and trapping many more under a jumbled mess of concrete. Rescuers tried to cut through the debris with earthmovers, drilling machines and their bare hands.

Less than five months after a factory fire killed 112 people, the disaster again underscored the unsafe conditions in Bangladesh’s massive garment industry. Workers said they hesitated to go to work Wednesday because the building had developed such severe cracks the previous day that it had been reported on local news channels.

Abdur Rahim, who worked on the fifth floor, said a factory manager assured them there was no problem, so they went inside.

“We started working. After about an hour or so the building collapsed suddenly,” he said. He next remembered regaining consciousness outside the building.

Home Minister Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir told reporters during a visit to the site that the building had violated construction codes and “the culprits would be punished.”

Among the businesses in the building were Phantom Apparels Ltd., New Wave Style Ltd., New Wave Bottoms Ltd. and New Wave Brothers Ltd., which make clothing for brands including Benetton, The Children’s Place and Dress Barn. Workers said they didn’t know what specific clothing brands were being produced in the building because labels are attached after the products are finished.

Sumi, a 25-year-old worker who goes by one name, said she was sewing jeans on the fifth floor with at least 400 others when the building fell. “It collapsed all of a sudden,” she said. “No shaking, no indication. It just collapsed on us.”

She said she managed to reach a hole in the building through which rescuers pulled her out.

Reports suggested the death toll was likely to rise.

“We sent two people inside the building and we could rescue at least 20 people alive. They also told us that at least 100 to 150 people are injured and about 50 dead people are still trapped inside this floor,” said Mohammad Humayun, a supervisor at one of the garment factories.

Tens of thousands of people gathered at the site, some of them weeping survivors, some searching for family members. Firefighters and soldiers using drilling machines and cranes worked with local volunteers in the search for survivors.

An enormous section of the concrete structure appeared to have splintered like twigs. Colorful sheets of fabric were tied to upper floors of the wreckage so those inside could climb or slide down and escape.

An arm jutted out of one section of rubble. The lifeless body of a woman covered in dust could be seen in another. A firefighter carried the body of what appeared to be a teenager from the area.

Rahim said his mother and father, who worked with him in the factory, were trapped inside.

“I have no idea what is going on,” he said.

Mosammat Khurshida wailed as she looked for her husband. “He came to work in the morning. I can’t find him,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. He does not pick up his phone.”

The building, in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, also housed a bank and shops.

Zahidur Rahman, director of public relations at Enam Medical College and Hospital, said by Wednesday evening 87 people had been confirmed dead. Brig. Gen. Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder said 600 people had been rescued.

At the morgue of the medical college, many wailed as they waited for the bodies of their loved ones. “Where’s my mother? Where’s my mother? Tell me, tell me, oh Allah, oh Allah,” Rana Ahmed cried.

The November fire at the Tazreen garment factory drew international attention to working conditions in Bangladesh’s $20 billion-a-year textile industry. The country has about 4,000 garment factories and exports clothes to leading Western retailers. The industry wields vast power in the South Asian nation.

Tazreen lacked emergency exits and its owner said only three floors of the eight-story building were legally built. Surviving employees said gates had been locked and managers had told them to go back to work after the fire alarm went off.

Clothes with Disney, Wal-Mart and other western labels were found at that factory.

In this photo released by China’s Xinhua news agency, people carrying their belongings walk in quake-damaged Gucheng Village, Longmen Township, Lushan County, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013. A powerful earthquake struck the steep hills of Sichuan province Saturday, nearly five years after a devastating quake wreaked widespread damage across the region. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Fei Maohua)

YA’AN, China (AP) — Residents huddled outdoors Saturday night in a town near the epicenter of a powerful earthquake that struck the steep hills of China’s southwestern Sichuan province, leaving at least 156 people dead and more than 5,500 injured.

Saturday morning’s earthquake triggered landslides and disrupted phone and power connections in mountainous Lushan county five years after a devastating quake wreaked widespread damage across the region. The village of Longmen was hit particularly hard, with authorities saying nearly all the buildings there had been destroyed in a frightening minute-long shaking by the quake.

In nearby Ya’an town, where aftershocks could be felt nearly 20 hours after the quake, residents sat in groups outside convenience stores watching the news on television sets. Fourteen-year-old Wang Xing sat with her family on chairs by the roadside in the cool night air, a large blanket on her lap.

Wang and her relatives said they planned to spend the night in their cars. “We don’t feel safe sleeping at home tonight,” said Wang, a student. She said the quake left tears on the walls of her family’s house. “It was very scary when it happened. I ran out of my bed and out of the house. I didn’t even have my shoes on.”

Along the main roads leading to the worst-hit county of Lushan, ambulances, fire engines and military trucks piled high with supplies waited in long lines, some turning back to try other routes when roads were impassable.

Rescuers turned the square outside the Lushan County Hospital into a triage center, where medical personnel bandaged bleeding victims, according to footage on China Central Television. Rescuers dynamited boulders that had fallen across roads to reach Longmen and other damaged areas lying farther up the mountain valleys, state media reported.

The China Earthquake Administration said at least 156 people had died, including 96 in Lushan. In the jurisdiction of Ya’an, which administers Lushan, 19 people were reported missing and more than 5,500 people were injured, the administration said.

The quake — measured by the earthquake administration at magnitude-7.0 and by the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 — struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m., when many people were at home, sleeping or having breakfast. People in their underwear and wrapped in blankets ran into the streets of Ya’an and even the provincial capital of Chengdu, 115 kilometers (70 miles) east of Lushan, according to photos, video and accounts posted online.

The quake’s shallow depth, less than 13 kilometers (8 miles), likely magnified the impact.

Chengdu’s airport shut down for about an hour before reopening, though many flights were canceled or delayed, and its railway station halted dozens of scheduled trains, state media said.

Lushan reported the most deaths, but there was concern that casualties in neighboring Baoxing county might have been under-reported because of inaccessibility after roads were blocked and power and phone services cut off.

As the region went into the first night after the quake, rain started to fall, slowing rescue work. Forecasts called for more rain in the next several days, and the China Meteorological Administration warned of possible landslides and other geological disasters.

Tens of thousands of people moved into tents or cars, unable to return home or too afraid to go back as aftershocks continued to jolt the region.

Lushan, where the quake struck, lies where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau and sits atop the Longmenshan fault. It was along that fault line that a devastating magnitude-7.9 quake struck on May 12, 2008, leaving more than 90,000 people dead or missing and presumed dead in one of the worst natural disasters to strike China in recent decades.

“It was just like May 12,” Liu Xi, a writer in Ya’an city, who was jolted awake by Saturday’s quake, said via a private message on his account on Sina Corporation’s Twitter-like Weibo service. “All the home decorations fell at once, and the old house cracked.”

The official Xinhua News Agency said the well-known Bifengxia panda preserve, which is near Lushan, was not affected by the quake. Dozens of pandas were moved to Bifengxia from another preserve, Wolong, after its habitat was wrecked by the 2008 quake.

As in most natural disasters, the government mobilized thousands of soldiers and others — 7,000 people by Saturday afternoon — sending excavators and other heavy machinery as well as tents, blankets and other emergency supplies. Two soldiers died after the vehicle that they and more than a dozen others were in slipped off the road and rolled down a cliff, state media reported.

Premier Li Keqiang flew to Ya’an to direct rescue efforts, and he and President Xi Jinping ordered officials and rescuers to make saving people the top priority, Xinhua said.

The Chinese Red Cross said it had deployed relief teams with supplies of food, water, medicine and rescue equipment to the disaster areas.

With roads blocked for several hours after the quake, the military surveyed the disaster area by air. Aerial photos released by the military and shown on state television showed individual houses in ruins in Lushan and outlying villages flattened into rubble. The roofs of some taller buildings appeared to have slipped off, exposing the floors beneath them.

A person whose posts to the micro-blogging account “Qingyi Riverside” on Weibo carried a locator geotag for Lushan said many buildings collapsed and that people could spot helicopters hovering above.

The earthquake administration said there had been at least 712 aftershocks, including two of magnitude-5.0 or higher.

“It’s too dangerous,” said a person with the Weibo account Chengduxinglin and with a Lushan geotag. “Even the aftershocks are scary.”

While rescuers and state media rushed to the disaster scene, China’s active social media users filled the information gap. They posted photos of people fleeing to streets for safety and of buildings flattened by the quake. They shared information on the availability of phone services, apparently through data services.
___

Associated Press writer Didi Tang contributed to this report from Beijing.

In this photo provided by China’s official Xinhua News Agency, a giant rock blocks the road, about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the county seat of Lushan in Ya’an city, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013. A powerful earthquake jolted China’s Sichuan province Saturday near where a devastating quake struck five years ago. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Hai Mingwei)

BEIJING — A powerful earthquake jolted China’s Sichuan province Saturday near where a devastating quake struck five years ago, leaving at least 41 dead and more than 600 injured and prompting state media to warn the casualty toll could climb sharply.

The quake — measured by China’s seismological bureau at magnitude-7 and the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 — struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m. toppling buildings, many of them older brick structures. Tiles fell from roofs, and pictures dropped from walls, sending people into the streets in their underwear and wrapped in blankets.

“Generally the quake felt much stronger than that from five years ago. Many decorations at home got smashed,” said Zhao Zheng, a resident of Ya’an city, near the quake. He was reached by direct message on his Twitter-like microblog resident and said he was awakened by the earthquake.

The People’s Daily newspaper said 41 people had been killed, including at least 28 in the epicenter of Lushan. Xu Mengjia, Communist Party secretary for Ya’an, which administers Lushan, told China Central Television that at least 32 people had been killed and more than 600 injured.

The quake’s shallow depth, less than 13 kilometers (8 miles), likely magnified the impact. The official Xinhua News Agency said that the quake rattled buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu 115 kilometers (70 miles), to the east. It caused the shutdown of the city’s airport for about an hour before reopening, state media said.

Lushan, where the quake struck, is home to 1.5 million people where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau. Known for its mountains, the area is near a well-known preserve for pandas.

Social media users who said they were in Lushan county posted photos of collapsed buildings and reported that water and electricity had been cut off.

A man who answered the phone at the Ya’an city government said telecommunications were cut and that medical and rescue teams are on the way to the area. Xinhua said more than 2,000 soldiers were being mobilized and sent to the disaster area.

“I felt the strong quake this morning in my office. All drawers of the desk opened and some stuff on the table fell on the floor,” said the man, who refused to give his name, as is usual with low-ranking Chinese government officials.

The area lies near the same Longmenshan fault where the devastating 7.9-magnitude quake struck May 12, 2008, leaving more than 90,000 people dead or missing and presumed dead.

“It was just like May 12,” said Liu Xi, a writer in Ya’an, who was jolted awake by Saturday’s quake. “All the home decorations fell at once, and the old house cracked.”

A newly-arrived Syrian refugee family waits under a shaded area upon their arrival to the new Jordanian-Emirati refugee camp, Mrajeeb al-Fhood, in Zarqa, Jordan, Wednesday, April 10, 2013. A second camp for Syrian refugees has opened in Jordan as more Syrians flee the civil war at home. The Jordanian-Emirati camp is the first funded by the United Arab Emirates and run by its Red Crescent Society in Jordan to assist families, single women, the disabled, and elderly.(AP photo/Mohammad Hannon)

BEIRUT — Tensions emerged Wednesday in a newly announced alliance between al-Qaida’s franchise in Iraq and the most powerful Syrian rebel faction, which said it was not consulted before the Iraqi group announced their merger and only heard about it through the media.

Al-Qaida in Iraq said Tuesday that it had joined forces with Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front — the most effective force among the mosaic of rebel brigades fighting to topple President Bashar Assad in Syria’s civil war. It said they had formed a new alliance called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

The Syrian government seized upon the purported merger to back its assertion that it is not facing a true popular movement for change but rather a foreign-backed terrorist plot.

The state news agency said Wednesday that the union “proves that this opposition was never anything other than a tool used by the West and by terrorists to destroy the Syrian people.”

Talk of an alliance between Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaida in Iraq has raised fears in Baghdad, where intelligence officials said increased cooperation was already evident in a number of deadly attacks.

And in Syria, a stronger Jabhat al-Nusra would only further complicate the battlefield where Western powers have been covertly trying to funnel weapons, training and aid toward more secular rebel groups and army defectors.

Washington has designated Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist organization over its links with al-Qaida, and the Syrian group’s now public ties with the terrorist network are unlikely to prompt a shift in international support for the broader Syrian opposition.

Earlier this year, the U.S. announced a $60 million non-lethal assistance package for Syria that includes meals and medical supplies for the armed opposition. It was greeted unenthusiastically by some rebel leaders, who said it does far too little.

Washington’s next step is expected to be a broader package of non-lethal assistance, expanding from food and medical supplies to body armor and night-vision goggles.

However, President Barack Obama has not given final approval on any new package and an announcement is not imminent, a senior administration official said.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who met with Syrian opposition leaders in London on Wednesday, hinted at the new non-lethal aid package this week, saying the administration had been holding intense talks on how to boost assistance to the rebels.

The U.S. opposes directly arming Syrian opposition fighters, in part out of fear that the weapons could fall into the hands of Islamic extremists such as Jabhat al-Nusra.

The apparent tensions between Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaida in Iraq emerged on Wednesday, when Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani appeared to distance himself from claims the two groups had merged. Instead, he pledged allegiance to al-Qaida’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Lady Margaret Thatcher was a special guest at Baylor on Feb. 23, 1999, when she met with a group of about 60 students in the Armstrong Browning Library Treasure Room and later spoke to more than 5,000 people in the Ferrell Center on “Challenges Facing the 21st Century.” Thatcher passed away from a stroke Monday morning in the Ritz hotel in London.
(Photos courtesy of Baylor University Media Communications)

As Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, left her marks on many parts of the world — including Baylor.

In a statement released Monday, President Ken Starr recalled his relationship with the woman he described as “the U.K’s second greatest prime minister of the 20th Century.” According to Starr, after meeting Thatcher in 1998, they developed a personal relationship.

“It was my great privilege over the years to come fully into her orbit. She anointed me as one of ‘her boys.’ All of us adored her,” Starr wrote.

In 1999 Thatcher, then nine years out of office, visited Baylor — meeting students, helping a young girl write her book report, and speaking to a crowd of over 5000. She was even named by then President Robert Sloan an “Honorary Alumnus by Choice.”

Then, Baylor was a much different place. There were businesses and parking lots where the broad lawns are near the highway. The great, spired parking garages had yet to tower over campus, and the Baylor Science Building was still a field. In 1999, it had only been three years since the dancing ban was lifted and the Lariat editorial the day after Thatcher’s visit was about the ongoing and contentious debate over allowing women to wear sports bras.

According to a February 24, 1999 article in the Lariat, Thatcher’s speech focused on crime and “the decline of the family,” and touched on the Bosnian conflict and the rise of China. According to another article that day, reaction to Thatcher’s speech, and the Q&A session that followed, was mixed.

“Reaction to the speech varied from glowing reviews of a revered politician to opposition to the conservative views that Lady Thatcher articulates,” the article states.

The next day, students voiced their opinions on her speech in the Lariat. Two letters addressed the conduct of Baylor students during the speech: one complained that Baylor students were getting up and leaving in the middle and another, written by 2001 graduate Michael Wibbelsman, criticized the crowd for clapping at inappropriate moments.

“She is a wonderful lady of high stature and was due more respect than was shown her last night,” Wibbelsman wrote.

Another letter that day, written by Bingqing Huang, then a graduate student criticized Thatcher’s politics.

“Her strong sense of cultural superiority over non-Western countries, almost omnipresent in her speech, can only destroy harmony and peace, aggrandize tensions and conflicts, and divert attention from the real problems threatening all human beings, such as nuclear weapons and pollution,” Huang wrote.

While there was dissent to both Thatcher’s political ideology and speech on campus, the general consensus seemed to be that Thatcher’s presence was both an honor and great opportunity for Baylor and its students. As the Lariat wrote in an editorial critical of Thatcher’s speech:

“Whatever one may think about Thatcher’s politics and ideology, she is without a doubt a woman with class, poise and dignity — virtues that all students should admire.”

Israel’s President Shimon Peres, right, meets with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in the President’s residence in Jerusalem, Monday, April, 8, 2013. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is looking to breathe new life into dormant Mideast peace talks in meetings Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli and Palestinian officials, amid talk of modifying a decade-old Arab plan that’s long been greeted with skepticism by the Jewish state. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty, Pool)

JERUSALEM — Secretary of State John Kerry worked Monday to corral Israeli and Palestinian leaders into a new and ambitious peace process that includes reviving parts of a long-dormant plan embraced by the Arab world a decade ago, officials said.

The 2002 initiative that Kerry wants to revive parts of would have provided Israel recognition throughout the Arab world in exchange for a pullout from territory conquered in 1967.

On his third trip to Jerusalem in the last two weeks, Kerry committed himself to a multi-month peace push that could mean numerous follow-up trips to the region. He met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli and Palestinian officials Monday, a day after sitting down for private one-on-one talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

“I am intensely focused on this issue and the region because it is vital really to American interests and regional interests to try and advance the peace process and because this festering absence of peace is used by groups everywhere to recruit and encourage extremism,” Kerry told reporters.

“Both sides mistrust each other deeply and there are reasons that mistrust has built up,” he added. “I am convinced that we can break that down.”

Kerry’s foremost goal is to restart direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that have hardly taken place at all over the last 4½ years. And, in a break from previous American-led efforts, he also wants to focus on a modified version of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

The initiative was revolutionary when Saudi Arabia introduced it and the 22-member Arab League endorsed it. It offered Israel comprehensive recognition in exchange for withdrawal from the lands it conquered in the 1967 Mideast war.

Although Israel never embraced the plan and the Palestinians oppose any changes to it, the basic parameters seem to be gaining traction as a framework for future talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. Arab League chief Nabil El-Araby and Qatar’s prime minister will lead a delegation to Washington this month to discuss the initiative with Kerry, Arab officials said.

Kerry, however, is seeking new conditions to sweeten the deal for Israel, officials said. Arab and Palestinian officials say he has talked about upgraded guarantees for Israel’s security and allowances for border adjustments based on mutual agreement.

A senior State Department official would only say Kerry wanted the plan “enhanced.” The American official spoke on condition of anonymity because of Kerry’s orders not to brief reporters.

Earlier Monday, Kerry told U.S. consulate staff in Jerusalem that he was coming so regularly to the Mideast because he believed peace could be reached.

FILE – This is a Tuesday, June, 8, 2010 file photo of Britian’s Prime Minister David Cameron poses with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street in London. Ex-spokesman Tim Bell says that Thatcher has died. She was 87. Bell said the woman known to friends and foes as “the Iron Lady” passed away Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant,File)

LONDON — Love her or loathe her, one thing’s beyond dispute: Margaret Thatcher transformed Britain.

The Iron Lady, who ruled for 11 remarkable years, imposed her will on a fractious, rundown nation — breaking the unions, triumphing in a far-off war, and selling off state industries at a record pace. She left behind a leaner government and more prosperous nation by the time a mutiny ousted her from No. 10 Downing Street.

Thatcher’s spokesman, Tim Bell, said the former prime minister died from a stroke Monday morning at the Ritz hotel in London. Flags were flown at half-staff at Buckingham Palace, Parliament and Downing Street for the 87 year old. Queen Elizabeth II authorized Thatcher to have a ceremonial funeral — a step short of a state funeral — to be held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London with military honors.

Prime Minister David Cameron cut short a trip to Madrid and Paris to return to Britain following news of Thatcher’s death, and his office confirmed that Thatcher would be cremated following the ceremonial funeral. It did not provide further details, saying only the arrangements were in line with the wishes of Thatcher’s family.

For admirers, Thatcher was a savior who rescued Britain from ruin and laid the groundwork for an extraordinary economic renaissance. For critics, she was a heartless tyrant who ushered in an era of greed that kicked the weak out onto the streets and let the rich become filthy rich.

“Let us not kid ourselves, she was a very divisive figure,” said Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary for her entire term. “She was a real toughie. She was a patriot with a great love for this country, and she raised the standing of Britain abroad.”

Thatcher was the first — and still only — female prime minister in Britain’s history. But she often found feminists tiresome and was not above using her handbag as a prop to underline her swagger and power. A grocer’s daughter, she rose to the top of Britain’s snobbish hierarchy the hard way, and envisioned a classless society that rewarded hard work and determination.

She was a trailblazer who at first believed trailblazing impossible: Thatcher told the Liverpool Daily Post in 1974 that she did not think a woman would serve as party leader or prime minister during her lifetime.

But once in power, she never showed an ounce of doubt.

Thatcher could be intimidating to those working for her: British diplomats sighed with relief on her first official visit to Washington, D.C., as prime minister to find that she was relaxed enough to enjoy a glass of whiskey and a half-glass of wine during an embassy lunch, according to official documents.

Like her close friend and political ally Ronald Reagan, Thatcher seemed motivated by an unshakable belief that free markets would build a better country than reliance on a strong, central government. Another thing she shared with the American president: a tendency to reduce problems to their basics, choose a path, and follow it to the end, no matter what the opposition.

She formed a deep attachment to the man she called “Ronnie” — some spoke of it as a schoolgirl crush. Still, she would not back down when she disagreed with him on important matters, even though the United States was the richer and vastly stronger partner in the so-called “special relationship.”

Thatcher was at her brashest when Britain was challenged. When Argentina’s military junta seized the remote Falklands Islands from Britain in 1982, she did not hesitate, even though her senior military advisers said it might not be feasible to reclaim the islands.

She simply would not allow Britain to be pushed around, particularly by military dictators, said Ingham, who recalls the Falklands War as the tensest period of Thatcher’s three terms in power. When diplomacy failed, she dispatched a military task force that accomplished her goal, despite the naysayers.

“That required enormous leadership,” Ingham said. “This was a formidable undertaking, this was a risk with a capital R-I-S-K, and she demonstrated her leadership by saying she would give the military their marching orders and let them get on with it.”

In deciding on war, Thatcher overruled Foreign Office specialists who warned her about the dangers of striking back. She was infuriated by warnings about the dangers to British citizens in Argentina and the difficulty of getting support from the U.N. Security Council.

“When you are at war you cannot allow the difficulties to dominate your thinking: you have to set out with an iron will to overcome them,” she said in her memoir, “Downing Street Years.” ”And anyway what was the alternative? That a common or garden dictator should rule over the queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was prime minister.”

Thatcher’s determination to reclaim the islands brought her into conflict with Reagan, who dispatched Secretary of State Alexander Haig on a shuttle mission to London and Buenos Aires to seek a peaceful solution, even as British warships approached the Falklands.

A private diary kept by U.S. diplomat Jim Rentschler captures Thatcher at this crisis point.

“And here’s Maggie, appearing in a flower-decorated salon adjoining the small dining room (…) sipping orange juice and sherry,” Rentschler wrote. “La Thatcher is really quite fetching in a dark velvet two-piece ensemble with grosgrain piping and a soft hairdo that heightens her blond English coloring.”

But the niceties faded over the dinner table.

“High color is in her cheeks, a note of rising indignation in her voice, she leans across the polished table and flatly rejects what she calls the ‘woolliness’ of our secondstage formulation,” Rentschler writes.

Needless to say, Haig’s peace mission soon collapsed.

The relatively quick triumph of British forces revived Thatcher’s political fortunes, which had been faltering along with the British economy. She won an overwhelming victory in 1983, tripling her majority in the House of Commons.

She trusted her gut instinct, famously concluding early on that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev represented a clear break in the Soviet tradition of autocratic rulers. She pronounced that the West could “do business” with him, a position that influenced Reagan’s vital dealings with Gorbachev in the twilight of the Soviet era.

It was heady stuff for a woman who had little training in foreign affairs when she triumphed over a weak field of indecisive Conservative Party candidates to take over the party leadership in 1975 and ultimately run as the party’s candidate for prime minister.

She profited from the enormous crisis facing the Labour Party government led by Harold Wilson and later James Callaghan. Britain was near economic collapse, its currency propped up by the International Monetary Fund, and its once defiant spirit seemingly broken.

The sagging Labour government had no parliamentary majority after 1977, and the next year it suffered through a “winter of discontent” with widespread strikes disrupting vital public services, including hospital care and even grave digging. The government’s effort to hold the line on inflation led to chaos in the streets.

Britain seemed adrift, no longer a credible world power, falling from second- to third-tier status.

It was then, Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, that she came to the unshakable, almost mystical belief that only she could save Britain. She cited a deep “inner conviction” that this would be her role.

Events seemed to be moving her way when she led the Conservative Party to victory in 1979, with a commitment to reduce the state’s role and champion private enterprise.

She was underestimated at first — by her own party, by the media, later by foreign adversaries. But they all soon learned to respect her. Thatcher’s “Iron Lady” nickname was coined by Soviet journalists, a grudging testament to her ferocious will and determination.

Thatcher set about upending decades of liberal doctrine, successfully challenging Britain’s welfare state and socialist traditions, in the process becoming the reviled bete noire of the country’s leftwing intelligentsia.

She is perhaps best remembered for her hardline position during the pivotal strike in 1984 and 1985 when she faced down coal miners in an ultimately successful bid to break the power of Britain’s unions. It was a reshaping of the British economic and political landscape that endures to this day.

It is for this that she is revered by free-market conservatives, who say the restructuring of the economy led to a boom that made London the rival of New York as a global financial center. The left demonized her as an implacably hostile union buster, with stone-cold indifference to the poor. But her economic philosophy eventually crossed party lines: Tony Blair led a revamped Labour Party to victory by adopting some of her ideas.

Thatcher was the West’s most outspoken opponent of imposing economic sanctions on South Africa’s minority government to end apartheid. She contended such sanctions cost jobs, including in Britain, hurt South Africa’s black majority most and harden white resistance to change.

In 1986, Britain’s Cabinet unanimously supported her resistance to such sanctions. As a result, protests ensued and many accused her of supporting the apartheid regime.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on Oct. 13, 1925. She learned the values of thrift, discipline and industry as the dutiful daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and Methodist lay preacher who eventually became the mayor of Grantham, a modest-sized town in Lincolnshire 110 miles (180 kilometers) north of London.

Thatcher’s personality, like that of so many of her contemporaries, was shaped in part by the traumatic events during her childhood. When World War II broke out, her hometown was one of the early targets for Luftwaffe bombs. Her belief in the need to stand up to aggressors was rooted in the failure of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to appease Adolf Hitler rather than confront him.

Thatcher said she learned much about the world simply by studying her father’s business. She grew up in the family’s apartment just above the shop.

“Before I read a line from the great liberal economists, I knew from my father’s accounts that the free market was like a vast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals all over the world to meet the ever-changing needs of peoples in different countries, from different classes, of different religions, with a kind of benign indifference to their status,” she wrote in her memoirs.

“The economic history of Britain for the next 40 years confirmed and amplified almost every item of my father’s practical economics. In effect, I had been equipped at an early age with the ideal mental outlook and tools of analysis for reconstructing an economy ravaged by state socialism.”

Educated at Oxford, Thatcher began her political career in her mid-20s with an unsuccessful 1950 campaign for a parliamentary seat in the Labour Party stronghold of Dartford. She earned nationwide publicity as the youngest female candidate in the country, despite her loss at the polls.

She was defeated again the next year, but on the campaign trail she met Denis Thatcher, a successful businessman whom she married in 1951. Their twins, Mark and Carol, were born two years later.

“She was beautiful, gay, very kind and thoughtful,” Denis Thatcher said in an interview 25 years later. “Who could meet Margaret without being completely slain by her personality and intellectual brilliance?”

As the first male Downing Street spouse, Denis Thatcher stayed out of the limelight to a large degree while supporting his wife on her many travels and public engagements. He was said to give her important behind-the-scenes advice on Cabinet choices and other personnel matters, but this role was not publicly discussed.

Margaret Thatcher first won election to Parliament in 1959, representing Finchley in north London. She climbed the Conservative Party ladder quickly, joining the Cabinet as education secretary in 1970.

In that post, she earned the unwanted nickname “Thatcher the milk snatcher” because of her reduction of school milk programs. It was a taste of battles to come.

As prime minister, she sold off one state industry after another: British Telecom, British Gas, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, British Coal, British Steel, the water companies and the electricity distribution system among them. She was proud of her government’s role in privatizing some public housing, turning tenants into homeowners.

She ruffled feathers simply by being herself. She had faith — sometimes blind faith — in the clarity of her vision and little use for those of a more cautious mien.

Success in the Falklands War set the stage for a pivotal fight with the National Union of Miners, which began a 51-week strike in March 1984 to oppose the government’s plans to close a number of mines.

The miners battled police on picket lines but couldn’t beat Thatcher, and returned to work without gaining any concessions.

She survived an audacious 1984 assassination attempt by the Irish Republican Army that nearly succeeded. The IRA detonated a bomb in her hotel in Brighton during a party conference, killing and injuring senior government figures, but leaving the prime minister and her husband unharmed.

Thatcher won a third term in another landslide in 1987, but may have become overconfident.

She trampled over cautionary advice from her own ministers in 1989 and 1990 by imposing a hugely controversial “community charge” tax that was quickly dubbed a “poll tax” by opponents. It was designed to move Britain away from a property tax and instead imposed a flat rate tax on every adult except for retirees and people who were registered unemployed.

That decision may have been a sign that hubris was undermining Thatcher’s political acumen. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in London and other cities, leading to some of the worst riots in the British capital for more than a century.

The shocking sight of Trafalgar Square turned into a smoldering battleground on March 31, 1990, helped convince many Conservative figures that Thatcher had stayed too long.

“How could a leader who was wise make 13 million people pay a tax they had never paid before? It just showed that she was no longer thinking in a rational way,” one of her junior ministers, David Mellor, said in a BBC documentary.

For Conservatives in Parliament, it was a question of survival. They feared vengeful voters would turn them out of office at the next election, and for many that fear trumped any gratitude they might have felt for their longtime leader.

Eight months after the riots, Thatcher was gone, struggling to hold back tears as she left Downing Street after being ousted by her own party.

It was a bitter end for Thatcher’s active political career — her family said she felt a keen sense of betrayal even years later.

In 1992, she was appointed in the House of Lords, taking the title Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven.

Thatcher wrote several best-selling memoirs after leaving office and was a frequent speaker on the international circuit before she suffered several small strokes that in 2002 led her to curtail her lucrative public speaking career.

Denis Thatcher died the following year; they had been married more than a half century.

Thatcher’s later years were marred by her son Mark Thatcher’s murky involvement in bankrolling a 2004 coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was fined and received a suspended sentence for his role in the tawdry affair.

She suffered from dementia in her final years, and her public appearances became increasingly rare. British media reported that Thatcher had been staying at the Ritz — where she died Monday — because her Belgravia home did not have an elevator and she was having difficulty getting around.

She is survived by her two children, Mark Thatcher and Carol Thatcher, and her two grandchildren.
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AP writers Cassandra Vinograd, Raphael Satter, Paisley Dodds and Jill Lawless contributed to this report.

An activist from Amnesty, wearing a mask of U.S. President Barack Obama, holds flowers during a campaign in Seoul, South Korea, ahead of negotiations of the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty in New York, Monday, March 18, 2013. The activists demanded to stop selling weapons to corporate human rights abusers. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade Tuesday, after a more than decade-long campaign to keep weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, warlords, organized crime figures and human rights violators.

Loud cheers erupted in the assembly chamber as the electronic board flashed the final vote: 154 in favor, 3 against and 23 abstentions.

“This is a victory for the world’s people,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “The Arms Trade Treaty will make it more difficult for deadly weapons to be diverted into the illicit market. … It will be a powerful new tool in our efforts to prevent grave human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law.”

The United States, the world’s biggest arms exporter, voted yes.

Iran, North Korea and Syria — all facing arms embargoes — cast the only no votes. They argued, among other things, that the agreement favors major arms suppliers like the U.S. over importers that need weapons for self-defense.

Russia and China, which are also major arms exporters, abstained along with India and Indonesia, while nuclear-armed Pakistan voted in favor. Many Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Qatar, abstained, while Lebanon voted yes.

Never before has there been a treaty regulating the global arms trade, which is estimated to be worth $60 billion today and which Amnesty International predicts will exceed $100 billion in the next four years.

“Today’s victory shows that ordinary people who care about protecting human rights can fight back to stop the gun lobby dead in its tracks, helping to save countless lives,” said Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA.

“The voices of reason triumphed over skeptics, treaty opponents and dealers in death to establish a revolutionary treaty that constitutes a major step toward keeping assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons out of the hands of despots and warlords who use them to kill and maim civilians, recruit child soldiers and commit other serious abuses.”

What impact the treaty will actually have remains to be seen. It will take effect 90 days after 50 countries ratify it, and a lot will depend on which ones ratify and which ones don’t, and how stringently it is implemented.

As for its chances of being ratified by the U.S., the powerful National Rifle Association has vehemently opposed it, and it is likely to face stiff resistance from conservatives in the Senate, where it needs two-thirds to win ratification.

Secretary of State John Kerry called it a “strong, effective and implementable” treaty and stressed that it applies only to international deals and “reaffirms the sovereign right of any state to regulate arms within its territory.”

The treaty prohibits countries that ratify it from exporting conventional weapons if they violate arms embargoes, or if they promote acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, or if they could be used in attacks against civilians or schools and hospitals.

Countries must also evaluate whether the weapons would be used by terrorists or organized crime or would undermine peace and security. They must take measures to prevent the weapons from being diverted to the black market.

The treaty covers battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles and missile launchers, and small arms and light weapons.

Enforcement is left up to the nations that ratify it. The pact requires these countries to assist each other in investigating and prosecuting violations.

“The treaty is a noble gesture that may over time acquire the kind of precedence or enforcement that would give it meaning,” said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “At this point it is more a declaration of principles — and the arms trade is an area where many people don’t have principles.”

Supporters of the treaty agreed that it is just a first step and that it must be followed by a campaign for implementation.

“The hard work starts now,” said Juan Manuel Gomez Robledo, Mexico’s vice minister for multilateral affairs.

Australian Ambassador Peter Woolcott, who chaired the negotiations, said the U.S. “played a hugely constructive role” in pushing the treaty through the United Nations.

“Obviously, as the world’s largest exporter, it would be unfortunate for the Arms Trade Treaty if the U.S. didn’t sign it, but obviously it’s a sovereign decision for them,” he said.
Hopes for adoption of the treaty by consensus instead of a vote were dashed last July when the U.S. said it needed more time to consider it.

At the end of the final negotiating conference last week, Iran, North Korea and Syria blocked another attempt at consensus. Over those countries’ objections, the treaty’s supporters decided to put it to a vote in the General Assembly.

Proponents of the treaty said it could make it much harder for regimes committing human rights violations to acquire arms, in conflicts such as the brutal civil war in Syria.

“The treaty’s prohibition section, if it were in force today, would prohibit the ongoing supply of weapons and parts and components to the Assad regime in Syria,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the independent Washington-based Arms Control Association.

Police officers guard a construction site and sections of the East Side Gallery, while parts of the former Berlin Wall are removed in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday March 27, 2013. Work crews backed by about 250 police have removed portions of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery to make way for an upscale building project, despite demands by protesters that the site be preserved. Plans to remove part of the 1.3-kilometer (3/4-mile) stretch of wall sparked protests that developers were sacrificing history for profit. (AP Photo/dpa, Britta Pedersen)

By Kirsten Grieshaber
Associated Press

BERLIN — For nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the hated symbol of the division of Europe, a gray, concrete mass that snaked through neighborhoods, separating families and friends. On Wednesday, it took hundreds of police to guarantee the safe removal of 15 feet (less than 5 meters) of what’s left of the wall.

Construction crews, protected by about 250 police, hauled down part of the three-quarter of a mile (1.3-kilometer) strip of the wall before dawn to provide access to a planned luxury apartment complex overlooking the Spree River.

Even though most of the strip remains intact, the move angered many Berliners, who believe that developers are sacrificing history for profit.

The site, known as the East Side Gallery, has become a major tourist attraction, painted by 120 artists with colorful scenes along the gray concrete tiles.

It is the longest remaining portion of the 96-mile (155-kilometer) wall that surrounded Western-occupied West Berlin from 1961 until the peaceful revolution against the communist East German government in 1989. At least 136 people were killed trying to escape over the wall.

The flap over the future of the East Side Gallery flared last month with the announcement that developers wanted to tear away part of the wall. The announcement triggered a series of protests, including one attended by American celebrity David Hasselhoff.

Hasselhoff is remembered here fondly for his song “Looking for Freedom” that became the unofficial anthem of the 1989 revolution.

“It’s like tearing down an Indian burial ground,” Hasselhoff said during the March 17 protest. “It’s a no-brainer.”

After the protests, demolition work was suspended while local politicians and the investors looked for alternative access to the apartment site, located in the heart of the German capital.

When no other access route could be found, the main investor, Maik Uwe Hinkel, decided to resume the project. Work began at 5 a.m. Wednesday when few people were out on the streets.

In an emailed statement, Hinkel said the removal of parts of the wall was a temporary move to enable trucks to access the building site. He said that after four weeks of fruitless deliberations with city officials and owners of adjacent property, he was no longer willing to wait.

As word of the demolition spread, small crowds of Berliners turned out to watch although no one sought to block the effort.

“I can’t believe they came here in the dark in such a sneaky manner,” said Kani Alavi, the head of the East Side Gallery’s artists’ group. “All they see is their money. They have no understanding for the historic relevance and art of this place.”

The irony of Berliners trying to preserve part of what was once a hated symbol of repression reflects a growing public belief that the German capital needs to preserve symbols of its past — both the good and the bad — for future generations.

Much of Adolf Hitler’s capital was destroyed by Allied bombing and the 1945 Soviet ground assault that ended World War II in Europe.

With the end of the Cold War, however, Germans have worked to preserve other sites, including those that do not flatter the country.

A museum to Nazi atrocities has been built over the site of Gestapo headquarters. Tourists can wander through dungeon-like prisons operated by the Soviets and the East German secret police — as well as underground complexes built in the west of the city to protect civilians against nuclear attack.

It’s all designed to allow new generations to understand the painful history behind a country that is now Europe’s economic powerhouse.

“The Berlin Wall is the most significant symbol of the division of Berlin,” said Maria Nooke, the deputy director of the Berlin Wall Foundation. “On the one hand it illustrates the repression in East Germany, on the other hand it symbolizes how Germans peacefully overcame that repression.”

It took years for Berliners — both easterners and westerners — to develop such feelings for the wall.

“After a while, there was a growing need to deal with that part of history and to preserve it for future generations,” Nooke said.

In an effort to give visitors and Berliners a taste of life in a divided city, a 70-meter (-yard) stretch of the wall on Bernauer Strasse was restored to its original state, including an East German watchtower from which guards would shoot at people trying to scale the structure.

The East Side Gallery was recently restored at a cost of more than 2 million euros ($3 million) to the city. It is now covered in colorful murals painted by about 120 artists.

Scenes include the famous image of a boxy East German Trabant car that appears to burst through the wall; and a fraternal communist kiss between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German boss Erich Honecker.

“I heard it on the radio, so I quickly took my son to nursery school and then came here,” said Jana Voigt, a kindergarten teacher who grew up in East Berlin. “I feel so betrayed that they tore down that piece of the wall while I was asleep. They knew that so many Berliners don’t want the wall to be touched.”

She said part of the wall needs to be protected for future generations “in order to understand what happened here.”

Karl-Heinz Richter was a 17-year-old teenager when he tried to escape from East Berlin three years after the wall was erected. His escape failed and he was jailed.

“What you see happening now is capitalism in its purest form: it’s all about money and power, history doesn’t matter anymore. That’s disgusting.” he said. “For me the wall is a holy site. I’m outraged that they would even dare to touch it.”