At least 10 people suffered minor injuries when a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 skidded to a rough landing Monday at New York's LaGuardia Airport as its front landing gear collapsed, authorities said.

At least 10 people suffered minor injuries when a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 skidded to a rough landing Monday at New York's LaGuardia Airport as its front landing gear collapsed, authorities said.

Six of the 149 people aboard Southwest Flight 345, from Nashville, Tenn., to New York, were being treated at Elmhurst General Hospital after the jet came to a stop on Runway 4 at 5:45 p.m. ET, said Thomas Bosco, the airport's general manager and acting aviation director for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Four others refused treatment, he said.

LaGuardia Airport General Manager Thomas Bosco says the nose gear of a Southwest Airlines flight collapsed, causing it to have a hard landing.

The airport, which was closed after the accident, was reopened at 7 p.m. ET, Bosco said.

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There was no immediate explanation for why the landing gear malfunctioned. The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday night that the pilot "reported possible front landing gear issues before landing," but it gave no further details.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending an investigator to gather information. It told NBC News that it hadn't yet decided whether to dispatch a full investigative team.

Bosco said the jet remained on the runway, which he said could be reopened Tuesday.

About a dozen emergency vehicles surrounded the Southwest plane, whose passengers evacuated by the rear chute and were taken by bus to the terminal. Bosco said none of the injuries occurred during the evacuation.

"It's a surreal scene here given what just happened in the Bay Area," Sam Brock of NBC Bay Area, who saw the incident from another plane he was on at the airport, told NBC New York in an on-air telephone interview, referring to the crash of Asiana Flight 214 early this month at San Francisco International Airport.

Brock said the pilot of his flight told passengers that there were no serious injuries and no sign of fire or flames on the Southwest plane.

Steve Czech, who was on the runway waiting for his American Airlines flight to take off, told NBC New York that he saw the Southwest plane touch down.

"There was just this fireball going down the runway. It was unbelievable — it was probably 300 yards from us, if that," Czech said.

"Clearly, there was no nose gear," he said. "It was just screeching down the runway, fire on both sides. There was debris kind of rolling off to the sides."

Suspected Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo's DNA matched that found at the scene of Mary Sullivan's death.

Suspected Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo's DNA matched that found at the scene of Mary Sullivan's death.

BOSTON —  DNA tests confirm that the man who once claimed to be the Boston Strangler did kill the woman believed to be the serial killer's last victim and was likely responsible for the deaths of the other victims, authorities said Friday.

Albert DeSalvo admitted to killing Mary Sullivan and 10 other women in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964 but later recanted. He was later killed in prison.

Related: Who is suspected Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo?

The DNA finding "leaves no doubt that Albert DeSalvo was responsible for the brutal murder of Mary Sullivan" and it was "most likely" that he also was the Boston Strangler, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said.

Eleven Boston-area women between the ages of 19 and 85 were sexually assaulted and killed between 1962 and 1964, crimes that terrorized the region and grabbed national headlines.

Authorities said recently that new technology allowed them to test semen left at the crime scene of Sullivan's death using DNA from a living relative of DeSalvo's. That produced a match with DeSalvo that excluded 99.9 percent of suspects, and was the first forensic evidence tying DeSalvo to the nearly 50-year-old case.

To confirm the match, investigators unearthed his remains a week ago and said Friday that the odds that the semen belonged to a male other than DeSalvo were 1 in 220 billion.

"It's a great day. This is now full justice for my aunt, Mary Sullivan," said her nephew, Casey Sherman.

A lawyer for DeSalvo's family, Elaine Sharp, said last week that even a perfect DNA match wouldn't mean he killed Sullivan and suggested that someone else was present at the slaying. She said previous private testing on Sullivan's remains showed the presence of DNA from what appeared to be semen that wasn't a match to DeSalvo.

Related: DNA links DeSalvo to Boston Strangler victim, officials say

Police responded last week by saying the evidence used in private testing from Sullivan's exhumed remains was "very questionable."

Sharp also said in a statement that DeSalvo's brother and his nephew — whom police secretly trailed to collect a family DNA sample from a discarded water bottle — won't comment on the new DNA result because it hasn't been proven to be relevant to the question of whether DeSalvo raped and strangled Sullivan.

"There is no level of 'unprecedented certainty' as now claimed by the government," Sharp said.

But the idea that the DNA match doesn't identify DeSalvo as Sullivan's killer is bizarre, responded Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley.

"It suggests that Mary Sullivan had consensual sex with Albert DeSalvo moments before another person who has never been identified sexually assaulted and strangled her to death, leaving no trace of his presence," Wark said. "Frankly, it defies everything we know about this case."

Sullivan was 19 when she died in January 1964, a few days after she moved from Cape Cod to Boston.

Law enforcement officials disagree about whether the same person killed all the women whose deaths became connected to the Strangler. DeSalvo went to prison for life for a series of armed robberies and sex assaults before someone fatally stabbed him in 1973.

F. Lee Bailey, a defense lawyer who once represented DeSalvo, said Friday that DeSalvo provided so many details that only the perpetrator would know that he became convinced that his client was the Boston Strangler.

He said it's fortunate that the DNA test was run because the failure to try DeSalvo for the 11 homicides led to speculation about the Strangler's identity.

Bailey said Friday's announcement shows that case detectives did good police work when they devised questions for DeSalvo that only the killer could answer correctly.

Sherman had once joined with the DeSalvo family in believing that Albert DeSalvo wasn't his aunt's killer, and even wrote a book on the case pointing to other possible suspects.

He said Friday that he thinks there will always be unanswered questions related to the Strangler case, but when it comes to his loved one's slaying, his family finally has a sense of closure.

"He's the killer of my aunt, which is all this has been about for me," Sherman said.

A lung transplant is a treatment, not a cure.

The View From the Inside. A lung transplant is a treatment, not a cure.  This is the single most important fact to keep in mind when considering a transplant.  As explained to me early on, a transplant is the process by which an untreatable disease is replaced with a treatable one.  Treatable in that you have to take anti-rejection/immune-suppression medications after the transplant to prevent chronic rejection and death.  However, for me and for the vast majority of patients with a disease that would otherwise prove fatal, this is an acceptable trade-off.  I felt that way going in, and I definitely feel that way some three years and change after the operation.
A lung transplant can be used to replace one or both lungs.  Some diseases require a double-lung replacement (e.g., cases with pulmonary hypertension), while others lend themselves well to a single-lung replacement (such as early- to mid-stage IPF).
Here are a  few details about donor organ allocation and patient eligibility that are specific to lung transplantation:
Allocation of donor lungs is not covered by a Status Level system, which enables a patient to move higher up the waiting list as he (or she) gets sicker, and is currently reserved for hearts, livers, and multiple-organ transplants.  Donor lungs are allocated through a basic Time-On-List method, therefore time is the primary factor used to determine when a lung transplant candidate will be transplanted.  In addition to time, there are other medical and/or physical categories of matching that are also involved, as follows:
1.  Size--You are a certain size, and so are your lungs.  People's sizes vary a great deal; so it is with lungs.  Obviously, a child's lungs could not support a grown adult, but the matching must be closer than that.  The height of the candidate and the height of the donor need to be as close as possible.
2.  Blood type--Basically speaking, the blood type of the donor has to match the blood type of the candidate.  Unlike with other organ transplants, with lungs, donor organs from one blood type are transplanted into candidates of the same blood type.  There is no exploitation of Type O+ (the "universal donor") lungs for candidates with other blood types, as has been the case with livers until very recently.
In addition to the matching categories listed above, the following factors are also sometimes used to determine a patient's eligibility for a given donor organ (or even sometimes a transplant in the first place), so I will also include them as well:
A.  CMV status matching of candidate and donor--CMV is sometimes known as the "daycare virus"; over 80% of the adult population of the US has been exposed to it and has antibodies for it.  If the donor and the candidate are not matched for CMV, there can be problems later with CMV infection, so some centers try to match prior to the transplant.  This policy varies, however, from center to center, and is (in my opinion) an exclusionary practice disguised as a protective measure.  As the transplant center should prophylactically treat for possible CMV infection with extended IV Gancyclovir infusions anyway, matching for CMV is essentially unnecessary.
B.  Prednisone dose level at time of transplant--It is commonly thought that the candidate should be taking no more than 20 mg. per day of Prednisone when they are transplanted.  This, too, is (in my opinion) another exclusionary practice that finds popularity at transplant centers attempting to stack all of the odds in their favor.  Common sense would tell you that the nature of most lung diseases, and the average waiting list time involved, makes increased steroid use a fact of life.  As the delayed healing effects of steroids are handled by the use of staples when closing the incision, and steroid use is required after the transplant anyway, this looks more and more like another restriction than a sensible requirement.
C.  Six-minute walk performance--This is another controversial issue (to me, anyway), that can be used as a tactic by transplant centers attempting to improve their success rates.  In fact, the "Welcome to the Program" letter I received from the transplant center at which I was initially listed stated in no uncertain terms that I could, at some point, become too sick to transplant.  Curiously, this never seems to be an issue with Status-Level allocated organs such as hearts and livers.  In fact, due to the very nature of the Status Level system, you basically have to be a day from death to even GET transplanted--there is always somebody sicker that moves in front of you on the list.  The fact is that at many centers, the six-minute walk has somehow become the standard by which a lung transplant candidate's ongoing transplantability is judged.  As such, it has become an object of fear that effectively undermines the relationship of trust that must exist between the patient and the transplant center.  I urge transplant centers to do a better job of listing patients earlier and being less restrictive after they are listed.
D.  Weight--Probably the most difficult issue facing many transplant candidates is pre-operative weight.  Unfortunately, a common side effect of pre-transplant steroid therapy is weight gain.  The reason given by transplant centers is that an overweight condition inhibits the patient's ability to rehabilitate.  The fact is that as the efficiency of a patient's oxygen system--the lungs, heart, and  blood--decreases through the course of their disease, it gets harder and harder to carry excess weight, so losing some only makes life easier anyway.  This one is probably legitimate.

Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas Are "Head Over Heels" in Love: All the Details on Their Romance

Prince Harry, Cressida Bonas

There might be a new addition to the royal family soon—and no, we're not taking about Kate Middleton and Prince William 's baby.

Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas are getting pretty close. In fact, a source tells E! News exclusively that the pair are "definitely more in love than ever," adding, "I would not be surprised if she's the one he marries." (!)

"They are very affectionate with one another when they are with their friends," adds the source. "They kiss and cuddle and just seem head over heels for one another. They both have the same sense of fun and adventure. They're on the same wavelength. They are so compatible."

NEWS: All the details on Harry and Cressida's time at Glastonbury

And Harry's ex-girlfriend is apparently more than OK with his new romance. "It's not awkward withChelsy Davy at all," says a source. "Chelsy and Cressida have become firm friends nowadays."

"It's different dating a royal and getting used to that life and the challenges it brings," adds a source. "Chelsy is someone that Cressida can talk to about her unique situation. Chelsy has a man of her own anyhow."

On June 22, Prince Harry, Cressida, and Chelsy attended the wedding of Melissa Percy and Thomas van Straubenzee . Prince William (sans Kate, who was on maternity leave), Pippa Middletonand Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie also showed up for the royal affair.

PHOTOS: Harry and Cressida get cozy on winter holiday

A source tells E! News it was actually Eugenie who introduced Harry, 28, and Cressida, 24. "Cressida is really smart, very naturally pretty and just a really cool girl to hang out with. It's hard for Harry to date as there are so many opportunities out there, but Cressida is someone he knows he can trust as she is already in his circle," adds a source.

She also comes from a prominent family. Her mother is Lady Mary-Gaye Georgiana Lorna Curzon, a darling among Tatler and the British society pages. She's also the half-sister of actress Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, who married Richard Branson's son Sam in March 2013.

So clearly, she fits right in to royal life. And Princess Cressida has a lovely ring to it!

Boston bombing suspect pleads not guilty

This courtroom sketch depicts Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsar...

 His arm in a cast and his face swollen, a blase-looking Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty Wednesday in the Boston Marathon bombing in a seven-minute proceeding that marked his first appearance in public since his capture in mid-April.

As survivors of the bombing looked on, Tsarnaev, 19, gave a small, lopsided smile to his two sisters upon arriving in the courtroom. He appeared to have a jaw injury and there was swelling around his left eye and cheek.

Leaning into the microphone, he told a federal judge, "Not guilty" in his Russian accent and said it over and over as the charges were read. Then he was led away in handcuffs, making a kissing gesture toward his family with his lips. One of his sisters sobbed loudly, resting her head on a woman seated next to her.

Tsarnaev, who has been hospitalized since his capture with wounds suffered in a shootout and getaway attempt, faces 30 federal charges, including using a weapon of mass destruction to kill, in connection with the April 15 attack that left three people dead and more than 260 wounded. He could get the death penalty if prosecutors choose to pursue it.

The proceedings took place in a heavily guarded courtroom packed not only with victims but with their families, police officers, and members of the public and the media.

The Russian immigrant and former college student looked much as he did in a photo widely circulated after his arrest, his hair curly and unkempt. Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, he appeared nonchalant, almost bored, during the hearing. The cast covered his left forearm, hand and fingers.

The bombing victims showed little reaction in the courtroom after a federal marshal warned them against any outbursts.

Liz Norden, the mother of two men who lost their right legs in the bombings, said afterward: "I actually felt sick to my stomach."

MIT Police Chief John DiFava, who was also in the courtroom, said Tsarnaev looked "smug."

"I didn't see a lot of remorse. I didn't see a lot of regret," he said. "It just seemed to me that if I was in that position, I would have been a lot more nervous, certainly scared."

DiFava added: "I just wanted to see him. I wanted to see the person that so coldly and callously killed four people, one of whom being an officer of mine."

Authorities say Tsarnaev orchestrated the bombing along with his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died following a gun battle with police three days after the attack. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested on April 19, hiding in a bloodstained boat in a suburban backyard after a manhunt that paralyzed much of the Boston area.

Tsarnaev is also charged in the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and the carjacking of a motorist during their getaway attempt.

His two sisters were in court in Muslim garb. One was carrying a baby; the other wiped away tears with a tissue. Tsarnaev's parents remained back in Russia.

Tsarnaev's lawyer Judy Clarke, an expert in death penalty cases, asked that the judge enter not-guilty pleas for him, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler said: "I would ask him to answer."

On the same day as the arraignment, Boston's police commissioner appeared on Capitol Hill and complained to a Senate panel that the Justice Department failed to share information on terrorism threats with local officials before the bombing.

"There is a gap with information sharing at a higher level while there are still opportunities to intervene in the planning of these terrorist events," Commissioner Edward F. Davis III said.

Reporters and spectators began lining up for seats in the courtroom at 7:30 a.m. as a dozen Federal Protective Service officers and bomb-sniffing dogs surrounded the courthouse. Four hours before the 3:30 p.m. hearing, the defendant arrived at the courthouse in a four-vehicle motorcade.

About a dozen Tsarnaev supporters cheered as the motorcade arrived. The demonstrators yelled, "Justice for Jahar!" as Tsarnaev is known. One woman held a sign that said, "Free Jahar."

Lacey Buckley said she traveled from her home in Wenatchee, Wash., to attend the arraignment. She said she believes he is innocent. "I just think so many of his rights were violated. They almost murdered an unarmed kid in a boat," she said.

A group of friends who were on the high school wrestling team with Tsarnaev at Cambridge Rindge and Latin waited in line for hours, hoping to get a seat.

One of them, Hank Alvarez, said Tsarnaev was calm, peaceful and apolitical in high school.

"Just knowing him, it's hard for me to face the fact that he did it," said Alvarez, 19, of Cambridge.

Prosecutors say Tsarnaev, a Muslim, wrote about his motivations for the bombing on the inside walls and beams of the boat. He scrawled that the U.S. government was "killing our innocent civilians," and also wrote: "We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all."

Martin Richard, 8, Krystle Marie Campbell, 29, and Lingzi Lu, 23, were killed by the two bombs, which were fashioned out of pressure cookers, gunpowder, nails and other shrapnel. Numerous victims lost legs.

Colombia extradites drug lord called 'The Madman' to US

The most notorious Colombian drug lord since Pablo Escobar is now headed to the U.S. in handcuffs, after plastic surgery failed to conceal his identity from police.Colombian authorities have now extradited the 51-year-old to New York, where he faces drug trafficking and money laundering charges in two federal courts. He was set to arrive in New York in Tuesday, and will be arraigned in Manhattan on Wednesday morning and in Brooklyn on Thursday morning. After he is prosecuted in New York, he will be arraigned in the Southern District of Florida.Daniel Barrera, AKA El Loco or The Madman, ran a 400-ton-per-year drug empire with the help of violent leftist guerrillas, and controlled the major cocaine smuggling routes from Colombia to the U.S. He burned off his fingerprints with acid and had cosmetic surgery on his face, but an international law enforcement task force was still able to track him to a phone booth in Venezuela in September.

"Thanks to the cooperative efforts of Colombian and U.S. [law enforcement], Barrera’s criminal career is over," said DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart. "He now faces charges that may bring him a life behind bars."

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said that Barrera had "operated at the center of a truly evil web."

"This was truly cocaine with blood in its background," said Bharara.

Barrera’s career as a drug smuggler dates back to the 1980s, and he is believed to have shipped thousands of tons of cocaine north, often in cooperation with the leftist guerrillas of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. FARC has been the world's largest supplier of cocaine and has engaged in bombings, massacres and kidnappings inside Colombia. FARC guerrillas allegedly provided Barrera with raw materials and charged him a monthly tax for establishing drug labs in their territory.

AFP - Getty Images

Colombian drug trafficker Daniel Barrera, AKA "El Loco" or 'The Madman," is due to appear in federal court in New York on Wednesday.

Barrera was convicted on drug charges in Colombia in 1990 but escaped. After his escape, he used public telephones instead of cell phones to avoid surveillance by law enforcement.

By the time he was caught by Venezuelan law enforcement last fall, authorities said he accumulated multiple dwellings, a yacht and 48 automobiles. The Venezuelans handed him over to the Colombians after his arrest.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced his capture on live television, saying, “We have caught the last of the great lords,” and thanked British and American authorities for their help.

“In the fight against drug trafficking, this is a very important and final step,” Santos said.

Pilot in charge of Asiana flight was on his first trip as an instructor: NTSB

NTSB via EPA

Investigators at the scene of the Asiana Flight 214 crash at San Francisco International Airport.

By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

The pilot who was in charge of the flight that crashed at the San Francisco airport was making his first trip as an instructor, overseeing a pilot who was still in training on the Boeing 777 and at the controls, the investigators said Tuesday.

The disclosure came after the National Transportation Safety Board interviewed three of the four pilots who were on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 during Sunday's accident, which killed two teenagers. The fourth, who was in the cabin at the time, was being interviewed Tuesday.

Drug and alcohol tests were not given to the pilots after the crash, but only U.S. pilots are required to take them after incidents at American airports, National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Deborah Hersman said at a Tuesday evening briefing.

There were four pilots on board Flight 214 because it was a trip of more than 10 hours across the Pacific Ocean from Seoul, South Korea.

The pilot at the controls, identified by the airline as Lee Kang-kuk, was still in training on the Boeing 777. He had had 43 hours of flying time in the aircraft, but officials have said he was landing a Triple 7 at San Francisco International for the first time.

He was working with a “training captain” who had logged 3,000 hours on the 777 — but who Hersman said was making his first trip as an instructor.

"This was the first time he and the flying pilot had flown together,” Hersman said.

She also revealed that the pilots told investigators they were relying on automated cockpit equipment to control their speed during final approach, which prompts questions about whether a mistake was made in programming the "autothrottle" or if the equipment malfunctioned.

The NTSB has not identified human error, mechanical failure or another problem as the cause of the accident, but the three pilots in the cockpit told the NTSB they realized they were coming in too low when they were at 500 feet.

They said they tried to correct it as they lost altitude but could not stop the jetliner's landing gear from clipping the seawall on the way to the runway.

“After the impact, the aircraft ballooned, it yawed left and went into a 360-degree spin,” Hersman said.

In a press conference Deborah Hersman of the NTSB details the events from inside the cockpit according to the flight crew during the crash landing of Asiana flight 214.

Details of what happened next illustrated the power and horror of the crash:

• Two flight attendants were ejected from the rear of the plane but survived, Hersman said.
• At least one evacuation slide deployed inside the cabin, trapping another flight attendant, she confirmed.
• An oil tank ruptured and leaked fuel onto the hot No. 2 engine, sparking the fire that left the jet a charred hulk.

Hersman said she walked from the seawall to the plane on Tuesday, following a trail of wreckage that revealed the landing gear struck the seawall before the tail smacked down and was ripped off. Sections of cabin, aircraft parts, galley materials, newspapers, magazines and flooring were found in the debris field.

Two Chinese teenagers on their way to summer camp in the United States were killed — one perhaps run over by a fire engine racing to the scene — and 180 people were injured. Remarkably, scores of people walked away unhurt.

The plane came in far too slow — 119 mph just before it crash-landed, about 40 mph slower than touchdown speed. Four seconds before impact, the cockpit was warned of a possible stall by a mechanism that rattles the controls in the pilot’s hand.

The airline’s chief executive, Yoon Young-doo, said earlier Tuesday that the pilots had adequate qualifications, but he said the airline would nonetheless “beef up” its simulation training.

Yoon planned to fly to San Francisco on Tuesday on the same Flight 214.