Midday Roundup: Teen miraculously survives plane crash

Death-defying. A 16-year-old from Washington state showed up on the side of a highway after she survived a plane crash and a two-day hike out of the mountains. Autumn Veatch was flying with her step-grandparents when their small plane hit the side of a mountain in the Cascades. She made her way down a drainage basin to safety, emerging from the ordeal dehydrated and scraped up, but otherwise healthy. “Yes, it’s a miracle,” said her father, David Veatch. “We had, I don’t know how many people say they’re praying for her on Facebook. Yes, I believe it works. Now, if I can convince her to come to church with me.”

Making peace. The family of an African-American man who died in police custody announced a $5.9 million settlement with New York City yesterday. Eric Garner, 43, resisted arrest outside a convenience store in Staten Island last summer. Police suspected him of illegally selling cigarettes. One officer put his arm around Garner’s neck in what looks like a chokehold. The officer insists he used a legal maneuver called a seatbelt. A grand jury decided not to indict the officer in Garner’s death. Video of the encounter, in which Garner says “I can’t breathe” multiple times, went viral, and Garner’s death led to widespread protests in New York and around the country.

On the offense. Iraqi security forces have launched a long-awaited offensive to take back Anbar Province from ISIS. The operation is aimed at recapturing the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, which ISIS overran in 2014. The bad news is that Iranian Shiite militia and Hezbollah military units are reportedly fighting alongside Iraqi security forces. There are no known U.S. airstrikes supporting the operation.

On the shelf. Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, a sequel of sorts to her 1960s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, comes out today. The novel looks at how Atticus Finch and his daughter, now grown-up Jean Louise “Scout,” handle racial tension in the 1950s South. Since the first book, narrated by Scout as a child, patriarch Atticus Finch has changed from an unapologetic champion of equal rights to a segregationist. Reviewers share almost universal disappointment in Atticus’ moral decline since Mockingbird, but say the novel nevertheless paints an illuminating picture of the harsh racial realities of the time. Lee wrote Watchman before Mockingbird and kept it unpublished for decades, until her lawyer uncovered the manuscript in 2014.

Photographic evidence. NASA received up-close images on Monday of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft, which traveled for 9 1/2 years to explore the dwarf planet on the edge of the solar system. After sending the photos, New Horizons stopped transmitting data as it flew closer to Pluto and began collecting information on the planet and its moons. NASA engineers are waiting anxiously for the spacecraft to start sending the data back to Earth, which should happen later this evening.

WORLD Radio’s Jim Henry and The Associated Press contributed to this report.