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LIVESTRONG $50M GIFT BIGGEST SINCE ARMSTRONG EXIT

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Lance Armstrong’s former charity made the largest investment in its history Tuesday by giving $50 million to the University of Texas, marking the group’s biggest splash since severing ties with the disgraced cyclist as it pushes to restore momentum and influence after a tumultuous two years.

The money will launch the Livestrong Cancer Institutes at a new medical school breaking ground on the university’s 50,000-student Austin campus. Armstrong didn’t attend the announcement in his hometown, and his absence was noticeable.

Livestrong President Doug Ulman said Livestrong has been immersed in “pretty deep” strategic planning and charting a new path since 2012, when Armstrong left the foundation - shortly continued on page 2

US DOCTOR WHO HAD EBOLA HAS RECOVERED

This undated photo provided by Samaritan’s Purse shows Dr. Kent Brantly and his wife, Amber. A spokesperson for the Samaritan’s Purse aid organization said that Dr. Kent Brantly, one of the two American aid workers infected with the Ebola virus in Africa, would be released Thursday, Aug. 21, 2014.

ATLANTA (AP) -- At least one of the two American aid workers who were infected with the deadly Ebola virus in Africa has recovered and was to be discharged Thursday from an Atlanta hospital, a spokeswoman for the aid group he was working for said.

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US MISSION TO RESCUE H O S T A G E S I N S Y R I A

The Ebola outbreak has killed 1,350 people and counting across West Africa.

On Thursday in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, calm set in one day after residents in a slum that was sealed off in an effort to contain the outbreak clashed with riot police and soldiers. World Health Organization officials were visiting two hospitals that are treating Ebola patients and struggling to keep up with the influx of patients.

The death toll is rising most quickly in Liberia, which now accounts for at least 576 of the fatalities, the WHO said. At least 2,473 people have been sickened across West Africa - more than the caseloads of all the previous two-dozen Ebola outbreaks combined.

Ebola is only spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick people experiencing symptoms.

Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, said the administration never intended to disclose the operation.

But she said the U.S. went public with mission Wednesday because a number of media outlets were preparing to report on the operation and the administration “would have no choice but to acknowledge it.”

Officials said the rescue mission was authorized after intelligence agencies believed they had identi- President Barack Obama speaks in Edgartown, Mass., Wednesday, Aug. fied the location inside Syria where 20, 2014, about the killing of American journalist James Foley by militants In a statement Wednesday night, the Islamic State extremist group. The president said the US will conPentagon spokesman Rear Adm. the hostages were being held. But with tinue to confront Islamic State extremists despite the brutal murder of jourthe several dozen special operations nalist James Foley. Obama said the entire world is “appalled” by Foley’s John Kirby said: “As we have said The president says he spoke Wednesday with Foley’s family and repeatedly, the United States govforces dropped by aircraft into Syria killing. offered condolences. ernment is committed to the safety did not find them at that location and engaged in a firefight with Islamic State militants before depart- and well-being of its citizens, particularly those suffering in caping, killing several militants. No Americans died but one sus- tivity. In this case, we put the best of the United States military in harm’s way to try and bring our citizens home.” tained a minor injury when an aircraft was hit.

“The U.S. government had what we believed was sufficient intelligence, and when the opportunity presented itself, the president authorized the Department of Defense to move aggressively to recover our citizens,” said Lisa Monaco, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, in a statement. “Unfortunately, that mission was ultimately not successful because the hostages were not present.”

The administration revealed the rescue operation a day after the militants released a video showing the beheading of Foley and threatened to kill a second hostage, Steven Sotloff, if U.S. airstrikes against the militants in Iraq continued.

It’s unclear how many Americans the special forces attempted to rescue in Syria. While the officials who described the mission would not provide an exact number, other U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, have said Foley was one of at least four Americans held in Syria.

Like Foley, two others are believed to have been kidnapped by the Islamic State. The fourth, freelance journalist Austin Tice, disappeared in Syria in August 2012 and is believed to be in the custody of government forces in Syria.

Despite the militants’ threats, the U.S. launched a new barrage of airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria Wednesday. The Obama administration did not rule out the prospect of a military operation in Syria to bring those responsible for Foley’s death to justice.

Administration officials would not say specifically when or where the operation took place, citing the need to protect operational details in order to preserve the ability to carry out future rescue missions. They did say that nearly every branch of the military was involved and that the special forces on the ground were supported from the air by fixed wing, rotary and surveillance aircraft.

The disclosure of the rescue mission marks the first time the U.S. has revealed that American military personnel have been on the ground in Syria since a bloody civil war there broke out more than three years ago. Obama has resisted calls to insert the U.S. military in the middle of Syria’s war, a cautious approach his critics say has allowed the Islamic State to strengthen there and

Obama has authorized previous military missions to rescue hostages. In 2009, Navy SEAL snipers carried out a daring sea operation to rescue an American ship captain held by Somali pirates in a lifeboat. And in 2012, special operations forces successfully rescued an American and Dutch aid worked held in Somalia.

AS US AIRSTRIKES IN IRAQ G R O W, D E TA I L S S TAY T H I N fighting. Those 160 military personnel are coordinating with Iraqi and Kurdish military officials in support of their efforts to defend Irbil, including the U.S. Consulate there, and surrounding territory from the Islamic State group.

Q. Who is carrying out the airstrikes?

A. The only portion of the air campaign that has been discussed publicly in detail is the work being done by a range of Navy aircraft launching off the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf area. These include F/A-18F Super Hornets, which carried out the first strikes authorized by President Barack Obama.

Franklin Graham, president of North Carolina-based Samaritan’s Purse, said in a statement that the group was celebrating Brantly’s recovery. He has been in the hospital’s isolation unit for nearly three weeks.

Brantly was flown out of the west African nation of Liberia on Aug. 2, and Nancy Writebol followed Aug. 5. The two were infected while working at a missionary clinic outside Liberia’s capital.

Writebol was working for North Carolina-based aid group SIM. Representatives for the group did not respond to messages Thursday morning.

make gains across the border in Iraq.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama sent special operations troops to Syria this summer on a secret mission to rescue American hostages, including journalist James Foley, held by Islamic State extremists, but they did not find them, the administration disclosed Wednesday.

Alison Geist, a spokeswoman for Samaritan’s Purse, told The Associated Press she did not know the exact time Dr. Kent Brantly would be released but confirmed it would happen Thursday.

Emory University Hospital planned to hold a news conference Thursday morning to discuss both patients’ discharge.

“Today I join all of our Samaritan’s Purse team around the world in giving thanks to God as we celebrate Dr. Kent Brantly’s recovery from Ebola and release from the hospital,” Graham’s statement said.

Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014

Also flying are EA-6B Prowlers, which are electronic warfare planes designed to suppress enemy air defenses on the ground.

Displaced Iraqis settle at a new camp outside the Bajid Kandala camp in Feeshkhabour town, Iraq, Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2014. Some 1.5 million people have been displaced by fighting in Iraq since the Islamic State’s rapid advance began in June, and thousands more have died. The scale of the humanitarian crisis prompted the U.N. to declare its highest level of emergency last week.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- America has returned to war, of a sort, in Iraq with airstrikes that have intensified in recent days against Islamic State militants. But details about the execution of this limited campaign, which so far includes no reported U.S. ground combat, are thin.

Some questions and answers about the mission, which began Aug. 8: Q. What U.S. forces are involved?

A. The specifics are hard to pin down in part because, as in any U.S. overseas conflict, many of the contributors work behind the scenes, sometimes in secret. We do know that the U.S. has about 750 military personnel in Iraq, not counting the 100 who have worked out of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad since before this crisis began.

None of the 750 are engaged in ground combat, but that does not mean they are not at risk.

Among the 750 are about 160 at what the military calls “joint operation centers”- one in Baghdad and another in Irbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region that is near the center of the latest

Speaking Wednesday from aboard the Bush, Rear Adm. DeWolfe H. Miller III, commander of the carrier strike group, said in a telephone interview with Washington reporters that his F/A-18F planes have launched about 30 strikes in Iraq. He would not talk about any air defenses his pilots may have encountered over Iraq.

Q. What about the Air Force?

The Air Force has said little about its combat role, although it is widely known inside the military that its F-15E attack planes as well as B-1 bombers and armed drones have participated in the campaign. The Air Force also flies aerial refueling missions that enable attack planes to remain over target areas for extended periods.

Q. Where are the Air Force planes flying from?

A. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations in Iraq and across the greater Middle East, will not say what bases are being used. It cites “host nation sensitivities,” which is a diplomatic way of saying the U.S. government is acceding to the wishes of Gulf states like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates that insist their involvement in U.S. offensive military operations not be publicly acknowledged. continued on page 7

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OBAMA WEIGHS BROADER MOVE ON LEGAL IMMIGRATION for business seeking global talent; shorten the green card line for those being sponsored by relatives, a wait that can stretch nearly 25 years; and potentially reduce the incentive for illegal immigration by creating more legal avenues for those wanting to come, as well as those already here.

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Obama’s aides have held more than 20 meetings in recent months with business groups and other interest groups to discuss possibilities, ahead of an announcement about next steps the president is expected to make in September. Coordinating these “listening sessions,” as the White House calls them, is its Office of Public Engagement, led by top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.

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In this July 31, 2014, file photo, faith leaders and activists participates in a demonstration in front of the White House in Washington, asking President Barack Obama to modify his deportation policies. Obama is considering key changes in the legal immigration system requested by tech, industry and powerful interest groups. Administration officials and advocates say those steps would go beyond the expected relief from deportations for some immigrants in the U.S. illegally that Obama signaled he’d pursue after immigration efforts in Congress collapsed.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is considering key changes in the nation’s immigration system requested by tech, industry and powerful interest groups, in a move that could blunt Republicans’ election-year criticism of the president’s go-italone approach to immigration.

Administration officials and advocates said the steps would go beyond the expected relief from deportations for some immigrants in the U.S. illegally that Obama signaled he’d adopt after immigration efforts in Congress collapsed. Following a bevy of recent White House meetings, top officials have compiled specific recommendations from business groups and other advocates whose support could undercut GOP claims that Obama is exceeding his authority to help people who have already violated immigration laws.

“The president has not made a decision regarding next steps, but he believes it’s important to understand and consider the full range of perspectives on potential solutions,” said White House spokesman Shawn Turner.

One of the more popular requests among business and family groups is a change in the way green cards are counted that would essentially free up some 800,000 additional visas the first year, advocates say.

The result would be threefold: It would lessen the visa bottleneck

LIVESTRONG $50M continued from page 1

before he admitted using performance-enhancing drugs after years of defiant denials. Armstrong created Livestrong in 1997, while being treated for cancer.

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“Our organization has always said we’re so appreciative of everything he did to get us to the point. Now the mission needs to live on,” Ulman said.

Among the lowest points for Livestrong was when Nike cut ties with the foundation last summer - ending a partnership that built the cancer charity into a global brand and introduced yellow wristbands that became an international symbol for cancer survivors.

The relationship with Nike had generated more than $100 million of the roughly $500 million raised by Livestrong since its inception.

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Now more than a year later, Livestrong is trying to send a clear signal that the foundation still packs financial wherewithal and relevance. The new cancer institute will focus on educating cancer patients and help then get access to treatment and resources.

“Looking forward, it’s time for the Livestrong Foundation to embrace an even bigger mission,” said Jeff Garvey, chairman of the foundation’s board.

Armstrong won the Tour de France every year from 1999 to 2005, but those titles were stripped after a massive report by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency detailed doping by Armstrong and his U.S. Postal Service teammates.

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Obama’s options without new laws from Congress are limited and would only partially address obstacles business groups say are preventing them from hiring more workers. Even so, administration officials say these groups are urging the White House to help streamline a complex and unpredictable system.

Republicans are working to use immigration and the surge of unaccompanied minors at the border against Democrats in the midterm elections by arguing that Obama and his party are undermining the rule of law.

“Politically we think it flips the switch because it’s not just talking about a benefit to those who broke the law,” said former Rep. Bruce Morrison, D-Conn., who authored the 1990 immigration law and is now lobbying on behalf of groups representing tech industry professionals, business management and U.S. citizens married to foreigners.

Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican strategist, said the moves on legal immigration might prompt businesses to praise the president, even if it’s not enough to persuade the business community to side with Democrats in the upcoming elections.

“From the White House’s perspective, this is an easy way for them to score some points,” Mackowiak said. “They’ll say: `We’re arguing about substance, Republicans are arguing about process.’”

Obama in June announced that in the face of congressional inaction, he would act on his own to address as much of the nation’s immigration mess as he could. Since then, advocates for the roughly 11 million people living in the country illegally have lobbied for deportation relief particularly for the parents of U.S.born children and the parents of youth who authorized to remain in the country under a program Obama announced in 2012.

But in recent weeks, other groups have stepped up public pressure in favor of presidential action that would change how the legal immigration system operates, too.

Those who support changing the green card count say each year half of the 140,000 employment-based green cards issued go to spouses and children, unnecessarily reducing the numbers available to workers.

Other requests have included removing the requirement that some spouses of U.S. citizens return to their native country for at least three years before they can apply for U.S. residency, as well as extending work permits to the spouses of all temporary H1-B skilled workers.

The potential for broader executive action ignited flames this week from Republicans in Congress already vehemently opposed to legislation that would increase immigration quotas.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., slammed the White House this week for meeting with big business to bring in more workers while “tens of millions of Americans are on welfare, unemployment and public assistance.”

Not all industries are pushing for broad action, though. Agriculture leaders, who acknowledge as much as 70 percent of their workforce is “unauthorized” have remained on the sidelines - a reminder of the limits of any Obama’s executive authority.

Kristi Boswell, director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau, said her organization has met this summer with White House to encourage administrative changes that would reduce immigration raids targeting farms and processing plants and cut the red tape on hiring guest workers.

“Absolutely, ag workers have an ability to benefit at least temporarily from executive action,” she said but added that reforming guest worker provisions and other aspects of the immigration system couldn’t be done by the president alone.

For that, she said, Congress will still have to act.

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M A N Y O N L Y

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P O L I C E K I L L I N G S , B U T F E R G U S O N E X P L O D E S black men die at the hands of the state.”

There was little violence after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer last July. Peace prevailed when at least four other unarmed black males were killed by police in recent months, from New York to Los Angeles.

Kelley and Powell both said that the nature of Brown’s killing fueled anger: He was shot six times in broad daylight, in the middle of the street, in his own housing complex. Then his body lay in the street for hours, uncovered, in a pool of blood, before being taken away.

Then Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri. And waves of rioting have convulsed the St. Louis suburb for more than 10 days.

Why Ferguson?

“There were more than 100 people there looking at his body,” Kelley said.

The response to Brown’s death turned violent because of a convergence of factors, observers say, including the stark nature of the killing in broad daylight, an aggressive police response to protests, a mainly black city being run by white officials - and the cumulative effect of killing after killing after killing of unarmed black males.

She mentioned the killings of Jonathan Ferrell, an unarmed black man who was shot by a white officer after crashing his car in Charlotte last September, and the black woman, Renisha McBride, who crashed her car in Detroit, went to a nearby house for help, and was shot dead through the front door.

“People are tired of it,” said Kevin Powell, president of the BK Nation advocacy group, who organized peaceful protests after the Florida neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was found innocent in Martin’s killing.

Powell is headed to Ferguson as an organizer and peace activist after the killing of Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old who was shot by white police officer Darren Wilson. Battles have raged in Ferguson almost nightly, with stores looted, police firing tear gas and rubber bullets, people tossing Molotov cocktails, and dozens of arrests.

When police first confronted protesters with armored military vehicles, assault weapons and dogs, it reminded Powell of images from the 1960s civil rights movement.

“Just a reckless disregard for the safety of the community they’re supposed to be protecting,” he said. “They just don’t care, it feels like they don’t care at all.”

“Zimmerman was one person. This is an entire police force. It feels like the whole system doesn’t care.”

It is not all that unusual for an unarmed black person to be killed by police. There are no reliable national statistics on people of any race killed by police, but anecdotal reports count significant numbers.

One study, relying on Internet searches of media reports, found 18 unarmed black people killed in the first three months of 2012,

A man watches as police walk through a cloud of smoke during a clash with protesters in Ferguson, Mo. The response to Brown’s death turned violent because of a convergence of factors, observers said.

including Trayvon Martin.

More recently: On July 17, Eric Garner was killed by a chokehold after an arrest for illegally selling loose cigarettes in New York City.

On August 5, John Crawford III was killed while handling a toy gun in a Walmart outside Dayton, Ohio.

On August 11, Ezell Ford, a mentally disabled man, was shot dead in South Los Angeles.

The circumstances of each case are different, of course, and investigations continue.

Brown was killed Aug. 9. The riots erupted Aug. 10, when more than two dozen businesses were damaged and looted. Some of the rioters, according to media reports, are hardened, violent young men who speak of seeking “justice,” which is often confused with revenge. Some are coming to Ferguson from out of town, whether to show solidarity or fight the crackdown, or possibly drawn to the media spectacle. Police have reported arrests of people from New York and California.

“It feels like a turning point,” said Blair L.M. Kelley, a history professor at North Carolina State University. “I think because so many

GREEK ARCHAEOLOGY SITE S PA R K S I N T E N S E I N T E R E S T traces of painted plaster decoration.

“It’s astonishing, the biggest tomb we have found in Greece so far,” said archaeologist Chryssoula Paliadelli, an expert on the period who is not involved in the excavation. “It clearly shows the wealth that allowed construction of what was, at the time, a hugely costly monument.”

But the tomb may well have been looted hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

In this handout photo released by the Greek Culture Ministry on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2014, two large stone sphinxes are seen under a barrel-vault topping the entrance to an ancient tomb under excavation at Amphipolis in northern Greece. Archaeologists excavating the large grave mound on Thursday asked politicians and others seeking guided tours of the site to leave them in peace until the dig is completed. The partially uncovered tomb, from the end of Greek warrior-king Alexander the Great’s reign, has captivated the public imagination, fueling wild speculation that it may contain rich treasure and the bones of an ancient celebrity.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- Archaeologists excavating a large burial mound in northern Greece that has captivated the public’s imagination have asked politicians and others seeking guided tours of the site to leave them in peace.

Part of a stone wall that blocked off the subterranean entrance is missing, while the sphinxes - originally two meters (6 feet) high - lack heads and wings. Near the sphinxes, excavators have found fragments of a large marble lion that originally capped the mound, which indicates the site was severely damaged and dug up in later antiquity.

Nobody knows yet who the mound was built for.

The Culture Ministry appealed Thursday for “understanding” while the Amphipolis excavation proceeds.

Alexander’s mother, widow, son, brother and sister-in-law were all murdered in separate attacks in the Amphipolis area during the brutal power struggles that followed his death.

However, Macedonian royals were traditionally buried at Aegae, further to the west, where rich, unplundered graves excavated in the late 1970s have been identified as those of Alexander’s father, Philip II, and a slain son.

The partially uncovered tomb from the end of Greek warrior-king Alexander the Great’s reign, which was found inside the mound, has sparked intense media interest amid wild speculation that it may contain rich treasures or the bones of an ancient celebrity.

Older research has tentatively linked the lion statue, which was removed during Roman times and discovered a century ago some 5 kilometers (3 miles) away, with Laomedon, one of Alexander’s military commanders; his admiral, Nearchos, was a citizen of Amphipolis.

Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia, in northern Greece, from where he set off to conquer a vast empire reaching India. He died in 323 B.C. at age 33 and was buried in Egypt - although the precise location of his grave is one of the enduring mysteries of archaeology.

“It’s all speculation until we see the inside (of the tomb)” said Michalis Tiverios, a professor of archaeology at the University of Thessaloniki.

The excavation is expected to last at least another few weeks.

“Those happened at nighttime, away from the public gaze,” Kelley said. “To leave Brown in the street like that, it was a disregard they could feel and taste and see.”

The last riots over an unarmed black death were in 2009, when Oscar Grant was killed by a white officer while lying face down on a train platform in Oakland, California. Hundreds of businesses were damaged, cars were overturned and smashed, and more than 100 people were arrested.

Similar circumstances led to unrest in Cincinnati in 2001 and in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1996. One of America’s worst race riots ever was in 1992 in Los Angeles, after the acquittal of four white officers who beat the black motorist Rodney King. And people in many cities rioted against racial oppression during the turmoil of the 1960s.

“Riots erupt when all other options have been closed,” said Cathy Schneider, an American University professor who studies race riots. “When people really feel vulnerable in the face of police violence and local authorities are totally impervious to community demands.”

Ferguson is 67 percent black; the mayor, city council, school board and police force are almost all white.

Schneider said that the riots of the 1960s gave rise to individuals and groups who could effectively negotiate tensions with police.

That infrastructure may not exist in Ferguson, where the population has rapidly changed due to white flight, she said. Local officials promised Tuesday to make changes and be more receptive to community concerns.

Powell sees Michael Brown as a bookend of sorts to Trayvon Martin.

S PA C E WA L K I N G ASTRONAUTS RELEASE BABY SATELLITE CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Spacewalking astronauts launched a tiny Peruvian research satellite Monday, setting it loose on a mission to observe Earth.

Russian Oleg Artemiev cast the 4-inch box off with his gloved right hand as the International Space Station sailed 260 miles above the cloud-flecked planet. The nanosatellite gently tumbled as it cleared the vicinity of the orbiting complex, precisely as planned.

“One, two, three,” someone called out in Russian as Artemiev let go of the satellite.

Cameras watched as the nanosatellite - named Chasqui after the Inca messengers who were fleet of foot - increased its distance and grew smaller. Artemiev’s Russian spacewalking partner, Alexander Skvortsov, tried to keep his helmet camera aimed at the satellite as it floated away.

The satellite - barely 2 pounds - holds instruments to measure temperature and pressure, and cameras that will photograph Earth. It’s a technological learning experience for the National University of Engineering in Lima. A Russian cargo ship delivered the device earlier this year.

Less than a half-hour into the spacewalk, the satellite was on its way, flying freely.

With that completed, Artemiev and Skvortsov set about installing fresh science experiments outside the Russian portion of the space station and retrieving old ones. “Be careful,” Russian Mission Control outside Moscow warned as the astronauts made their way to their next work site. They also collected samples from a window of the main Russian living compartment; engineers want to check for any engine residue from visiting spacecraft.

The spacewalkers wrapped up their work early. Flight controllers thanked them for their five-hour effort.

The two conducted a spacewalk in June, a few months after moving into the space station. Four other men live there: another Russian, two Americans and one German.

U.S. spacewalks, meanwhile, remain on hold.

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has already visited the Amphipolis excavation and state TV daily leads news bulletins with incremental developments about the dig.

NASA hoped to resume them this month after a yearlong investigation but delayed the activity until fall to get fresh spacesuit batteries on board. The SpaceX company will deliver the batteries on a Dragon supply ship next month. Engineers are concerned about the fuses of the on-board batteries.

So far, archaeologists have uncovered part of the late 4th-century B.C. tomb’s entrance, which has two large marble sphinxes placed on a lintel just under the barrel-vaulted roof. Underneath lies the doorway, still covered in earth, with

Before the battery issue, NASA was stymied by a spacesuit problem that nearly cost an Italian astronaut his life last summer. Luca Parmitano’s helmet flooded with water from the suit’s cooling system, and he barely made it back inside. The investigation into that incident is now complete, with safety improvements made to the U.S. spacesuits.

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GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- An Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed three senior commanders of the Hamas military wing Thursday, delivering a likely blow to the organization’s morale and highlighting the long reach of Israel’s intelligence services.

Hamas military wing said Deif was not in the targeted home at the time.

The back-to-back targeting of top Hamas military leaders came after indirect Israel-Hamas negotiations in Cairo on a sustainable truce broke down Tuesday. Gaza militants resumed rocket fire on Israel, even before the formal end of a six-day truce at midnight that day.

The pre-dawn strike leveled a four-story house in a densely populated neighborhood of the southern town of Rafah, killing six people, including the three senior Hamas commanders.

Since then, Hamas and other groups have fired dozens more rockets, and Israeli aircraft have struck dozens of targets in Gaza, dimming prospects for a resumption of the Cairo talks.

The trio had played a key role in expanding Hamas’ military capabilities in recent years, including digging attack tunnels leading to Israel, training of fighters and smuggling of weapons to Gaza, Israel said.

It was not immediately clear if their assassination would prompt a change in Hamas strategy in the current round of fighting with Israel or diminish the group’s ability to fire rockets at Israel. The military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, is a secretive organization.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said Israel “will not succeed in breaking the will of our people or weaken the resistance,” and that Israel “will pay the price.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the “superior intelligence” of the Shin Bet security service and the military’s “precise execution” of the attack.

Smoke and dust rise after an Israeli strike hit Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014.

without warning. “We only heard multiple F-16 (warplane) missiles, one after the other, six or seven missiles,” he said.

Several hours later, a large earth mover was still clearing mounds of debris and wreckage.

In pinpointing the whereabouts of the Hamas commanders, Israel likely relied to some extent on local informers. Israel has maintained a network of informers despite its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, in some cases using blackmail or the lure of exit permits to win cooperation.

The killing of the three top Hamas commanders will likely buy Netanyahu some time as the Israeli public becomes increasingly impatient with the government’s inability to halt rocket fire from Gaza.

Al Majd, a website linked to the Hamas security services, said Thursday that seven suspected informers were arrested in recent days and that three were killed “after the completion of the revolutionary procedures against them.” The wording suggested they did not receive a trial.

Israel and Hamas identified the three commanders killed in the 3 a.m. airstrike in Rafah’s Tel Sultan neighborhood as Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, Raed Attar and Mohammed Barhoum.

It was the second time during the Gaza war that the website announced suspected informers had been killed by Hamas.

Gaza police and witnesses said several missiles hit the four-story building.

The Rafah attack came a day after an apparent Israeli attempt to kill the top Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike on a house in Gaza City.

Hamza Khalifa, an area resident said the house was struck

Deif’s wife and an infant son were killed in that strike, but the

UNITED LURES TOP FLIERS WITH PROMISE OF A HOT MEAL This June 15, 2007 file photo shows actor and comedian Robin Williams posing to promote his film, “License To Wed” in Santa Monica, Calif. Williams, whose freeform comedy and adept impressions dazzled audiences for decades, has died in an apparent suicide. He was 63.

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office said Williams was pronounced dead at his home in California on Monday, Aug. 11, 2014. The sheriff’s office said a preliminary investigation showed the cause of death to be a suicide due to asphyxia.

NEW YORK (AP) -- To win the hearts of frequent business travelers, United Airlines is going through their stomachs.

The carrier has been looking for ways to woo back some of its top fliers who defected to other carriers following a rocky merger with Continental Airlines. So, it’s upgrading first class food options and replacing snacks with full meals on some of its shortest flights.

The changes, announced Thursday, mean that instead of potato chips, chocolate chip cookies and bananas, passengers on flights of at least 800 miles will get meals such as chicken and mozzarella on a tomato focaccia roll and turkey and Swiss cheese on a cranberry baguette. Currently, meals are only served on flights of 900 miles or more - trips that usually last close to two hours.

Passengers on 13 extra routes, such as Houston-to-Des Moines, Iowa, will be getting full meal service starting in February.

The move comes as American Airlines goes the other way, eliminating hot meals on most flights less than 1,000 miles starting Sept. 1. The change - which upset many frequent fliers - is part of American’s merger with US Airways and does expand meals to some US Airways flights that previously only had snacks. Delta Air Lines serves first class meals on flights of more than 900 miles.

That means United will offer full meals on more short flights than its competitors, although each airline makes exceptions for some key shorter business routes like the 731-mile trip between New York and Chicago.

United already this month replaced two bland salad options

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with four heartier choices. Starting Sept. 1, three frozen and reheated sandwiches currently served will be replaced by eight sandwich and wrap choices made daily. In the fall, it will add Prosecco sparkling wine to its beverage menu.

“Customers shouldn’t have to make sacrifices just because they are onboard an aircraft,” says Todd Traynor-Corey, the airline’s managing director of food design.

That might be true, but in an industry known for its razor-thin profit margins, food has always been a target of cost-cutting.

With U.S. airlines each year carrying 645 million passengers domestically, every little food decision had big implications.

In the 1980s, then American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall famously decided to remove a single olive from every salad. The thought was: passengers wouldn’t notice and American would save $40,000 a year.

It’s been a decade since most airlines stopped serving free meals in coach on domestic flights.

Dennis Cary, an airline consultant with ICF International, says meals alone won’t drive passengers to one airline over another, but can help leave a better impression of a flight.

“It’s on the margin,” Cary says, “but it’s one of the things people like to talk about.”

United has been struggling since its 2010 merger with Continental. It lags behind American and Delta in the number of planes with Wi-Fi, its on-time performance slipped and a series of computer glitches have left passengers angry. Business travelers who fly weekly got fed up with the repeated problems; other airlines were successful in luring some away.

CEO Jeff Smisek has struggled to collect the same high airfares from business customers that other airline do, leading to pressure from Wall Street analysts. Improving food could be a start to winning back some passengers.

A hot meal on a two-hour flight might not sound like a necessity, but for busy frequent fliers it might be the only chance to grab a bite.

“Business travelers, running from a meeting to catch an earlier flight, don’t have the time stop and pick up food along the way,” says Gary Leff, co-founder of online frequent flier discussion site MilePoint.

Despite the crisis, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was holding talks in Qatar on Thursday with Hamas’ top political leader in exile, Khaled Mashaal, and the emir of Qatar. Before the collapse of the truce talks, Abbas had planned to use the meetings in Qatar to urge Mashaal and his Qatari backers to support an Egyptian cease-fire plan.

Hamas has rejected the Egyptian proposal, saying it contained no commitments by Israel to ease the border blockade of Gaza. The blockade was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007.

Hamas leaders said they could not accept a deal they feared would restore the closure regime that was in place before the start of the latest round of fighting on July 8. The border restrictions prevent most Gazans from traveling outside the crowded coastal strip and bar most exports.

Since the Gaza war erupted six weeks ago, more than 2,000 Palestinians have been killed and about 100,000 left homeless, according to the U.N. and Palestinian officials. Israel lost 67 people, all but three of them soldiers.

It was unclear if the killing of the three Hamas commanders would affect its ability to fire rockets. Israel estimated that Hamas had 10,000 rockets before the war and lost about twothirds of its arsenal since then.

In a joint statement, the Israeli military and Shin Bet security service emphasized the importance of Abu Shamaleh, Attar and Barhoum to the Hamas military operation.

Abu Shamaleh had been the top Hamas commander in southern Gaza, it said. Attar was in charge of weapons smuggling into Gaza, the construction of attack tunnels and had played a role in the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit, in 2006. Barhoum was a senior Hamas operative in Rafah, the statement said.

Abu Shamaleh was a confederate of Deif’s who was involved in planning and carrying out at least four major attacks on Israeli soldiers since the 1990s, including one in 2004 that killed four and wounded 10, the statement said.

Attar, it said, was responsible for orchestrating a series of complex attacks on Israeli targets, including through the Sinai Peninsula in neighboring Egypt.

“This morning’s strike sends a clear message to those responsible for planning attacks, we will strike those that have terrorized our communities, towns and cities, we will pursue the perpetrators of abduction of our soldiers and teenagers, and we will succeed in restoring security to the State of Israel,” said an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

In addition to the Hamas operatives, three others were killed in the Rafah strike, including a resident of the house and two neighbors, according to Palestinian health official Ashraf al-Kidra.

The neighbors were identified as Hassan and Amal Younis, the parents of Issam Younis, the director of Al Mezan, a leading human rights organization in Gaza.

At least 20 people, including four children - among them three brothers, and their father - were killed in 31 airstrikes across Gaza, according to al-Kidra.

Israel also hit at smuggling tunnels along the Gaza border with Egypt and at agricultural lands west of Rafah in Thursday’s airstrikes.

The military said 18 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza since midnight Wednesday, compared to more than 210 over the previous 30 hours.

An Israeli was seriously wounded when a mortar hit south of the southern city of Ashkelon on Thursday, it said.

In a nationally televised address Wednesday, Netanyahu showed little willingness to return to the negotiating table after six weeks of war with Hamas.

“We are determined to continue the campaign with all means and as is needed,” he said, his defense minister by his side.

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014 ____________________________________________________________

O B A M A , A L L I E S V O W F I R M R E S P O N S E T O I S L A M I C S T A T E

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States stood firm Wednesday in its fight against Islamic State militants who beheaded a U.S. journalist in Iraq, pledging to continue attacking the group despite its threats to kill another American hostage. President Barack Obama denounced the group as a “cancer” threatening the entire region as the administration weighed sending even more American troops to Iraq.

of the crisis in Syria, where Foley was captured in 2012. “Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to his killers,” Obama said. He spoke from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where his family is vacationing.

Foley, 40, went missing in northern Syria in November 2012 while freelancing for Agence France-Presse and the Boston-based media company GlobalPost. The car he was riding in was stopped by four militants in a contested battle zone that both Sunni rebel fighters and government forces were trying to control. He had not been heard from since.

“We will be vigilant and we will be relentless,” Obama said as the U.S. military pressed ahead with more airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq.

The execution of journalist James Foley drew international condemnation, and western nations responded with steppedup efforts to counter the threat posed by Islamic State.

Germany announced it would supply the Kurds with weapons to fight the insurgent. Italy’s defense minister said the country hopes to contribute machine guns, ammunition and anti-tank rockets. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the killing showed the true face of this “caliphate of barbarism.”

In capitals across the Middle East, by contrast, the news of Foley’s death was met with silence, even in Syria and Iraq - the two countries where the Islamic State is strongest. On social media, people in the region condemned Foley’s killing, but stressed that the Islamic State has been committing atrocities against Iraqis and Syrians for years.

In Foley’s home town of Rochester, New Hampshire, his parents spoke to reporters in an appearance where wrenching grief over their son’s death mingled with laughter over his life. Diane Foley said her son was courageous to the end and called his death “just evil.”

“We are just very proud of Jimmy and we are praying for the strength to love like he did and keep courageous and keep fighting for all the people he was fighting for,” she said. “We

“All of us feel the ache of his absence,” Obama said. “All of us mourn his loss.” pray for all the remaining Americans.”

Obama’s remarks affirmed that the U.S. would not scale back its military posture in Iraq in response to Foley’s killing. In fact, the State Department did not rule out extending military operations into Syria to bring those responsible to justice, with spokeswoman Marie Harf saying the U.S. “reserves the right to hold people accountable when they harm Americans.

What that looks like going forward, those conversations will be happening.”

Since the video was released Tuesday, the U.S. military has conducted 14 airstrikes on Islamic State targets. And U.S. officials said military planners were considering the possibility of sending a small number of additional troops to Iraq, at the request of the State Department, mainly to provide additional security around Baghdad.

Obama said he’d told Foley’s family in a phone call Wednesday that the United States joins them in honoring all that Foley did, praising the journalist for his work telling the story

R E P O R T E R ’ S D E A T H G A LVA N I Z E S ANGER, LITTLE ACTION they felt it would be unethical to tell him of a treatment they might not use. Shortly after their decision, however, Khan’s condition worsened, the statement said, and the company providing the medical evacuation decided not to transfer him. He died a few days later, on July 29.

“Every day, doctors have to make choices, sometimes difficult, about treatment for their patients,” said the Doctors Without Borders statement. “Trying an untested drug on patients is a very difficult decision, particularly in the light of the `do no harm’ principle.”

This September 2012 file photo posted on the website freejamesfoley.org shows journalist James Foley in Aleppo, Syria.In a horrifying act of revenge for U.S. airstrikes in northern Iraq, militants with the Islamic State extremist group have beheaded Foley — and are threatening to kill another hostage, U.S. officials say.

ZMapp has since been used on two Americans and a Spaniard. The California-based company that makes the drug, Mapp Pharmaceuticals, has said that its supplies are now exhausted, and it will take months to produce even a modest amount.

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) -- Doctors treating a Sierra Leone physician with Ebola defended their decision not to give him an experimental drug, saying Wednesday they feared it was too risky.

The drug has never before been tested in humans, and it is not clear if it is effective or even harmful. The Americans are improving - although it is unclear what role ZMapp has played in that - but the Spaniard died Tuesday.

Calling it “an impossible dilemma,” Doctors Without Borders explained in detail their decision in response to a New York Times story on the case. It would have been the first time the experimental drug was tried in humans.

The last known doses of ZMapp arrived Wednesday in Liberia, where the government has said they will be given to two sick doctors. They will be the first Africans known to receive the treatment.

The explanation came the same day that another top doctor from Sierra Leone died of the disease, further fueling a debate about how to apportion a limited supply of untested drugs and vaccines and whether they are even effective.

But the debate over experimental treatments and vaccines will continue. Canada has promised to donate 800 to 1,000 doses of its untested Ebola vaccine to the World Health Organization and already questions are being asked about who will get it and how scientists will determine if it works.

Ebola has killed more than 1,000 people and sickened nearly 2,000 in the current West African outbreak that has also hit Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria. Many of the dead are health workers, who are often working with inadequate supplies and protection.

At the time the experimental treatment was being considered for Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, his immune system was already starting to produce antibodies suggesting he might recover, Doctors Without Borders said in the statement.

Khan was also due to be transferred to a European hospital that would be more capable of handling problems that might arise, it said.

The statement did not specify what drug was considered.

But it is believed to be ZMapp, an experimental drug designed to boost the immune system to help it fight the virus. Since Khan’s body was already producing an immune response, the doctors may have feared that any boost would kick it into overdrive.

In the end, the treating physicians decided against using the drug. They never told Khan of its existence because

Likely candidates for the vaccine are health care workers in Africa who are among the most vulnerable because of their close contact with Ebola patients.

Liberia has asked for the vaccine, and Guinea is considering asking for access to it.

Unlike ZMapp, which is being given to only a handful of people and is unlikely to yield significant information about the drug’s effectiveness, the vaccine could be tested in a small, but more rigorous field trial.

“It gives us an opportunity to test the vaccine in an outbreak situation in populations that are at risk,” said David Heymann, who professor at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Meanwhile, Nigeria confirmed that another person has died from Ebola, bringing the toll in that country to three. The man was under quarantine because he had contact with Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian-American who flew into Nigeria with the disease and died of it last month.

The beheading marks the first time the Islamic State has killed an American citizen since the Syrian conflict broke out in March 2011, upping the stakes in an increasingly chaotic and multilayered war. The killing is likely to complicate U.S. involvement in Iraq and the Obama administration’s efforts to contain the group as it expands in both Iraq and Syria.

The group is the heir apparent of the militancy known as al-Qaida in Iraq, which beheaded many of its victims, including American businessman Nicholas Berg in 2004.

The video released on websites Tuesday suggests increasing sophistication of the Islamic State group’s media unit and begins with scenes of Obama explaining his decision to order airstrikes. It then cuts to Foley, kneeling in the desert.

A masked militant is shown apparently beginning to cut at Foley’s neck. The video fades to black before the beheading is completed; the next shot shows Foley’s dead body.

The militant in the video has not been identified, but he spoke with a British accent, and British Prime Minister David Cameron said that “from what we have seen it looks increasingly likely that is a British citizen.” U.S. officials agreed with that assessment.

GlobalPost President Philip Balboni said the news service received an email “full of rage” last week in which Foley’s captors threatened to kill him. Balboni said the White House was aware of the threat, but no negotiations took place.

Obama did not specifically mention Steven Sotloff, another kidnapped American journalist that Islamic State says could be killed next. But he offered prayers on behalf of the American people for “those other Americans who are separated from their families.”

A man identified as Sotloff appears at the end of the Foley video. Sotloff was kidnapped near the Syrian-Turkish border in August 2013. He had freelanced for Time, the National Interest and MediaLine.

Tuesday’s airstrikes by American fighter jets and drones centered on targets around the Mosul Dam and were designed to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces create a buffer zone at the key facility, according to a U.S. official. The official was not authorized to discuss the ongoing operations publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Since Aug. 8, there have been 84 U.S. airstrikes in Iraq on Islamic State targets - including security checkpoints, vehicles and weapons caches. It’s not clear how many militants have been killed in the strikes, although it’s likely that some were.

The Islamic State militant group is so ruthless in its attacks against all people they consider heretics or infidels that it has been disowned by al-Qaida’s leaders. In seeking to impose its harsh interpretation of Islamic law in the lands it is trying to control, the extremists have slain soldiers and civilians alike in horrifying ways - including mounting the decapitated heads of some of its victims on spikes.

Senators from both parties condemned the killing, and some Republicans questioned Obama’s resolve in confronting the Islamic State.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Obama’s tone was right but his strategy insufficient.

“The strategy should be to launch all-out air attacks in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS, not stop them,” McCain said in a telephone interview.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says that more than 80 journalists have been abducted in Syria, and estimates that around 20 are currently missing there. It has not released their nationalities. In its annual report in November, the committee described the widespread seizure of journalists as unprecedented and largely unreported by news organizations in the hope that keeping the kidnappings out of public view may help in the captives’ release.

_____________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014

W H Y B A N K O F A M E R I C A M I G H T N O T C O S T I T WASHINGTON (AP) -- How much will Bank of America’s expected $17 billion mortgage settlement cost the company? The answer is, almost certainly not that much.

In the deal with JPMorgan in November, the department had a clear message for homeowners: Billions of dollars’ worth of help was coming. Attorney General Eric Holder at the time described the appointment of an independent monitor who would distribute $4 billion set aside for homeowner relief.

Inflated figures make sensational headlines for the Justice Department, and $17 billion would be the largest settlement by far arising from the economic meltdown in which millions of people in the United States lost their homes to foreclosure. But the true cost to companies is often obscured by potential tax deductions and opaque accounting techniques.

The actual relief is more complicated than cash handouts, however.

A Bank of America branch on Peachtree Street, in Atlanta. How much will Bank of America’s expected $17 billion mortgage settlement cost the company? The answer is, almost certainly not $17 billion. In mega-settlements negotiated with the U.S. government, a dollar is rarely worth an actual dollar. Inflated figures make sensational headlines for the Justice Department, and $17 billion would be the largest settlement by far arising from the economic meltdown in which millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. But the true cost to companies is often obscured by opaque accounting techniques.

Bank of America declined comment on any settlement-related topics Wednesday.

“Companies that have reached for these settlements have not taken an explicit charge for it,” said Moshe Orenbuch, a banking stock analyst for Credit Suisse who has debated how to value noncash settlements with clients.

Whether cash payments are structured as penalties or legal settlements can determine whether targeted companies can declare them as tax-deductible business expenses. Also, consumer relief is an amorphous cost category: If Bank of America’s deal resembles the department’s previous settlements with JPMorgan and Citigroup, that part could be less costly to the company than the huge figures suggest.

In discussing the deals with analysts, the banks “always say, `just remember, there’s the piece that’s cash and the piece that’s not cash.’

In general terms, they’re suggesting that the relief is stuff they’re doing anyway.”

Some of the relief will, in fact, come in the form of cash donated to community organizations or, in Citi’s case, lending money to affordable housing projects at below-market rates. But much of the relief will come from modifying loans that the banks have already concluded could not be recovered in full. Reducing the principal on troubled loans often just brings the amount that borrowers owe in line with what the banks already know the loan to be worth.

Settlement math also affects the actual cost of the deals, allowing banks to earn a multiple for each dollar spent on certain forms of relief. Under Citi’s deal, for example, each dollar spent on legal aid counselors is worth $2 in credits, and paper losses on some affordable housing project loans can be credited at as much as four times their actual value.

How much the total package of cash and non-cash borrower aid is worth is impossible for outside observers to say.

D E A L $ 1 7 B

“This is public policy making through settlements that aren’t even related to the nature of the lawsuit,” says Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. “But there’s no other tool available for people who are concerned about poor communities right now.”

In mega-settlements negotiated with the government, a dollar is rarely worth an actual dollar.

The expected Bank of America settlement will resolve allegations that the bank and companies it later bought misrepresented the quality of loans they sold to investors. Most of the problem loans were sold

by Merill Lynch and Countrywide Financial before Bank of America bought them during the 2008 financial crisis. To settle the government’s claims against the three companies, Bank of America will pay $9.65 billion in cash and provide consumer relief valued at $7 billion, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal isn’t scheduled to be announced until Thursday at the earliest.

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Beyond the bonus credits, the lengthy durations of the deals mean banks can accrue some of the credits they need simply by running business as usual.

JPMorgan, for example, must provide roughly $2 billion of principal reductions to homeowners before the end of 2017. That is one-fifth the $10 billion that the bank forgave between 2009 and 2012, according to its annual social responsibility reports.

Even before its settlement with the Justice Department, the bank had committed itself to continuing the same principal reduction programs.

Both the department and the banks declined comment.

Consumer advocates said settlement amounts can obscure the actual costs at stake. But since the disputed business behaviors affected mortgage investors, not mortgage borrowers directly, they welcome any consumer aid.

Both Citigroup and JPMorgan earn credits under the settlement from a “menu” of different consumer-friendly activities, according to settlement documents. The options are effectively an update of the consumer relief previously provided through the national mortgage servicing settlement, a 2012 deal between state attorneys general and the major banks.

JPMorgan probably will earn its $4 billion in credits under the settlement through a total of $4.65 billion of activities that qualified as relief, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit run by executives from low-income housing groups and major banks.

More than half will come from principal reductions, with the rest earned through actions such as writing new loans in distressed areas, donating foreclosed properties to community groups and temporarily suspending payments on some loans.

The report described the settlement as “a reasonable model from a consumer perspective.” But one of its authors, Andrew Jakobovics, acknowledged that many of JPMorgan’s credits probably will come from activities that are part of its regular business practices. The bank has announced plans to complete its obligations at least one year ahead of schedule.

Citigroup’s settlement gives it until the end of 2018 to earn $2.5 billion in credits. It must provide half its $825 million in principal reduction credits in neighborhoods designated as “hardest hit” by the Department of Housing and Urban Development because of high concentrations of foreclosures and vacant properties.

It also can earn credit by waiving some closing costs on new loans to low-income home buyers and forgiving principal on loans where the bank began a foreclosure but never completed it.

“Will it cost them money? No,” said Rheingold, who said he supports the settlements. “But would they have done it otherwise? No.”

G U I LT Y P L E A E X P E C T E D B Y M A R AT H O N S U S P E C T ’ S F R I E N D U S A I R S T R I K E S Tazhayakov was convicted last month of agreeing with the plan to remove the items.

The charges against both Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov carry a maximum of 25 years in prison.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

During Tazhayakov’s trial, witnesses said Kadyrbayev took the backpack and threw it in the trash.

Prosecutors said the items were removed from Tsarnaev’s room hours after Kadyrbayev received a text message from Tsarnaev saying he could go to his dorm room and “take what’s there.”

Courtroom sketch, Dias Kadyrbayev, left, testifies in federal court in Boston. Kadyrbayev, a native of Kazakhstan and friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy for allegedly removing a backpack containing fireworks from Tsarnaev’s dorm room after realizing he was suspected of carrying out the deadly 2013 attack. Kadyrbayev is scheduled to be in federal court in Boston, Thursday, Aug. 21, 2014 where he is expected to plead guilty to the charges. He was to go on trial in September.

BOSTON (AP) -- A college friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev plans to plead guilty to impeding the investigation into the deadly attack.

Dias Kadyrbayev, 20, is accused of removing a backpack containing emptied-out fireworks from Tsarnaev’s dorm room after realizing he was suspected of carrying out the 2013 attack with his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Prosecutors said Kadyrbayev and another friend, Azamat Tazhayakov, decided to take the items from Tsarnaev’s room at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth several days after two bombs exploded near the finish line of the marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260. The items, along with Tsarnaev’s laptop computer, were removed hours after the FBI publicly released photographs of Tsarnaev and his brother as suspects in the bombing.

Kadyrbayev was scheduled to go on trial next month on obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges.

An electronic notice filed Wednesday said Kadyrbayev is expected to be in court Thursday for a change-of-plea hearing. His lawyer, Robert Stahl, confirmed that he intends to plead guilty, but wouldn’t say whether he would admit to one or both charges. Stahl also declined to say whether he and prosecutors have agreed on a joint sentencing recommendation.

The backpack and fireworks were recovered later in a New Bedford landfill. Prosecutors said the fireworks had been emptied of explosive powder that can be used to make bombs.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police several days after the bombings. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to 30 federal charges and faces the possibility of the death penalty if convicted. His trial is scheduled to begin in November.

A third college friend, Robel Phillipos, of Cambridge, is charged with lying to federal investigators. He is scheduled to go on trial next month.

continued from page 1

It is no secret inside the Pentagon that the U.S. is flying some of its Iraq missions from al-Udeid air base in Qatar. The U.S. has an advanced air operations center at al-Udeid but specifics are rarely acknowledged publicly; it used the center to coordinate air operations during the 2003-11 Iraq War as well as the war in Afghanistan.

The U.S. also has considerable ground and air forces in Kuwait.

Q. How many targets have been bombed in Iraq so far?

A. Central Command said Wednesday that it has conducted a total of 84 airstrikes since Aug. 8. That includes 14 on Wednesday against a range of Islamic State militant targets in the vicinity of a Tigris River dam just north of Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq. Of the 84 strikes, 51 have been in support of Iraqi forces near the dam. President Barack Obama declared Monday that Iraqi and Kurdish forces had recaptured the dam.

Q. What else is being struck?

A. U.S. warplanes have hit a wide range of Islamic State militant targets, including artillery, armored personnel carriers, armored Humvees, light trucks, mortar positions, checkpoints and roadside bomb emplacements.

There’s the potential for the air campaign to expand into Syria, in which case the U.S. would have to call on aircraft and other elements of its military based in the Middle East and possibly Europe.

h t t p : / / w w w . l i p t o n t o y o t a . c o m /

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014 ____________________________________________________________

S E A L E D O F F L I B E R I A S L U M C A L M A M I D E B O L A O U T B R E A K MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) -- Calm returned Thursday to a slum in the Liberian capital that was sealed off in the government’s attempt to halt the spread of Ebola, a day after clashes erupted between residents and security forces, but now the tens of thousands of residents worried about getting food.

cordoned off, and there are concerns this is slowing the supply of food and other goods to these areas. The World Food Program is preparing to feed 1 million people affected by such travel restrictions.

Several airlines have also suspended flights to the affected countries, despite the World Health Organization’s advice that Ebola is unlikely to spread through air travel. Guinea’s president, Alpha Conde, met airline representatives and foreign diplomats on Wednesday to reassure them that Guinea is screening passengers leaving the country for fever and other symptoms, in line with WHO recommendations.

Many residents of West Point, located on a peninsula in the seaside capital, are fearful they’ll be cut off from food since many market traders are stuck behind the barricades. Food prices were already rising Wednesday, hours after Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf announced the impoverished neighborhood was being sealed off by troops and police, with no one allowed to leave or enter.

the World Instant Noodles Association, although its per capita consumption pales next to South Korea’s. The food is often a low-end option for Chinese people short of money, time or cooking facilities.

West Point neighborhood of Monrovia, Richard Kieh, told The Associated Press on Thursday that “the township was quiet last night but what we now need is food.”

Kieh said officials had promised to bring in food, but it has not yet arrived, and it was unclear whom it would be for.

Tensions between West Point residents and security forces erupted into clashes Wednesday. A local TV station showed images of three people with injuries from the unrest. A nationwide nighttime curfew, first imposed countrywide in Liberia on Wednesday night, appeared to have been put in place without major incident.

Meanwhile, officials from the World Health Organization were visiting two hospitals in Monrovia on Thursday that are treating Ebola patients.

The two treatment centers are struggling to keep up with the influx of patients.

In the United States, an aid worker who was infected in Liberia has recovered and was to be discharged from a hospital.

Both Dr. Kent Brantly and another American aid worker who was also infected had received ZMapp, an experimental and unproven treatment for Ebola. Alison Geist, a spokeswoman for Samaritan’s Purse, the aid group Brantly worked for, told AP she did not know the exact time Brantly would be released from the Atlanta hospital but confirmed it would happen Thursday.

Three health workers are currently receiving the same treatment in Liberia - the first and so far only Africans to get the drug - were showing “very positive signs of recovery,” Liberia’s information ministry said earlier this week. A Spaniard who had contracted Ebola and also received the treatment died. The drug supply is now exhausted, the U.S.

Liberia security forces dressed in riot gear, left, control a crowd of people in the West Point area, as the government clamps down on the movement of people to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus in Monrovia, Liberia, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014. Security forces deployed Wednesday to enforce a quarantine around a slum in the Liberian capital, stepping up the government’s fight to stop the spread of Ebola and unnerving residents.

manufacturer has said.

Liberia is being hit especially hard by the dreaded virus that has killed more than 1,300 people in West Africa.

The current outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria is the largest ever, and officials have said that treatment centers are filling up faster than new ones can be opened or expanded. This leaves the sick packing hallways, potentially infecting more people.

Ebola is transmitted by direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is sick and showing symptoms. To stop its spread, experts say, the sick should be isolated and not have any contact with the healthy.

Overcrowded treatment centers, a reluctance on the part of sick people to seek medical care and burial practices that involve touching the dead have helped fuel the disease’s spread.

With at least 2,473 people sickened, this outbreak now has more recorded cases than in the previous two-dozen outbreaks combined.

Several counties and districts in Sierra Leone and Liberia have been

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at the halfway point of a trail snaking up South Korea’s highest mountain, hikers can refresh themselves with cup noodles.

Elderly South Koreans often feel deep nostalgia for instant noodles, which entered the local market in the 1960s as the country began clawing its way out of the poverty and destruction of the Korean War into what’s now Asia’s fourth-biggest economy.

Many vividly remember their first taste of the once-exotic treat, and hard-drinking South Koreans consider instant noodles an ideal remedy for aching, alcohol-laden bellies and subsequent hangovers.

Some people won’t leave the country without them, worried they’ll have to eat inferior noodles abroad. What could be better at relieving homesickness than a salty shot of ramyeon?

In this Aug. 19. 2014 photo, a cook prepares “ramyeon” instant noodles for Han Seungyoun, left, during an interview at a ramyeon restaurant in Seoul, South Korea. Instant noodles are an essential, even passionate, part of life for many in South Korea and other Asian countries. Hence the emotional heartburn caused by a Baylor Heart and Vascular Hospital study in the United States that found excessive consumption of instant noodles

by South Koreans was associated with risks for diabetes, heart disease or stroke. The study has provoked feelings of wounded pride, mild guilt, stubborn resistance, even nationalism among South Koreans, who eat more instant noodles per capita than anyone in the world.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Kim Min-koo has an easy reply to new American research that hits South Korea where it hurts - in the noodles. Drunk and hungry just after dawn, he rips the lid off a bowl of his beloved fast food, wobbling on his feet but still defiant over a report that links instant noodles to health hazards.

“There’s no way any study is going to stop me from eating this,” says Kim, his red face beaded with sweat as he adds hot water to his noodles in a Seoul convenience store. His mouth waters, wooden chopsticks poised above the softening strands, his glasses fogged by steam. At last, he spears a slippery heap, lets forth a mighty, noodle-cooling blast of air and starts slurping.

“This is the best moment - the first bite,” Kim, a freelance film editor who indulges about five times a week, says between gulps. “The taste, the smell, the chewiness - it’s just perfect.”

Instant noodles carry a broke college student aura in America, but they are an essential, even passionate, part of life for many in South Korea and across Asia. Hence the emotional heartburn caused by a Baylor Heart and Vascular Hospital study in the United States that linked instant noodles consumption by South Koreans to some risks for heart disease.

The study has provoked feelings of wounded pride, mild guilt, stubborn resistance, even nationalism among South Koreans, who eat more instant noodles per capita than anyone in the world. Many of those interviewed vowed, like Kim, not to quit.

Other noodle lovers offered up techniques they swore kept them healthy: taking Omega-3, adding vegetables, using less seasoning, avoiding the soup. Some dismissed the study because the hospital involved is based in cheeseburger-gobbling America.

The heated reaction is partly explained by the omnipresence here of instant noodles, which, for South Koreans, usually mean the spicy, salty “ramyeon” that costs less than a dollar a package.

Individually-wrapped disposable bowls and cups are everywhere: Internet cafes, libraries, trains, ice-skating rinks. Even

“Ramyeon is like kimchi to Koreans,” says Ko Dong-ryun, 36, an engineer from Seoul, referring to the spicy, fermented vegetable dish that graces most Korean meals. “The smell and taste create an instant sense of home.”

Japan, considered the spiritual home of instant noodles, boasts a dazzling array. Masaya “Instant” Oyama, 55, who says he eats more than 400 packages of instant noodles a year, rattles off a sampling: Hello Kitty instant noodles, polar bear instant noodles developed by a zoo, black squid ink instant noodles.

In Tokyo, 33-year-old Miyuki Ogata considers instant noodles a godsend because of her busy schedule and contempt for cooking.

They also bring her back to the days when she was a poor student learning to become a filmmaker, and would buy two cup noodles at the 100 yen shop. Every time she eats a cup now, she is celebrating what she calls “that eternal hungry spirit.”

In South Korea, it’s all about speed, cost and flavor.

Thousands of convenience stores have corners devoted to noodles: Tear off the top, add hot water from a dispenser, wait a couple minutes and it’s ready to eat, often at a nearby counter.

Some even skip the water, pounding on the package to break up the dry noodles, adding the seasoning, then shaking everything up.

“It’s toasty, chewy, much better than most other snacks out there,” Byon Sarah, 28, who owns a consulting company, says of a technique she discovered in middle school. “And the seasoning is so addictive - sweet, salty and spicy.”

Cheap electric pots that boil water for instant noodles in one minute are popular with single people. Making an “instant” meal even faster, however, isn’t always appreciated.

At the comic book store she runs in Seoul, Lim Eun-jung, 42, says she noticed a lot more belly fat about six months after she installed a fast-cooking instant noodle machine for customers.

“It’s obvious that it’s not good for my body,” Lim says. “But I’m lazy, and ramyeon is the perfect fast food for lazy people.”

PICTURE EMERGES OF OFFICER IN FERGUSON SHOOTING

Ko fills half his luggage with instant noodles for his international business travels, a lesson he learned after assuming on his first trip that three packages would suffice for six days. “Man, was I wrong. Since then, I always make sure I pack enough.”

The U.S. study was based on South Korean surveys from 20072009 of more than 10,700 adults aged 19-64, about half of them women. It found that people who ate a diet rich in meat, soda and fried and fast foods, including instant noodles, were associated with an increase in abdominal obesity and LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol. Eating instant noodles more than twice a week was associated with a higher prevalence of metabolic syndrome, another heart risk factor, in women but not in men.

The study raises important questions, but can’t prove that instant noodles are to blame rather than the overall diets of people who eat lots of them, cautions Alice Lichtenstein, director of the cardiovascular nutrition lab at Tufts University in Boston.

“What’s jumping out is the sodium (intake) is higher in those who are consuming ramen noodles,” she says. “What we don’t know is whether it’s coming from the ramen noodles or what they are consuming with the ramen noodles.”

In this Feb. 11, 2014 image from video released by the City of Ferguson, Mo., officer Darren Wilson attends a city council meeting in Ferguson. Police identified Wilson, 28, as the police officer who shot Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, sparking over a week of protests in the suburban St. Louis town

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) -- A white police officer whose shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old ignited racial upheaval in a St. Louis suburb has been characterized as either an aggressor whose deadly gunfire constituted a daylight execution or a law enforcer wrongly maligned for just doing his job.

There’s certainly a lot of sodium in those little cups. A serving of the top-selling instant ramyeon provides more than 90 percent of South Korea’s recommended daily sodium intake.

An incomplete picture of Texas-born Ferguson officer Darren Wilson has emerged since Aug. 9, when authorities say the white six-year police veteran killed Michael Brown during a confrontation in the predominantly black city where all but three of the 53 police officers are white.

Still, it’s tough to expect much nutrition from a meal that costs around 80 cents, says Choi Yong-min, 44, marketing director for Paldo, a South Korean food company. “I can’t say it’s good for your health, but it is produced safely.”

The Brown family’s attorneys have labeled Wilson as a murderer, though the investigation continues and no charges have been filed.

The 28-year-old officer has gone underground since the shooting, with relatives contacted by The Associated Press refusing to reveal his whereabouts or discuss the shooting or Wilson’s background.

By value, instant noodles were the top-selling manufactured food in South Korea in 2012, the most recent year figures are available, with about 1.85 trillion won ($1.8 billion) worth sold, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.

China is the world’s largest instant noodle market, according to

But snippets of his life have emerged. His parents were married only four years before divorcing in 1989 in Texas. Court records say he divorced last November. His mother, a convicted forger and alleged con artist, died 12 years ago. Wilson got a commendation in February from the Ferguson police force, four years into his job there.

continued on page 9

_____________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014

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R E C O R D D R O U G H T S A P S CALIFORNIA HONEY PRODUCTION honey.”

LOS BANOS, Calif. (AP) -- California’s record drought hasn’t been sweet to honeybees, and it’s creating a sticky situation for beekeepers and honey buyers.

Many California beekeepers, including Gene Brandi’s brother, are taking their hives to states such as North Dakota where they can forage in clover and buckwheat fields.

The state is traditionally one of the country’s largest honey producers, with abundant crops and wildflowers that provide the nectar that bees turn into honey. But the lack of rain has ravaged native plants and forced farmers to scale back crop production, leaving fewer places for honeybees to forage.

The drought is hurting businesses such as Marshall’s Farm Honey, which supplies raw honey to high-end restaurants, grocery stores and farmers markets in Northern California.

The historic drought, now in its third year, is reducing supplies of California honey, raising prices for consumers and making it harder for beekeepers to earn a living.

The Napa Valley business is having trouble making and buying enough honey to meet the demands of its customers. Many varieties such as honey made from sage and star-thistle aren’t available at all because it’s too dry for their flowers to produce nectar.

“Our honey crop is severely impacted by the drought, and it does impact our bottom line as a business,” said Gene Brandi, a beekeeper in Los Banos, a farming town in California’s Central Valley.

The state’s deepening drought is having widespread impacts across the state. More than 80 percent of the state is under “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a drought emergency, and residents now face fines of up to $500 a day for wasting water.

The drought is just the latest blow to honeybees, which pollinate about one third of U.S. agricultural crops. In recent years, bee populations worldwide have been decimated by pesticides, parasites and colony collapse disorder, a mysterious phenomenon in which worker bees suddenly disappear.

The drought is worsening a worldwide shortage of honey that has pushed prices to all-time highs. Over the past eight years, the average retail price for honey has increased 65 percent from $3.83 to $6.32 per pound, according to the National Honey Board.

Since the drought began, California’s honey crop has fallen sharply from 27.5 million pounds in 2010 to 10.9 million pounds last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And this year’s crop is expected to be even worse.

California was the country’s leading honey producer as recently as 2003, but it has since been surpassed by North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota and Florida. In 2013, California produced less than 10 percent of the country’s $317 million honey crop.

A bee rests on Mike Brandi’s finger at the Gene Brandi Apiary in Los Banos, Calif. The state is traditionally one of the country’s biggest honey producers, with abundant crops and wildflowers that provide nectar that bees turn into honey. But a three-year drought has left hillsides barren and forced farmers to tear out orchards and leave fields fallow.

On a recent summer morning in Los Banos, swarms of honeybees surrounded Gene Brandi and his son Mike, wearing white helmets with mesh veils, as they cracked open wooden hives and inserted packets of protein supplement to keep the insects healthy.

This year their colonies have only produced about 10 percent of the honey they make in a good year, said Brandi, who is vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

Besides selling honey, beekeepers earn their living from pollinating crops such as almonds, cotton, alfalfa and melons. But farmers are renting fewer hives because the lack of irrigation water has forced them to tear out orchards and leave fields unplanted.

Like many beekeepers, Brandi is feeding his bees a lot more sugar syrup than usual to compensate for the lack of nectar. The supplemental feed keeps the bees alive, but it is expensive and doesn’t produce honey.

“Not only are you feeding as an expense, but you aren’t gaining any income.” said Brandi’s son Mike, who is also a beekeeper.

“If this would persist, you’d see higher food costs, higher pollination fees and unfortunately higher prices for the commodity of

T E X A S G O V. P E R R Y F O R M A L LY E N T E R S N O T G U I L T Y P L E A This image provided by the Austin Police Department shows Texas Gov. Rick Perry while being booked at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center in Austin, Texas, for two felony indictments of abuse of power on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2014, in Austin, Texas.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry has formally pleaded not guilty to criminal charges of leveraging his power to try to oust a Democratic district attorney convicted of drunken driving, according to court documents obtained Wednesday.

The potential 2016 presidential candidate entered his plea in a Travis County court filing. He also waived an arraignment that had been set for Friday.

The waiver was no surprise given that Perry has signaled no intention of the felony charges interrupting a busy travel schedule to court GOP voters elsewhere. Perry was set to discuss immigration at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington on Thursday, followed by a two-day stop in New Hampshire.

Perry’s plea was filed with the court late Tuesday, shortly after the longest-serving governor in Texas history was fingerprinted and had his mug shot taken. He tweeted a picture of himself stopping for vanilla ice cream on the way back from his booking.

But what’s next for Perry isn’t so glib: His high-powered and pricey legal team will now quickly try to extinguish the case against him, which includes two felony charges stemming from his veto last summer of state funds for public corruption prosecutors.

Houston attorney Tony Buzbee, who heads Perry’s defense team, on Wednesday would not address their potential next move but said he doesn’t anticipate the need for Perry to personally appear in court in the near future.

“I don’t anticipate the governor getting sidetracked by this,” Buzbee said. “We feel we’re strong on the law. We’re confident in the court.”

Perry was in campaign mode Tuesday when he arrived at the Travis County courthouse - just a block behind the governor’s

mansion - for processing. He strode to a lectern in front of a phalanx of cameras and reporters, and his vows to fight the charges were interrupted by chants of “Perry! Perry!” from a few dozen supporters.

About the only time Perry didn’t seem in control was when he was instructed to remove his newly signature, black-framed glasses for the booking photo.

“The actions that I took were lawful, they were legal, and they were proper,” Perry said before entering the courthouse.

Perry was indicted last week on charges of coercion and official oppression for vetoing $7.5 million for the state public integrity unit, which investigates wrongdoing by elected officials and is run by the Travis County district attorney’s office. Perry threatened the veto if the county’s Democratic district attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, stayed in office after a drunken driving conviction.

Lehmberg refused to resign and Perry carried out the veto, drawing an ethics complaint from a left-leaning government watchdog group.

Perry was indicted by a grand jury in Austin, a liberal bastion in otherwise mostly fiercely conservative Texas.

If convicted on both counts, Perry could face a maximum 109 years in prison - though legal experts across the political spectrum have said the case against him may be a tough sell to a jury.

No one disputes that Perry has the right to veto any measures passed by the state Legislature, including any parts of the state budget.

But the complaint against Perry alleges that by publicly threatening a veto and trying to force Lehmberg to resign, he coerced her.

The Republican judge assigned to the case has assigned a San Antonio-based special prosecutor who insists the case is stronger than it may outwardly appear.

The governor has hired a team of high-powered attorneys, who are being paid with state funds to defend him. Perry spokeswoman Lucy Nashed said Wednesday that no contracts with the attorneys have been signed yet; Buzbee said they’re still sorting through the process.

Perry is the first Texas governor to be indicted since 1917. Top Republicans have been especially quick to defend him, though, since a jail video following Lehmberg’s April 2013 arrest showed the district attorney badly slurring her words, shouting at staffers to call the sheriff, kicking the door of her cell, and sticking her tongue out. Her blood alcohol level was also three times the legal limit for driving.

“They keep coming back wanting more, and it’s very painful to have to say, `We don’t have it,’” said Helene Marshall, who runs the business with her husband Spencer. “There’s increased demand because of increased awareness of how good it is for you, and there is less supply.”

Spencer Marshall, who maintains hives throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, said this is by far the worst year for honey production he’s seen in five decades of beekeeping. When the drought ends, “the bees may come back, but the beekeepers may not,” Marshall said.

Amelia Barad-Humphries, who owns a restaurant and floral business in Napa Valley, said she’s concerned about the drought’s impact on bees and honey supplies. She said she eats a teaspoon of local honey every day to keep her allergies in check and she relies on bees to pollinate her backyard garden.

“We need honeybees for everything,” she said. “People should be paying attention.”

FE R GU SON SHOOT I N G continued from page 8

An online fundraising drive on Wilson’s behalf as of Thursday had drawn more than $77,000 in donations for the tall, slender and blond-haired cop. And a longtime friend - former high school classmate and hockey buddy Jake Shepard - publicly has come to Wilson’s defense, insisting in interviews that the shy Wilson would never maliciously take a life and fears possible retribution.

Having talked to Wilson since the shooting, Shepard said, “I think he’s kind of struggling a little bit, but I think he’s doing OK.” “He didn’t really want to talk much about it,” Shepard, also 28, said of Brown’s death. “But I can tell you for sure it was not racially motivated. He’s not the type of person to harbor any hate for anybody.

He was always nice, respectable and well-mannered, a gentleman.

He doesn’t have anything bad to say about anybody, ever. He’s very genuine.”

Similar depictions of Wilson, who has been on paid administrative leave since Brown’s death, have come from his boss, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson.

During a Ferguson City Council meeting in February, Wilson got special recognition from Jackson for what the chief said then was his role in responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle, then struggling with the driver and detaining him for arrest until help arrived. Jackson said the suspect was preparing a large quantity of marijuana for sale. His proclamation in hand, according a video of the meeting obtained Tuesday by the AP, Wilson returned to his seat with a broad grin.

“He was a gentle, quiet man,” Jackson told reporters last Friday while publicly identifying Wilson, a four-year veteran of the department after spending two policing in nearby Jennings, as the officer who shot Brown, noting that Wilson has no prior disciplinary record. Calling Wilson “distinguished” and “a gentleman,” Jackson added that “he is, he has been, an excellent officer.”

Online court records show that Wilson’s mother - Tonya Durso, also known as Tonya Harris - pleaded guilty in 2001 to a dozen felony stealing and forgery counts in Missouri’s St. Charles County just west of St. Louis and was sentenced to five years on probation, with the judge suspending a five-year prison sentence. Durso was 35 when she died in 2002, and Wilson was placed under the guardianship of Tyler Harris until a St. Charles County judge dissolved that in mid-2004.

Wilson, who has Missouri hunting and fishing licenses, did not answer the AP’s knock Tuesday on his door at his brick, ranch-style home in Missouri’s Crestwood, a largely white St. Louis suburb some 18 miles southwest of Ferguson.

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014 __________________________________________________________

A P P L E ’ S B A C K T O

S T O C K B O U N C E S H I T A N E W H I G H

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Apple’s stock touched a new high Wednesday, reflecting investors’ renewed faith in CEO Tim Cook’s ability to outwit the competition and expand the technological hit factory built by the late Steve Jobs.

alive and running Apple. Jobs groomed Cook as his successor before he died in October 2011 after a long battle with cancer.

Apple’s stock has nearly doubled since Cook became CEO, outpacing the roughly 70 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 during the same stretch. Cook has done some things that most analysts doubt Jobs would have done, including buying headphone maker and music-streaming service provider Beats Electronics for $3 billion and funneling so much of Apple’s cash into buying back its own stock.

The milestone represents a dramatic turnaround in sentiment since Apple’s shares reached its previous split-adjusted peak of $100.72 in September 2012. After hitting $101.09 Wednesday afternoon, shares closed up 4 cents at $100.57. That gave Apple a market value of $602 billion - by far more than any other publicly held company.

Apple’s stock had fallen to a split-adjusted $55.01 in April 2013 to wipe out about $300 billion in shareholder wealth amid worries that the Cupertino, California, company had run out of ideas without Jobs as its mastermind. The anxiety escalated as sales of iPhones and iPads slowed amid the growing popularity of less expensive smartphones and tablet computers made by Samsung Electronics and other rivals relying on Google’s free Android software.

Now, there are signs that Samsung’s devices are losing momentum while Apple prepares to release the next version of its iPhone this fall and investors wait for Cook to deliver on his promise to introduce a product that will open up new opportunities. The breakthrough is widely expected to be a smartwatch that will include sensors to help people monitor their health.

Hewing to its secretive ways, Apple hasn’t provided details about its upcoming products.

Cook, though, has been raising hopes that Apple is poised to create a new product category for the first time since the iPad’s release four years ago. “We’ve got some great things that we’re working on that I’m very, very proud of and very, very excited about,” he told analysts in April.

Anticipation for the next iPhone already is running even higher than the usual frenetic buildup. The device is expected to feature a display screen of at least 4.7 inches, an upgrade likely to spur many Apple fans to scrap their old models for a more spacious version. Apple’s stock hit its previous high the last time the company increased the iPhone’s screen size in 2012, going from 3.5 inches to 4 inches that time.

Analysts are also enthused about Apple’s efforts to immerse its devices

Cook and the rest of the board increased the amount being spent on Apple’s stock under pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, who began accumulating his 0.8 percent stake in the company last summer when the stock was hovering around a split-adjusted $60. Icahn spent the next few months trumpeting Apple’s stock as a bargain investment, an assessment that now looks prescient.

Apple CEO Tim Cook gestures during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Apple’s stock touched a new high Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014, reflecting investors’ renewed faith in Cook’s ability to outwit the competition and expand the technological hit factory built by the late Steve Jobs.

and services even more deeply into people’s lives by creating a system that syncs the iPhone with display screens in autos and implanting a health-tracking system in the next version of its mobile software due out this fall. The new software, called iOS 8, could also work with a smartwatch, if Apple does release one.

Apple’s stock has bounced back with the help of some financial engineering, too. The company’s board voted in April to spend an additional $30 billion buying back Apple’s stock and approved an unusual 7-for-1 stock split.

The split, completed last month, was Apple’s first in nine years.

Although a split doesn’t change a company’s market value, it often helps lift a stock’s price by making the shares appear more affordable to a larger pool of potential investors. In Apple’s case, the split caused the stock price to fall from about $645 to $92 to adjust for the issuance of more than 5 billion additional shares. Apple’s stock has risen 34 percent since the split was announced in April.

The rally is a vindication of sorts for Cook, whose every move is viewed through the prism of what Jobs might have done if he were still

S O C I A L M E D I A P U S H E S B A C K A T M I L I T A N T P R O P A G A N D A Phillip Smyth, a University of Maryland researcher who tracks the social media activity of jihadists, has noted a modest but noteworthy rise in the speed with which rogue accounts are being removed from Twitter and terror-supporting pages are being pulled from Facebook.

“It’s happening,” he said. “I can tell you first-hand because I look at this stuff every day.”

The Islamic State group, an al-Qaida offshoot, has been a determined user of social media, broadcasting high-definition video of horrific forms of punishment including crucifixions, beheadings, stonings and mass slaughter. journalist James Foley poses for a photo during an interview with The Associated Press, in Boston. A video by Islamic State militants that purports to show the killing of Foley by the militant group was released Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2014. Foley, from Rochester, N.H., went missing in 2012 in northern Syria while on assignment for Agence France-Press and the Boston-based media company GlobalPost.

BEIRUT (AP) -- The extremists of the Islamic State group have turned their social media into a theater of horror, broadcasting a stomach-turning stream of battles, bombings and beheadings to a global audience.

The strategy is aimed at terrorizing opponents at home and winning recruits abroad. But there are increasing signs of pushback - both from companies swiftly censoring objectionable content and users determined not to let it go viral.

Public disgust with the group’s callous propaganda tactics was evident following the group’s posting of the beheading video of American journalist James Foley - chilling footage that spread rapidly when it appeared online late Tuesday.

The slickly edited video begins with scenes of Obama explaining his decision to order airstrikes in Iraq, before switching to Foley in an orange jumpsuit kneeling in the desert, a blackclad Islamic State fighter by his side.

The fighter who beheads Foley is then seen holding another U.S. journalist, Steven Sotloff, threatening to kill him next.

“The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision,” he says.

By Wednesday, many social media users were urging each other not to post the video as a form of protest.

A chilling, 61-minute video posted online in June, shows Islamic State militants knocking on the door of a Sunni police major in the dead of night in Iraq. When he answers, they blindfold and cuff him before they slice off his head with a knife in his own bedroom.

The fear created by such footage was seen as one factor behind the stunning collapse of Iraqi security forces when Islamic State fighters overran the cities of Mosul and Tikrit in June.

Faysal Itani, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, said the militants’ slick production techniques are partly due to the foreigners who have joined their cause.

“They’re the Twitter generation,” he said. “They’re good at it.”

The Islamic State’s adept use of the Internet is in many ways an extension of al-Qaida’s technological evolution, illustrating how much the group has changed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and why it has flourished despite America’s decade-long quest to crush it.

Unlike its Afghan Taliban allies, who banned television when they were in power, al-Qaida has never rejected modern technology. The group and its affiliates have exploited the Internet to rally and connect supporters, and are quick to adopt new technology.

Twitter Inc. says it’s trying to keep the group’s most gruesome videos off its platform, an issue that gained new urgency following the release of the Foley beheading footage.

In a Tuesday post on his Twitter account, Icahn reminded his 175,000 followers that he considered his investment in Apple to be one of his “no-brainers.” He added: “All my chips are still on the table.”

In a tweet, CEO Dick Costolo said his company was “actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery.”

Smyth and others who track such activity reported a steep drop-off in jihadi posts after that. The number of images from Islamic State militants “dropped dramatically,” researcher J.M. Berger said in a tweet, while Smyth said some 50-odd accounts associated with the group had been suspended.

Video-sharing sites saw a similar vanishing act.

On YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., the images were posted for some time Tuesday before being removed.

By Wednesday, searches on YouTube mainly turned up links to news reports of Foley’s slaying, or to reedited videos that removed footage of the beheading.

In a statement, YouTube said its policies “prohibit content like gratuitous violence,” and it removes videos in violation when flagged by users.

Facebook said it began removing links to the Foley beheading Tuesday, a process that continued Wednesday as users reported the clips. The Menlo Park, California, company said it was still allowing people to post snippets of the clip in the context of a discussion about the incident.

Even before Silicon Valley moved to quash the images, some users - many of them journalists - called on their colleagues to help prevent them from going viral. Organizing themselves under the hashtag “ISISmediablackout” they shared photos of Foley at work, copies of his articles and videos of his speeches.

For a brief period, a section of the social media world - generally full of look-at-me, look-at-this messages - was reduced to one stark request: “Look away.”

For journalists and researchers alike, the censorship, even if self-imposed, raised some awkward questions.

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its strategic technologies program, said companies acted responsibly in removing the footage fast.

“Taking this stuff down off the social networks is important,” he said. “You shouldn’t suppress the facts, but you can suppress the image. That’s just pornography.”

Still, others noted that while urging a boycott of the video may help give people a sense of solidarity against a deplorable act, it also risks attracting more viewers out of curiosity.

“This kind of thing can put you in a bind because by stating that you don’t want it publicized, you are publicizing it,” said Steve Jones, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who studies the cultural impact of social networks. “When you say to someone, `Don’t look at this,’ the usual reaction is: `Oh, why not? Maybe I should see this for myself.’”

Smyth said that there was a tension between allowing or encouraging everyone to see the brutality of militant groups like the Islamic State and stifling their propaganda.

“Part of me would have said: `Allow this to spread because we need to know what kind of enemy we’re dealing with.’ But as time goes on, I’ve seen how manipulative they can be,” he said.

He said he’s seen jihadists boast on forums about how many thousands of “likes” this or that video has received on Facebook.

“They want people to spread these images, to spread their narrative one way or another.”

____________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014

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1 0 0 , 0 0 0 E L E P H A N T S K I L L E D I N A F R I C A , S T U D Y F I N D S NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Poachers killed an estimated 100,000 elephants across Africa between 2010 and 2012, a huge spike in the continent’s death rate of the world’s largest mammals because of an increased demand for ivory in China and other Asian nations, a new study published Monday found.

“Wildlife crimes are a cross-border menace,” Liu said, according to a transcript of the ceremony published by Kenya’s Capital FM. “I assure you that more action will follow as will support to fulfil our promise. We firmly believe that, through joint efforts, the drive of combating wildlife crimes will achieve success.”

Warnings about massive elephant slaughters have been ringing for years, but Monday’s study is the first to scientifically quantify the number of deaths across the continent by measuring deaths in one closely monitored park in Kenya and using other published data to extrapolate fatality tolls across the continent.

Counting elephants is extremely difficult. Even Douglas-Hamilton refuses to offer an estimate as to how many live in Africa.

An often-cited number is roughly 400,000, but the Save the Elephants founder would argue that no one truly knows.

The study - which was carried out by the world’s leading elephant experts - found that the proportion of illegally killed elephants has climbed from 25 percent of all elephant deaths a decade ago to roughly 65 percent of all elephant deaths today, a percentage that, if continued, will lead to the extinction of the species.

China’s rising middle class and the demand for ivory in that country of 1.3 billion people is driving the black market price of ivory up, leading to more impoverished people in Africa “willing to take the criminal risk on and kill elephants. The causation in my mind is clear,” said the study’s lead author, George Wittemyer of Colorado State University.

The peer-review study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was co-authored by experts from Save the Elephants, the Kenya Wildlife Service, an international group called MIKE responsible for monitoring the illegal killings of elephants, and two international universities.

CHILDREN USED AS CHILD SOLDIERS IN SOUTH SUDAN

A herd of adult and baby elephants walks in the dawn light across Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya, with the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, seen behind. A new study released Monday Aug. 18, 2014, by lead author George Wittemye of Colorado State University, found that the proportion of illegally killed elephants has climbed to about 65 percent of all African elephant deaths, accounting for around 100,000 elephants killed by poachers between 2010 and 2012.

“The current demand for ivory is unsustainable. That is our overarching conclusion. It must come down. Otherwise the elephants will continue to decrease,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants.

Elephant deaths are not happening at the same rate across Africa.

The highest death rate is in central Africa, with East Africa - Tanzania and Kenya - not far behind. Botswana is a bright spot, with a population that is holding steady or growing. South Africa’s rhinos are being killed, but poachers have not yet begun attacking elephants.

Some individual elephant death numbers are shocking. The elephant population in Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve dropped from 40,000 to 13,000 over the last three years.

China is aware of its image problem concerning the ivory trade.

The embassy in Kenya this month donated anti-poaching equipment to four wildlife conservancies. Chinese Ambassador Liu Xianfa said at the handover ceremony that China is increasing publicity and education of its people to increase understanding of the illegal ivory trade.

Counting elephant deaths is just as hard. But a Save the Elephants project in northern Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve has counted elephant births and deaths - including if the death was natural or from poachers - for the last 16 years. Using that data, the authors examined known death numbers in other African regions compared with the rate of natural deaths and were able to determine that the continent’s deaths between 2010-2012 were about 100,000.

“This is the best work available from the best data we have using officials from the top organization, so in my mind this is the best you are going to get at the moment,” said Wittemyer. “Because of the magnitude of the issue and the politics we’ve been very careful. The scrutiny we did internally was at a much greater level than the questions we got in the peer review process.”

Despite the huge death numbers, both Wittemyer and Douglas-Hamilton believe elephants can survive. Wittemyer said more elephants will be killed, but in areas where countries are willing to invest in wildlife security numbers will hold steady, he said.

Elephants survived a huge poaching crisis in the 1970s and 1980s fueled by Japan, Douglas-Hamilton noted.

“I have to be an optimist,” he said. “I’ve been through all of this before in the 70s and 80s. As a collective group we stopped that killing, and in the savannahs there was a reprieve of 20 years. I believe we can do it again.”

V O I C E , I M A G E G I V E C L U E S I N H U N T F O R F O L E Y ’ S K I L L E R information as well.

“There is no such thing as a voice print fingerprint,” he said.

Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, said investigators would use basic detective techniques to narrow down the field of suspects before voice recognition or other sophisticated technology came into play.

He said most Western militants in Syria have Facebook or Twitter accounts, on which they post pictures of themselves and give away other clues to their origins, such as a favorite soccer team.

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- The U.N.’s top official for children and armed conflicts says the use of child soldiers and violence against children is commonplace in South Sudan’s year of warfare.

Leila Zerrougui said during a stop in Kenya on Monday that the U.N. Security Council will debate the South Sudan child soldier situation next month. She said there is a lot of concern about the practice.

Human Rights Watch this week said South Sudan’s government used children in fighting this month in Bentiu and Rubkona. Witnesses told the group that they saw dozens of armed children in military uniform.

Human Rights Watch said members of the military and government admitted that their forces include children but thosee officials said that the children have been coming

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“Just because they are Islamic extremists and behead people doesn’t meant they don’t talk about football clubs,” he said.

In this June 17, 2011 photo, journalist James Foley receives applause from students at the Christa McAuliffe Regional Charter Public School in Framingham, Mass. Foley had been released a month prior after being detained for six weeks in Libya. Students at the school had written government leaders to work for his release. Foley was abducted in November 2012 while covering the Syrian conflict. Islamic militants posted a video showing his murder on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2014, and said they killed him because the U.S. had launched airstrikes in northern Iraq.

LONDON (AP) -- Police and intelligence services are using image analysis and voice-recognition software, studying social media postings and seeking human tips as they scramble to identify the militant recorded on a video showing the killing of American journalist James Foley.

He said online photos could be analyzed to determine height, weight, eye color and other information.

He said that even though the militants, most in their teens and 20s, know they should be careful, they are so ingrained in online culture that “they let their guard down.”

Prime Minister David Cameron has said the masked jihadi in the recording is likely British. Linguists say his accent suggests he is from the London area.

The Guardian newspaper quoted an unnamed former captive who was held in Raqqa, Syria, as saying he appeared to be one of several British militants - nicknamed “The Beatles” by hostages - charged with guarding Islamic State prisoners.

John O’Regan, a linguist at London’s Institute of Education, said Thursday that analysts would likely make a voice print of the speaker and compare it to recordings of known suspects.

He said the militant spoke with a “multicultural London English” accent but with more formal standard English pronunciation, suggesting that his words denouncing American actions in the Middle East had been carefully scripted.

“The person is taking great care to do `posh talk,’ as it were,” O’Regan said. “They’re very mindful of their p’s and q’s.”

He said that even though the speech differs from the man’s normal speaking voice, “there are enough features in the accent” to provide strong clues to his identity.

But he said piecing together the puzzle would need other

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Aug 24, 2014 __________________________________________________________

E M E R G I N G S O L A R P L A N T S S C O R C H B I R D S I N M I D - A I R

IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. (AP) -- Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays - “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials say they want a death toll for a full year of operation.

Given the apparent scale of bird deaths at Ivanpah, authorities should thoroughly track bird kills there for a year, including during annual migratory seasons, before granting any more permits for that kind of solar technology, said George, of the Audubon Society.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

The toll on birds has been surprising, said Robert Weisenmiller, chairman of the California Energy Commission. “We didn’t see a lot of impact” on birds at the first, smaller power towers in the U.S. and Europe, Weisenmiller said.

The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand

by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.

The deaths are “alarming. It’s hard to say whether that’s the location or the technology,” said Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. “There needs to be some caution.”

The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the quest for clean energy sometimes has inadvertent environmental harm. Solar farms have been criticized for their impacts on desert tortoises, and wind farms have killed birds, including numerous raptors.

“We take this issue very seriously,” said Jeff Holland, a spokesman for NRG Solar of Carlsbad, California, the second of the three companies behind the plant. The third, Google, deferred comment to its partners.

The $2.2 billion plant, which launched in February, is at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border. The operator says it’s the world’s biggest plant to employ so-called power towers.

More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. The water inside is heated to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes.

Sun rays sent up by the field of mirrors are bright enough to dazzle pilots flying in and out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

In this Aug. 13, 2014 photo, A truck drives through an array of mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System near Primm, Nev. The site uses over 300,000 mirrors to focus sunlight on boilers’ tubes atop 450 foot towers heating water into steam which in turn drives turbines to create electricity. New estimates for the plant near the California-Nevada border say thousands of birds are dying yearly, roasted by the concentrated sun rays from the mirrors.

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a “mega-trap” for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays.

Federal and state biologists call the number of deaths significant, based on sightings of birds getting singed and falling, and on retrieval of carcasses with feathers charred too severely for flight.

Ivanpah officials dispute the source of the so-called streamers, saying at least some of the puffs of smoke mark insects and bits of airborne trash being ignited by the solar rays.

Wildlife officials who witnessed the phenomena say many of the clouds of smoke were too big to come from anything but a bird, and they add that they saw “birds entering the solar flux and igniting, consequently become a streamer.”

N E A N D E R T H A L S A N D H A D ‘ A M P L E T I M E ’

H U M A N S T O M I X

some Neanderthal sites include artifacts that look like those introduced to Europe by humans migrating from Africa.

This would point to the possibility that Neanderthals - whose name derives from a valley in western Germany - adopted certain human habits and technologies even as they were being gradually pushed out of their territory.

“I think they were eventually outcompeted,” said Higham.

Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, cautioned that the study relies to a large decree on testing of stone tools, rather than bones, and these haven’t been conclusively linked to particular species, or hominins.

TO GO WITH STORY BY FRANK JORDANS EUROPE NEANDERTHALS - FILE - This Jan. 8, 2003 file photo shows a reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, and a modern human version of a skeleton, left, on display at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Humans and Neanderthals may have coexisted in Europe for more than 5,000 years, providing ample time for the two species to meet and mix, according to new research. Using new carbon dating techniques and mathematical models, the researchers examined about 200 samples found at 40 sites from Spain to Russia.

BERLIN (AP) -- Humans and Neanderthals may have coexisted in Europe for more than 5,000 years, providing ample time for the two species to meet and mix, according to new research.

Using new carbon dating techniques and mathematical models, researchers examined about 200 samples found at 40 sites from Spain to Russia, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. They concluded with a high probability that pockets of Neanderthal culture survived until between 41,030 and 39,260 years ago.

Although this puts the disappearance of Neanderthals earlier than some scientists previously thought, the findings support the idea that they lived alongside humans, who arrived in Europe about 45,000-43,000 years ago.

“The results of this impressive dating study are clear, but the assumptions about the association of stone artefact with hominin types underlying the interpretation of the dating results will be undoubtedly rigorously tested in field- and laboratory work over the near future,” said Roebroeks, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Such testing can now be done with a chronologically clean slate.”

KIDS’ BRAINS REORGANIZE WHEN L E A R N I N G M AT H third grade teacher Melissa Grieshober teaches a math lesson at Silver Lake Elementary School in Middletown, Del. Sometime in elementary school, you quit counting your fingers and just know the answer. Now scientists have put youngsters into brain scanners to find out why, and watched how the brain reorganizes itself as kids learn math. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark,

“We believe we now have the first robust timeline that sheds new light on some of the key questions around the possible interactions between Neanderthals and modern humans,” said Thomas Higham, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who led the study.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sometime in elementary school, you quit counting your fingers and just know the answer. Now scientists have put youngsters into brain scanners to find out why, and watched how the brain reorganizes itself as kids learn math.

While it’s known that Neanderthal genes have survived in the DNA of many modern humans to this day, suggesting that at least some interbreeding took place, scientists are still unclear about the extent of their contact and the reasons why Neanderthals vanished.

The take-home advice: Drilling your kids on simple addition and multiplication may pay off.

“These new results confirm a long-suspected chronological overlap between the last Neanderthals and the first modern humans in Europe,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Experience really does matter,” said Dr. Kathy Mann Koepke of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research.

Healthy children start making that switch between counting to what’s called fact retrieval when they’re 8 years old to 9 years old, when they’re still working on fundamental addition and subtraction. How well kids make that shift to memory-based problem-solving is known to predict their ultimate math achievement.

Apart from narrowing the length of time that the two species existed alongside each other to between 2,600 and 5,400 years, Higham and his colleagues also believe they have shown that Neanderthals and humans largely kept to themselves.

Those who fall behind “are impairing or slowing down their math learning later on,” Mann Koepke said.

“What we don’t see is that there is spatial overlap (in where they settled),” said Higham.

To start finding out, Stanford University researchers first peeked into the brains of 28 children as they solved a series of simple addition problems inside a brain-scanning MRI machine.

This is puzzling, because there is evidence that late-stage Neanderthals were culturally influenced by modern humans. Samples taken from

But why do some kids make the transition easier than others?

No scribbling out the answer: The 7- to 9-year-olds saw a calculation

The commission is now considering the application from Oakland-based BrightSource to build a mirror field and a 75-story power tower that would reach above the sand dunes and creek washes between Joshua Tree National Park and the California-Arizona border.

The proposed plant is on a flight path for birds between the Colorado River and California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea - an area, experts say, is richer in avian life than the Ivanpah plant, with protected golden eagles and peregrine falcons and more than 100 other species of birds recorded there.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials warned California this month that the power-tower style of solar technology holds “the highest lethality potential” of the many solar projects burgeoning in the deserts of California.

The commission’s staff estimates the proposed new tower would be almost four times as dangerous to birds as the Ivanpah plant. The agency is expected to decide this autumn on the proposal.

While biologists say there is no known feasible way to curb the number of birds killed, the companies behind the projects say they are hoping to find one - studying whether lights, sounds or some other technology would scare them away, said Joseph Desmond, senior vice president at BrightSource Energy.

BrightSource also is offering $1.8 million in compensation for anticipated bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.

The company is proposing the money for programs such as those to spay and neuter domestic cats, which a government study found kill over 1.4 billion birds a year. Opponents say that would do nothing to help the desert birds at the proposed site.

Power-tower proponents are fighting to keep the deaths from forcing a pause in the building of new plants when they see the technology on the verge of becoming more affordable and accessible, said Thomas Conroy, a renewable-energy expert.

When it comes to powering the country’s grids, “diversity of technology ... is critical,” Conroy said. “Nobody should be arguing let’s be all coal, all solar,” all wind, or all nuclear. “And every one of those technologies has a long list of pros and cons.”

- three plus four equals seven, for example - flash on a screen and pushed a button to say if the answer was right or wrong. Scientists recorded how quickly they responded and what regions of their brain became active as they did.

In a separate session, they also tested the kids face to face, watching if they moved their lips or counted on their fingers, for comparison with the brain data.

The children were tested twice, roughly a year apart. As the kids got older, their answers relied more on memory and became faster and more accurate, and it showed in the brain. There was less activity in the prefrontal and parietal regions associated with counting and more in the brain’s memory center, the hippocampus, the researchers reported Sunday in Nature Neuroscience.

The hippocampus is sort of like a relay station where new memories come in - short-term working memory - and then can be sent elsewhere for longer-term storage and retrieval. Those hippocampal connections increased with the kids’ math performance.

“The stronger the connections, the greater each individual’s ability to retrieve facts from memory,” said Dr. Vinod Menon, a psychiatry professor at Stanford and the study’s senior author.

But that’s not the whole story.

Next, Menon’s team put 20 adolescents and 20 adults into the MRI machines and gave them the same simple addition problems. It turns out that adults don’t use their memory-crunching hippocampus in the same way. Instead of using a lot of effort, retrieving six plus four equals 10 from long-term storage was almost automatic, Menon said.

In other words, over time the brain became increasingly efficient at retrieving facts. Think of it like a bumpy, grassy field, NIH’s Mann Koepke explained. Walk over the same spot enough and a smooth, grass-free path forms, making it easier to get from start to end.

If your brain doesn’t have to work as hard on simple math, it has more working memory free to process the teacher’s brand-new lesson on more complex math.

“The study provides new evidence that this experience with math actually changes the hippocampal patterns, or the connections. They become more stable with skill development,” she said. “So learning your addition and multiplication tables and having them in rote memory helps.”

Quiz your child in different orders, she advised - nine times three and then 10 times nine - to make sure they really remember and didn’t have to think it through.

While the study focuses on math, Mann Koepke said cognitive development in general probably works the same way. After all, kids who match sounds to letters earlier learn to read faster.

Stanford’s Menon said the next step is to study what goes wrong with this system in children with math learning disabilities, so that scientists might try new strategies to help them learn.