Wnd feb9

THE

FREE

WEEKLY NEWS DIGEST

Ciculated Weekly in Florida

Volume 004 Issue 05

OBAMA MINGLES WITH P O W E R B R O K E R S AT ALFALFA CLUB LUNCHEON WASHINGTON (AP) -President Barack Obama mingled with Washington power brokers at an Alfalfa Club luncheon.

The gathering was at the home of lawyer Vernon Jordan, a confidant to President Bill Clinton.

According to club history, the club is named after the alfalfa because the plant extends its roots far for a drink. The club’s main event is an annual dinner where politicians and business leaders rub elbows and share some laughs off limits to reporters. Obama doesn’t plan to attend this year.

The organization has about 200 members, including former Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, Chief Justice John Roberts, Warren Buffett and Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, who accompanied the president Saturday.

The New York Times says 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is to be inducted Saturday night.

ENORMO US INT E RE ST IN NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH CUBA

Established 2012

NY ATTORNEY GENERAL TARGETS POPULAR HERBAL SUPPLEMENTS

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- Numerous store brand supplements aren’t what their labels claim to be, an ongoing investigation of popular herbal supplements subjected to DNA testing has found, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Tuesday.

The supplements, including echinacea, ginseng, St. John’s wort, garlic, ginkgo biloba and saw palmetto, were contaminated with substances including rice, beans, pine, citrus, asparagus, primrose, wheat, houseplant and wild carrot. In many cases, unlisted contaminants were the only plant material found in the product samples.

Overall, 21 percent of the test results from store brand herbal supplements contained DNA from the plants listed on the labels. The retailer with the poorest showing was Walmart, where 4 percent of the products tested showed DNA from the plants listed on the labels.

“This investigation makes one thing abundantly clear: The old adage `buyer beware’ may be especially true for consumers of herbal supplements,” Schneiderman said.

Schneiderman asked the companies to provide detailed information on production, processing, testing and quality control for herbal supplements sold at their stores.

Walgreen and GNC pledged to cooperate with the attorney general.

“We take these issues very seriously and as a precautionary measure, we are in the process of removing these products from our shelves as we review this matter further,” Walgreen spokesman James Graham said.

BOSTON (AP) -- North America has an “enormous interest” in building diplomatic relationships with Cuba, Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday during a weekend meeting with his counterparts from Canada and Mexico.

“This is an effort we believe offers the best opportunity for the people of Cuba to improve their lives and to take part in the choices about their lives,” Kerry said during a news conference at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

A high-level U.S. delegation held two days of talks with Cuban officials in Havana last week for the first time in decades.

In December, President Barack Obama announced plans to restore diplomatic relations with the Caribbean island nation after more than 50 years.

“It’s time to try something new,” Kerry said of the five-decade economic embargo against Cuba. He added that the Obama administration will continue to press Cuban leaders on democracy, human rights protections and civil society issues.

The Obama administration has said that goal is supported by removing barriers to U.S. travel, remittances and exports to Cuba. In turn, Cuba has said it welcomes those measures but has no intention of changing its system.

Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird and Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs Jose Antonio Meade joined Kerry in Boston to discuss issues facing North America, among them climate change, trade and eliminating global extremism.

Baird applauded the administration’s willingness to engage in dialogue with Cuba.

“The more American values and American capital that are permitted into Cuba, the freer the Cuban people will be,” Baird said. “Not only was it about time, but it was the perfect time that this important change in policy was made.”

the state. Testing was performed by an expert in DNA barcoding technology, James Schulte II of Clarkson University in Potsdam. The DNA tests were performed on three to four samples of each of the supplements purchased. Each sample was tested five times.

Overall, 390 tests involving 78 samples were performed.

GNC, Target, Walmart and Walgreen Co. sold supplements that either couldn’t be verified to contain the labeled substance or that contained ingredients not listed on the label, Schneiderman’s office said.

Walmart spokesman Brian Nick said the company is immediately reaching out to suppliers and will take appropriate action.

ALDE President Guy Verhofstadt, center, EU Counter-Terrorism chief Gilles de Kerchove, 2nd right, and Public Policy manager of Google Verity Harding attend a meeting of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) on a counter-terrorism action plan, at the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2015

Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

Target didn’t initially respond to a request for comment.

“We stand by the quality, purity and potency of all ingredients listed on the labels of our private label products,” said GNC spokeswoman Laura Brophy.

The investigation looked at six herbal supplements sold at stores across

public health.”

Steve Mister, president and CEO of the dietary supplement trade group the Council for Responsible Nutrition, on Tuesday criticized the testing procedure and Schneiderman, who he accused of engaging in a “self-serving publicity stunt under the guise of protecting

He said the companies should have been given a greater opportunity to respond before Schneiderman went public and “processing during manufacturing of botanical supplements can remove or damage DNA; therefore while a DNA testing method can be useful in some cases, this method well may be the wrong test for these kinds of products.”

Michael McGuffin, president of the American Herbal Products Association, which represents the herbal industry, called DNA testing “an emerging technology that has the potential to be useful in the future when it has been rigorously tested and validated.” He said identification of an herb through DNA testing must be confirmed with established analytical tools that herbal experts use, such as chromatography or microscopy.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires companies to verify their products are safe and properly labeled. But supplements aren’t subjected to the rigorous evaluation process used for drugs.

If a manufacturer fails to identify all the ingredients on an herbal product’s label, a consumer with allergies or who is taking medication for an unrelated illness could risk serious health issues every time a contaminated herbal supplement is ingested.

A DNA study conducted by the University of Guelph in 2013 also found contamination and substitution in herbal products in most of the products tested. One product labeled as St. John’s wort, often used to treat depression, contained Senna alexandrina, a plant with laxative properties. One ginkgo product was contaminated with black walnut, which could endanger people with nut allergies.

A 2013 study from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research estimated there are about 65,000 dietary supplements on the market consumed by more than 150 million Americans.

IN RUSSIA, CREEPING AWARENESS THAT ECONOMIC CRISIS WILL LAST In this photo taken on Sunday Jan. 25, 2015, women sit on the chairs they bought from the closed restaurant in Moscow, Russia. Chairs, tables, designer chandeliers, and an enormous pink lamp in the shape of a bear’s head: at The Red Fox and the Lazy Hound, an upscale restaurant that is one of many closing in Moscow this month, everything must go. And surprisingly, Muscovites have come out in numbers to find cheap deals. Frugality is making a comeback _ with no end in sight to Western sanctions or the painful drop in Russia’s oil revenues, there is a creeping awareness that the tough times are here to stay.

MOSCOW (AP) -- Chairs, tables, designer chandeliers, and an enormous pink lamp in the shape of a bear’s head: at The Red Fox and the Lazy Hound, an upscale restaurant that is one of many closing in Moscow this month, everything must go.

And surprisingly, Muscovites have come out in numbers to find cheap deals.

Garage sales have long been a rarity here, where a decade of boom times has turned Russians into some of the world’s biggest gourmands and luxury shoppers. But frugality is making a comeback - with no end in sight to Western sanctions or the painful drop in Russia’s oil revenues, there is a creeping awareness that the tough times are here to stay.

Shopping prices have jumped higher, and are expected to keep rising for months. About a fifth of Moscow’s restaurants are forecast to close this year and businesses in all sectors are planning layoffs.

Anna Serzhantov and her husband Sergei, who on Sunday were browsing the restaurant’s fire-sale, had never bought used furniture before.

By the time they had finished renovating their apartment this autumn, the value of the ruble - which has fallen about 50 percent in a year had dropped so far that they couldn’t buy half of what they wanted.

The only affordable option, IKEA, hiked its prices up in December in response to the devaluation of the currency.

The Serzhantovs found the garage sale through a website that hooks up deal-hungry buyers with shuttered restaurants.

“We still have to buy things for our bedroom,” Anna said, “But unfortunately I don’t think we’ll find that unless the hotels start closing, too.”

Olga Ovcharova, a restaurant critic for Time Out who co-founded the garage sale website, says there are more businesses than ever shutting down and selling off their wares.

“People’s salaries are going down while everything around them is getting more expensive,” she said.

Igor Bukharov, president of the Russian Federation of Restaurateurs and Hoteliers, told the AP that he expects at least 20 percent of restaurants in Moscow to close this year due to sluggish demand and rising prices. According to 2GIS, a company that posts restaurant listings online, Moscow saw in the November-January period the first net decrease in venues in two years, with 46 closures.

As the ruble has dropped, the mood in Russia has darkened. According to a January poll by the independent Levada Center, 49 percent said economic turmoil was the greatest threat to Russia, up from 29 percent one year ago. That concern was outstripped only by that of rising prices, which 54 percent of respondents said was a threat. continued on page 3

2

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

PUBLISHER INFORMATION Published By

Digital Media Publishing For The Weekly News Digest

Design, Production & Layout Digital Media Pubishing Records Department Administrator

Yrma Perez

Local Sales & Marketing Office The Weeklt News Digest, LLC. 237 S.W. 13st Miami, Florida 33130 twndigest@gmail.com TheWeeklyNewsDigest™ is published

four times a month by “The Weekly News Digest LLC.” All rights are reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in whole or part is strictly prohibited. Editorial inquiries and manuscripts should be directed to the Editor. Manuscripts or other submissions must be accompanied by self addressed, stamped envelopes. “The Weekly News Digest”, assumes no responsibility for the return of unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, or artwork. All correspondence regarding business, editorial, production, and address changes should be sent to:

Local Sales & Marketing Office The Weekly News Digest, LLC. 237 S.W. 13st Miami, Florida 33130

WHITE HOUSE GRAPPLES WITH FRAUGHT TERRORISM you understand who your enemy is, unless you clearly identify your enemy, then you cannot come up with a very effective strategy to defeat that enemy.”

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Twice this month, the White House has publicly grappled with the politically fraught language of terrorism.

In the days after a deadly terror spree in Paris, President Barack Obama was criticized for purposely avoiding calling the attacks an example of “Islamic extremism,” settling for the more generic “violent extremism.” This week, the White House struggled to explain why the administration sometimes classifies the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization - and sometimes does not.

Similarly, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who until last year was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a conference in Washington last week that “you cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists.”

President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 30, 2015. Twice this month, the White House has publicly grappled with the politically fraught language of terrorism. In the days after a deadly terror spree in Paris, President Barack Obama was criticized for purposely avoiding calling the attacks an example of “Islamic extremism,” settling for the more generic “violent extremism.” This week, the White House struggled to explain why the administration sometimes classifies the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization _ and sometimes does not.

The rhetorical wrangling underscores the extent to which a president who pledged to end his predecessor’s war on terror is still navigating how to explain the threats that persist to the American public, while also being mindful of the impact his words can have abroad.

“They do believe that the part of the roots of terrorism comes from the way the United States acts and talks and is perceived globally,” said Trevor McCrisken, a professor at Britain’s University of Warwick who has studied Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric.

The early January attacks on a French satirical newspaper and kosher deli put a fresh spotlight on what Obama’s supporters see as his appropriately careful language and his critics see as overly cautious.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the attacks that left 17 people dead suggested the world was “waging a war against Islamist extremists.” And British Prime Minister David Cameron, on a visit to Washington two weeks ago, said Europe and the U.S. face a “very serious Islamist extremist terrorist threat.”

Obama, however, assiduously avoided associating the attacks with Islam, a decision White House spokesman Josh Earnest said was made for the sake of “accuracy.”

“These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism, and they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it,” Earnest said. “We also don’t want to be in a situation where we are legitimizing what we consider to be a completely illegitimate justification for this violence, this act of terrorism.”

Obama’s conservative opponents quickly seized on the president’s rhetorical choice and cast it as an example of the White House downplaying the root cause of the terror threat. At least one Democrat - Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran - agreed, saying the president’s terror terminology matters, particularly as Congress weighs a new authorization for military action in Iraq and Syria.

Children Incorporated 4205 Dover Road Richmond, VA 23221-3267

www.childrenincorporated.

“By his not using this term `Islamic extremism’ and clearly identifying our enemies, it raised a whole host of questions in exactly what Congress will be authorizing,” Gabbard said on Fox News. “Unless

INFECTIONS MOST COMMON CAUSE OF READMISSIONS AFTER SURGERY CHICAGO (AP) -- Surgery patients end up back in the hospital most often because of incision infections that don’t show up until after they’re sent home, according to a study that found unexpected readmission rates vary widely.

POTECTING SPEICIES worldwildlife.org

Among six common surgeries, the lowest readmission rate was just under 4 percent for hysterectomy patients. The highest rate - almost 15 percent - was for artery disease patients who had surgery to reroute blood flow in the legs.

“Most of these things are clearly related to the surgery, well-known accepted complications that we all try to reduce,” said Dr. Karl Bilimoria, the study’s senior author and director of the surgical quality improvement center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Bilimoria said surgery patients need clear instructions with information on warning signs and who to contact day or night if symptoms occur after they go home. Patients should seek treatment at the earliest sign of

www.redcross.org

The president has long tried to shift his administration’s terror rhetoric away from what he saw as the hyperbolic terminology used by his predecessor, George W. Bush, particularly his declaration in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the U.S. was engaged in a “war on terror.”

In a high-profile national security address in 2013, Obama declared, “We must define our effort not as a boundless `global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

Under Obama’s narrower definition, his advisers say the U.S. is at war with terror groups like al-Qaida and its affiliates, as well as the Islamic State group.

Given the U.S. policy of not making concessions to terrorists, the White House has refused to negotiate with Islamic State militants to free American hostages and opposes Jordan’s ongoing efforts to orchestrate a prisoner swap with the group. However, the U.S. did negotiate with the Taliban through an intermediary last year to free American Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five Afghan detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The White House insisted anew this week that those negotiations did not violate U.S. policy because the administration does not classify that Taliban as a terrorist organization - though officials said there are overlapping characteristics.

“They do carry out tactics that are akin to terrorism. They do pursue terror attacks in an effort to try to advance their agenda,” Earnest, the White House spokesman, said. The difference, he said, is that the Taliban threat to the U.S. is mainly confined to interests in Afghanistan, while a group like al-Qaida has broader ambitions.

Yet even the administration’s classifications of the Taliban have some contradictions.

The Afghan Taliban is not on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, thereby allowing the White House to engage in the negotiations for Bergdahl. Yet the Treasury Department does list the Afghan Taliban on the list of specially designated terrorists, giving

an infection, which may include redness or swelling, he said.

The researchers analyzed 2012 data from 346 hospitals involved in an American College of Surgeons quality improvement program. Results were published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study notes that hospital readmissions are a focus of nationwide efforts to control hospital costs and improve quality of patient care.

Infections at the surgery site typically are caused by bacteria entering the incision area, sometimes due to bacteria from the patient’s own body, or from inadequately sterilized surgical instruments. In recent years, hospitals have beefed up efforts to fight them, with staff hand-washing campaigns and other methods.

But these infections can be difficult to prevent and in most patients studied, symptoms didn’t show up until several days after they went home.

Some patients are more vulnerable, including those with artery disease affecting the legs, who have poor blood flow and often other illnesses.

Incision infection was the reason for more than 1 in 3 unplanned readmissions for these patients, and for at least 1 in 4 patients who had either hysterectomies, abdominal hernia repair, or colorectal surgery.

Among hip or knee replacement patients, it was the reason for almost 1 in 5 readmissions, and for obesity surgery patients, just over 11 percent of readmissions. continued on page 10

SUBSCRIPTION REQUEST FORM The Weekly News Digest is happy to offer subscriptions to individuals and businesses that would like to receive a weekly publication. However, if you would like to have one of the newspapers sent to you on a weekly basis, please fill out the form below and return it with a money order for $24.95 per year to cover postage & handling. Outside Florida $52.95 Tax Incuded MAIL TO :

The Weekly News Digest 237 S.W. 13 St. Miami, Florida 33031

Name _____________________________

www.additions.generalcontractors1.com

Address ___________________________ City ____________________State____

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

S T O C K S S A G A T J A N U A RY F I N I S H E S All told, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 3 percent in January, its worse monthly performance in a year. While the U.S. economy continued to show signs of strength, energy companies suffered from a sharp drop in oil prices and some big multinational companies saw their earnings dinged by a stronger dollar.

The one sector that rose was energy. Benchmark U.S. crude jumped $3.71 to close at $48.24 a barrel in New York on expectations of lower supplies. The number of working drilling rigs continued to fall, according to a closely-watched industry count.

Concerns over an attack on oil-rich Kirkuk, Iraq, by Islamic insurgents also spurred oil buying and higher prices.

Danny Meyer, center, Founder & CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, waits for the Shake Shack IPO to begin trading, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, Jan. 30, 2015. Shares of Shake Shack Inc. have more than doubled minutes after they debuted on the stock market Friday.

The concerns about a surging dollar intensified after Russia’s central bank unexpectedly cut interest rates to 15 percent from 17 percent to help the weakening economy. That sent the ruble down against the dollar.

by 2.2 percent, the biggest calendar-year increase since 2008

Before the U.S. market opened, the government said that the economy grew 2.6 percent in the last quarter of 2014, as weaker government and business spending held growth back. The decline was unexpected and down from a gain of 4.6 percent in the second quarter and 5 percent in the third quarter.

Amazon.com and Visa reported strong results late Thursday. Amazon jumped 13.7 percent, while Visa rose 2.8 percent.

Investors also sifted through the latest batch of corporate earnings news, and the results were mixed.

Several companies didn’t fare as well, including Ugg footwear maker Deckers Outdoor and the parent of Hawaiian Airlines, which offered discouraging outlooks. Deckers slumped 19.7 percent, while Hawaiian Holdings slid 27 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 251.90 points, or 1.5

AFTER SETTING IPHONE RECORD, W H AT D O E S A P P L E D O N E X T ? cisms that the project - first initiated by former Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat, and British billionaire Richard Branson - is a boondoggle.

Others, including Republican Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration, say the state has a chance to carve out a new niche for economic development and position itself on the front end of space tourism.

New Mexico has struggled to rebound from the recession, creating only 14,000 jobs over the past year while neighboring states have bounced back to 2008 employment levels.

Whitesides visited Spaceport America in December. The runway was quiet, but workers inside the massive, futuristic hangar continued to outfit it for the day Virgin Galactic opens. image shows the taxiway leading to the hangar at Spaceport America in Upham, N.M. Spaceport officials are planning to open a visitors’ gallery at the hangar in late February and are looking forward to SpaceX beginning test flights for its rocket program this spring.

“I really think we’re on the edge of something truly incredible, which is enabling people and students to experience space, whether going themselves or sending their experiments,” he said.

UPHAM, N.M. (AP) -- The only thing interrupting the creosote and mesquite that makes up one of New Mexico’s most remote stretches of desert is a pristine runway where Virgin Galactic plans one day to launch the world’s first commercial space-line.

He added, “These things are hard. That’s why they haven’t happened yet.”

In the four years since its completion, however, the runway has seen little use. No constant roar of jet engines. No screeches from landing gear. Just promises, year after year, that it would shuttle paying passengers to the edges of Earth.

Virgin Galactic had proclaimed 2015 was finally going to be the year.

That was until the company’s rocket-powered spacecraft broke apart over California’s Mojave Desert during a test flight last fall, killing one pilot and igniting speculation about the future of commercial space tourism and Spaceport America.

Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said things are on track now and testing will take off again this year.

“I really think we’re turning the corner,” Whitesides said. “We’ve gone through one of the toughest things a company can go through and we’re still standing, and now we’re really moving forward with pace.”

He said the company and its investors aren’t backing down from the goal of making space accessible.

Virgin Galactic’s manufacturing crew is about two-thirds done with building a new spacecraft, and the operations team is ramping up for a test-flight program that will serve as one of the last major hurdles to getting off the ground.

“Our company has spent a lot of time and money to get to the point where we can carry out successful commercial operations at Spaceport America. We’re still committed,” he said.

Whitesides has always been reluctant to attach a timeline to the milestones the company needs to reach, but he’s certain test flights will resume later this year.

That’s what New Mexico taxpayers want to hear.

They’ve already funneled nearly a quarter of a billion dollars into the world’s first purpose-built spaceport, and state lawmakers are being asked for nearly $2 million more this year to make up for the lost fees stemming from the delay in Virgin Galactic’s commercial flights.

Some lawmakers have called for pulling the plug, adding fuel to criti-

percent, to close at 17,164.95. The S&P 500 index lost 26.26 points, or 1.3 percent, to 1,994.99. The Nasdaq composite fell 48.17 points, or 1 percent, to 4,635.24.

Nine of the 10 sectors in the S&P 500 fell, and utilities declined the most.

On Friday, investors also weighed the consequences of a slowdown in U.S. economic growth and how further strength in the dollar could dent corporate profits.

But others news signaled the steady health of the U.S. economy.

Consumer spending surged in the final three months of 2014. The Labor Department reported that wages and benefits rose last year

3

T H E C L O S E ; O N W E A K N O T E

The U.S. stock market capped a rough month Friday, delivering its third loss in five days and extending its declines for the year.

“The real issue still is the confusion, the uncertainty around the speed of decline in oil prices and what that means, and the rise in the dollar and what that means for earnings,” said Bob Doll, chief equity strategist at Nuveen Asset Management.

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

Christine Anderson, the head of New Mexico’s Spaceport Authority, pointed to the ill-fated Apollo I test launch and the 1986 Challenger explosion as examples of space exploration efforts that resulted in tragedy. Still, astronauts and scientists pushed on, and she said those backing Virgin Galactic and Spaceport America are doing the same.

“We have invested $218 million, so there’s absolutely no reason to stop now,” she said.

Virgin Galactic continues to pay its lease, and more money will come from lease and user fees related to the testing scheduled to begin this spring for a reusable rocket being developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But Anderson acknowledged that the spaceport needs to entice more tenants and host other events, including fashion and auto photo shoots, conferences and more rocket launches by companies such as UP Aerospace.

The spaceport in late February also expects to open its visitors’ gallery at the site, which spans more than 28 square miles.

“The challenge was to build a commercial spaceport here. There was absolutely nothing here. We did it,” Anderson said. “It’s amazing to think of it.”

While oil had a strong day, it remains in a deep slump. U.S. crude has fallen to $48 a barrel from $107 last June.

Demand for ultra-safe bonds rose Friday. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 1.66 percent Friday, the lowest since May 2013. Yields fall as bond prices rise.

“I think that the bond market is starting to scare equity investors: `What do they know that I don’t?’” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management. “The bond market is telling us that things are getting worse.”

The stock of Shake Shack, a burger chain that started as a New York City hot dog cart, more than doubled in their first day of trading. Shake Shack jumped $24.90, or 119 percent, to close at $45.90, putting the market value of the small chain at more than $1.6 billion.

The dollar strengthened against the euro, which slipped to $1.1291 from $1.1327. Gold rose $23.90, or 2 percent, to $1,278.50 an ounce. Silver gained 44 cents, or 3 percent, to $17.21 an ounce.

Copper climbed 4 cents, or 2 percent, to $2.49 a pound.

In other energy futures trading: - Brent crude rose $3.86 to close at $52.99 in London.

- Wholesale gasoline rose 6.1 cents to close at $1.415 a gallon.

- Heating oil rose 6.8 cents to close at $1.686 a gallon.

ECONOMIC CRISIS continued from page 1

While restaurants have been the first and hardest hit, the ruble’s collapse and weakening demand is reverberating through other sectors of the economy, such as clothes retailers and even manufacturers.

OPORA, an NGO that advocates for small business, estimates that up to 30 percent of manufacturing businesses are planning layoffs to free up money they are not getting from loans, which have become scarce because the financial system is frozen.

Fashion retailers, meanwhile, are dealing with both the problem of less consumer spending and the fact that they buy designer collections in euros or dollars, which have doubled in value in the matter of months.

“They’re really being squeezed,” said Robert Courtney, who leases out space in shopping centers to small retailers.

There is only so much Russian authorities can do to alleviate the crisis. The government has pledged 2.3 trillion rubles ($34 billion), but at least half of that will be spent supporting the banks.

The central bank, meanwhile, is having to choose between supporting the ruble or the economy. Higher interest rates can support a currency but hurt the economy by making borrowing more expensive. The central bank is bowing to pressure from the government and businesses to bring back down its key interest rate, which it had hiked sharply to 17 percent in December. Last week, it cut it to 15 percent, an indication it will accept the ruble’s drop.

While so far retailers have attempted to keep costs low and not drive away customers too quickly, many acknowledge that a further rise in prices is inevitable.

“Importers have taken a big hit for a period of four months,” said Satesh Melwani, a British citizen who owns a snack-importing business in Russia. “Now we’re starting to raise prices to our retailers, and the retailers are going to start raising prices to the consumer. The reality is that there’s a lag in real inflation as it hits the buyer’s pocketbook.”

Alexei Amyotov, co-founder of Look At Media, a digital media holding company, estimates Russians will really start to feel the impact of inflation this summer. His firm, which generates most of its revenue through online ads, has not seen a mass exodus of clients, but many advertisers are now refusing to make long-term commitments or invest in year-long campaigns.

“It’s like in the movies, when the hero is wounded but he hasn’t yet understood that he’s dead and he keeps running,” he said. “Everybody is just afraid of looking down and seeing how big that hole is.”

4

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

F L O R I D A C R A S H S TAT I S T I C S C r a s h c l o s e s e n t r a n c e r a m p t o I - 9 5 S a t P G A B l v d An early morning crash forced Florida Highway Patrol to shut down the entrance ramp to I-95 South at PGA Boulevard.[...]

OCT 17, 2014 07:26AM

D e p u t i e s : D r u n k e n m a n r a m s c r u i s e r , p u s h e s i t 2 0 0 f e e t The 22-year-old had a blood-alcohol level of 0.288 percent when he hit hit the parked squad car, a report says.[...]

OCT 17, 2014 07:12AM

O n e

p e r s o n i n j u r e d i n c r a s h i n N a p l e s

I - 7 5

The northbound lanes of I-75 have been reopened near mile marker 111 in Naples due to a crash involving injuries, according to Collier County Sheriff’s officials.[...]

OCT 17, 2014 02:15AM

7 0 - y e a r- o l d N e w S m y r n a B e a c h r e s i d e n t k i l l e d i n I - 9 5 m o t o r c y c l e c r a s h A motorcyclist died in a New Smyrna Beach crash Thursday afternoon, according to Florida Highway Patrol troopers. The single-vehicle accident happened on the Interstate 95 southbound ramp to State Road 44.

The 70-year-old victim, whose name hasn’t be[...]

OCT 16, 2014 1:43PM

Road Ranger Hit By Car While Helping Motorists Florida Highway Patrol Troopers said a road ranger helping a motorist on I-95 when a car hit him early Sunday morning.[...]

OCT 14, 2014 02:42AM

Wreck snarls traffic on I-95 near Ormond Beach

Dont Text and Drive

Sierra Sierra Sierra Sierra

“

Club Club Club Club

Sierra Sierra Sierra Sierra

Club Club Club Club

“

Improves the health and lives of people affected by poverty, disaster, and civil unrest.

Learn more

www.directrelief.org

John Muir (1838-1914) was America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist, and founder of the Sierra Club. This website, known as the “John Muir Exhibit” features his life and contributions.

h t t p : / / w w w . s i e r r a c l u b . o r g /

POTECTING SPEICIES Learn more

www.worldwildlife.org

www.redcross.org

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

5

H AT F I E L D S , M C C O Y S M A K E M O O N S H I N E L E G A L L Y I N S O U T H E R N W . VA later a cable reality show featured several Hatfield descendants and relatives of the McCoys on the maternal side.

GILBERT, W.Va. (AP) -- After generations of bootlegging, direct descendants of the Hatfields have teamed up with the McCoy name to produce legal moonshine in southern West Virginia with the state’s blessing - the start of a new legacy for the families made famous for their 19th-century feud.

After the state passed legislation allowing for regulated moonshine distilleries, Chad Bishop, a former longtime coal miner who also comes from a long line of family moonshiners, acquired the necessary permits in 2012. The distillery started shipping to the state Alcohol Beverage Control warehouse in November 2013 for distribution to retailers.

Production of “Drink of the Devil” has been in full swing at a distillery on original Hatfield land, bringing batches to the nation’s store shelves using the original recipe of family patriarch William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield.

The equipment alone to get the operation started cost $200,000, and there have been other challenges. Making batches with local products has kept the profit margin low.

Overseen by Chad Bishop, husband of Hatfield’s great-great-great granddaughter, all the work is done by hand in a converted garage on a mountainside six miles from “Devil Anse” Hatfield’s gravesite.

The operation is in an ongoing trademark dispute with a Missouri-based group of investors that also wants the Hatfield and McCoy family names on its moonshine products. Chiartas said he’s confident an agreement will be worked out that lets both parties use the names.

After going through fermentation and distilling processes at Hatfield & McCoy Moonshine, batches are bottled, corked and packaged inhouse before being shipped to West Virginia, Florida, Kentucky, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

“This is as close as you’ll get to the way it was made 150 years ago,” Bishop said.

While openly discussing their strong Christian beliefs, Amber and Nancy Hatfield strongly promote the product.

Among those lending knowledge and elbow grease to the business are Bishop’s wife, Amber, and her mother, Nancy Hatfield, the oldest living descendant of “Devil Anse.”

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney speaks during the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting aboard the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. As he decides whether to run for president a third time, Romney has accepted an invitation to speak at Jacksonville University’s spring graduation in the key presidential battleground of Florida. Romney also will receive an honorary degree on April 25, the private school announced

Ronald McCoy, a great-great grandson of McCoy patriarch Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy, was a consultant for the distillery’s startup and

the product’s testing and marketing.

MAN ARRESTED IN MURDER CASE OF B O D Y PA R T S F O U N D IN LUGGAGE

Sold in 25-ounce bottles, moonshine is essentially whiskey that hasn’t aged. The business sells between 1,800 and 3,000 bottles each month at $32.99 per bottle.

“I’ll be honest. It’s just kind of crazy,” Amber Bishop said. “We never dreamed that it was ever going to be anything like this.”

Considering the families’ history, her ancestors probably wouldn’t have, either.

“I know God’s not in moonshine. I know that,” Nancy Hatfield said.

“This is just the way I was raised. I come from a moonshining daddy.

He used to bootleg when I was a little girl. I used to bottle it for him in the bathtub.”

Going commercial with moonshine has “always been my idea,” she said.

McCoy, who doesn’t have an equity stake in the business, didn’t respond to a request for comment made through Bishop. Chiartas said McCoy, too, is deeply religious and isn’t involved in the daily operations.

“He’s not opposed to it,” Chiartas said. “But he doesn’t believe he shouldn’t make any profits from it. That would be like a violation of his religious beliefs. And so we just respect that and we keep him posted on how things are going.”

The feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky is believed to have begun in the 1870s over a stolen pig and escalated over timber rights. By 1888, at least 12 people had died as a result of the shooting war. The violence ended by 1900, and a truce signed in 2003 marked an official end to the conflict.

Now, in the name of commerce, the families are banding together.

“They really take it very seriously,” distillery attorney Greg Chiartas said. “It really is about economic development for them.”

Interest in the former feud spiked in 2012 when a miniseries co-starring Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton aired on cable television. A year

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- San Francisco police arrested a man on suspicion of murder Saturday in connection with a suitcase found on a downtown street stuffed with dismembered human remains.

Mark Andrus, 59, had been spotted on surveillance footage near where the suitcase was discovered and was booked into county jail hours after he was detained as a “person of interest,” Officer Grace Gatpandan said.

Gatpandan said she could not comment on exactly how police linked Andrus to the body, but said they were aided by the surveillance footage and witness statements. She did not have any additional information about Andrus, the body parts found in the suitcase or a possible motive.

Police received a call on Friday night on the department’s anonymous tip line that a “person of interest” in the suitcase incident had been spotted in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, Gatpandan said.

They responded and detained two people, including Andrus.

Police had released photos of Andrus from the surveillance footage earlier in the day showing him in a striped baseball cap, light blue jeans and a blue and orange jacket.

On Friday night, Police Chief Greg Suhr confirmed a “person of interest” was detained for questioning, the San Francisco Chronicle reported (http://bit.ly/1Dpchju ).

The suitcase was found Wednesday afternoon on a street in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. More body parts were found in a trash can nearby. The San Francisco medical examiner determined that the remains belong to an unidentified light-skinned man.

Authorities will now turn to a DNA laboratory to identify him.

The condition of the man’s torso had police considering the possibility that organized crime or a gang was responsible for the remains, Officer Albie Esparza told the Chronicle before the announcement of Saturday’s arrest. He did not elaborate in the story.

Gatpandan said she did not know whether the second person who was detained remained in custody Saturday.

Dont Text and Drive

www.additions.generalcontractors1.com

6

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

CIVILIANS FLEE EAST UKRAINE TOWN AS FIGHTING INTENSIFIES

The towns are separated by 13 kilometers (eight miles) of road and railroad. When Ukrainian troops were overrun by formidably armed rebel attackers Thursday, some soldiers were forced to retreat to their positions in Debaltseve on foot.

DEBALTSEVE, Ukraine (AP) -- Outgoing heavy-caliber fire boomed incessantly, shaking the ground and rattling windows around the besieged town. Residents of Debaltseve, seemingly inured to the racket, listened impassively as they mustered at the town hall on Saturday to be evacuated with as many belongings as they could carry.

Despite claiming to rely solely on military equipment poached from the Ukrainian army, separatist forces have consistently deployed vast quantities of powerful weapons, some of which military experts say is not even known to be in Ukraine’s possession.

The government-held town has been without power, water and gas for at least 10 days, prompting many to flee from an intense artillery duel between government and Russian-backed separatist forces. Almost every one of the largely deserted streets in the center showed signs of having been struck by projectiles.

A month of relative quiet in eastern Ukraine was shattered in early January by full-blown fighting as the separatists attempted to claw back additional territory from government hands. Rebel leaders accused Ukraine of mobilizing its forces in advance of an imminent offensive.

Efforts to hold talks on halting the escalating violence have to date been unsuccessful.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a telephone conversation, all expressed hope that negotiations in Minsk, Belarus, will focus on a cease-fire and pulling out heavy weaponry from residential areas, the Kremlin said.

However, representatives for the rebels, Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe left the government compound late evening on Saturday after spending four hours behind closed doors.

Ukraine’s envoy, Leonid Kuchma, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that the talks were derailed after the rebel representatives “refused to discuss steps to bring a complete cease-fire and the withdrawal of heavy weaponry.”

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said on Saturday that 1,000 residents have been evacuated in the past days from Debaltseve. But the number of crammed civilian vehicles seen speeding out of the town’s rutted, icy roads over the past few days suggests official figures may be on the conservative side.

“Six buses shuttle (refugees) from there and they constantly come under fire,” Yatsenyuk said in comments carried by his press office. “As soon as they (the rebels) see that we are evacuating the people, they open fire.”

Since the conflict started in April, it has claimed more than 5,100 lives and displaced more than 900,000 people across the country, according to U.N. estimates.

People carry their belongings as they walk to a bus to leave the town of Debaltseve, Ukraine, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2015. Fighting between government and Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine has intensified in recent days as rebels seek to encircle the town of Debaltseve, which hosts a strategically important railway hub.

Ukraine’s Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak said on Saturday that 15 soldiers had died and that another 30 were injured over the previous day’s fighting.

added that none of the refugees has been injured.

“This happened along the entire line of conflict, starting from the Luhansk region and ending in Mariupol,” he said.

Vyacheslav Abroskin, head of police for the Donetsk region, said 12 people had been killed by shelling in Debaltseve, which hosts a strategic railway hub. He did not specify over what period the deaths had taken place.

With the government apparently unable to handle all the people wishing to leave, volunteer groups are trying to fill the gap.

“We are evacuating people from this hotspot, so they don’t have to deal with what is going on, because this is not their war after all. This has nothing to do with them,” said Andrei Vasilyev, a worker with a charitable organization based in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

As Vasilyev’s minibus was being loaded, a small child held in his mother’s arms pleaded plaintively to leave as soon as possible. Infirm and elderly passengers needed to be lifted into the tightly packed transport.

Leaving Debaltseve carries its own risks because of the encroachment of separatist forces on all sides. Roads running west and east are controlled by rebels, leaving the northbound road the only remaining corridor of relative safety. But fresh, scorched shell craters alongside that road testify that it is dangerous too.

Fighting inched toward Debaltseve this week when separatists burst through government lines to occupy part of the town of Vuhlehirsk.

Yatsenyuk has asked the defense ministry to help secure the evacuation and

C H I C A G O M AY O R WA G E S L I V E LY C A M PA I G N W I T H N O B I G C H A L L E N G E R S The challengers say they’re not intimidated.

“It’s easy to see he’s vulnerable by the amount he’s raising that is absolutely obscene by any standard,” said two-term Alderman Bob Fioretti, a frequent voice of dissent on a City Council that often backs the mayor’s ideas.

Emerging as another potential top challenger is Cook County Commissioner Jesus Garcia, a former alderman and state lawmaker who has support from the city teachers’ union. He’s billing himself as the neighborhood candidate, often stressing his decades living in Chicago and raising a family.

CHICAGO (AP) -- Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn’t face any big-name challengers in his push for a second term, but the former White House chief of staff isn’t taking any chances.

He’s pulled in more than nine times more money than any of his challengers through fundraising and a PAC. He’s dominated the airwaves with commercials, including a radio spot this week featuring an endorsement from his old boss, President Barack Obama.

And he’s agreed to attend no less than six forums and debates - far more than the single debate he did during his 2011 bid to lead the nation’s third-largest city.

Never known to be bashful, Emanuel says he takes every challenge seriously. But his acknowledgement that he’s not in position to coast to victory is rooted in political reality.

He has struggled with poor popularity ratings after confronting contentious issues like school closures and gun violence that resonate in Chicago’s neighborhoods. And he appears determined to capture a majority in the Feb. 24 vote to avoid an embarrassing April runoff that could allow a sole remaining challenger to consolidate the opposition.

Since launching his bid, Emanuel has defended his policies by taking a set of campaign talks on the road and confronting his challengers head-on, a change from his first campaign when he largely stayed out of the fray. He’s asked his opponents to release tax returns and turned the intensity up this week, going after two candidates in the first debate.

“If you look at it, there’s only one candidate that is drawing strength from the entire city of Chicago, not just parts of it,” Emanuel told reporters Thursday after receiving an endorsement from trade unions.

The contest features an outspoken alderman, a county commissioner, an activist and a millionaire businessman, the only other candidate with enough money for television ads.

Emanuel has more than $16 million to help him, most from his own campaign fund. The money includes donations from labor, business executives and Hollywood.

The others are political newcomer Willie Wilson, who boasts of building a successful medical-supply company despite receiving only a middle-school education. He’s put more than $1 million of his own money into the race. Perennial candidate William Walls, an activist, is also running.

They’ve capitalized on the schools issue.

Emanuel’s relationship with schools has been especially strained after tense contract negotiations led to a teacher’s strike in 2012. The following year, he pushed to close dozens of schools to cut costs, despite angry protests. Advocacy groups have continued to question the cost savings and are demanding an elected school board instead of one appointed by the mayor.

The public-school turmoil pitted Emanuel against Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis. A frequent and vocal critic of Emanuel, she was seen as his fiercest challenger until she dropped her potential bid because of serious illness. She now backs Garcia.

The challengers are hoping to get enough votes to force an April 7 runoff, which would happen if Emanuel isn’t able to capture 50 percent plus 1 vote.

A Chicago Tribune poll released Thursday showed Emanuel with 42 percent, Garcia 18 percent, Fioretti 10 percent, Wilson 7 percent and Walls 2 percent. The poll, conducted Jan. 22 through Tuesday, drew on telephone interviews with more than 700 registered voters. It had an error margin of 3.7 percentage points.

Emanuel won the mayor’s race with 55 percent of the vote in 2011, when former Mayor Richard Daley retired after 22 years in office.

On the campaign trail, Emanuel has focused on improvements, like working with environmental activists and hiring minority contractors to upgrade a portion of the city’s Red Line train tracks. When launching his re-election bid in December, Emanuel told supporters a vote for him would continue progress for a “new Chicago.”

But his rivals challenge the notion that he represents all Chicagoans.

“The neighborhoods,” Garcia said, “appear to be an afterthought and stand in contrast to the vitality and wealth in the central business district.”

The United Nations on Friday voiced concern about the deteriorating situation in Debaltseve and other densely populated areas where intense fighting is going on. Neal Walker, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, has called for an immediate humanitarian truce to allow humanitarian assistance and evacuation of civilians.

O B A M A’ S B U D G E T TARGETS HIGH COST OF CUTTING-EDGE DRUGS WASHINGTON (AP) -- With patients facing greater exposure to the high cost of new medications, President Barack Obama on Monday called for government to use its buying power to squeeze drug companies for lower prices.

Obama’s budget asks Congress to authorize Medicare to negotiate on behalf of its beneficiaries for so-called “specialty” drugs that require hefty copayments from patients. They include biologics, which are medications derived from natural substances, ranging from insulin to some of the latest cancer treatments.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell said the proposal aims to both control costs and improve patient care. It’s expected to be submitted as legislation.

The move sends a political message since drug companies were allies in Obama’s struggle to pass his health care overhaul from 2009 to 2010.

Fast forward to 2015, and it’s insurance companies that are helping put the law’s coverage expansion into place. Insurers have been complaining loudly about the high price of new drugs, such as Sovaldi, the $1,000-perpill medication that can cure hepatitis C. Unlike the U.S., governments in many other countries play a central role in determining drug prices. While the Veterans Affairs Department and state Medicaid programs have legal authority to obtain steep discounts from drug makers, that doesn’t include the largest payer, Medicare.

Congress denied HHS the authority to negotiate prices when the Medicare prescription program was created.

Instead, that role is played by private insurers who deliver the prescription benefit to the more than 55 million Medicare beneficiaries. But when it comes to new drugs with no generic competitors, insurers have limited leverage. As a result such medications often wind up on coverage tiers that require patients themselves to pay a big share of the price.

Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said the debate needs to go beyond Medicare. A comprehensive approach to drug costs is needed across insurance programs.

“If in this competitive market, Medicare is able to drop the floor on prices, what is the ripple effect?” asked Salo. “Does Medicaid get charged more?”

It’s unclear how hard the administration intends to push for Medicare negotiating authority, and the pharmaceutical industry remains one of the most formidable lobbying outfits in Washington.

John Castellani, head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement that Obama’s budget would “fundamentally alter the structure” of the Medicare prescription program, and could drive premiums up.

Obama’s $1.1 trillion health care budget also called for: - Increases, starting in 2019, in Medicare premiums for high-income beneficiaries. New enrollees as well would face additional charges.

Those charges include a home health copayment, changes to the Part B deductible, and a premium surcharge for seniors who’ve also purchased a kind of supplemental insurance seen as encouraging overuse of Medicare services. Obama has proposed similar steps before, and many Republicans agree. But AARP, the seniors’ lobby, is strongly opposed.

- A near-doubling of tobacco taxes, to extend health insurance for low-income children. The federal cigarette tax would rise from just under $1.01 per pack to about $1.95 per pack. Taxes on other tobacco products also would go up. That would provide financing to pay for the Children’s Health Insurance Program through 2019. The federal-state program serves about 8 million children, and funding technically expires Sept. 30. The tobacco tax hike would take effect in 2016.

- An $80-million increase for the HHS inspector general, whose agency investigates fraud and abuse. Part of the money would be used to oversee the insurance markets created under Obama’s health care law.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

7

PILE OF DAUNTING CHALLENGES A H E A D F O R N E X T D E F E N S E S E C R E TA R Y

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As defense secretary, Ashton Carter would face a daunting pile of problems at home and abroad. And then there are the unforeseen crises, the ones that explode onto a Pentagon chief’s agenda without warning.

all U.S. troops out by the end of 2016. Afghan officials are worried about the reduction in U.S. troop support.

U.S. military commanders say they will wait until after this summer’s fighting season to decide if they should request any changes to the current drawdown.

Any change to the pace could be seen as Obama reneging on his promise to end the war, making such a request politically tricky for Carter.

Chuck Hagel, the man Carter would replace if confirmed, as expected, by the Senate, has noted that when he took the job in February 2013, he had no idea that U.S. troops would be back in a fractured Iraq or that the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa would require an urgent deployment of the 101st Airborne Division.

--RUSSIA

Even predictable challenges, such as pursuing and killing terrorists in the Middle East and Afghanistan, can be harder than they seemed on the outside, even for an experienced national security practitioner like the 60-year-old Carter. He served in the Pentagon under President Bill Clinton and was deputy defense secretary in 2011-2013.

Carter’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee are scheduled to begin Wednesday.

A sampling of the top issues facing the next defense secretary: ISLAMIC STATE Even though President Barack Obama expected the nation to be off a war footing by 2015, among the most vexing problems Carter would inherit is the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

The bombing of IS targets in Syria, which began in September, probably will continue well into Carter’s tenure and maybe beyond. But he may face a more rapidly changing situation on the ground in Iraq, where the U.S. now has about 2,500 troops.

The Iraqi government wants to launch a major counteroffensive to regain lost territory, particularly the northern city of Mosul, but it is unclear whether Iraqi troops can succeed without U.S. soldiers by their side to call in airstrikes.

Carter may have to decide in coming months whether to recommend to Obama that he authorize U.S. troops to perform that riskier, close-in combat role in support of the Iraqis.

Carter also would manage - and assess the effectiveness of - a program designed to train members of the moderate Syrian opposition.

--THE BUDGET The looming automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, will be one of Carter’s priorities because everything the military does is based on having

The U.S. is relying on NATO partners to help pressure Russia to relent in its support of anti-government rebels in eastern Ukraine - a problem that aligns with Carter’s long history of advocating for closer NATO ties to Ukraine.

Ashton Carter, President Barack Obama’s choice to head the Defense Department, listens as the president Barack Obama announces Carter as his nominee for defense secretary Friday, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington.

enough money to pay for troops, equipment, weapons and training. Unless Congress takes action, the steep cuts initially approved in 2011 would be reinstated.

Defense and military leaders have insisted that deep cuts will require more reductions in the size of the force, particularly the Army, and make it more difficult to keep troops prepared to respond to threats or upheaval around the world.

Carter’s main job will be as the top salesman leading the charge on Capitol Hill and persuading lawmakers not only to reverse the cuts but also bolster Pentagon spending.

---

Carter would be expected to weigh in on the question of whether to expand U.S. assistance for Ukraine to include weaponry.

Carter’s background also fits another Russia problem: Moscow’s reluctance to continue with a decades-long U.S. program to help secure surplus Russian nuclear materials to ensure they do not fall into terrorists’ hands. Carter has focused on the problem of “loose nukes” in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

--CHINA Improving defense relations with China is likely to rank as a Carter priority, in part because of tensions over Beijing’s growing military might, regional influence and expanding cyberwarfare capability. Carter will have to key an eye on the other leading defense challenge in Asia: North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

---

AFGHANISTAN Obama decreed that America’s combat mission in Afghanistan is over, but there are more than 10,500 U.S. troops on the ground and many are still conducing counterterrorism operations against the Taliban and other insurgents.

American and coalition forces continue to train and advise the Afghan military.

Obama has said that the U.S. can continue to provide ground and air support to the Afghan forces when needed.

Carter, however, will have to deal with nagging questions about the pace of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which under current plans would have

I S L A M I C S TAT E F I G H T E R S A D M I T D E F E AT I N S Y R I A N T O W N O F K O B A N I The United States and several Arab allies have been striking IS positions in Syria since Sept. 23. The campaign aims to push back the jihadi organization after it took over about a third of Iraq and Syria and declared the captured territory a new caliphate.

Now Kurdish officials are hailing the retaking of Kobani as an important step toward rolling back the Islamic State group’s territorial gains.

“Kobani Canton is a representative of the resistance against terrorism in the world,” said senior Syrian Kurdish official in Kobani, Anwar Muslim. “We hope that the world will support us to come through our struggle against IS.” In this picture taken Friday, Jan. 30, 2015, a Syrian Kurdish sniper looks at the rubble in the Syrian city of Ain al-Arab, also known as Kobani. The Islamic State group has acknowledged for the first time that its fighters have been defeated in the Syrian town of Kobani and vowed to attack the town again.

Meanwhile the IS fighters vowed that their defeat in Kobani will not weaken them.

BEIRUT (AP) -- The Islamic State group has acknowledged for the first time that its fighters have been defeated in the Syrian town of Kobani and vowed to attack the town again.

“The Islamic State will stay. Say that to (U.S. President Barack) Obama,” said the fighter, pointing his finger toward destruction on the edge of Kobani.

In a video released by the pro-IS Aamaq News Agency late Friday, two fighters said the airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition were the main reason why IS fighters were forced to withdraw from Kobani. One fighter vowed to defeat the main Kurdish militia in Syria, the People’s Protection Units known as the YPG.

The fighters both laid blame for their defeat on the coalition air campaign, seemingly downplaying the role played by Kurdish

HEALTH OF THE FORCE After more than a dozen years at war, America’s service members have battled more than enemy insurgents. At home, suicides, sexual assaults, traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress all increased as the wars dragged on.

Both suicides and reported sexual assaults increased last year, compared with 2013.

The Pentagon sees the increase in reported sexual assaults as a positive sign that victims are more willing to come forward. But the military services continue to struggle to reduce assaults while also protecting victims are insuring they get proper care. It will be up to Carter to continue to pressure the services to make progress.

He also will be the final arbiter when the military services come forward later this year to say what combat jobs should not be opened to women. While thousands of front-line jobs are now open to women, many of the more difficult infantry, armor and commando jobs are still being reviewed and debated.

militiamen - whom they refer to as “rats.”

Another IS fighter, also speaking in Arabic, said while standing on a road with a green sign with “Ayn al-Islam” sprayed on it: “The warplanes did not leave any construction. They destroyed everything, so we had to withdraw and the rats advanced.”

“The warplanes were bombarding us night and day. They bombarded everything, even motorcycles,” the fighter said.

IS launched an offensive on the Kobani region in mid-September capturing more than 300 Kurdish villages and parts of the town.

As a result of the airstrikes and stiff Kurdish resistance, IS began retreating a few weeks ago, losing more than 1,000 fighters, according to activists.

More than 200,000 Kurds were forced from their homes. Many fled to neighboring Turkey.

Earlier this week, Kurdish officials said YPG fighters have launched a counterattack to retake some of the surrounding villages around Kobani, many of which remain in IS hands.

On Monday, activists and Kurdish officials said the town was almost cleared of IS fighters, who once held nearly half of Kobani.

An Associated Press video from inside the town showed widespread destruction, streets littered with debris and abandoned neighborhoods. The video also showed a new cemetery with fresh graves.

The town’s famous Freedom Square, with a statue of an eagle spreading its wings, stood intact in the middle of the destruction.

The square is near the so-called Kurdish security quarter - an eastern district where Kurdish militiamen maintained security buildings and offices, and which was occupied by IS fighters for about two months until they were forced out earlier in January.

In the newly released IS video, the militant fighters acknowledged that they have been driven from the town.

“A while ago we retreated a bit from Ayn al-Islam because of the bombardment and the killing of some brothers,” said one masked fighter, using the group’s preferred name for Kobani. He spoke Arabic with a north African accent.

The failure to capture and hold Kobani was a major blow to the extremists. Their hopes for an easy victory dissolved into a costly siege under withering airstrikes by coalition forces and an assault

by Kurdish militiamen.

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

8

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

SOUTH AFRICA RIOTS RAISE WORRY ABOUT ANTI-FOREIGN SENTIMENT Peering over his sunglasses, Malefetse said he doesn’t understand how immigrants from war-torn, impoverished African nations can set up and successfully run businesses in South Africa.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) -- South African youths recently swept through an intersection in the heart of Soweto township, breaking into immigrant-owned shops and grabbing whatever they could - soda, a loaf of bread, sometimes even the shelves. Nearly 40 years ago, at the same intersection, young blacks marched to protest the white racist rulers of the time, drawing a bloody crackdown that shocked the world.

In another part of Johannesburg, known as Little Mogadishu, Somali Salat Abdullahi recalled how relatives raised funds to buy him a bus ticket to South Africa. In 2013, while he was away at boarding school, an attack by Islamist extremists killed his family.

The recent looting and unrest that hit Soweto and other areas around Johannesburg was not as bloody as the anti-apartheid demonstrations and the ensuing bloodshed in 1976. But it alarmed a nation built on the ideals of racial reconciliation and underscored that, two decades after apartheid was replaced by the promise of a “rainbow nation,” many South Africans remain marginalized by a lack of economic opportunity.

“People said, go to South Africa, your life will be settled there,” said the 20-year-old, slumped in a dirty office chair outside the makeshift office set up to help displaced shop owners by the Somali Community Board of South Africa.

This month, though, he ended up barricaded in his Soweto shop while looters threatened him. Police escorted him out of the area.

Resentment against foreigners stoked the looting and rioting in late January that killed six people and forced many shopkeepers to flee.

Joyce Piliso-Seroke, 81, was arrested in 1976 for trying to help the marching students, some of whom burned buildings linked to the apartheid state. The anti-government movements that once aired frustrations against white minority rule now control the state but don’t have answers for the younger generation, she said.

“It’s complete silence now in the country,” Piliso-Seroke said, referring to the lack of effective prescriptions for fixing education and providing employment.

The weeklong disorder was sparked by the shooting of a 14-year-old South African boy by a Somali shop owner who believed he was being robbed. The rioting has died down and minibus taxis daily clog the road at the Soweto intersection. On the sidewalk, overturned crates and a discarded door form a stand where bruised bananas and leafy spinach, pieces of bright cloth and plastic buckets are sold. A decades-old dilapidated shopfront faces a recently built supermarket chain.

Rows of high-heel shoes and strappy sandals are laid on a faded floral bedsheet on the pavement at a shoe stall run by Morena Malefetse, 29, and Tshepo Tsosane, 27. It could have been an easy target for looters

In this photo taken Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015, Somalian, Salat Abdullahi, talks with the Associated Press, in what is known as Little Mogadishu in Johannesburg. Abdullahi is living in temporary quarters after he was barricaded inside the shop that he worked and slept in, in Soweto, while looters threatened him from outside during unrest and looting in the township south west of Johannesburg.

but they ignored the merchandise of local vendors, instead targeting a foreign-owned butchery and an electronics shop.

Malefetse and Tsosane condemned the violence against shops owned by people from Somalia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

But they said they understand the frustration on the streets.

“Young South Africans are hungry,” said Malefetse, who sports tattoos on his calf and forearm.

“It makes them angry, seeing foreigners come into the country like it’s a land of milk and honey, finding opportunities,” said Tsosane, who supports a young son.

Malefetse and Tsosane have diplomas in computer science but have been unable to find work in their fields and so have worked as security guards, installed satellite dishes and baked and sold cakes. They have been running their shoe stall for about a month.

AT TO R N E Y: V I D E O E X I S T S O F ‘ S U G E ’ K N I G H T I N D E A D LY R U N - I N

video for the biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” about the rise of N.W.A., according to a person familiar with the project who was not authorized to speak about it publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The argument resumed and escalated a short while later at a fast-food restaurant about two miles away, with Knight and the man exchanging punches through his open window. Knight then struck the man and a friend with his vehicle and fled, said sheriff’s Lt. John Corina.

Tall and with angular features, Abdullahi stands out in South Africa and he said customers had sometimes insulted him.

“What they are doing is racist,” he said.

African immigrants in South Africa remain cautious after a spate of anti-foreigner attacks in 2008 left 60 people dead. There are also concerns about the official attitude toward immigrants.

Lindiwe Zulu, the minister for small business development, was an anti-apartheid activist who spent time as an exile in Tanzania, Uganda and Angola, and previously served as a special adviser to President Jacob Zuma on international relations.

“Foreigners need to understand that they are here as a courtesy and our priority is to the people of this country,” said Zulu, after the looting.

“They cannot barricade themselves in and not share their practices with local business owners.”

Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, another former N.W.A. member, were at the film location Thursday, but they didn’t see Knight, according to the person who spoke on condition of anonymity. Filming was shut down for the day and not resumed Friday.

The history of Knight’s run-ins with the law goes back more than 20 years.

In November, Knight pleaded not guilty to a robbery charge filed over an incident in which a celebrity photographer accused him of stealing her camera i

AUDIO TOUR APP TAKES GROUPON FOUNDER ON NEW JOURNEY

Terry Carter, 55, Knight’s friend who authorities do not believe was involved in the altercation, died at a hospital, Corina said. The other man was identified by his manager as Cle “Bone” Sloan, 51, an actor and film consultant. He was hospitalized in stable condition, said manager Jermaine Shelton.

This image from video shows Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight, right, walking into the Los Angeles County Sheriffs department early Friday morning Jan. 30, 2015 in connection with a hit-and-run incident that left one man dead and another injured. Man at left is an unidentified police officer.

Corina said Knight backed up his pickup truck and knocked Sloan down.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An attorney for Marion “Suge” Knight says there’s video of an incident in which the hip-hop music mogul hit two men with his pickup truck, killing one.

“Then he puts the truck in drive, drives forward, running over him, and then keeps going forward and keeps on driving, and runs over Carter, who is standing in the parking lot, and keeps on going after that,” Corina said.

James Blatt says Saturday that the video is in “police custody” and he’ll see it on Monday or Tuesday.

Blatt says he’s confident it will show Knight being attacked by four men through his truck window and him fleeing in fear of his life.

Sheriff’s investigators say Knight was asked to leave a film set Thursday after an argument broke out between him and a man working there.

Later, the two exchanged punches in a fast food restaurant parking lot in Compton before Knight ran him over and fatally struck a friend with his truck.

He said witnesses told investigators it looked like an intentional act.

Defense attorney James Blatt said Knight was called to Tam’s Burgers in Compton for a meeting and was attacked by four people, including Sloan, as he slowed his truck. The men beat him through his window and threatened to kill him.

Corina said evidence thus far disputed Blatt’s account, saying only one man exchanged blows with Knight through the window before he got run over.

Knight’s been booked on suspicion of murder.

The incident comes less than six months after Knight was shot six times at a West Hollywood nightclub in August - the second shooting he’s survived. No arrests have been made.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

Knight punched the gas and fled in fear, Blatt said. He had no idea he hit two men. Corina said that claim is hard to believe.

As Marion “Suge” Knight sat jailed on suspicion of murder, dueling narratives cast him as attacker and victim in the hip-hop music mogul’s latest and most serious run-in with the law.

Knight surrendered early Friday and was booked on suspicion of murder. He was being held on $2 million bail.

Sheriff’s deputies said he hit and killed a man with his pickup truck, injured another and then fled. His lawyer said he was an innocent victim who accidentally ran over his friend and the other man as he tried to escape an attack.

He turned himself in and was booked on Friday.

The incident was the latest in a long line of brushes with death and the law for the 49-year-old founder of Death Row Records, one of the genre’s leading labels.

Knight started the label that helped solidify West Coast rap with Dr. Dre, who had been a member of the legendary group N.W.A. The label also launched the career of Snoop Dogg and had Tupac Shakur in the last months of his life.

The fatal incident occurred a short while after Knight was told by deputies to leave a film location where he had argued with someone, authorities said.

The cast and crew were taking a break from filming a promotional

At 6-foot-4 and weighing 325 pounds, Knight’s reputation as an imposing figure is credited, in part, with helping create Death Row Records when he strong-armed another label to release Dr. Dre from his contract, said Chuck Creekmur, CEO of allhiphop.com.

“You can’t separate Suge from the music that came out of Death Row Records,” Creekmur said. “He’s linked forever to a really, really great musical period of time. And that would be linked to a really horrific period when we lost several of our brightest stars.”

Knight was at the center of one of the most notorious rap conflicts of the 1990s, pitting rappers Tupac Shakur against Biggie Smalls in an East Coast versus West Coast rivalry.

Knight was sent to prison for nearly five years for badly beating a rival with Shakur at a Las Vegas hotel, just hours before Shakur was fatally shot while riding in Knight’s car just east of the Strip.

Smalls, whose real name was Chris Wallace, was shot to death in a similar attack six months later.

Knight and Dre later had a falling out and Dre left. The record company eventually declared bankruptcy and was auctioned off.

In this Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015 photo, Detour co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason uses his new Detour app to take an audio tour of Jack Kerouac Alley in San Francisco. Nearly two years after being fired as Groupon’s CEO, Mason is setting out on a new entrepreneurial journey selling unconventional audio tours of major cities on a new iPhone app called Detour. The first set of excursions weave through some of San Francisco’s famous neighborhoods while regaling listeners with tales about the city’s lore

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Two years after his ouster as Groupon’s CEO, Andrew Mason is embarking on a new entrepreneurial journey selling unconventional audio tours of major cities on a new iPhone app called Detour.

The initial selection of seven different San Francisco expeditions released Tuesday meander from the city’s beatnik bars to the weathered docks of the bay while regaling listeners with colorful tales about local lore. Each excursion costs $5.

If Detour follows the course being charted by Mason, the audio tours will span the world within the next five years and the app will become a standard accessory for vacationers or city dwellers just looking for a fun way to learn more about where they live.

“Most of the audio tours that exist today are about what’s popular inside museums,” Mason says. “So what we are trying to do is turn the world into a museum.”

Mason, 34, became rich by trying to create the world’s biggest bargain bin. In 2008, he transformed an online service devoted to social causes into Groupon, which offered steep discounts on everything from restaurant meals to hot-air balloon flights if enough people bought them.

By late 2011, Groupon had become an Internet sensation valued at $13 billion in an initial public offering of stock that turned Mason into a billionaire.

Things unraveled quickly as Groupon battled copycat services from hundreds of rivals, including Google and Amazon.com, and the thrill of the deals faded with many consumers. By early 2013, continued on page 9

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

9

DRIVE TO REPEAL MEDICAL DEVICE TA X N O S L A M D U N K I N C O N G R E S S “It’s going to take some work, and we’re going to have to bring it up at the right time,” he said. “I think Democrats would have a tough time voting against it.”

The repeal fight could take any of several paths.

The tax’s $29 billion covers a small fraction of the health care law’s overall costs. The White House and Democrats could end up accepting repeal as a battle not worth fighting, or opposing it as an erosion of Obama’s treasured law.

The bill could be hampered by amendments taking other swipes at the overall law. Or it could prompt negotiations over changes both sides might accept.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah leaves the Senate chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington. It flew through the Republican-run House in 2012, and a year later 79 of the Democratic-led Senate’s 100 members embraced it.

With Republicans now controlling both chambers of Congress, the chances for repealing the 2.3 percent tax on medical devices are better than ever. Yet abolishing the tax won’t be easy, even though Republicans rank it a top priority and are backed by Democrats from states that rely on the industry for jobs.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It flew through the Republican-run House in 2012, and a year later 79 of the Democratic-led Senate’s 100 members embraced it. With Republicans now controlling both chambers of Congress, the chances for repealing the 2.3 percent tax on medical devices are better than ever.

Yet abolishing the tax won’t be easy, even though Republicans rank it a top priority and are backed by Democrats from states that rely on the industry for jobs.

The upcoming battle underscores the complex politics surrounding President Barack Obama’s health care law. Another round of that fight looms next week, when the House will likely vote to repeal the entire 2010 law.

The device tax repeal faces a possible Obama veto. It is also opposed by many Democrats, including some who backed eliminating the tax in 2013 but say they want to replace any lost revenue.

Created under Obama’s expansion of health care coverage, the tax will raise an estimated $29 billion through 2022. So far no one has revealed a broadly acceptable alternative for raising that money.

The tax took effect in 2013 and is paid by manufacturers and importers of equipment like imaging systems and artificial hearts.

Exempted are consumer items like eyeglasses, hearing aids and bandages.

Obama has been opaque. The White House threatened to veto the House-passed repeal of the tax in 2012. But asked in November if he would veto a repeal of the medical device tax, Obama said, “Let me take a look comprehensively at the ideas that they present.”

The medical device industry says its 7,000 firms provide more than 400,000 U.S. jobs, and argues that the tax jeopardizes many of them. AdvaMed, the industry’s top lobbying group, says that 39,000 existing and planned jobs have been lost and companies have had to slash research, development and new investments because of the tax.

“This is a tax on manufacturing,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a leading Democratic supporter from a state where the industry says it provides 27,000 jobs.

A January study by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said the tax’s impact was far less severe. It estimated total job losses ranging from zero to 1,200 - or 0.2 percent of industry employment. It said any reductions in jobs and production “probably would be more than offset” by the added people covered by the health care law.

The measure should have no problem clearing the House in coming weeks, as it did in 2012 by a mostly party-line 270-146.

The bigger question is the Senate. When the Senate voted 79-20 to repeal the tax in 2013, 34 Democrats supported the effort. Many of those Democrats say that vote wasn’t meaningful because it didn’t specify how the lost money would be recouped and was on a budget resolution, which is advisory and not binding.

“The budget resolution was an easy vote. It was a statement of policy,” said No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Dick Durbin of Illinois, who backed that measure. “It didn’t answer the hard question -

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chief sponsor, says he wants a bipartisan bill and is open to finding replacement revenue but will push forward one way or another.

He’s introduced legislation repealing the tax retroactively to 2013, without replenishing the lost money.

tique Internationale, a process that could take weeks or months.

BOSTON BOUNCES BACK QUICKLY AFTER 2-FOOT BLIZZARD

Troy Bradley of Albuquerque and Leonid Tiukhtyaev of Russia lifted off from Japan Sunday morning, and by Friday, they beat what’s considered the “holy grail” of ballooning achievements, the 137-hour duration record set in 1978 by the Double Eagle crew of Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman in the first balloon flight across the Atlantic. They also easily exceeded the distance record of 5,209 miles set by the Double Eagle V team during the first trans-Pacific flight in 1981.

Bradley and his family have been planning for the record-breaking attempt for 15 years, spending countless hours thinking about every aspect of the journey.

“For Troy, it’s a personal thing to do something better than anyone else in the world has done it before and to push himself,” said his wife, Tami Bradley, who is a balloon pilot herself.

She said her husband’s heroes include early balloonists such as Abruzzo and Anderson.

“For Troy, it’s also his way of paying homage to those who came before him by attempting to go after their records,” she said.

Chris Laudani, a bartender at the Back Bay Social Club, pauses after shoveling snow from the Boston Marathon finish line on Boylston Street, in Boston, during a winter storm that slammed eastern Massachusetts with as much as 2 feet of snow.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Two pilots in a helium-filled balloon landed safely off the coast of Mexico early Saturday after an audacious, nearly 7,000-mile-long trip across the Pacific Ocean that shattered two long-standing records for ballooning.

The pilots landed 4 miles offshore in Baja California about 300 miles north of the popular beach destination of Cabo San Lucas. The pilots came in low and dropped thick trailing ropes into the ocean to help slow the balloon before setting down in a controlled water landing.

Mission control in Albuquerque was packed with balloon team members and the pilots’ families as it descended, with all eyes focused on a giant screen showing a map of the coast and the balloon’s location.

They exchanged hugs and smiled with relief after it touched down.

But it wasn’t until they received word that the pilots were safe and aboard a fishing boat headed to the shore that cheers erupted and the cork was popped on a bottle of champagne.

“We’re really pleased with the distance numbers we have here and very pleased with the duration numbers,” said Steve Shope, mission control director. “These are significant improvements over the existing records. We didn’t break them by just a little bit. They were broken by a significant amount.”

The world has been tracking the progress of the Two Eagles Balloon team online and through social media sites. Still, the official distance and time of the flight must be confirmed by the Federation Aeronau-

The pilots were said to be in good spirits at various times during the trip, but it was a grueling ordeal. The balloon’s capsule is about the size of a large tent - 7 feet long, 5 feet wide and 5 feet tall. At times, they flew at an altitude of more than 15,000 feet, requiring them to wear oxygen masks and bundle up against the 50-degree temperature inside the capsule. They had sleeping bags, a small onboard heater and a simple toilet.

The original route took the pilots on a path from Japan, across the Pacific Ocean and toward the Pacific Northwest before they encountered shifting weather patterns. They then made a sweeping right turn and headed south along the California coast for the Mexico landing.

By Saturday morning, the Two Eagles team had smashed the records, having traveled 6,646 miles over six days, 16 hours and 38 minutes.

what about the loss of revenue?”

Senate supporters have a strong shot at getting the 60 votes they will likely need for initial passage. With Republicans requiring votes from at least six Democrats, Hatch’s bill is already co-sponsored by five Democrats from states where the medical device industry is important.

Getting two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate to override a potential Obama veto would be much harder.

“People who support the Affordable Care Act, those of us who believe in it and shed blood for it, have to think about what’s the revenue that’s going to be the replacement in order to preserve” the health care law, said Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., using that law’s formal name.

Menendez voted for repeal in 2013.

One wild card is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. A leading liberal voice and strong supporter of Obama’s health care law, Warren voted to repeal the tax in 2013 and represents a state that AdvaMed says has nearly 24,000 industry jobs.

Asked if Warren would back Hatch’s bill, a spokeswoman said the senator has always supported repeal with a proper offset.

AUDIO TOUR APP continued from page 8

Groupon’s stock had plunged nearly 80 percent below its IPO price of $20, triggering Mason’s firing. The collapse shrunk the value of Mason’s stake in Groupon from $1.5 billion to about $228 million.

Mason, a former punk band keyboardist known for his flippant humor, initially spent his time making a quirky album called “Hardly Workin’” after his ouster from Groupon.

After that diversion, Mason moved from his longtime home in Chicago to San Francisco to focus on Detour - an idea that he had pondered even before he launched Groupon. He recalls becoming frustrated when he and his future wife were vacationing in Rome in 2007 and that could only find mundane audio tours that shackled listeners to a group of fellow travelers.

Mason figured a company would eventually make a more versatile mobile app for audio tours, but he couldn’t find one each time he went on vacation. So he decided to try to do it himself, especially once he realized he couldn’t think of anything else better to do after his whirlwind success at Groupon.

“My mind got corrupted, so I basically had to work through all the old ideas I had before I became successful,” Mason says after arriving to an interview on his Vespa scooter. He is drawing upon his own personal wealth to finance Detour, which so far has just 10 employees in addition to freelance writers who help script for the audio tours.

Detour won’t be as easy to copy as Groupon, Mason hopes, because of the technology powering it and the creative stories woven into in it.

When it’s open, Detour tracks a listener’s location to allow the tours to be taken as quickly or as slowly as desired. The flexibility means the app can automatically adjust for pit stops in restaurants and bars or other distractions. This feature threatens to raise privacy worries, but Mason says Detour only tracks user’s locations to steer them through their journeys.

Detour also uses Bluetooth signals to connect multiple people on different phones to they can simultaneously listen to audio tours that look beyond famous San Francisco landmarks.

One tour consists of a 90-minute jaunt through the old haunts of Jack Kerouac and other iconoclastic writers who catapulted San Francisco to the forefront of the Beat Generation during the 1950s. Another 75-minute stroll traipses through San Francisco’s grittier sections accompanied by the narration of Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.

Mason’s to-do list includes expanding his new app’s itinerary to include New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, as well as London and Paris.

He also jokes that he may make another musical detour by making a Christmas album this year. “I feel like I need to gift the world with my take on `Jingle Bells,’” he says.

“The technology has improved so much in the last couple of years. I don’t think there’s going to be any question about the records,” said Katie Griggs, a regional director with the nonprofit Balloon Federation of America.

The balloon is outfitted with an array of monitors and other instruments that are tracking its course and compiling the data, using technology that didn’t exist in decades past, leaving some claims unproven.

The journey has been tough on the pilots, who have been on oxygen for days; high altitude can take a physical toll. But they’ve been managing to crack jokes when checking in with mission control and their families.

POTECTING SPEICIES worldwildlife.org

10

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I T A L Y ’ S L A W M A K E R S E L E C T S E R G I O M AT TA R E L L A A S P R E S I D E N T support.

ROME (AP) -- Sergio Mattarella, a Constitutional Court justice widely considered to be above the political fray, was elected Saturday as Italy’s president in the third day of balloting by lawmakers.

Former Berlusconi allies now in Renzi’s coalition chafed at the unilateral choice of the Mattarella candidacy. But the government’s short-term survival seemed little threatened. Politicians are generally uneager to provoke a crisis that could bring early elections, with voters exasperated over their leaders’ failure so revive the economy.

He quickly set as priorities attention to his country’s moribund economy and the need for unity in Europe’s fight against a `’new season of terror.”

Mattarella’s election as head of state was clinched when he amassed 505 votes - a simple majority. The 73-year-old former minister with center-left political roots went on to garner a total of 665 votes from the 1,009 eligible electors.

Renzi’s choice of Mattarella as a nominee despite Berlusconi’s opposition “will undoubtedly increase friction within and without the ruling coalition,” London-based Eurasia Group analyst Federico Santi said in a statement on the eve of the successful balloting. “It may complicate reform progress at the margin. However, it will not derail reforms or threaten political stability.”

Known as a man of few words, Mattarella cemented that reputation with his first remarks to the nation.

“My thoughts go, above all, and before everything, to the difficulties and hopes of our fellow citizens. That’s enough,” he said in brief comments at his court office just down the street from the presidential palace. Italy is mired in recession and unemployment has hovered about 13 percent nationally. Young Italians are increasingly seeking work abroad.

Then he applied a European-wide vision to his largely ceremonial post when he made a surprise, private visit to the Ardeatine Caves, a monument to Rome’s victims of its World War II Nazi occupiers, on the city’s outskirts. After pausing in reflection there, Mattarella hailed the wartime alliance “between nations and peoples that knew how to defeat Nazi, racial, anti-Semitic and totalitarian hate” and called for more of the same solidarity now.

“The same unity in Europe and in the world will know how to defeat those who want to drag us into a new season of terror,” the presidential palace quoted him as saying.

Renzi pushed hard for Mattarella’s election, and some of Renzi’s rebellious Democrats resented the premier’s imposing his choice on them. Mattarella’s victory signals that Renzi for now succeeded in closing fractious ranks, including former Communists, in the governing coalition’s main party.

“Thanks for being serious,” Renzi and some loyalists wrote in a text message to Democrats during the balloting, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right opposition vowed to cast blank ballots. While acknowledging Mattarella’s credentials to be guarantor of the Constitution and arbiter in political crises, they insisted Renzi should have reached agreement first with Berlusconi on a candidate.

Mattarella raised conflict-of-interest concerns when media mogul Berlusconi jumped into politics two decades ago. He also resigned as education minister in 1990 to protest legislation that helped Berlusconi transform what started out as several local channels into a business empire including Italy’s three main private TV

In this image made from video posted by a Libyan blogger, the Cortinthia Hotel is seen under attack in Tripoli, Libya, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015. Gunmen stormed the luxury hotel in the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Tuesday, killing several foreigners and guards, officials said. The attack, which included a car bombing, struck the hotel, which sits along the Mediterranean Sea. The blogger, @AliTweel, captured the moments shortly after the blast, when flames rose up from outside the hotel, appearing to be from the aftermath of the car bomb.

networks.

Mattarella, a Sicilian, was first elected to Parliament in 1983. His Christian Democrat party collapsed in corruption probes of the 1990s, but Mattarella was unscathed. His older brother, Piersanti Mattarella, governor of Sicily, was killed in 1980 by the Mafia.

The silver-haired Mattarella, a widower with three grown children, has been living in the modest quarters of Constitutional Court justices in Rome. He will take the oath of office, for a seven-year term, on Tuesday.

A year ago, Berlusconi pledged his support for the electoral reform agenda of Renzi, who had just assumed the Democratic Party leadership. Buoyed by the deal, Renzi quickly pushed fellow Democrat Enrico Letta out of the premiership. Berlusconi lost his Senate seat because of a tax fraud conviction but is keen on keeping political influence.

Reforms include changing Italy’s electoral law to make governments more stable.

Whether Berlusconi, irked over Renzi’s picking the presidential candidate, will renege on the reforms deal is unclear. A pro-Berlusconi lawmaker, Maurizio Gasparri, predicted the media mogul’s center-right lawmakers might be “less generous” with

H O W C A N G O O G L E S N A P I T S S TO C K O U T O F I T S S T U P O R ? $64 billion in cash to shareholders when asked about it Thursday. He indicated Google would be more likely to do so if laws are changed to allow U.S. companies to bring back money held in overseas accounts at lower tax rates. About 60 percent, or $38 billion, of Google’s cash is held outside of the U.S., Pichette said.

Although no commitments were made, those remarks seemed to be enough to reverse an initial sell-off in Google’s stock following the disappointing earnings report.

After shedding 2 percent in the first hour of extended trading, the shares rebounded to post a 1 percent gain of $6.27 to $519.50.

CONTROLLING EXPENSES

National Retail Federation listen to a discussion about Google Wallet, in New York.

Google has gotten into the habit of missing analysts’ earnings targets, frustrating investors who believe the online search leader would be more profitable it wasn’t pouring so much money into far-flung projects such as Internet-connected eyewear and driverless cars. The latest letdown came Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015, with the release of Google’s fourth-quarter financial results. The earnings were well below analysts’ predictions, marking the fifth consecutive quarter that Google Inc. hasn’t cleared a key hurdle for publicly held companies.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google has turned into a stock market laggard as the shift to mobile devices has lowered the Internet search leader’s digital ad prices and the company’s expensive investments in far-out technology has trimmed its profit margins.

Those factors have left some investors wondering what Google might do to boost its stock price, especially after the company’s latest financial report. The earnings released late Thursday missed analyst targets, marking the fifth consecutive quarter that has happened.

That discouraging trend is one reason Google’s stock price ended Thursday’s trading session 8 percent below where it stood 13 months ago. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index has climbed by 9 percent during the same stretch.

POTENTIAL CATALYSTS One way to lift the stock would be to slash expenses to boost earnings, something that Google CEO Larry Page doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing. Page believes the company needs to continue taking risks and making big bets on ambitious ideas to open future moneymaking opportunities while striving to make the world a better place.

Another way would be for Google to start paying a quarterly dividend for the first time in its 10-year history as a public company, or to pour money into buying back its own stock. That strategy has worked well for another technology leader, Apple Inc., whose own shares have surged by nearly 60 percent since the iPhone maker announced a higher dividend and increased stock buybacks nine months ago.

Investors also may have drawn hope from Pichette’s pledge to spend in a “prudent manner,” even after a year that saw Google pour billions into hiring nearly 10,000 more employees and a wide range of projects that include self-driving cars, Internet-connected eyewear, Internet-beaming balloons, robotics, satellites and biotechnology.

“From an investment perspective, we’ll continue to seek a healthy balance between growth and discipline and the willingness to throttle back when we reach the limits of what we believe we can manageably absorb,” Pichette said.

REASON FOR SKEPTICSM Edward Jones analyst Josh Olson doubts Google is going to start paying dividends or buying bushels of its own stock anytime soon. He interpreted Pichette’s comments as a “false signal.”

Paying a dividend also is frequently done by companies that have run out of growth opportunities, Olson said, and that isn’t the case with Google.

Even though shift from desktop computers to smartphones has curbed Google’s pricing power in the digital market, Olson believes the Mountain View, California, company is likely to regain some of the clout as the mobile market evolves.

Although he didn’t participate in Thursday’s conference call, Page has made it clear through the years that he isn’t interesting in pursuing strategies designed to increase earnings from one quarter to next or provide a short-term lift to Google’s stock price. Page’s opinion matters even more than most CEOs because he and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin control enough Google stock to veto everyone else.

“If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short-term results but are in the best long-term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities,” Page wrote in a letter leading up to Google’s initial public offering in 2004. “We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.”

The video, released on militant websites, heightened fears for the life of a Jordanian pilot whose fate had been linked to that of Goto. Earlier this week, Jordan had offered to free an al-Qaida prisoner for the pilot, but a swap never moved forward.

Jordan’s government spokesman, Mohammed al-Momani, declined comment late Saturday on the video of Goto’s purported beheading.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the Cabinet was convening an emergency meeting and was rushing to confirm the authenticity of the online video.

Suga described the online video as a `deplorable terrorist act.”

The video, highlighted by militant sympathizers on social media sites, bore the symbol of the Islamic State group’s al-Furqan media arm.

Though the video could not be immediately independently verified by The Associated Press, it conformed to other beheading videos released by the extremists, who now control about a third of both Syria and neighboring Iraq in a self-declared caliphate.

The video, called “A Message to the Government of Japan,” featured a militant who looked and sounded like a militant with a British accent who has taken part in other beheading videos by the Islamic State group. Goto, kneeling in an orange prison jumpsuit, said nothing in the roughly one-minute-long video.

“Abe,” the militant says in the video, referring to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, “because of your reckless decision to take part in an unwinnable war, this man will not only slaughter Kenji, but will also carry on and cause carnage wherever your people are found. So let the nightmare for Japan begin.”

U.S. officials said they were trying to confirm the authenticity of the video.

“We have seen the video purporting to show that Japanese citizen Kenji Goto has been murdered by the terrorist group ISIL,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the White House’s National Security Council, using an alternate acronym for the extremist group. “The United States strongly condemns ISIL’s actions and we call for the immediate release of all the remaining hostages. We stand in solidarity with our ally Japan.”

Goto, a 47-year-old freelance journalist, was captured in October, after he traveled to Syria to try to win the release of Haruna Yukawa, a colleague held by the Islamic State group.

Yukawa reportedly was killed previously, though authorities have yet to authenticate the video claiming that.

Saturday’s video made no mention of the Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, who was captured after his fighter plane went down in December over an Islamic State-controlled area of Syria.

Earlier this week, Jordan had offered to release an al-Qaida prisoner for the pilot. However, in a purported online message earlier this week, the militants threatened to kill the pilot if the prisoner wasn’t released by Thursday. That deadline passed, and the families of the pilot and the journalist were left to wait in agony for two days.

Late Friday, Japan’s deputy foreign minister reported a deadlock in efforts to free Goto.

The hostage drama began last week after militants threatened to kill Goto and Yukawa in 72 hours unless Japan paid $200 million.

Later, the militants’ demand shifted to a release of the al-Qaida prisoner, Sajijda al-Rishawi, 44, who faces death by hanging in Jordan for her role in triple hotel bombings in Amman in 2005. Sixty people were killed in those attacks, the worst terror attack in Jordan’s history.

Al-Rishawi has close family ties to the Iraq branch of al-Qaida, a precursor of the Islamic State group.

Jordan and Japan reportedly conducted indirect negotiations with the militants through Iraqi tribal leaders.

AFTER SURGERY continued from page 1

“The real focus has to be on what’s happening in the operating room,” said Leape, who wrote a JAMA editorial.

He noted that some surgeries seldom result in infections and said the solution might be to have other surgeons watch what goes on in operating rooms where patients are rarely infected.

“Share price does matter,” Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer, said in a Thursday conference call. “It matters to our board. It matters to all of us.”

Pichette didn’t rule out the possibility of returning some of Google’s

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- An online video released Saturday night purported to show an Islamic State group militant beheading Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, ending days of negotiations by diplomats to save the man.

Dr. Lucien Leape, a prominent patient safety advocate and Harvard School of Public Health professor, said incision infections are very rarely the patient’s fault.

Google certainly has an incentive to do something, if for no other reason than to keep its 53,600 workers happy. Company stock is part of their pay package, so employee morale could suffer if Google’s stock remains in a funk.

LIFTING SPIRITS

ISLAMIC STATE GROUP B E H E A D S J A PA N E S E JOURNALIST

www.additions.generalcontractors1.com

“Go out there and copy the best,” he said. “There’s pretty good evidence that that works.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

11

VAT I C A N H I T S S O U R N O T E W I T H W O M E N , B U T P R O G R E S S M AY C O M E VATICAN CITY (AP) -- A new Vatican outreach initiative to listen to women hit a sour note before it even got off the ground: The sexy blonde on its Internet promo video came under such ridicule that it was quickly taken down.

nations and is totally unacceptable in predominantly Muslim countries - the fact of the matter is that highlighting a stereotypical spokeswoman is not the way to ask for women’s input.”

Critics noted that the women the Vatican might most want to hear from - those suffering from poverty, violence or war - might not have a smart phone at hand to send in a clip. Others noted that the two-week deadline - at the height of the Christmas holidays - worked against any widespread response.

But the program is going ahead, and an inaugural meeting this week will study women’s issues in ways that are utterly new for the Holy See. No, there is no talk of ordaining women priests.

The English version of Brilli’s promo was summarily yanked, though the Italian remains on the ministry’s website.

But the working paper for the Pontifical Council of Culture’s plenary assembly on “Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference” speaks about opening the church’s doors to women so they can offer their skills “in full collaboration and integration” with men.

It denounces plastic surgery as a form of “aggression” against the female body “like a burqa made of flesh.” And it acknowledges that the church has for centuries offered women “ideological and ancestral left-overs.”

This is dangerous territory for the all-male Catholic Church hierarchy, as even Pope Francis has faced criticism for being a bit tone deaf as far as women are concerned.

The pontiff, a master of communication, has sincerely praised the “feminine genius.” But he has also elicited cringes, such as when he recently welcomed female members of the church’s most prestigious theological commission as “strawberries on the cake.” And when asked if a woman might someday head a Vatican office, he joked that “pastors often wind up under the authority of their housekeeper!”

Few people doubt the seriousness of Francis’ pledge to appoint women to key Vatican decision-making jobs once his bureaucratic reform is complete. Nor do they question his sincerity when he says: “Women can ask questions that we men just don’t get.”

But, as Vatican commentator David Gibson recently pointed out, Francis can also sound an awful lot like the 78-year-old Argentine churchman that he is - “using analogies that sound alternately condescending and impolitic, even if well-intentioned.”

The Vatican has made progress in recent years, appointing laywomen to some Vatican offices and giving women’s issues as a whole more ink with the monthly women’s insert of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

But many would argue that much remains to be done when the recently ousted Vatican high court judge, Cardinal Raymond Burke, complains that the church has been “assaulted” by radical feminism and that the

In the end, some 250 videos were sent in. A good number came from activists advocating for women’s ordination.

Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi waves to reporters as he arrives for a meeting, at the Vatican. A new Vatican initiative to actually listen to women hit a sour note before it even got off the ground when an Internet promotional video featuring a sexy blonde was so ridiculed that it was quickly taken down. But the initiative is going ahead, and an

shortage of priests is due to an overly “feminized” church.

The latest initiative comes courtesy of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, an academic who quotes Nietzsche and Amy Winehouse with equal ease and has no fear of courting controversy as he raises the Vatican profile in sport, art and even atheist circles at the helm of the Vatican’s culture ministry.

Ravasi’s first major foray into women’s issues, however, was a flop - at least in the English-speaking world.

Just before Christmas, his office launched the (hash)lifeofwomen crowd-sourcing initiative to promote the Feb. 4-7 plenary meeting and invite women around the globe to send in a 60-second video of their lives for possible inclusion in a montage to be screened at the “big meeting of cardinals and bishops” next week.

In the video, Italian actress Nancy Brilli - buxom albeit in a modest blue top - earnestly asked her viewers how often they ask themselves “Who are you? What do you do? What do you think about yourself as a woman?”

The criticism was swift and harsh.

“What were they thinking at the Vatican?” wrote Phyllis Zagano of Hofstra University in the liberal National Catholic Reporter. “Aside from the obvious - sexy sell has long gone by the boards in developed

JUST WHOSE INTERNET IS IT? NEW F E D E R A L R U L E S M AY A N S W E R T H AT Broadband providers have questioned the fairness of this approach. They have invested heavily in a sophisticated infrastructure and question whether the government should be telling them how to run their networks and package services.

But what if the major cable companies that provide much of the nation’s broadband had free rein to load some files faster than others? It is easy to imagine scenarios where these providers might favor content produced by their affiliates or start charging “tolls” to move data. Consumers naturally would gravitate toward faster sites and services that pay those fees, while smaller startups or nonprofits get shut out.

THE OPTIONS

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler speaks during new conference in Washington. Whose Internet is it anyway? Wheeler says he’s keeping that question in mind as he pitches the biggest regulatory shake-up to the telecommunications industry since 1996, when people still used noisy modems and referred to the “information superhighway” as a fun way to buy books or check the weather.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Whose Internet is it anyway?

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, says he’s keeping that question in mind as he pitches the biggest regulatory shake-up to the telecommunications industry since 1996, when people still used noisy modems and referred to the “information superhighway” as a fun way to buy books or check the weather.

Wheeler has not publicly released his plan yet, and might not for a few weeks. But he has suggested that Internet service has become as critical to people in the United States as water, electricity or phone service and should be regulated like any other public utility.

Wheeler told reporters this past week that he wants “yardsticks in place to determine what is in the best interest of consumers as opposed to what is in the best interest of the gatekeepers.”

That has the industry sounding the alarms, warning consumers of an inevitable $72 annual tax increase on each U.S. wireless account. But advocates of the approach say that is not likely to happen and that your Internet experience probably will carry on as usual.

A look at what “net neutrality” means and what is likely to happen: THE ISSUE Net neutrality is the idea that Internet providers should not move some content faster than others or enter into paid agreements with companies such as Netflix to prioritize their data.

The FCC had used the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which was intended to encourage competition in the telephone and cable industry, to enforce “open Internet” rules, until recently, when a federal appeals court knocked down that approach.

President Barack Obama and consumer advocates say a better tack would be to apply Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. That law, written with radio, telegraph and phone service in mind, prohibits companies from charging unreasonable rates or threatening access to services that are critical to society.

Industry likens that approach to cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.

THE FCC Wheeler says he will circulate his proposal among the other FCC commissioners before Thursday. He has suggested it probably will apply Title II regulation to all Internet service, including wireless, but with some caveats.

Industry experts expect that Wheeler will say many rules should not apply to broadband, invoking what’s called “forbearance.”

The commissioners will vote Feb. 26. Wheeler expected to have the support of the other two Democratic commissioners. The two Republican commissioners have made clear that they do not support applying Title II. Next stop will be the courts. Industry lobbyists and FCC officials say there’s no doubt one of the big providers will sue and probably ask the court to suspend enforcement of the new regulation pending appeal. It’s possible the issue won’t be resolved for several more years, even well into the next president’s first term.

CONGRESS Lawmakers could try to resolve the uncertainty, but Congress rarely is that pragmatic. Lawmakers tend to take on issues that fire up their base or bring their states money, and an in-the-

Consuela Corradi, a sociologist at Rome’s Catholic Lumsa university, was one of 15 women who advised Ravasi on the initiative. She complained that criticism of the video was unfair.

“If we had chosen an ugly woman, would that have changed the message? I don’t think so,” she said. She said the women consultants were entirely responsible for penning the working document, with no interference from the ministry, though she said their document was trimmed for length.

It remains unclear, however, what will come of it. Often such working drafts become the basis for a final document that is adopted by the full membership of a Vatican office at the end of a plenary meeting. Ravasi, though, hasn’t said what he’ll do with it.

Helen Alvare, a law professor at George Mason University and a consultant at the Vatican’s laity office, said the language in the draft paper was remarkable given that it calls for “collaboration and integration” with men within the church. She said that mirrors findings from leading business consultancies that companies do better when men and women collaborate at every level.

“That statement is the strongest endorsement I have seen in a church document for what we sometimes call complementarity within the church,” she said in a phone interview. weeds compromise on telecommunications law would be a lot of work with little immediate payoff.

So far, Republicans have pitched an idea that would enforce basic open Internet rules but could strip the FCC of its ability to help local municipalities build their own broadband. It’s a nonstarter for Obama and congressional Democrats who say poor and rural areas have been left behind in the deployment of high-speed Internet.

Assuming Wheeler’s proposal satisfies consumer advocacy groups, Democrats would have little incentive to revisit the issue.

While Republicans have the votes to ram though their own anti-regulation legislation without Democratic support, Obama would veto it.

CONSUMERS Most Internet providers, except Sprint, have warned the legal uncertainty will chill future investments. FCC officials point to a recent wireless spectrum auction that has attracted some $44 billion as proof that the telecommunications industry is thriving even amid the current uncertainty.

As for taxes, the Progressive Policy Institute estimated that treating the Internet like phone service would trigger taxes and fees up to $15 billion a year, including $67 for each wired service and $72 for wireless in state and local taxes.

But that report, widely quoted by industry lobbyists, did not take into account the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibits state and local governments from imposing new taxes on Internet access, or the FCC’s ability to shield consumers against some state and local taxes by claiming the Internet is an “interstate” service.

Improves the health and lives of people affected by poverty, disaster, and civil unrest.

www.directrelief.org

12

The Weekly News Digest, Feb 9 thru Feb 13, 2015

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

POLL SHOWS GIANT GAP BETWEEN W H AT P U B L I C , S C I E N T I S T S T H I N K

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The American public and U.S. scientists are light-years apart on science issues. And 98 percent of surveyed scientists say it’s a problem that we don’t know what they’re talking about.

Scientists are far less worried about genetically modified food, pesticide use and nuclear power than is the general public, according to matching polls of both the general public and the country’s largest general science organization. Scientists were more certain that global warming is caused by man, evolution is real, overpopulation is a danger and mandatory vaccination against childhood diseases is needed.

In eight of 13 science-oriented issues, there was a 20-percentage-point or higher gap separating the opinions of the public and members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, according to survey work by the Pew Research Center. The gaps didn’t correlate to any liberal-conservative split; the scientists at times take more traditionally conservative views and at times more liberal.

“These are big and notable gaps,” said Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s internet, science and technology research. He said they are “pretty powerful indicators of the public and the scientific community seeing the world differently.”

In the most dramatic split, 88 percent of the scientists surveyed said it is safe to eat genetically modified foods, while only 37 percent of the public say it is safe and 57 percent say it is unsafe. And 68 percent of scientists said it is safe to eat foods grown with pesticides, compared with only 28 percent of the general public.

Ninety-eight percent of scientists say humans evolved over time, compared with 65 percent of the public. The gap wasn’t quite as large for vaccines, with 86 percent of the scientists favoring mandatory childhood shots while 68 percent of the public did.

Eighty-seven percent of scientists said global warming is mostly due to human activity, while only half of the public did. The figures for scientists are slightly different than past academic studies because of wording of the question and the fact that AAAS members include many specialties, but they tell the same essential story, said Pew associate director Cary Funk.

What to do about climate change is another issue. Nearly twothirds of scientists favored building more nuclear power plants, but only 45 percent of the public did. But more of the public favored offshore drilling for oil and fracking than scientists

In this Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, picture, a harvester works through a field of genetically modified corn on the dairy farm owned

by Al Lafranchi, near Santa Rosa, Calif. Scientists are far less worried about genetically modified food, pesticide use, and nuclear power than is the general public, according to matching polls of both the general public and the country’s largest general science organization.

did.

More than four out of five scientists thought the growing world population will be a major problem, but just less than three out of five members of the public did.

LONDON (AP) -- British lawmakers will vote Tuesday on whether to let scientists use controversial techniques to create babies from the DNA of three people - a move that could prevent children from inheriting potentially fatal diseases yet would make Britain the first country in the world to allow embryos to be genetically modified.

The techniques - which aim to prevent mothers from passing on inherited diseases - involve altering a human egg or embryo before transferring it into the mother. British law currently forbids any such modification.

The technology is completely different from that used to create genetically modified foods, where scientists typically select individual genes to be transferred from one organism into another.

In Britain’s House of Commons on Tuesday, health minister Jane Ellison kicked off the debate by urging support for the change.

“This is a bold step to take, but it is a considered and informed step,” she said, of the proposed technology to help women with mitochondrial diseases.

Defects in the mitochondria can result in diseases including muscular dystrophy, heart, kidney and liver failure and severe muscle weakness.

Critics, however, say the techniques cross a fundamental scientific boundary, since the changes made to the embryos will be passed on to future generations.

They say approving these techniques could lead to the creation of “designer babies.” “(This is) about protecting children from the severe health risks of these unnecessary techniques and protecting everyone from the eugenic designer-baby future that will follow from this,” said David King, director of the secular watchdog group Human Genetics Alert.

“It’s not about being smart or dumb,” Leshner said. “It’s about whether, in fact, you understand the source of the fact and what the facts are.”

NASA LAUNCHES E A RT H - O B S E RV I N G S AT E L L I T E

Pew polled 2,002 adults in August and did an online survey of 3,748 AAAS members in the fall. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points for the public and 1.7 percentage points for the scientists.

In 2009, Pew asked only a handful of questions like these to both scientists and the public and the gap hasn’t changed much since, Funk said.

“On the whole, as compared to most members of the public, scientists are likely drawing from a larger scientific knowledge base - and thinking more scientifically - about each of these issues,” George Mason University communications professor Edward Maibach said in an email. “Therefore, their views appear to be more in line with a completely dispassionate reading of the risks versus the benefits.”

Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS, said the gap between the way the public and scientists look at issues is a cause for concern.

“Science is about facts; science is not about values,” Leshner said. “Policies are made on facts and values and we want to make sure that the accurate, non-distorted facts are brought in to any kind of discussion.”

The trouble is that scientists don’t think the public knows the facts. The survey said 84 percent of the scientists said it is a

UK TO DECIDE IF IT’S OK TO MAKE BA B I E S F RO M DNA OF 3 PEOPLE

British lawmakers will vote Tuesday Feb. 3, 2015, on whether to allow scientists to use controversial techniques to create babies from the DNA of three people to prevent children from inheriting potentially fatal diseases from their mothers, a move that could make the country the first in the world to allow embryos to be genetically modified.

major problem that “the public does not know very much about science” and another 14 percent said it is a minor problem.

And 97 percent of the scientists criticized the educational system. Three-quarters of the scientists said not enough science and math education is a major problem and another 22 percent said it was a minor one.

This photo provided by NASA, A Delta 2 rocket carrying the Soil Moisture Active Passive, SMAP ,satellite launches early Saturday, Jan. 31, 2015 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The launch is a three-year mission to track the amount of water locked in soil, which may help residents in low-lying regions brace for floods or farmers prepare for drought conditions.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) -- A NASA satellite lifted off early Saturday with the hope it will transmit data that will help the world do a better job of preparing for floods and droughts.

The satellite is on a three-year mission to track the amount of water locked in soil, which may help residents in low-lying regions brace for floods or farmers get ready for drought conditions.

The Delta 2 rocket carrying the Soil Moisture Active Passive - or SMAP - satellite launched shortly before sunrise from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central coast. As the rocket zoomed skyward, it gave off an orange glow.

About an hour later, the satellite successfully separated from the rocket and began unfurling its solar panels to start generating power.

NASA launch manager Tim Dunn said there were zero launch problems with the rocket, calling Delta 2 a “workhorse.”

The techniques would likely only be used in about a dozen British women every year who have faulty mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell’s nucleus. To fix that, scientists remove the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother and insert it into a donor egg from which the nucleus DNA has been removed. This can be done either before or after fertilization.

Once the satellite reaches the desired orbit 430 miles high, engineers will spend two weeks checking out the two instruments, which will measure moisture in the soil every several days to produce high-resolution global maps.

The resulting embryo would end up with the nucleus DNA from its parents but the mitochondrial DNA from the donor. Scientists say the DNA from the donor egg amounts to less than 1 percent of the resulting embryo’s genes.

Scientists hope data collected by the satellite, the latest to join NASA’s Earth-orbiting fleet, will improve flood forecasts and drought monitoring.

Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held a meeting to discuss the techniques and scientists warned it could take decades to determine if they are safe. Experts say the techniques are likely being used elsewhere, such as in China and Japan, but are mostly unregulated.

At a news conference broadcast online, SMAP mission project manager Kent Kellogg said the launch went off without a hitch and called it a “terrific ride into space.”

Rachel Kean, whose aunt suffered from mitochondrial disease and had several miscarriages and stillbirths, said she hoped British politicians would approve the techniques. Kean, an activist for the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, said her mother is also a carrier of mitochondrial disease and that she herself would like the option one day of having children who won’t be affected.

“Knowing that you could bring a child into this world for a short, painful life of suffering is not something I would want to do,” she said.

A spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron said he was a “strong supporter” of the change. Cameron had a severely disabled son, Ivan, who died at age 6 in 2009, from a rare form of epilepsy.

Lisa Jardine, who chaired a review into the techniques conducted by Britain’s fertility regulator, said each case will be under close scrutiny and that doctors will track children born using this technique as well as their future offspring.

She acknowledged there was still uncertainty about the safety of the novel techniques.

“Every medical procedure ultimately carries a small risk,” she said, pointing out that the first baby created using in-vitro fertilization would never have been born if scientists hadn’t risked experimenting with unproven methods.

Kean said she understood the opposition to the new technology.

“It’s everybody’s prerogative to object due to their own personal beliefs,” she said. “But to me the most ethical option is stopping these devastating diseases from causing suffering in the future.”

“This data will benefit not only scientists seeking a better understanding of our planet, climate and environment ... it’s a boon for emergency planners and policy makers,” said Geoffery Yoder, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for programs.

Currently, drought maps and flash flood guidance issued by the federal government are based on computer modeling. SMAP will take real-time measurements that can be incorporated into forecasts, said Dara Entekhabi, mission science team leader from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The rocket was supposed to fly earlier this week, but high winds and technical problems kept it grounded.

JPL manages the $916 million mission, which is designed to last at least three years.

Besides the satellite, the rocket also carried three research nanosatellites for JPL, Montana State University and California Polytechnic State University. More than 100 university students took part in designing and building the tiny satellites known as CubeSats.

All four CubeSats were ejected and flying free Saturday morning and their transmitters were slowly being turned on, said Scott Higginbotham, a mission manager in the Ground Processing Directorate at NASA.