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OBAMA HIGHLIGHTS CHILD CARE IN GOP STRONGHOLDS OF KANSAS President Barack Obama visits with 3-5 year-olds at the Community Children’s Center in Lawrence, Kansas, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015, before speaking about the themes in his State of the Union address.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- President Barack Obama is pitching a plan for universal child care at a liberal stronghold deep in Republican territory, promoting his Democratic party agenda while calling for less partisanship in Washington.

He says that with two working parents in many U.S. households, high-quality child care programs “are not just nice-to-haves, these are must-haves.”

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NY ASSEMBLY SPEAKER MASKED BRIBES AS LEGITIMATE INCOME

NEW YORK (AP) -- New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was arrested Thursday on corruption charges and accused of using his position as one of the most powerful politicians in Albany to obtain millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks masked as legitimate income.

The 70-year-old Silver was taken into custody around 8 a.m. at the FBI’s New York City office, FBI spokesman Peter Donald confirmed. Silver faces five counts, including conspiracy and bribery, and the charges carry a potential penalty of 100 years in prison.

Legislature agreed to certain changes to campaign finance reporting requirements and bribery laws.

As speaker of the Democrat-controlled Assembly, Silver is one of the most influential people in New York state government. Along with the Senate majority leader and the governor, he plays a major role in creating state budgets, laws and policies in a system long-criticized in Albany as “three men in a room.”

New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is transported by federal agents to federal court, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015 in New York. Silver, who has been one of the most powerful men in Albany for more than two decades, was arrested Thursday on public corruption charges.

Obama told a crowd at the University of Kansas: “I don’t want anybody being daycare poor.”

In a criminal complaint, authorities said Silver abused his power and “obtained about $4 million in payments characterized as attorney referral fees solely through the corrupt use of his official position.”

He acknowledged losing Kansas twice during his presidential campaigns,

Silver’s attorney, Joel Cohen, called the charges “meritless.”

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C L E A N U P U N D E R WAY FOR NEARLY 3M-GALLON SALTWATER SPILL IN ND In this photo taken Jan. 12, 2015, crews dig up land at a saltwater spill site near Blacktail Creek outside Williston, N.D. A North Dakota health official called the 70,000 barrel spill the state’s largest during the state’s current oil boom. (

Cleanup is underway after nearly 3 million gallons of brine, a salty, toxic byproduct of oil and natural gas production, leaked from a pipeline in western North Dakota, the largest spill of its kind in the state since the current energy boom began.

The full environmental impact of the spill, which contaminated two creeks, might not be clear for months. Some previous saltwater spills have taken years to clean up. A contractor hired by the pipeline operator will be on site Thursday, assessing the damage.

Operator Summit Midstream Partners LLC detected the pipeline spill on Jan. 6, about 15 miles north of Williston and informed North Dakota officials then. State health officials on Wednesday said they weren’t given a full account of the size until Tuesday.

Inspectors have been monitoring the area near Williston, in the heart of North Dakota’s oil country, but it will be difficult to assess the effects of the spill until the ice melts, said Dave Glatt, chief of the North Dakota Department of Health’s environmental health section.

“This is not something we want to happen in North Dakota,” Glatt said.

The spill presently doesn’t threaten public drinking water or human health, Glatt said. He said a handful of farmers have been asked to keep their livestock away from the two creeks, the smaller of which will be drained.

Brine, also referred to as saltwater, is an unwanted byproduct of drilling that is much saltier than sea water and may also contain petroleum and residue from hydraulic fracturing operations.

The new spill is almost three times larger than one that fouled a portion of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in July. Another million-gallon saltwater spill in 2006, near Alexander, is still being cleaned up nearly a decade later.

Summit Midstream said in a statement Wednesday that about 65,000 barrels of a mix of freshwater and brine have been pumped out from Blacktail Creek. Brine also reached the bigger Little Muddy Creek and potentially the Missouri River.

Glatt said the Blacktail Creek will be completely drained as part of the initial cleanup, but the water and soil will have to be continuously tested until after the spring thaw because some of the contaminated water has frozen. The Little Muddy Creek will not be drained because it is bigger than the Blacktail Creek and the saltwater is being diluted.

“We will be monitoring to see how quickly it gets back to natural background water quality conditions, and we are already starting to see that,” Glatt said of the Little Muddy Creek. “It’s getting back pretty quickly.”

Summit Midstream’s chief operating officer, Rene Casadaban, said in a statement that the company’s “full and undivided attention” is focused continued on page 6

Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

“Mr. Silver looks forward to responding to them - in court - and ultimately his full exoneration,” Cohen said in a statement.

Silver was expected to make a court appearance later Thursday.

The arrest sent shock waves through New York’s Capitol as a new legislative session began, and it came just a day after Silver shared the stage with Gov. Andrew Cuomo during his State of the State address.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara took over the files of New York’s Moreland anti-corruption commission after Cuomo closed it in April. Bharara said in October that investigations into Albany’s pay-to-play politics are continuing.

The commission and Bharara were looking into lawmakers’ earnings outside their state salaries. Silver’s outside income has long been a subject of discussion and controversy. Last year, he reported making up to $750,000 for legal work, mostly with the trial firm of Weitz & Luxenberg.

When the commission began to investigate public corruption in 2013, including outside income earned by Silver and other state legislators, “Silver took legal action and other steps to prevent the disclosure of such information,” the complaint said.

It noted that Silver publicly accused the commission of abusing its power by engaging “in a fishing expedition to intimidate legislators.”

The complaint said Cuomo disbanded the commission in March only after Silver and his staff played a key role in negotiations in which the

in leadership.

The Assembly canceled a scheduled Thursday session.

Its majority Democratic Conference was meeting, but members said they would make no immediate changes

“There’s no chance of that happening,” said Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, a Manhattan Democrat. Legislators hadn’t seen the charges, Silver is presumed innocent, and it’s “a sad day considering” all the work Silver and the conference have done protecting New York’s poor and others, he said.

Silver has gone toe-to-toe with five New York governors - from the late Mario Cuomo to his son Andrew Cuomo - since early 1994, when he was selected Assembly speaker to replace the ailing Saul Welprin.

Silver was first elected to the Assembly in 1976, representing a district on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he was born and still lives with his wife, Rosa. The complaint noted that his total annual salary and compensation is $121,000, plus per diem pay, a car and driver and travel reimbursement.

A graduate of Brooklyn Law School and a practicing attorney, Silver has championed liberal causes in the Legislature, where he has used his position as a powerbroker to support teachers, trial lawyers and civil service unions.

But he has also seen more than his share of corruption and scandal in his chamber. Several Assembly members have been hit in recent years with criminal charges ranging from taking bribes to using campaign funds for personal expenses.

In 2003, Silver’s then-counsel, Michael Boxley, was convicted of sexual misconduct. Nine years later, Silver handled a confidential settlement of $103,000 in public funds for two women who said they were sexually harassed by their boss, then-Assemblyman Vito Lopez of Brooklyn. After the details of the settlement went public, the Assembly speaker was criticized for his role. Silver later said the case should have been handled by the ethics committee.

EX-NEW MEXICO LAWMAN GETS 10 YEARS IN BIZARRE ROAD RAGE CASE Rep. Debbie Rodella, D-Espanola, the wife of former Rio Arriba County Sheriff Thomas Rodella, center, wearing sunglasses, is helped from the federal courthouse as family members and supporters leave, on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015, in Albuquerque, N.M., after the former lawman was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in a road rage case. Rodella was convicted in September 2014 of brandishing a firearm and depriving a motorist of his rights during a March traffic stop.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced a former New Mexico sheriff to 10 years in prison for abusing a driver in a bizarre, off-duty traffic stop that prosecutors described as a fit of road rage.

Ex-Rio Arriba County Sheriff Thomas Rodella told the judge during the sentencing hearing that he did good deeds during his tenure, and the court received letters from community members who praised his service.

However, others wrote letters criticizing the former sheriff over allegations that he abused his office.

One letter compared Rodella to the Dallas Cowboys, U.S. District Judge James Browning said. Either you love him or you hate him, he said.

Defense attorneys sought to lessen Rodella’s term over health concerns.

But prosecutors argued Rodella created a dangerous situation the day he pulled over a motorist, and health concerns were an issue when he sought re-election.

“I hope this is part of your journey in life,” Browning told Rodella during sentencing. “I hope you use this time.”

The sentence, which includes three years of supervised release and a $200,000 fine, left Rodella’s family and friends in tears. They consoled each other outside the courthouse and declined to answer reporters’ questions.

Rodella was convicted of brandishing a firearm and deprivation of rights following a four-day trial in September.

He faced up to 17 years in prison over the March encounter.

According to prosecutors, Rodella pulled a gun on Michael Tafoya and struck him in the face with his badge because Tafoya cut him off in traffic.

Tafoya testified during the trial that he felt his life was in danger when Rodella chased him and pulled out his gun.

“I said, `Please, don’t kill me,’” Tafoya told jurors.

Rodella, who was in plain clothes at the time, said Tafoya was a reckless driver whom he was trying to stop in the interest of public safety.

Defense lawyer Robert Gorence twice tried to win a new trial but was unsuccessful. He has said Rodella plans to appeal.

U.S. Attorney Damon Martinez said he respected the judge’s decision despite the reduced sentence. But he noted law officers need to keep the public’s trust.

“When one of those officers crosses the line ... that person needs to be held accountable,” Martinez said.

The sentencing likely ends Rodella’s long, troubled career in politics and law enforcement.

Rodella was elected sheriff in 2010, despite having been ousted as a mag-

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NO-TIP RESTAURANT OFFERS FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON PAY, BENEFITS $2.83 hourly. After taking tips into account, that translates into a median wage of $8.25 an hour, or just over $17,000 per year for a full-time employee, according to Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, an organization seeking to improve conditions in the field.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Customers to Girard Brasserie and Bruncherie might be in for a surprise when they read the note attached to their bills: “Tipping is not necessary.”

That’s food for thought in an industry where servers depend on gratuities for the bulk of their pay.

Yet staff at the French-inspired restaurant earn about $13 an hour, and they get sick time, vacation days and health insurance.

People walk past Girard a “No-Tip” restaurant in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014. The new restaurant in Philadelphia offers French-inspired cuisine and food for thought: Customers are told they don’t have to tip. That’s because servers at Girard Brasserie and Bruncherie earn about $13 an hour.

They also get sick time, vacation days and health insurance. The restaurant has reignited debate over working conditions in the food service industry, where high wages and benefits are almost unheard of.

The economics aren’t easy, said Girard co-owner Brian Oliveira.

Ideally, though, the provisions make for more loyal and content employees, who then create a better experience for customers, he said.

“We had to make less money as owners and sacrifice some of that, but in the end, it created a better environment and everyone’s happier,” said Oliveira, who is also the chef.

The unusual model highlights a debate about pay and conditions in an industry that employs 10 percent of the U.S. workforce, according to the National Restaurant Association. The group doesn’t track the number of no-tip models among the nation’s nearly 1 million eateries, but examples have popped up over the past year in Pittsburgh, New York, Los Angeles and near Cincinnati.

The federal hourly minimum wage for non-tipped workers, such as dishwashers and cooks, is $7.25; the minimum for tipped workers like waiters and bartenders is $2.13. Paid time off and medical benefits are almost unheard of in the high-turnover business.

Congress hasn’t raised the tipped wage in nearly 25 years. The restaurant association, which has fought increased minimums, argues that requiring higher wages will force owners to lay off servers, cut workers’ hours or raise prices.

Some cities and states, acting to address growing income inequality, have raised the tipping wage on their own. Among the highest: $10.74 an hour in San Francisco, $9.47 an hour in Washington state and $9.25 an hour in Oregon.

The state minimum for tipped employees in Pennsylvania is

CHILD CARE IN GOP continued from page 1

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though he added cheerily that he probably won some sectors of the university town of Lawrence.

Obama was on the second day of a two-day trip to conservative states where he was making the case for initiatives that he outlined in his State of the Union speech Tuesday.

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Currently in between bar gigs, he earns $2.83 plus tips as a server at Dottie’s Dinette, just few blocks from Girard in the city’s Fishtown section. Bowman acknowledged the lack of time off and health insurance have been “speed bumps and challenges” in a career he otherwise enjoys.

At Girard, the menu and checks explain that “dishes are priced accordingly” to provide staff with higher wages and benefits. A fixed price, three-course dinner ranges from $31 to $42.

Kelly Cinquegrana visited Girard shortly after its debut in late November, in part to support the idea of a better working environment. The cost of the meal was reasonable - “equal to giving a tip, anyway” - and she gave the food and service a glowing review on Yelp.

“I think it’s pretty important to want to treat waitstaff well,” Cinquegrana said.

So far, only one employee, a dishwasher, has used a paid sick day, said Girard co-owner Cristian Mora. Scheduling is harder than he imagined and margins are tight; the new approach is “not for everyone,” he said.

“A lot of people do make a very good living with the model as it is now, with the guest leaving a tip,” he said.

But Mora, who also didn’t have health insurance for most of his 15-year restaurant career, said he’s glad to be among the vanguard.

He noted about half the customers are leaving tips of 5 percent to 10 percent for a job well done - what Mora calls “a true gratuity,” akin to the European custom of leaving a token amount for servers, who generally earn a living wage and have national health care.

Girard waitress Katie Breen, 31, says she’s been able to work almost full-time as the restaurant’s business has increased, yielding a decent paycheck on top of about $250 weekly in tips. She’s making less money than at past serving jobs, but the overall quality of life is better for her and her 3-year-old daughter.

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

“I have a better schedule, I have health insurance,” Breen said.

“I think that this is the best job that I have ever had.”

President Barack Obama likes to say there are no red states or blue states, just the United States of America. Yet his first two stops on the traditional sell-the-speech tour after giving the annual State of the Union address were in Republican “red” states.

in new spending to make community college free for most students, provide paid sick leave to workers who don’t get that kind of time off and expand child-care tax credits.

It was not a coincidence, the White House said.

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But tips offer the potential to earn a lot more - and sometimes much more quickly - than even a higher hourly wage might allow, said Geoff Bowman, a longtime bartender in Philadelphia.

“Idaho is a good example of a state where they have made an effort to invest in those kinds of programs that ensures that middle-class families have access to skills and training that are critically important to getting a middle-class job,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said, explaining to reporters traveling with Obama that the president wanted to visit to show that Republican support exists for the kinds of programs he is pushing nationally.

Obama wants to pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthiest individuals, a virtual nonstarter in a Congress now under complete Republican control.

“It’s not a coincidence that the president traveled to two red states,” Earnest said Wednesday on the way to Boise, Idaho. Even though Republicans are setting the policies in Idaho and Kansas, “there are areas where their policy priorities are not entirely inconsistent with some of the policy priorities that the president has identified.”

Earnest noted that in Idaho and in Kansas, where Obama stopped Thursday, Republicans hold the governor’s office, control the Legislature and make up 100 percent of each state’s congressional delegation.

At the University of Kansas on Thursday, Obama planned to talk about making child care more affordable, calling for new spending on federal-state child-care subsidies for eligible families with preschool age children. The spending would be in addition to Obama’s previously announced proposal to triple the maximum child-care tax credit for middle-class families with young children to $3,000 per child.

Back in Washington, though, congressional Republicans gave a reception as chilly as a mid-January day in Idaho to Obama’s call for billions of dollars

Before the speech, Obama dropped in on a local Head Start class that the White House said is one of the oldest in the country. He told the kids that

Obama has emphasized skills training throughout his presidency.

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O P E N S S H O W D O W N W I T H O V E R I R A N S A N C T I O N S Minister David Cameron and Israeli intelligence officials and no one has said that permitting Congress to have an up-down vote would hamper the ongoing talks - and could even strengthen the U.S. position.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senators in both parties squared off with the Obama administration Wednesday about whether the threat of new sanctions would scuttle nuclear talks with Iran as House Speaker John Boehner, without consulting the White House, invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress.

Ranking Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey reiterated his support for legislation he’s drafted with Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., that would ramp up sanctions against Iran if a deal is not reached

by July 6. The bill does not impose any new sanctions during the remaining timeline for negotiations, but if there’s no deal, the sanctions that were eased during the talks would be reinstated and then Iran would face new punitive measures in the months thereafter.

Netanyahu is a staunch opponent of Iran, and Boehner’s move to bring him before a joint meeting of Congress likely increases the chances of a congressional collision with the White House. Boehner said he did not consult with the White House about inviting Netanyahu.

“The Iranians are playing for time. ... After 18 months of stalling, Iran needs to know that there will be consequences for failure,” Menendez said.

“Congress can make this decision on its own. I don’t believe I am poking anyone in the eye,” the speaker said. “There is a serious threat that exists in the world. And the president last night kind of papered over it.”

The White House said the invitation was a breach of typical diplomatic protocol. Spokesman Josh Earnest, traveling with the president to Idaho, told reporters the administration would “reserve judgment until we have an opportunity to speak to the Israelis about their plans for the trip and about what he plans to say.”

The invitation was a coordinated effort involving Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., with staff discussions beginning last year, according to a senior Republican aide.

Boehner contacted the Israeli ambassador earlier this month to assess Netanyahu’s interest and received a positive response. In turn, several dates were suggested, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the individual wasn’t authorized to

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks with House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio to make a statement on Capitol Hill in Washington. Boehner has invited Netanyahu to address Congress about Iran.

publicly discuss the private talks.

At a heated hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker vigorously pushed legislation that would allow Congress to take an up-down vote on any agreement that the Obama administration and its international partners reaches with Iran to prevent it from being able to develop a nuclear weapon.

Corker, now the committee chairman after the November elections gave the GOP control of the Senate, said he had talked directly with U.S., French and European Union negotiators, British Prime

GUN MAKER GETS NEWTOWN LAWSUIT MOVED TO FEDERAL COURT risks injury to others.

That exception, known as “negligent entrustment,” was designed for cases such as when a gun store sells to someone who is obviously intoxicated and threatening to kill someone, Lytton said.

The lawyers for the Newtown families are arguing that the Bushmaster is a military weapon that was negligently entrusted to civilians, who should not have been allowed to purchase it.

Lytton said it might have been harder for Remington to defend against that argument, especially on appeal, in the state court system.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Gun maker Remington has moved a lawsuit by families of those shot in the Sandy Hook school massacre from state to federal court, where at least one expert says it has less chance of succeeding.

Nine families sued Remington and others in Bridgeport Superior Court in December arguing the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle used in the shooting should not have been sold for civilian use because of its overwhelming firepower. A 10th family joined the lawsuit adding a wrongful death claim.

The case was placed before U.S. District Judge Robert Chatigny last week after Remington argued that since it is located in North Carolina and not Connecticut, federal court was a more proper jurisdiction.

Timothy Lytton, a professor at the Albany Law School who has written extensively about suing the gun industry, said getting the case into the 2nd U.S. Circuit, of which Connecticut is a part, is a victory for the defendants.

Antony Blinken, deputy secretary of state, said any new sanctions and even legislation that would trigger new ones if a deal is not reached would not help and could provoke “Iran to walk away from the negotiating table.”

He argued that the talks have halted Iran’s rush toward larger stockpiles of enriched uranium and other nuclear activities and have led to more intrusive and frequent inspections. Blinken said the existing sanctions are stifling Iran’s economy.

“Iran is already under acute pressure from the application of the existing sanctions regime,” he said. “... Iran is well aware that an even sharper sword of Damocles hangs over its head. It needs no further motivation.”

Time is running out to reach a deal with Iran, which claims that its nuclear program is peaceful and exists only to produce energy for civilian use. Talks have been extended until July, with the goal of reaching a framework for a deal by the end of March.

Boehner released a letter extending the invitation to Netanyahu for Feb. 11. Boehner also told a private meeting of GOP lawmakers that Congress would proceed on new penalties against Iran despite Obama’s warning that any legislation would scuttle diplomatic negotiations over the country’s nuclear program.

“You may have seen that on Friday, the president warned us not to move ahead with sanctions on Iran, a state sponsor of terror,” Boehner told colleagues, according to his office. “His exact message to us was: `Hold your fire.’ He expects us to stand idly by and do nothing while he cuts a bad deal with Iran.

“Two words: `Hell no!’ ... We’re going to do no such thing,” the speaker said.

“They may be concerned about local sentiment in the state courts,” Lytton said. “And they may be more confident, given the 2nd Circuit’s history of refusing to allow these cases to go forward, that they stand a better chance in federal court.”

The invitation comes at a crucial time for Netanyahu, who is in the midst of a tough fight to win re-election in Israel’s upcoming March vote.

The plaintiffs in the case stemming from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre include the families of Mary Sherlach, Vicki Soto, Dylan Hockley, Noah Pozner, Lauren Rousseau, Benjamin Wheeler, Jesse Lewis, Daniel Barden, Rachel D’Avino and a teacher, Natalie Hammond, who was injured and survived.

Polls show Netanyahu’s Likud Party running behind the main opposition group headed by Yitzhak Herzog’s Labor Party, and a main theme employed effectively by his rivals has been the rancor in the country’s critical relationship with the United States.

In addition to Remington Arms, which makes the rifle, the defendants are Camfour, a firearm distributor, and Riverview Gun Sales, the now-closed East Windsor store where the gunman’s mother purchased the Bushmaster rifle in 2010.

While many voters in Israel can distinguish between Boehner’s Republicans and the White House, the image of Netanyahu addressing Congress - still a

VOLCANIC ERUPTION IN TONGA C R E AT E S N E W I S L A N D about 100 meters (109 yards) above the sea.

“The 2nd Circuit has previously refused to hold gun manufacturers liable or permit lawsuits against gun manufacturers for injuries caused by third parties,” he said. “It has a history of knocking these types of cases down.”

“It’s quite an exciting site, you get to see the birth of an island,” he said.

“Visually it was quite spectacular, but there was no big sound coming with it, no boom. It was a bit eerie.”

A 2005 federal law shields gun manufacturers from most lawsuits over criminal use of their products, but it does include an exception for cases where companies should know a weapon is likely to be used in a way that

He said that once the volcano stops erupting, it will likely take the ocean no more than a few months to erode the island entirely. He said it would need to be made of lava or something more durable to survive.

IRAN AIRSTRIKES

Fournier, who works for New Zealand agency GNS Science, said he was able to establish that the volcano was mainly belching steam into the atmosphere, and that the small amount of ash it was sending out was rising no more than about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles).

continued from page 1 istrate judge by the state Supreme Court two years earlier for misconduct.

The court barred him from running again for judicial office.

Then-Gov. Bill Richardson appointed Rodella as a magistrate in 2005.

But Rodella resigned a few months later amid criticism - and pressure from Richardson - for helping secure the release of a family friend who was jailed for drunken driving.

As a state police officer, Rodella was disciplined for marijuana use, improper use of a weapon, falsifying official reports, abusing sick leave and using his position for personal gain.

Last year, the FBI searched the sheriff’s office in Espanola after media reports that Rodella’s staff was accepting donations for a scholarship fund managed by Rodella, in lieu of prosecuting some traffic offenses. He was not charged in that case.

That will come as a relief to airlines, as it is the ash that can be dangerous to planes.

CORRECTS SOURCE - In this photo, taken Jan. 14, 2015 and released by New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, a volcano erupts near Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean. A volcano that has been erupting for several weeks near Tonga has created a new island in the ocean.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A volcanic eruption in Tonga has created a new island - although one scientist said Wednesday it could soon disappear.

Fournier said the ocean around the island is likely fairly shallow, perhaps only about 100-200 meters (328-656 feet) deep. He said there is no name yet for the new island, and he has been told that any naming rights will fall to Tonga’s king.

The volcano has been erupting for a month in the ocean about 65 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of the capital, Nuku’alofa. Last week it disrupted international air travel to the Pacific archipelago for several days.

As an incumbent in the June primary, he lost the Democratic nomination for Rio Arriba County sheriff to James Lujan by 200 votes. Lujan was a deputy whom Rodella had fired.

New Zealand volcanologist Nico Fournier said he traveled by boat to within about a mile of the new island on Saturday to take a closer look.

FBI agents

He said it’s made mainly of loose scoria and its dimensions are about 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) by 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles), and that it rises

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l a n e s o p e n o n s o u t h b o u n d i n B o c a R a t o n

All lanes are open on Interstate 95 southbound at Palmetto Park Road after an earlier wreck Thursday morning, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. CLEARED: Crash in Palm Beach on I-95 south at Exit 44 Palmetto Park Rd, 2 right lanes blocked.[...]

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D r i v e n C r a s h e s

A Lakeland man driving east on Interstate 4 crashed a tractor-trailer carrying concrete beams at the U.S. 301 exit this morning, the Florida Highway Patrol reported.[...]

Car struck back of cruiser investigating earlier accident A Florida Highway Patrol cruiser was rear-ended on Interstate 95 in St. Johns County on Wednesday morning, one of two state troopers who had stopped to assist with an earlier accident was injured, and a woman suffered life-threatening injuries,

Ta m p a

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A 62-year-old Tampa man died Wednesday morning after he had medical condition while driving on Interstate 275 and crashed, the Florida Highway Patrol said.[...]

Pick-up lodged under semi, WB I-4 lanes blocked at Thonotosassa Rd. All westbound lanes of I-4 are blocked after an accident involving a Publix semi-truck and a pick-up truck. The Florida Highway Patrol said it happened shortly before 7 a.m. near Thonotosassa Road.

Northbound I-275 lanes are now open The northbound Interstate 275 lanes are open again after being shut down earlier because of an accident.[...]

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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

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R O M N E Y S AY S L E A D E R S I N B O T H PA R T I E S FA I L I N G T H E N AT I O N SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Outlining his possible rationale for a third presidential bid, Mitt Romney said Wednesday night that political leaders in both parties are failing to address the nation’s most pressing problems - climate change, poverty and education reform, among them - as he acknowledged lessons learned from his failed 2012 presidential campaign.

campaign in which opponents cast him as an out-of-touch millionaire. But in public and private conversations in recent weeks he has focused on poverty, perhaps above all, a dramatic shift for the former private-equity executive.

“Let’s deal with poverty,” he said Wednesday night. “Have we done it? No. Let’s do it.”

“Why run for office in the first place?” Romney asked aloud as he addressed a sold-out crowd of about 3,000 at an investment management conference in Utah. “The major challenges that this country faces are not being dealt with by leaders in Washington.”

Romney acknowledged his past political struggles with a touch of humor, citing a remark from former Vice President Walter Mondale who was defeated by former President Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential contest.

He continued: “On both sides of the aisle, we just haven’t been able to take on and try and make progress on the major issues of our day.”

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee’s remarks came hours before he was scheduled to meet privately with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whose aggressive steps toward a White House bid of his

U S , C U B A L AY O U T PAT H T O R E S U M I N G D I P L O M AT I C T I E S

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

own helped force Romney’s hand. Should they both run, they would compete for much of same establishment support.

Thursday’s Utah meeting has been “on the books for some time,” said Bush spokesman Kristy Campbell.

“Gov. Bush is very much looking forward to the opportunity to catch up and visit with Gov. Romney,” she said. “He respects him very much.”

Romney’s public address Wednesday was his second since privately telling potential donors earlier in the month that he’s considering a 2016 presidential campaign. He used the remarks Wednesday evening to broaden a populist platform he first touched on last week that marks a sharp shift from the rhetoric of his first two campaigns.

Assistant Secretary of State of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta S. Jacobson, flanked by Jeffrey DeLaurentis, left, chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Edward Alex Lee, right, start the second day negotiations with Cuban officials, in Havana, Cuba, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015. U.S. objectives during Thursday’s session include the lifting of restrictions on American diplomats in Cuba and assurances that Cubans will have unfettered access to a future U.S. Embassy in Havana.

HAVANA (AP) -- The United States and Cuba began laying out the path to normalized ties Thursday as the highest-level U.S. delegation to the communist island in more than three decades held a second day of talks in Havana.

Officials from both countries described the morning session as cordial, straightforward and focused on the details of converting their interest sections into embassies.

The details include ending caps on staff, limits on diplomats’ movements and, in the case of the U.S. building, removing guard posts and other Cuban structures along the perimeter.

Both sides said they expected the negotiations to require more than Thursday’s meeting to resolve, raising the possibility of future rounds.

That could set back U.S. hopes of reopening the embassies before April’s Summit of the Americas, which Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro are expected to attend.

Gustavo Machin, Cuba’s deputy chief of North American Affairs, said the meeting was productive and took place “in a relaxed atmosphere of respect.”

“Look at my face,” he said, smiling. “It reflects the spirit in which we’ve been talking up `til now.”

Cuba is demanding its removal from a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, which Washington says it is considering.

On Wednesday, the U.S. said it sent additional ships to the Florida Straits to halt Cuban rafters. But Washington rebuffed demands for broader changes to U.S. migration rules that grant virtually automatic legal residency to any Cuban who touches U.S. soil.

Cuba’s government blames the Cold War policy for luring tens of thousands of Cubans a year to make perilous journeys by land and sea to try to reach the United States. Still, many Cubans are worried the elimination of the rules would take away their chance to have a better life in the U.S. In Washington, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said America’s “wet foot, dry foot” approach, which generally shields Cubans from deportation if they reach U.S. territory, remains in effect.

But he stressed that those trying to come illegally would most likely be interdicted and returned.

U.S. officials reported a spike in the number of rafters attempting to reach Florida after the Dec. 17 announcement that the countries would move to normalize ties. Those numbers appear to have slowed in recent days.

“Cuba wants a normal relationship with the U.S., in the broadest sense but also in the area of migration,” said Cuba’s head of North American Affairs, Josefina Vidal. She called for the U.S. to end “exceptional treatment that no other citizens in the world receive, causing an irregular situation in the flow of migrants.”

American officials instead pressed Cuba to take back tens of thousands of its nationals whom U.S. authorities want to deport because they have been convicted of crimes. No progress was made on that issue, according to an official present in the meeting. The official wasn’t authorized to speak on the matter and demanded anonymity.

While hitting familiar Republican points criticizing the size of the federal debt, Romney at times sounded like a Democrat, calling for President Barack Obama and other leaders in Washington to act on common liberal priorities such as climate change, poverty and education.

“I’m one of those Republicans who thinks we are getting warmer and that we contribute to that,” he said of climate change, charging that federal leaders have failed to enact global agreements needed to tackle the problem.

His evolving platform comes as he works to reshape his image after consecutive presidential defeats. Romney spent little time talking about poverty, the middle class or climate change in a 2012

“He said, `You know, I always wanted to run for president in the worst way. And that’s just what I did,’” Romney said with a chuckle.

“I learned some lessons, too.”

Romney had previously acknowledged that climate change is real, noting in his 2010 book that “human activity is a contributing factor.” But he questioned the extent to which man was contributing to the warming of the planet and said throughout his 2012 campaign that America shouldn’t spend significant resources combating the problem - particularly with major polluters like China doing little.

The former Massachusetts governor also criticized Obama’s State of the Union address, saying the president had minimized the threat of radical, violent jihadism and terror attacks in Paris.

“This is a very serious threat the world faces,” he said. “And to minimize that, and sort of brush it aside with a few minutes of discussion, I thought was disappointing.”

Romney said a growing education gap is one of the country’s biggest challenges and suggested that teacher pay should be raised.

At times during the speech, he appeared equal parts candidate and economics professor, gesturing from behind a podium to a projected slideshow of graphs and pie charts of the federal debt and poverty rates.

Before the speech - tickets were sold to the public - Romney spoke to a private dinner of about 130 clients of Diversify Inc., the investment firm that sponsored the event. Tyler Fagergren, a manager with the firm, said people asked Romney questions about the economy and investment but were not allowed to ask about a possible 2016 campaign.

Romney told the larger audience that he’s honored to be a Utah resident now. He’s built a home in an upscale Salt Lake City suburb and registered late last year as a Utah voter.

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The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

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J A PA N ’ S A B E ‘ F I G H T I N G A G A I N S T T I M E ’ S E E K I N G T O F R E E H O S TA G E S for a world leader - could undercut his opposition’s message. At the same time, he risks aggravating the tense relationship he currently has with the Obama administration.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defying President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner announced on Wednesday that he’s invited Israel’s prime minister to stand before Congress and push for new sanctions against its archenemy Iran.

Time could be running out to reach a deal with Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful and exists only to produce energy for civilian use. Talks have been extended until July, with the goal of reaching a framework for a deal by the end of March.

Boehner’s decision to bring Benjamin Netanyahu before a joint meeting of Congress on Feb. 11 seemed to catch the White House by surprise. And it added fuel to a drive by lawmakers from both parties to pass legislation calling for fresh penalties if there is no deal soon to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Barely sworn in, the new Republican-controlled Congress is already on a collision course with Obama over a major foreign policy issue.

Obama has threatened to veto any new sanctions legislation, saying it could scuttle ongoing nuclear talks with Iran and heighten the risk of a military showdown.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday quoted an unidentified Israeli intelligence official as saying that adding sanctions now “would be like throwing a grenade into the process.”

But Boehner is not backing down. He told a private meeting of GOP lawmakers that Congress would proceed on further penalties against Iran despite Obama’s warning.

“He expects us to stand idly by and do nothing while he cuts a bad deal with Iran,” Boehner said. “Two words: `Hell no!’ ... We’re going to do no such thing.”

The Democrats’ House leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, strongly disagreed. She said Obama has had diplomatic success in bringing countries together for the current economic sanctions aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear program. And she said it would be “irresponsible” for Congress to impose new penalties that “could undermine the negotiations and undermine the diplomatic coalition that is there - the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany.”

The White House said Boehner’s invitation also was a breach of diplomatic protocol. Traditionally, no administration would learn about a foreign leader’s plan to visit the United States from the speaker of

Just after Boehner announced that Netanyahu had been invited, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a three-hour hearing on the Iranian nuclear talks and the role of Congress.

This image taken from an online video released by the Islamic State group’s al-Furqan media arm on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015, purports to show the group threatening to kill two Japanese hostages that the militants identify as Kenji Goto Jogo, left, and Haruna Yukawa, right, unless a $200 million ransom is paid within 72 hours. Japan’s Foreign Ministry’s anti-terrorism section has seen the video and analysts are assessing it, a ministry official said on Tuesday.

the House, said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

Said Boehner: “I don’t believe I am poking anyone in the eye.”

The invitation was a coordinated effort involving Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with staff discussions beginning last year, according to a senior Republican aide, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to publicly discuss the private talks. Boehner contacted the Israeli ambassador on Jan. 8 to assess Netanyahu’s interest and received a positive response.

Republicans and some Democrats on the committee argued that Iran is playing for time and that the U.S. and its international partners are inching closer to Iran’s negotiating position. But other lawmakers agreed with the administration that it’s best to let the negotiations play out.

Committee chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., is pressing for legislation that would allow Congress to vote on any deal the U.S. and its international partners might reach with Tehran.

“I want these negotiations to be successful ... but just stiff-arming (Congress) . and saying, `No, we really don’t want you to play a

SHIITE REBELS, YEMEN’S PRESIDENT REACH DEAL TO END STANDOFF

Netanyahu stands to gain politically at home from the U.S. visit.

He is in a tough fight to win re-election in Israel’s upcoming March vote. Netanyahu’s Likud Party is running behind the main opposition group headed by Yitzhak Herzog’s Labor Party, which has been highlighting rancor in the country’s critical relationship with the United States.

The image of Netanyahu addressing Congress - an infrequent honor

PAT R I O T S C O A C H S AY S H E D O E S N ’ T K N O W H O W B A L L S W E R E D E F L AT E D balls until they’re turned over to ball handlers provided by home teams just before kickoff.

Belichick said the balls used by the Patriots offense are inflated to the “12 1/2-pound range” and “any deflation would then take us under that.”

Going forward, he said, the Patriots will inflate footballs to a safe level to prevent them from dropping under allowable air pressure during games.

“We will take steps in the future to make sure that we don’t put ourselves in this type of situation again,” he said.

The coach who has won three Super Bowls said he generally forces players to practice under bad-ball conditions.

“Anytime players complain about the quality of the footballs, I make it worse and that stops the complaints,” he said. “We never use the condition of the footballs as an excuse. We play with whatever or kick with whatever we have to use.”

New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick reacts during a news conference prior to a team practice in Foxborough, Mass., Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015. Belichick addressed the issue of the NFL investigation of deflated footballs.

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) -- Patriots coach Bill Belichick said Thursday he doesn’t know how footballs became deflated during the game that got his team to the Super Bowl.

But Belichick declined to answer questions after saying he knew nothing until Monday morning about accusations that his team cheated with underinflated footballs in its win against the Colts in the AFC championship game on Sunday night.

The NFL is investigating. Belichick said the team is fully cooperating.

“I had no knowledge of this situation until Monday morning,” said Belichick, who said he was “shocked” to learn the news.

“I would say I’ve learned a lot more about this process in the last three days than I knew or have talked about it in the last 40 years that I’ve coached in this league,” Belichick said during an 8 1/2-minute opening statement during an 11 1/2-minute news conference. “I had no knowledge of the various steps involved in the game balls and process that went through.”

Belichick did not specify who in the Patriots organization was responsible for the underinflated balls, or absolve anyone besides himself of potential wrongdoing.

Softer balls are generally considered easier to throw and catch, and quarterbacks, specialists and equipment managers are known to have very individualized preferences in how footballs are readied for games. Belichick said he was unaware of the process for game balls until the accusations were raised.

Belichick says he sometimes hears quarterbacks, kickers and other specialists talk about their preferences.

“I can tell you and they will tell you that there is never any sympathy from me whatsoever on that subject. Zero,” Belichick said.

Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is expected to address reporters later Thursday.

“Tom’s personal preferences on his ball, footballs, are something that he can talk about in much better detail and information than I could possibly provide,” Belichick said. “I can tell you that in my entire coaching career I have never talked to any player, staff member about football air pressure.”

The NFL requires balls to be inflated between 12.5 and 13.5 pound per square inch. Under league rules, each team provides its own balls for use on offense.

Referees approve the balls more than 2 hours before game time, then keep the

The issue has drawn strong reaction from around the game and its fans as the Patriots prepare to play the Seattle Seahawks on Feb. 1 in Glendale, Arizona, for the NFL title.

Belichick declined to answer several questions after his opening remarks, answering several questions by saying: “I’ve told you everything I know,” and “I don’t have an explanation.”

S A LT WAT E R S P I L L continued from page 1

on cleaning up the spill and repairing any environmental damage.

Spokesman Jonathan Morgan did not immediately confirm exactly when the spill began. It also was not clear what caused the pipeline to rupture. Glatt said the company has found the damaged portion of pipeline and it was sent to a laboratory to determine what caused the hole.

North Dakota has suffered scores of saltwater spills since the state’s oil boom began in earnest in 2006.

A network of saltwater pipelines extends to hundreds of disposal wells in the western part of the state, where the briny water is pumped underground for permanent storage. Legislation to mandate flow meters and cutoff switches on saltwater pipelines was overwhelmingly rejected in the Legislature in 2013.

Wayde Schafer, a North Dakota spokesman for the Sierra Club, called the brine “a real toxic mix” and “an extreme threat to the environment and people’s health.”

“Technology exists to prevent these spills and nothing is being done,” said Schafer. “Better pipelines, flow meters, cutoff switches, more inspectors - something has got to be done.”

Daryl Peterson, a grain farmer from Mohall who has had spills on his property, said the latest incident underscores the need for tougher regulation and enforcement.

“Until we start holding companies fully accountable with penalties, I don’t think we’re going to change this whole situation we have in North D

Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, President of Yemen, sits after addressing the 67th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters. Two of the Yemeni embattled president’s advisers said that the president is held “captive” in hands of Houthis and warned if submitted resignation in protest to Houthis’ power grab, to face prosecution.

SANAA, Yemen (AP) -- Shiite rebels holding Yemen’s president captive in his home reached a deal with the U.S.-backed leader Wednesday to end a violent standoff in the capital, the country’s state news agency reported.

The agreement promised to give the rebel Houthi movement more say in the affairs of the Arab world’s poorest country in exchange for the group removing its fighters from President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s home, the SABA news agency said.

However, the late-night deal left unanswered who really controls the country and how much power is still held by Hadi, a key ally in U.S. efforts to battle Yemen’s local al-Qaida branch.

In the deal, the Houthis also agreed to release a top aide to Hadi that they had kidnapped in recent days.

SABA said the agreement included a clause that would answer the rebels’ demands to amend the constitution and expand their representation in the parliament and in state institutions. It also included promises to ensure better representation for Yemen’s southerners as well, the deal said.

The agreement also calls on Hadi to shake up a commission tasked with writing a draft constitution to ensure bigger representation for the Houthis.

The draft constitution has proposed a federation of six regions, something the Houthis reject. The agreement reached Wednesday night also ensures that Yemen would be a federal state, but doesn’t mention the six region proposal, saying controversial issues will be further discussed.

The agreement, while addressing the immediate Houthi takeover and security concerns in the capital, leaves the contentious political issues unresolved.

The Houthis, who took control of the capital in September, say they only want an equal share of power, while critics say that they prefer presence of Hadi as a symbolic leader while they keep a grip on power. Critics also say the Houthis are backed by Shiite power Iran, something they deny.

The increasingly weakened leadership and power vacuum are setting stage for al-Qaida in Yemen, which claimed the recent attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and failed assaults on the U.S. homeland, to grow more powerful in the chaos.

Aides to Hadi said earlier Wednesday that he was “captive” in his home. Soon after the agreement Wednesday night, there was no visible change in Houthi deployment outside Hadi’s house.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

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BOEHNER DEFIES OBAMA ON IRAN S A N C T I O N S , I N V I T E S N E TA N YA H U

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defying President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner announced on Wednesday that he’s invited Israel’s prime minister to stand before Congress and push for new sanctions against its archenemy Iran.

Just after Boehner announced that Netanyahu had been invited, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a three-hour hearing on the Iranian nuclear talks and the role of Congress.

Boehner’s decision to bring Benjamin Netanyahu before a joint meeting of Congress on Feb. 11 seemed to catch the White House by surprise.

And it added fuel to a drive by lawmakers from both parties to pass legislation calling for fresh penalties if there is no deal soon to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Republicans and some Democrats on the committee argued that Iran is playing for time and that the U.S. and its international partners are inching closer to Iran’s negotiating position. But other lawmakers agreed with the administration that it’s best to let the negotiations play out.

Committee chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., is pressing for legislation that would allow Congress to vote on any deal the U.S. and its international partners might reach with Tehran.

Barely sworn in, the new Republican-controlled Congress is already on a collision course with Obama over a major foreign policy issue.

Obama has threatened to veto any new sanctions legislation, saying it could scuttle ongoing nuclear talks with Iran and heighten the risk of a military showdown.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday quoted an unidentified Israeli intelligence official as saying that adding sanctions now “would be like throwing a grenade into the process.”

But Boehner is not backing down. He told a private meeting of GOP lawmakers that Congress would proceed on further penalties against Iran despite Obama’s warning.

“He expects us to stand idly by and do nothing while he cuts a bad deal with Iran,” Boehner said. “Two words: `Hell no!’ ... We’re going to do no such thing.”

The Democrats’ House leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, strongly disagreed. She said Obama has had diplomatic success in bringing countries together for the current economic sanctions aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear program. And she said it would be “irresponsible” for Congress to impose new penalties that “could undermine the negotiations and undermine the diplomatic coalition that is there - the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany.”

The White House said Boehner’s invitation also was a breach of diplomatic protocol. Traditionally, no administration would learn about a foreign leader’s plan to visit the United States from the speaker of the House, said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

Said Boehner: “I don’t believe I am poking anyone in the eye.”

“I want these negotiations to be successful ... but just stiff-arming (Congress) . and saying, `No, we really don’t want you to play a role, we want you to just trust us,’ is totally unacceptable from my standpoint,” Corker said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks with House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio to make a statement on Capitol Hill in Washington. Boehner has invited Netanyahu to address Congress about Iran.

The invitation was a coordinated effort involving Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with staff discussions beginning last year, according to a senior Republican aide, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to publicly discuss the private talks. Boehner contacted the Israeli ambassador on Jan. 8 to assess Netanyahu’s interest and received a positive response.

Netanyahu stands to gain politically at home from the U.S. visit. He is in a tough fight to win re-election in Israel’s upcoming March vote.

Netanyahu’s Likud Party is running behind the main opposition group headed by Yitzhak Herzog’s Labor Party, which has been highlighting rancor in the country’s critical relationship with the United States.

The image of Netanyahu addressing Congress - an infrequent honor for a world leader - could undercut his opposition’s message. At the same time, he risks aggravating the tense relationship he currently has with the Obama administration.

Time could be running out to reach a deal with Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful and exists only to produce energy for civilian use. Talks have been extended until July, with the goal of reaching a framework for a deal by the end of March.

FRENCH TERROR JUDGE SEES S H I F T I N G J I H A D I P R O F I L E S forces.

Investigators are still untangling the web of recent extremist and veteran fighters. Another man from Kouachi’s old network, dubbed the “Buttes-Chaumont ring” for the Paris park where the young men trained together, went before an anti-terrorism judge on Thursday after he was expelled by Turkey. The man, Chekhou Diakhaby, was arrested there Jan. 2, the same day Coulibaly’s widow left France for a journey that ultimately took her to Syria.

Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the committee, and Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., are pushing legislation that would impose heavier sanctions that would take effect if there’s no deal.

That bill would not impose any new sanctions during the remaining timeline for negotiations. But if there’s no deal, the sanctions that have been eased during the talks would be reinstated and Iran would face new punitive measures.

“Iran is clearly taking steps that can only be interpreted as provocative, yet the administration appears willing to excuse away any connection between these developments and signs of Iran’s bad faith in negotiations,” Menendez said.

Antony Blinken, deputy secretary of state, said new sanctions legislation would not help and could provoke “Iran to walk away from the negotiating table.”

He argued that the talks have halted Iran’s rush toward larger stockpiles of enriched uranium and have led to more intrusive and frequent inspections. Blinken said the existing sanctions are stifling Iran’s economy.

“Iran is well aware that an even sharper sword of Damocles hangs over its head. It needs no further motivation,” he said.

and Iraq, according to figures confirmed this week by the prosecutor and security officials, compared with 555 a year ago. Of those 240 have returned.

“These are people who have lost their bearings, who don’t have a very deep radicalization but who jump on this occasion to make a life somewhere else and to feel important somewhere on the planet,” Trevidic said.

Even if most are under surveillance when they return “we don’t have the means to do anything very extensive,” he said. Among those who remain in Syria and Iraq “are those who have a hatred of our society and a desire for revenge. That is a dangerous category.”

Diakhaby was captured by American forces in Fallujah in 2004 and was detained for seven years before returning to France in 2011. His activities since are unclear.

French Investigating Judge Marc Trevidic as he addresses reporter during an interview with the Associated Press in Paris. France’s top terror judge says Europe’s combustible mix of experienced extremist fighters and young jihadis looking to join the fighting in Syria poses new dangers for a continent ill-equipped to trace hundreds of people newly radicalized and trained in warfare. Marc Trevidic, whose former bodyguard was among 20 dead in three days of attacks around Paris, spoke to the Associated Press in an interview Wednesday Jan. 21, 2015, two weeks after the massacre in the Charlie Hebdo offices.

PARIS (AP) -- Europe’s combustible mix of experienced extremist fighters and young jihadis looking to join the fighting in Syria poses new dangers for a continent ill-equipped to trace hundreds of newly radicalized people, says a top French anti-terrorism judge.

“These people have a lot of contact with the jihadi nexus. They have already had problems with the law, they know the system, they often have gone to training camps in the past,” Trevidic said.

At their side is the new generation, largely young men aged between 15 and 30, who have become radicalized in a matter of months on the Internet. About a quarter of them are converts, according to the Paris prosecutor.

A total of 1,281 people from France are linked to jihad in Syria

Marc Trevidic has handled French terrorism cases since 2006, but has recused himself from investigating the Jan. 7-9 attacks that left 20 people dead, including the attackers. The victims included Trevedic’s former police bodyguard, who had been assigned to protect the editor of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and was among the first to be killed in the attack against the newspaper.

“We have this particular situation of having plenty of young people that we don’t know and veterans who are once more in action,” Trevidic said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The experienced extremists “are small in number” but pose other challenges to authorities, he said, because they “have a lot contacts in the web of jihadis ... they know the system well.”

The attacks against Charlie Hebdo were carried out by brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi. Cherif Kouachi’s ties to radical Islam date back a decade to a network dedicated to sending jihadis to fight against American forces in Iraq. He was convicted in 2008 and served time in prison. His brother, meanwhile, stayed below the radar and received paramilitary training with al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen.

In prison, Cherif Kouachi struck up an acquaintance with Amedy Coulibaly, a petty criminal with a history of selling drugs but no prior links to radical Islam. On Jan. 8, Coulibaly shot a policewoman to death on the outskirts of Paris; the next day, he killed four hostages in a kosher supermarket as the Kouachi brothers holed up in a printing plant outside the city. Three days of terror ended when the three gunmen died in standoffs with security

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The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

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VIDEO OF NEW JERSEY MAN SHOT B Y P O L I C E R A I S E S Q U E S T I O N S

BRIDGETON, N.J. (AP) -- A police video of officers confronting and then fatally shooting a black man in southern New Jersey has raised questions and stirred anger over another death at the hands of police.

the case because she knows Days. But Lawanda Reid’s lawyer and activists are demanding the state attorney general’s office take over the investigation, something it said it will not do.

The video of the Dec. 30 killing of Jerame Reid in Bridgeton, a struggling, mostly minority city of 25,000 people about 40 miles south of Philadelphia, was released this week.

In the video, the mood changes in a flash when Days tells his partner about the gun and starts yelling, “Show me your hands!” The driver, Leroy Tutt, raises his hands immediately. Reid does not at first.

The nearly two-minute deadly standoff came after the killings of black men in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, triggered months of turbulent protests, violence and calls for a re-examination of police use of force.

Days, still yelling, reaches into the car and appears to remove a gun.

“I’m going to shoot you,” Days shouts, at one point addressing Reid by his first name. “You’re going to be f---ing dead. If you reach for something, you’re going to be f---ing dead.”

Conrad Benedetto, a Philadelphia lawyer, said he has been hired by Reid’s wife, Lawanda, to investigate. He said in a statement the footage “raises serious questions as to the legality and/or reasonableness of the officers’ actions that night” because Reid was shot as he raised his hands.

With the dashboard camera in their cruiser rolling, police pulled a Jaguar over for running a stop sign on a dark night. But things suddenly turned tense when one of the officers warned his partner that he could see a gun in the glove compartment.

Screaming over and over “Don’t you f---ing move!” and “Show me your hands!” at the man in the passenger seat, the officer reached into the car and appeared to remove a silver handgun.

Then, the passenger, despite being warned repeatedly not to move, stepped out of the Jaguar, his hands raised about shoulder level.

The officers opened fire, killing him.

Reid and the man driving the car were black. The Bridgeton officer who spotted the gun, Braheme Days, is black; his partner, Roger Worley, is white. Both officers have been placed on leave while prosecutors investigate.

“The video speaks for itself that at no point was Jerame Reid a threat and he possessed no weapon on his person,” Walter Hudson, chairman and founder of the civil rights group the National Awareness Alliance, said Wednesday. “He complied with the officer and the officer shot him.”

Days tells his partner, “He’s reaching for something.”

In this frame grab from an officer’s dashboard camera taken Dec. 30, 2014, and provided by the Bridgeton, N..J. Police Department, police officers Braheme Days and Roger Worley stand near a car they pulled over for running a stop sign in Bridgeton. One of the officers warned his partner that he could see a gun in the glove compartment. The nearly two-minute standoff resulted in the death of Jerame Reid, one of two men in the car.

Reid, 36, spent about 13 years in prison for shooting at three state troopers when he was a teenager. And Days knew who he was; Days was among the arresting officers last year when Reid was charged with several crimes, including drug possession and obstruction.

In Bridgeton, where two-thirds of the residents are black or Hispanic, the killing has stirred small protests over the past couple of weeks, including a demonstration on Wednesday, a day after the video was made public at the request of two newspapers under the state’s open records law.

The Cumberland County prosecutor’s office previously said a gun was seized during the stop but would not comment further on the investigation. Bridgeton police would not answer any questions about the video and said they opposed its release as neither “compassionate or professional.”

County prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae has disqualified herself from

Faintly on the video, Reid can be heard telling the officer, “I ain’t doing nothing. I’m not reaching for nothing, bro. I ain’t got no reason to reach for nothing.”

Then one of the men in the car tells the officer, “I’m getting out and getting on the ground.”

The officer again orders Reid not to move. Seconds later, Reid emerges from the car, raising his hands, which appear to be empty. Both officers fire immediately, shooting at least six rounds.

Bystanders start yelling at the officers, and other emergency vehicles arrive.

The South Jersey Times reported this week that residents had filed seven municipal court complaints against Days since 2013 and two against Worley in that span for alleged abuses of power; all the complaints were dismissed.

SONS OF EGYPT’S MUBARAK TO BE RELEASED ON BAIL

U S N O T S E N D I N G G I T M O D E T A I N E E S T O Y E M E N bill. “We have not received assurances from the administration that they will not seek to transfer anyone to Yemen, despite the wild, wild West nature of what we’re facing when it comes to terrorism in Yemen.”

Administration officials say even if they will not send detainees to Yemen now, Obama will not officially reinstate the ban to maintain flexibility in case conditions improve. The officials say he does not want any further restrictions on his ability to close Guantanamo with so little time left to meet his goal of shuttering it.

Houthi Shiite Yemeni wearing army uniforms stand guard on a street leading to the presidential palace in Sanaa, Yemen, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. Authorities in southern Yemen have closed the country’s second-largest airport there in protest over the Shiite rebels’ power grab in the capital, Sanaa, which has plunged the nation deeper into chaos and threatens to fracture the country.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In another challenge to President Barack Obama’s efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, a ban on transferring detainees to Yemen has been effectively pushed back into place because of security concerns in the volatile Middle Eastern nation, administration officials say.

While Obama approved sending detainees back to Yemen nearly two years ago, his administration has yet to use that authority.

And officials say deep concerns about the threat posed by a Yemeni-based al-Qaida offshoot have removed that option for the foreseeable future, although that could change if conditions improve. The officials described the stance on condition of anonymity without authority to speak on the record.

Obama insisted in his State of the Union address Tuesday that he will not relent in his determination to close Guantanamo before he leaves office, and the administration is working on agreements with third countries willing to take Yemenis who are clear to leave the U.S. prison in Cuba. Nearly two-thirds of the remaining 122 detainees are from Yemen, including 47 of the 54 who have been approved for transfer.

Yemen has been gripped by a violent power struggle, with Shiite rebels taking President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi prisoner in his own home this week. Yemen’s state news agency reported late Wednesday that rebels reached a deal with the U.S.-backed Hadi to end the standoff, but questions remain about who really controls the country.

Meanwhile, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which Washington considers to be the group’s most dangerous branch, has been thriving in Yemen amid the chaos. The group has claimed responsibility for the recent attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and failed assaults on the U.S. homeland.

While U.S. officials have questioned how much control the group had of the Paris operation, the United States has long been waging drone strikes in Yemen to target the terrorist threat.

Republican senators introduced legislation last week, citing the Paris and other terrorist attacks, as a reason to legally reinstate a ban on Yemeni transfers among other restrictions on Guantanamo transfers during Obama’s remaining two years in office.

“The last thing we should be doing is transferring detainees from Guantanamo to a country like Yemen,” New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte said in a news conference to announce the

Obama suspended transfers to Yemen in January 2010 after a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a U.S.-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear on instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. But in May 2013, the president announced a renewed effort to close the prison after being blocked by Congress in his first term.

“I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen so we can review them on a case-by-case basis,” Obama said in a speech at National Defense University.

At the time administration officials cited Hadi’s cooperation in the terrorist fight as reason for hope that the country would be an acceptable place to send detainees. Yemen agreed to open a rehabilitation center for former detainees, but it hasn’t been established. Still, in August, the U.S. returned to Yemen two prisoners who had been held at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan.

The strategy for Guantanamo detainees is to find other nations where administration officials have confidence they can be reintegrated into society without posing a new threat. A dozen Yemenis have been sent to third countries since November, including last week’s transfer of five to Oman and Estonia.

“While our policy preference is to repatriate detainees where we can do so consistent with our national security and humane treatment policies, we recognize that under certain circumstances the most viable transfer option is resettlement in a third country,” said Ian Moss, who works on detainee transfers at the State Department. “We are actively working to identify appropriate transfer locations for every single detainee approved for transfer and it may be the case that resettlement in a third country is the best option.”

CHILD CARE IN GOP continued from page 2

most of the issues he deals with as president would be solved if everybody read Dr. Seuss’ “The Sneetches,” a story often used in discussions about discrimination. The sneeches are yellow creatures, some of which have green stars on their bellies and some of which do not.

Idaho is the 47th state Obama has visited as president, though he headlined a rally there during his 2008 presidential run.

Earnest said Obama would like to visit South Dakota, Utah and South Carolina - all “red states” - to complete a 50-state run before his term ends in January 2017.

Idaho and Kansas both overwhelmingly supported the Republican candidate over Obama the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

Despite the losses - Obama described them Wednesday as having gotten “whupped twice” - and Idaho’s conservative political bent, more than 6,000 people who filled the Boise State University sports complex cheered when Obama talked about helping students afford college, repairing highways

CAIRO (AP) -- The two sons of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak were ordered released on bail Thursday pending a retrial in the last case that was keeping them behind bars, paving the way for their release for the first time since they were incarcerated in the wake of their father’s 2011 ouster.

It is not clear when Gamal and Alaa Mubarak would be released or whether prosecutors would appeal the court decision, which came three days before the fourth anniversary of the protests that eventually forced Mubarak to step down. The release of the two sons, widely reviled as symbols of corruption during Mubarak’s nearly three-decade rule, could inflame public sentiment.

Mubarak was believed to have been grooming his younger son for the presidency. Gamal’s imprisonment was seen as a popular verdict against those aspirations.

Dozens of protesters gathered near Cairo’s Tahrir square to protest the decision to release Mubarak’s sons. Police rapidly moved in to disperse them, using tear gas to flush them out of downtown side streets. Thirteen were arrested, a security official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

Thousands of Islamists were imprisoned and hundreds were killed in street clashes after the military ousted President Mohammed Morsi in the summer of 2013 following mass protests against his year in power.

Hundreds of young activists are also detained and facing trial for protesting, with some having received tough sentences.

Shady Ghazali Harb, an activist who was among those who spearheaded the 2011 protests, said the court order is the latest in a series of decisions that exonerate Mubarak and snub those who took to the streets demanding change.

“I think there is an attempt to create a new reality and impose it on society and the youth, that even though the state claims to be celebrating the Jan. 25 revolution as a national holiday, everything associated with it is retreating and not coming true,” Harb told The Associated Press.

“They are betting on frustrating any hope for change.”

“This will lead to a new clash between the youth, who represent the majority of the population, and the regime. Even if not immediately,” he said.

The Mubarak sons were sentenced to four years in prison on charges of using state funds to renovate family residencies. Their father got three years in the case.

The sentences were overturned earlier this month. Mubarak, who will turn 87 in May, has been held in a military hospital in a southern Cairo suburb and is likely to stay there despite there being no legal grounds for holding him.

The two sons face another trial on charges of insider trading, and another court had ordered their release pending trial. That trial resumes in March.

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The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

9

CONFLICTING EVIDENCE CLOUDS D E AT H O F A R G E N T I N E P R O S E C U T O R BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said Thursday she’s “convinced” prosecutor Alberto Nisman did not commit suicide as more questions arose in the death of the man who had accused the president of a cover-up in the nation’s worst terrorist attack.

stroke the serious accusations that weigh on the Iranian fugitives ... something unprecedented and never before seen.”

The document did not appear to show direct or documentary evidence of a deal, but it did include wiretap transcripts of several people discussing such negotiations and saying the deal was approved by “la jefa” - Spanish for a female “chief” - and “at the highest level.”

In a letter published by the state news agency Telam, Fernandez said all the questions about Nisman’s death “have been converted into certainty. The suicide (I’m convinced) was not a suicide.”

The government dismissed Nisman’s allegations as “weak” and “baseless,” and Fernandez on Tuesday released a long message saying Nisman’s investigation was meant “to divert, to lie, to cover up and confuse” ahead of a trial of former President Carlos Menem and other officials for a separate alleged cover-up of the bombing.

Nisman, however, was the prosecutor in that case as well.

Fernandez’ letter contrasts with the one she wrote Monday saying she believed Nisman took his life.

The 51-year-old Nisman was found slumped in the bathroom of his apartment Sunday night with a bullet wound in his head. He was lying next to a .22-caliber handgun and a bullet casing.

Four days, before Nisman gave a judge a 289-page report alleging Fernandez secretly reached a deal to prevent prosecution of former Iranian officials accused of involvement in the 1994 car bombing of Argentina’s largest Jewish center.

People gather outside the AMIA Jewish community center asking for “Justice” in the death of a prosecutor who had accused Argentina’s president of a criminal conspiracy, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. Special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who had been investigating the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center that killed 85 people and who accused President Cristina Fernandez of shielding Iranian suspects, was found dead from a gunshot to the head, in his apartment late Sunday, hours before he was to testify in a Congressional hearing about the case.

Fernandez dismissed those accusations in Thursday’s letter.

the service door. Authorities said Monday that Nisman’s mother hadn’t been able to open the service door because a key was in the lock on the other side.

On Wednesday, a locksmith said the service door wasn’t fully locked at the apartment where Nisman was found shot dead. Investigators have also revealed the existence of a previously unknown entry as new doubts about what happened continued to pop up.

“The service door wasn’t closed. I simply pushed the key and entered in two minutes,” the locksmith told reporters.

Viviana Fein, the lead investigator into Nisman’s death, said Monday the death appeared to be suicide and there were no indications anyone else was involved. The apartment’s door was locked from the inside and there were no signs it had been forced, she said.

But family and friends of Nisman immediately rejected the finding and protesters took to the streets demanding justice for the prosecutor who had spent 10 years investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.

Details began trickling out that raise questions about the suicide hypothesis.

No suicide note was found and a test of Nisman’s hand showed no gunpowder residue, though Fein said that may have been due to the small caliber of the gun. Also feeding suspicion was the rapid appearance of national Security Secretary Sergio Berni at the apartment, since he is a government, not a judicial, official. He denied he altered the crime scene.

He said he was able to quickly open the door with the help of a hook. “It took me longer to pack up my things (tools) than to open the door.”

He added, “If someone entered or not, I don’t know.”

The official news agency Telam, meanwhile, said investigators had found a third access to the home, a narrow passage holding air conditioning equipment that connects to a neighboring apartment occupied by an unidentified foreigner. They were investigating a seemingly recent footprint and fingerprint found inside.

Fein said the gun found beside Nisman was registered to another man, Diego Lagomarsino, described by officials as a colleague of Nisman, who had given it to him.

The death, and Tuesday’s release of Nisman’s full report, caused a crisis for the government, which scrambled to promise “maximum transparency and cooperation” in the investigation.

Then the locksmith who opened the back door to give investigators access to Nisman’s apartment said it hadn’t been properly locked, raising speculation about whether a killer might have entered or exited the 13th-story apartment.

The report accused Fernandez and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman of reaching agreement with Iran to avoid prosecution of eight Iranians, including former senior officials, charged with involvement in the bombing. He said that would open a lucrative trade in Argentine grains and meat for Iranian oil.

After testifying to investigators Tuesday, the locksmith, who gave his name to journalists only as Walter, said he was called to let authorities into Nisman’s apartment.

In the end, Interpol never dropped its “red notices” for the arrest of five of the Iranians, and the government said trade with Iran has diminished in recent years.

The front door had a keyless system so he decided to go in through

Writing with passion, Nisman called it “a criminal plan to erase at a

F R A N C E TA C K L E S D I S C R I M I N AT I O N , I N E Q U A L I T I E S A F T E R AT TA C K S newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Twenty people were killed, including the three gunmen, who had lived in restive neighborhoods in Paris and its suburbs.

In suburbs northeast of Paris on Thursday, many could understand why some children didn’t observe the moment of silence, even if they denounced the terrorist attacks.

women walk in the streets of Montfermeil, outside Paris. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls shocked many this week by referring to a “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid” in the suburbs, or “banlieues,” tinderboxes of social discontent where the values that bind the nation are often absent. They house France’s poorest, especially minorities with immigrant roots, including many Muslims from former French colonies.

PARIS (AP) -- The French government launched a new effort Thursday to heal social and religious fractures by better teaching children about secular values and steering them away from extremist propaganda, after French-born Islamic radicals shocked the nation in three days of terrorist attacks.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls shocked many this week by referring to a “territorial, social, ethnic apartheid” that especially affects troubled suburbs or “banlieues,” tinderboxes of discontent where values that bind the nation are often absent. They house France’s poorest, especially minorities with immigrant roots, including many Muslims from former French colonies.

Valls convened a special government meeting Thursday to tackle this societal divide. The proposals that emerged focus on schools, which Valls calls an “essential link” in transmitting French values of tolerance and freedoms.

Concern about schools jumped to the forefront of national debate after some children refused to observe a minute of silence for victims of the Jan. 7-9 attacks on a kosher market and satirical

“People were killed in the housing projects by police, and there was no minute of silence” for them, said Aly Sacko, a 28-year-old working with city hall in Clichy-sous-Bois. Two teenagers from immigrant backgrounds were killed in a power substation in Clichysous-Bois in 2005 while fleeing police, sparking weeks of riots in suburbs across the country. Similar incidents have prompted smaller riots in other cities in the decade since.

Sacko, a French-born Muslim of Malian origin, said the prime minister’s plans to fix poverty and social tensions are a “dream.”

“Nothing will change, I promise you,” he said.

Nisman was appointed to his post in 2005 by then President Nestor Kirchner, Fernandez’s late husband, after a bungled 10-year probe launched under Menem that led to a trial in which all the defendants were found innocent.

said the projects “provoke rejection, despair” and presciently called it a “problem which will weigh for years on our society.”

Violence continued to simmer. The big wake-up call came in 2005 with fiery nationwide riots. France seemed to discover only then that swaths of the population were living in a parallel world. Soaring unemployment, a high crime rate and even lack of access to public transport fed a deep sense of inequality.

The situation in the suburban housing projects defies France’s model for integration - assimilation by which all colors, races and creeds blend into a single people. It’s illegal to count people in France by ethnic or religious background, and diverse populations are expected to blend in - not live in ethnic enclaves.

Yet it is French officialdom that pushed newcomers into suburban projects, where today dozens of nationalities mostly cling to their roots.

When he was president, Nicolas Sarkozy made fixing the suburbs a priority. He created a Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity - since dismantled - and in 2008 unveiled a master plan. It included $728 million to create new trains and tramways, an expansion of “second-chance schools” for dropouts, and professional guidance for thousands of youths wanting to start a company or get on a job track. It also included more police.

The plan grew and changed along the way. The global financial crisis hit, and Europe’s debt troubles, and attention turned elsewhere.

There is no clear record of how assiduously it was enacted.

The housing project that was home to Amedy Coulibaly, one of the Paris gunmen this month, remains a different universe from the gilded governmental palaces of the capital, just a few miles (kilometers) away. Some doctors and postal workers refuse to venture into the Grande Borne in the town of Grigny. Even police enter with caution to a zone where drug dealers and teenage thugs hold sway.

Some improvements are visible in suburbs that received attention after the 2005 riots. In what was once one of the toughest projects in the Paris region, known as Les Bosquets (The Groves) in the town of Montfermeil northeast of Paris, high-rises and long buildings scarred with graffiti have been demolished, and replaced with human-sized town houses.

A police station has been installed in neighboring Clichy-SousBois - where the 2005 riots got started. However, a long-promised tramway to reduce the approximately 90-minute journey by bus and train to nearby Paris and its job prospects hasn’t yet materialized, and may not be in place before 2019.

Samir Ouahfi, a 29-year-old father of three working in a cafe in Les Bosquets, had little hope that the current government would do better than its predecessors.

“They say there is equality and fraternity,” he said, referring to the French national motto. But here on the gray concrete of the projects, he added, “there isn’t any.”

The plans announced Thursday include special training and testing for school teachers about French and European citizenship, secularism and how to teach it.

Specific funds to help the poorest families with some schooling costs will increase by 20 percent, to 45 million euros ($52 million), she said.

Another idea is to teach children how to better navigate modern media, for example to distinguish between extremist propaganda and verified information. Every secondary school will be requested to develop its own radio, newspaper, or blog.

Education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem announced that the time dedicated to civics classes will increase from 100 to 300 hours during primary and secondary education.

The ideas remain vague, and relatively modest. And they are not France’s first effort to tackle troubles in the suburbs.

Unrest first broke out in 1990. Then-President Francois Mitterrand

Children Incorporated 4205 Dover Road Richmond, VA 23221-3267

www.childrenincorporated.

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The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

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FAT H E R O F C O L O R A D O S H O O T I N G VICTIM FINDS SOLACE IN OFFICER thoughts. It doesn’t always work.

EVERGREEN, Colo. (AP) -- Ian Sullivan visits his daughter’s grave on her birthday every year since a gunman burst into a crowded Colorado movie theater and shot the 6-year-old as she sat with her mother in the third row.

“I wasn’t there to protect her,” he said.

And every year he finds a birthday card, put there by the man who was with Veronica when Sullivan wishes he could have been: The police officer who carried the dying girl out of the theater in his arms.

Sullivan’s father, Robert Sullivan, said he encourages his son to talk and tries to listen. “What I notice is a very strong underlying anger and anguish that is going to be very difficult to overcome,” he said. “It’s going to forever alter him.”

Sullivan’s is one of the many horror stories that emerged from the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, in suburban Denver, where James Holmes killed 12 people, including Veronica, and injured 70 others in July 2012.

Just after midnight on July 20, 2012, Sullivan fell asleep at his Denver studio apartment, exhausted after returning from one of the long-haul routes he drove as a trucker. Two hours later, he was awakened by his phone.

Since then, survivors have been trying to reconstruct their lives, finding comfort in each other or seeking a higher purpose. A couple, wounded, got married. A father who lost his son became a gun control advocate.

Others turned to faith.

A relative of his ex-wife told him he needed to get to the hospital.

Veronica was dying.

Sullivan, 28, cut his ties to many of those who were closest to him before the attack, retreating to a home in Colorado’s mountains. A lifeline has been the police officer whom he only knows by his first name, Mike.

The officer, Mike Hawkins, declined to comment, citing a judge’s gag order barring anyone - defense attorneys, officers, prosecutors, witnesses - from talking to the news media about the case.

The officer still checks in on Sullivan with texts on the days that are the hardest - holidays, the birthday, Sullivan said.

“It’s not so much all he was able to tell me, but more so the understanding that I was not alone,” he said.

Veronica was born when Sullivan was 19. He said he had been far from a perfect teenager, getting into trouble with the law. He and Veronica’s mother, Ashley Moser, weren’t necessarily ready for the responsibility of parenting, he said.

But he was proud when he saw his newborn daughter. “It dramatically changed my life to have her,” he said.

Ian Sullivan closes the hood of his custom racing Subaru, at home in Evergreen, Colo.

Sullivan’s has struggled daily to cope emotionally ever since 2012, when a heavily armed gunman opened fire in a movie theater where his six year old daughter Veronica and Sullivan’s x-wife were watching a movie, leaving 12 dead, including his daughter Veronica.

The couple divorced when Veronica was 3, but he still saw her regularly. He reveled in their time outdoors. A high point came in May 2012, when she caught her first fish, a trout. She gutted it herself.

One recent afternoon in a cramped, basement computer room where he spends much of his time these days, he flipped through photos of her.

Veronica holding a fish by the lure. On a sandy beach. In a race car. On the first day of kindergarten. She flashes a toothless grin beneath her sandy blonde hair and Hello Kitty earrings.

Upstairs in his kitchen, he pushed a button on a photo frame she gave him a month before she was killed, and her voice filled the room.

He arrived too late to say goodbye to his daughter. Her mother was paralyzed in the attack.

Days later, he asked a victim’s advocate to introduce him to the police officer who carried Veronica from the theater. They met at a police station in Aurora, not far from the shooting scene.

The officer told Sullivan that he, too, was a father. Sullivan said the officer told him that he thought he felt Veronica’s heartbeat as he carried her from the theater. Sullivan realizes what the officer probably felt was his own pulse, his heart racing.

“The most comforting thing for me was knowing he was a father himself. To know that he picked her up the same way he picks up his own kids and he carried her the same way he carries his own kids,” Sullivan said.

“I love you, Daddy,” she cooed, stumbling over a Father’s Day greeting.

He told the officer the hardest part was feeling powerless and unable to protect his daughter.

To keep Veronica’s memory alive, he tries to do the things he used to do with her. He hikes. He skis. He works on cars - she used to hand him wrenches while he was under the chassis, he said.

“I know it took a lot out of him as well. I could see how much damage it had done to him,” he said.

He tries to stay busy to keep his mind from wandering into darker

E B AY T O C U T 2 , 4 0 0 J O B S , S P I N OFF OR SELL ENTERPRISE UNIT Now eBay is adding executive from Icahn’s investment firm, Jonathan Christodoro, to its board, along with Wall Street executives Frank Yeary and Perry Traquina. That brings eBay’s board to 15, including 13 independent directors.

For the October-to-December quarter, net income came to $936 million, or 75 cents per share, from $850 million, or 65 cents per share in same quarter the year before.

Getting the sporadic text messages and seeing the birthday cards reminds him that someone else out there - who was with Veronica when he couldn’t be - is thinking about his pain.

“It helps to understand there’s still someone there who actually cares,” he said.

ASTEROID 1,800 FEET ACROSS TO WHIP PAST E A R T H O N M O N D AY

Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, came to 90 cents per share, beating the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research of 89 cents per share.

Revenue rose 9 percent, to $4.92 billion from $4.53 billion. Analysts expected $4.93 billion, according to Zacks.

This Jan. 14, 2015 photo shows an exterior view of eBay headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

EBay reports quarterly financial results on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015.

NEW YORK (AP) -- EBay plans to cut 2,400 jobs, or 7 percent of its staff, in the first quarter to simplify its structure and boost profit ahead of a planned separation of its business.

The job cuts will fall across its marketplaces, PayPal and enterprise businesses.

They come as the e-commerce company reported Wednesday that its fourth-quarter net income rose 10 percent on continued strength of its PayPal payments business, which it expects to spin off in the second half of the year.

Other developments Wednesday: EBay said it may also spin off or sell its enterprise unit, which develops online shopping sites for brick-and-mortar retailers, and agreed to add an executive from activist investor Carl Icahn’s firm to its board.

The string of changes comes after a tough 2014. A cyberattack compromised eBay users’ passwords, email addresses and phone numbers, although no financial information was stolen. And a change by Google also made it harder for eBay results to come up during Web searches.

“We have some challenges,” said CEO John Donahoe in a call with investors. “But overall, our focus and operating discipline delivered solid company performance in a year that quite frankly we’re glad to see come to an end.”

Still, the company said it faces a difficult first half of 2015 as well, as it continues to deal with the search engine changes and a stronger dollar. But Donohoe said results would start improving in the second half of the year.

The San Jose, California-based eBay has been under pressure to improve profitability from Icahn, one of its largest investors with a 3.7-percent stake in the company. He has pushed eBay to sell off PayPal, its best-performing unit.

PayPal services $1 of every $6 dollars spent online. It collects fees from over 162 million users who use the online service to send money to other users and pay for goods and services in more than 200 markets.

For PayPal, total payment volume grew 24 percent in the fourth quarter and revenue rose to $2.2 billion, about 45 percent of total revenue for the quarter.

For the current quarter ending in March, eBay expects its pershare earnings to range from 68 cents to 71 cents and revenue of $4.35 billion to $4.45 billion.

For the year, eBay expects earnings of $3.05 to $3.15 per share, with revenue ranging from $18.6 billion to $19.1 billion.

Shares rose 33 cents to $53.71 in aftermarket trading. The stock has lost 1.4 percent over the past 12 months.

D o n t Te x t a n d D r i v e

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- An asteroid up to 1,800 feet across is headed Earth’s way. But don’t worry: It will miss us by 745,000 miles, about three times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Still, that’s close for such a large rock.

NASA scientists say asteroid 2004 BL86 will come closest Monday.

That will be the nearest the asteroid gets for another 200 years. And it will be the closest known encounter by such a giant space rock until another mega-asteroid flies by in 2027.

It was discovered in 2004 and is estimated to be about one-third of a mile in size, or between 1,600 and 1,800 feet.

Amateur astronomers across North America should be able to see it with telescopes and binoculars.

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

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The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

11

D AV O S WAT C H : A N X I E T Y O V E R G R E E C E , C U R R E N C Y WA R S , Q E S U P P O R T

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- The World Economic Forum held in the Swiss ski resort of Davos has the official goal of “improving the state of the world.” In practice, it’s a massive networking event that brings together 2,500 heads of state, business leaders, philanthropists and artists.

Central banks provide stimulus to help their economies, but a convenient side effect is that such stimulus weighs on the currency, helping the country’s exporters compete in the global market.

Increasingly, major central banks are providing stimulus - those of Japan, Canada, Switzerland, India and the eurozone to name but a few.

The question is whether it’s meant mainly to weaken their currencies.

Here are some glimpses of what’s happening and being discussed Thursday at Davos: MERKEL UPSTAGED

Cohn has no doubts: “We’re in currency wars,” he told a debate in Davos.

It’s not often that German Chancellor Angela Merkel gets upstaged - but upstaged she was as she arrived to speak before the World Economic Forum As Merkel returned to Swiss ski resort following her absence last year due to a broken leg, all eyes were on Frankfurt as Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, delivered the news that the ECB was ready to buy government bonds on a massive scale to oil the wheels of the eurozone’s ailing economy.

During Merkel’s speech, many in the audience were scrolling social media to get the details about Draghi.

Merkel said little on the European economy that would take the spotlight away from Draghi. The ECB, she insisted, was “totally independent,” free from the wiles of politicians. Few things in life, she added, “were black and white” - even on the ECB’s governing council, where the German representatives are thought to have been against the stimulus.

Whatever the ECB did, it wouldn’t be enough, according to Merkel.

EU governments have to continue to reform their economies to get more competitive. Some have been forced to do so in return for bailout money, such as Portugal and Ireland. Others, such as Italy and France, are now doing so too, she said.

On non-economic matters, Merkel said the terror attacks in Paris had “woken us up thoroughly.” She also said there was no military solution to the conflict in Ukraine and that any solution rested on the Ukraine’s territorial integrity being “restored,” first in eastern Ukraine around Donetsk. Crimea, which Russia has annexed, is “not forgotten,” she added.

- By Pan Pylas, Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/panpylas FEMEN PROTEST A Frenchwoman took an early morning train from Paris and by mid-afternoon was baring her breasts in a protest in Davos against the financial world.

The woman was a member of the activist group Femen, which also targeted the World Economic Forum two years ago. Police detained her and escorted her away.

- By Carlo Piovano, Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cpiovano --EUROPE CHEERLEADING Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi speaks during the panel “Egypt in the World” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015. The meeting runs from Jan. 21 through Jan. 24. (

Femen has used similar tactics around the world to get its point across, including at the Vatican.

- By Pan Pylas, , Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/panpylas GREEK FORGIVENESS The Greek elections due Sunday are making EU leaders uneasy.

Greece’s left-wing Syriza party, which is leading in the polls, has been calling for easier terms on bailout loans the country owes to fellow EU countries. Some fear that if it does come to power, a big disagreement on this point could push Greece to leave the euro, the common currency used by 19 European nations.

European leaders don’t want to forgive Greece’s debt outright. But they also recognize that, if Syriza wins, they will have to negotiate with a democratically elected government.

“It will be very difficult for us to forgive any loans or restructure debt at this particular moment,” said Alexander Stubb, the prime minister of Finland. “We can look at different kinds of extensions, at different kind of programs,” he added, referring to longer repayment periods or lower interest rates.

- By Carlo Piovano, Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cpiovano ---

The world’s central banks are competing to weaken their currencies, says Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn.

L I V E S T A L E

powerful tales.”

The film includes six independent stories about people who lose control in stressful situations, from feeling road rage to finding out about an infidelity to using a plane as a tool for carrying out a vendetta. In each case, the protagonist feels liberated when he or she reacts in a violent way.

“Evidently, this was a sort of catharsis,” Szifron said about the movie, then recounted his own wildest tale:

Cast members of film “Relatos Salvajes,” or Wild Tales, from right, actress Julieta Zylberberg, actress Rita Cortese, Director Damian Szifron, actor Oscar Martinez and producer Hugo Sigman pose for pictures during a press conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, Jan. 16, 2015. The film includes six independent stories about people who lose control in stressful situations, and has become the most-viewed domestic film of all time in Argentina.

NEW YORK (AP) -- With an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film crowning a string of accolades, director Damian Szifron seems to be living his own wild tale “Relatos Salvajes,” or “Wild Tales,” a widely honored comedy about violence, earned Argentina its seventh Oscar nomination Thursday. Praised for its narration and sense of humor, it has become the most-seen domestic film of all time in Argentina, with more than 3.4 million viewers. It was a hit at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or. After getting the nomination, Szifron said he was “overflowing with joy, like Gene Kelly in `Singing in the Rain.’”

He has said the film, which he also wrote, came naturally to him, “without any pain, or neurosis,” ideas for the project germinating over the years as he worked on other films.

“I was driving along the road and would get into an argument with a guy, and would get all tense, and quickly from there, I’d start imagining something. And I’d stop the car in the middle of the road to write a story, which would then become a tale,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.

“Then, I’d try to compress the next ideas to avoid them from becoming feature films. The result was a series of

Many leaders gathered here support the ECB’s move, a program technically called QE that is facing some resistance from Germany amid worries it could expose its national finances to risks.

“We’re all for QE in Europe,” Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, said during a panel including International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde.

The question is whether the stimulus will be enough.

Lagarde noted that expectations of the stimulus had already boosted markets. “To a point, you can say it has already worked.”

Summers replied that if that’s the extent of the stimulus’ impact, it’s worrying, as economic forecasts remain dismal. “We should not make the mistake that the situation in Europe is in hand,” he said, adding that rich governments like Germany, need to accept to spend more to help growth.

German Chancel

CHILD CARE IN GOP continued from page 8

and bridges, and spending on research and development.

People lined the sidewalks of Boise to welcome Obama as his motorcade made the approximately 15-minute drive from the airport.

In remarks reprising his State of the Union message, Obama said disagreement is the nature of democracy but “we don’t have to be divided as a people.”

CURRENCY WAR

D A M I A N S Z I F R O N H I S O W N W I L D

All eyes today are on the eurozone, where there are expectations - and hopes - that the European Central Bank will deliver another stimulus.

“I went to a restaurant with my wife and as we were starting to eat and drink a bottle of wine, they wanted to kick us out because they were closing. `Get out, leave,’ they’d say. It was unbelievable.”

“Whoever we are - whether we are Republican, or Democrat, or independent, or young or old, or black, white, gay, straight - we all share a common vision for our future,” he said to applause. “We want a better country for your generation, and for your kids’ generation. And I want this country to be one that shows the world what we still know to be true, that we are not just a collection of red states and blue states. We are still the United States of America.”

“It really is quite shocking. When I wrote this story I never realized the journey it could take,” Szifron said. “This is my first movie that really crosses boundaries and is being shown in many festivals, so in comparison to what I’ve done before, I feel that this is an absolute revolution. I feel revolutionized.”

This year’s other nominees in the foreign film category include “Leviathan” from Russia, “Ida” from Poland, “Timbuktu” from Mauritania and “Tangerines,” an Estonian-Georgian film.

The winners of the 87th Academy Awards will be announced at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Feb. 22.

He began an argument and as it heated up he announced that he was going to take the bottle and glasses out and drink the wine on a nearby square because he had already paid.

“Just as I was taking everything, a waiter and the cook came out ... and all of a sudden, the cook was grabbing my wife in a really rough way and I thought he pushed her, so I punched him!

“I’m the least likely person to do something like that ... but it came from my soul. And all of a sudden I was in a fistfight with the waiter and the cook. In the midst of all that, one of the cups broke, cutting the cook’s ear. He started bleeding and the police showed up,” he concluded.

The “Wild Tales” cast includes Ricardo Darin, who starred in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” an Argentine film that won the 2010 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Argentina also won the best foreign film category in 1985 with “The Official Story.”

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The Weekly News Digest, Jan 19 thru Jan 26, 2015

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X - R AY S U N L O C K S E C R E T S O F A N C I E N T SCROLLS BURIED BY VOLCANO BERLIN (AP) -- Scientists have succeeded in reading parts of an ancient scroll that was buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago, holding out the promise that the world’s oldest surviving library may one day reveal all of its secrets.

The scroll is among hundreds retrieved from the remains of a lavish villa at Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was one of several Roman towns that were destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.

Some of the texts from what is called the Villa of the Papyri have been deciphered since they were discovered in the 1750s. But many more remain a mystery to science because they were so badly damaged that unrolling the papyrus they were written on would have destroyed them completely.

“The papyri were completely covered in blazing-hot volcanic material,” said Vito Mocella, a theoretical scientist at the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems (CNR) in Naples who led the latest project.

Previous attempts to peer inside the scrolls failed to yield any readable texts because the ink used in ancient times was made from a mixture of charcoal and gum. This makes it indistinguishable from the burned papyrus.

Mocella and his colleagues decided to try a method called X-ray phase contrast tomography that had previously been used to examine fossils without damaging them.

Phase contrast tomography takes advantage of subtle differences in the way radiation - such as X-rays - passes through different substances, in this case papyrus and ink.

Photo provided by Nature Publishing group on Tuesday, Jan 20, 2015 shows close up of Herculaneum Papyrus scroll. Scientists have succeeded in reading parts of an ancient scroll that was buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago, holding out the promise that the world’s oldest surviving library may one day reveal all of its secrets.

Using lab time at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, the researchers found they were able to decipher several letters, proving that the method could be used to read what’s hidden inside the scrolls.

That number is slated to increase by another 100 inspectors under a $27 million budget increase approved last year. That would still leave inspectors stretched thin given the mileage of pipelines.

Dena Hoff, a farmer and rancher whose land borders the site of the Poplar accident, said she’s had a good working relationship with Bridger Pipeline, and she commended the company for taking responsibility for the spill.

Sen. Jon Tester said Saturday’s spill from the decades-old Poplar Pipeline was avoidable, but “we just didn’t have the folks on the ground” to prevent it.

The Montana Democrat told The Associated Press that more frequent inspections by regulators are needed, and older pipelines should face stricter safety standards.

“We need to take a look at some of these pipelines that have been in the ground for half a century and say, `Are they still doing a good job?’ “ Tester said.

The latest spill comes as Republicans and some Democrats, including Tester, want the Obama administration to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf.

Keystone would cross the Yellowstone roughly 20 miles upstream of the Poplar Pipeline spill.

In 2011, an ExxonMobil pipeline break spilled 63,000 gallons of oil during flooding on the Yellowstone near Billings. The break was blamed on scouring of the river bottom that exposed the company’s Silvertip line to floodwaters.

Officials involved in the Poplar Pipeline spill have said it’s too soon to say if that line also was exposed.

Poplar, owned by Wyoming-based Bridger Pipeline, was constructed in the 1950s. The breached section beneath the Yellowstone was replaced at least four decades ago, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, according to the company.

Based on the number of miles of pipelines in the U.S. that carry oil,

DEVELOPER HAS PLANS TO PRESERVE WESTINGHOUSE ATOM SMASHER

Scholars studying the Herculaneum texts say the new technique, which was detailed in an article published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, may well mark a breakthrough for their efforts to unlock the ancient philosophical ideas hidden from view

The agency’s Office of Pipeline Safety has roughly 150 inspectors overseeing 2.6 million miles of gas, oil and other pipelines.

Investigators and company officials on Wednesday were trying to determine the cause of the 40,000-gallon spill that contaminated downstream water supplies in the city of Glendive.

“There needs to be much work before one can virtually unroll carbonized papyrus because one will have to develop a digital method that will allow us to follow the layers,” he said. “But i

The next challenge will be to automate the laborious process of scanning the charred lumps of papyrus and deciphering the texts inside them, so that some 700 further scrolls stored in Naples can be read, Mocella said.

gasoline and other hazardous liquids, just over half were installed prior to 1970, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- A second large oil spill into Montana’s Yellowstone River in less than four years is reviving questions about oversight of the nation’s aging pipeline network.

“It’s a philosophical library of Epicurean texts from a time when this philosophy influenced the most important classical Latin authors, such as Virgil, Horace and Cicero,” said Juergen Hammerstaedt, a professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Cologne, Germany, who was not involved in the project.

“Our goal was to show that the technique is sensitive to the writing,” said Mocella. In a further step, the scientists compared the handwriting to that of other texts, allowing them to conclude that it was likely the work of Philodemus, a poet and Epicurean philosopher who died about a century before the volcanic eruption.

M O N TA N A O I L S P I L L R E N E W S W O R RY OVER SAFETY OF OLD PIPELINES

Eric Held carries water to his vehicle at a public distribution center, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015, in Glendive, Mont. A cancer-causing component of oil has been detected in the Glendive drinking water supply, just downstream from a crude oil spill that entered the Yellowstone River.

for almost two millennia.

But Hoff said the spill should spur second thoughts about Keystone and whether it’s a good idea to have pipelines that cross beneath surface waters.

“It’s the nature of the beast. Pipelines leak and pipelines break. We’re never going to get around that,” she said. “We have to decide if water is more valuable than oil.”

Authorities continue work to clean up Glendive’s public water supply after cancer-causing benzene was detected in water coming from the city’s treatment plant. The plant draws directly from the Yellowstone.

Bridger Pipeline has committed to providing bottled water for Glendive’s roughly 6,000 residents until the water-treatment plant is running again.

Late Wednesday night, Dawson County Disaster and Emergency Services Coordinator Mary Jo Gehnert said in an email that the plant has been decontaminated. If tests conducted Thursday show that the plant’s water is safe to use, county workers will give information to the public on how to flush the water in homes and businesses, Gehnert said.

Workers late Tuesday recovered about 10,000 gallons of oil that was still in the Poplar line after it was shut down because of the breach.

Bridger Pipeline Co. spokesman Bill Salvin said Wednesday only a “very small” amount of oil has been siphoned from the river itself.

Company officials and government regulators say most of the oil is thought to be within the first 6 miles of the spill site. That includes the stretch of the river through Glendive.

“What we’re working on is identifying places where we can collect more oil,” Salvin said. “The cleanup could extend for a while.”

Oil sheens have been reported as far away as Williston, North Dakota, below the Yellowstone’s confluence with the Missouri River, officials said.

photo shows the 5-million volt van de Graff generator, the nation’s first large-scale industrial atom smasher, at a Westinghouse research facility in Forest Hills, Pa. The property was sold to developer Gary Silversmith, of Washington, D.C. in 2013. During site preparation on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2015, the 1937 iconic Westinghouse atom smasher was torn down. But Silversmith says he plans to preserve the structure no matter what happens to the property it was on

FOREST HILLS, Pa. (AP) -- A developer has knocked over the Westinghouse atom smasher east of Pittsburgh but plans to preserve the structure no matter what happens to the property it was on.

The brick building at the base of the five-story, lightbulb-shaped atom smasher was in too much disrepair to save, said property owner Gary Silversmith of Washington, D.C. “But we are going to establish a new concrete base for it, and keep it at the site, and have the bulb repainted, including the `W’ for Westinghouse,” Silversmith said. “I think this is an iconic piece of history.”

Westinghouse Electric Corporation completed the atom smasher in 1937 as the nation’s first industrial nuclear generator.

Silversmith’s investment company bought the property from Westinghouse parent, CBS Corp., in 2013.

The atom smasher was so far ahead of its time that when Westinghouse decided to build it in 1936, it would be another three years before the discovery of nuclear fission revealed the possibilities of nuclear power.

Westinghouse physicists created nuclear reactions by bombarding target atoms with high-energy particles. They accelerated those particles down a vacuum tube from the top of the structure to a pressure vessel 47 feet below.

Research done at the Forest Hills site led to the discovery of the photo-fission of uranium, part of the process involved in the generation of nuclear power, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The atom smasher was deactivated in 1958.

Silversmith may develop residences or rental storage units on the property, but said he’ll keep the atom smasher intact because of its historical significance.

Silversmith - and before him, CBS parent Viacom - has tried to donate the structure to the Smithsonian Institution, as well as the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center and the Carnegie Science, both in Pittsburgh, but were refused because of the unit’s size.

The atom smasher was designated historically significant by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation in 2000.

The farthest downstream that free-floating oil has been seen was at an intake dam about 28 miles from the spill site, officials said.

Montana Department of Environmental Quality Director Tom Livers said he was concerned that when the ice breaks up in the spring, oil will spread farther downstream.

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