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OBAMA COMMEMORATES MOON LANDING’S 45TH ANNIVERSARY

WASHINGTON (AP) -- This week’s 45th anniversary of man’s first landing on the moon is being celebrated at the White House.

President Barack Obama met with representatives of the Apollo 11 mission in the Oval Office Tuesday morning.

Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, died two years ago.

Armstrong’s fellow crew members, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, were among those who met with Obama, along with Armstrong’s widow, Carol. NASA administrator Charles Bolden and White House science and technology official Patricia Falcone also participated in the private meeting.

VERY BAD WEEK: AIRLINE DISASTERS COME IN A CLUSTER

Volume 003 Issue 29

Established 2012

SOCIAL SECURITY’S $300M IT PROJECT DOESN’T WORK

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After spending nearly $300 million on a new computer system to handle disability claims, the Social Security Administration still can’t get it to work. And officials can’t say when it will.

Six years ago, Social Security embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. But the project has been racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency.

to hear what the results are,” Gruber said in an interview Wednesday.

“We are absolutely committed to deliver this initiative and by implementing the recommendations we obtained independently, we think we have a very good prospect on doing just that.”

The Social Security Administration’s main campus is seen in Woodlawn, Md. Six years ago the Social Security Administration embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. Nearly $300 million later, the new system is nowhere near ready and agency officials are struggling to salvage a project racked by delays and mismanagement.

Today, the project is still in the testing phase, and the agency can’t say when it will be operational or how much it will cost.

In the meantime, people filing for disability claims face long delays at nearly every step of the process - delays that were supposed to be reduced by the new processing system.

“The program has invested $288 million over six years, delivered limited functionality, and faced schedule delays as well as increasing stakeholder concerns,” said a report by McKinsey and Co., a management consulting firm.

As a result, agency leaders have decided to “reset” the program in an effort to save it, the report said. As part of that effort, Social Security brought in the outside consultants from McKinsey to figure out what went wrong.

They found a massive technology initiative with no one in charge - no single person responsible for completing the project. They issued their report in June, though it was not publicly released.

As part of McKinsey’s recommendations, Acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin appointed Terrie Gruber to oversee the project last month. Gruber had been an assistant deputy commissioner.

“We asked for this, this independent look, and we weren’t afraid

A forensic team recovers human remains among the wreckage of crashed TransAsia Airways flight GE222 on the outlying island of Penghu, Taiwan, Thursday, July 24, 2014.

Stormy weather on the trailing edge of Typhoon Matmo was the likely cause of the plane crash that killed more than 40 people, the airline said. Aviation has suffered one of its worst weeks in memory, a cluster of disasters spanning three continents.

But Beatty said he also finds the disaster cluster “a cold reminder” that airline accidents are likely to increase because the industry is growing, especially in developing countries. The more flights there are, the more potential for accidents, he noted.

The misfortunes began July 18 when Malaysia flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine with 298 people on board. It’s still uncertain who fired the missile that destroyed the plane, but Ukrainian officials have blamed ethnic Russian rebels and U.S. officials have pointed to circumstantial evidence that suggests that may be the case.

The shootdown doubled Malaysia Airlines’ misfortunes this year.

The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 with 239 continued on page 4

The House Oversight Committee is also looking into the program, and whether Social Security officials tried to bury the McKinsey report. In a letter to Colvin on Wednesday, committee leaders requested all documents and communications about the computer project since March 1.

The letter was signed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the Oversight committee, and Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and James Lankford, R-Okla. They called the project “an IT boondoggle.”

The troubled computer project is known as the Disability Case Processing System, or DCPS. It was supposed to replace 54 separate, antiquated computer systems used by state Social Security offices to process disability claims. As envisioned, workers across the country would be able to use the system to process claims and track them as benefits are awarded or denied and claims are appealed.

But as of April, the system couldn’t even process all new claims, let alone accurately track them as they wound their way through the system, the report said. In all, more than 380 problems were still outstanding, and users hadn’t even started testing the ability of the system to handle applications from children.

“The DCPS project is adrift, the scope of the project is ambiguous, the project has been poorly executed, and the project’s decontinued on page 2

proposal rolled out Wednesday by a working group Boehner established.

Conservative lawmakers voiced objections, and Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana said Boehner told Republicans he was undecided about bringing the plan to the floor because he doesn’t know if there are enough votes to pass it.

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala, said he couldn’t support it, complaining that Obama has turned the U.S. into the “world’s sugar daddy.”

Industry analysts and safety experts shake their heads at the seeming randomness of the tragedies, saying they can find no common themes. Nor do they think the events indicate that flying is suddenly becoming less safe.

“One of the things that makes me feel better when we look at these events is that if they all were the same type event or same root cause then you would say there’s a systemic problem here, but each event is unique in its own way,” said Jon Beatty, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, an airline industry-supported nonprofit in Alexandria, Virginia, that promotes global aviation safety.

The revelations come at an awkward time for Colvin. President Barack Obama nominated Colvin to a full six-year term in June, and she now faces confirmation by the Senate.

Colvin was deputy commissioner for 3 1/2 years before becoming acting commissioner in February 2013.

HOUSE GOP: SEND NATIONAL G U A R D , S P E E D R E M O VA L S

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly 300 passengers perish when their plane is shot out of the sky. Airlines suspend flights to Israel’s largest airport after rocket attacks. An airliner crashes during a storm, and yet another disappears. Aviation has suffered one of its worst weeks in memory, a cluster of disasters spanning three continents.

Less than one in 2 million flights last year ended in an accident in which the plane was damaged beyond repair, according to the International Air Transport Association. That includes accidents involving cargo and charter airlines as well as scheduled passenger flights.

July 21 thru 28, 2014

Several GOP lawmakers said the House plan would cost about $1.5 billion, compared to Obama’s original $3.7 billion request for more immigration judges, detention facilities and other resources to deal with unaccompanied kids.

In this July 12, 2014, photo, Central American migrants ride a freight train during their journey toward the U.S.-Mexico border in Ixtepec, Mexico. The last time so few people were arrested at the country’s borders was 1973, when the Border Patrol recorded just fewer than 500,000 arrests. And the volume of people being arrested at the border remains dramatically lower than the all-time high of more than 1.6 people in 2000.

A plan by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski would cost $2.7 billion.

But the biggest conflict between the House and Senate is not over costs, but policy instead.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans want to slash President Barack Obama’s emergency spending request for the border, speed young migrants back home to Central America, and send in the National Guard.

Mikulski, D-Md., said she was omitting from her legislation any changes to a 2008 trafficking victims law that Republicans say has contributed to the crisis by allowing Central American youths to stay in this country indefinitely while awaiting far-off court dates.

The proposals Wednesday morning amounted to a rebuke of Obama’s proposed solution to the crisis on the Southern Border. They put the House on a collision course with the Democratic-run Senate, and increased the likelihood that congressional efforts to address the crisis on the Southern Border, where unaccompanied kids and teens have been showing up by the tens of thousands, will end in stalemate.

Republicans are demanding changes in that law as the price for approving any money for the crisis.

“Without trying to fix the problem I don’t know how we actually are in a position to give the president any more money,” said Speaker John Boehner, shortly after the rank and file reviewed steps to respond to the influx of tens of thousands of kids and teens across the Rio Grande. “What the president’s asking for is a blank check.”

Moreover it was not clear if the House would be able to approve the

“Modifications to the law can be done to expedite the process while ensuring proper protections are in place for the children who need them,” said Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, who led Boehner’s working group.

The result looks like a stalemate, with little time left to resolve it because Congress’ annual August recess is just around the corner.

“Unfortunately, it looks like we’re on a track to do absolutely nothing,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said. continued on page 7

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The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014 ________________________________________________________________

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F U K U S H I M A S T U D Y: T H I N K ABOUT UNTHINKABLE DISASTERS but that’s not really part of their training or nature, he said.

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The report said the 2011 Japanese accident, caused by an earthquake and tsunami, should not have been a surprise. The report says another Japanese nuclear power plant also hit by the tsunami was closer to the quake’s fault. But the Onagawa plant wasn’t damaged because quakes and flooding were considered when it was built.

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photo, shows workers in protective suits and masks as they wait to enter the emergency operation center at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station in Okuma, Japan. A U.S. science advisory report says a key lesson from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident is that the nation’s nuclear industry needs to focus more on the highly unlikely but super-serious worst case scenarios and radiation traveling further than previously figured.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. science advisory report says Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident offers a key lesson to the nation’s nuclear industry: Focus more on the highly unlikely but worst case scenarios.

That means thinking about earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, solar storms, multiple failures and situations that seem freakishly unusual, according to Thursday’s National Academy of Sciences report. Those kinds of things triggered the world’s three major nuclear accidents.

“We need to do a soul searching when it comes to the assumptions” of how to deal with worst case events, said University of Southern California engineering professor Najmedin Meshkati, the panel’s technical adviser. Engineers should “think about something that could happen once every, perhaps 1,000 years”

$300M IT PROJECT continued from page 1

velopment lacks leadership,” the three lawmakers said in their letter to Colvin.

Maryland-based Lockheed Martin was selected in 2011 as the prime contractor on the project. At the time, the company valued the contract at up to $200 million, according to a press release.

McKinsey’s report does not specifically fault Lockheed but raises the possibility of changing vendors and says Social Security officials need to better manage the project.

Gruber said Social Security will continue to work with Lockheed “to make sure that we are successful in the delivery of this program.”

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Steve Field, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, would only say that the company is committed to delivering the program.

Nearly 11 million disabled workers, spouses and children get Social Security disability benefits. That’s a 45 percent increase from a decade ago. The average monthly benefit for a disabled worker is $1,146.

The report comes as the disability program edges toward the brink of insolvency. The trust fund that supports Social Security’s disability program is projected to run out of money in 2016.

At that point, the system will collect only enough money in payroll taxes to pay 80 percent of benefits, triggering an automatic 20 percent cut in benefits.

POTECTING SPEICIES

Congress could redirect money from Social Security’s much bigger retirement program to shore up the disability program, as it did in 1994. But that would worsen the finances of the re-

Onagawa had crucial backup electricity available for when the main power went down, as opposed to Fukushima which had emergency generators in a basement that flooded. Onagawa’s operators had “a different mindset” than the executives who ran Fukushima, Meshkati said.

The other two nuclear accidents - at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island and Ukraine’s Chernobyl- were caused by multiple system failures.

Lee Clarke, a Rutgers University risk expert and author of the book “Worst Cases,” criticized the academy’s report as too weak.

He said the tone of the report made it seem like the accident was unpredictable and caught reasonable people by surprise “and it shouldn’t have.” But the report itself said the “the Fukushima accident was not a technical surprise.”

David Lochbaum of the activist group Union of Concerned Scientists said the problem is that federal law financially protects the U.S. nuclear industry from accidents gives utilities little incentive to spend money on low-probability, high-consequence problems.

But Nuclear Energy Institute senior vice president Anthony Pietrangelo said the American nuclear industry has already taken several steps to shore up backup power and deal with natural disasters.

“We cannot let such an accident happen here,” he said in a statement.

Another issue the report raised was about how far radiation may go in a worst case accident.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission orders plants to have emergency plans for a zone of 10 miles around a nuclear plant.

But the academy study said Fukushima showed that “may prove inadequate” if a similar accident happened in the U.S. People nearly 19 miles away in Japan needed protection from radiation.

But the committee would not say what would be a good emergency zone.

tirement program, which is facing its own long-term financial problems.

Social Security disability claims are first processed through a network of field offices and state agencies called Disability Determination Services. There are 54 of these offices, and they all use different computer systems, Gruber said.

If your claim is rejected, you can ask the state agency to reconsider. If your claim is rejected again, you can appeal to an administrative law judge, who is employed by Social Security.

It takes more than 100 days, on average, to processing initial applications, according to agency data. The average processing time for a hearing before an administrative law judge is more than 400 days.

The new processing system is supposed to help alleviate some of these delays.

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A I R L I N E S B A N F L I G H T S T O I S R A E L A F T E R R O C K E T S T R I K E for 24 hours “due to the potentially hazardous situation created by the armed conflict in Israel and Gaza.” Later, the European Aviation Safety Agency issued an advisory to airlines saying it “strongly recommends” airlines avoid the airport.

The military said Sgt. Oron Shaul was among seven soldiers in avehicle that was hit by an anti-tank missile in a battle in Gaza over the weekend. The other six have been confirmed as dead, but no remains have been identified as Shaul’s.

Germany’s Lufthansa, Air France, Air Canada, Alitalia, Dutch KLM, Britain’s easyJet, Turkish Airlines and Greece’s Aegean Airlines were among those carriers canceling flights to Tel Aviv over safety concerns amid the increasing violence.

Hamas claims to have abducted him and has flaunted his name and military ID number to try to back that claim. Military officials say the soldier is almost certainly dead, but it would be a nightmare scenario for the Jewish state if even his remains were in the hands of Hamas.

Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz called on the U.S. aviation authority to reconsider, calling the flight ban “unnecessary” and saying Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system provided cover for civil aviation.

Israeli police officers secure a destroyed house that was hit by a rocket fired by Palestinians militants from Gaza, in Yahud, a Tel Aviv suburb near the airport, central Israel, Tuesday, July 22, 2014. As a result, Delta Air Lines and U.S. Airlines decided to cancel their scheduled flights to Israel.

JERUSALEM (AP) -- A Hamas rocket exploded Tuesday near Israel’s main airport, prompting a ban on flights from the U.S. and many from Europe and Canada as aviation authorities responded to the shock of seeing a civilian jetliner shot down over Ukraine.

Israel declared that Ben-Gurion Airport was safe and said there was no reason to “hand terror a prize” by halting flights.

The rare flight ban came as Israel grappled with news that a soldier went missing after an attack in the Gaza Strip, raising the possibility he was abducted, a scenario that could complicate intense diplomatic efforts to end the two-week conflict.

Palestinian militants have fired more than 2,000 rockets toward Israel since fighting began on July 8, but most - including several heading toward Tel Aviv - fell harmlessly into open areas or were shot out of the sky by the “Iron Dome” defense system, keeping Israeli casualties low.

Tuesday’s rocket attack was the closest to the airport so far, said police spokeswoman Luba Samri, and largely destroyed a house, slightly injuring one Israeli in the nearby Tel Aviv suburb of Yehud.

Aviation authorities reacted swiftly. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration prohibited American airlines from flying to Tel Aviv

“Ben-Gurion Airport is safe and completely guarded and there is no reason whatsoever that American companies would stop their flights and hand terror a prize,” his office said in a statement.

Past abductions of Israeli soldiers have turned into painful drawnout affairs and Israel has paid a heavy price in lopsided prisoner swaps to retrieve captured soldiers or remains held by its enemies. The prolonged saga of Gilad Schalit, a soldier captured by Hamas-allied militants in 2006 and held for more than five years before he was swapped for more than 1,000 Palestinians prisoners, still weighs heavily in Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the issue of the ban with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was in the Middle East on Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

“We understand the terror organization is looking for some leverage and as cynical as it sounds, one type of leverage is bargaining over parts of bodies,” said Lior Lotan, a reserve Israeli colonel and former head of its POW and MIA department.

“The FAA’s notice was issued to protect American citizens and American carriers. The only consideration in issuing the notice was the safety and security of our citizens,” Psaki said in a statement. “

Israeli airstrikes continued to pummel Gaza tunnels, rocket launchers and militants on the 15th day of the war Tuesday as diplomatic efforts intensified to end fighting that has killed at least 630 Palestinians and 29 Israelis - 27 soldiers and two civilians.

International airlines and passengers have grown more anxious about safety since last week, when a Malaysia Airlines jet was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. While Hamas rockets aren’t guided missiles, they still can cause massive damage to an aircraft. For instance, unguided mortar fire in Tripoli from a militia battling to control its international airport destroyed an Airbus A330 on the ground over the weekend.

Human rights activists say past confrontations have shown that when Israeli carries out attacks in densely populated Palestinian areas, civilian deaths are inevitable.

Another Hamas objective was to abduct an Israeli soldier, and Israeli fears over such an occurrence were revisited Tuesday when the military announced that a soldier was missing following a deadly battle in Gaza, where the Israelis are fighting Hamas militants in the third such war in just over five years.

The Israeli military said that after a firefight with Palestinian militants on Tuesday, troops saw some Palestinian gunmen flee the scene in an ambulance.

top helipad. They rigged up electricity, opened stores and barbershops, and created a sophisticated internal management system.

On Tuesday, Maria Sevilla, manager of the 28th floor, looked wistfully at the sooty concrete skeleton, with its steep ledges and incomplete stories stippled with satellite dishes.

“What I’ll miss the most is the community we built here,” she said.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- The beginning of the end came for the world’s tallest slum Tuesday as officials began evicting thousands of squatters from a haphazard community inside the half-built Caracas skyscraper known as the Tower of David.

Police in riot gear and soldiers with Kalashnikov assault rifles stood on side streets as dozens of residents boarded buses for their new government-provided apartments in the town of Cua, 23 miles (37 kilometers) south of Caracas.

Ernesto Villegas, the government minister overseeing Caracas’ redevelopment, told reporters the residents could not be allowed to stay indefinitely because the 45-story building in the heart of the capital is unsafe.

He said children have fallen to their deaths from the tower, which in some places is missing walls or windows. The damp, foul-smelling concrete lobby attested to the lack of working plumbing.

Meant to be the crown jewel of a glittering downtown, the building was abandoned amid a 1990s banking crisis. It later was nicknamed the Tower of David, after its financier David Brillembourg.

Villegas said the tower started its life as a symbol of failed capitalism, and later came to represent the power of community. The squatters’ invasion was part of a larger appropriation of vacant buildings encouraged by the late President Hugo Chavez.

By 2007, the “invaders,” as they’re called in Caracas, had claimed everything from the parking garages to the roof-

Israel says it is trying hard to avoid civilian casualties and blames Hamas for using civilians as “human shields.”

The Tel Aviv airport is Israel’s main gateway to the world and Hamas militants have said they hoped to target it to disrupt life in Israel.

END COMES FOR NOTORIOUS VENEZUELAN VERTICAL SLUM

Broken windows are seen covered with wood planks at the the world’s tallest slum, a half-built skyscraper that was abandoned in the 1990s and was transformed by squatters into a vertical ghetto, in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, July 22, 2014. Tuesday saw the beginning of the end for one of Caracas’ strangest landmarks. Officials and armed soldiers began moving out the first of thousands of squatters who have lived for nearly a decade in a soaring, half-built skyscraper in the heart of Caracas.

Israel says its troops have killed hundreds of Hamas gunmen, while Gaza officials say the vast majority have been civilians, many of them children.

A former street vendor, Sevilla said the 50 neighbors on her floor had become like family to her and her teenage children.

For outsiders, the tower symbolized the height of anarchic dysfunction. The surreal-looking high-rise was widely believed to harbor criminals as well as working families, and it was sometimes raided by police looking for kidnapping victims. The U.S. television show “Homeland” depicted the building as a lawless place where thugs participate in international conspiracies and kill with impunity.

The building’s neighbors celebrated the eviction Tuesday. Retiree Antonio Farias looked on with glee, saying the slum had brought the constant threat of kidnapping, rape and robbery.

“It was so beautiful at first,” he said.

Inside the tower, the mood was subdued even as dozens of children ran about. Young men talked about families they heard were going to refuse to leave.

Residents complained that they did not want to move so far away. They worry about losing the million-dollar views, and their easy access to supermarkets, public transportation and, possibly, employment.

“I don’t know how I’ll be able to find a job out there,” said Yaritza Casares, 28, leading her 4-year-old daughter through a soaring courtyard. “We were lucky to live here.”

The military said soldiers “did not target the ambulance in light of the possibility uninvolved civilians were in it.”

Egypt, Israel and the U.S. back an unconditional cease-fire, to be followed by talks on a possible new border arrangement for Gaza.

Israel and Egypt have severely restricted movement in and out of Gaza since Hamas seized the territory in 2007. But Hamas has rejected repeated Egyptian truce proposals.

Both U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon and Kerry were in the region to make the highest-level push yet to end the deadly conflict.

Kerry met with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and other senior officials in Cairo. He stopped short of advocating a new round of peace talks but left the door open for broad negotiations between Israel and Palestinian officials once a cease-fire is in place.

“Just reaching a cease-fire is clearly not enough,” Kerry said.

“It is imperative that there be a serious engagement, discussion, negotiation, regarding the underlying issues and addressing all the concerns that have brought us to where we are today.”

El-Sissi said he raised with Ban the possibility of an international donor conference for Gaza reconstruction after a cease-fire is implemented.

The U.N. secretary-general, meanwhile, said it was his “hope and belief” that his mission would lead to an end to the fighting “in the very near future.” Ban told the Security Council by videoconference from the West Bank city of Ramallah that he could not publicly reveal details “at this highly sensitive moment.” As he spoke a siren could be heard in the background.

Ban earlier met with Netanyahu in Israel, where he urged a resumption of talks toward bringing about a two-state solution.

Netanyahu responded that Hamas, a group whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, does not want a two-state solution and said the international community needed to hold Hamas accountable for the latest round of violence, saying its refusal to agree to a cease-fire had prevented an earlier end to the fighting.

“What we’re seeing here with Hamas is another instance of Islamist extremism, violent extremism,” Netanyahu said at a joint press conference in Tel Aviv. “What grievance can we solve with Hamas? Their grievance is that we exist. They don’t want a twostate solution, they don’t want any state solution.”

Hamas, with backing from its allies Qatar and Turkey, says it wants guarantees on lifting the blockade before halting its fire.

Israel launched a massive air campaign on July 8 to stop relentless Hamas rocket fire into Israel, and expanded it to a ground war last week aimed at destroying tunnels the military says Hamas has constructed from Gaza into Israel for attacks against Israelis.

Israel has struck almost 3,000 sites in Gaza, killed more than 180 armed Palestinians and uncovered 66 access shafts of 23 tunnels, the military said.

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The Weekly News Digest, July July 21 thru 28 , 2014 ___________________________________________________________

F L O R I D A C R A S H S TAT I S T I C S

AIRLINE DISASTERS continued from page 1

people on board in March combined with the destruction of Flight 17 added up to more than twice the total global airline fatalities in all of last year, which was the industry’s safest year on record.

Ascend, a global aviation industry consulting firm headquartered in London, counted 163 fatalities in 2013 involving airliners with 14 seats or more.

On Wednesday, a mere seven days after the shootdown over Ukraine, a TransAsia Airways plane crashed in Taiwan in stormy weather trailing a typhoon, killing 48 passengers, injuring 10 others and crew, and injuring five more people on the ground.

The next day an Air Algerie flight with 116 passengers and crew disappeared in a rainstorm over Mali while en route from Burkina Faso to Algeria’s capital. The plane was operated for the airline

by Swiftair, a Spanish carrier.

Together, the disasters have the potential to push airline fatalities this year to over 700 - the most since 2010. And 2014 is still barely half over.

Aviation industry analyst Robert W. Mann Jr. said he doesn’t expect the recent events to deter travelers from flying.

“They’re all tragic, but the global air travel consumer has a very short memory and it’s highly localized to their home markets where they fly,” he said. “The places where these things are happening, 99 percent of passengers never go to or fly to. ...

This isn’t a headline issue for most people, and that’s why people continue to fly despite the headlines.”

Airline passengers interviewed by The Associated Press said they weren’t overly concerned about their safety.

“It could be happening every day or never again,” said Bram Holshoff, a Netherlands traveler at Berlin’s Tegel Airport. “It’s a bit much that it happened three times this week, but for me nothing will change.”

Lam Nguyen, 52, of Tahiti, who was headed to Los Angeles from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, said he considers flying “a very safe mode of transportation.”

“And if it has to happen, it will happen. ... It doesn’t prevent me from taking planes,” he said.

The shootdown of flight 17 has raised questions about whether airlines - and the aviation authorities in their home countries - are adjusting flight routes quickly enough when unrest in troubled parts of the world threatens the safety of planes. But aviation safety consultant John Cox, a former airline pilot and accident investigator, said he sees no connection between that event and the other disasters.

“I don’t know how you could respond to anything when there is not a commonality of events,” he said. “We don’t have a full understanding of the Taiwan accident and certainly not on the” Air Algerie plane.

Cox attributed the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision Tuesday to prohibit flights to Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv to “hypersensitivity” to the possibility of another shootdown. The FAA issued the order after a Hamas rocket exploded about a mile from the airport. The prohibition was lifted 36 hours later.

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Aviation is “fundamentally safe and getting safer, but can it can always fall prey to the mistakes or ill will of man,” said former FAA chief counsel Kenneth Quinn, a partner in the Pillsbury law firm in Washington. “We sometimes forget the magic of flight, or the fragility of life, but this week has brought home the need to appreciate this more and protect both better.”

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G E T PA I D F O R P O S T S ? S O C I A L N E T W O R K I N G ’ S N E W T W I S T SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Facebook and most other social networks are built on the premise that just about everything should be shared -except the money those posts produce.

“They just take all your information and make all the money for themselves. It’s insane,” Kelly says.

Despite the occasional uproar, Facebook Inc. has been thriving while feeding off the free content of its 1.3 billion users. The Menlo Park, California, company now has a market value of about $180 billion, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ranks among the world’s wealthiest people with a fortune of about $30 billion, based on the latest estimates from Forbes magazine.

At least two services are trying to change that. Bubblews, a social network that came out of out of an extended test phase last week, pays users for posts that attract traffic and advertisers. Another company, Bonzo Me, has been doing something similar since early July.

“I just feel like everyone on social networks has been taken advantage of for long enough,” says Michael Nusbaum, a Morristown, New Jersey surgeon who created Bonzo Me. “Facebook has been making a ton of money, and the people providing the content aren’t getting anything.”

Bonzo Me is paying its users up to 80 percent of its ad revenue for the most popular posts.

Bubblews’ compensation formula is more complex. It’s based on the number of times that each post is clicked on or provokes some other kind of networking activity. To start, the payments are expected to translate into just a penny per view, comment or like. Bubblews plans to pay its users in $50 increments, meaning it could take a while for most users to qualify for their first paycheck unless they post material that that goes viral.

“No one should come to our site in anticipation of being able to quit their day job,” Bubblews CEO Arvind Dixit says. “But we are trying to be fair with our users. Social networks don’t have to be places where you feel like you’re being exploited.”

Bubblews is also trying to make its service worthwhile for users by encouraging deeper, thoughtful posts instead of musings about trifling subjects. To do that, it requires each post to span at least 400 characters, or roughly the opening two paragraphs of this story.

Technology analyst Rob Enderle believes Bubblews, or something like it, eventually will catch on.

“I don’t think this free-content model is sustainable,” Enderle says. “You can’t sustain the quality of the product if you aren’t

Gerry Kelly, founder of clothing brand Sonas Denim and a Bubblews user, poses near his home in San Francisco. Kelly has already earned nearly $100 from Bubblews since he began using a test version in January. His Bubblews feed serves as a journal about the lessons he has learned in life, as well as a forum for his clothing brand.

paying people for the content that they are creating. And you can’t pay your bills if all you are getting are `likes.’”

Gerry Kelly of San Francisco has already earned nearly $100 from Bubblews since he began using a test version in January.

His Bubblews feed serves as a journal about the lessons he has learned in life, as well as a forum for his clothing brand, Sonas Denim.

Though Facebook is by far the largest social network, it has a history of irking users. People have complained when Facebook changed privacy settings in ways that exposed posts to a wider audience. They have criticized Facebook for circulating ads containing endorsements from users who didn’t authorize the marketing messages.

More recently, people were upset over a 2012 experiment in which Facebook manipulated the accounts of about 700,000 users to analyze how their moods were affected by the emotional tenor of the posts flowing through their pages. Facebook apologized.

Kelly still regularly posts on his Facebook page to stay in touch with friends and family, but says he is more leery of the service.

BLACK COLLEGES FACE HARD CHOICES ON $25M KOCH GIFT Dillard is giving the money in increments of $2,000 to $5,000 to candidates such as an honor student whose single mother lost her job due to health issues. The student had been planning to sleep on classmates’ couches because she didn’t have money for room and board, Kimbrough said.

Kimbrough does not agree with much of the Kochs’ political actions. But “I’ll still fight for things important to the African-American community, and I’ll use their money to do it,” he said.

Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, is interviewed in Washington. The United Negro College Fund announced a $25 million grant from Koch Industries Inc. and the Charles Koch Foundation, a large donation from the conservative powerhouse Koch name that Democrats have sought to vilify heading into the 2014 mid-term elections.

America’s black colleges are struggling for funds. The Republican Party is struggling to attract black voters.

Enter a $25 million gift to the United Negro College Fund from the conservative Koch brothers, which has pitted the needs of black students against liberals’ insistence that the Kochs are pursuing a racist political agenda.

Whether genuine philanthropy, political jujitsu or some of both, the gift sparked a debate that peaked when Lee Saunders, president of the powerful American Federation for State, County and Municipal Employees union, sent the UNCF a blistering letter ending the union’s financial support.

Historically black colleges and universities have educated a huge percentage of black America. Today, HBCUs are facing unprecedented challenges: decreases in government funding, tougher parent loan eligibility, and the threat of losing even more federal aid based on low retention and graduation rates.

In this environment, how could the UNCF turn down $25 million - much of it earmarked for direct distribution to needy students?

“I can take their money and use it for good,” said Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University.

Kimbrough’s historically black university has already received about $50,000 from the Kochs’ UNCF gift, earmarked for students whose parents no longer qualify for federal PLUS loans.

David and Charles Koch inherited an oil business from their engineer father and expanded it into the privately held Koch Industries, which had $115 billion in 2013 revenues, according to Forbes. They are reviled by liberals for donating hundreds of millions to conservative causes, and have been labeled as racists particularly for their support of laws that critics say make it harder for black people to vote.

“They are white supremacists . They are flooding our country with money,” the activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte said last year.

A Koch spokesperson, Melissa Cohlmia, called Belafonte’s remarks “false and reprehensible.” She said the Kochs “have devoted their lives to advancing tolerance and a free society where every individual is judged on his or her individual merits and they are free to make decisions about their lives.”

Advertisers, meanwhile, are pouring more money into social networks because that is where people are spending more time, particularly on smartphones. Facebook’s share of the $140 billion worldwide market for digital ads this year is expected to climb to nearly 8 percent, or $11 billion, up from a market share of roughly 6 percent, or $7 billion last year, according to the research firm eMarketer.

Although it still isn’t profitable, short-messaging service Twitter is also becoming a bigger advertising magnet, thanks largely to its 255 million users who also provide a steady flow of free content. Twitter’s digital ad revenue this year is expected to rise to $1.1 billion, nearly doubling from $600 million last year, according to eMarketer.

Facebook and Twitter have become such important marketing tools that celebrities and other users with large social-media followings are being paid by advertisers to mention and promote products on their accounts.

Bubblews wants to make money, too, but it also wants to ensure that everyone using it gets at least a small slice of the advertising pie.

Dixit, 26, who started Bubblews with his college buddy Jason Zuccari, says the service got about 200,000 users during a “beta” test phase that began in September 2012. The service unveiled a redesigned website last week as it finally moved out of testing.

Bonzo Me is even smaller, with just a few thousand users since the release of apps for the Web, iPhones and Android devices in early July. The service has paid about $30,000 in ad revenue to users so far, according to Nusbaum.

Sandy Youssef of New Brunswick, New Jersey, likes being on Facebook, but she also intends to start posting video on Bonzo Me just in case she shares something that becomes a big hit.

“We are living in an age when the things you post on the Internet can go viral, so you may as well get paid for it,” she says. “It’s time to spread the wealth.” maybe allowing the Kochs to sleep well at night.”

Unlike union president Saunders, who criticized UNCF president Michael Lomax for accepting the $25 million and then speaking at a Koch conference, Robinson would not say the gift should have been declined. But he still found it “incredibly challenging.”

“This money is just a drop in the bucket for the Kochs. This is money in the sofa,” he said. “It will not help to shift or change the damage they do and continue to do.”

The racism accusations rankle Armstrong Williams, a black conservative commentator and entrepreneur who graduated from historically black South Carolina State University. He noted that the Kochs have donated smaller amounts to the UNCF for the past decade, and have given to many historically white universities.

“If somebody asks them if they have ever given money to a black institution and they say no, that further cements the idea that they’re racist. So how can they win?” Williams said.

“It sets an example for others to rise above partisanship to do things that empower black students,” he said.

The Kochs have black and white supporters who say their efforts to require voter ID have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with stopping rampant fraud at the polls. Democrats say fraud is minuscule and insignificant, and that the goal of voter ID is to suppress Democratic votes in poor areas, which are disproportionately black. And if the Kochs fund initiatives that unfairly keep black people from voting, Democrats say, that is racist.

Some see the donation as an opportunity that extends beyond students who need money for school.

As executive director of Color of Change, Rashad Robinson has battled organizations funded by the Kochs such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, which led efforts nationwide to pass voter ID and “stand your ground” laws. Color of Change says 69 corporations have cut ties with ALEC due to their activism.

Walters said the UNCF and HBCUs should use the spotlight of the Koch donation to start new research on the influence of money on politics: “Not for a political agenda, but for scholarship. To educate a Republican or a Democrat.”

“Charity is not justice,” Robinson said.

“Giving someone a check at the end of spending years putting in laws to suppress them is not justice. It’s cover,” he said. “It’s

“One should not be subject to the simplicity of black and white arguments about this. It’s become divisive, and it shouldn’t be,” said professor Eric Walters, a past president of the faculty senate at Howard University, where he studies neuroscience and molecular genetics.

He also would like to see the HBCU community use this opportunity to generate dialogue about how the Kochs’ wider agenda impacts black Americans - and to challenge others to donate as much as the Kochs.

If they do, Walters said, “you can leave the Koch brothers behind, black people.”

6

The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014 ________________________________________________________________

CREWS MAKE GAINS ON MASSIVE WA S H I N G T O N W I L D F I R E

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) -- Firefighters made progress Tuesday in their efforts to get the largest wildfire in Washington state’s history under control, with wetter weather bringing some relief but also raising concerns about flash flooding.

of an apparent heart attack Saturday while he and his wife were hauling water and digging fire lines near their home. Koczewski was a retired Washington State Patrol trooper and U.S. Marine.

The number of homes destroyed in the Carlton Complex fire remained at 150, Payne said. Two structures, an outbuilding and a seasonal cabin, were confirmed destroyed Tuesday in the Chiwaukum Creek Fire near Leavenworth, she said.

The Carlton Complex of fires, which has burned nearly 400 square miles in the north-central part of the state, was 16 percent contained as of Tuesday, fire spokeswoman Jessica Payne said.

A day earlier, the fire was just 2 percent contained.

Firefighters and local authorities have been heartened by forecasts that call for cooler temperatures and higher humidity.

But even though wetter weather has moved in, they worry that lightning strikes could ignite more fires.

Rain also brought worries about the potential for flash flooding because so much ground vegetation has been burned away.

A firefighting plane drops water from Fishtrap Lake on a stubborn fire burning near the lake in Lincoln County, Sunday, July 20, 2014, near Cheney, Wash. The fire started Saturday afternoon and spread to several thousand acres, driven by high winds.

The National Weather Service issued a flood watch from Wednesday morning through Wednesday evening due to expected heavy rainfall.

Speaking at a fundraiser Tuesday in Seattle, President Barack Obama said the wildfire, along with other Western blazes, can be attributed to climate change.

“It takes as little as 10 minutes of heavy rain to cause flash flooding and debris flows in and below areas affected by wildfires,” the advisory said. “Rain runs off almost instantly from burned soils ... causing creeks and drainages to flood at a much faster rate than normal.”

“A lot of it has to do with drought, a lot of it has to do with changing precipitation patterns and a lot of that has to do with climate change,” the president said.

Still, the weather change was a positive development.

“The cooler weather and the moisture has cooled aspects of the fire down,” fire spokeswoman Susan Peterson said Tuesday evening. “In some instances, firefighters were able to do a direct attack.

“We had additional crews come in, and they were able to put lines in closer to the fire itself.”

Obama also said Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Craig Fugate had authorized an emergency declaration to ensure communities that lost power because of burned power lines and poles get electrical power.

At more than 250,000 acres, the Carlton Complex is larger than the 1902 Yacolt Burn, which consumed 238,920 acres in southwestern Washington and was the state’s largest recorded forest fire, according to HistoryLink.org, an online resource of Washington state history.

The fire is being blamed for one death. Rob Koczewski, 67, died

A F T E R 3 - Y E A R P R O B E , F E D S T O M O N I T O R N E WA R K sonable suspicion of criminal activity. Instead, the stops were made because people were “milling, loitering or wandering” in high-crime areas, according to Jocelyn Samuels, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C. Eighty-five percent of those stopped were black in a city where blacks make up 54 percent of the population; Fishman said the report doesn’t accuse the police force of profiling but urges better compiling and analyzing of data on the stops.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- Newark police engaged in the excessive use of force, routinely stopped people on the street for no legitimate reason and regularly stole property from civilians, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in a report released Tuesday that set the stage for federal monitoring of the police department that serves New Jersey’s largest city.

The report is the culmination of a three-year investigation begun months after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint. The report describes a police agency rife with instances of misconduct and seemingly unable or unwilling to police itself.

“Most of the men and women who wear the uniform of the Newark Police Department bring enormous dedication and integrity to their jobs every day,” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman in Newark said at a news conference also attended by Mayor Ras Baraka and city police officials. “But we also found an organization that is challenged in fundamental ways and has engaged in a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing in a broad range of areas.”

Newly-appointed Police Director Eugene Venable said he wouldn’t disagree with the DOJ findings.

“We accept the report and we look forward to making all the corrections that have been offered to us and pinpointed in the Department of Justice report,” Venable said. “We are looking forward to just rolling up our sleeves and working on these problems and solving them.”

The report laid much of the blame for the negative findings on what it characterized as deficiencies in the police department’s systems for detecting and preventing misconduct, including its investigation of citizen complaints. For example, the DOJ investigation found that over a six-year period, only one excessive force complaint was upheld by the police department, a figure Fishman called “stunningly low” for a police department of its size.

The investigation also found that over a three-and-a-half year period, 75 percent of pedestrian stops were made without constitutionally adequate reasons, where officers had a rea-

More than 2,100 firefighters and support crew are involved with fighting the fire, Payne said. She said firefighters have had success with fire lines on the east side of state Highway 153 between Carlton and Twisp, and they planned to burn lines around Pearrygin Lake.

“If that’s successful, it will mitigate some of the risk to the homes in the area,” she said.

Karina Shagren, spokeswoman for the state’s Military Department, said the National Guard has already been offering aerial support, but 100 National Guard troops were now being used on the ground for firefighting, and additional troops were receiving firefighting training for potential future use.

Gov. Jay Inslee briefed Obama on the fire situation after the president arrived in Seattle Tuesday afternoon at the start of a three-day West Coast trip.

“We have real significant challenges,” Inslee said. “To have the president here today is actually a stroke of luck.”

Inslee said Obama called Koczewski’s wife to express his condolences.

Inslee said officials will assess damage to determine whether the state qualifies for a major disaster declaration that would allow people whose properties have been damaged or destroyed to seek additional resources.

Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell were among a dozen U.S. senators who sent a letter to Senate leaders Tuesday asking for passage of emergency legislation to allocate $615 million to fight wildfires.

Fires are currently burning in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and California, and both Oregon and Washington have declared states of emergency.

Inslee said that while it was promising that firefighters had gained some ground on the fire, “it’s still a growing and dangerous beast.”

“We have a long, long ways to go in the fire season, months, before we’re out of the woods,” he said.

Theft by police department personnel is “more than an aberration limited to a few officers or incidents within the NPD,” the report concluded. The problem is particularly acute in the specialized units such as narcotics, gangs and prisoner processing. The department was aware of the problem but still didn’t sustain any theft complaints against the officers with the highest number of incidents, the report found.

N A S A D O E S N ’ T H AV E T H E M O N E Y FOR BIG ROCKETS

Since the ACLU complaint was filed, Newark and the Justice Department have reached an agreement in principle. An independent monitor is expected to be named by mid-September when a federal judge signs off on the agreement.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- NASA doesn’t have enough money to get its new, $12 billion rocket system off the ground by the end of 2017 as planned, federal auditors say.

Samuels said the monitoring period will be measured in years, not months, and will include benchmarks the police department must meet throughout the process.

Newark joins more than a dozen other cities that have been under some form of federal oversight in recent years, a list that includes Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Seattle.

The mayor, who was sworn in to his first term on July 1, said he viewed the findings as a chance to make changes.

“One could look at this, 22 days in as mayor, that the roof is caving in, but I look at it as an opportunity to build a new roof,” Baraka said. “We are excited, not about the bad acts of a few police officers in our department, we are excited that we have the ability to transform the Newark police department.”

The Government Accountability Office issued a report Wednesday saying NASA’s Space Launch System is at “high risk of missing” its planned December 2017 initial test flight. The post-space shuttle program would build the biggest rockets ever - larger than the Saturn V rockets which sent men to the moon - to send astronauts to asteroids and Mars.

“They can’t meet the date with the money they have,” report author Cristina Chaplain said. She said it wasn’t because the space agency had technical problems with the congressionally-required program, but that NASA didn’t get enough money to carry out the massive undertaking.

The GAO report put the current shortfall at $400 million, but did say NASA was “making solid progress” on the rocket program design.

NASA’s launch system officials told the GAO that there was a 90 percent chance of not hitting the launch date at this time.

This usually means NASA has to delay its test launch date, get more money or be less ambitious about what it plans to do, said former NASA associate administrator Scott Pace, space policy director at George Washington University.

NASA is working on the problems GAO highlighted, but delaying launch or diverting money from other programs would harm taxpayers, NASA Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier wrote in the agency’s response.

“Welcome to aerospace,” Pace said, pointing out that large space projects often end up as much as 50 percent over budget. He said that “is why you shouldn’t believe initial cost estimates.”

The space agency has been reluctant to put an overall price tag on the Space Launch System. The GAO report says it will cost $12 billion to get to the first test launch and “potentially billions more to develop increasingly capable vehicles” that could be used for launches to asteroids and Mars.

_______________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014

7

N Y C O F F I C I A L : T H I E V E S G O T I N T O 1 K S T U B H U B A C C O U N T S

NEW YORK (AP) -- Some of the hottest tickets in town to Broadway hits, Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake concerts, a New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox game - were snapped up by an international ring of cyber thieves who commandeered more than 1,000 StubHub users’ accounts to make big money by fraudulently buying tickets and reselling them, prosecutors said Wednesday.

spokesman Glenn Lehrman said.

After the buys, members of the ring re-sold the tickets and routed the money to others who laundered it, and the group split the profits, Vance said.

“This guy (Polyakov) is pretty much admitting he is a hacker,” one of the alleged fences, Daniel Petryszyn, wrote in an online chat, according to prosecutors. “These tickets are all profits ... I will launder all the money they want.”

Ten people around the world have been indicted or arrested in connection with the case, which involved more than 3,500 tickets and at least $1.6 million in unauthorized purchases of sought-after seats, some to sold-out shows or behind the Yankee Stadium dugout, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said.

“Today’s arrests and indictment connect a global network of hackers, identity thieves and money-launderers” who targeted the leading digital marketplace for reselling event tickets, Vance said. The scheme spooled from Russia to London to Toronto to the New York area and even to Barcelona, Spain, where accused Russian ringleader Vadim Polyakov was arrested while vacationing earlier this month.

The case comes amid growing concern about data thieves targeting consumer giants, and it pointed up pitfalls customers may face in using one password in multiple parts of their online lives.

StubHub said it was alerted to “a small number of accounts that had been illegally taken over by fraudsters” last year, contacted authorities and gave the affected customers refunds.

While prosecutors said they weren’t certain how the alleged thieves got access, San Francisco-based StubHub said they got account-holders’ login and password information from key-loggers or other malware on the customers’ computers or from data breaches at other businesses. San Francisco-based StubHub, owned by eBay Inc., said there had been “no intrusions into StubHub technical or financial systems.”

Bryan Caputo, left, and Daniel Petryszyn sit during arraignment proceedings in New York state Supreme Court, Wednesday, July 23, 2014. They are two of six people who were indicted Wednesday in an international ring that took over more than 1,600 StubHub users’ accounts and fraudulently bought tickets to such prime events as Jay-Z and Elton John concerts and Broadway shows like “The Book of Mormon,” the Manhattan district attorney said Wednesday.

In the last few years, such major companies as Target, LinkedIn, eBay and Neiman Marcus have been hacked.

Since many customers use the same email and password on multiple websites, thieves can net a combination from one site that works in many others, data security experts say.

It’s like re-using “the same key for every lock in your life - especially if you’re giving that key out to everyone you meet,” says Joe Siegrist, the CEO of LastPass, which makes password-management software.

In the StubHub case, once the suspects had those digital keys, they were able to use the credit-card and other information stored in unsuspecting users’ accounts to buy tickets - some as pricey as a $994 pair of field-level seats to a St. Louis Rams-Houston Texans game, prosecutors said.

Buyers can download tickets directly to their StubHub accounts. Account-holders do get emails confirming their purchase; in some cases, those emails prompted customers to contact StubHub and report fraudulent buys, company

EX-VENEZUELAN INTELLIGENCE C H I E F D E TA I N E D I N A R U B A no immunity.”

U.S. prosecutors now have 60 days to formalize their extradition request, Angela said.

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment.

Chavez was an instructor at the military academy in Caracas when Carvajal was a student there in the early 1980s. Like many other cadets from that era, Carvajal later took up arms with Chavez in a failed 1992 coup uprising that catapulted the young tank commander to fame and set the stage for his future rise to power through the ballot box.

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Authorities in Aruba announced Thursday that they arrested a close confidant of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who was sent as that country’s consul to the Caribbean island despite being sanctioned by the U.S. government on charges of drug trafficking.

Hugo Carvajal, the former head of military intelligence under Chavez, was arrested at the request of the U.S. prosecutors and is expected to appear in an Aruban court Friday.

Carvajal was one of a number of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury in 2008 for allegedly providing weapons to Marxist rebels in neighboring Colombia and helping them smuggle cocaine to fund their insurgency. Despite the charges, he remained close to power circles in Venezuela and in January was appointed consul to Aruba by Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro.

Venezuela condemned the arrest, calling it a “grave violation” of international law and the Vienna Convention granting diplomats immunity from arrest.

Venezuela’s foreign ministry released a statement calling on the Netherlands, which manages foreign affairs for the otherwise autonomously run Aruba, to immediately free Carvajal. It warned that commercial and diplomatic ties could be affected.

There was no immediate comment from the Dutch government.

Officials in Aruba said they were initially confused about whether Carvajal had immunity since he holds a diplomatic passport from Venezuela. However, they went ahead with the detention because he had yet to receive his accreditation.

“Immunity is always linked to a function,” prosecutors’ spokeswoman Ann Angela said in a phone interview. “And he does not have any function here in Aruba. He is not the consul general; therefore he has

Although Aruba is located just 15 miles (24 kilometers) off Venezuela’s coast, the semi-autonomous country has more ties to Washington than Caracas, said Michael Sharpe, an assistant professor at New York’s York College who specializes in international relations and has published on the Dutch Caribbean.

Petryszyn, 28, and another accused re-seller, Bryan Caputo, 29, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to money laundering and stolen property possession charges. Petryszyn, who works at a catering business, “has every intention of challenging these charges,” said his lawyer, Liam Malanaphy.

Caputo, who works at a restaurant company, simply re-sold some tickets, said his lawyer, Reginald Sharpe. “If they were stolen, he didn’t know that they were,” Sharpe said.

Polyakov, 30, was awaiting extradition, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether he had a lawyer. Three other men indicted in the Manhattan case hadn’t yet been arrested; two are in Russia. Meanwhile, authorities have arrested three suspected money-launderers in London and one in Toronto on local charges there.

S P E E D R E M O VA L S continued from page 1

It comes even as Homeland Security officials are pleading again for action, saying overstressed border and immigration agencies will run out of money in the next two months. “Doing nothing in Congress is not an option,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Tuesday.

More than 57,000 minors have arrived since October, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

The 2008 law guarantees them judicial hearings, which in practice allows them to stay in this country for years - before any deportation can be carried out - because of major backlogs in the immigration court system.

Republicans want the law changed so that unaccompanied Central American children can be treated like those from Mexico, who can be sent back by Border Patrol agents unless they can demonstrate a fear of return that necessitates further screening. Republicans say that’s the only way to send a message to parents in the Central American nations that there’s no point in sending their children on the arduous journey north.

White House officials have indicated support for such changes but have sent mixed signals, under pressure from immigration advocates who say they would amount to sending kids fleeing vicious gang violence back home to their deaths. Some Democrats initially were open to such changes but most are now strongly opposed.

“I’m very reluctant to change the law because I think these children face death, murder, vicious abuse, persecution, if they are returned,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said.

“Despite Aruba at one time being the location of one of the largest oil refineries in the world refining Venezuelan oil, this is no longer the case. Since the closing of the oil refineries in the 1980s, Aruba’s No. 1 source of revenue has been tourism and thus it has far more extensive ties to the U.S. economically than it does to Venezuela,” Sharpe said.

The island’s currency is pegged to the U.S. dollar and like the neighboring Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, U.S. military planes can use the island for multinational counter-drug missions in the region, a cause of friction with Venezuela. Aruba, unlike many of its Caribbean neighbors, has never been a member of Venezuela’s Petrocaribe fuel initiative.

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

8

The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014

____________________________________________________________

G A N G V I O L E N C E , F E A R S F O R C H I L D R E N F U E L R U S H T O U S

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Many immigrants flooding across the southern border of the U.S. say they’re fleeing violent gangs in Central America.

long as three years to get a hearing. In the meantime, children are reunited with family in the U.S. and live far away from the violence at home.

Experts, however, say those gangs are actually a byproduct of U.S. policies in the 1990s that sent many immigrants back to Central America after they had been indoctrinated into gang culture in this country.

WHAT HAVE THE CENTRAL AMERICAN AND U.S. GOVERNMENTS DONE AND WHAT ARE THEY DOING NOW?

The violence they took with them easily took hold and flourished in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala - countries with weak, dysfunctional governments.

A few things to know: WHERE DO CENTRAL AMERICAN GANGS COME FROM? One study estimated some 350,000 Salvadoran immigrants illegally came to Southern California from 1980 to 1985 while trying to escape civil war and corruption in their home country.

They arrived with few English skills and many settled in poor neighborhoods with strong Mexican- and African-American gangs.

To survive and avoid bullying, they formed gangs such as Mara Salvatruch or joined others such as the 18th Street gang. They committed serious crimes and were sent to prison, where they were further exposed to violent gang culture.

In the 1990s, the U.S. increased deportations of immigrants facing criminal charges, particularly gang members. As many as 1,500 Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran youths were sent back each month to Central America. They arrived with the notoriety of being a Los Angeles gangster.

“There’s this huge explosion in all three of these countries of the gangs and the number of gang members, partially because it’s the way of street kids getting status and reputation, and partially because it’s a way of surviving,” said Tom Ward, a USC associate professor who has studied the issue.

WHAT IS THE RELATION BETWEEN THE GANGS AND THE INFLUX OF IMMIGRANTS AT THE U.S BORDER? Many people fleeing Central America say they are running from violence perpetrated by the gangs. But the migration is also an effort to reunify families.

At least 80 percent of youths stopped at the border have one parent or a close relative already in the United States, said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization

In this June 18, 2014, file photo, detainees sleep in a holding cell at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection, processing facility in Brownsville,Texas. Many of the immigrants recently flooding the nation’s southern border say they’re fleeing violent gangs in Central America. These gangs were a byproduct of U.S. immigration and Cold War policies, specifically growing from the increase in deportations in the 1990s. With weak dysfunctional governments at home, U.S. street gang culture easily took hold and flourished in these countries.

Service and senior fellow for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Family members already in the U.S. have saved enough money to pay a smuggler to bring their children across the border so boys won’t be forcibly recruited into gangs and daughters won’t be subjected to sexual violence.

WHY ARE WE SEEING THIS INFLUX OF IMMIGRANTS, ESPECIALLY CHILDREN, NOW? Word of mouth in Central American is strong and there is a pervasive belief that the U.S. has been relaxing its immigration stance toward minors. The belief was spurred by recent discussions about possibly changing U.S. immigration policy and by a change in U.S. law in 2008 that provided more rights to minors at the border that included a hearing before a judge.

At the same time, a crackdown on cartels caused those criminal organizations and their smuggling operations to spread from Mexico to Central America. And more people decided it was time to leave for the U.S. where they believed they would be allowed to stay.

Migrants were told to have their children turn themselves into the Border Patrol and they would be given a permit to enter the U.S., said Eric Olson, associate director of the Latin American Program for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The permit, however, was really an order to appear for a deportation hearing.

Even so, with court backlogs and a shortage of judges, it can take as

I S R A E L I F I R E H I T S U N F A C I L I T Y I N G A Z A , K I L L I N G members, also from Stockton.

Police said that they recovered at least three handguns and an assault rifle and that the gunmen had ammunition strapped to their bodies.

“It was such a chaotic ... fluid situation, really one of the most dangerous, tense situations that a police officer could go through,” Police Chief Eric Jones said. He added: “There was a lot on the line and the officers responded appropriately.”

Fourteen police cars and many homes along the chase route were peppered with bullets, Jones said.

Israeli soldiers work on a tank near the Israel and Gaza border Thursday, July 24, 2014.

Israeli tanks and warplanes bombarded the Gaza Strip on Thursday, as Hamas militants stuck to their demand for the lifting of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade in the face of U.S. efforts to reach a cease-fire.

STOCKTON, Calif. (AP) -- Three bank robbers took three screaming women hostage as they made their getaway and waged a ferocious, high-speed gunbattle with police that left three people dead and cars and homes riddled with bullets, authorities said.

Two of the robbers were killed along with a hostage who police said had been used as a human shield.

During the hour-long chase through the streets, two of the hostages jumped or were thrown from the stolen SUV, one of them while it may have been going more than 50 mph. At least one suffered a gunshot wound. Both were expected to survive.

The chase and shootout began Wednesday afternoon when the heavily armed men held up a Bank of the West branch in Stockton, a city about 80 miles east of San Francisco, and took two bank employees and a customer hostage. It ended in a hail of gunfire after police shot out the tires of the getaway vehicle.

It was not clear whether the hostage who died - the bank customer - was shot by police or by the robbers.

“What we’ve got to remember is what and who started this very deadly incident. It’s three armed and very violent suspects,” Stockton police spokesman Joe Silva said.

The sole surviving suspect was identified as Jaime Ramos, 19, of Stockton. Police said the other robbers, ages 27 and 30, were gang

“The firing never stopped,” Jones said. “They were trying to kill (the officers), no doubt.”

Witnesses said the shootout that brought the episode to a close looked like a war.

“It sounded like five minutes of straight gunfire,” Sam York told KCRA-TV. “It seemed like it wasn’t real.”

At one point during the pursuit, the SUV - taken from a bank employee - stopped around a corner and turned to face the direction officers were coming from, in what would have been an ambush, police said.

One of the gunmen was leaning out, taking aim with a rifle, police said. An officer shot at the gunman, and the SUV took off again.

When the SUV’s tires were shot and the vehicle came to a stop, officers exchanged fire with at least one of the robbers, police said.

When it was all over, the last hostage was found dead in the SUV along with one of the gunmen, police said. A second gunmen died later at a hospital.

Jose Maldonado, who said he saw the robbers taking the women out of the bank, said the men had rifles slung over their shoulders and didn’t seem to care that there were police all around.

“They were not afraid. They weren’t going to take no for an answer. These poor women, they were screaming, they were so distraught, so scared,” Maldonado said.

During the holdup, the robbers also tied up a bank security guard.

Since 2008, the U.S. has approved $803 million for the Central American Regional Security Initiative, which includes efforts to disrupt narcotics trafficking, support development of strong police and justice institutions, and prevent crime and violence. The efforts have generally focused on preventing youths from joining gangs not busting gang members. And the impacts of these programs have not been effectively measured.

The Obama administration is now requesting that Congress approve $3.7 billion in emergency funding to deal with the border crisis.

The proposal includes $300 million to address repatriation and reintegration efforts among other issues. Funding would also pay for a media campaign to get the word out about the dangers of the journey to the U.S. and the lack of potential immigration status when people arrive. It would also go to gang intervention and prison reform.

POPE MEETS CHRISTIAN S E N T E N C E D T O D E AT H F O R FA I T H In this photo provided by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Pope Francis meets Meriam Ibrahim, from Sudan, with her daughter Maya in her arms, in his Santa Marta residence, at the Vatican, Thursday, July 24, 2014. The Sudanese woman who was sentenced to death in Sudan for refusing to recant her Christian faith has arrived in Italy along with her family, including the infant born in prison. Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but whose mother was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia, was sentenced to death over charges of apostasy. She married her husband, a Christian, in a church ceremony in 2011

ROME (AP) -- Pope Francis met privately Thursday with a Sudanese woman who refused to recant her Christian faith in the face of a death sentence, blessing the woman as she cradled her infant born just weeks ago in prison.

The Vatican characterized the visit with Meriam Ibrahim, 27, her husband and their two small children as “very affectionate.”

The 30-minute encounter took place just hours after the family landed at Rome’s Ciampino airport, accompanied by an Italian diplomat who helped negotiate her release, and welcomed by Italy’s premier, who hailed it as a “day of celebration.”

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the pope “thanked her for her faith and courage, and she thanked him for his prayer and solidarity” during the halfhour meeting Thursday. Francis frequently calls attention to the suffering of those persecuted for their religious beliefs.

Lombardi said the presence of “their wonderful small children” added to the affectionate tone of the meeting. Ibrahim was presented with a rosary, a gift from the pope.

Ibrahim held her sleeping infant as she stepped off the plane from Sudan, which had blocked her from leaving the country even after the country’s highest court overturned her death sentence in June. An Italian diplomat carried her 18-month-old son and they were followed by her husband, Daniel Wani, who is a citizen of the United States and South Sudan.

Ibrahim and her family are expected to spend a few days in Rome before heading to the United States.

Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but whose mother was an Orthodox Christian from Ethiopia, was sentenced to death over charges of apostasy. She married her husband, a Christian, in a church ceremony in 2011. As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, though Muslim men can marry outside their faith.

The sentence was condemned by the United States, the United Nations and Amnesty International, among others, and both the United States and Italy - a strong death penalty opponent with long ties to the Horn of Africa region - worked to win her release.

Sudan’s high court threw out her death sentence in June, but she was then blocked from leaving the country by authorities who questioned the validity of her travel documents.

Lapo Pistelli, an Italian diplomat who accompanied the family from Sudan, said Italy was able to leverage its ties within the region. “We had the patience to speak to everyone in a friendly way. This paid off in the end,” he said.

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The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014

P U S H E S F O R G A Z A B A T T L E

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T R U C E R A G E S

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli troops battled Hamas militants on Wednesday near a southern Gaza Strip town as the top U.S. diplomat reported progress in efforts to end fighting that has so far killed more than 680 Palestinians and 34 Israelis.

of modern weaponry against Gaza’s 1.7 million people, inflicting a heavy civilian death toll and leveling entire buildings. The Palestinian death toll stands at 684, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra.

But neither side appeared to be backing down, after Palestinian rocket fire led several international airlines to cancel flights to Tel Aviv and Israeli troops clashed with Hamas near the Gaza town of Khan Younis in heavy fighting that forced dozens of families to flee.

Israel says it launched the Gaza operation to halt Hamas rocket fire into Israel - more than 2,100 have been fired since the conflict erupted - and to destroy a network of cross-border tunnels, some of which have been used to stage attacks.

Israel has insisted it must substantially curb the military capabilities of the Islamic militant group Hamas -- a position that appears to have gained support within the U.S. administration -- while Hamas has demanded the lifting of a crippling Israeli and Egyptian blockade on the impoverished coastal territory it has ruled since 2007.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flew into Tel Aviv despite a Federal Aviation Administration ban following a Hamas rocket that hit near the airport the day before, reflecting his determination to achieve a cease-fire.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights meanwhile warned both sides against targeting civilians and said war crimes may have been committed.

Smoke from an Israeli strike rises over Gaza City, Wednesday, July 23, 2014. Israeli troops battled Hamas militants on Wednesday near a southern Gaza Strip town, sending Palestinian residents fleeing, as the U.S. secretary of state presses ahead with top-gear efforts to end the conflict that has killed hundreds of Palestinians and tens of Israelis.

in tow. They said they were seeking shelter in nearby U.N. schools.

“The airplanes and airstrikes are all around us,” said Aziza Msabah, a resident of Khan Younis. “They are hitting the houses, which are collapsing upon us.”

He was to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after earlier talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, who is also in the region. But U.S. officials have downplayed expectations for an immediate, lasting truce.

Further north, in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, which saw intense fighting earlier this week, an airstrike demolished a home, killing 30-year-old journalist Abdul Rahman Abu Hean, his grandfather Hassan and his nephew Osama.

In Jerusalem, Kerry said negotiations toward a Gaza cease-fire were making some progress as he met for a second time this week with Ban. “We certainly have made steps forward,” Kerry said. “There’s still work to be done.”

Israel also struck the Wafa hospital in Gaza City, which the military says houses a Hamas command center. Basman Ashi, the medical center’s director, said all 97 patients and staff were evacuated following Israeli warnings and that no one was hurt in the attack.

White House deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken meanwhile said Hamas must be denied the ability to “rain down rockets on Israeli civilians.”

“One of the results, one would hope, of a cease-fire would be some form of demilitarization so that this doesn’t continue, doesn’t repeat itself,” Blinken said in an interview with NPR. “That needs to be the end result.”

On the ground, meanwhile, Israeli troops backed by tanks and aerial drones clashed with Hamas fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on the outskirts of Khan Younis, killing at least eight militants, according to a Palestinian health official.

The Palestinian Red Crescent was trying to evacuate some 250 people from the area, which has been pummeled by air strikes and tank shelling since early Wednesday.

Hundreds of residents of eastern Khan Younis were seen fleeing their homes as the battle unfolded, flooding into the streets with what few belongings they could carry, many with children

Meanwhile, a foreign worker in Israel was killed when a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip landed near the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on Wednesday, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

She did not immediately know the worker’s nationality.

Navi Pillay noted an Israeli drone strike that killed three children and wounded two others while they were playing on the roof of their home. She also referenced Israeli fire that struck seven children playing on Gaza beach, killing four from the same family.

“These are just a few examples where there seems to be a strong possibility that international humanitarian law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes,” Pillay told the 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council, saying such incidents should be investigated.

As the Gaza death toll mounted, a 34-year-old Palestinian man was killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers near the West Bank City of Bethlehem, doctors said, a potentially ominous development in an area that has so far been relatively quiet.

On Tuesday, U.S. and European airlines canceled flights to Israel after a Hamas rocket hit near the Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. Israeli officials have slammed the cancellations as an overreaction that rewards Hamas, and Israel’s own El Al airline is still flying in and out of Ben-Gurion.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said the flight cancellations were a “great victory” for the group.

Israel said five more of its soldiers have died in the conflict, bringing the military’s death toll to 32, without providing further details. Two Israeli civilians have been killed in 15 days of fighting.

In Jerusalem, 30,000 people attended the funeral of Max Steinberg, a 24-year-old from the San Fernando Valley of southern California serving in the Israeli military. Steinberg was killed in an attack on an armored personnel carrier on Sunday.

“I spoke with him a day and a half ago,” his mother, Evie Steinberg, told Israeli Channel 2 TV. “I said `are you afraid?’ He said `no. I am afraid only for you.’ He’s a hero.” Kerry offered “profound gratitude” for the large turnout.

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The Palestinians say Israel is randomly deploying a wide array

H E A D O F T R O U B L E D C D C A N T H R A X L A B H A S R E S I G N E D No one got sick. But an internal investigation found serious safety lapses, including use of an unapproved sterilization technique and use of a potent type of anthrax in an experiment that did not require a live form of the germ.

Skinner declined to answer questions about what blame has been placed on Farrell in the events that led to the error. He also did not say whether Farrell was asked to resign.

In this Oct. 8, 2013, file photo, a sign marks the entrance to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Michael Farrell head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab that potentially exposed workers to live anthrax, resigned an agency spokesman said Wednesday, July 23, 2014. Farrell was reassigned following an incident last month at an Atlanta lab that handles bioterrorism agents.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The head of the government lab that potentially exposed workers to live anthrax has resigned, an agency spokesman said Wednesday.

Michael Farrell was head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab since 2009. He submitted his resignation Tuesday, the spokesman said.

Farrell declined interview requests, said the spokesman, Tom Skinner.

Farrell was reassigned following an incident last month at an Atlanta lab that handles bioterrorism agents. The lab was supposed to completely kill anthrax samples before sending them to two other CDC labs that had fewer safeguards.

But the higher-security lab did not completely sterilize the bacteria.

Dozens of CDC workers were potentially exposed to anthrax.

POTECTING SPEICIES

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The CDC fell under a harsh spotlight following the incident and the subsequent disclosure of another safety breach at the agency’s vaunted influenza laboratory. In that incident, relatively harmless bird flu virus was accidentally contaminated with a much deadlier strain. The contaminated virus was then sent to a lab run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The contamination was discovered in May, but the incident was not reported to CDC’s top management until last week.

No one has been reported infected. But CDC Director Tom Frieden has said the second incident was particularly worrisome because flu, unlike anthrax, is a germ that can potentially spread easily from person to person.

Frieden said the two incidents forced agency officials to recognize that a number of safety lapses - which had been treated as isolated accidents - were actually signs of systemic safety problems in the CDC laboratories that handle dangerous germs.

Frieden closed the anthrax and flu labs, halted exports from other high-level labs, and kicked off an analysis that is to include appointment of an external panel of experts.

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The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014 _____________________________________________________________

L G E L E C T R O N I C S P R O F I T M O R E T H A N

The recovery comes as Samsung Electronics is expected to report poor financial results as the explosive growth of its smartphone sales slows.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- LG Electronics Inc. reported a forecast-beating quarterly profit Thursday and gave an upbeat outlook for smartphone profitability as its mobile division ended a streak of losses.

LG also expanded its lineup of both cheaper phones and high-end handsets such as the G-Pro smartphone series that features a giant screen.

Like other South Korean exporters, LG Electronics said the strength of the country’s currency, the won, eroded its oversea profits. Still, the company’s profit was better than expected as smartphone sales jumped to a record high and TV sales recovered ahead of the World Cup.

LG Electronics has tried to differentiate its products from those of Apple and Samsung Electronics, which capture most of the profit in the global smartphone market.

LG executives said solid sales of handset devices will help its mobile division stay profitable during the fall and winter, even as Apple Inc. is expected to unveil a bigger iPhone and Samsung Electronics Co. is likely to release new models.

The G3 features a 5.5-inch display screen that packs more pixels per inch than other leading phones. LG also introduced design changes in its mobile devices, such as moving the power and volume buttons to the back of its phones.

“Even if we spend more on marketing expenses, profitability is expected to improve,” chief financial officer David Jung told investors.

LG brought forward the global release dates of its new phones as part of efforts to turn around the performance of its smartphone business.

The South Korean consumer electronics company said its net income for the April-June quarter was 411.8 billion won ($400 million), compared with 155.5 billion won a year earlier.

The G3 smartphone was launched in South Korea at the end of May. Four major carriers in the U.S. began selling the Android-based smartphone last week after its rollout in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

The figure was more than a fourfold increase from the first quarter and also beat expectations. Analysts polled by financial data provider FactSet forecast 300.9 billion won income.

Operating profit rose 27 percent to 606.2 billion won while sales inched up 1 percent to 15.4 trillion won.

LG said its mobile division was profitable for the first time in a year thanks to strong sales of its flagship G3 smartphones and cheaper L-series phones in North America.

It sold a record 14.5 million smartphones during the latest quarter.

About one third of those were devices that run on advanced wireless networks known as LTE, which were more profitable for the handset maker.

Yoo Bu-hyun, head of financial planning at LG’s mobile division, said mobile carriers in the U.S. have responded very positively to the G3 and have become more willing to promote LG devices in their stores.

“I see no problem in reaching 10 million sales” of the G3, Yoo told an investor meeting.

LG’s mobile division suffered losses during the second half of last year as it boosted marketing costs to burnish its brand and attract consumers from Samsung and Apple. LG expressed confidence Thursday that its smartphone business will remain profitable.

SUPREME COURT ALLOWS ARIZONA EXECUTION TO PROCEED photo provided by the Arizona Department of Corrections shows inmate Joseph Rudolph Wood. The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, July 22, 2014, allowed the Arizona executionof Wood to go forward amid a closely watched First Amendment fight over the secrecy surrounding lethal injection drugs in the country.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed an Arizona execution to go forward amid a closely watched First Amendment fight over the secrecy surrounding lethal injection drugs in the country.

The court ruled in favor of Arizona officials in the case of Joseph Rudolph Wood, who was convicted of murder in the 1989 shooting deaths of his estranged girlfriend and her father. The state plans to execute him Wednesday.

Wood, 55, argued he has a First Amendment right to details about the state’s lethal injection method, the qualifications of the executioner and who makes the drugs. Such demands for greater transparency have become a new legal tactic in death penalty cases in recent months.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had put Wood’s execution on hold, saying the state must reveal the information. That marked the first time an appeals court has acted to delayed an execution based on the issue of drug secrecy, said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. The 9th Circuit gave new hope to death penalty opponents. While many death row inmates have made the same First Amendment argument as Wood, other appeals courts have shot them down. But the Supreme Court has not been receptive to the defense lawyers’ latest arguments, ruling against them each time the transparency issue has come before the justices.

him to die. In Oklahoma, an inmate died of a heart attack minutes after prison officials halted the process of his execution because the drugs weren’t being administered properly.

States have refused to reveal details such as which pharmacies are supplying lethal injection drugs and who is administering them because of concerns over harassment.

In the Wood case, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit put the execution on hold after finding Wood “raised serious questions” about whether he should have access to the drug information and executioner qualifications. Arizona appealed to the full 11-member court but was denied a rehearing, then appealed to the Supreme Court on Monday. “(The) Ninth Circuit has enjoined a state from carrying out a lawful execution so that the inmate can pursue litigation unrelated to the lawfulness of the execution,” the state’s attorneys wrote.

The high court’s short order Tuesday afternoon didn’t delve into the issue but simply said the appeals court’s judgment is vacated.

The fight over the Arizona execution has also attracted attention because of a dissenting judge’s comments that made a case for a firing squad as a more human method of execution.

“The guillotine is probably best but seems inconsistent with our national ethos. And the electric chair, hanging and the gas chamber are each subject to occasional mishaps. The firing squad strikes me as the most promising,” wrote Alex Kozinski, the 9th Circuit’s chief judge. “Using drugs meant for individuals with medical needs to carry out executions is a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful - like something any one of us might experience in our final moment.”

Had the Supreme Court upheld the 9th Circuit’s judgment, “the whole country would likely be affected,” Dieter said.

Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the Arizona attorney general’s office, said the agency had no comment on the Supreme Court ruling but will issue a statement after Wood’s execution.

Wood’s case highlights scrutiny surrounding lethal injections after several controversial executions, including that of an Ohio inmate in January who snorted and gasped during the 26 minutes it took

On the television front, the world’s second-largest TV maker plans to roll out a new model later this year featuring an advanced display called OLED, which provides rich and vivid colors.

US PULLS PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS F R O M K E N YA NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- The Peace Corps is suspending its programs in Kenya because of security concerns and is pulling more than 50 volunteers out of the country until threat levels decrease, the Peace Corps and State Department said Thursday.

A statement to The Associated Press from the State Department said that the Peace Corps “has been closely monitoring the security environment in Kenya ... and has decided to officially suspend the program in Kenya.” The Peace Corps will monitor the security situation and determine when volunteers can return, it said.

The decision comes amid a tightening of security by the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, which has seen dozens of grenade and gunfire attacks over the last two years. Earlier this year the embassy increased the number of security personnel at the embassy and put armed Marines behind sandbag bunkers on the embassy roof. The State Department also reduced the number of U.S. personnel here by moving a regional USAID office out of the country.

“While volunteers are leaving, the Peace Corps plans to retain its office in Kenya and will continue to assess the safety and security climate,” said Shira Kramer, the spokeswoman for the Peace Corps.

The decision to suspend the Peace Corps program has been in the works for a while but was not announced publicly. U.S. warnings about the high risk of terror attacks in Kenya always ruffle the feathers of Kenyan leaders, and the State Department and Peace Corps statements underscored the long U.S.-Kenya relationship and the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. pours into Kenya every year.

But it was clear that given the grenade and gunfire assaults, as well as the massive bombing of Westgate Mall last year that killed at least 67 people, the government felt that its Peace Corps volunteers - who live in far-flung villages with little security protection - were vulnerable.

Recent Peace Corps volunteers in Kenya said they felt the U.S. government program did a good job of keeping them updated about security, including the sending of security text messages, but they acknowledged that security was deteriorating and that ensuring a safe environment for the dozens of volunteers was all but impossible.

“Some volunteers weren’t very pleased with the level of security they provided, but I’m not sure what they were expecting. We don’t have security guards to protect us, and it’s Kenya, so sometimes bad things happen regardless of any preventative measures,” said Nik Schuetz, a 28-year-old volunteer in Kenya from 2009-11 now studying at the University of Kansas.

“They taught us to be smart about our surroundings and to trust the hairs on the back of our necks to sense whether it was a safe situation or not. And some things like bombings or grenade attacks, you just can’t prepare for other than leaving the country,” he said.

Wood’s attorney, Dale Baich, said, “The secrecy which Arizona fought tooth and nail to protect is harmful to our democracy because it prevents the public, the courts and the condemned from knowing if executions are carried out in compliance with all state and federal laws.”

Wood has one more appeal for a stay of execution pending before the 9th Circuit, Baich said. The habeas corpus challenge to his conviction and sentence will be decided by Wednesday.

S A Y S 2 Q D O U B L E D

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Anna Martin a Peace Corps volunteer in Busia, Kenya from 2010-12 who still lives in the country, said she always felt safe as a Peace Corps volunteer because the U.S. mission was “always making the best decisions regarding our safety and well-being.”

“My opinion ... is that things just weren’t getting better,” said Martin, who remained in Kenya after her Peace Corps commitment was completed. “Peace Corps had already taken measures to protect volunteers but had to ultimately make a bigger decision. And it a wise one.”

_______________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014

N A Z I D I E S

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W A R S U S P E C T , 8 9 , A S E X T R A D I T I O N sole function was to kill people.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- An 89-year-old Nazi war crimes suspect died in custody hours before a U.S. ruling Wednesday that he should be extradited to Germany to face trial.

“It is particularly unfortunate that Breyer could not be brought to justice in view of the significant efforts that were invested in trying to hold him accountable for his service at the Auschwitz death camp,” said Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. “This setback should in no way discourage or hamper the efforts to bring other perpetrators to justice at this time.”

Johann Breyer died Tuesday night at a Philadelphia hospital, where he had been transferred Saturday after a month in jail, his lawyer and the U.S. Marshals Service said. His death was disclosed Wednesday just as U.S. Magistrate Timothy Rice approved the extradition request, which would still have needed final U.S. government review.

The warrant accused Breyer of 158 counts of accessory to murder - one count for each trainload of victims brought to the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland from May to October 1944, when Breyer was allegedly a guard there.

Rice found probable cause that Breyer was the person being sought by German authorities over his suspected service as an SS guard at Auschwitz during World War II. “No statute of limitations offers a safe haven for murder,” he wrote in Wednesday’s ruling.

U.S. marshals had arrested him in June outside his home in Philadelphia. He was facing charges of aiding in the killing of 216,000 Jewish men, women and children at a Nazi death camp.

“As outlined by Germany, a death camp guard such as Breyer could not have served at Auschwitz during the peak of the Nazi reign of terror in 1944 without knowing that hundreds of thousands of human beings were being brutally slaughtered in gas chambers and then burned on site,” Rice wrote.

“A daily parade of freight trains delivered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, most of whom simply vanished overnight. Yet, the screams, the smells, and the pall of death permeated the air. The allegations establish that Breyer can no longer deceive himself and others of his complicity in such horror,” the judge said.

image shows the main gate of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz I, Poland, which was liberated by the Russians in January 1945. Writing over the gate reads: “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes free - or work liberates). The lawyer for Nazi war crimes suspect Johann “Hans” Breyer says the 89-year-old Philadelphia man died Tuesday, July 22, 2014 while awaiting extradition to Germany. German prosecutors had hoped to try Breyer on charges of aiding in the murder of more than 200,000 Jews at the Auschwitz death camp.

Breyer claimed he was unaware of the massive slaughter at Auschwitz and then that he did not participate in it, but “the German allegations belie his claims,” the judge wrote.

Breyer died at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, according to his lawyer, Dennis Boyle, and the Marshals Service. The lawyer said Breyer’s health had deteriorated but he didn’t know the cause of death.

German authorities in the Bavarian town of Weiden issued a warrant for Breyer’s arrest in June 2013 under revised laws that allow Nazi guards to be charged with accessory to murder even without proof they took part in the killings, because the camps’

A G E N T S G E T S U B S I D I Z E D ‘ O B A M A C A R E ’ U S I N G FA K E I D S tion has resolved some 600,000 cases.

Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., said the findings point to more bungling by the Obama administration. “This is simply not a question of whether one likes the administration’s health care law; it’s a question of being good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” he said.

Speaking for committee Democrats, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia said it’s time for Republicans to stop trying to dismantle the health care law and instead start fixing problems.

“We will not go back to a time when Americans did not have access to affordable health insurance,” said Lewis.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Undercover investigators using fake identities were able to secure taxpayer-subsidized health insurance under President Barack Obama’s health care law, congressional investigators said Wednesday.

The Obama administration is taking the report seriously.

The weak link seemed to be call centers that handled applications for frazzled consumers unable to get through online.

“We are examining this report carefully and will work with GAO to identify additional strategies to strengthen our verification processes,” said spokesman Aaron Albright. At least on paper, fraudsters risk prosecution and heavy fines.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office told a House committee that its investigators were able to get subsidized health care under fake names in 11 out of 18 attempts - even after HealthCare.gov’s much maligned online system flagged some applications as problematic.

The GAO said its investigators concocted fake identities using invalid Social Security numbers and falsely claiming citizenship or legal residence. In other cases, they made up income figures that would disqualify them from getting subsidies.

The GAO is still paying premiums for the policies, even as the Obama administration attempts to verify phony documentation.

Among the findings:

Those follow-up verification checks also appeared to need tightening; the GAO said parts of the fake documentation it submitted for two applications actually got through the process.

Nonetheless, GAO audits and investigations chief Seto Bagdoyan told the House Ways and Means Committee that the agency has not drawn any sweeping conclusions from what he called its “preliminary” findings. A full assessment will take several months.

In the real world, it may be difficult for fraud artists to profit from the nation’s newest social program, since government health care subsidies are paid directly to insurance companies.

Still, GAO’s report opened another line of attack for Republican lawmakers who have relentlessly tried to kill the 2010 Affordable Care Act. It raised questions about new sorts of flaws in the enrollment system, which experienced computer gridlock when it went live last fall. Ultimately, 8 million people managed to sign up for subsidized health care in federal and state exchanges that handled “Obamacare” enrollment.

GAO also testified that there’s still a huge backlog of applications with data discrepancies, even though the administra-

-Contractors processing applications for the government told the GAO their role was not to ferret out potential fraud.

“There is no provision to look for fraud, in the contract itself,” said Bagdoyan.

-Five of six bogus phone applications went through successfully. The one exception involved an applicant who refused to provide a Social Security number.

-Six online applications were snagged by an identity checking system. But investigators just dialed a call center and all six were approved. That seemed to be an open pathway to coverage.

-The GAO also tried to check the reliability of counselors providing in-person assistance. In five out of six cases, investigators were unable to get help. In the final case, the counselor correctly told the undercover investigator that the agent’s stated income would not qualify for subsidized coverage.

Breyer told The Associated Press in a 2012 interview that while he was a guard at Auschwitz, he was assigned to a part of the camp that was not involved in the slaughter of Jews and others.

“I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t rape anybody - and I don’t even have a traffic ticket here,” he said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Breyer moved to Philadelphia after World War II and for decades lived a quiet, middle-class life with his wife, children and grandchildren. He had American citizenship because his mother was born in the U.S.; she later moved to Europe, where Breyer was born.

In 1992, the U.S. government tried to revoke Breyer’s citizenship after discovering his wartime background. The effort became a yearslong legal saga and appeared to end with a 2003 decision that found Breyer had joined the SS as a minor and could therefore not be held legally responsible for participation in it.

Then he was arrested last month outside his home in northeast Philadelphia based on the 2013 German warrant. Officials say the arrest was delayed for a year because of the complexity of the extradition request.

His lawyers unsuccessfully argued that Breyer should be released on bail pending the extradition hearing because of his frail health. They said he has mild dementia, heart conditions and has suffered strokes in recent years.

A judge ruled that the federal prison system was capable of caring for Breyer.

W O R L D B R E A K S M O N T H LY H E AT RECORD 2 TIMES IN A ROW WASHINGTON (AP) -- The globe is on a hot streak, setting a heat record in June. That’s after the world broke a record in May. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday that last month’s average global temperature was 61.2 degrees, which is 1.3 degrees higher than the 20th century average. It beat 2010’s old record by one-twentieth of a degree.

While one-twentieth of a degree doesn’t sound like much, in temperature records it’s like winning a horse race by several lengths, said NOAA climate monitoring chief Derek Arndt.

And that’s only part of it. The world’s oceans not only broke a monthly heat record at 62.7 degrees, but it was the hottest the oceans have been on record no matter what the month, Arndt said.

“We are living in the steroid era of the climate system,” Arndt said.

Arndt said both the June and May records were driven by unusually hot oceans, especially the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Heat records in June broke on every continent but Antarctica, especially in New Zealand, northern South America, Greenland, central Africa and southern Asia.

The United States had only its 33rd hottest June.

All 12 of the world’s monthly heat records have been set after 1997, more than half in the last decade. All the global cold monthly records were set before 1917.

And with a likely El Nino this year - the warming of the tropical Pacific which influences the world’s weather and increases global temperatures - it is starting to look like another extra warm year, said University of Arizona climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck.

The first six months of the year are the third warmest first six months on record, coming behind 2010 and 1998, according to NOAA Global temperature records go back to 1880 and this is the 352nd hotter than average month in a row.

“This is what global warming looks like,” Overpeck said in an email. “Not record hot everywhere all the time, but certainly a reflection that the odds of record hot are going up everywhere around the planet.”

12

The Weekly News Digest, July 21 thru 28 , 2014 _____________________________________________________________

W Y O M I N G S E C R E T S

C AV E W I T H F O S S I L T O B E E X C A V A T E D

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) -- For the first time in more than 30 years, paleontologists are about to revisit one of North America’s most remarkable troves of late Pleistocene fossils: The bones of tens of thousands of animals piled at least 30 feet deep at the bottom of a sinkhole-type cave.

One goal is to learn more about the Pleistocene extinction, when climate change and possibly the arrival of humans in North America at least 13,000 years ago wiped out dozens of species.

Natural Trap Cave in north-central Wyoming is 85 feet deep and almost impossible to see until you’re standing right next to it. Over tens of thousands of years, m any, many animals - including now-extinct mammoths, short-faced bears, American lions and American cheetahs - shared the misfortune of not noticing the 15-foot-wide opening until they were plunging to their deaths.

The scrubby, rocky country surrounding the cave probably looks much like it did back then, though the climate may have been cooler and wetter, Meachen said.

Now, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is preparing to reopen a metal grate over the opening to offer scientists what may be their best look yet at the variety of critters that roamed the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains during the planet’s last glacial period around 25,000 years ago.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be easy,” she said. “But I think we’re going to be pretty well prepared.”

Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen said she has been getting ready to lead the international team of a dozen researchers and assistants by hitting the climbing gym.

“I’m pretty terrified,” Meachen admitted Wednesday.

She hasn’t done any real climbing before, she said, and the only way in is to rappel down. The only way out is an eight-story, single-rope climb all the way back up.

The cave is perpetually cold and clammy, with temperatures in the mid40s and humidity around 98 percent. Even Bureau of Land Management regional paleontologist Brent Breithaupt, who isn’t one to get the willies from lots of animal bones, describes it as a tad creepy.

“One can only hope that, as a researcher, you’re able to leave,” said Breithaupt, who visited the cave as a college student the last time it was open to scientists. “It’s an imposing hole in the ground. But one that actually has very important scientific value.”

Some mammal remains from the cave could be over 100,000 years old, Breithaupt said.

The remote site is exceptionally well preserved. It’s far too challenging and dangerous to have been trammeled in by casual spelunkers. The Bureau of Land Management installed the grate to keep people and animals out in the 1970s.

A mound of dirt and rock containing layer upon layer of animal bones rises from the floor of the 120-foot-wide, bell-shaped chamber. Meachen

The scientists will camp out nearby and venture into the cave more than once a day. Ropes will haul bones up top in boxes, Meachen said.

In an image provided by the Bureau of Land Management, date not known, Bureau of Land Management cave specialist Bryan McKenzie rappels into Natural Trap Cave in north-central Wyoming during a cleanup expedition. The cave holds the remains of tens of thousands of animals, including many now-extinct species, from the late Pleistocene period tens of thousands of years ago. Starting July 28, 2014, scientists plan to venture back into the cave and resume digging for the first time in more than 30 years.

hopes the remains are sufficiently preserved in the cold, sheltered environment to contain snippets of genetic information.

Co-investigator Alan Cooper with the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide will attempt to retrieve fragments of mitochondrial DNA from the bones, Meachen said.

Such analysis wasn’t possible the last time scientists dug in the cave and could shed light on how the animals were related to their modern counterparts and each other.

“It’s so cold all year long, that it has got just the perfect conditions for preserving DNA, in multiple species, in large numbers of individuals,” Meachen said. “Which is not really found anywhere except Siberia and the Arctic.”

Starting Monday, scientists plan to re-explore the cavern, dig and extract as many fossils over a two-week period as possible. The researchers will dig by lights powered by a generator at the surface.

A National Science Foundation grant will enable additional excavations in 2015 and 2016.

SHARK SIGHTINGS OFF CAPE COD A BOON FOR TOURISM Local shops sell jewelry, candy, clothes, stuffed animals and beverages with shark motifs.

A study released last month by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found the number of great white sharks off the Eastern U.S. and Canada is surging after decades of decline. Conservation efforts and the greater availability of prey such as Massachusetts’ seals are credited with the reversal.

Mark McCurdy, of Everett, Mass., examines shark-themed clothing at the Chatham Clothing Bar in Chatham, Mass. Growing sightings of great white sharks off Cape Cod are generating business for local entrepreneurs as residents and tourists seek a glimpse of the offshore predators -- or purchase their shark-themed memorabilia and apparel.

CHATHAM, Mass. (AP) -- Great white sharks are having an unusual effect on Cape Cod this summer, and many a merchant is going to need a bigger wallet.

The sharks being spotted in growing numbers are stirring curiosity and a buying frenzy for shark-related merchandise.

Shark T-shirts are everywhere, “Jaws” has been playing in local movie theaters and boats are taking more tourists out to see the huge seal population that keeps the sharks coming.

Harbormasters have issued warnings but - unlike the sharks in the movies - the great whites generally are not seen as a threat to human swimmers.

Among the entrepreneurs is Justin Labdon, owner of the Cape Cod Beach Chair Company, who started selling “Chatham Whites” T-shirts after customers who were renting paddle boards and kayaks began asking whether it was safe to go to sea.

“I mean, truthfully, we’ve probably grown about 500 percent in terms of the sale of our shark apparel,” he said. The T-shirts, hoodies, hats, belts, dog collars and other accessories bear the iconic, torpedo-shaped image of great whites and sell for between $10 and $45.

He said his store brings in thousands of dollars in sales of the shark-themed merchandise.

Tourists peer through coin-operated binoculars in hopes of catching a glimpse of a shark fin from the beaches of Chatham. The posh resort town is on the elbow of the cape that has a large population of gray seals - the massive animals whose blubber is the fuel of choice for great white sharks.

Shark sightings have soared from generally fewer than two annually before 2004 to more than 20 in each of the last few years off Cape Cod, where the economy depends heavily on the summer tourism season. Despite notices urging boaters and swimmers to use caution, the official reaction has been nearly the opposite of the panic depicted in “Jaws,” the 1975 film shot mainly on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard.

“White sharks are this iconic species in society and it draws amazing amounts of attention,” said Gregory Skomal, a senior marine fisheries biologist who also leads the Massachusetts Shark Research Program, who said people are coming in hopes of witnessing the animals in their splendor. “I have not been approached by anyone who has said to me `let’s go kill these sharks.’”

Skomal said sharks have been coming closer to shore to feed on the seals, which he said have been coming on shore in greater numbers because of successful conservation efforts.

Confrontations with people are rare, with only 106 unprovoked white shark attacks - 13 of them fatal - in U.S. waters since 1916, according to data provided by the University of Florida.

Still, officials are wary of the damage that could be done to tourism if one of the predators bites a person. Brochures have been distributed to raise awareness of sharks and safe practices in the event of a sighting.

AS NUMBERS OF GRAY SEALS RISE, SO DO CONFLICTS ROCKLAND, Maine (AP) -- Decades after gray seals were all but wiped out in New England waters, the population has rebounded so much that some frustrated residents are calling for a controlled hunt.

The once-thriving New England gray seal population was decimated by the mid-20th century because of hunting, with Massachusetts keeping a seal bounty on the books until the 1960s.

But scientists say conservation efforts, an abundance of food and migration from Canada combined to revive the population.

Environmentalists cheer the resurgence, saying the gray seal boost is good for biodiversity and a boon for popular seal watch tours in coastal New England. But many fishermen say the seals interfere with fishing charters and steal catch. Beachgoers bemoan the 600-plus-pound seals taking over large stretches of shore, befouling beaches and attracting sharks, which feed on seals.

Some residents of Nantucket are so fed up over the huge seal population that now calls the affluent island home that they have suggested a controlled hunt, similar to the way states manage deer.

Nantucket resident and recreational fisherman Peter Krogh, whose Seal Abatement Coalition has collected 2,000 signatures asking federal officials to amend laws that prevent dispersion of gray seals, said gray seals are a threat to fishing and tourism on the island.

Asked if he supports a seal cull, Krogh said “all options” should be on the table for managing the population.

“This is a real threat to the traditional way of life on this island,” Krogh said.

Conservationists scoff at the idea of providing amendments to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which protects seals. They say culling the herd would undo the results of the act, which allowed the species to recover in New England.

The seals’ burgeoning population is a blessing for at least one industry.

Business is booming for Keith Lincoln, who operates a seal watch ferry to Monomoy Island off Cape Cod. Seal sightings have skyrocketed from about 50 per trip in 1989 to about 2,000 per trip now, he said. The curious seals frequently come close to the boats, a thrill for gawking tourists, he said.

“Once the word spread out, the word spread quick,” Lincoln said. “The cuteness of them is what draws everybody.”

Some also believe the seals’ negative impact on fishing is overstated. Brian Sharp, the manager of marine mammal rescue for the Cape Cod-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, said gray seals feed mostly on fish species of little commercial value, like sand lance.

Others in the commercial fishing industry don’t see seals as a threat. Lobstermen off Rockland, Maine, where gray seals are often spotted, say the seals and fishery coexist with little strife.

“Culls of gray seals have not been shown to increase fish populations. It’s not that simple,” Sharp said. “What we’re seeing is a normal growth curve of seals repopulating an area.”

The gray seals, also called horsehead seals, can grow to more than 10 feet long and inhabit both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean. They are sometimes found in the same areas as their smaller cousins, harbor seals.

“You have to make sure people understand,” Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce CEO Wendy Northcross said, “if they go to the beach and they see a family of seals there, that’s probably not the best place to hang out.”

Encounters with humans frequently don’t end well for the seals, Sharp said. They sometimes become entangled in fishing gear, and six of them were illegally shot and killed on the southern ridge of Cape Cod in 2011, he said.

Laurie Moss McCandless of Memphis, Tennessee, has vacationed on Cape Cod every summer since she was a little girl and doesn’t remember hearing about sharks back then. But her son is obsessed with sharks, she said, and she’s hoping to hear more about them on their vacation in Chatham.

For now, the seal population is flourishing, and its ability to sustain seal watch businesses off Massachusetts and Maine is evidence that it can have an economic benefit, said Gordon Waring, fishery research biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

“He loves all his sharks paraphernalia,” McCandless, 39, said as she bought a shark-themed sweatshirt for one of her three children.

“Seals are just another large marine predator, and they are part of the diversity of the marine environment,” he said. “And they are able to thrive and recover.”