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OBAMA TO VISIT LAS VEGAS AS IMMIGRATION MOVES NEAR

WASHINGTON (AP) -President Barack Obama will travel to Las Vegas Friday, a Democratic official said, heightening anticipation that he will announce executive orders on immigration this week.

The president is expected to take administrative steps to protect as many as 5 million people in the country illegally from deportation, and grant them work permits. Republicans are vehemently opposed to the president’s likely actions, with some conservative members threatening to pursue a government shutdown if Obama follows through on his promises to act on immigration before the end of the year.

The White House would not confirm Obama’s travel plans or the purpose for the visit. In 2013, the president visited Las Vegas’ Del Sol High School, which has a large population of non-English speaking students, to unveil his blueprint for comprehensive immigration legislation.

A wide-ranging immigration bill passed the Senate, but stalled in the Republican-led House. Obama vowed this summer to instead pursue changes to the immigration system using his presidential administrative authority, but delayed the measures until after the midterm elections, in part because of concerns from some Democrats facing tough races.

Democrats still lost control of the Senate in the midterm balloting.

Astrid Silva, an organizer for the group Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, said the president “has a duty to keep his promise and use his full legal authority to take action where Congress has failed.” The group said the White House has been in touch with Nevada activists about the trip.

The Democratic official insisted on anonymity because this person wasn’t authorized to confirm the president’s trip by name.

H O W T O T E A C H SELF-DRIVING CARS ETHICS OF THE ROAD In this Monday, Nov. 18, 2014 photo, University of Southern California professor Jeffery Miller sits in his car in Los Angeles. Miller develops software that will help the cars of the future drive themselves.

tion suddenly veers into your lane.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A large truck speeding in the opposite direc-

Jerk the wheel left and smash into a bicyclist? Swerve right toward a family on foot? Slam the brakes and brace for head-on impact?

Drivers make split-second decisions based on instinct and a limited view of the dangers around them. The cars of the future - those that can drive themselves thanks to an array of sensors and computing power will have near-perfect perception and react based on preprogrammed logic.

Volume 003 Issue 46

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SOARING GENERIC DRUG PRICES DRAW SENATE SCRUTINY

WASHINGTON (AP) -Some low-cost generic drugs that have helped restrain health care costs for decades are seeing unexpected price spikes of up to 8,000 percent, prompting a backlash from patients, pharmacists and now Washington lawmakers.

Members of the Senate meet Thursday to scrutinize the recent, unexpected trend among generic medicines, which are copies of branded drugs that have lost patent protection. They usually cost between 30 to 80 percent less than the original medicines.

Experts point to multiple, often unrelated, forces behind the price hikes, including drug ingredient shortages, industry consolidation and production slowdowns due to manufacturing problems. But the lawmakers convening Thursday’s hearing, led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, say the federal government needs to do more to bring down prices.

“These companies have seen the opportunity to make a whole lot of money and are seizing that opportunity,” said Sanders, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging.

Sanders is a political independent who usually votes with the liberal wing of the Democratic party. “There is no rational economic reason for prices to go up 1000 percent,” he said.

One strategy Sanders favors: requiring generic drugmakers to pay rebates to the federal Medicare and Medicaid drug plan when the prices of their medications outpace inflation. Those payments are already mandatory for branded drugs, but have never applied to generics.

The lower prices of generic drugs make them the first choice for both patients and insurers. Generic drugs account for roughly 85 percent of all medicines dispensed in the U.S., according to IMS Health. Typically, generic drug prices fall as more companies begin offering competing versions of the same drug.

But recent examples suggest the market forces that have kept generic prices low are not working properly.

The company most aggressively developing self-driving cars isn’t a carmaker at all. Google has invested heavily in the technology, driving hundreds of thousands of miles on roads and highways in tricked-out Priuses and Lexus SUVs. Leaders at the Silicon Valley giant have said they want to get the technology to the public by 2017.

For now, Google is focused on mastering the most common driving scenarios, programming the cars to drive defensively in hopes of avoiding the rare instances when an accident is truly unavoidable.

“People are philosophizing about it, but the question about real-world capability and real-world events that can affect us, we really haven’t studied that issue,” said Ron Medford, the director of safety for Google’s self-driving car project.

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“Only by the grace of my family was I able survive and escape the trap of homelessness,” says Field, 50. “My sister has paid for all of my medication.”

Last month, Sanders and House Rep. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, sent letters to the makers of 10 generic drugs that have seen price increases of over 300 percent or more in recent months, including doxycycline.

The Generic Pharmaceutical Association says the ten drugs cited by lawmakers do not reflect the broader U.S. market, which includes 12,000 generic medications that have reduced drug costs by billions.

The group also points to data suggesting generic drug prices have been cut in half since 2008, according to pharmacy benefit provider Express Scripts.

The letters from Sanders and Cummings follow requests for congressional hearings by the National Community Pharmacists Association, which says independent pharmacies are being squeezed by the price hikes. In some cases, pharmacists are losing money on drugs that are purchased at new sky-high prices but are still reimbursed at the older, lower rates by pharmacy benefit companies.

“Community pharmacies are put in the untenable position of having to absorb the difference between the large sums of money that they spent to acquire the drugs and the lower amounts that they are paid,” states pharmacist Rob Frankil, in prepared testimony obtained by the Associated Press.

Frankil is scheduled to testify Thursday on behalf of the pharmacist group, along with generic industry executives and academics, including Dr. Aaron Kesselheim of Harvard Medical School.

Kesselheim will recommend that federal officials be notified of all drug price increases greater than 100 percent, according to written testimony. In previous cases where drug shortages have led to price spikes, the Food and Drug Administration has approved emergency imports of extra supplies from foreign sources.

The price for the antibiotic doxycycline hyclate, used to treat various infections, rose more than 8,280 percent during the same time frame from $20 per 100-pill bottle to $1,849.

Kesselheim also says more funding is needed for the Federal Trade Commission, which has responsibility for policing anticompetitive tactics among companies, including generic drugmakers.

REPUBLICANS: KEYSTONE PIPELINE DOWN, BUT NOT OUT odds in a Dec. 6 runoff election against Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy. “I’m going to fight for the people of my state until the day that I leave, and I hope that will not be soon,” she said.

Republicans are likely to have enough votes to assure the bill’s passage in January, when they will have at least 53 seats - 54 if Cassidy wins the Louisiana runoff.

It’s relatively easy to write computer code that directs the car how to respond to a sudden dilemma. The hard part is deciding what that response should be.

Companies that are testing driverless cars are not focusing on these moral questions.

John Field of Mt Vernon, Missouri, says he used to be able to buy a month’s supply of doxycycline for $4 to treat his Lyme disease, which forced him to stop working as a pipe fitter. The medication now costs $167 per month, a 4,000 percent increase that he is unable to afford.

The average price of albuterol sulfate, a common asthma treatment, shot from $11 per bottle last October to $434 per bottle in April 2014, an increase of over 4,000 percent, according to data from the Healthcare Supply Chain Association cited by the Senate subcommittee.

While cars that do most or even all of the driving may be much safer, accidents happen.

“The problem is, who’s determining what we want?” asks Jeffrey Miller, a University of Southern California professor who develops driverless vehicle software. “You’re not going to have 100 percent buyin that says, `Hit the guy on the right.’”

Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

“If you look at new Congress, you can count four more (GOP seats) right away, and there may be others,” Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, the lead sponsor of the bill, said after the 5941 vote Tuesday. “You can see we’re well over 60.”

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and the Keystone XL oil pipeline bill sponsor, joined by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., , left, and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., right, speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014. The U.S. Senate has rejected a proposal to fast-track the approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is promising the new Republican majority will quickly resurrect Keystone XL pipeline legislation killed

by Democrats, potentially setting up an early 2015 veto confrontation with President Barack Obama.

“I look forward to the new Republican majority taking up and passing the Keystone jobs bill early in the new year,” the Kentucky Republican said Tuesday, shortly after the bill fell one vote short of the 60 votes needed to advance. He was joined by incoming Senate Energy Committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who said the fight wasn’t over.

The vote was a blow to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who had forced the issue onto the Senate agenda, and who faces difficult

Hoeven acknowledged that Republicans would need 67 votes to override a veto, but said one possibility is to include Keystone in a larger energy package that may not prompt a veto threat.

The vote was one of the last acts of this Senate controlled by the Democrats. It is expected to complete its work by mid-December.

Cassidy, Landrieu’s Republican opponent, said Louisiana families “need better jobs, better wages and better benefits,” and the pipeline would provide them.

Democratic divisions were on vivid display in a bill that pitted environmentalists against energy advocates.

While Obama opposes the measure, likely 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has repeatedly refused to take a position. Most recently, her spokesman did not respond continued on page 5

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The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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ISRAEL TO DEMOLISH HOMES O F S Y N A G O G U E AT TA C K E R S The violence, which reached a new turning point with the synagogue attack, has taken place against the background of roiling tensions over access to Jerusalem’s most holy site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The Palestinians fear that Israel wants to allow Jews to pray there, breaking a status quo in effect since Israel captured the area in the 1967 Mideast War.

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli police on Thursday handed home demolition notices to families of four Palestinian attackers from east Jerusalem, including two assailants who killed five people in a synagogue attack earlier this week, according to relatives and Palestinian officials.

The orders followed a pledge by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step up home demolitions as a punitive measure for a wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis over the past month.

The policy has drawn heavy criticism in the past and was rarely used in recent years, but Israeli officials decided to resume the practice in hopes of deterring potential attackers.

The Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al Aqsa Mosque compound is seen in Jerusalem’s old city Thursday, Nov. 20, 2014. Tensions in the region have spiked in recent weeks, largely over the disputed holy site in Jerusalem sacred to both Muslims and Jews

Said Abu Jamal, a cousin of the two synagogue attackers, said police summoned their families Thursday and issued the demolition orders.

The two Palestinian cousins from east Jerusalem - Ghassan and Oday Abu Jamal - burst into a crowded synagogue on Tuesday morning, killing four worshippers and a Druze Arab policeman with meat cleavers and gunfire before they were shot dead. It was the deadliest attack in the city since 2008.

Families of two other Palestinian attackers, Ibrahim al-Akari and Moataz Hijazi, received similar notices earlier on Thursday, according Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian Authority minister for Jerusalem affairs. An Israeli police spokesman said he was checking the report.

Al-Akari was shot dead by security forces after killing two Israelis earlier this month, when he rammed his car into a Jerusalem light rail station. Israeli police also killed Hijazi after he shot and seriously wounded an Israeli activist who has lobbied for greater Jewish access to a sensitive Jerusalem holy site in October.

On Wednesday, Israel demolished the home of another Palestinian man who rammed his car into a train station last month, killing two people before he was shot dead by police.

Netanyahu has called for tough action amid a wave of attacks against Israelis. Eleven people have died in five separate incidents in recent weeks - most of them in Jerusalem, but also in Tel Aviv and the occupied West Bank. At least five Palestinians involved in the attacks were killed.

SURGE OF RUSSIAN AIRCRAFT SEEN O V E R B A LT I C S E A

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Meanwhile, the Israeli military said Thursday that militants in the Gaza Strip test-fired rockets into the Mediterranean Sea, in an apparent attempt to show off their capabilities.

Four rockets were fired in the past 24 hours, the military said, without elaborating on the test or type of rockets fired. There was no immediate confirmation from Palestinian officials in Gaza.

Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers fought a 50-day war over the summer that claimed more than 2,100 Palestinian and 70 Israeli lives.

At the time, Israel said it launched the operation to halt Hamas’ rocket attacks from Gaza - rockets that now have the ability to reach Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other Israeli cities. And though the rocket fire continued throughout the war, it was largely neutralized by Israel’s “Iron Dome” aerial defense system.

On March 27, 2012, an SU-27 Russian fighter plane entering from Kaliningrad strayed some 12 kilometers (8 miles) into Lithuania’s airspace, the Defense Ministry says.

FINLAND

Two other Russian violations of Finland’s airspace occurred a few days earlier, involving a Tupolev TU-134 jet and an AN-26 cargo plane.

The most serious incident happened on Oct. 21, when a Russian Ilyushin-20 surveillance aircraft crossed into Estonia’s airspace for about a minute near the island of Saaremaa. Estonia summoned Russia’s ambassador to lodge a formal complaint.

SWEDEN

Latvia hasn’t seen any airspace violations by Russian aircraft this year. But Latvia’s Defense Ministry says it has recorded more than 180 incidents of Russian military planes straying “dangerously close” to Latvia’s airspace without identifying themselves.

Defense Ministry spokesman Kaspars Galkins said Russian military planes, as a rule, fail to submit flight plans and have switched off their transponders.

LITHUANIA No airspace violations by Russian aircraft so far this year, but Defense Ministry says Russian activity close to Lithuania’s airspace has grown substantially.

Lithuania says Russia’s military flights violate International Civil Aviation Organization regulations and pose a risk to civil aviation by failing to report flight plans, ignoring civilian air traffic controllers and switching off their on-board transponders.

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Arab citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population of 8 million people. Tensions over the Jerusalem holy site have spilled into their community as well and Israeli police recently shot to death an Arab Israeli man who approached a police car wielding a knife.

NATO member Estonia says Russian aircraft have violated its airspace six times this year, a sharp increase compared to previous years.

LATVIA

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The move drew widespread criticism on Thursday, including from Netanyahu who said “there is no place for discrimination against Israeli Arabs.” Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, who anchors the far right wing of Netanyahu’s coalition, insisted that “99 percent of Israeli Arabs are completely loyal” to Israel.

ESTONIA

Another example took place near the island of Vaindloo in the Gulf of Finland near a corridor where Russian military planes fly to get from the St. Petersburg area to the Russian outpost of Kaliningrad, which is wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

POTECTING SPEICIES

The tensions have in turn spurred anti-Arab demonstrations by Israeli hardliners. On Wednesday, Mayor Itamar Shimoni of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon suspended Israeli Arab laborers from work. They were renovating bomb shelters at local day-care centers.

On Aug. 28, a Russian AN-72 transport plane briefly entered Finnish airspace over the Gulf of Finland. Finland’s defense minister, Carl Haglund, said he suspected that was intentional and he demanded an explanation from Moscow. The Finnish Border Guard said the flight plan indicated the Russian carrier Aeroflot as being the transport flight’s operator.

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) -- Russia’s increased military presence in the Baltic Sea area, including its air force, has prompted some officials to compare it to the Cold War. Here’s a summary of the most serious incidents reported across the region.

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Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have repeatedly denied the claim but nationalistic politicians have increasingly stirred tensions by visiting the site.

Last month the non-NATO member launched its first submarine hunt since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sweden said a small, foreign submarine entered its waters illegally but never found it and didn’t disclose its nationality.

Sweden’s armed forces say foreign aircraft - including Russian and NATO planes - have breached Swedish airspace 10 times this year, up from eight last year and seven in 2012.

On Sept. 17 two Russian SU-24 bombers crossed the border south of Oland island for about 30 seconds, leaving only after Swedish air force fighters approached them.

Sweden’s military says its own spy planes flying over the Baltic Sea have been approached by Russian planes flying unusually close. But it’s not just Russian aircraft. On July 18, an American spy plane entered Swedish airspace to avoid Russian military planes.

DENMARK No airspace violations recorded, but on March 3 an SAS passenger jet taking off from Copenhagen Airport nearly collided with a Russian spy plane. This happened in international airspace near Sweden, and its investigators said the Russian plane came within 100 meters (300 feet) of the SAS plane. The Ilyushin-20, flying without transponders, wasn’t registered by civilian air traffic controllers.

POLAND Polish officials reported one air space violation in April by a military aircraft of a foreign country, and a NATO military official identified it as a Russian aircraft.

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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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AP EXCLUS IV E : F R OM I S M I L I TA N T T O I R A Q I N F O R M A N T WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is embracing a radical change in how the government treats Internet service, coming down on the side of consumer activists who fear slower download speeds and higher costs but angering Republicans and the nation’s cable giants who say the plan would kill jobs.

service that is based on the transmission of information - whether a phone call, or a packet of data,” Obama said.

This approach is exactly what industry lobbyists have spent months fighting against. While Internet providers say they support the concept of an open Internet, they want flexibility to think up new ways to package and sell Internet services. And, given the billions of dollars spent to improve network infrastructure, some officials say it’s only fair to make data hogs like Netflix bear some of the costs of handling heavy traffic.

Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to more heavily regulate Internet providers and treat broadband much as it would any other public utility. He said the FCC should explicitly prohibit Internet providers like Verizon and AT&T from charging data hogs like Netflix extra to move their content more quickly. The announcement sent cable stocks tumbling.

The FCC, an independent regulatory body led by political appointees, is nearing a decision on whether broadband providers should be allowed to cut deals with the content providers but is stumbling over the legal complexities.

“We are stunned the president would abandon the longstanding, bipartisan policy of lightly regulating the Internet and calling for extreme” regulation, said Michael Powell, president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the primary lobbying arm of the cable industry, which supplies much of the nation’s Internet access.

This “tectonic shift in national policy, should it be adopted, would create devastating results,” added Powell, who chaired the FCC during the Bush administration until 2005.

Consumer groups and content providers hailed Obama’s move, with Netflix posting to its Facebook page that “consumers should pick winners and losers on the Internet, not broadband gatekeepers.”

“Net neutrality” is the idea that Internet service providers shouldn’t block, slow or manipulate data moving across its networks. As long as content isn’t against the law, such as child pornography or pirated music, a file or video posted on one site will load generally at the same speed as a similarly sized file or video on another site.

In 2010, the FCC embraced the concept in a rule. But last January,

In this file photo taken Wednesday, June 25, 2014, fighters of the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) parade in the northern city of Mosul, Iraq. “We can’t stop this thing, but we can limit it,” a former Islamic State group commander told the Associated Press of the Sunni militant group’s ambition to create a self-styled caliphate.

“Daesh has nothing to lose,” he added, using the group’s Arabic acronym. ”They like it when (they are) hot in the news.” The former commander was interviewed at an Iraqi prison where he is now held and works as an informant.

a federal appeals court struck down the regulation because the court said the FCC didn’t technically have the legal authority to tell broadband providers how to manage their networks.

The uncertainty has prompted the public to file some 3.7 million comments with the FCC - more than double the number filed after Janet Jackson’s infamous wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl.

On Monday, Obama waded into the fray and gave a major boost to Internet activists by saying the FCC should explicitly ban any “paid prioritization” on the Internet. Obama also suggested that the FCC reclassify consumer broadband as a public utility under the 1934 Communications Act so there’s no legal ambiguity. That would mean the Internet would be regulated more heavily in the way phone service is.

“It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any

GUN SALES SURGE AHEAD OF J U RY ’ S F E R G U S O N D E C I S I O N Ferguson, a town that borders his community of Florissant and shares a school district with its neighbor, were the decisive factor.

“Everyone else has one,” he said. “I figured I’d better too.”

The St. Louis County Police Department reports a sharp increase in the number of concealed-carry permits issued since Brown’s death compared with a year ago.

From May through July, the county issued fewer permits compared with 2013, records show. But from Aug. 1 through Nov. 12, officials issued 600 more permits, including more than twice as many in October as a year earlier. Fifty-three more permits were issued in the first eight business days of November than in all of November 2013.

In this Saturday, Nov. 15, 2014 photo, Steven King works behind the counter at at Metro Shooting Supplies, in Bridgeton, Mo. St. Louis County gun dealers like King are reporting a surge in sales and an increase in first-time buyers as fearful residents await a grand jury decision in Michael Brown’s police shooting death.

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) -- Some suburban St. Louis gun dealers have been doing brisk business, particularly among first-time buyers, as fearful residents await a grand jury’s decision on whether to indict the police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown.

Metro Shooting Supplies, in an area near the city’s main airport, reports selling two to three times more weapons than usual in recent weeks - an average of 30 to 50 guns each day - while the jury prepares to conclude its three-month review of the case that sparked looting and weeks of sometimes-violent protests in August.

“We’re selling everything that’s not nailed down,” owner Steven King said. “Police aren’t going to be able to protect every single individual. If you don’t prepare yourself and get ready for the worst, you have no one to blame but yourself.”

The store’s waiting list for private lessons and concealed-carry training classes extends into 2015.

Protest leaders say they are preparing for non-violent demonstrations after the grand jury’s decision is announced, but they also acknowledge the risk of more unrest if the panel decides not to issue criminal charges against Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Brown, who was black and unarmed.

Other gun dealers say their sales spikes are comparable to the increases seen soon after Brown’s death on Aug. 9.

“I’ve probably sold more guns this past month than all of last year,” said County Guns owner Adam Weinstein, who fended off looters last summer at his storefront on West Florissant Avenue, the roadway that was the scene of many nightly protests. Weinstein stood guard over his business with an assault rifle and pistol.

The store has since moved out of Ferguson - in part because of concerns about potential further violence.

First-time gun owners account for about 60 percent of his recent customers, King said. Among them is Dave Benne, who on Saturday purchased a Smith & Wesson handgun as shoppers swarmed the 8,600-square-foot showroom.

Benne said he’s considered buying a gun for some time, but the events in

Police spokesman Brian Schellman said “it would be naive” to say the increase has not been driven by concern over the grand jury decision.

The purchases are not limited to residents. The owner of an online business that sells tactical gear to law-enforcement agencies said his warehouse in the suburb of Chesterfield has been visited by Missouri state troopers and officers from the Department of Homeland Security assigned to help state and local police.

“None of us has ever seen anything quite like this before,” said Chad Weinman of Cat5 Commerce, which operates the website TacticalGear. com. “There is an uncertainty in the air that has my entire staff on edge. To say that St. Louis residents are concerned about what will transpire in the coming days is an understatement.”

At the Ferguson Wal-Mart, one of more than a dozen stores attacked the night after Brown’s death, managers have removed ammunition from shelves as a precaution.

The move to make the ammo less visible apparently did not deter customers. A manager said Monday that the store had sold most of its supply of bullets.

M U T I N Y I N S I D E YEMEN’S SPECIAL FORCES SANAA, Yemen (AP) -- Yemeni officials say officers loyal to ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh are leading a mutiny inside the headquarters of an elite paramilitary unit, seeking to oust their commander.

The officials say gunfire was heard Thursday afternoon inside the Special Forces headquarters, located in the heart of the capital and near the presidential palace. The mutineers chanted “leave leave” and tried to storm the office of Mohammed Mansour al-Ghadraa, their new commander. Al-Ghadraa was appointed in September.

The unit, part of the Interior Ministry, was led for nearly a decade by Saleh’s nephew, Yahia Saleh, before he was recently removed. It’s not immediately clear whom the mutineers want to replace al-Ghadraa.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

AT&T on Monday threatened legal action if the FCC adopted Obama’s plan, while Comcast Corp. said reclassifying broadband regulation would be “a radical reversal that would harm investment and innovation, as today’s immediate stock market reaction demonstrates.” Similar statements were released by Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications and several industry groups including CTIA-The Wireless Association, USTelecom, the Telecommunications Industry Association and Broadband for America.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest, traveling with Obama in China, said the president “felt this was an appropriate time” to make his views known because of the FCC’s regulatory timeline, and that the timing wasn’t related to Obama’s trip this week to Asia and Australia.

Asked whether Comcast had been consulted on the issue, Earnest said only that the White House had been in touch with the business community on a variety of issues.

“There are members of Congress on both sides of this,” he added.

Many Republicans including House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sided with industry in denouncing the plan as government overreach. “`Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a tea party favorite, declared on Twitter. “The Internet should not operate at the speed of government.”

The Internet Association, which represents many content providers like Netflix, Twitter, eBay and Google, applauded Obama’s proposal.

On Monday, as the Standard & Poor’s 500 index edged up slightly, stock prices fell for big cable companies, including Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cablevision and Charter Communications.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a former industry lobbyist and venture capitalist, has said he is open to using a “hybrid” approach that would draw from both Title II of the 1934 law and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. On Monday, Wheeler said he welcomed the president’s comments, but suggested that his proposal was easier said than done.

“The more deeply we examined the issues around the various legal options, the more it has become plain that there is more work to do,” Wheeler said. “The reclassification and hybrid approaches before us raise substantive legal questions. We found we would need more time to examine these to ensure that whatever approach is taken, it can withstand any legal challenges it may face.”

The FCC isn’t under a deadline to make a decision.

The president’s statement all but guarantees that the major cable companies will spend the next few months trying to encourage Congress to step in to protect their interests. Still, Internet activists are hoping that Obama’s position will go a long way, even as his popularity among his party has waned.

“When the leader of the free world says the Internet should remain free, that’s a game changer,” said Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

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The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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

T r a c t o r - T r a i l e r b y L a k e l a n d M a n o n I - 4

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

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

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

Ta m p a

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

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

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

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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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O B A M A ’ S I M M I G R A T I O N A C T I O N S D O H A V E L I M I T S WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is poised to level broad authority to grant work permits to millions of immigrants living illegally in the United States and to protect them from deportation, but the plan would leave the fate of millions more still unresolved. Republicans vowed an all-out fight against it.

specter of impeachment.

“Congress will act,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned on the Senate floor Thursday, hours before Obama’s 8 p.m. EST address sidestepping Congress on this volatile issue.

In a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans, McConnell urged restraint. Still, there were concerns among some Republicans that the potential 2016 presidential candidates in the Senate would use the announcement to elevate their standing, challenging Obama directly.

“We’re considering a variety of options,” McConnell told Senate colleagues. “But make no mistake. When the newly elected representatives of the people take their seats, they will act.”

Obama’s measures could make as many as 5 million people eligible for work permits, with the broadest action likely

SELF-DRIVING CARS continued from page 1

One of those philosophers is Patrick Lin, a professor who directs the ethics and emerging sciences group at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

“This is one of the most profoundly serious decisions we can make.

Program a machine that can foreseeably lead to someone’s death,” said Lin. “When we make programming decisions, we expect those to be as right as we can be.”

What right looks like may differ from company to company, but according to Lin automakers have a duty to show that they have wrestled with these complex questions - and publicly reveal the answers they reach.

Lin said he has discussed the ethics of driverless cars with Google as well as automakers including Tesla, Nissan and BMW. As far as he knows, only BMW has formed an internal group to study the issue.

Many automakers remain skeptical that cars will operate completely without drivers, at least not in the next five or 10 years.

Uwe Higgen, head of BMW’s group technology office in Silicon Valley, said the automaker has brought together specialists in technology, ethics, social impact, and the law to discuss a range of issues related to cars that do ever-more driving instead of people.

“This is a constant process going forward,” Higgen said.

To some, the fundamental moral question doesn’t ask about rare and catastrophic accidents but rather how to balance appropriate caution over introducing the technology against its potential to save lives. After all, more than 30,000 people die in traffic accidents each year in the United States.

“No one has a good answer for how safe is safe enough,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor who has written extensively on self-driving cars. The cars “are going to crash, and that is something that the companies need to accept and the public needs to accept.”

And what about government regulators - how will they react to crashes, especially those that are particularly gruesome or the result of a decision that a person would be unlikely to make? Just four states have passed any rules governing self-driving cars on public roads, and the federal government appears to be in no hurry to regulate them.

In California, the department of motor vehicles is discussing ethical questions with companies, but isn’t writing rules.

“That’s a natural question that would come up and it does come up,” said Bernard Soriano, the department’s point man on driverless cars, of how cars should decide between a series of bad choices. “There will have to be some sort of explanation.”

KEYSTONE PIPELINE continued from page 1

to two requests over the weekend to do so.

The project would move oil from Canada into the United States and eventually to the Texas Gulf Coast. Supporters say it would create jobs and ease American dependence on Middle East oil.

A government environmental impact statement also predicts that a pipeline would result in less damage to the climate than moving the same oil by rail.

Critics argue that the drilling itself is environmentally harmful, and said much of the Canadian crude would be exported with little or no impact on America’s drive for energy stability.

At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest said the measure is something “the president doesn’t support because the president believes that this is something that should be determined through the State Department and the regular process that is in place to evaluate projects like this.”

After the vote, five people were handcuffed and led off by Capitol police outside the Senate chamber after breaking into loud yowls. One was wearing what appeared to be Native American beads and feathers in his hair.

Party leaders warned against such talk and sought to avoid spending-bill tactics that could lead to a government shutdown. They said such moves could backfire, alienating Hispanic voters and others.

The White House is seen at dusk in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014. President Barack Obama on Thursday is expected to announce steps he will take to shield up to 5 million immigrants illegally in the United States from deportation.

aimed at extending deportation protections to parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, as long as those parents have been in the country for five years.

Other potential winners under Obama’s actions would be young immigrants who entered the country illegally as children but do not now qualify under a 2012 directive from the president that’s expected to be expanded.

And as far-reaching as Obama’s steps would be, they fall far short of what a comprehensive immigration overhaul passed by the Senate last year would have accomplished. The House never voted on that legislation. It would have set tougher border security standards, increased caps for visas for foreign high-skilled workers and allowed the 11 million immigrants illegally in the country to obtain work permits and begin a 10year path toward a green card and, ultimately, citizenship.

“This is not the way we want to proceed. It will not solve the problem permanently,” White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri acknowledged Thursday on MSNBC.

Changes also are expected to law enforcement programs and business visas. But with more than 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally, Obama’s actions would not affect millions of other illegal immigrants, although their chances of getting deported if they have not committed a crime are low.

None of those affected by Obama’s actions would have a path to citizenship, and the actions could be reversed by a new president after Obama leaves office. Moreover, officials said the eligible immigrants would not be entitled to federal benefits - including health care tax credits - under Obama’s plan.

“What I’m going to be laying out is the things that I can do with my lawful authority as president to make the system better, even as I continue to work with Congress and encourage them to get a bipartisan, comprehensive bill that can solve the entire problem,” Obama said in a video posted Wednesday on Facebook.

Some immigrant advocates worried that even though Obama’s actions would make millions eligible for work permits, not all would participate out of fear that Republicans or a new president would reverse Obama’s actions.

But the vehement reaction of Republicans, who will have complete control of Congress come January, made clear that Obama was courting what could be one of the most pitched partisan confrontations of his presidency.

“If the reaction to this is that the Republicans are going to do everything they can to tear this apart, to make it unworkable, the big interesting question will be, will our folks sign up knowing that there is this cloud hanging over it,” said Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza.

How Republicans will respond remained uncertain, and the party was divided. But a major battle on Capitol Hill looked inevitable.

Still, Democrats battered by election losses two weeks ago welcomed Obama’s steps.

Some on the right pushed for using must-pass spending legislation to try to shut-down Obama’s move. One lawmakertwo-term Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama - raised the

“The last two weeks haven’t been great weeks for us,” said Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, one of 18 congressional Democrats who had dinner Wednesday night with Obama.

“The president is about to change that.”

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The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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EGYPT MAKING SLOW PROGRESS O N G E N I T A L M U T I L A T I O N

MANSHIET EL-IKHWA, Egypt (AP) -- Raslan Fadl, the first doctor in Egypt to be put on trial for committing female genital mutilation, is still practicing even through a 13-year-old girl died after he performed the procedure. And in this Nile Delta Village, he has plenty of patients.

Young girls and their families on a recent day sat in his waiting room, where the bright yellow walls are decorated with Winnie the Pooh pictures, in the same building where Soheir el-Batea came for her operation last year. Residents call him a well-respected figure in the community, known for his charity work.

It could not be determined whether any were at his office for “circumcision,” as it is known here, and Fadl would not speak to The Associated Press. But Fadl’s continued popularity demonstrates the challenges to curbing the practice in Egypt, where more than 90 percent of women are estimated to have undergone it - one of the highest rates in the world.

Female genital cutting was criminalized in 2008 and the most important Sunni Muslim religious authority has declared it dangerous and without any religious justification. The U.N. says there appears to be a slow reduction in the rate of the practice, but that it is still widespread.

A verdict is expected Thursday in Fadl’s trial, and if convicted he could face up to two years in prison. Rights advocates say the outcome of this case could set a key precedent for deterring doctors and families in the future. Sohair’s father is also charged in the case.

But even in the home village of the girl, Dierb Biqtaris, there is little outcry against the practice.

Rasha Mohammed, a friend of Sohair, remembers that the girl felt scared before the operation and didn’t want to go. But Rasha chalks up her death to an accident, saying 11 other girls underwent FGM with the doctor that day and “nothing happened to them.”

Sohair’s grandmother declined to comment on the case, saying a year and a half has passed and she doesn’t want to bring up the topic again.

“It was her destiny,” she said.

Emad Hamdi, a local worker, said he is still weighing whether to circumcise his daughters. He said he’s heard that without it, a girl would be “sexually voracious,” which could be “dangerous for her” - a common justification for the practice. A widely used Egyptian Arabic term for it translates literally as “purification.”

This undated photo provided by the Women’s Center for Guidance and Legal Awareness, shows a portrait of Sohair elBatea, who died last year after undergoing a female genital mutilation operation by Dr. Raslan Fadl, in Egypt.

On Thursday, Nov. 20, 2014 a court is expected to issue a verdict in Egypt’s first-ever prosecution of a doctor accused of committing FGM. Thirteen-yearold Sohair died during the operation last year.

Rights advocates say the outcome of this case could set a key precedent for deterring doctors and families in the future.

Genital mutilation involves removing all or part of the clitoris and labia minora. It is practiced in 29 countries, most of them in East and West Africa, but also in Egypt and parts of Iraq and Yemen. It is practiced among both Muslims and Christians, usually because it is seen as needed for cleanliness or to prevent a girl’s sexual desire from running out of control. Social pressure is strong: Many families fear that an uncircumcised daughter will be unable to marry. Rights advocates condemn the practice as an attempt to control women’s sexuality that scars girls physically and psychologically.

It was not easy getting the landmark case to trial - one indication why no cases came to court for years despite the ban. Sohair’s family initially filed a police report saying she died as a result of FGM, but changed their story after reconciling with the doctor, said lawyer Reda el-Danbouki.

So rights groups had to push for trial. Prosecutors were slow, preferring “for the matter to end,” he said.

Philippe Duamelle, the UNICEF representative in Egypt, said the case was an opportunity for the government to show “this crime is now taken with all the seriousness it requires.”

The latest survey, conducted in 2008, showed 91 percent for women aged 15-49 have undergone the procedure. But among women ages

15-17, the rate is down to 74 percent, suggesting more families are deciding to forgo it with their daughters. Duamelle said the reduction has been significant but “doesn’t go fast enough.”

In southern Egypt, organizer Manal Fawzy hopes for a “sharp punishment” for the doctor as a deterrent. If the verdict is not strong, she fears the law will be seen as just propaganda.

But the ban is just one tool, she said. “To change a behavior, it’s so difficult.”

She runs the Assiut Childhood and Development Organization, a UNICEF partner organization that takes a community approach to getting people to abandon the practice. It operates in Assiut province, where rates are among highest in the country. The group identifies residents who are already critical of genital mutilation and gives them training and information to convince their neighbors.

“When I see a neighbor like me, and she stands against this practice and we are in the same tradition and the same village and the same place, it is very effective for them,” Fawzy said. The group also calls on religious leaders and doctors to speak to residents.

The group encourages families to publicly declare their rejection of the tradition, sometimes in front of hundreds of people. There tends to be resistance at the beginning, and people are reluctant to talk about the sensitive subject, she said. But slowly the taboo is being broken, she said. “You find it’s something critical for them, for their life.”

In Sidfa, a village where the organization operates, The Associated Press spoke to dozens of residents about their decision to abandon the practice.

Hamdiya Nazmi said one of her seven daughters was “circumcised” but she decided not to do so with the other six after being convinced by Fawzy’s organization. “I spoke with people who live near me and convinced them it was wrong too.” She remembers feeling terrified when she was taken to the midwife as a girl for her own operation.

Ihsan Abdel Waly, a 75-year-old local midwife who used to circumcise girls, said she was convinced to stop doing it seven years ago after speaking to doctors.

“In the old days, it was out of ignorance,” she said. “Medicine developed and people now understand.”

P O L I C E : M I S S H O N D U R A S S I S T E R A P PA R E N T LY K I L L E D S U R V I V O R S In this April 26, 2014 photo, Maria Jose Alvarado is crowned the new Miss Honduras in San Pedro, Sula, Honduras. Alvarado, and her sister Sofia disappeared after attending a birthday party in Western Honduras on Thursday Nov. 13, but authorities were not notified until the weekend.

The 19-year-old beauty queen was expected to attend the Miss World pageant in Britain this December

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) -- Two bodies believed to belong to Miss Honduras 2014 and her sister have been found buried near the spa where they disappeared six days ago, the Honduras National Police director said Wednesday.

Authorities were awaiting confirmation from forensic officials that the victims are Maria Jose Alvarado, 19, and her sister, Sofia, 23, said Gen. Ramon Sabillon.

Sabillon said Sofia’s boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz, confessed to killing the sisters and led authorities to the bodies buried in a river bank in a mountainous area of Santa Barbara, about 240 miles (400 kilometers) west of Tegucigalpa.

They were found near La Aguagua spa, where they had gone Thursday to celebrate Ruiz’s birthday.

Both women, who grew up in the area, were shot to death and appeared to have been killed the night they disappeared, Sabillon said.

next month. She was supposed to have left for London this week.

A pageant representative said Honduras would not compete in the contest this year, given the tragedy.

Honduras, overrun with streets gangs and drug trafficking, has the highest murder rate in the world for a country not at war, with an estimated 90 to 95 killings per 100,000 people. It is one of Latin America’s poorest countries and earlier this year was the main source of a surge in unaccompanied minors migrating to the United States, many to escape the violence.

Women and girls are increasingly fleeing Honduras and other Central American nations after being kidnapped or raped, with many of them seeking asylum in the United States.

Alvarado had also worked as a model on the game program “El Show X O da Dinero” of television personality and former presidential candidate Salvador Nasrallah. He said he was very saddened by the news.

“A lot of girls die this way, but because they’re not famous, it doesn’t get the attention and the crimes go unpunished,” Nasrallah said. “She was a girl of good principles who fell into a trap, a game with guns, and ended up a victim of a violent system.”

In the South American nation of Venezuela, which also suffers from high crime, a former Miss Venezuela and popular soap-opera actress, Monica Spear, was killed along with her husband during a robbery in January while she was visiting her homeland.

Beauty queens are very popular in many parts of Latin America, where they are viewed as celebrities and often go on to become entertainers.

O F F E M A L E G E N I TA L M U T I L A T I O N In this Saturday, Nov. 15, 2014 photo, Ihsan Abdel Waly, 75, who worked as a midwife and has been subjected to female genital mutilation herself, poses for a photograph in Sidfa, 340 kilometers (210 miles) south of Cairo, Egypt.

Abdel Waly started practicing in her early twenties. She learned from her mother who performed the procedure on her. “During my mother’s generation there were hardly any midwives. It was a mothers duty to perform the procedure to her own daughter. My generation was full of mid-wives. It became a job.” Abdel Waly is mother to four boys and one girl.

She operated on her only daughter. “I regret working as a midwife and operating on all these girls,” she said. She feels it’s her responsibility now to speak out against FGM.

SIDFA, Egypt (AP) -- In this ancient village in southern Egypt on the banks of the Nile, some women are now speaking out about a long-standing tradition once never discussed.

Female genital mutilation is rampant in Egypt, with an estimated 90 percent of women in the country having undergone the forceful procedure - misguidedly called “circumcision” - as children out of the belief that it controls women’s sexuality. The United Nations says the practice is concentrated in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Egypt’s government criminalized the practice in 2008 and religious leaders have declared it dangerous and without any spiritual justification, but rights advocates say it is still widespread.

Here in Sidfa, 340 kilometers (210 miles) south of Cairo, several survivors spoke to The Associated Press about undergoing female genital mutilation as children without anesthesia.

“They were not very astute about assessing the people around them. They were just friendly,” the sisters’ mother, Teresa Munoz, told Televicentro. “They were taken out by people they hadn’t known very long.”

“I ran out of my house onto the streets screaming when I saw the midwife,” said Samya Shehata, 35, a Coptic Christian. “My mom eventually caught me, helped the midwife hold me down and did the operation.”

An alleged accomplice, Aris Maldonado, was also being held.

Sabillon said the two men buried the bodies near the river in hopes that they would decompose quickly.

Laila Nazma, 37, remembered it as “a day of hell,” having undergone it at age 12.

“I will never forget when my mother said, `Let’s go,’ and I knew what she was talking about,” said Nazma, also a Coptic Christian. “I fainted from the pain and bled a lot. When I woke up after the operation I felt like I was butchered.”

He said Ruiz apparently shot his girlfriend, Sofia, because she was dancing with another man. After a fierce argument, he pulled out a pistol and fired at Sofia first, then at Maria Jose as she tried to flee. The beauty queen was shot at least twice in the back, Sabillon said.

Munoz said Ruiz called her the following morning, acting nervous and claiming the young women had left the party in a car with some other people.

Maria Jose Alvarado was crowned Miss Honduras in April and was expected to compete in the Miss World Pageant in London

Youssra Hosny, a 34-year-old Muslim, was cut at 9 months old.

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www.childrenincorporated.

“When I grew older I wanted to understand what happened to me,” Hosny said. “I decided to visit the midwife that did this to me. I told her to tell me the story. She did. I was very angry after I found out everything. I have two daughters and would never do this to them.”

Here are a series of evocative portraits by AP photographer Nariman El-Mofty of female genital mutilation survivors.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

N E W U S T O U G H

MOSCOW (AP) -- Ask most Russians and they will tell you that the United States instigated the conflict in Ukraine with the ultimate aim of subjugating Russia. This is what they hear from President Vladimir Putin and in a steady stream of reports on state television.

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A M B A S S A D O R H A S J O B I N M O S C O W Russia but throughout the world.

This message finds fertile ground with Russians still deeply bitter over the humiliation of the years following the 1991 Soviet collapse. The anti-Americanism also serves to rally Russians around Putin, a leader seen as strong enough to stand up to the West.

Most in the West view it differently, of course. They condemn Russia for seizing the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, and accuse the Kremlin of arming the separatists whose battles with government troops in eastern Ukraine have claimed more than 4,000 lives. The U.S. and European Union have imposed punishing sanctions, but this has only made Russia more defiant.

Tefft replaces Michael McFaul, the Stanford University professor who was the architect of President Barack Obama’s effort to reset relations with Russia.

With little common ground between these two narratives, tensions between Russia and the West are higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Diplomacy has stalled.

McFaul had the misfortune to arrive in Moscow in the middle of the mass anti-Putin protests of early 2012. A scholar who had long studied the development of democracy in Russia, he was an easy target for the Kremlin as it sought to portray the protests as a U.S. plot.

The arrival of new U.S. Ambassador John Tefft, a career diplomat with experience in Russia and Ukraine, offered some hope of improved lines of communication. But his reception Wednesday, when he presented his credentials to Putin, showed his job will not be easy.

Tefft has been seen as more likely to be able to work with the Russians, who are accustomed to dealing with professional diplomats. This was the point he made Wednesday:

Putin gave a slight smile as Tefft strode toward him across a vast, gilded Kremlin hall. His words, though, contained both a welcome and a warning.

“We are ready for practical cooperation with our American partners in all fields on the principles of respect for each other’s interests, equal partnership and non-interference in our domestic affairs,” Putin said during the Kremlin ceremony.

Rossiya state television sent a sharper message. The news presenter described Tefft as a “specialist in color revolutions,” a reference to the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine that ushered in Western-leaning governments a decade ago. Tefft has been the U.S. ambassador in both countries, in addition to having served in Russia and in other State Department posts with responsibility for the region.

“They call him a diplomat saboteur,” the presenter said. The implication

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Tefft toast at a ceremony of presention of credentials in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014. The new U.S. ambassador to Russia presented his credentials to President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday in a ceremony at the Kremlin that politely hinted at the challenges the career diplomat will face in Moscow.

was that he was sent to Moscow to foment a popular uprising with the aim of overthrowing Putin.

The Western sanctions, which target Russian businesses and individuals, including some members of Putin’s inner circle, are seen as part of this effort.

Tefft was one of 15 ambassadors to present their credentials Wednesday, but television reports unsurprisingly focused almost exclusively on him.

Russian television news broadcasts and talk shows seem obsessed with the United States. The state-owned channels churn out programs that portray the U.S. as the greatest threat to stability and security not only in

FRACKING TO BE PERMITTED I N G W N A T I O N A L F O R E S T This lobbying fight was mostly over principle, since no energy company has wanted to actually drill on the land they’re leasing, Bonnie acknowledged. “The economic value of these reserves is very low. We’ve had very little interest on oil and gas on the forest,” Bonnie said.

Also, more environmental analysis and public comment would be encouraged before any drilling is approved, the Forest Service said.

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -- Environmentalists and energy boosters alike welcomed a federal compromise announced Tuesday that will allow fracking in the largest national forest in the eastern United States, but make most of its woods off-limits to drilling.

The decision was highly anticipated because about half of the George Washington National Forest sits atop the Marcellus shale formation, a vast underground deposit of natural gas that runs from upstate New York to West Virginia and yields more than $10 billion in gas a year.

The federal management plan reverses an outright ban on hydraulic fracturing that the U.S. Forest Service had proposed in 2011 for the 1.1 million-acre forest, which includes the headwaters of the James and Potomac rivers. Those rivers feed the Chesapeake Bay, which is the focus of a multibillion-dollar, multistate restoration directed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

A total ban would have been a first for America’s national forests, which unlike national parks are commonly leased out for mining, timber and drilling. But some environmentalists were pleased that at least some balance was struck between energy development and conservation.

“We think the decision shows the Forest Service listened to the local community,” said Sarah Francisco, leader of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s national forests and parks program. “The vast majority of the forest is protected in this decision.”

With both sides lobbying hard, Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe told his climate change panel in September that federal officials had assured him fracking was off the table. “I won’t allow it as long as I’m governor,” he said.

But the final word rested with Ken Arney, a regional Forest Service manager. And by Tuesday afternoon, well after the decision was announced, the governor wasn’t commenting.

“We think we’ve ended up in a much better place, which is we are allowing oil and gas drilling,” said Robert Bonnie, the undersecretary for national resources and environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service.

“From a policy perspective, the Forest Service allows fracking on forest lands throughout the country. We didn’t want to make a policy decision or change policy related to fracking,” Bonnie told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The new plan eliminates the potential for oil and gas leases on 985,000 acres where they could have been granted, and permits drilling only on 167,000 acres with existing private mineral rights and 10,000 acres already leased to oil and gas companies. The private mineral rights are scattered throughout the forest, which hadn’t updated its management plan since 1993.

“As a U.S. diplomat for more than four decades, I am committed to maintaining open and frank lines of communication between our two great nations - helping explain Russia’s perspective to Washington and expressing the U.S. government’s views to Moscow,” the new ambassador said in a statement.

Judging by the reception he received in the Kremlin and on state television, this will not be easy.

FA M I LY, S C H O O L S PA R I N C O U RT I N ‘UNDER GOD’ SUIT FREEHOLD, N.J. (AP) -- Attorneys offered contrasting interpretations of the Pledge of Allegiance during oral arguments Wednesday in a New Jersey family’s lawsuit claiming a school district is discriminating against their child’s atheist beliefs.

The lawsuit focuses on the words “under God” that were added to the Pledge in 1954 and that have survived legal challenges before. Earlier this year, Massachusetts’ high court ruled in a similar lawsuit that the pledge is not discriminatory.

David Niose, an attorney for the American Humanist Association who is representing the unnamed family in the New Jersey case, said the Massachusetts’ court’s focus on the fact that the pledge was voluntary was “simply wrong.”

Fracking enables the extraction of oil and gas from otherwise marginal shale deposits by injecting water mixed with chemicals and sand or gravel deep underground at extremely high pressure.

“Harm is occurring every day the state is invalidating the plaintiff’s religious class,” he said under questioning by state Superior Court Judge David Bauman.

Environmental groups fear the drilling and its waste could pollute mountain streams that directly provide drinking water to about 260,000 people in the Shenandoah Valley. Another 2.7 million people in Northern Virginia and Washington get part of their drinking water from the forest.

The Aberdeen Matawan school district doesn’t require that students say the pledge, and Bauman said there wasn’t any evidence the student in question had been “bullied, ostracized or in any way mistreated.”

“The risks of fracking are well documented, from water, air and climate pollution to the industrialization of special places,” Glen Besa, director of the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter, said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, these risks remain for the existing leases in the forest.

While the leases may be low value, they are certainly high risk.”

Opponents also argued that the trucks, wells and other infrastructure that would come with gas drilling are incompatible with the forest’s primary attractions of hiking, fishing, hunting, camping, tourism and its abundant wildlife. The forest includes a section of the Appalachian Trail and attracts more than 1 million visitors annually.

The American Petroleum Institute maintains that hydraulic fracturing can be done safely and without risk to groundwater, but the science has not been conclusive.

“Natural gas is an enormously versatile fuel that helps power our nation’s economy. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing is helping to unlock the tremendous economic and job creation benefits that Virginians, and all Americans, need and want,” Virginia Petroleum Council Executive Director Michael Ward said in a statement.

But he also noted during his questioning of district attorney David Rubin that district policy requires parents whose children don’t say the pledge to furnish an explanation in writing.

Rubin said he wasn’t aware of any cases where parents had refused to supply an explanation and didn’t know what the ramifications would be if they didn’t. He accused the plaintiffs of filing a lawsuit claiming the pledge violates laws against the official establishment of religion “masquerading as an equal protection case.”

The Pledge is “an innocuous reference to the deity in a ceremonial setting” and not a religious exercise, he told Bauman. Since courts have ruled the Pledge does not establish a religion, he said, “then you’re left with something going on in school that offends their religious sensibilities.”

Allowing the suit to go forward would be akin to students taking days off for religious holidays but suing because the school stayed open for other students, Rubin said.

Bauman didn’t issue a ruling on the district’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit but said he expected to issue one shortly.

Bauman, a nominee by Gov. Chris Christie for the state Supreme Court whose nomination expired before being taken up by the Legislature, probed both sides with hypotheticals, including whether substituting the phrase “under God” with “created by great white men” would create grounds for discrimination suits by women and minorities.

He asked Niose whether New Jersey’s constitution, which mentions “Almighty God” in its preamble, could be considered discriminatory, and pointed out that the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t mention a specific god.

“This is a state-sponsored and state-conducted exercise that happens every single day,” Niose argued. “It’s done every single day, for every student in all classrooms. It’s not like a biology lesson or a sex education class or a controversial novel a class will have to read. It’s intended to instill patriotism and to define patriotism.”

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The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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N E W Y O R K D E A L I N G W I T H MASSIVE SNOW; STORM LOOMING

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- A ferocious lake-effect storm left the Buffalo area buried under 6 feet of snow Wednesday, trapping people on highways and in homes, and another storm expected to drop 2 to 3 feet more was on its way.

Foreback had become stuck in a long line of cars near the Lackawanna toll booths just south of Buffalo about 10:30 Monday night.

Officials with the Thruway Authority and state police did not provide information on how many people remained stranded Wednesday morning.

Even hardened Buffalo residents were caught off-guard by the early-season storm that was expected to end by Wednesday afternoon. The storm came in so fast and furious it trapped more than 100 vehicles on a 132-mile stretch of the state Thruway in western New York that remained closed Wednesday.

The lake-effect snow created a stark divide: In downtown Buffalo and north of the city, there was a mere dusting of precipitation, while in the south parts, snow was everywhere. The snow band that brought the snow was very much evident throughout the day as gray clouds persistently hovered over the southern part of the city. The band was so apparent, that the wall of snow could be seen from a mile away.

Snow plunged off one family’s roof with such force that it blew in the back door, filling a room with snow.

“It was a huge crash. We all started running back there. We actually thought that it was the roof coming down in the house,” said Chrissy Gritzke Hazard, who was home with her husband, five children and three of her children’s friends Tuesday. “We were definitely not expecting it to be the doors blown out, the frame, everything, inside the house.”

Snow covers a street at daybreak Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014, in south Buffalo, N.Y. Buffalo-area officials are getting help from a neighboring county in their efforts to clear roads and provide emergency services during the snowstorm that has buried sections of western New York in more than 5 feet of snow.

The snowstorm shifted slightly into Buffalo’s northern suburbs Wednesday morning, giving the hardest hits areas a bit of a reprieve, but forecasters said a second round of lake-effect snow could deliver an additional 2 feet or more into Thursday.

“We have tried to get out of our house, and we are lucky to be able to shovel so we can open the door,” said Linda Oakley of Buffalo. “We’re just thinking that in case of an emergency we can at least get out the door. We can’t go any further.”

Cold weather enveloped the entire country Tuesday, leading to record-low temperatures more familiar to January than November.

Racing winds and icy roads caused accidents, school closings and delays in municipal operations from the Midwest to the South even where snowfall was low or mercifully absent.

Members of the Niagara University’s women’s basketball team were among those trapped on the Thruway. Stranded since 1 a.m.

Tuesday, team members tweeted photos of a plow starting to clear the road. State troopers picked them up early Wednesday morning and brought them to a nearby police station where another bus was waiting to take them back to campus, Niagara guard Tiffany Corselli said.

The storm was blamed for five western New York deaths, three of them heart attacks. Erie County officials said a 46-year-old man was discovered early Wednesday in his car, which was in a ditch and buried in snow in the town of Alden, 24 miles east of Buffalo. It was unclear how he died.

Two other deaths were reported in New Hampshire and Michigan.

“It seemed like a nightmare. It just didn’t feel like it was going to end,” Bryce Foreback, 23, of Shicora, Pennsylvania, told The Associated Press by cellphone 20 hours into his wait for help.

“I haven’t slept in like 30 hours and I’m just waiting to get out of here.”

Amtrak passenger train service between Albany and the Buffalo area remained suspended Wednesday. Dozens of schools canceled classes for a second day.

In a region accustomed to highway-choking snowstorms, this one is being called one of the worst in memory.

In New Hampshire and elsewhere, icy roads led to accidents.

Lake-effect storms in Michigan produced gale-force winds and as much as 18 inches of snow, and canceled several flights at the Grand Rapids airport.

Schools closed in the North Carolina mountains amid blustery winds and ice-coated roads. In Indiana, three firefighters were hurt when a semitrailer hit a fire truck on a snowy highway.

In Atlanta, tourists Morten and Annette Larsen from Copenhagen were caught off-guard by the 30-degree weather as they took photos of a monument to the 1996 summer Olympics at Centennial Olympic Park.

“It’s as cold here as it is in Denmark right now. We didn’t expect that,” Larsen said,

K E R R Y I N D I P L O M AT I C O V E R D R I V E U S - C H I N A D E A L O N I R A N N U C L E A R D E A L COULD END FEES ON talks earlier this month and was the site of secret U.S.-Iranian gatherings dating back to 2012. Those earlier discussions laid the groundwork for an interim nuclear agreement reached a year ago, which the so-called P5+1 countries are now trying to cement with Iran in Vienna.

$1T IN TECH SALES

Details of Kerry’s meetings with bin Alawi were not immediately clear and U.S. officials were tight-lipped about any role Oman might play beyond that of an intermediary.

In Paris, Kerry will meet Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. Those meetings are key because French objections last year delayed the adoption of an interim agreement by several weeks, and Saudi Arabia remains deeply concerned about the potential for its arch-rival Iran to win concessions from the West.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, and Oman Foreign Minister Yusuf Bin Alawi bin Abdullah perform a posed handshake for photographers at the start of their meeting at the official residence of the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Winfield House, in London, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014.

LONDON (AP) -- With a deadline for Iranian nuclear deal fast approaching, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has embarked on a frenzy of high-stakes diplomacy in a last-minute push to secure an agreement - or at least prevent the process from collapsing.

As senior negotiators huddled for a second day in Vienna in the latest round of talks, Kerry held separate meetings in London and was to travel to Paris on Thursday for further discussions before deciding whether or when to join the larger effort in the Austrian capital to forge a pact that would prevent the Islamic republic from reaching the capability to produce atomic weapons.

Despite his efforts, though, signs increasingly pointed to the prospect that Monday’s deadline will be pass without a deal and the negotiations will be extended a second time.

In London, Kerry met Wednesday at his hotel with Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi of Oman, which has emerged as a key bridge between Washington and Tehran, a senior U.S. official said. Bin Alawi was in Tehran last weekend and met with Kerry on Tuesday. Their follow-up meeting, Wednesday however, was unannounced and confirmed only after an Associated Press reporter saw the foreign minister in Kerry’s hotel.

Oman is not party to the negotiations among Iran, the U.S., Britain, China, France, Russia, the European Union and Germany. But unique among the Gulf Arab states for the close ties it maintains with Iran, it hosted high-level nuclear

In Washington, meanwhile, Obama administration officials, congressional aides and independent experts who’ve closely monitored the discussions said an extension of the talks was most likely. And, in a twist, many opponents of a deal now see prolonged negotiations as more preferable than an accord.

Even though many U.S. lawmakers opposed an extension when the last one was announced in June, aides in both parties said an agreement now would be viewed as a sign of the administration’s desperation to secure a diplomatic breakthrough at any cost.

Republicans in particular want more time so that they can attempt to pass new sanctions legislation that would pressure Iran into greater concessions. The Senate’s plan is to bring up a package of conditional penalties after January, when Republicans take the majority, according to aides who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.

Some Democrats are on board with that effort, though Obama has threatened to veto any new sanctions threatening the diplomacy.

The midterm elections have others weighing their approaches. The powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, issued a statement after the last extension urging the U.S. government to “make clear that Iran can expect no further extension of the talks.”

In Israel itself, which has been outspoken in opposition of a deal that it fears could leave it vulnerable to Iran, officials said they believe an extension is the way to go.

A senior Israeli official said Israel supports an extension in the talks’ deadline to allow time for a better deal to be negotiated through additional economic sanctions on Iran.

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FARC Commander Pastor Alape talks to the press, accompanied by Pablo Catatumbo, chief of the FARC’s western bloc, second left, in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014.

President Juan Manuel Santos demanded that Colombia’s largest rebel group immediately release an army general it captured, saying the resumption of suspended talks to end the half-century-old conflict depend on it. FARC leaders in Havana for the talks that Santos called off said they will investigate the general’s alleged capture by members of their group.

HAVANA (AP) -- Colombias largest rebel group energetically defended negotiations aimed at ending a half-century insurgency even as those talks hung in the balance following the rebels’ surprise capture of an army general.

President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the talks after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia captured Gen. Ruben Dario Alzate and two others as they traveled on a remote river in western Colombia over the weekend.

On the second anniversary of the start of talks, FARC commander best known by his alias Ivan Marquez said the biggest achievement so far is a growing sense of reconciliation among Colombians.

But progress is being undermined by the guerrillas’ latest actions, which have infuriated Colombian officials. In addition to the capture of Alzate, a U.S.-trained general who oversaw a counterinsurgency task force, FARC members in the past two weeks have captured two soldiers during a firefight in northeastern Colombia and have killed two Indians.

Yielding to rebels’ demand for a bilateral cease-fire would be political suicide for Santos, who has long rejected such an option amid criticism from conservative opponents and military officials who say it would allow the guerrillas to regroup after a decade of heavy battlefield losses.

Statements by rebel leaders in Havana suggest they want a quick solution to the impasse. The two sides have already agreed on wide-reaching agreements on agrarian reform, political participation for the FARC and how to jointly combat illicit drugs in what was long the world’s largest cocaine producer.

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Marquez said Wednesday that it’s up to the FARC’s military commander in Colombia’s jungles, who is known as Timochenko, to decide Alzate’s fate. Still, he said he trusted that the International Red Cross and the peace process’ international guarantors, including Cuba and Norway, could play a role in securing his release if needed.

The FARC considers military personnel to be prisoners of war but released all soldiers and swore off kidnapping of civilians before the start of peace talks in 2012.

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M Y J A I L’ : C O R R U P T I O N G O E S T O T R I A L BGF maintains its stronghold in the jail, according to detective Jonathan Hayden, who testified in Baltimore City Circuit Court on Tuesday at a hearing in a separate case against 38 BGF members and associates and 10 others accused of dealing drugs.

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Inside the Baltimore City Detention Center, gang members used smuggled cellphones, dealt drugs and had sex with corrupt guards - several of whom they impregnated - who helped them as they ran operations of the Black Guerilla Family, according to court papers in a case alleging widespread corruption at the state-run facility.

“They still have quite a bit of control, especially within the `working men,’” Hayden said, referring to inmates assigned janitorial, food service or laundry jobs. “They still have a very good highway of information flowing from the jail onto the street.”

“This is my jail, you understand that,” Tavon “Bulldog” White told a friend in a January 2013 call, according to the documents.

“I make every final call in this jail ... everything come to me.”

“Whatever I say is law,” White, a member of the gang that took root in Baltimore’s jails in the 1990s, proclaimed in a call a month later. “Like I am the law.”

Black Guerilla Family members worked with guards to smuggle drugs and cellphones - crucial for the gang to conduct business on the outside - into the jail and other correctional facilities, according to a 2013 federal indictment charging White, 16 other inmates and 27 correctional officers with conspiracy, drug distribution or money laundering charges. Prosecutors also say the ring involved sex between inmates and guards, which led to four officers becoming pregnant.

In this Nov. 14, 2013 file photo, a corrections officer stands near a gate at Baltimore City Detention Center in Baltimore. Inside the Baltimore City Detention Center, gang members used smuggled cellphones, dealt drugs and had sex with corrupt guards — several of whom they impregnated — who helped them as they ran operations of the Black Guerilla Family, according to court papers in a case alleging widespread corruption at the staterun facility.

Nearly all of those charged, including White, accepted plea deals. Starting Wednesday, two inmates, five correctional officers and another state employee will go on trial.

While the most recent scandal made national headlines, it is not the first time authorities have tried to dismantle Black Guerilla Family’s stronghold in Baltimore’s jails.

The case reveals details about how inmates controlled the guards tasked with supervising them and provides a glimpse into the strategies of the Black Guerilla Family’s operations both on the streets and behind bars. The case also sparked fierce backlash and harsh criticism, leading then-Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services Gary Maynard to resign.

Founded in San Francisco in the 1960s, Black Guerilla Family began taking root in Maryland in the 1990s, according to federal investigators. In 2008, BGF became the dominant gang at the jail, where members established a monopoly over the drug trade through fear, violence, witness retaliation and control of guards.

Since the indictment, the Public Safety Department has increased personnel in its intelligence and investigations unit and is developing a polygraph unit that can test guard candidates, spokesman Mark Vernarelli said. The department invested $4 million in technology that throws a virtual net over the facility to block calls on unauthorized cellphones. And since the indictment, the facility is searched at least once a week, he said.

Several new laws were passed this year to try to strengthen security and ensure oversight. One enables the state to remove officers from an institution without pay for bringing a cellphone

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The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

or charger into a facility, in addition to drugs and alcohol.

Another raises fines for visitors who smuggle electronics to inmates and increases jail time for inmates caught with contraband.

The next year, a seven-month federal investigation produced 24 indictments against BGF members and associates in Baltimore, four of whom were state corrections officers.

One defendant in that case, Eric Brown, complained on a jailhouse phone call that he was unable to smuggle lobster into the maximum-security facility where he was incarcerated. Instead, he and other BGF members settled for “salmon with shrimp” and “crab imperial,” in addition to champagne and Grey Goose vodka, according to court papers.

Even with improvements and upgrades and increased scrutiny,

C O N T E S T O V E R S H A D O W S G O V E R N O R S M E E T I N G until Thursday.

“I told them I’d be willing to do it,” Haslam said in a brief interview.

“It’s an important organization,” he added, explaining his interest in the post. “I am one of those guys who thinks it matters who governs - particularly who governs in our states.”

The conference comes two weeks after the GOP’s midterm rout, in which they gained control of Congress and expanded their majority of governorships across the country. In January the Republican Party will control 31 compared with Democrats’ 19. The party’s strong performance offers a presidential springboard to governors who won re-election, Walker among them, and others, like Christie, who played a leading role in the GOP’s success.

In this Nov. 17, 2014 file photo, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie leaves the Capitol in Washington. Christie’s brash, say-it-like-it-is persona has made him a political celebrity.

But as he relinquishes his position as chairman of the Republican Governors Association this week, Christie shifts from advocate for others to salesman for himself as a potential 2016 presidential candidate.

BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) -- No fewer than a half-dozen potential presidential candidates are gathering in Florida as the Republican Governors Association prepares to select its next leader.

The organization’s annual conference began Wednesday in a luxury oceanside resort where the nation’s Republican governors are celebrating their party’s recent success in the midterm elections while privately jockeying for position as the 2016 presidential contest looms.

None of the most likely White House candidates is expected to seek to replace the outgoing RGA chief, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, as the group’s chairman. It’s a position with responsibilities that would conflict with the presidential primary season.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said he would not run for the RGA chairmanship for just that reason.

“It’s pretty obvious at least it’s something I should consider,” Walker said of a White House bid during an interview with The Associated Press. “And if I’m going to do that, I’m not going to put my colleagues in the position of having someone in place who isn’t 100 percent committed to the leadership of the organization.”

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam acknowledged he has emerged as the favorite to lead the Republican Governors Association through the next year, although the formal vote won’t occur

While Hillary Rodham Clinton remains the overwhelming Democratic front-runner should she seek the presidency, the prospective Republican field is crowded and without a clear leader. A handful of Senate Republicans may join the 2016 contest, but many donors and party officials would prefer a presidential nominee to emerge from the ranks of the Republican governors, who have executive experience and are not tainted by Congress’ low approval ratings.

Christie arrives in Florida in a strong position after having broadened his national network while raising tens of millions of dollars to help elect Republican governors. Christie and Walker will spend this week alongside a list of other prospective presidential candidates that includes Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder.

Governors, governors-elect, senior aides and prominent donors began to descend on the Boca Raton Resort & Club on Tuesday. The bright pink resort is a sprawling maze of fountains, manicured gardens, ballrooms and high-end restaurants, complete with its own beach club, marina and golf clubhouse.

While much of this week’s action takes place behind closed

Maryland State Del. Michael Smigiel, who shortly after the indictments toured the Baltimore City Detention Center and called it a “kennel for humans,” said more work needs to be done to stabilize the deeply troubled facility, particularly raising the standards for hiring corrections officers.

“They took care of a specific situation but not the systemic problem,” Smigiel said Tuesday.

On Wednesday, eight defendants begin an eight-week trial.

Prosecutors allege that Joseph “Monster” Young, a Black Guerilla Family floor boss at the jail, administered punishments to two inmates suspected of stealing cellphones from another gang member. Russell Carrington, or “Rutt,” stands accused of trying to recruit correctional officers to help smuggle contraband.

The other defendants are corrections officers whose alleged crimes include helping BGF members smuggle contraband into the jail and dole out beatings to inmates with impunity. Prosecutors say one corrections officer, Riccole Hall, accepted bribes in exchange for her help smuggling in contraband. Hall was one of three corrections officers on a review board tasked with hearing cases against corrections officers suspected of violating department rules.

Another officer on trial is Clarissa Clayton, who prosecutors say opened a cell door so a BGF member could administer a punishment to another inmate. Her attorney, Kevin McCants, said Clayton is innocent.

“It’s ridiculous,” McCants said on Tuesday. “There’s no way to know what will happen when you open a cell door.” doors, a Wednesday open session titled “Republican Governors: The Road Ahead” features five prospective presidential contenders: Pence, Perry, Jindal, Walker and Kasich.

“Whoever our nominee is, I’m going to be slugging with both fists,” said Foster Friess, who was among the many prominent donors mingling with governors on Wednesday.

In one of the gathering’s only formal agenda items, Christie will hand over the reins of the RGA on Thursday, ending what has arguably been a politically life-saving tenure as the group’s chairman. Beyond boosting his 2016 prospects, he has used the position to help repair his reputation after the political retribution traffic scandal in New Jersey that badly tainted his brand earlier in the year.

But the role has also cost him at home. An AP analysis of his public schedule shows that Christie will have spent about 40 percent of his second term out of state by the time he finishes up in Florida on Friday. At the same time, his popularity has slumped at home, according to a number of local polls, with increasingly vocal critics charging that he’s neglected local issues.

None of the Republican governors considering the presidency is particularly popular at home, however, according to interviews with voters after this month’s midterm elections. Just a quarter of Louisiana voters said Jindal would make a good president, while one-third of Texas voters said the same of Perry. For Walker, who just won his third gubernatorial election in four years, just over 4 in 10 of Wisconsin voters said he is presidential material.

10 The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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D I V I D E D J E R U S A L E M : AT TA C K S P U T H O L Y C I T Y O N E D G E JERUSALEM (AP) -- Streets are subdued, marketplaces are quiet and people are on edge in Jewish areas of Jerusalem, where Arabs have been using meat cleavers, guns, screwdrivers and even their cars in deadly, small-scale attacks.

Mount, the site of the biblical Hebrew temples, is the most sacred spot in Judaism. It is the third-holiest place in Islam, revered by Muslims as the location where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven, and is home today to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.

The holy city - which Israel says must forever stay united - has rarely seemed more divided.

Under a longstanding agreement, Muslims administer the compound under Jordanian custody. While Jews are permitted to visit, they are not allowed to pray. In recent months, a growing number of Jewish worshippers have visited, many of whom seek greater access and the right to pray.

In their 47th year of occupation, Palestinians are seething with anger over neglect and discrimination, continued Jewish settlement in their areas, and a belief, despite official denials, that Israel is scheming to take over their most revered site.

This anger, coupled with Jewish fears of further violence, has left the city’s 800,000 residents apprehensive, seemingly united in the belief that things will get worse before they get better.

“I’m really not safe, and before leaving the house I think twice,” said Sara Levi, a 22-year-old stay at home mother. “We are not calm, and we hope there is going to be an end to this, and that it is not just a beginning.”

Levi spoke as she waited at a stop for Jerusalem’s light rail train - a frequent target of Palestinian violence. The trains, meant to serve as a symbol of a united city, are frequently pelted with stones when passing through Palestinian areas. There have been two deadly attacks in recent weeks by ramming cars into crowded stations.

In a separate attack, a Palestinian gunman on a motorcycle shot and seriously wounded a prominent Jewish activist who has pushed for greater Jewish access to the city’s most sensitive holy site - the hilltop compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.

The violence reached a new turning point Tuesday when two Palestinian attackers burst into a crowded synagogue during morning prayers, killing four worshippers and a policeman with the meat cleavers and gunfire. It was the deadliest attack in the city since 2008, and gruesome pictures of blood-covered holy books and prayer shawls shocked a country long accustomed to political violence.

Those deaths brought to 11 the number of people killed by Palestinian attacks - most of them in Jerusalem - but also in Tel Aviv and the West Bank in recent weeks. At least five Palestinians involved in the attacks were killed.

Sheikh Samir Assi, the imam of the Al-Jazaar mosque in the northern Israeli city of Acre, addresses Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics outside the synagogue, where on Tuesday two Palestinians killed five Israelis, in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014. The clergy met to plead for tolerance amid spiking regional tensions

you blame them?”

In parliament, a group of mothers implored lawmakers to hire more security guards for day care centers. The city says it has increased protection, but many kindergartens remain without guards.

Scher, a mother of two young children, said her routine includes new precautions - such as standing away from crowds at bus stops. “I’m definitely being warier, looking around more when dropping off or picking up the kids,” she said.

Although Israel proudly says the city can never be divided again, it is riven by separations of its three major population groups: secular and traditional Jews, ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs.

Identifying the cause of the unrest is an imprecise science.

The Palestinians are in an especially precarious situation.

Relations with the Palestinians took a downturn with the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks in April. Then Palestinian militants in the West Bank kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenage boys in early June. Weeks later, Jewish extremists kidnapped and killed a Palestinian teenager in a revenge attack in Jerusalem.

Most have never accepted Israeli citizenship and instead hold residency rights. While they have access to Israeli services and freedom of movement that their brethren in the neighboring West Bank don’t have, they have suffered from years of neglect, discrimination and poverty. The result is a disenfranchised group that feels separate from Jewish Israelis and abandoned by the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. Most of the recent attacks have been carried out by Palestinian men from east Jerusalem.

“Business is weak today. It was worse yesterday,” vegetable salesman Itzik Shimon said as he stood at his empty stall. “People are afraid. Can

But perhaps more than anything, Palestinians point to turmoil at the Jerusalem holy site as the cause of their consternation. The Temple

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- A gunman opened fire early Thursday at a Florida State University library, sending hundreds of students who had been up all night studying for exams scrambling for cover in the book aisles and barricading themselves in with desks. Three students were wounded before police killed the gunman in a shootout, authorities said.

Police and FSU officials called the shooting an “isolated incident,” but have not released many details, including how far the suspected gunman made it into Strozier Library. FSU’s compact campus is located less than a mile from downtown Tallahassee and the state Capitol.

“This person just for whatever reason produced a handgun and then began shooting students in the library,” FSU Police Chief David Perry said.

The attack started soon after midnight when students inside the multistory library heard about half a dozen gunshots. Students began screaming that someone was shooting at them and flipped over chairs in their race to take cover.

“I ran for my life,” said Allison Kope, a freshman from Cocoa Beach, who was on the library’s first floor. “I ran right out the backdoor. My laptop and everything is still in there. It was shock. It was just instinct.

You don’t think about anything else, you just go.”

Other students hid in the book aisles and some barricaded themselves in rooms.

Sarah Evans, a senior from Miami, said she was inside the library and heard a male student say he had been shot. When she looked at him, he was on the ground with blood spreading on his pants leg.

Two of the victims were taken to a local hospital. FSU officials said a third student was only grazed by a bullet and was treated at the scene and released.

Tallahassee and Florida State University police confronted the gunman just outside the library that sits in the middle of the campus and ordered

“We are angry because we feel lost,” said Mahmoud Ammouri, a teacher in the Arab neighborhood of Shuafat. “What has happened in the Al-Aqsa Mosque is just the explosion of years of suffering.”

Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed the area to its capital. While the move has never been internationally recognized, Israel celebrates the unification of the city each year. East Jerusalem is home to the Old City, where places sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims are located.

In Jewish parts of Jerusalem, traffic was lighter than usual Wednesday.

Fewer people were riding the train, and the crowds that normally pack the city’s Mahane Yehuda open-air marketplace were thin.

Tallahassee police investigate the scene of a shooting outside the Strozier library on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, Fla. Thursday Nov 20, 2014. Officers shot and killed the suspected gunman police said. It has been confirmed by authorities that the body in this image is that of the dead gunman.

There were no other fatalities in the shooting.

This perceived assault on Al-Aqsa has fueled an even deeper sense among Palestinians that they are embattled and alone.

“There was a feeling that with yesterday’s attack ... terrorists are trying to send a message that they can get anywhere in Jerusalem,” said Dena Scher, a member of the group. “Everyone is concerned.”

The violence widened during the summer when Israel fought a 50-day war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Jewish nationalists have moved into a tense Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem, the section of the city claimed by the Palestinians as their capital, and Israel has pushed forward plans to build hundreds of homes for Jews in the eastern part of the city.

G U N M A N S H O O T

These visits, which are closely covered in the Palestinian media, have sparked clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli police. In turn, Israel, as a security measure, has frequently restricted Muslim access to pray, fueling accusations that it is secretly plotting to take over the site, despite repeated pledges from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel has no intention of changing the arrangements.

him to drop his handgun, but he fired a shot at them and they unleashed a volley of shots, Tallahassee Police spokesman Dave Northway said.

Hours after the shooting, detectives could be seen inspecting the body of the suspected gunman, who was lying face down at the top of an access ramp just outside the library. A gray baseball cap lay near his head.

The shooting prompted a campus alert that urged students to take shelter and stay away from doors and windows. After the shooting, FSU officials announced classes would be canceled for Thursday.

Daniel Morales, a 19-year-old freshman from Fort Pierce who was in the library during the attack, said that when he first heard someone say “somebody’s got a gun. I thought he was joking.” But after realizing there was a gunman in the library, Morales and others raced to a back room on the second floor where they barricaded a door with desks.

Freshman Nikolai Hernandez said he was in his dorm room across from the library when he heard five or six rapid gunshots.

“It was a consecutive bop, bop, bop, bop, bop,” Hernandez said. “It makes me definitely a little bit nervous. I was supposed to be in the library. I had a paper to do and I got a little bit lazy and decided not to do it.”

Florida State President John Thrasher, who took office earlier this month, said by phone that he was in New York City at the time of the shooting. He said he was scheduled to return to Tallahassee later Thursday.

The threat of vigilante retribution and fears of police harassment also loom for Palestinians. Following Tuesday’s attack, a large crowd of Jewish youths marched through downtown Jerusalem calling for revenge and chanting, “Death to Arabs.”

“Palestinians in the city feel that the Palestinian Authority, the Arabs and the Muslims are neglecting them, while Israel is targeting them.

They don’t know to whom they belong,” said Zakaria Qak, a teacher of national security in Al-Quds University.

Mayor Nir Barkat has said he is quietly working with Arab leaders to ease tensions, but his response to the violence has focused heavily on security.

Police say they have sent an additional 1,000 officers to the streets in recent weeks, placed barricades around the train stops, and stepped up their presence in Arab neighborhoods.

Netanyahu has ordered security forces to resume a policy of home demolitions, a punitive tactic that has caused much controversy. Early Wednesday, Israel demolished the home of a Palestinian who attacked one of the light rail stations last month.

Barkat on Wednesday showed Netanyahu the city’s new command center of its “observation unit,” which operates surveillance balloons to monitor public disturbances.

Sheikh Mohammed Hussein, the top Muslim cleric in Jerusalem, said years of Israeli practices make life very hard in east Jerusalem. “The people in our city don’t see a political horizon, and they need to feel that there is a horizon and that they are part of it,” he said.

Sima Kadmon, a commentator in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, said it was time for Israeli leaders to take responsibility for the troubles in Jerusalem and even consider relinquishing control of some Arab neighborhoods.

“So we can demolish houses, we can put up roadblocks, we can increase the number of guards. But none of this will bring quiet to a city that has, unwillingly, become a city that doesn’t rest, and from day to day, becomes a city with no hope,” she said.

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The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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G I F T G U I D E : D R A G O N S , A L I E N S , H E R O E S F O R T H E G A M E R fresh arenas this year. “Titanfall” adds giant robots to the mayhem, while “Destiny” delivers a wider variety of intense cooperative battles.

Sony’s PlayStation 4 video-game console has built an impressive lead over its competitors. That’s good news for holiday shoppers because it has driven Microsoft and Nintendo to offer more budget-friendly holiday deals on their consoles.

- “Wolfenstein: The New Order” (Bethesda Softworks, for the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, $59.99): Some trigger-happy gamers prefer a good story to the chaos of online play. For them, I recommend this chilling alternate history, in which a plucky resistance fighter tries to take down the Nazi regime that has overrun all of Europe.

Microsoft Corp.’s $350 Xbox One packages have jettisoned the Kinect motion-sensing device, which some gamers didn’t find appealing because it gave them more exercise than they would have liked. Instead, you get a copy of either “Assassin’s Creed Unity” or “Sunset Overdrive.”

Meanwhile, Nintendo has a $300 Wii U package with “Super Mario 3D World.”

- “Alien: Isolation” (Sega, for the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, $59.95): The toothsome alien stalking this space station can’t be killed, so anyone who goes in with guns blazing is likely to get eaten. It’s almost as nerve-racking as the original “Alien” movie from 1979.

Sony Corp.’s console still costs $400, but you can get “Grand Theft Auto V,” updated with better graphics, free with one PS4 Black Friday bundle.

Of course, your gaming loved one probably already has the latest console.

In that case, here are some new games to feed the machine. Be sure to find out which console your loved one owns, or there’s bound to be disappointment.

FOR ADULTS - “Dragon Age: Inquisition” (Electronic Arts Inc., for the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, $59.99): Anyone who’s into “Game of Thrones” or “The Lord of the Rings” will adore this sword-and-sorcery epic from the role-playing masters at BioWare. It offers more than 100 hours of adventure as you build an army of humans, elves, dwarves and more to prevent

Snow melt from a roof forms into icicles in Bozeman, Mont., Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2014.

demons from destroying a sprawling, gorgeous fantasy world.

- “Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor” (Warner Bros., for the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, $59.99): In this action-focused take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s world, a sword-wielding ranger takes on a series of orc warlords, one by one. No two duels are the same, and victory requires a satisfying blend of strategy and reflexes.

- “Titanfall” (Electronic Arts, for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, $59.99) or “Destiny” (Activision, for the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, $59.99): Gamers who love to go online and shoot other gamers got two

E A R LY S T A T I N U S E L O N G - T E R M H E A R T

M AY G I V E B E N E F I T S

statin group at the 20-year mark, a benefit not seen earlier on.

“The big surprise” was a 31 percent lower risk of heart failure in the group initially assigned to take the statin, Packard said.

Heart failure occurs when a heart damaged from a heart attack or other cause gradually weakens over time and can’t pump blood effectively.

Doctors have long suspected that the way statins work gives benefits beyond lowering cholesterol, and the heart failure result supports that theory, Packard said.

This June 14, 2011, file photo, shows the drug Lipitor at Medco Health Solutions Inc., in Willingboro, N.J. A new study shows very long-term benefits from even short-term use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, such as Lipitor.

CHICAGO (AP) -- Taking a cholesterol-lowering drug for five years in middle age can lower heart and death risks for decades afterward, and the benefits seem to grow over time, a landmark study finds. Doctors say it’s the first evidence that early use of a statin can have a legacy effect, perhaps changing someone’s odds of disease for good.

“This is another stone in the foundation supporting the value of preventive cardiology,” said Dr. Sidney C. Smith Jr., a former Heart Association president from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Other factors might have played some role in how these men fared, but “nevertheless, a moderate-dose statin taken for primary prevention shows long-term benefit.”

Once the study ended, the men went back to their regular doctors, and about one-third of both groups kept or started taking a statin. This means any differences seen years later probably is due to whether they took statins during the five-year study, Packard explained.

Scotland has national health care and good electronic medical records, so researchers were able to document what happened to more than 90 percent of the men.

Twenty year after the study began, the risk of heart-related deaths was 27 percent lower among the men who took Pravachol for those first five years rather than dummy pills.

The chance of dying from any cause was 13 percent lower in the

- “Skylanders Trap Team” (Activision, for the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii U, $74.99): Activision started the whole toys-to-life trend with this blockbuster franchise, and this year’s model is as clever as ever.

The new Trap Team Skylanders can capture villains in shells made of “traptanium” (known to the rest of us as plastic). Switching traps allows you to play as different bad guys. There are now hundreds of Skylander characters available, costing $5 to $16 apiece. Surely the collector in your family is missing a few.

- “Fantasia: Music Evolved” (Disney, for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, $59.99): Players become conductors in Disney’s reimagining of the classic film, rearranging tunes from a playlist that goes from Mozart to Elton John to Nicki Minaj. Like most rhythm games, it’s good fun for family gatherings. (Be advised: It does require Kinect.)

- “Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth” (2K Games, for the PC, $49.99): The stargazer on your list will dig the latest “Civ” simulator, which adds all kinds of crazy technology, from nanorobotics to neural uploading, to the classic formula. Why settle for conquering Earth when there are whole new planets out there?

Since spring, there have been more than 14,000 Ebola cases and more than 5,100 deaths in the epidemic, according to World Health Organization figures.

The results are from the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Trial, the first study ever to show that statins could prevent heart problems in people who had not yet developed clogged arteries but had high LDL, the bad type of cholesterol.

The study, which started in 1989, involved about 6,600 Scottish men, ages 45 to 64, with high LDL - around 190, on average. Half were given the statin Pravachol and the rest, dummy pills. Five years later, there were 35 percent fewer heart-related deaths and also fewer heart attacks in the statin group.

- “Disney Infinity 2.0: Marvel Super Heroes” (Disney, for the PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii U, $74.99): The Walt Disney Co., meanwhile, has expanded its line of playable figurines by calling on the Avengers to assemble. The starter kit includes Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow, all starring in a goofy, kid-friendly adventure in Marvel’s Manhattan. Additional heroes like Spider-Man and Groot cost $15 apiece.

When he released the Ebola projections two months ago, Frieden said he was confident the most pessimistic numbers would not occur.

Since then, “there has been very effective intervention with USAID, ourselves, the global community, and most importantly the countries and the communities most affected,” he said Wednesday.

Not only did original benefits of statins continue into late life, but researchers were surprised to see new ones become evident over time, he said.

The long-term results were discussed at an American Heart Association conference that ends Wednesday in Chicago.

- amiibo (Nintendo, Wii U, $12.99): The “toys-to-life” category - figurines that interact with video games - has been the hottest thing in toy stores for the past few years. Nintendo Co. is finally joining the fray.

Want to team up with Mario in “Super Smash Bros. for Wii U” ($59.99)?

Place his character on the Wii U’s GamePad, and you can teach him new fighting styles. The amiibo models include favorites such as Donkey Kong, Pikachu and Kirby. They are also compatible with “Mario Kart 8,” “Hyrule Warriors” and more games to come.

C D C C H I E F D R O P S W O R S T C A S E E B O L A E S T I M A T E

“It might be a lifetime effect,” said one study leader, Dr. Chris Packard of the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

The watershed trial led to these drugs - sold as Lipitor, Crestor, Zocor and now in generic form - becoming a mainstay of treatment and one of the most prescribed medicines around the world.

FOR EVERYONE

Frieden said the CDC thinks that now between 1,000 and 2,000 new cases are occurring in West Africa each week. That seems to be in the neighborhood of the CDC’s best-case estimates for the epidemic by mid-January. photo shows a sign reading ‘Kill Ebola Before Ebola Kill You’, on a gate as part of the country’s Ebola awareness campaign in the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone. The government’s worst-case scenario forecast for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa won’t happen, a U.S. health official said Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014.

Also on Wednesday, a Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. military is scaling back the size and number of Ebola treatment facilities it is building in Liberia from 17 to 10 centers.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The government’s worst-case scenario forecast for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa won’t happen, a U.S. health official said Wednesday.

In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated the number of people sickened by the Ebola virus could explode to as many as 1.4 million by mid-January without more help.

Things have changed. On Wednesday, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said, “We don’t think the projections from over the summer will come to pass.”

Frieden did not provide new estimates. He was speaking in Washington at a U.S. Senate hearing on preparedness and response to public health threats.

The earlier projection was a worst-case scenario for reported and unreported illnesses in Liberia and Sierra Leone, based on conditions in late August - before an international surge in medical aid and supplies. That seems to have helped slow the epidemic in Liberia, one of the three hardest-hit countries. However, the epidemic has been fierce lately in Sierra Leone; it remains unpredictable in Guinea,

Children Incorporated 4205 Dover Road Richmond, VA 23221-3267

www.childrenincorporated.

12 The Weekly News Digest, Nov 17 thru Nov 24, 2014

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C O R N E L L P R O F E S S O R U N L O C K S M Y S T E R I E S O F P A I N T I N G S ITHACA, N.Y. (AP) -- Richard Johnson can see right through the masterpieces of Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

ing work of precisely dating and ordering all of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings.

The Cornell University electrical and computer engineering professor is a digital art detective, able to unlock the mysteries of a work’s age and authenticity by analyzing its underlying canvas or paper.

The technique has also provided evidence to date Diego Velazquez’s “Sebastian de Morra.” A separate analysis of 24 Johannes Vermeer canvases supported the sometimes doubted attribution of one painting and provided fresh evidence to link two paintings at the National Gallery in London as complementary works.

Using high-resolution X-ray images, the 64-year-old academic can actually determine if paintings came from the same bolt of handloomed canvas, each of which has a varying thread density pattern that can be as unique as a fingerprint. Linking multiple pieces of canvas to the same bolt can shore up arguments for authenticity and even put works in chronological order.

“It’s one more technical tool in the box of studying pictures,” said Walter Liedtke, curator of European paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, who worked with Johnson on the Vermeers.

It’s a valuable service to world-class museums that comes through the unlikely cross-pollinating of traditional art history and contemporary computer science.

“You take this added evidence and you join it with - in the case of the two Vermeers in London - pigment analysis, the iconography of the pictures, whether they were together in their history at earlier dates. “

“By mixing the two groups we’ve been able to do more than either group had been able to do separately studying the paintings,” Johnson said in a room full of Dutch paintings at Cornell’s Johnson Museum. “We’re not trying to replace the art historian, we’re trying to extend their reach.”

Researchers have been conducting science-based analyses of artworks for some time. But it has become more common to use computers to analyze large amounts of digital data. It’s sometimes called computational art history and also includes assessing brushstrokes for distinctive patterns.

Johnson is a tech whiz and an art lover - the rare person able to speak with authority about Rembrandt’s brush strokes and adaptive feedback systems theory.

Although he didn’t make his first visit to an art museum until he was a student on fellowship in Germany, the rooms full of Rembrandts left him thunderstruck.

Johnson melded the two worlds in 2007 with a stint as an adjunct research fellow at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He began examining high-resolution X-ray images of the canvases used by the 19th century master.

Eventually, Johnson and Rice University professor Don Johnson

C R E W S T R Y T O I D S U B S TA N C E I N CALIFORNIA FIRE

A Rembrandt etching titled, Self Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill, ca. 1639, etched by famed Dutch artist, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669), at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, Thursday, October 2, 2014. Prof.

Richard Johnson, a Cornell University computer engineering professor, has developed a way to date and authenticate the centuries-old works by analyzing X-ray images of the art. Top museums in New York City and Europe have relied on his algorithm, which analyzes thread densities and average thread counts in canvas and paper.

(no relation) developed digital “weave density maps” of canvases that added computational power to what had been a painstaking process that required scholars to study small samples with magnifying glasses.

“It turns out with the eye, you make mistakes,” said Louis van Tilborgh, senior researcher at the Van Gogh museum.

Van Tilborgh sees the weave maps as an important tool in the ongo-

Johnson in recent years has left the canvas to other researchers as he focuses on paper. He’s been analyzing the old-fashioned paper used by Rembrandt for his prints, which was made by laying pulp on screens. Scholars know the dates when Rembrandt etched the copper plates to make the prints, but they are often less sure when an individual print was made. Was it one of the initial prints or did it come years later after the artist’s death?

Johnson is using high-resolution digital images of Rembrandt prints owned by Cornell’s museum to try to discern patterns that the screens impressed on the back of the prints. Separate prints cut from the same larger sheet of paper could be matched to provide the same sort of contextual information revealed by studying canvas.

The details are different, but the idea of searching for useful patterns is the same, as is the idea of bridging the gap between art and tech.

“My philosophy all along has been to convince both sides that this is worth doing and they should be talking to each other,” Johnson said.

M I S S I O N M O O N : M I L L I O N S M A Y H E L P L U N A R L A N D I N G a chance to buy space on memory discs that will be buried in a hole drilled into the lunar surface.

The public will be invited to leave music, photos and videos on the disc - helping creating a chronicle of the people of Earth. Those offering more funding will leave more data, including DNA in form of a strand of hair.

“Governments are finding it increasingly difficult to fund space explor photoation that is solely for the advancement of human knowledge and understanding as opposed to commercial return,” said British engineer and city financier David Iron, who came up with the plan. “The world class team of advisers and supporters we have assembled will address this issue and crucially anyone from around the world can get involved for as little as a few pounds.”

In this aerial still frame from video provided by Fox 11 LA, a waste treatment facity burns after an unstable chemical mixture exploded in Santa Paula, Calif., early Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014, sending about 30 people to the hospital for decontamination and prompting an order to evacuate for a mile around the plant, authorities said. No burn injuries were reported, but two drivers on a vacuum truck, three firefighters, hospital medical staff and a few nearby residents were washed down or treated for complaints such as breathing problems, red eyes and skin rashes, said Lori Ross, a spokeswoman for the Ventura County Fire Department. The vacuum truck was delivering a load around 3:45 a.m. when it exploded at the Santa Clara Waste Water Co., authorities said.

SANTA PAULA, Calif. (AP) -- Hazardous materials crews were trying Wednesday to determine how to deal with an unstable substance remaining after an explosion and fire at a California waste treatment facility.

Only a handful of smoldering hot spots remained at the site in an agricultural area near Santa Paula, northwest of Los Angeles, according to Ventura County fire Capt. Mike Lindbery.

A vacuum truck exploded early Tuesday at Santa Clara Waste Water Co., spreading about 1,200 gallons of a chemical mixture that contained sulfuric acid and an organic peroxide, fire officials said.

The resulting substance is highly toxic and combustible, Lindbery said.

“We need to determine exactly what this material is,” he said.

“How do we neutralize it, and how do we clean it up?”

A private contractor will be in charge of the cleanup, under the supervision of county health officials and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

No burn injuries were reported, but two drivers on the vacuum truck, three firefighters, hospital medical staff and a few nearby residents were washed down or treated for complaints such as breathing problems, red eyes and skin rashes, said Lori Ross, a spokeswoman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

Officials said 37 people were treated at hospitals, including one from the initial blast who had non-life-threatening trauma injuries.

After the initial blasts, firefighters backed off and let the fires burn themselves out rather than try to put water on the chemical and potentially flush it into the nearby Santa Clara River.

Concerned that toxic smoke might be drifting from the fires, authorities ordered the evacuation of the area within a mile of the plant, but it is mostly composed of farmland, light industrial businesses and only a few homes, Ross said.

A July 20, 1969 photo from files made showing astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. posing for a photograph beside the U.S. flag deployed on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. A project to fund a private lunar exploration mission got underway Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014, offering the public the chance to take part. For as little as 10 pounds ($15), Lunar Mission One gives the public a chance to buy space on memory discs that will be buried in a hole drilled into the lunar surface. The public will be invited to leave music, photos and videos on the disc _ helping creating a chronicle of the people of Earth. Those offering more funding will leave more data, including DNA in form of hair.

LONDON (AP) -- It’s the moon mission for the masses.

A project to fund a private lunar exploration mission got underway Wednesday, offering the public the chance to take part.

For as little as 10 pounds ($15), Lunar Mission One gives the public

The mission plans to land a spacecraft on the moon in 10 years. It will drill a hole at least 20 meters (21 yards) but possibly as deep as 100 meters (109 yards) to access lunar rock that is billions of years old.

It will use crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to finance its development phase.

“We have carried out research and been quite surprised how keen people are,” Iron said. “School kids think the idea of having a bit of themselves on the moon is fantastic.”

Lunar Mission One hopes to tap into the excitement surrounding the European Space Agency’s recent historic first - landing a washing machine-sized spacecraft on a comet speeding through our solar system at 41,000 mph (66,000 kph).

C H I N A B L O C K S W E B S I T E S A S I N T E R N E T M E E T I N G B E G I N S BEIJING (AP) -- Chinese censors have newly blocked access to several popular websites as they target content delivery networks that serve much of the Internet, according to a U.S. Internet service company.

The action comes as China hosts the World Internet Conference, which brings together many of the world’s top technology companies.

EdgeCast, an affiliate of Verizon, says censors have taken down several networks that provide local servers to help speed website performance.

EdgeCast provides such a network, and its clients include software company Mozilla, publishing company The Atlantic and content management system Drupal.

The online activist group Greatfire.org said Wednesday that it was the target of the Chinese action, which blocked many other sites that use EdgeCast. The group enables Chinese Internet users to access websites otherwise blocked by Chinese censors. EdgeCast did not confirm Greatfire.org’s statement.

A Greatfire.org co-founder, who goes by the pseudonym Charlie Smith,

said they had chosen to use several content delivery networks knowing that any move to take down their site would affect others.

“We knew that ahead of time,” he said. “It was our feeling that the authorities would not take that kind of action.”

China employs thousands of censors who block hundreds of websites and erase social media messages dealing with sensitive political topics.

At the same time, it claims some of the world’s most popular online sites, including e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma told the Internet conference Wednesday that China’s online strength is bound to transform the Web. Outside the conference hall, several protesters were detained after holding up a banner demanding that China allow access to sites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.

“I believe China’s Internet is not only profoundly influencing aspects of China’s economic development but is also participating in the development of the Internet across the world,” Ma told the conference.