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US TO BEGIN SAFETY TESTING EBOLA VA C C I N E N E X T W E E K

A healthcare worker walking near a Ebola isolation unit wearing protective gear against the virus at Kenema Government Hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone. Federal researchers next week will start testing humans with an experimental vaccine to prevent the deadly Ebola virus. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced Thursday that it is launching the safety trial on a vaccine developed by the agency’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and GlaxoSmithKline. They will test 20 healthy adult volunteers to see if the virus is safe and triggers an adequate response in their immune systems.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal researchers next week will start testing humans with an experimental vaccine to prevent the deadly Ebola virus.

The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday that it is launching the safety trial on a vaccine developed by the agency’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and GlaxoSmithKline. It will test 20 healthy adult volunteers to see if the virus is safe and triggers an adequate response in their immune systems.

That testing will be at NIH’s campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

Later in September, NIH and a British team will test that vaccine on volunteers in the United Kingdom, Gambia and Mali.

American health officials are also talking about a future trial in Nigeria.

So far Ebola has killed 1,552 people in West Africa.

UN SECURITY COUNCIL MEETS ON UKRAINE CRISIS

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WHITE HOUSE PREPS LEGAL CASE FOR IMMIGRATION STEPS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- With impeachment threats and potential lawsuits looming, President Barack Obama knows whatever executive actions he takes on immigration will face intense opposition. So as a self-imposed, end-of-summer deadline to act approaches, Obama’s lawyers are carefully crafting a legal rationale they believe will withstand scrutiny and survive any court challenges, administration officials say.

major expansion of a 2012 Obama program that deferred prosecutions for those brought here illegally as children.

Roughly half a million have benefited from that program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

President Barack Obama speaking in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Aug. 1, 2014. The president spoke on various topics including the economy, immigration, Ukraine and the Middle East. The White House is crafting a blame-it-on-Congress legal justification to back up President Barack Obama’s impending executive actions on immigration. Facing an expect onslaught of opposition, the administration plans to argue that by failing to provide enough resources to fully enforce U.S. laws, lawmakers have ceded wide latitude to White House to prioritize deportations, administration officials and legal experts said.

But Republicans, too, are exploring their legal options for stopping Obama from what they’ve deemed an egregious presidential overstep.

The argument goes something like this: Beyond failing to fix broken immigration laws, Congress hasn’t even provided the government with enough resources to fully enforce the laws already on the books. With roughly 11.5 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally - far more than the government could reasonably deport - the White House believes it has wide latitude to prioritize which of those individuals should be sent home.

But Republicans, too, are exploring their legal options for stopping Obama from what they’ve deemed egregious presidential overreaching.

While Obama has yet to receive the formal recommendations he’s requested from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, administration officials said the president is intimately familiar with the universe of options and won’t spend much time deliberating once Johnson delivers his report.

Obama’s goal had been to announce his decision around Labor Day, before leaving on a trip next week to Estonia and Wales.

But a host of national security crises have pushed the announcement back, likely until after Obama returns, said the officials, who weren’t authorized to comment by name and demanded anonymity.

After resisting calls to act alone in hopes Congress would pass a comprehensive immigration fix, Obama in June bowed to immigration activists and said that “if Congress will not do their job, at least we can do ours.” The most sweeping, controversial step under consideration involves halting deportation for millions, a

clean criminal records.

But while prosecutors are routinely expected to use their discretion on a case-by-case basis, such blanket exempting of entire categories of people has never been done on the scale of what Obama is considering - potentially involving many millions of people if he extends relief to parents of DACA children, close relatives of U.S. citizens or immigrants with

“The question is how broadly can the president extend the categories and still stay on the side of spectrum of ensuring the laws are faithfully executed?” said Cristina Rodriguez, who left the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2013 to teach at Yale Law School.

Other options under consideration, such as changes to how green cards are distributed and counted, might be less controversial because of the support they enjoy from the business community and other influential groups. But Derrick Morgan, a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Obama will still face staunch opposition as long as he attempts an end run around Congress.

“Any potential executive action the president takes will be rooted in a solid legal foundation,” White House spokesman Shawn Turner said, but Obama’s actions will almost surely be challenged in court.

What’s more, Obama may have undermined his case because he has insisted time and again that he’s the president, not the king, and “can’t just make the laws up by myself.” In a 2012 interview with Telemundo, the Spanish-language TV network, Obama decontinued on page 2

BLACKWATER DEFENSE: IRAQI POLICE REMOVED EVIDENCE fired on, said Brian Heberlig, who is representing former Blackwater guard Paul Slough.

Declaring that there was no incoming gunfire, Asuncion said the four defendants “took something that didn’t belong to them” - the lives of human beings and the health of others who are still suffering from their wounds from the Sept. 16, 2007 shootings.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday accused Moscow of having “outright lied” about its role in Ukraine, as alarmed members of the Security Council demanded that Russia remove its fighters from a new front in the unfolding crisis in Ukraine.

Council members at the emergency meeting heard from a top U.N. official that the spread of violence in southeastern Ukraine marked a dangerous escalation, but that the international body had no way of independently verifying the latest reports of Russia sending in troops and tanks.

The latest meeting came hours after a top Ukrainian official Thursday said two columns of Russian tanks and military vehicles fired missiles from Russia at a Ukraine border post, then rolled into the country. That opened a new front in the war in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russia separatists and the new Ukrainian government.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said Russia “has manipulated.

It has obfuscated. It has outright lied,” reminding the council that the meeting was “the 24th session to try to rein in Russia’s aggressive acts in the Ukraine.”

“Every single one has sent a straightforward, unified message: `Russia, stop this conflict. Russia is not listening,’” she said, adding that Russia’s force along the border is the largest it’s been since it started deploying there in late May.

The jurors’ job “is a search for truth” in the wake of violently shattered lives, Asuncion said.

The U.S. government brought charges against the defendants in 14 of the deaths and 18 of the non-fatal shootings.

Iraqi traffic policeman inspecting a car destroyed by a Blackwater security detail in alNisoor Square in Baghdad, Iraq. A prosecutor told a federal jury on Wednesday that four Blackwater guards unleashed a hail of gunfire on more than 30 innocent Iraqi civilians seven years ago, leaving “bloody, bullet-riddled corpses” at Nisoor Square in downtown Baghdad.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A defense attorney told a federal jury on Wednesday that Iraqi national police removed evidence that would prove Blackwater security guards were being fired on by insurgents, prompting the guards to return fire in shootings that killed or wounded over 30 Iraqi civilians.

The assertion came in closing arguments at the guards’ trial that began in June. Prosecutor Anthony Asuncion told the federal jury that the Blackwater guards unleashed a hail of gunfire that left “bloody, bullet-riddled corpses” at Nisoor Square in downtown Baghdad seven years ago.

Churkin did deny not the presence of Russian fighters.

Lawyers for the defendants said the guards acted in self-defense in firing their weapons, that there is ample evidence they were fired upon by insurgents, but that additional evidence supporting their case had disappeared.

“There are Russian volunteers in eastern parts of Ukraine. No one continued on page 4

“We will never know the extent to which Iraqi national police scrubbed the scene” of evidence that Blackwater guards were

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin offered a spirited defense, saying Kiev “is waging war against its own people.”

One defendant, Nicholas Slatten, faces a first-degree murder charge. Defendants Slough, Dustin Heard and Evan Liberty are charged with voluntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and gun charges.

Slatten could be sentenced to life imprisonment if convicted.

The others face mandatory minimum sentences of 30 years in prison if convicted of the gun charge and one other count.

In his closing argument, Asuncion disputed the self-defense assertions.

One of the witnesses in the trial, Blackwater team leader Jimmy Watson, testified that on that day in Nisoor Square, he heard the incoming “pop” of what sounded like AK-47 rounds shortly before Slatten fired his weapon twice at the start of the violence.

Watson’s testimony supports the idea that there was incoming gunfire because AK-47s were the type of weapons used by insurgents. continued on page 6

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This undated image posted on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014 by the Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group, a Syrian opposition group, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, shows a fighter of the Islamic State group waving their flag from inside a captured government fighter jet following the battle for the Tabqa air base, in Raqqa, Syria on Sunday. A U.N. commission on Wednesday accused the extremist Islamic State organization of committing crimes against humanity with attacks on civilians, as pictures emerged of the extremists’ bloody takeover of a Syrian military air base that added to the international organization’s claims. (AP Photo/ Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State

BEIRUT (AP) -- As the U.S. strikes Islamic State targets in Iraq, extremists belonging to the same militant group across the border in Syria are capturing new territory and becoming bolder by the day.

There, in its power base, the Islamic State group controls thousands of square kilometers (miles) of territory, including most of Syria’s oil-producing region. In the areas under its control, it has established an elaborate governing system that oversees every aspect of people’s lives.

The U.S. has begun surveillance flights over Syria as a possible precursor for airstrikes against Islamic State targets there. U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the group cannot be defeated “without addressing that side of the organization which resides in Syria.”

A look at the Islamic State group in Syria: SCOPE AND SIZE By some estimates, the Islamic State group occupies up to 35 percent of Syria, or about a third of the country. It has consolidated its hold over an impressive stretch of territory from its westernmost end on the outskirts of the city of Aleppo, across northern Syria and most of the east. It spreads into most of the Sunni-dominated areas of northern and western Iraq, right up to the edges of Baghdad. That terrain includes the oil fields of Syria’s eastern Deir el-Zour province and parts of Hassakeh. It also includes parts of Aleppo province, including the major towns of Manbej and al-Bab, where the group’s black flags flutter over

I M M I G R AT I O N S T E P S continued from page 1

fended his decision to defer deportations for children but said he couldn’t go any bigger.

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“If we start broadening that, then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally. So that’s not an option,” he said then.

Republicans are already hinting they’ll consider legal action to thwart what they’ve denounced as a violation of the separation of powers. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in a conference call this month with GOP House members, accused Obama of “threatening to rewrite our immigration laws unilaterally.”

“If the president fails to faithfully execute the laws of our country, we will hold him accountable,” Boehner said, according to an individual who participated in the call.

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The House already has passed legislation to block Obama from expanding DACA and, through its power of the purse, could attempt to cut off the funds that would be needed to implement the expansion. House Republicans could also consider widening or amending their existing lawsuit against Obama over his health care law, a case both parties have suggested could be a prelude to impeachment proceedings.

The Islamic State’s declared capital is Raqqa, a city in northeastern Syria along the Euphrates River. With a population of 500,000, Raqqa is the group’s power base. Foreign fighters, some with their families, have flocked there from all over the world. Although it always has been a conservative city with strong tribal presence, Raqqa was once a diverse, thriving commercial center. Today, it is patrolled 24 hours a day by vice squads known as the Hisba - armed fighters in long robes who make sure their strict interpretation of Islam is observed. The militants have banned music and smoking, and have forced women to cover up. They have carried out beheadings in the main square for violators of Shariah, or Islamic law. People who were killed have had their bodies hung from crosses. The group recently imposed a curriculum in Raqqa schools, scrapping subjects such as philosophy and chemistry.

RESOURCES AND GOVERNING The group controls virtually all major oil fields of eastern Syria, including the Omar oil field, Syria’s largest, with a capacity to produce 75,000 barrels a day. According to several activists, the group has resumed some pumping and has secured revenue by selling crude oil at lower-than-market prices and exporting to Iraq and Turkey through middlemen with tankers. The group also enjoys other assets, such as three major border crossings, grain silos and the al-Furat dam, Syria’s largest. In the past two years, the group has become entrenched in parts of Syria, establishing a governing system that includes administrative offices, Islamic courts and traffic police.

MILITARY STRENGTH The group is a formidable fighting force in Syria, battling anyone who stands in its way. Since about the beginning of the year, the group has been engaged in a war of attrition with Western-backed rebels, overwhelming their outposts and picking off towns and villages one by one through force and intimidation.

Hundreds of people have been killed in the fighting, which has detracted from the rebellion’s main goal of toppling President Bashar Assad. More recently, the jihadists have turned their attention to Assad’s forces, seizing a series of military bases, including the Tabqa airfield in Raqqa province. Following its blitz in Iraq, the group has moved tanks, cannons, Humvees and surface-to-surface missiles into Syria, parading the hardware recently in Raqqa. Most of the group’s leaders are believed to be in Syria, including Omar al-Shishani, a Chechen and one of its most prominent military figures.

ASSAD’S ACTIONS Assad has recently stepped up airstrikes against strongholds of the Islamic State group, perhaps to try to ward off U.S. involvement, to show he can do the job himself and to portray himself as a partner for the international community. The Syrian government has opened the door for potential cooperation with the U.S. to contain the Islamic State group but says any strikes should be done in coordination with Damascus. That’s a problem for the U.S., which risks appearing on the same side as Assad, whose ouster the Obama administration has sought for years.

U.S. strikes against the Islamic State group in Syria may help Assad by legitimizing his government at the expense of those seeking to topple him. Any U.S. airstrikes would likely focus on areas near the Iraqi border and militant targets such as training camps in Raqqa, where Assad’s air defense capabilities are almost nonexistent.

COMPLICATIONS U.S. airstrikes in Syria against the Islamic State group would be much more complicated than in Iraq, where they are sanctioned

by Baghdad and where battle lines are more clearly drawn. The picture in Syria is more complex, with a host of military players operating in close proximity to each other, including the Islamic State group, the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, Western-backed rebels and pro-government forces. While the Western-backed rebels have urged the U.S. to extend airstrikes to target the Islamic State group, more hard-line groups in Syria oppose any U.S. involvement.

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U K R A I N E : 2 T A N K C O L U M N S F R O M R U S S I A E N T E R U K R A I N E have fought on the separatist side since the armed conflict began in April.

NOVOAZOVSK, Ukraine (AP) -- Two columns of Russian tanks and military vehicles fired Grad missiles at a border post in southeastern Ukraine, then rolled into the country Thursday as Ukraine’s overmatched border guards fled, a top Ukrainian official said.

The U.S. government accused Russia of orchestrating a new military campaign in Ukraine, helping rebel forces expand their fight and sending in tanks, rocket launchers and armored vehicles.

The comments by Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security Council, and other statements from NATO, the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine and the United States left no doubt that the Russian military had invaded southeastern Ukraine.

“These incursions indicate a Russian-directed counteroffensive is likely underway in Donetsk and Luhansk,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Wednesday. She voiced concern about overnight deliveries of materiel in southeast Ukraine near Novoazovsk and said Russia was being dishonest about its actions, even to its own people.

A top NATO official said at least 1,000 Russian troops have poured into Ukraine with sophisticated equipment and have been in direct “contact” with Ukrainian soldiers, resulting in casualties. He called that a conservative estimate and said another 20,000 Russian troops were right over the Russian border.

“Russian forces have entered Ukraine,” Ukraine’s president declared Thursday, cancelling a foreign trip and calling an emergency meeting of his security council.

Members of the OSCE examine the scene of a shelling in the town of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. The Obama administration accused Russia on Wednesday of orchestrating a new military campaign in Ukraine, helping rebel forces expand their fight in the country’s east and sending tanks, rocket launchers and armored vehicles toward communities elsewhere.

President Petro Poroshenko summoned the council as the strategic southeastern town of Novoazovsk appeared firmly under the control of separatists and their Russian backers, a new front in the war in eastern Ukraine between the separatists and Poroshenko’s government in Kiev.

“Over the past two weeks we have noted a significant escalation in both the level and sophistication of Russia’s military interference in Ukraine,” Tak said in Casteau, Brussels. “Russia is reinforcing and resupplying separatist forces in a blatant attempt to change the momentum of the fighting, which is currently favoring the Ukrainian military.”

“Today the president’s place is in Kiev,” Poroshenko said.

Lysenko said the missiles from Russia were fired about 11 a.m. and about an hour and a half later, two columns, including tanks and other fighting vehicles began an attack. They entered Ukraine from Veselo-Voznesenka and Maximovo of the Rostov region in Russia.

Russian stock markets dived as fears grew that the country was escalating its role in the conflict, a move that could provoke the U.S. and European Union to impose further sanctions on Russian businesses and individuals. Russia’s MICEX index dropped nearly 2 percent on Thursday, and major Russian state banks VTB and Sberbank dropped more than 4 percent.

Brig. Gen. Nico Tak told reporters at NATO headquarters that the ultimate aim of Russia was to stave off defeat for the separatists and turn eastern Ukraine into a “frozen conflict” that would destabilize the country “indefinitely.”

NATO also produced satellite images to provide what it called “additional evidence that Russian combat soldiers, equipped with sophisticated heavy weaponry, are operating inside Ukraine’s sovereign territory.”

Tak said the satellite images were only “the tip of the iceberg in terms of the overall scope of Russian troop and weapons movements.”

“We have also detected large quantities of advanced weapons, including air defense systems, artillery, tanks, and armored personnel carriers being transferred to separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine,” he said. “The presence of these weapons along with substantial numbers of Russian combat troops inside Ukraine make the situation increasingly grave.”

The leader of the insurgency, Alexander Zakharchenko, said in an interview on Russian state television that 3,000 to 4,000 Russians

ISLAMIC STATE GROUP KILLS CAPTURED SYRIAN SOLDIERS of committing crimes against humanity in Syria. The U.N. has accused the group of similar crimes in Iraq.

In southern Syria, meanwhile, government warplanes targeted rebels near the country’s frontier with Israel in the Golan Heights, a day after opposition fighters captured a crossing point on the disputed border.

The Syrian airstrikes hit several areas near the frontier in Quneitra province, including the village of Jaba, said the Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria. The Local Coordination Committees, another activist group, also reported the air raids.

Smoke rises following an explosion in Syria’s Quneitra province as Syrian rebels clashed with President Bashar Assad’s forces, seen from the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, Thursday, Aug. 28, 2014. From the Israeli side of the de facto border, large clouds of smoke could be seen, as gunfire and explosions sounded in the distance. Israeli soldiers observed the fighting.

BEIRUT (AP) -- The Islamic State group has killed dozens of Syrian soldiers it captured after overrunning a military base in northeastern Syria, shooting some and using knives on others in the latest brutal mass killing attributed to the extremists, activists said Thursday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the militants rounded up the soldiers in the arid countryside on Wednesday near the Tabqa airfield, three days after seizing the base in heavy fighting. The government troops were among a large group of soldiers from the base who were stuck behind the front lines after the airfield fell to the jihadi fighters.

Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman said the extremists killed up to 65 soldiers. He said some were shot to death, while others were killed with knives.

The Observatory said heavy clashes were raging between the rebels and the Syrian military in Jaba and the surrounding countryside.

White plumes of smoke set off by exploding mortar rounds could be seen on Thursday from the Israeli side of the Golan.

The sound of small arms fire could be heard echoing in the background.

An array of Syrian rebel groups, including the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, captured the frontier crossing on Wednesday. A rebel spokesman said the opposition is focused on fighting President Bashar Assad, and poses no threat to Israel.

F B I I N V E S T I G AT I N G REPORTS OF ATTACKS ON US BANKS

A statement posted online and circulated on Twitter by supporters of the Islamic State group claimed the extremists killed “about 200” government prisoners captured near Tabqa.

Russian forces, she said, are being sent 30 miles (48 kilometers) inside Ukraine, without them or their families knowing where they are going. She cited reports of burials in Russia for those who have died in Ukraine and wounded Russian soldiers being treated in a St. Petersburg hospital.

On Thursday morning, an Associated Press journalist saw rebel checkpoints at the outskirts of Novoazovsk and was told he could not enter. One of the rebels said there was no fighting in the town.

Novoazovsk, which lies along the road connecting Russia to the Russia-annexed Crimean Peninsula, had come under shelling for three days, with the rebels entering it on Wednesday. This area had previously escaped the fighting that has engulfed areas to the north, and the only way rebels could have reached the southeast was coming through Russia.

The new southeastern front raised fears that the separatists are seeking to create a land link between Russia and Crimea. If successful, it could give them or Russia control over the entire Sea of Azov and the gas and mineral riches that energy experts believe it contains.

Ukraine already lost roughly half its coastline, several major ports and significant Black Sea mineral rights in March when Russia annexed Crimea. n Mariupol, a city of 450,000 about 30 kilometers (20 miles) to the west of Novoazovsk, a brigade of Ukrainian forces arrived at the airport on Wednesday, while deep trenches were dug a day earlier on the city’s edge.

National Guard spokesman Ruslan Muzychuk told The Associated Press in Mariupol that the government has evidence that large amounts of weapons have been brought into Novoazovsk from across the Russian border.

He added that National Guard reinforcements were taking up positions in Mariupol.

“The positions are being strengthened,” the spokesman said.

“The road from Novoazovsk to Mariupol is under the control of Ukrainian troops.”

Joseph Dempsey, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said recent images of a military convoy in eastern Ukraine showed a type of T-72 tank that “is not known to have been exported or operated outside of Russia.”

The tanks’ presence, he said in note Thursday, “strongly supports the contention that Russia is supplying arms to separatist forces.”

Associated Press journalists on the border have seen the rebels with a wide range of unmarked military equipment - including tanks, Buk missile launchers and armored personnel carriers - and have run into many Russians among the rebel fighters. Ukraine also captured 10 soldiers from a Russian paratrooper division Monday around Amvrosiivka, a town 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Russian border.

In Donetsk, the largest rebel-held city, 11 people were killed by shelling overnight, the city said Thursday.

investigating an incident in which Russian hackers attacked the U.S financial system this month in possible retaliation against U.S. government-sponsored sanctions aimed at Russia.

The attack, Bloomberg said, led to the loss of sensitive data.

Bloomberg cited security experts saying that the attack appeared “far beyond the capability of ordinary criminal hackers.”

The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, said JPMorgan Chase and at least four other firms were hit this month by coordinated attacks that siphoned off huge amounts of data, including checking and savings account information.

JPMorgan spokeswoman Trish Wexler said large companies experience cyberattacks nearly every day.

“We have multiple layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels,” said Wexler, who did not confirm the reports.

It also showed photographs of what it said were the prisoners: young men stripped down to their underwear marching in the desert. The photos could not immediately be verified, but correspond to other AP reporting.

The Wall Street Journal cited unnamed sources in a report that called the attacks a “significant breach of corporate computer security.”

The photos and reported mass killing underscored how the group uses violence - and images of violence - to terrorize its opponents, as it sweeps further into Syria and Iraq. The group has declared an Islamic state, or caliphate, in the territories it controls straddling the border.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The FBI said Wednesday it’s working with the Secret Service to determine the scope of recently reported cyberattacks against several U.S. financial institutions.

On Wednesday, a U.N. commission accused the extremist group

A report on Bloomberg.com said Wednesday that the FBI is

JPMorgan is the largest U.S. bank by assets.

The FBI said in a statement that combating cyberthreats and criminals remains a top priority for the U.S. government and that it’s “constantly working with American companies to fight cyber attacks.”

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G U N T O U R I S M G R O W S I N P O P U L A R I T Y I N R E C E N T Y E A R S LAS VEGAS (AP) -- The death of an Arizona firearms instructor by a 9-year-old girl who was firing a fully automatic Uzi displayed a tragic side of what has become a hot industry in the U.S.: gun tourism.

In this Aug. 25, 2014 image made from video provided by the Mohave County Sheriff Department, firing-range instructor Charles Vacca, left, shows a 9-year old girl how to use an Uzi. Vacca, 39, was standing next to the girl on Monday at the Last Stop range in Arizona, south of Las Vegas, when the girl squeezed the trigger, causing the Uzi to recoil upward and shoot Vacca in the head.

With gun laws keeping high-powered weapons out of reach for most people - especially those outside the U.S. - indoor shooting ranges with high-powered weapons have become a popular attraction.

There’s also the prohibitive cost of owning an automatic weapon - an M5 might go for $25,000, while a chance to gun down zombie targets with an AR-15 and three other weapons costs less than $200.

Tourists from Japan flock to ranges in Waikiki, Hawaii, and the dozen or so that have cropped up in Las Vegas offer bullet-riddled bachelor parties and literal shotgun weddings, where newly married couples can fire submachine gun rounds and pose with Uzis and ammo belts.

“People just want to experience things they can’t experience elsewhere,” said Genghis Cohen, owner of Machine Guns Vegas. “There’s not an action movie in the past 30 years without a machine gun.”

The accidental shooting death of the firing-range instructor in Arizona set off a powerful debate over youngsters and guns, with many people wondering what sort of parents would let a child handle a submachine gun.

“It’s an opportunity that people may not come across again in their lifetime,” Sessions said.

Tourists from Australia, Europe or Asia, where civilians are barred from many types of guns, long to indulge in the quintessentially American right to bear arms.

Instructor Charles Vacca, 39, was standing next to the girl Monday at the Last Stop range in White Hills, Arizona, about 60 miles south of Las Vegas, when she squeezed the trigger.

The recoil wrenched the Uzi upward, and Vacca was shot in the head.

“People have a fascination with guns,” said Cohen, who is from New Zealand and estimates about 90 percent of his customers are tourists. “They see guns as a big part of American culture, and they want to experience American culture.”

Prosecutors say they will not file charges in the case. The identities of the girl and her family have not been released.

The businesses cast a lighthearted spin on their shooting experiences, staging weddings in their ranges and selling souvenir T-shirts full of bullet holes.

The dusty outdoor range calls itself the Bullets and Burgers Adventure and touts its “Desert Storm atmosphere.”

Similar attractions have been around since the 1980s in Las Vegas, although the city has experienced a boom of such businesses in the past few years. Excitement over guns tends to spike when there’s fear of tighter gun restrictions, according to Dan Sessions, general manager of Discount Firearms and Ammo, which houses the Vegas Machine Gun Experience.

But behind the bravado, owners acknowledge they are one errant movement away from tragedy. Cohen’s business, for example, is installing a tethering system that will prevent machine guns from riding upward after firing - the same motion that killed the gun instructor this week.

“Guns are designed to cause damage, and if they’re mishandled, they’ll do exactly that,” said Bob Irwin, owner of The

S T E WA R T R E T U R N I N G T O COMPETITION AFTER CRASH

fellow driver during a dirt-track race.

Tony Stewart is introduced before the NASCAR Daytona 500 Sprint Cup series auto race at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Fla. Stewart will return to Sprint Cup competition Sunday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway, ending a three-race hiatus taken after he struck and killed a

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Tony Stewart will return to Sprint Cup competition Sunday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway, ending a three-race hiatus taken after he struck and killed a fellow driver during a dirt-track race.

tion is still ongoing.

Meanwhile, the 43-year-old NASCAR superstar will move forward with his career and attempt to salvage his season.

NASCAR released a statement saying that Stewart was eligible to return because he “has received all necessary clearances required to return to all racing activities.” NASCAR said it would have no further comment until President Mike Helton speaks Friday afternoon.

Stewart, who has 48 career Cup wins in 542 starts, is one of the biggest stars in the garage. His peers have been protective of him as questions emerged in the aftermath of the crash, and it pained them that Stewart was grieving in private and had cut off communication with so many of them. He will talk to the media for the first time since the fatal crash on Friday.

The three-time NASCAR champion has not raced since his car hit Kevin Ward Jr. at an Aug. 9 sprint car event in upstate New York. Stewart pulled out of the NASCAR race at Watkins Glen the next morning, then skipped races at Michigan and Bristol Motor Speedway.

NASCAR rules state a driver must attempt to either qualify or race the car in every points-paying event to be eligible for Chase for the Sprint Cup championship, unless a waiver is granted. There was no immediate word if NASCAR would grant that waiver.

Stewart, who was described by police as “visibly shaken” the night of Ward’s death, has been in seclusion ever since. Stewart-Haas Racing executive vice president Brett Frood has said the emphasis was on giving Stewart time needed to get him “in a better place than he is.”

Since Ward’s death, NASCAR has announced a rule that prohibits drivers from exiting from a crashed or disabled vehicle - unless it is on fire - until safety personnel arrive. Last week, Denny Hamlin crashed while leading at Bristol and stayed in his car until safety personnel arrived.

Stewart’s only comment since the crash was a statement the day after the crash in which he said “there aren’t words to describe the sadness I feel about the accident that took the life of Kevin Ward Jr.”

But Hamlin then exited his vehicle and angrily tossed a safety device at Kevin Harvick as he passed by moments later. He was not penalized.

Ward had climbed from his car after it had spun while racing for position with Stewart. The 20-year-old walked down onto the racing surface waving his arms in an apparent attempt to confront Stewart.

Authorities said the first car to pass Ward had to swerve to miss hitting him. The front of Stewart’s car then appeared to clear Ward, but Ward was struck by the right rear tire and hurtled through the air. He died of blunt force trauma.

Stewart will return with a decision pending on whether he will be charged in Ward’s death. Ontario County Sheriff Philip Povero has said investigators did not have any evidence to support criminal intent by Stewart. Povero said Thursday the investiga-

Gun Store, the original Las Vegas machine gun attraction.

“They have to be respected.”

Sam Scarmardo, who operates the outdoor range in Arizona where the instructor was killed, said Wednesday that the parents had signed waivers saying they understood the rules and were standing nearby, video-recording their daughter, when the accident happened.

“I have regret we let this child shoot, and I have regret that Charlie was killed in the incident,” Scarmardo said. He said he doesn’t know what went wrong, pointing out that Vacca was an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jace Zack, chief deputy for the Mohave County Attorney’s Office, said the instructor was probably the most criminally negligent person involved in the accident for having allowed the child to hold the gun without enough training.

“The parents aren’t culpable,” Zack said. “They trusted the instructor to know what he was doing, and the girl could not possibly have comprehended the potential dangers involved.”

Still, the accident has raised questions about whether children that young should be handling such powerful weapons.

“We have better safety standards for who gets to ride a roller coaster at an amusement park,” said Gerry Hills, founder of Arizonans for Gun Safety, a group seeking to reduce gun violence. Referring to the girl’s parents, Hills said: “I just don’t see any reason in the world why you would allow a 9-year-old to put her hands on an Uzi.” In 2008, an 8-year-old boy died after accidentally shooting himself in the head with an Uzi at a gun expo near Springfield, Massachusetts. Christopher Bizilj was firing at pumpkins when the gun kicked back. A former Massachusetts police chief whose company co-sponsored the gun show was later acquitted of involuntary manslaughter.

Dave Workman, senior editor at thegunmag.com and a spokesman for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said it can be safe to let children shoot an automatic weapon if a properly trained adult is helping them hold it.

After viewing the video of the Arizona shooting, Workman said Vacca appeared to have tried to help the girl maintain control by placing his left hand under the weapon. But automatic weapons tend to recoil upward, he noted.

“If it was the first time she’d ever handled a full-auto firearm, it’s a big surprise when that gun continues to go off,” said Workman, a firearms instructor for 30 years. “I’ve even seen adults stunned by it.”

Scarmardo said his policy of allowing children 8 and older to fire guns under adult supervision and the watchful eye of an instructor is standard practice in the industry. The range’s policies are under review, he said.

G U N C O M PA N Y C U T S TIES WITH REALITY TV STAR reality television star Will Hayden, after he was arrested in East Baton Rouge Parish on a charge accusing him of raping a child. Hayden, whose show “Sons of Guns” appeared on The Discover Channel, had been free on $150,000 bond after an Aug. 9 arrest for alleged child molestation.

A sheriff’s office spokeswoman says she cannot say whether both arrests involve the same child

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- A firearms company affiliated with reality TV star Will Hayden is distancing itself from him after his arrest on rape charges.

In a statement on its website, Red Jacket Firearms LLC says it has legally separated from Hayden.

The Baton Rouge-based company says it will remain in business.

The Discovery Channel canceled “Sons of Guns” after Hayden’s arrest on Tuesday. Discovery says it killed the show due to “the serious and horrific nature of the charges” against Hayden. The show featured Hayden and his firearms business.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office says Hayden was arrested on aggravated rape charges involving a child. He already faced child molestation and aggravated crime against nature charges.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Hayden had an attorney.

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 24 thru Sept 4 , 2014 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

U S C O N S I D E R I N G R E L I E F M I S S I O N I N

N E W I R A Q

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration is considering a humanitarian relief operation for Shiite Turkmen in northern Iraq who have been under siege for weeks by Islamic State militants, U.S. defense officials said Wednesday.

the fight against the Islamic State group, according to a statement issued by al-Abadi’s office. The statement said Austin expressed the U.S. government’s willingness to provide more counterterrorism training for Iraqi security forces.

And as the administration weighed its options for targeting the Islamic State group’s strongholds in neighboring Syria, the U.S. Central Command announced three more airstrikes in the vicinity of Ibril and the Mosul Dam. The strikes by unspecified U.S. fighter, attack and drone aircraft, destroyed an Islamic State Humvee, a supply truck and three armored vehicles and damaged an Islamic State building, Central Command said.

The U.S. has several hundred military personnel in Iraq providing security for American facilities, including the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the U.S. consulate in Irbil, and coordinating with Iraqi security forces.

The three attacks brought to 101 the number of U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq since Aug. 8. The northern Iraqi city of Irbil was the site earlier this month of U.S. airstrikes to protect Americans helping Kurdish forces repel the militant group. The dam was recently released from Islamic State control.

The contemplated relief mission would be the second recent U.S. military humanitarian intervention in Iraq. U.S. C-17 and C-130 cargo planes dropped tons of food and water to displaced Yazidis on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq earlier this month, supported by U.S. airstrikes on nearby Islamic State fighting positions.

The administration is now focused on the imperiled town of Amirli, which is situated about 105 miles north of Baghdad and just a few miles from Kurdish territory. An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people are estimated to have no access to food or water.

The head of the United Nation’s assistance mission in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, earlier this week called for urgent action in Amirli and described the situation as desperate.

Three U.S. defense officials said a humanitarian mission was under consideration. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they could not discuss internal administration deliberations by name. The timetable for a decision on whether and how to go ahead with the mission was not immediately clear.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest declined to comment.

But he said, “This is the kind of situation that the president has ordered military action in support of in the past.” Earnest added that the administration is closely monitoring Amirli’s plight.

One resident in Amirli, Qassim Jawad Hussein, a 45-year-old father of five, said in a telephone interview from the besieged town that food being flown in by Iraqi military helicopters is falling far short of their needs. He said the Iraqi helicopters leaving Amirli are evacuating pregnant women because the town’s only medical clinic has neither medicine nor doctors.

Separately, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, met Wednesday in Baghdad with Iraq’s premier-designate, Haider al-Abadi, to discuss cooperation in

U S E C O N O M Y F O R E C A S T T O GROW BY 1.5 PERCENT IN 2014 The deficit spiked at $1.4 trillion in Obama’s first year in office and remained above $1 trillion for his entire first term.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday forecast that the U.S. economy will grow by just 1.5 percent in 2014, undermined by a poor performance during the first three months of the year.

The new assessment was considerably more pessimistic than the Obama administration’s, which predicted last month that the economy would expand by 2.6 percent this year even though it contracted by an annual rate of 2.1 percent in the first quarter.

The economy did grow by 0.9 percent during the first half of 2014.

Looking ahead, the CBO said it expected the economy to grow by 3.4 percent over 2015 and 2016, and predicted that the unemployment rate would remain below 6 percent into the future.

The economy went into reverse at the beginning of this year, reeling from an unusually harsh winter that disrupted consumer spending, factory production and other business activity.

Growth in the gross domestic product, the economy’s total output of goods and services, recovered in the second quarter, advancing at an annual rate of 4 percent, according to the government’s first estimate. That forecast will be revised on Thursday.

Even with the rebound, economists have lowered their outlook for the entire year, given the weak start. Economists at JPMorgan Chase are forecasting that the economy will grow by 1.9 percent this year, when measured from the fourth quarter, down from 3.1 percent in 2013.

The CBO also projected that the government would run a deficit of $506 billion for the budget year that ends Sept.

30. That would be the lowest level of Barack Obama’s presidency.

When the deficit is measured against the size of the economy, the comparison used most by analysts, it is within historic levels at 2.9 percent of GDP. Last year’s deficit was $680 billion.

The CBO foresees a slight increase from its earlier $492 billion projection of this year’s deficit in part because of a decline in expected corporate tax receipts. But it see modest improvement over the coming decade compared with earlier forecasts, in large part because it predicts lower-than-expected interest payments on the national debt.

Obama inherited a recession and a trillion-dollar-plus deficit picture when he took office in the aftermath of the 2008 fiscal crisis. The economy has recovered more slowly than hoped; some of the recent drop in the jobless rate is due to frustrated job-seekers leaving the labor market.

“There is no question we have made progress - businesses have added 9.9 million jobs over 53 straight months of job growth,” said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “But there is more we need to do.”

The report confirms a trend of short-term improvement in the deficit but an unsustainable long-term fiscal path if Washington doesn’t cut spending or raise additional revenue.

Over the long term, the CBO said “the large and increasing amount of federal debt would have serious negative consequences” including the risk of a crisis that could raise interest rates.

All told, the CBO predicted that the government would add $7.2 trillion to the national debt over the coming decade, bringing the total debt to $26.6 trillion by 2024.

The latest numbers come as the GOP-controlled House and Obama are taking a break from the budget, debt and tax battles that have flared up several times since Republicans won back the House in 2010.

One of the biggest unresolved issue facing lawmakers when they return to Washington next month is the fate of dozens of popular expired tax breaks for businesses and individuals. Those breaks, if renewed, could add almost $140 billion to next year’s deficit.

Obama did not see attacking the deficit as a priority during his first term. Republicans forced him to the negotiating table in 2011 and extracted more than $2 trillion in spending cuts over the following decade, though little of that savings came from big benefit programs such as Medicare.

The U.S. also has a military-run Office of Security Cooperation as part of the U.S. Embassy, but the military personnel assigned to that office work on military sales rather than provide field training for Iraqi forces.

The siege of Amirli is part of the Islamic State group’s offensive, which seized large swaths of western and northern Iraq this summer and pushed further in neighboring Syria.

Residents have put up fierce resistance since the siege began, preventing the Sunni militants from successfully taking over the town. But the militants have, in turn, cut off the town, leaving thousands without access to food, water and medicine, despite recent airdrops by the Iraqi military.

Like other minorities in Iraq such as the Christians and the Yazidis, the Shiite Turkmen community has also been targeted by the Islamic State, which views them as apostates. Tens of thousands of Turkmens, Iraq’s third-largest ethnic group, have been uprooted from their homes since the Islamic State group took Mosul, the northern city of Tikrit and a spate of towns and villages in the area.

Dr. Ali al-Bayati, head of an Iraq-based humanitarian group called the Turkmen Saving Foundation, said Wednesday that at least 15,000 civilians, including many women and children, remain trapped in Amirli without access to food or water.

He said the streets are blocked by Islamic State fighters and the only way out is by air. The nearest Iraqi ground force is in the town of Toz Khormatu, which has seen intense clashes in recent weeks. Electricity and water are completely cut off in Amirli, according to al-Bayati.

Al-Bayati said airdrops from the Iraqi military have provided residents with desperately needed staples like rice, oil and cheese, as well as weapons to help them resist the Islamic State. However the residents often go 10 days without any airdrops successfully reaching them.

David Pollock, a former State Department official and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the U.S. military could assist in opening a land corridor into Kurdish territory for the besieged Turkmen.

“It’s a very urgent situation,” Pollock said.

B L A C K WAT E R continued from page 1

Asuncion discounted Watson’s testimony, with the prosecutor saying that Watson had never said anything previously about incoming gunfire under questioning by investigators.

It’s different when your former associates “are looking you in the eye” in an open courtroom, Asuncion said in suggesting that Watson had made up the story to help his former Blackwater colleagues.

During the trial, the defense team has made much of photos of eight AK-47 shell casings that were taken near Nisoor Square the same day as the shootings, suggesting they were evidence of insurgents firing on the Blackwater convoy.

“Shell casings on the streets of Baghdad are about as common as seashells at the beach,” Asuncion told the jury. “They are scattered all over the place. The defense desperately wants you to believe” the shell casings are significant.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Sept 4, 2014

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GENEVA (AP) -- The Ebola outbreak in West Africa eventually could exceed 20,000 cases, more than six times as many as are now known, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

farmers from their fields. Denise Brown, the West Africa regional director for the U.N. agency, said $70 million is needed immediately to meet those needs.

A new plan released by the U.N. health agency to stop Ebola also assumes that the actual number of cases in many hard-hit areas may be two to four times higher than currently reported. If that’s accurate, it suggests there could be up to 12,000 cases already.

On Thursday, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced it will start testing an experimental Ebola vaccine in humans next week. The vaccine was developed by the U.S. government and GlaxoSmithKline and the preliminary trial will test the shot in healthy U.S. adults in Maryland. At the same time, British experts will test the same vaccine in healthy people in the U.K., Gambia and Mali.

Currently, about half of the people infected with Ebola have died, so in the worst case scenario outlined by the WHO, the death toll could reach 10,000.

“This far outstrips any historic Ebola outbreak in numbers. The largest outbreak in the past was about 400 cases,” Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO’s assistant director-general for emergency operations, told reporters.

He said the agency does not necessarily expect 20,000 cases, but a system must be put in place to handle a massive increase in the numbers.

The outbreak is posing a unique challenge, Aylward said, because there are multiple hotspots in several countries, including in densely populated urban areas. Previous outbreaks had happened in a single, remote area.

In new figures published Thursday, the agency said 1,552 people have died from the virus from among the 3,069 cases reported so far in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria. More than 40 percent of the cases have been identified in the last three weeks, the U.N. health agency said, adding that “the outbreak continues to accelerate.”

The new plan for handling the outbreak aims to stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months and prevent it from spreading internationally.

The plan calls for $489 million over the next nine months and requires 750 international workers and 12,000 national workers.

The goal is to take “the heat out of this outbreak” within three months, he said.

The next goal, Aylward said, is to be able to stop transmission within eight weeks of a new case being confirmed anywhere.

The third major goal is to increase the preparedness for dealing with Ebola in all nations that share borders with affected countries or have major transportation hubs, he said.

Doctors Without Borders, which has criticized the WHO and the

The vaccine trial was accelerated in response to the outbreak. Preliminary results to determine if the vaccine is safe could be available within months.

People stand on the shoreline near a sign reading ‘NO DUMPING’, amongst rubbish at West Point, a area heavily effected by the Ebola virus, with residence not being allowed to leave West Point, as government forces clamp down on movement to prevent the spread of Ebola, in Monrovia, Liberia, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. Health officials in Liberia said the other two recipients of ZMapp in Liberia — a Congolese doctor and a Liberian physician’s assistant, have recovered. Both are expected to be discharged from an Ebola treatment center on Friday, said Dr. Moses Massaquoi, a Liberian doctor with the treatment team.

international community, in general, for responding too slowly to the crisis, warned that the plan “should not give a false sense of hope.”

“As an international public health emergency, states with the capacity to help have the responsibility to mobilize resources to the affected countries, rather than watching from the sidelines with a naive hope that the situation will improve,” Brice de le Vingne, the group’s director of operations, said in a statement.

“I shed more than one tear, especially when I would see the same mother, several times over the years burying a baby there. It just melted my heart,” said Sadler, who has eight children in a blended family, and 17 grandchildren.

Nigerian authorities, meanwhile, said a man who contracted Ebola after coming into contact with a traveler from Liberia had evaded surveillance and infected a doctor in southern Nigeria who later died.

So far, she has found at least 543 names of people buried at the cemetery, and publicized her index in local papers and at the “Standing on the Corner” festival and others that attracted townsfolk, tourists and Navajo and Hopi tribal members.

The doctor is the sixth person to die of the disease in Nigeria and marks the first fatality outside the commercial capital of Lagos, where a Liberian-American man, Patrick Sawyer, arrived in late July.

The World Food Program says it is preparing to feed 1.3 million people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the coming months because measures to control an Ebola outbreak have cut off whole communities from markets, pushed up food prices and separated

She said she was moved by a “sweet spirit” and a desire restore respect and dignity to the burial ground, with a better security fence and a monument.

“It just struck me that it was going to need a champion or nothing would be done,” she said.

The cemetery was an afterthought in Winslow, a railroad city on the edge of the Navajo and Hopi reservations that was immortalized in 1972 by the Eagles’ song, “Take it Easy,” with the lyrics: “Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.”

It’s hard, if not impossible, to know where each grave, some just 18 inches deep, is located at the Winslow Indian Cemetery. The aluminum plates and crosses that once marked them were trampled on, washed away or carried off.

It was no place to mourn, thought local historical preservationist Gail Sadler, before she made it her mission to unearth the identities of the roughly 600 people buried there and help their descendants reconnect with their history.

“If anyone is searching for family, I don’t want these little ones to be lost,” said the soft-spoken child welfare worker.

What she learned, however, was that not everyone wanted to reconnect.

Her Mormon belief about the value of knowing one’s ancestry suddenly came up against traditional Navajo beliefs about death as something one rarely discusses, and Navajo and Hopi tradition about not visiting burial sites.

Some warned her that she risked inviting evil spirits if she continued her pursuit of the dead.

She would imagine the stories and the faces of the people she read about.

“Right now there is a super risk of the response effort being choked off, being restricted, because we simply cannot get enough seats on enough airplanes to get people in and out, and rotating, to get goods and supplies in and out and rotating,” he said.

On her first visit, she climbed through a barbed wire fence and found liquor bottles, roofing shingles and a washing machine. She wondered if a hole in the corner meant someone was trying to dig a fresh grave or dig up an old one.

Inside cotton sacks, burlap bags and blankets buried in the ground are the remains dating back to the 1930s of stillborn babies, tuberculosis patients, and sick and malnourished Native Americans from Winslow and the nearby Navajo and Hopi reservations.

Her project also kept her up at night. Lying restless in her bed, she would slip out of the blankets and walk barefoot in the dark to a corner bedroom set up as an office. She would flip on the light and get to work.

Air France on Wednesday canceled its flights to Sierra Leone; the WHO has urged airlines to lift such restrictions.

Sadler, 58, said she was both heartbroken - and appalled - at the condition of the cemetery when she first laid eyes on it in 2008, soon after she had been appointed to the Winslow Historic Preservation Commission.

WINSLOW, Ariz. (AP) -- A dusty, barren field in the shadow of a busy Arizona interstate was for decades a place where children played freely, teenagers spooked themselves on Halloween and locals dumped trash, seemingly unaware of the history beneath them.

Sadler then would painstakingly enter each detail into a spreadsheet, from parents’ names to birthplaces to causes of death.

Sadler struggled with reading about a mother who died in labor, along with her newborn. The placenta preceded the child, and the mother hemorrhaged. Sadler experienced hemorrhaging in successfully delivering one of her own children.

W O M A N U N E A RT H S PA S T O F FORGOTTEN INDIAN CEMETERY

This July 9, 2014 photo shows Gail Sadler standing amid broken crosses in a pauper’s grave in Winslow, Arizona. The local historic preservation commissioner has made it her mission to unearth the identities of roughly 600 people buried there and help their descendants reconnect with a lost part of their history.

Her mission quickly became an obsession. On nights after work and on weekends, Sadler would go online and scour death certificates - some 8,800 from 1932 to 1962 - looking for the Indian Cemetery as the final resting place.

In the early 1930s, the land where the cemetery is was tied to a tuberculosis sanatorium that broadened its patient base and finally became the Winslow Indian Health Care Center.

Native Americans who died there were taken the half-mile to the cemetery and largely forgotten over time.

Finding out who was buried there became Sadler’s main fundraising tool to get a more secure fence built. With the names of only a few dozen that she gathered from a former commissioner, she said city officials initially were hesitant to contribute to the cause.

Sadler was met with blank stares, raised eyebrows and warnings not to press forward with her work when she spoke with traditional Navajos, whose culture teaches that death is not something to dwell on and that burial sites should be avoided.

“If you talk about death, you’re in a sense luring death to come to you,” said Paul Begay, whose knowledge of Navajo culture and history was passed down through his father and grandfather, both medicine men.

Burials of Hopi generally are private and occur within a day of a person’s death to allow the physical and spiritual journey of a person to begin simultaneously. Once a person is buried, Hopis don’t revisit the burial site.

“We allow nature to take its course, and the spirit has journeyed already,” said Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the tribe’s cultural preservation office, but talking about a deceased person isn’t frowned upon.

“When you remember your people, you recognize that spiritually they are still with us,” he said.

In April, Sadler accomplished one of her goals: A simple black iron fence replaced the barbed wire fence at the cemetery, paid for by donations and the city. She still is seeking funds to build a monument to those who were buried there.

Her index, however, continues to inspire discussions among Native American families, unearthing lost history.

Sylvia John, 63, found out five years ago that she had a brother who died after a fall as a toddler. She asked her mother about him after seeing him in old family photos but didn’t push for more details in deference to her traditional Navajo beliefs.

On a recent day, they took a break from a quilting class and flipped through photos of the chubby-cheeked toddler wearing a western shirt, sitting on his mother’s lap and standing next to his father.

Only then did John, who is Mormon, ask her 89-year-old mother where her brother was buried.

At the Winslow Indian Cemetery, she said. His name is on the first page of Sadler’s index.

“I’m just wanting to go there to the cemetery and look for him,” Sylvia John said.

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 24 thru Sept 4 , 2014 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

G O D Z I L L A S T O M P S U L T R A H D , W I R E S TOKYO (AP) -- At a humble Tokyo laboratory, Godzilla, including the 1954 black-and-white original, is stomping back with a digital makeover that delivers four times the image quality of high definition.

Nihon Eiga also aired a special program on the 4K Godzilla project on its cable network, which broadcasts to 7.5 million households in Japan.

Restoring movie classics into 4K might do wonders for the chicken-and-egg dilemma for new technology, which generally won’t take off until there is content people want to watch.

The effort with “4K” technology is carefully removing scratches and discoloration from the films and also unearthing hidden information on the reel-to-reel.

“TV drama shows shot in digital cannot be restored as 4K,” he said. “But Godzilla can become 4K.”

Experts say the chemical reactions used to make old movies stored far greater detail than was visible with the limited projection technology of the era, as well as with subsequent digital updates.

If all the hidden information of a reel-to-reel is ever brought out, quality would approximate 8K, they say.

Only one minute from the original film and from each of the sequels has been turned into 4K so far but the results are stunning enough.

Faded, blurry, yellowing footage of the radiation-breathing creature that emerged from the Pacific after atomic-bomb testing turns sharp, clear and vivid. It almost looks like state-of-the-art animation.

It’s better than the original, said Toshifumi Shimizu of Tokyo Laboratory Co., the studio that undertook the painstaking effort.

“You can feel the impact of the bodies banging into each other under the suits,” he said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press.

He said many scenes are more real and emotionally moving than what is achieved by today’s computer-graphics manipulation, widespread in Hollywood blockbusters.

The details of the cityscape models, the bumpy skin of Godzilla and the metallic shine of the robots are revealed as they once were.

The craftsmen at the lab made a point to keep visible the wires from which the flying monsters hung. The goal was to stay true to the intention of the original.

In turning Godzilla films into 4K, each frame of the reel-to-reel is scanned by a special machine. Each frame is then examined for blotches and other damage that has crept in over the last 60 years. Any problems with a frame are fixed on a computer, one by one, by a film-processing specialist.

Shoko Ideriha, one of the specialists, said the team pieced together the best

In this April 28, 2014 file photo, a large size figure of Godzilla in a diorama is on display at Cheepa’s gallery in Tokyo. At a humble Tokyo laboratory, Godzilla, including the 1954 black-and-white original, is stomping back with a digital makeover that delivers four times the image quality of high definition. Experts say the chemical reactions used to make old movies stored far greater detail than was visible with the limited projection technology of the era, as well as with subsequent digital updates.

The big catch is that 4K, also known as ultra-high definition, or Ultra HD, can’t be seen in most homes or theaters yet.

For one, you would need a 4K TV, which is not cheap. Sony’s 85-inch model sells for $25,000, although prices are gradually coming down overall.

More crucial still, 4K broadcasting is virtually non-existent. In Japan, it’s available only in limited test programming.

But believers swear that it will become the standard of the not-so-distant future. Other movie classics, such as “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Gone With the Wind,” have turned 4K. What 4K promises for movie classics is astounding, said Takashi Sawa, of Nihon Eiga Satellite Broadcasting Corp., which aired all 28 Toho Godzilla classics for the 60th anniversary of Godzilla’s birth, which fell this year and marked the debut of Gareth Edwards’ Hollywood Godzilla.

have also alleged fraud in the vote.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who has traveled twice to Afghanistan to try to bring both sides back together, helped broker the audit as a way to determine the winner. The audit was to be supervised by representatives from both political camps as well as domestic and international observers.

But on Wednesday, Abdullah’s camp pulled their observers from the process, saying that their fraud concerns were being ignored.

Ghani Ahmadzai’s side later pulled out after a request from the United Nations to ensure fairness, and the audit, which had been temporarily paused, continued.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A massive audit of Afghanistan’s disputed presidential election won’t be done until Sept. 10, the U.N. said Thursday, quashing hopes the new president would be determined before an upcoming NATO summit.

The U.N. has been helping supervise an audit of eight million ballots to see who will succeed President Hamid Karzai, with the goal that the new president would be inaugurated by the end of August. But the audit has become increasingly contentious, which has slowed down the process.

The announcement by the U.N.’s representative in Afghanistan, Jan Kubis, came after a meeting with Karzai.

The U.N. said in a statement that Kubis told Karzai: “....a rigorous and credible audit required time, but could be completed around 10 September. Following all necessary steps, as required by law, the inauguration of the new President should then be possible soon after.”

The U.S., the international community and Karzai had wanted to see the new president sworn in before the summit so he could represent Afghanistan at a meeting expected to discuss issues such as funding and support for Afghanistan’s security forces in coming years.

Karzai’s office has said previously that the Sept. 2 deadline was not extendable. The president’s office said in its own statement Thursday that Kubis had informed the president that completing the audit by that date was “not possible.”

Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai are both vying for the presidency in a fiercely contested race that has seen widespread allegations of fraud. Karzai is barred by law from running for a third term.

Abdullah won the first round but not by enough to avoid a runoff on June 14. In a dramatic reversal, preliminary results from the runoff showed Ghani Ahmadzai ahead, which unleashed sharp cries of fraud from Abdullah’s camp and fears that the election process could spiral into violence. Ghani Ahmadzai’s supporters

JOLIE, PITT WED P R I VA T E L Y A T C H AT E A U I N F R A N C E

segments, working with the only three copies left of the 1954 Godzilla. She compared fixing film to being a doctor treating a patient.

U N : A F G H A N E L E C T I O N A U D I T D O N E A R O U N D S E P T. 1 0

Afghan election commission workers sort ballots for an audit of the presidential run-off votes in front of international observers at an election commission office in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. One of two men vying to become the president of Afghanistan, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled his observers Wednesday from an audit of the country’s disputed election over concerns of widespread fraud in a move that throws the already contentious election into further crisis.

B A C K I N I N T A C T

ECONOMIC CRIME continued from page 1

is hiding that,” he said. But he questioned the presence of Western advisers and asked where Ukrainian troops were getting weapons.

Churkin said he wanted to “send a message to Washington: Stop interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states.”

Moscow has been virtually isolated in the two dozen previous Security Council meetings on the Ukrainian crisis, but because of Russia’s veto power as one of the council’s five permanent members, the body has been unable to act.

Statements from NATO, Ukranian President Petro Poroshenko, the separatists, the United States and the president of the Security Council left no doubt that Russia had crossed the border into Ukraine. The various statements cited internal reports, satellite imagery of armored vehicles and even photographs from Russian troops, including one by a soldier who showed himself operating military hardware.

As of Thursday, the separatist arsenal included up to 100 tanks, 80 armored personnel carriers; 500 anti-tank weapons, and more than 100 artillery pieces, said British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, the council president this month. Russia has directly supplied almost all of this equipment throughout the conflict, Lyall Grant added.

“Now we see irrefutable evidence of regular Russian forces operating inside Ukraine,” he said.

The new southeastern front raised fears that the separatists are seeking to create a land link between Russia and Crimea, which Russia annexed in March.

U.N. Undersecretary-General of Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman told council members the latest developments mark a “dangerous escalation in the conflict” but that the U.N. could not verify on its own the latest reports of Russian troops inside Ukraine.

Ukraine’s deputy ambassador to the U.N., Oleksandr Pavlichenko, wondered aloud if the world will ignore the apparent invasion or act.

“How many more red lines have to be crossed before this challenge can be addressed?” Pavlichenko asked the council.

As the final council member spoke, the German mission to the U.N. tweeted, “All but one (hash)UNSC members condemn recent military escalation, call for restraint. Just one member has very different narrative.”

In this Monday, July 19, 2010, file photo, cast member Angelina Jolie, right and Brad Pitt arrive at the premiere of “Salt” in Los Angeles. Jolie and Pitt were married Saturday, Aug. 23, 2014, in France, according to a spokesman for the couple.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The wait is finally over: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Hollywood’s reigning royal couple, have tied the knot.

Despite two years of feverish scrutiny, the pair managed to keep one of the world’s most anticipated weddings shrouded from the media’s glare.

When? Where? Why haven’t they yet? Did they already? The celebrity press and “Brangelina” fans alike had been consumed with the matrimonial mystery.

Then on Thursday, a spokesman for the couple quietly confirmed to The Associated Press that Hollywood’s undisputed royal couple had wed Saturday in a private ceremony in Southern France.

Jolie and Pitt exchanged vows in a small chapel at the Chateau Miraval in the Provence hamlet of Correns. Since 2008, Miraval has been their Southern France home, a sprawling estate they bought three years ago.

The union was less a vow of commitment than the official affirmation of one made long ago. Pitt and Jolie have been together nearly a decade and have six children, all of whom participated in the wedding.

The wedding may have been cloaked in secrecy, but Pitt and Jolie are preparing to be a big presence at the movies this fall.

Pitt stars in the upcoming World War II drama “Fury,” due out Oct. 17. Jolie’s second directorial effort, the World War II odyssey “Unbroken,” will be released in December.

On Thursday, Pitt was far from any honeymoon hideaway.

Instead, he was at the Bovington Tank Museum in Dorset, U.K., promoting “Fury,” a brutal tale about a tank of American soldiers rolling through Europe in the final days of World War II. Both movies could be major players in Hollywood’s award season, which last year was dominated by a film produced by Pitt, the best picture-winning historical drama “12 Years a Slave.”

At Saturday’s ceremony, Jolie walked the aisle with her eldest sons, 13-year-old Maddox and 10-year-old Pax. Daughters Zahara, 9, and Vivienne, 6, threw flower petals. Eight-yearold Shiloh and Knox, 6, served as ring bearers, the couple’s spokesman said.

In advance of the nondenominational civil ceremony, Pitt and Jolie obtained a marriage license from a local California judge.

The judge also conducted the ceremony in France.

Pitt once said that he didn’t want to marry until gay marriage was legal everywhere, but in recent years, the couple had said publicly they intended to. They were engaged in early 2012 after some seven years together.

“It’s an exciting prospect, even though for us, we’ve gone further than that,” Pitt told The AP in an interview in November 2012. “But to concretize it in that way, it actually means more to me than I thought it would. It means a lot to our kids.”

This is the second marriage for Pitt, who wed Jennifer Aniston in 2000. They divorced in 2005.

Jolie was previously married to British actor Jonny Lee Miller for three years in the late 1990s and to Billy Bob Thornton for three years before divorcing in 2003. Jolie has said she and Pitt fell in love while making the 2005 film “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”

Jolie won the supporting actress Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted” in 1999 and was nominated for the best-actress Oscar for 2008’s “Changeling.” Pitt shared the Academy Award for best picture for “12 Years a Slave.”

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Sept 4, 2014

3 WAY S I N S U R E R S C A N D I S C O U R A G E SICK FROM ENROLLING

Insurers can no longer reject customers with expensive medical conditions thanks to the health care overhaul. But consumer advocates warn that companies are still using wiggle room to discourage the sickest - and costliest - patients from enrolling.

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Insurers say plans with narrow networks are among many coverage choices consumers can make when they shop for insurance, and they are not an attempt to dodge the sick.

Narrow provider networks help maximize value by grouping providers “who have a track record of delivering high-quality, cost-effective care,” said Krusing, the AHIP spokeswoman.

Some insurers are excluding well-known cancer centers from the list of providers they cover under a plan; requiring patients to make large, initial payments for HIV medications; or delaying participation in public insurance exchanges created by the overhaul.

Advocates and industry insiders say these practices may dissuade the neediest from signing up and make it likelier that the customers these insurers do serve will be healthier -- and less expensive.

She added that insurers who sell coverage on the overhaul’s public insurance exchanges have to offer more than one plan. It would make little sense for them to steer patients away from one plan when that person could just choose another option from the same insurer with broader benefits.

“It’s the same insurance companies that are up to the same strategies: Take in as much premium as possible and pay out as little as possible,” said Jerry Flanagan, an attorney with the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog.

The overhaul sets some standards for provider networks, and a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman said regulators plan to increase their review of these networks for 2015 to figure out whether they need to strengthen requirements.

Insurers acknowledge that people may see changes in coverage, driven in part by how the overhaul affects insurance. But they say prudent business practices, not discrimination against the sick, are key factors behind some of the trends that have raised concerns.

They point out that if customers find a plan they don’t like, they generally have plenty of additional options to choose from both on and off the exchanges.

They also note that the overhaul takes several steps to discourage them from avoiding costly patients. It prevents insurers from marketing or designing a plan that would discourage someone from applying based on their health.

It also calls for insurers to chip into a pool that compensates competitors who wind up with a more expensive patient population.

That lowers their incentive for discouraging the sick from enrolling.

“Health plans now guarantee coverage for individuals and families regardless of health status,” said Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for the trade association America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP. There are three major ways insurers still might steer sick or expensive patients away from their coverage: - FORM NARROW NETWORKS Insurers can lower their chances for covering patients with expensive medical conditions like cancer and autism simply by limiting the number of doctors and hospitals in a coverage network. That would send those patients searching for coverage elsewhere because

An infusion drug to treat cancer is administered to a patient via intravenous drip at a cancer center hospital in Durham, N.C. Insurers can no longer reject customers with expensive medical conditions thanks to the health care overhaul, but patient advocates still see wiggle room for companies to avoid covering the sickest and costliest patients. An Associated Press survey in 2014 found that some of the nation’s top cancer centers were excluded from the networks of insurance plans sold on state exchanges.

they don’t want to pay expensive, out-of-network rates.

Narrow insurer networks might include only 30 percent or less of a market’s hospitals, as opposed to 70 percent or more for a broader network, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. These narrow networks have grown more common in recent years, especially in coverage sold on new public health insurance exchanges created by the overhaul.

An Associated Press survey of the nation’s top cancer centers this spring found that patients covered under the health care law could encounter barriers to access in many cases. For instance, MD Anderson Cancer Center said it is included in the networks of less than half of the plans sold on the Houston area’s public insurance exchange.

Aside from excluding patients, narrow networks also can help insurers form a healthy customer base by lowering the cost of coverage. A narrow provider network gives insurers leverage to squeeze better rates out of doctors who want to be included in that network in order to get the insurer’s business.

Better rates lead to lower premiums, and young and healthy people generally shop for insurance based on price.

“They’re the ones that don’t check the provider directory,” said Bob Laszewski, a former insurance executive turned industry consultant.

O M A H A P O L I C E B U L L E T K I L L S ` C O P S ’ F I L M C R E W M E M B E R Frame grabs from security video showing an armed robbery at a Wendy’s restaurant in Omaha is displayed during a news conference at police headquarters in Omaha, Neb., Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. Bryce Dion, a sound technician with the “Cops” television show who was embedded with Omaha police, was killed on Tuesday during an armed robbery at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant.

The armed robber was shot and died as well.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) -- When the call came from an officer who needed help facing an armed robber at a fast-food restaurant, two members of a reality television show riding along with Omaha police hustled to record the confrontation.

In the chaotic scene that unfolded, one crew member was struck by “friendly fire” from one of the officers, a bullet slipping past his bulletproof vest and killing him, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said Wednesday. The robbery suspect was also killed. The weapon he was carrying turned out to be a pellet gun, though it looked and sounded so real that both witnesses and officers were fooled, Schmaderer said.

Bryce Dion, 38, of Boston, the audio supervisor for “Cops,” is the first crew member of the long-running TV show to be killed while filming police in action, executives with the show’s production company said. Police identified the robbery suspect as 32-year-old Cortez Washington, who was on parole from Missouri for a robbery conviction.

Schmaderer told reporters that police and prosecutors have reviewed the “Cops” video of Tuesday’s shooting and found that the officers “had no choice” but to open fire, though a grand jury will still be tasked with investigating.

Schmaderer said the incident began when drive-thru customers alerted Detective Darren Cunningham - on his way to a different robbery scene in midtown Omaha - to an armed robbery at a Wendy’s. Cunningham called for backup, and Officers Brooks Riley and Jason Wilhelm - along with Dion and a “Cops” cameraman arrived at the restaurant within 15 seconds, Schmaderer said.

The “Cops” crew followed the officers into the restaurant. There, police confronted a hooded and masked man. The cameraman darted into the dining area, crouched behind a low wall and held up

his camera to record the confrontation. But Dion didn’t make it past the glass-enclosed entrance to the restaurant. Almost immediately, Schmaderer said, the suspect raised his gun and fired twice.

Schmaderer said three witnesses described Washington firing his gun directly at Cunningham and Riley. “The witnesses described hearing the suspect’s handgun being fired and seeing the slide recoil with the shots,” he said.

Officers returned fire, hitting Washington, who still managed to run from the store. Officers continued firing as Washington - his gun still pointed at police - entered the glass vestibule, Schmaderer said. It was then that a bullet hit Dion in the chest, Schmaderer said.

Washington collapsed in the restaurant parking lot.

After the shooting, police discovered that Washington’s weapon was an air gun that shoots only plastic pellets.

Washington’s criminal record included an accessory to robbery conviction from Missouri for which he was on parole. He moved to Nebraska in September 2013, and his parole was due to expire in June 2017.

“Cops” started on Fox in 1989 and is now shown on the Spike network. According to the “Cops” website, the show has been filmed in at least 140 U.S. cities and three foreign countries.

Langley Productions President John Langley and Executive Producer Morgan Langley described Dion as talented - “one of our best” - who had worked for the show for seven years.

“He did something that he loved and was passionate about,” Morgan Langley said. “We’ve been very fortunate over the years; we’ve never had an incident like this. Now we’re dealing with it, and it’s a very sad day for us.”

In 2010, a TV crew for the A&E reality show “The First 48” recorded a Detroit police raid in which a 7-year-old girl was accidentally killed by an officer. That incident highlighted concerns about whether TV cameras influence police behavior, perhaps encouraging showboating. But some experts and officers believe TV crews increase accountability.

Schmaderer bristled at the suggestion that his officers overreacted knowing that cameras were recording them, calling it “absolutely ridiculous.”

The police chief said he accepted the invitation from “Cops” to film in Omaha in the name of transparency. “Personally, I will live with this forever,” Schmaderer said. “If I’d have known that this would happen, of course, I wouldn’t have done it.”

- CAUSE PRESCRIPTION STICKER SHOCK Some plans are requiring patients to initially pay 30 percent or more of the bill for drugs that can cost several thousand dollars a month.

HIV drugs and multiple sclerosis medications are among them.

The overhaul caps the annual amounts patients are required to pay for these so-called out-of-pocket expenses. Still, some say the higher cost-sharing requirements can steer patients that need these medications away from enrolling.

“It’s another way to send a message to sicker patients that says, `If you’re taking these medications, we’d rather not sell insurance to you,” Flanagan said.

The AIDS Institute filed a complaint with U.S. Health and Human Services department earlier this summer against four Florida insurance companies over the issue.

Insurers say their plans follow HHS guidelines and cover all medically necessary HIV drugs. They also note that the price patients pay reflects, to some degree, what drugmakers charge for their medications.

Insurers also say customers have options if they find a prescription plan they dislike. In some markets, a customer may have more than a dozen choices, some of which might offer better coverage or a lower-cost alternative for their prescriptions.

But AIDS Institute Deputy Executive Director Carl Schmid said he worries that patient choices will dissolve over time if the high prescription payments spread to other insurers in a market, and “the good plans will become the bad plans.”

- ENTER MARKETS CAUTIOUSLY Another way insurers might land a healthier population is by playing the waiting game.

The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group Inc., will dive into the overhaul’s public insurance exchanges with plans to sell 2015 individual coverage in 24 exchanges. That’s up from only four in 2014.

These exchanges debuted last fall and offer shoppers a chance to compare and buy policies, often with help from an income-based tax credit.

UnitedHealth’s delayed growth could be a savvy way to avoid some of the sickest patients who likely rushed to sign up for insurance in the initial year of the exchanges, said Laszewski, the industry consultant.

That could free UnitedHealth to enter markets and sign up healthier patients after other insurers, most likely nonprofits with deep community roots, have “taken the bullet” the first year, he said.

Health insurers are still figuring out plan options for 2015, so there are no signs yet that other insurers are following UnitedHealth’s example.

UnitedHealth said it had always planned a measured approach.

It needed a year to set up provider networks and see how the exchanges worked in their debut before deciding whether to plunge in deeper. Spokesman Tyler Mason said the insurer wasn’t waiting for those competitors to sign up all the sick patients first.

“Philosophically, we’ve always said the marketplaces would evolve over time and that they would be good markets and that reform is needed,” he said.

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 24 thru Sept 4 , 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

T E X A S A B U Z Z A B O U T P O S S I B L E P E R RY- C R U Z 2 0 1 6 B AT T L E maybe even used to be friends.”

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Two Texans, one White House. Is the 2016 Republican campaign trail big enough?

Perry is a monster fundraiser but relies heavily on Texas. Cruz has raised big bucks from a large national base that tends to give in small increments.

After plummeting from prime contender to political punchline three years ago, Gov. Rick Perry has spent months gearing up for a second run. And he’s turned his recent indictment on felony abuse-of-power charges into a campaign rallying cry.

Cruz has been unequivocal in standing behind Perry following the governor’s indictment for cutting off state funds to an office investigating statewide corruption after the Democratic district attorney who runs it ignored his calls to resign. But the two Republicans don’t always see eye-to-eye. Perry’s key selling point is his record as a job-creator, overseeing Texas’ white-hot economy. But Cruz counters that only the free market, not politicians offering tax incentives or pulling policy strings, as Perry has done, can create jobs.

But even as Perry works to convince conservatives that he’ll be better at coping with the national spotlight this time, he’s increasingly bumping up against his state’s junior senator, tea party darling Ted Cruz, whose firebomb approach on Capitol Hill has grassroots activists clamoring for him to make a White House run.

The prospect of a two-Texan presidential tilt is dominating political conversation in the state, even outshining a fiercely contested governor’s race - and starting to get noticed nationally. Perry’s preparations have long been obvious, while Cruz is working to raise his profile beyond just the far-right base and insert himself into the presidential conversation.

Asked about the 2016 prospects of both, Jim DeMint, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, replied, “I think Cruz even more than Perry right now.”

Though he’s not endorsing either yet, DeMint added, “Ted has become really the national conservative leader.”

Cruz and Perry, along with potential presidential rival Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, are addressing this weekend’s national gathering of Americans for Prosperity, the powerful group backed by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers. Cruz has made himself the star of such events, sometimes introduced as “our next president.”

At a recent national gathering organized by the conservative blog RedState, hundreds of attendees bowed their heads to pray for him, calling Cruz an instrument of God’s will.

Cruz himself says “time will tell” if he joins the presidential race.

Perry has made no secret he’s seriously considering a run.

Governor Rick Perry pauses as he addresses attendees at the 2014 Red State convention in Fort Worth, Texas. Two Texans, one White House. Is the 2016 Republican campaign trail big enough? After plummeting from a front-runner to political punchline three years ago, Governor Perry appears poised to run again _ hoping to convince conservatives he can better cope with the national spotlight.

Bush and Ross Perot in 1992. Things got testy that time, as the New England-born incumbent had his true-Texas credentials questioned by the billionaire Dallas businessman, with his exaggerated twang and outlandish axioms like, “If someone as blessed as I am is not willing to clean out the barn, who will?”

“I think they’re both running. They probably don’t like me saying it,” said Texas Republican Party chairman Steve Munisteri, who noted that Texas’ March 1 presidential primary in 2016 should make it the first to vote among large states, and could leave only one Texan standing.

Both, meanwhile, would be competing at least to start for the same slice of the Republican base, the religious and social conservatives energized by an intense mistrust of President Barack Obama.

Some Texas donors are already bracing for the prospect. “I’d be splitting dollars, no question,” said George Strake, Jr., a former Texas secretary of state and Perry 2012 donor who also served as Houston finance chairman for Cruz’s Senate campaign. “It’s going to split up a lot of people who used to give to the same one, or who

Two Texans haven’t competed for the presidency since George H.W.

D AY 3 O F B I G WAV E S E X P E C T E D I N S O U T H E R N C A L I F O R N I A “It’s like being born,” he said as he zipped his wetsuit and prepared to go back out. “You don’t know what the outcome will be, but when you do make it through all that pressure is alleviated, it’s liberation, truly the feeling of liberation.”

Asked if he was afraid, he replied, “I was scared leaving my house. Dude, I was scared last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

Asked about the possibility that Cruz had outpaced him as Texas’ top conservative, Perry quipped in June, “Ask me in eight years if Senator Cruz has made an impact.”

At a recent event, Cruz made a subtle dig when he flubbed while counting off a list of his Senate accomplishments: “Victory number four - five,” Cruz said, adding, “I could say `oops,’ but that would make news.” That recalls Perry’s infamous 2011 “oops moment” brain freeze in a 2010 GOP debate that damaged his candidacy.

As the GOP field takes shape, Perry has been to Iowa five times since November, as well as to New Hampshire and South Carolina. Cruz has been to all three states even more often. His former regional director has founded a group called Draft Ted Cruz for President.

Jamie Johnson, a Republican Central Committee member in Iowa, which holds the first presidential caucus, says the buzz about 2016 is growing. Especially about Cruz.

“It’s not just name recognition or likability, it’s how much will people rearrange their schedule to go see someone or meet someone,” Johnson said “and that is happening for Ted Cruz.”

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Some gawkers had to park nearly 2 miles away and walk to the scene. One man rode a skateboard, carrying a baby. A man put a sign on his car offering his parking space for cash and another was selling commemorative T-shirts for $20 apiece.

Davin Galinto, left, and Dorian Ortloff recoil from a wave crashing against the board way on the Peninsula in Long Beach, Calif. during high tide on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014.

Hurricane Marie in the Pacific Ocean west of Mexico has caused higher than normal surf along the Southern California coast Wednesday.

Lifeguards up and down the coast sought to keep anyone out of the water who did not have strong experience and were kept busy making rescues all day.

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP) -- A third day of huge waves, dangerous rip currents and potential flooding was expected Thursday in Southern California as the coast felt the ripple effects of Tropical Storm Marie churning off the Mexican coast.

Residents of about four blocks of homes along Seal Beach, south of Los Angeles, swept seawater from ground-floor rooms, and bulldozers reinforced a 6-foot-tall sand berm hastily built to protect shoreline structures.

The biggest surf was expected at south-facing beaches in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, with wave sets topping 15 feet in some areas, according to the National Weather Service. A high surf advisory was in effect through Friday before calmer waters return.

The berm - a measure normally not needed until winter storms - and the use of pumps prevented more water intrusion during the Wednesday morning high tide.

The weather service called this week’s storm surge the most significant southerly swell event since July 25, 1996.

Spectators lined the shore of the Wedge in Newport Beach on Wednesday, where 20-foot waves were crashing and some of the world’s best surfers were riding.

“It’s as big as Southern California ever gets,” Peter Mel, a prominent big-wave surfer just back from an event in Tahiti, told the Orange County Register. “It’s perfect.”

Amateurs took to the water too, at least the experienced ones who wary lifeguards would allow in.

Among them was Joshua Magner, 35, who has been surfing since he was 10, and said being in the water was life-altering.

The towering waves and rip currents were being produced by swells generated by Hurricane Marie in the Pacific Ocean about 800 miles west of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. While Hurricane-generated waves reached California’s shores, the storm itself would remain far from the state.

Marie weakened to tropical storm levels, but life-threatening water conditions were expected to continue through Thursday.

West of Malibu, the old Cove House, used by lifeguards as a home base for decades, collapsed in big waves late Wednesday, several hours after it was emptied out.

“A lot of lifeguards have put a lot of time into it over the years.

It’s sad,” retired lifeguard Norm Chapman told KCBS-TV. “It’s hard not to get choked up.”

Two cargo terminals at the Port of Long Beach stopped opera-

POTECTING SPEICIES

www.worldwildlife.org

tions late Tuesday because surging, 10- to 15-foot-high waves endangered dockworkers.

The powerful surge also tossed heavy rocks from a seawall onto a road, causing damage and closing the roadway.

On Santa Catalina Island south of Los Angeles, a heavy surge Tuesday night sent sand, water and some 3,000-pound rocks into a boatyard, causing substantial damage and tossing some dry-docked boats off their stands, Avalon Harbor Master Brian Bray said.

The surge also tore away a floating children’s swim platform and closed several docks to incoming traffic.

Along the shoreline in Seal Beach, firefighters went door to door, dropping off more sandbags for residents and surveying damage after the initial surge late Tuesday that topped a 2 1/2 foot beach wall, causing flooding in or around the first row of homes. About 100 residences were affected, Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Steve Concialdi said.

Jaime and Blanca Brown’s seaside home had a foot of seawater throughout the home, garage and carport. Soaked floor tiles in the hallway were buckled, and a dirty line marked the high point of water in almost every room and the garage. Sodden mattresses and carpets were stacked outside.

The Malibu Pier was closed after pilings were knocked loose.

The pier’s structural integrity remained sound because of redundancy but people were asked to stay away, State Parks Department official Craig Sap he said.

____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________The Weekly News Digest, Aug 18 thru Sept 4, 2014

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A P P L E T O U N V E I L N E X T P R O D U C T S A T S E P T .

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Apple’s latest product launch will be in a setting that holds a special place in its history, signaling how big this event is for the company.

wearable technology devices, but hasn’t provided any concrete clues about what the company is working on. Cook has only said he is excited about what Apple’s latest inventions, a sentiment echoed by one of his top lieutenants, Eddy Cue, who earlier this year hailed the company’s product pipeline as its best in 25 years.

The Sept. 9 launch, which is expected to feature a larger iPhone and possibly a computerized watch, will be in the same Silicon Valley venue where Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, took the wraps off the original Mac computer 30 years ago. That machine was hailed as a major breakthrough that helped bring personal computing to the masses.

Apple has just been redesigning and adding features to its iPhones, iPads, iPods and Mac since the release of the iPad, raising concerns among investors that the company had run out of new ideas after the October 2011 death of Jobs, who served as its chief visionary.

These events have become an annual rite since the 2007 release of the iPhone, but this year’s may be the most highly anticipated since the iPad came out in 2010.

A “smartwatch” or other wearable technology would mark the company’s first foray into a new product category since the iPad came out.

True to its secretive nature, Apple Inc. isn’t giving any clues about what’s on the Sept. 9 agenda. “Wish we could say more,” Apple said in a succinct white invitation mailed Thursday to reporters and others.

The company scheduled the event at an auditorium about 3 miles from its Cupertino, California, headquarters. It seats about 2,300 people, a far larger capacity than the places that Apple usually

5 THINGS TO KNOW A B O U T E A R T H Q U A K E FA U LT S

In a Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011, file photo, a person stands near the Apple logo at the company’s store in Grand Central Terminal, in New York. Apple will show off its newest products Sept. 9, 2014. The iPhone and iPad maker set the date in invitations mailed Thursday, Aug. 28, 2014, to reporters and others who typically come to see the unveiling of Apple’s latest twists on technology.

uses to show off its new products.

Those worries have subsided during the past four months as the excitement has built for Apple’s new products. Apple’s stock hit a new high of $102.78 in Thursday morning’s trading before falling back to close at $102.25, up 12 cents for the session. The shares have risen 25 percent in 2014.

Apple watchers expect an iPhone with a larger screen than the 4-inch display on the previous two generations of the device.

The iPhone 6 is expected to feature a 4.7-inch screen to make it more competitive with larger smartphones made by Samsung Electronics and other rivals relying on Google Inc.’s free Android software. There also has been speculation that Apple may release another iPhone model with a 5.5-inch screen.

A bigger-screen iPhone could unleash a surge of sales among Apple fans who own iPhones with smaller displays. Some analysts think Apple could sell at least 70 million units of the iPhone 6 within the first few months after the device hits the market.

Although the iPhone is Apple’s biggest moneymaker, much of the intrigue around this year’s event surrounds the possibility that the company may release a long-awaited smartwatch that could help monitor people’s health and serve as control center for Internet-connected appliances and electronics in the home.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has indicated that he is intrigued with

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M U R D E R C H A R G E S F I L E D A G A I N S T P A K I S T A N P M et-star-turned-politician Imran Khan have been leading mass rallies for two weeks in Islamabad.

The demonstrations initially locked down Islamabad and disrupted life and business in much of the city. Lately, the rallies have mostly fizzled out but the crowds, which are camped out near the parliament and administration buildings in the heart of the city, still surge, especially in the evenings.

Contractors pull loose bricks from the roof of an earthquake damaged 36,000 square foot former boat shop on Mare Island Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2014, in Vallejo, Calif. The building dates from 1904 and was used by the Navy. The bayside city that twice was briefly the capital of California sustained more than $5 million in damage and dozens of injuries. It was the latest blow to a town that has weathered years of bankruptcy and is now beset by gangs and crime.

Khan and Qadri are demanding Sharif resign over allegations of vote fraud in last year’s elections - something the prime minister has repeatedly said he would not do, though he is prepared to negotiate on some of the other demands by the protesters.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The 6.0-earthquake that damaged buildings and left scores of people injured in California’s wine country was the largest temblor to hit the San Francisco Bay Area since the 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

Loma Prieta occurred on the extremely active San Andreas Fault. Seismologists say Sunday’s quake near Napa occurred on the lesser-known West Napa Fault, which has not been well-mapped.

“If you had put a bunch of seismologists and geologists together in a room and asked them where the next magnitude-6.0 quake would occur in the Bay Area, this would likely be the fifth fault they would name or the sixth,” said Jack Boatwright, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The amount we don’t know is overwhelming.”

Here are five things to know about faults in California: WHAT ARE FAULTS? - Faults are fractures between two blocks of rock that form the Earth’s crust. A big earthquake can result when the blocks move. But faults can be difficult to discover when there is nothing on the surface such as visible fissures to indicate their presence. At least part of the West Napa Fault falls into this category, according to Boatwright. An earthquake such as the temblor that struck Sunday can help scientists spot and study faults.

The speed at which one side of the fault slides past the other determines earthquake activity. The fastest moving faults have more and larger earthquakes.

HOW MANY FAULTS ARE THERE IN CALIFORNIA? - There are several hundred known faults in the state and others that are not known, said Lucy Jones, a seismologist with the USGS. About 200 are considered potentially hazardous, according to the state Department of Conservation.

WHAT IS AN ACTIVE FAULT? - Scientists consider an active fault to be one that has ruptured in the past 11,000 years, Jones said. The San Andreas is extremely active and produces a big earthquake every 100 to 200 years. It is blamed for the 1906 quake that led to devastating fires in San Francisco and leveled much of the city.

HAS THE WEST NAPA FAULT PRODUCED OTHER SIGNIFICANT QUAKES? - A magnitude-5.0 earthquake that also caused damage occurred in the Napa area in 2000.

DO QUAKES RELIEVE PRESSURE ON FAULTS? - Yes, but the pressure can be distributed to other parts of the fault, which can then produce other quakes. So Sunday’s temblor does not mean the West Napa Fault, which is thought to stretch about 20 miles, won’t see another quake of some significance. There are not enough small quakes to adequately relieve pressure and prevent big ones, Boatwright said.

Governor of Pakistan’s Sind province Ishratul Abad, left, talks with Muslim cleric Tahir-ul-Qadri, after failed negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014.

A Cabinet minister on Wednesday urged Pakistan’s two key opposition figures leading mass rallies outside parliament to back off their demand for the prime minister’s resignation in ongoing talks with the government. The call by Railways Minister Saad Rafiq came as authorities and the two opposition leaders — cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan and fiery cleric Tahir-ul-Qadri — were set to continue negotiations later Wednesday.

Qadri, a dual Pakistani-Canadian citizen with a wide following, emerged from a lengthy late night round with of meetings with government representatives to tell his followers that the talks had made no progress.

“I announce with regret that out talks with the government have failed,” Qadri said early Thursday. “We will now shut the door on any further talks.”

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistani police have registered allegations of abetting murder against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother over the June killing of 14 supporters of a cleric who is currently leading thousands of anti-government demonstrators in Islamabad.

Qadri has also demanded that Sharif and the premier’s younger brother, who is chief minister in the eastern Punjab province, be arrested over an incident in June in the eastern city of Lahore when 14 people were killed during clashes between Qadri’s supporters and police.

Police officer Sharif Sindhu said the case filed by cleric Tahir-ul-Qadri’s organization on Thursday includes 19 other defendants, including other ministers and police officers.

Under Pakistani law, the prime minister enjoys immunity and cannot be arrested as long as he is in office.

The case is linked to a June incident in the eastern city of Lahore in which Qadri’s supporters were killed in clashes with police. Lahore is the capital of Punjab province, for which Sharif’s younger brother Shahbaz serves as chief minister. He is also named in the case.

Qadri is demanding the Sharifs step down and be tried. The prime minister enjoys immunity as long as he remains in office.

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

A fiery Pakistani cleric who has been leading a mass rally outside parliament demanding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s resignation said on Thursday that he has “shut the door” on further talks with the government.

The development was a worrisome sign in the already troubled negotiations between the Pakistani government and the opposition amid a lingering crisis that has raised fears of political instability in this nuclear-armed country of 180 million people with a history of political turmoil and military dictatorships.

The cleric, Tahir-ul-Qadri, and Pakistan’s crick-

In a compromise gesture, Railways Minister Saad Rafiq who is leading the talks with the opposition said the government agreed to register the Lahore case with the local authorities meaning the incident would have to be investigated and could possibly go to trial.

“This case is being registered against all those people who have been named in the complaint” by Qadri, Rafiq said.

However, Rafiq said the government would never accept any unconstitutional demands, such as the disbanding of the parliament or Sharif’s resignation.

“Tahir-ul-Qadri wants the dissolution of assemblies and resignation of the prime minister,” he said. “We will never accept this demand.”

Sharif, whose election last May marked the first democratic transfer of power since Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947, cancelled a planned official visit to Turkey on Thursday to deal with the situation.

Sharif was forced once before from office during a previous stint as premier, when the then-army chief Pervez Musharraf seized power in a coup in 1999.

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The Weekly News Digest, Aug 24 thru Sept 4 , 2014 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

U N P A N E L : G L O B A L WA R M I N G H U M A N - C A U S E D , D A N G E R O U S

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Global warming is here, human-caused and probably already dangerous - and it’s increasingly likely that the heating trend could be irreversible, a draft of a new international science report says.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday sent governments a final draft of its synthesis report, which combines three earlier, gigantic documents by the Nobel Prize-winning group. There is little in the report that wasn’t in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to connect the different scientific disciplines studying problems caused by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas.

The 127-page draft, obtained by The Associated Press, paints a harsh warning of what’s causing global warming and what it will do to humans and the environment. It also describes what can be done about it.

“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” the report says. The final report will be issued after governments and scientists go over the draft line by line in an October conference in Copenhagen.

Depending on circumstances and values, “currently observed impacts might already be considered dangerous,” the report says. It mentions extreme weather and rising sea levels, such as heat waves, flooding and droughts. It even raises, as an earlier report did, the idea that climate change will worsen violent conflicts and refugee problems and could hinder efforts to grow more food. And ocean acidification, which comes from the added carbon absorbed by oceans, will harm marine life, it says.

Without changes in greenhouse gas emissions, “climate change risks are likely to be high or very high by the end of the 21st century,” the report says.

In 2009, countries across the globe set a goal of limiting global warming to about another 2 degrees Fahrenheit above current levels. But the report says that it is looking more likely that the world will shoot past

change, there’s still a level of uncertainty about how much, and that makes the problem all about how much risk we accept, said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel.

If it’s soon and only a little risk, he said, that’s not too bad, but when you look at the risk curve the other end of it is “very frightening.”

The report used the word risk 351 times in just 127 pages.

Flash flood waters from the overrun Skunk Creek flood I-10 in northwestern Phoenix.

Global warming is here, human-caused and can already be considered dangerous, a draft of a new international science report says, warning that it is increasingly likely that climate change could be irreversible. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday sent governments a final draft of its synthesis report, which combines three earlier, gigantic documents by the Nobel Prize-winning group. There is little in the report, that wasn’t in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to paint a bigger picture of the problem caused by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas.

that point. Limiting warming to that much is possible but would require dramatic and immediate cuts in carbon dioxide pollution.

The report says if the world continues to spew greenhouse gases at its accelerating rate, it’s likely that by mid-century temperatures will increase by about another 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) compared to temperatures from 1986 to 2005. And by the end of the century, that scenario will bring temperatures that are about 6.7 degrees warmer (3.7 degrees Celsius).

“The report tells us once again what we know with a greater degree of certainty: that climate change is real, it is caused by us, and it is already causing substantial damage to us and our environment,” Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann wrote in an email. “If there is one take home point of this report it is this: We have to act now.”

John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, is in the tiny minority of scientists who are skeptical of mainstream science’s claim that global warming is a major problem. He says people will do OK: “Humans are clever. We shall adapt to whatever happens.”

While projections show that the world will warm and climate will

G R O U P F I L E S P E T I T I O N T O I D L E C O A S T A L N U K E P L A N T The petition echoes those concerns. The group argues the reactors located between Los Angeles and San Francisco should remain closed until a rigorous safety review is completed and PG&E amends its license.

Following the AP report, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee announced it would hold hearings into how the NRC has handled Peck’s recommendation, which was filed in July 2013.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An environmental group asked federal regulators Tuesday to idle California’s last operating nuclear plant to review whether its reactors can withstand strong shaking from nearby earthquake faults.

The conflict between Peck and his superiors stems from the 2008 discovery of the Shoreline fault, which snakes offshore about 650 yards from the reactors. A larger crack, the Hosgri fault, had been discovered in the 1970s about 3 miles away, after the plant’s construction permits had been issued and work was underway.

Surveys have mapped a network of other faults north and south of the reactors.

Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group critical of the nuclear power industry, filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking for a hearing on seismic risks at the Diablo Canyon plant. The group says the plant is violating its federal operating license.

According to Peck’s filing, PG&E research in 2011 determined that any of three nearby faults - the Shoreline, Los Osos and San Luis Bay - is capable of producing significantly more ground motion during an earthquake than was accounted for in the design of important plant equipment.

Neighboring faults, one about 650 yards from the plant, pose “a serious safety risk to the public and the environment,” the 92page petition said.

The NRC says the Hosgri fault presents the greatest earthquake risk and that Diablo Canyon’s reactors can withstand the largest projected quake on it. But Peck writes that after officials learned of the Hosgri fault’s potential shaking power, the NRC never required changes in the structural strength of many systems and components in the plant.

The NRC, which oversees the nation’s commercial nuclear power industry, and Diablo Canyon owner Pacific Gas and Electric Co., have said the nearly three-decade-old reactors, which produce enough electricity for more than 3 million people annually, are safe and that the facility complies with its operating license, including earthquake safety standards.

A statement from NRC spokeswoman Lara Uselding said the agency would review the petition. PG&E spokesman Blair Jones said the environmental group “is mischaracterizing the facts.”

“The plant was built with seismic safety in mind ... and is designed to withstand the largest potential earthquakes that could occur in the region,” Jones said. “Major components can continue to perform their safety functions during and after” a strong earthquake.

The petition was filed after The Associated Press disclosed Monday that a senior federal nuclear expert is urging the NRC to shut down the seaside plant until it can determine whether the twin reactors can withstand shaking from any of several nearby faults.

Michael Peck, who for five years was the NRC’s lead inspector at the plant, says in a 42-page, confidential report that the NRC is not applying the safety rules it set out for the plant’s operation.

The document, which was obtained and verified by AP, does not say the plant itself is unsafe. Instead, according to Peck’s analysis, no one knows whether the facility’s key equipment can withstand strong shaking from those faults - the potential for which was realized decades after the facility was built.

J A PA N L A B U N A B L E T O R E P L I C A T E S T E M C E L L R E S U LT S Riken Center for Development Biology director Ryoji Noyori speaks to the media after submitting the government-affiliated research center’s organizational overhaul plan to Japanese education, culture, sports and science minister at the ministry in Tokyo Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2014. Riken, the Japanese laboratory that retracted a paper reporting a potentially major breakthrough in stem cell research, said Wednesday its researchers have not managed to replicate the results.

Riken scientists said they are still trying to match results reported in two papers published by the journal Nature in January and then retracted in July. But they refused to say whether or not they expected to succeed in doing so.

TOKYO (AP) -- The Japanese laboratory that retracted a paper reporting a potentially major breakthrough in stem cell research said Wednesday its researchers have not managed to replicate the results.

Scientists at the government-affiliated Riken Center for Developmental Biology said they are still trying to match results reported in two papers published by the journal Nature in January and then retracted in July. But they refused to say whether or not they expected to succeed in doing so.

“It’s like asking scientists to try to predict the odds of winning a lottery,” said Shinichi Aizawa. Later in the press conference he said his analogy was not entirely apt in explaining his reluctance to speculate on the chances for success.

Riken scientist Haruko Obokata, originally lauded for leading the research that raised hopes for a discovery of a simple way to grow replacement tissue for various diseases, is participating in the experiments. They are to continue until next March.

Obokata and other researchers in Boston and Japan participating in the project said they used a simple procedure to turn ordinary cells from mice into stem cells. They exposed cells from spleens of newborn mice to a more acidic environment than they are used to.

Having failed to generate the stem cells using spleen cells from one type of mouse, the scientists plan to use cells from another type of mouse, and from other organs, and to alter the methods of stressing those cells, said lead researcher Hitoshi Niwa.

The discovery of problems with the original research caused an uproar and prompted an investigation at Riken.

One senior Japanese scientist involved in the research died earlier this month in an apparent suicide.

Riken announced plans Wednesday for an organizational overhaul to prevent any further problems, changing its director and halving the number of researchers.

F E D S P R O T E C T 2 0 S P E C I E S O F C O R A L A S T H R E A T E N E D This undated handout photo provided by NOAA shows Acropora globiceps which occurs in the Indo-Pacific; within U.S. waters it occurs in Guam, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Pacific Remote island areas and American Samoa.

NOAA announced Wednesday it will afford Endangered Species Act protections to 20 coral species. All 20 species will be listed as threatened, none as endangered. Fifteen of the newly listed species occur in the Indo-Pacific and five in the Caribbean.

Other threats include overfishing, runoff from the land, and some coastal construction, but those are lesser, Bernhart said.

Five species can be found off the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. They include pillar coral, rough cactus coral and three species of star coral. The other 15 are in the Pacific Ocean area near Guam and American Samoa, but not Hawaii.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal government is protecting 20 types of colorful coral by putting them on the list of threatened species, partly because of climate change.

The agency looked at listing 66 species, but Wednesday listed only 20 for various reasons. All are called threatened, not endangered. Two coral species were already listed.

As with the polar bear, much of the threat to the coral species is because of future expected problems due to global warming, said David Bernhart, an endangered-species official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These coral species are already being hurt by climate change “but not to the point that they are endangered yet,” he said.

Coral reefs, which are in trouble worldwide, are important fish habitats.

Climate change is making the oceans warmer, more acidic and helping with coral diseases like bleaching - and those “are the major threats” explaining why the species were put on the threatened list, Bernhart said in a Wednesday conference call.

The agency did not create any new rules yet that would prevent coral from being harvested or damaged.

“There is a growing body of expert scientists talking about a risk of mass extinction in the sea and on land,” said Elliott Norse, founder and chief scientist of the Marine Conservation Institute of Seattle. Coral “are organisms on the front line of anything that humans do.”