102 Search Results for ""associated press""

• The Income Gap Widens

  • From: austinrealestatenews
  • Description:

    The Great Recession is not the great American equalizer after all. It's been widely reported recently that this recession hit middle and low income families the hardest, while the wealthy have continued to prosper. It may be chic to save and everyone brags about coupon clipping, but the idea that "we are all in this together" may not actually be the case.
    
    According to the Associated Press, incomes have declined across all demographics, but at a greater percentage for middle and lower income groups. "Median income fell last year from $52,163 to $50,303, wiping out a decade's worth of gains to hit the lowest level since 1997." In fact, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to the point that the wealthiest ten percent of Americans earned 11.4 times those below the poverty line earning $12,000 a year. Previously, the highest earning difference was 11.22 times higher in 2003.
    
    The unemployment rate stands at a thirty year high of 9.7 and a great majority of those job losses have been lower income ones, particularly in construction and manufacturing. While wealthier Americans have had reductions in executive pay, far more of the middle and lower income earners have lost their jobs. This disparity between the rich and the poor is more pronounced in larger cities, like Atlanta, New York and Chicago.
    
    The recession seems to be coming to a close with signs that the economy is finally growing. The Commerce Department reported that the economy shrank less than expected, with gross domestic product dipping just 0.7 percent from April to June, after dropping 6.4 percent in the first quarter of the year (AP). Measuring the value of all goods and services, the GPD is a good barometer of the health of the economy.
    
    The better than anticipated numbers are attributed to businesses and consumers spending more than expected. The better news is largely credited to the government's $787 billion stimulus package and programs like Cash for Clunkers. What is not expected to improve anytime soon is the unemployment rate, which analysts believe will reach 10 percent by the end of the year.
    
    As hiring in most sectors remains stagnate and layoffs continue, the gap between the haves and have-nots is likely to widen. Congress is considering ways to regulate executive pay and this along with The Great Recession is not the great American equalizer after all. It's been widely reported recently that this recession hit middle and low income families the hardest, while the wealthy have continued to prosper. It may be chic to save and everyone brags about coupon clipping, but the idea that "we are all in this together" may not actually be the case.
    
    According to the Associated Press, incomes have declined across all demographics, but at a greater percentage for middle and lower income groups. "Median income fell last year from $52,163 to $50,303, wiping out a decade's worth of gains to hit the lowest level since 1997." In fact, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to the point that the wealthiest ten percent of Americans earned 11.4 times those below the poverty line earning $12,000 a year.
    
    The unemployment rate stands at a thirty year high of 9.7 and a great majority of those job losses have been lower income ones, particularly in construction and manufacturing. While wealthier Americans have had reductions in executive pay, far more of the middle and lower income earners have lost their jobs. This disparity between the rich and the poor is more pronounced in larger cities, like Atlanta, New York and Chicago.
    
    The recession seems to be coming to a close with signs that the economy is finally growing. The Commerce Department reported that the economy shrank less than expected, with gross domestic product dipping just 0.7 percent from April to June, after dropping 6.4 percent in the first quarter of the year (AP). Measuring the value of all goods and services, the GPD is a good barometer of the health of the economy.
    
    The better than anticipated numbers are attributed to businesses and consumers spending more than expected. The better news is largely credited to the government's $787 billion stimulus package and programs like Cash for Clunkers. What is not expected to improve anytime soon is the unemployment rate, which analysts believe will reach 10 percent by the end of the year.
    
    As hiring in most sectors remains stagnate and layoffs continue, the gap between the haves and have-nots is likely to widen. Congress considering ways to regulate executive pay along with President Obama suggesting higher taxes on the wealthy as one the ways to pay for health care reform, the resentment between the two ends of the income spectrum may also increase. While the Great Recession is the worst state the economy has been in since the Great Depression, some Americans are faring better than others.
    
    
    Ki's real estate business is based in Austin, Texas. His website gives comprehensive information on Austin real estate. His website provides future home buyers with a free search of homes in the Austin MLS along with a blog with statistics and commentary on Austin Texas real estate.

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• Pirates want 7 mil for hostage

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    MOGADISHU, Somalia – Somali pirates who are demanding $7 million in ransom for a British sailing couple said Saturday that boats from other countries are plundering Somalia's fish-rich waters.

    Ahmed Gadaf, who described himself as a spokesman for the pirates, said Western fishing vessels "harass" local fishermen and destroy their nets. Gadaf spoke to The Associated Press by satellite phone.

    Gadaf says the British couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, are safe and will not be harmed.

    The British government on Saturday reiterated its refusal to ransom the pair, saying in a statement that officials would not make any "substantive concessions to hostage-takers, and that includes the payment of ransom."

    The Chandlers were headed to Tanzania in their boat, the Lynn Rival, when a distress signal was sent Oct. 23. The British navy found their empty yacht on Thursday, and both have been in sporadic contact with the British media since.

    Illegal fishing off the coast of Somalia stirs strong passions in the country. The country's prime minister, Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, said in a speech Wednesday that many countries are fishing illegally in Somali waters and have pushed formerly profitable Somali fishermen into the pirate trade.

    He also said during Wednesday's appearance at London-based Chatham House think tank that many pirates are former fishermen "responding to the loss and disappearance of their livelihoods."

    Helene Bours, an expert on fisheries in Africa who works as a consultant for non-governmental organizations in Africa and Europe, said she was skeptical that international overfishing in Somalia had a significant effect on the rise of piracy.

    "The extent to which the piracy business has developed is way beyond a few fishermen turning (into) pirates," she said.

    Bours most international ships operated far from the Somali coast in order to bring in deep-sea fish, and would not be competing with smaller Somali fishing boats working closer to shore. She cautioned however, that the lack of reliable information from the chaotic country made any assessment unreliable.

    Sharmarke said he was aware of extensive foreign fishing off Somalia's coast.

    "I shall not name names, but suffice to say many countries are fishing illegally in Somali waters," he said. "We estimate that the value of the fish being taken from our waters is perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars."

    Pirate attacks have increased the last several weeks after the recent end of the monsoon season. An international armada is patrolling the region to try to stop the attacks.

    ____

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• The Great Recession Has Been a

  • From: austinrealestatenews
  • Description:

    It is hard to believe just two years ago in October the Dow Jones industrial set a record high of 14,164. According to the Associated Press, just one year after that it was at 8,451 in mid October 2008. Today the Dow is around 9,800. Stocks have rallied recently on signs that retail sales are improving. The last two years have been a bumpy ride.
    
    The AP recently broke down the economic numbers, putting into perspective just where the U.S. economy stands today. "The panic of last fall has been replaced by the resignation that the worst is over but it might be years before the economy booms again." It seems for every gain there is something else to put in the loss column. For example, while the stock market is steadily gaining ground, the total losses in the stock market from the peak of October 2007 to the bottom of March 2009 was a mind-boggling $11.2 trillion.
    
    A positive sign is that after steadily declining for fourteen months, retail sales increased 2.7 percent in August. But the unemployment rate in October 2008 was 6.2 percent and today it is 9.8 percent. Consumer confidence, which is measured on a scale of 1 to 100, was at a record low of 25.3 last October and this month it is 53.1. To put these numbers in perspective, two years ago consumer confidence stood at 95.2.
    
    Some oddly positive side effects of the Great Recession have been the increase in personal savings rate from 0.5 percent in 2005, when home prices were soaring, to 6.9 percent in May 2009. Also, credit card debt held by Americans last September was a staggering $975 billion. That number is down 8 percent now to $899 billion.
    
    To put the housing numbers in perspective, 2005 was a record year with 7 million home resales. January 2009 the annual rate of home resales was 4.5 million, but rose to 5.1 million in August. On the other hand, the median price of homes sold in 2006 was a record high $245,000. The median price of homes sold last October was $213,000 and dipped to $195,000 in August.
    
    Some other signs of the time: Starbucks launched an instant coffee product in September. PepsiCo Inc announced recently that it will continue to offer and develop products with price in mind, feeling customers will continue to be price-conscious even after the recession ends. Retailers will need to stay creative to entice shoppers this holiday season amid rising unemployment. Wall Street may be seeing a smoother path to recovery, but it's still a bumpy ride on Main Street.
    
    
    Ki works in Austin real estate. He works to help buyers find the perfect property. His website provides general information on Austin real estate. It also allows buyers to search for homes in the Austin MLS along with providing a free mortgage calculator.

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• SOUTH ASIA TSUNAMI

  • From: zackshields
  • Description:
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    A tsunami hurled by a powerful earthquake flattened Samoan villages and swept cars and people out to sea, killing at least 99 and leaving dozens missing Wednesday. The toll was expected to rise.

    The same day, western Indonesia was rocked by a strong underwater temblor, briefly triggering a tsunami alert for countries along the Indian Ocean and sending panicked residents out of their houses. The alert was later canceled.

    Survivors of the South Pacific islands tsunami fled the fast-churning water for higher ground and remained huddled there hours after the quake, with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3, struck around dawn Tuesday.

    The quake was centered about 125 miles (200 kilometers) from Samoa, an island nation of 180,000 people located about halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii. It was about 120 miles (190 kilometers) from neighboring American Samoa, a U.S. territory that is home to 65,000 people.

    Four tsunami waves 15 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) high roared ashore on American Samoa, reaching up to a mile (1.5 kilometers) inland, Mike Reynolds, superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa, was quoted as saying by a parks service spokeswoman.

    Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to determine damage and casualties.

    By KENI LESA and FILI SAGAPOLUTELE, Associated Press Writers Keni Lesa And Fili Sagapolutele, Associated Press Writers

    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Here are some the aftermath pictures in that part of the world.

    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    
    

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  • 2 months ago
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• AUSTRALIA RED SKY: GREAT VIDEO

  • From: zackshields
  • Description:
    Australia's worst dust storm in 70 years blanketed the heavily populated east coast Wednesday in a cloud of red Outback grit, nearly closed the country's largest airport and left millions of people coughing and sputtering in the streets.

    No one was hurt as a result of the pall that swept in overnight, bringing an eerie orange dawn to Sydney, but ambulance services reported a spike in emergency calls from people with breathing difficulties, and police warned drivers to take it easy on the roads.

    Dust clouds blowing east from Australia's dry interior — parched even further by the worst drought on record — covered dozens of towns and cities in two states as strong winds snatched up tons of topsoil, threw it high into the sky and carried it hundreds of miles (kilometers).

    International flights were diverted from Sydney to other cities — three from New Zealand were turned around altogether — and domestic schedules were thrown into chaos as operations at Sydney Airport were curtailed by unsafe visibility levels. Passenger ferries on the city's famous harbor were also stopped for several hours for safety reasons.

    The storms — visible as a huge brown smudge in satellite photographs of Australia on Wednesday — are the most severe since the 1940s, experts said. One was recorded traveling from southern Australia all the way to New Zealand some 1,400 miles (2,220 kilometers) away.

    By ROHAN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer – Wed Sep 23, 4:10 am ET

    Here is some of the video of the red and weird looking sky caused by the rare and massive dust storm.

    You can see the dust storm from space...impressive!

    

     

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  • 2 months ago
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• Mary Travers Dies P P& M

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    BOSTON – Mary Travers, who as one-third of the hugely popular 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary helped popularize such tunes as "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" and "If I Had a Hammer," died Wednesday after battling leukemia for several years. She was 72.

    The band's publicist, Heather Lylis, says Travers died at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut.

    Bandmate Peter Yarrow said that in her final months, Travers handled her declining health with bravery and generosity, showing her love to friends and family "with great dignity and without restraint."

    "It was, as Mary always was, honest and completely authentic," he said. "That's the way she sang, too; honestly and with complete authenticity."

    Noel "Paul" Stookey, the trio's other member, praised Travers for her inspiring activism, "especially in her defense of the defenseless."

    "I am deadened and heartsick beyond words to consider a life without Mary Travers and honored beyond my wildest dreams to have shared her spirit and her career," he said.

    Mary Allin Travers was born on Nov. 9, 1936 in Louisville, Ky., the daughter of journalists who moved the family to Manhattan's bohemian Greenwich Village. She quickly became enamored with folk performers like the Weavers, and was soon performing with Pete Seeger, a founding member of the Weavers who lived in the same building as the Travers family.

    With a group called the Song Swappers, Travers backed Seeger on one album and two shows at Carnegie Hall. She also appeared (as one of a group of folk singers) in a short-lived 1958 Broadway show called "The Next President," starring comedian Mort Sahl.

    It wasn't until she met up with Yarrow and Stookey that Travers would taste success on her own. Yarrow was managed by Albert B. Grossman, who later worked in the same capacity for Bob Dylan.

    In the book "Positively 4th Street" by David Hajdu, Travers recalled that Grossman's strategy was to "find a nobody that he could nurture and make famous."

    The budding trio, boosted by the arrangements of Milt Okun, spent seven months rehearsing in her Greenwich Village apartment before their 1961 public debut at the Bitter End.

    Their beatnik look — a tall blonde flanked by a pair of goateed guitarists — was a part of their initial appeal. As The New York Times critic Robert Shelton put it not long afterward, "Sex appeal as a keystone for a folk-song group was the idea of the group's manager ... who searched for months for `the girl' until he decided on Miss Travers."

    The trio mingled their music with liberal politics, both onstage and off. Their version of "If I Had a Hammer" became an anthem for racial equality. Other hits included "Lemon Tree," "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and "Puff (The Magic Dragon.)"

    They were early champions of Dylan and performed his "Blowin' in the Wind" at the August 1963 March on Washington.

    And they were vehement in their opposition to the Vietnam War, managing to stay true to their liberal beliefs while creating music that resonated in the American mainstream.

    The group collected five Grammy Awards for their three-part harmony on enduring songs like "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" and "Blowin' in the Wind."

    At one point in 1963, three of their albums were in the top six Billboard best-selling LPs as they became the biggest stars of the folk revival movement.

    It was heady stuff for a trio that had formed in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village, running through simple tunes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

    Their debut album came out in 1962, and immediately scored a pair of hits with their versions of "If I Had a Hammer" and "Lemon Tree." The former won them Grammys for best folk recording, and best performance by a vocal group.

    "Moving" was the follow-up, including the hit tale of innocence lost, "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" — which reached No. 2 on the charts, and generated since-discounted reports that it was an ode to marijuana.

    Album No. 3, "In the Wind," featured three songs by the 22-year-old Dylan. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and "Blowin' in the Wind" both reached the top 10, bringing Dylan's material to a massive audience; the latter shipped 300,000 copies during one two-week period.

    "Blowin' In the Wind" became an another civil rights anthem, and Peter, Paul and Mary fully embraced the cause. They marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and performed with him in Washington.

    In a 1966 New York Times interview, Travers said the three worked well together because they respected one another. "There has to be a certain amount of love just in order for you to survive together," she said. "I think a lot of groups have gone down the tubes because they were not able to relate to one another."

    With the advent of the Beatles and Dylan's switch to electric guitar, the folk boom disappeared. Travers expressed disdain for folk-rock, telling the Chicago Daily News in 1966 that "it's so badly written. ... When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers."

    But the trio continued their success, scoring with the tongue-in-cheek single "I Dig Rock and Roll Music," a gentle parody of the Mamas and the Papas, in 1967 and the John Denver-penned "Leaving on a Jet Plane" two years later.

    They also continued as boosters for young songwriters, recording numbers written by then-little-known Gordon Lightfoot and Laura Nyro.

    In 1969, the group earned their final Grammy for "Peter, Paul and Mommy," which won for best children's album. They disbanded in 1971, launching solo careers — Travers released five albums — that never achieved the heights of their collaborations.

    Over the years they enjoyed several reunions, including a performance at a 1978 anti-nuclear benefit organized by Yarrow and a 35th anniversary album, "Lifelines," with fellow folkies Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk and Seeger. A boxed set of their music was released in 2004.

    They remained politically active as well, performing at the 1995 anniversary of the Kent State shootings and performing for California strawberry pickers.

    Travers had undergone a successful bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia and was able to return to performing after that.

    "It was like a miracle," Travers told The Associated Press in 2006. "I'm just feeling fabulous. What's incredible is someone has given your life back. I'm out in the garden today. This time last year I was looking out a window at a hospital." She also said she told the marrow donor "how incredibly grateful I was."

    But by mid-2009, Yarrow told WTOP radio in Washington that her condition had worsened again and he thought she would no longer be able to perform.

    Travers lived for many years in Redding, Conn. She is survived by her husband, Ethan Robbins and daughters, Alicia and Erika.

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• I Object to the wrong portraya

  • From: gwgiere
  • Description:

    I object to the wrong portrayal of normal "Straight" people. Tyler Perry was portrayed as a "crossdressor" in the Associated Press release. this WRONG. Get it right OR keep comments to yourself. Don't report lies. He, Tyler Perry, is the Star of the show, and he is not a crossdressor. "Perry co-stars as his brash, cross-dressing alter ego, Madea." He is dressed as the character is written. Not a crossdresser. Again, get it RIGHT, or don't put LIES on the NEWS. GG  

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• GOV"S affair angers Gop

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. – Republican legislators fumed Saturday over Gov. Mark Sanford's affair and questionable travel, though they stopped short of trying to force his resignation or impeachment before they return to the Statehouse in January.

    Still, the House GOP Caucus that dominates the lower chamber with 73 of the body's 124 members made two things clear — they want Sanford gone and they want to act soon. However, lawmakers are waiting to make any decisions until the state ethics commission finishes its investigation. And starting impeachment proceedings now could require a costly and special session.

    In all, 56 members were on hand and not one raised a word to defend Sanford, who shocked state residents by disappearing for five days in June to rendezvous with his Argentine lover. Since then, investigations by The Associated Press and a state senator have prompted state Attorney General Henry McMaster to call for an ethics investigation. The probe has been under way for about a week.

    State Rep. Rita Allison was an education adviser to Sanford, and he supported her 2008 bid to return to a House seat she had held for years before running for lieutenant governor in 2002. Even Allison was mum when House President Pro Tem Harry Cato said Sanford supporters needed to raise their voices now.

    "That's because we want him to resign," Allison said afterward. "He made a choice. It wasn't our choice."

    Since news of his affair broke, three Associated Press investigations found Sanford used state aircraft for personal travel, violated state requirements by using high-priced air fare and didn't report use of private aircraft.

    Sanford has said the news reports reflect "cherry-picking" of his records and that he only followed the practices set by other governors. He's also brushed aside other criticism and investigations as politically motivated.

    House Speaker Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, said he's been telling Sanford for weeks legislators and the public are angry. On Saturday, he urged the GOP caucus to hold off on any action involving an impeachment resolution until the state Ethics Commission wrapped up its probe.

    "Members of the caucus are disappointed in him, angry with him and in some ways disgusted by the whole thing and they want to deal with it and they want to deal with it as quickly as possible," Harrell said.

    Sanford issued a statement Saturday about the caucus but didn't directly address the disgust of lawmakers.

    "It's also important to reiterate what we said yesterday: that we're dedicated to an open and fair ethics process, and would further urge all levels of state government to embrace that same transparency," the statement said.

    Harrell said he'll continue gauging sentiment in the caucus on whether it should send a joint letter calling for Sanford to resign. But legislators left without taking any action.

    Two-thirds of the House would have to approve an impeachment resolution; two-thirds of the Senate would have to approve Sanford's removal from office.

    Ethics commission director Herb Hayden said it could take as long as six months for commissioners to review the investigation, schedule hearings and reach a decision. Harrell said that wouldn't be acceptable and hoped it could be wrapped up in a matter of weeks.

    "If we can get the results of their investigation from them, I think that would suffice for us to make a determination on how we should proceed," he said.

    State Rep. Greg Delleney, R-Chester, said there was already enough proof of misconduct.

    "He has disgraced the office of governor of South Carolina," Delleney said. "He has disgraced and brought shame on the state."

    Delleney laid out specifics of the impeachment resolution he is drafting, noting Sanford "planned this trip that he wanted to take all because he wanted to have sex with a woman that he wasn't married to." He said that amounted to a "premeditated dereliction of duty."

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• Girl missing 18 yrs Found

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    ANTIOCH, Calif. – Phillip Garrido's unspeakable private life began unraveling in a very public place: a college campus.

    He arrived Monday at the police office at the University of California, Berkeley, with two girls, ages 11 and 15. He announced he wanted to hold a religious event on campus related to a group called God's Desire. He seemed weird and unstable. But it was the pale, blonde, blue-eyed girls in drab dresses who really set off alarm bells.

    "There were some things about him and the kids that were really alarming, that just didn't settle right with me," said Lisa Campbell, the department's manager of special events, who previously worked as a police officer in Chicago and a background investigator for the Los Angeles Police Department.

    So she arranged another meeting for the next day, and called upon officer Ally Jacobs to join her. Jacobs ran a records check — and discovered that Garrido was a registered sex offender who had been convicted of rape and kidnapping more than 30 years ago.

    The girls unnerved Jacobs, as well. They seemed programmed — "almost like `Little House on the Prairie' meets robots," she says.

    The younger girl "was staring directly at me," says Jacobs, the mother of two small boys. "It was almost like she was looking into my soul. ... Her eyes were so penetrating."

    When Jacobs asked her about a bump near her eye, "she immediately replied with this very rehearsed response: `It's a birth defect ... I'll have it for the rest of my life.'

    "I was a little taken aback. ... She just wouldn't stop smiling."

    The older daughter, meanwhile, stared at the ceiling and looked at her father "in awe, as if she were in worship of him. I kind of got the feeling that these kids were like robots."

    Garrido gave them copies of his book he had written called "Origin of Schizophrenia Revealed." They had a hard time following his conversation.

    But he revealed the girls were home-schooled by his wife, with an assist from him. The girls said they had an older sister at home, 28 or 29, and that seemed strange, too, that she was even mentioned.

    Finally, Jacobs says, Garrido grabbed his oldest daughter and said: "'I'm so proud of my girls. They don't know any curse words. We raised them right. They don't know anything bad about the world.'"

    By then, she says, "my police mode turned into my mother mode."

    A call was made to Garrido's parole officer. A terrible secret was about to be revealed.

    ___

    Garrido — known to kids as "Creepy Phil" in his neighborhood — had a reputation for peculiarity. He rambled nonsensically. He was dismissed as "kind of nutty." He said God spoke to him through a box.

    Neighbors were worried enough about him to call police, but no one knew how bizarre his world truly was until last week when authorities revealed the stunning news: Hidden in the backyard of his cinderblock house on Walnut Avenue, behind a 6-foot (1.8-meter) fence, leafy trees and a tarp, was a compound of weathered tents, wood sheds and buildings.

    What looked like a messy campground with mattresses, small chairs, bikes, books, piles of toys, a trampoline, showers, an outhouse, swing set — even a carved pumpkin — was really a prison, of sorts. Its inmate: Jaycee Lee Dugard, the carefree little girl abducted in 1991 who, authorities say, had been raped, held captive and shut off from society for nearly two decades.

    As shocking as that was, there was one more stunning revelation: Jaycee was now a 29-year-old mother. She had given birth to two of her suspected abductor's children, two girls raised in isolation. They had, according to authorities, never attended school, never visited a doctor — and Jaycee, it seems, had never reached out to anybody.

    When Jaycee resurfaced last week — she called herself Allissa — 18 years had passed. One daughter was 15, the other 11, the same age Jaycee was that day when she was heading to catch a school bus and instead was pulled screaming into a Ford Granada and driven here, 170 miles (273 kilometers) from home.

    Garrido, 58, and his 54-year-old wife, Nancy, were arrested last week in that kidnapping. On Friday, they appeared in court and pleaded not guilty to more than two dozen charges, including forcible abduction, rape and false imprisonment.

    Even with their arrests, there are more questions than answers in this mystery, questions about who knew about Jaycee, why she remained there, how she and her children lived — and how a man with a rap sheet, a parole officer and years of suspicious behavior managed to keep a sordid secret even when authorities were in his house.

    ___

    Diane Doty has lived for 16 years in a house with a yard that abuts the one connected to the Garrido home.

    From her deck, she could she could see tarps, but the trees concealed much else. Doty says she could hear kids in the back but they sounded normal. She thought she could also hear a shower.

    "I asked my husband, 'Why is he living in tents?' And he said, 'Maybe that is how they like to live.'"

    Monica Adams, 33, whose mother, Betty, lives on the street said Garrido once set up speakers at a party she was having at her parents' home, but stuck around even though he wasn't invited. She kicked him out because he was acting weird and staring at all the women.

    Adams was watching the news later that night and discovered the public could look for sex offenders in their communities. She went online — and found Garrido's name. "We were irate and we told all of our neighbors," she says.

    She knew children were living with him, but she says she figured he was a registered sex offender who was being checked up on by law enforcement.

    Her confidence was misplaced. Authorities bungled many chances to catch Garrido and rescue Jaycee.

    In November 2006, a neighbor called police and described Garrido as a psychotic sex addict who was living with children and had people staying in tents in his backyard.

    A sheriff's deputy talked with Garrido a half-hour on his front porch, but he didn't enter the house or walk into the backyard. He left warning the tents could be a code violation. He did not know Garrido was a convicted sex offender even though his office had that information.

    "I cannot change the course of events but we are beating ourselves up over this and continue to do so," Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren E. Rupf said. "We should have been more inquisitive, more curious and turned over a rock or two."

    Garrido was 25 when he was convicted of a federal kidnapping charge and a state forcible rape charge after snatching a 25-year-old woman from a South Lake Tahoe, California, parking lot, handcuffing her, tying her down and holding her in a storage unit in Reno in November 1976.

    In his 1977 federal trial in Reno, Garrido testified that he took four hits of LSD after seizing the woman, and that he had used LSD, cocaine, marijuana, hashish and other drugs since 1968.

    He had confessed to a Reno police detective Dan DeMaranville, telling him that he preferred sex by force. DeMaranville, since retired, described the storage unit where the rape occurred as a "sex palace," with a bed, rugs on the floor and walls, various sex aids, sex magazines and videos, stage lights and wine.

    "He had it set up real cozy," DeMaranville recalled.

    He was sentenced to 50 years for the kidnapping conviction and life for the rape conviction but was granted an early release in August 1988.

    As a parolee, Garrido also wore a global positioning satellite-linked ankle bracelet that tracked his every movement, met with his parole agent several times each month and was subject to routine surprise home visits and random drug and alcohol tests, authorities said. The latest was conducted just last month.

    Garrido's life may have been a secret, but his strangeness was there for all to see.

    Just last Monday, he marched into the FBI office in San Francisco, leaving behind documents containing rambling passages about religion, mind control and sexual compulsion. The documents, obtained by The Associated Press, do not mention Dugard.

    "I'm a very powerful man," he later boasted to KCRA-TV, a Sacramento station. "When you get these documents in your hands you are going to fall over."

    Religion rants had become increasingly common for Garrido. Tim Allen, president of East County Glass and Window Inc., heard them frequently as he came to know Garrido when he bought business cards and letterhead from his printing business.

    He said Garrido once brought a "box" into his shop that he claimed channeled God's voice. He then opened it and asked "Can you hear?" then spoke as if his voice were God's. He had a blog, too, claiming to have the ability to speak to people through his mind.

    Allen also recalls Garrido bringing two little blonde girls into his showroom years ago who were "clingy."

    But he says he was unaware of Garrido's criminal past and felt sorry for him. "You never thought anything bad about the guy," he says. "He was just kind of nutty."

    Garrido's own father, Manuel, has a harsher assessment. His son, he says, is "absolutely out of his mind" and he traces his problems to a bad motorcycle accident long ago when he went from a "comical, funny" boy to someone who fell in with the wrong crowd and took LSD.

    Whatever the root of his problems, after Garrido's encounter with campus police at Berkeley, his parole officer told him to come in.

    ___

    Garrido arrived for the meeting on Wednesday. He was accompanied by his wife, two girls and a blonde woman who initially identified herself as Allissa — in fact, Jaycee Lee Dugard. During that conversation, investigators say, Garrido confessed to the kidnapping.

    Her family had waited 18 years for some word on Jaycee. Her mother, Terry Probyn, had never give up hope.

    Nearly a decade earlier, on the 10th anniversary of Jaycee's disappearance, Terry returned to the South Lake Tahoe area from her Southern California home for a pink-ribbon parade — in honor of Jaycee's favorite color, the color of the jacket and stretch pants the fifth grader wore the day she was abducted.

    "Someone out there knows what happened," her mother said then. "We need peace. Give us that gift."

    The gift arrived with a miraculous phone call. Then came a reunion.

    Both mother and daughter are avoiding the spotlight, according to Jaycee's stepfather, Carl Probyn.

    Jaycee, he says, greeted her mother by saying, "Hi, Mom, I have babies." Her two daughters apparently were never told she was kidnapped, her stepfather says.

    Sitting in his dimly lit house in Orange, Probyn has vivid memories of that morning, how he saw Jaycee snatched, how he hopped on his mountainbike, furiously pedaling up a twisted road, his legs no match for the Granada's horsepower.

    "After 18 years, you never think she'd be alive," he says. Framed pictures of Jaycee sit on the kitchen table. In one, she's a fresh-faced girl in a sweater with an embroidered cat. In a Christmas picture, she's next to her half-sister Shayna, who was just 14 months old when Dugard was abducted.

    Authorities say they do not yet know whether Jaycee ever tried to escape or notify anyone of her location. But she apparently had chances to flee; Garrido did a stint behind bars during the time she was held captive.

    "Jaycee has strong feelings with this guy," Probyn told the AP. "She really feels it's almost like a marriage."

    He also points out Probyn says Jaycee was a mellow, easygoing girl who never got mad at anyone. She probably wouldn't climb a wall to escape.

    Maybe, he says, that's why she's alive today.

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• The Truth Behind the Housing N

  • From: austinrealestatenews
  • Description:

    The recent headlines have trumpeted a rebound in the American housing market. According to the Associated Press, July's 7.2 percent increase in home sales was the biggest month-to-month jump in the last ten years. But before breathing a sigh of relief and checking Zillow for increased home values, it might be a good idea to look at the story behind the new and improved numbers.
    
    A big chunk of the recent increase is first-time home buyers taking advantage of the tax credit. One third of recent home sales are due to the $8000 incentive for first-time home buyers, which will end in November. Another third of the recent sales across the nation are actually foreclosures. According to a recent report on NBC news, home prices overall are down 23 percent in the last year, largely due to the number of foreclosures across the country.
    
    NBC news broke down the numbers even further, showing that the biggest surge in home sales are for homes under $100,000. While sales of homes in this price range rose an impressive 39 percent in the last month, sales for homes over $250,000 are actually down. In fact, the higher the price tag the fewer homes are selling.
    
    Better numbers in several sectors of the economy, including housing, have led Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to announce that the U.S. economy is on the verge of recovery. He said at a Federal Reserve conference in Wyoming that "the prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good." Not a resounding endorsement of the world economy, but certainly keeping to the more positive tone he has taken lately.
    
    According the Associated Press, Bernanke continues to stress the importance of freeing up consumer credit, stating this is the key to any kind of long term economic recovery. However, banks continue to be careful with lending to consumers. Mortgage defaults remain at an all time high--which brings us back to the housing numbers. While foreclosures continue to less of a factor in Austin as they are in other parts of the country, they are taking a toll on the economy as a whole.
    
    As the latest housing numbers have indicated, foreclosures are great for bargain hunters but bad for the housing sector and the overall economy. It only takes one foreclosure in a neighborhood to skew the assessment of overall home values in that area. Mortgage defaults that lead to foreclosures cost banks a significant amount of money. The banks in turn raise rates on credit cards and fees to recoup some of these losses, along with making fewer loans overall.
    
    The real estate industry is lobbying Congress to get an extension on the first-time buyers' tax credit, because many industry analysts are predicting a plunge in the housing numbers after November. "I would not be at all surprised to see a dip at the end of the year once the tax credit expires," Robert Dye, senior economist with PNC Financial Services Group, told the AP.
    
    Austin continues to weather this long recession better than the rest of the country, but let's hope the story behind the national numbers gets better.
    
    
    Ki moved to Austin for school. After graduation, he started working in the Austin real estate market. He has a website where future owners can search the Austin MLS. His website also has a blog with updates in Austin Texas real estate.

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• jACKOS DOTOR iNDICTED

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    LOS ANGELES – Authorities investigating Michael Jackson's death referred to him as an "addict" and were seeking evidence related to the powerful anesthetic propofol, according to search warrants released Thursday.

    The documents show investigators have cause to believe several California Business and Professions codes had been broken, including "excessive prescribing," a misdemeanor punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to 180 days.

    Los Angeles police and federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents spent much of Tuesday at the Las Vegas home and business of Jackson's personal doctor, Conrad Murray, who is the focus of a manslaughter investigation. The raids sought evidence supporting that charge, as well as code violations, including "prescribing to an addict" and "unprofessional conduct."

    The state codes cover all prescribing professionals, including doctors and dentists, and violations could lead to a revoked or suspended license, said Kimberly Kirchmeyer, deputy director of the Medical Board of California. The codes state a physician cannot prescribe drugs to anyone with a chemical dependency or who is using the drugs for non-therapeutic purposes; they define an addict as someone who continues to use a drug despite harm, shows compulsive use or has impaired control over use.

    The warrants, which had been sealed when the searches were conducted, also said investigators wanted all documentation relating to the "purchase, transfer, receiving, ordering, delivery and storage of propofol."

    A law enforcement official earlier told The Associated Press that on the day Jackson died Murray gave him propofol to help him sleep and that investigators are working under the theory the anesthetic caused Jackson's heart to stop. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

    A cause of death has yet to be announced. The Los Angeles County coroner has twice said toxicology findings on Jackson were imminent but after meeting Thursday with investigators Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter announced an indefinite delay. Winter said further investigation needs to be done; he did not go into detail.

    Propofol, dubbed "milk of amnesia," is commonly used for surgeries and is not meant as a sleep agent or to be given in private homes. Because of its potency, only trained anesthesia professionals are supposed to administer it and patients are to be monitored at all times.

    Murray, a cardiologist, has spoken to police but not commented publicly since Jackson died June 25. His attorney, Edward Chernoff, did not comment Thursday, but has previously said the doctor did not prescribe anything that "should have" killed Jackson.

    Jackson was given anesthesia for numerous medical procedures over the years and had a long history of prescription drug use.

    Search warrants issued last week in Houston allowed authorities to search Murray's clinic and a storage unit. They were the first public acknowledgment that investigators consider Jackson's death a possible manslaughter and that Murray is the target of the investigation.

    The Las Vegas warrants were far more detailed and authorized authorities to look for medical and other records related to Jackson or any of the apparent 19 aliases he used, including the names Omar Arnold, Josephine Baker, Paul Farance, Jack London and Michael Amir Williams Muhammad.

    Among the items seized in the Vegas searches were an iPhone, copies of several computer hard drives, a CD with the name Omar Arnold on it and a binder containing invoices for medical equipment and supplies. No propofol was found.

    The warrant also shows investigators are seeking correspondence from seven doctors it names. One, Dr. Allan Metzger of Los Angeles, is an internist and rheumatologist who had a close relationship with Jackson beginning in 2002 and was godfather to one of the singer's children, said his attorney, Harland Braun.

    Braun said Jackson invited Metzger to his home April 18. He spent about an hour and a half with him, during which time Jackson asked about sleep medication, particularly propofol.

    Metzger told him it was dangerous, could be life threatening and should not be used outside a hospital, and suggested Jackson use some other sleep medication, Braun said.

    Metzger's experience echoed Cherilyn Lee, a registered nurse who gave Jackson nutritional counseling earlier this year, who said he complained of insomnia and asked her repeatedly for Diprivan, the brand-name version of propofol. Lee said she also warned him of the drug's dangers and rejected his requests.

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• Dr.gaveJackodrugs at death

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    LOS ANGELES – Michael Jackson's personal doctor administered a powerful anesthetic to help him sleep, and authorities believe the drug killed the pop singer, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Monday.

    The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, also provided a glimpse inside Jackson's rented mansion, describing the room Jackson slept in as outfitted with oxygen tanks and an IV drip. Another of his bedrooms was a shambles, with clothes and other items strewn about and handwritten notes stuck on the walls. One read: "children are sweet and innocent."

    The official said Jackson regularly received propofol to sleep, relying on the drug like an alarm clock. A doctor would administer it when he went to sleep, then stop the intravenous drip when he wanted to wake up. On June 25, the day Jackson died, Dr. Conrad Murray gave him the drug through an IV sometime after midnight, the official said.

    Though toxicology reports are pending, investigators are working under the theory propofol caused Jackson's heart to stop, the official said. Jackson is believed to have been using the drug for about two years and investigators are trying to determine how many other doctors administered it, the official said.

    Murray, 51, has been identified in court papers as the subject of a manslaughter investigation and authorities last week raided his office and a storage unit in Houston. Police say Murray is cooperating and have not labeled him a suspect.

    Using propofol to sleep is a practice far outside the drug's intended purpose. One doctor said administering it in a home to help a person sleep would constitute malpractice.

    Murray's lawyer, Edward Chernoff, has said the doctor "didn't prescribe or administer anything that should have killed Michael Jackson." When asked Monday about the law enforcement official's statements he said: "We will not be commenting on rumors, innuendo or unnamed sources."

    In a more detailed statement posted online late Monday, Chernoff added that "things tend to shake out when all the facts are made known, and I'm sure that will happen here as well."

    Murray became Jackson's personal physician in May and was to accompany him to London for a series of concerts starting in July.

    He was staying with Jackson in the Los Angeles mansion and, according to Chernoff, "happened to find" an unconscious Jackson in the pop star's bedroom the morning of June 25. Murray tried to revive him by compressing his chest with one hand while supporting Jackson's back with the other.

    It's unclear how long it took for someone at Jackson's home to summon paramedics, though Murray's own lawyers have said it was up to a half-hour. Paramedics arrived about three minutes after they were called and tried to revive the music superstar for another 42 minutes before sliding him into the ambulance and racing with lights flashing and siren blaring to UCLA Medical Center, where Jackson was pronounced dead.

    Authorities arrived at the singer's house after the death and found a chaotic scene. The top floor had been all but sealed off, with only Jackson, his children and Murray allowed upstairs, the official said. Jackson's bedroom was a mess, with items seemingly thrown about and some 20 handwritten notes stuck on the walls.

    A porcelain girl doll wearing a dress was found on top of the covers of the bed where he slept, the official said.

    The temperature upstairs was stiflingly hot, with gas fireplaces and the heating system on high because Jackson always complained of feeling cold, the official said.

    Police found propofol and other drugs in the home. An IV line and three tanks of oxygen were in the room where Jackson slept and 15 more oxygen tanks were in a security guard's shack, the official said.

    Propofol can depress breathing and lower heart rates and blood pressure. Because of the risks, propofol is only supposed to be administered in medical settings by trained personnel. Instructions on the drug's package warn that patients must be continuously monitored, and that equipment to maintain breathing, to provide artificial ventilation, and to administer oxygen if needed "must be immediately available."

    Dr. Zeev Kain, who heads the anesthesiology department at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, said he has never encountered a situation where propofol was given in a home to help someone sleep. Such a situation would constitute malpractice, he said.

    Cherilyn Lee, a registered nurse who gave Jackson nutritional counseling and vitamins earlier this year, said he complained of insomnia and asked her repeatedly for Diprivan, the brand-name version of propofol. Lee said she warned him of the drug's dangers and rejected his requests.

    Los Angeles police interviewed Murray twice soon after Jackson's death. Last week, detectives flew to Houston and, along with federal drug agents, searched a medical clinic he ran and a storage unit he rented. They seized a long list of items, including the contents of three computer hard drives, two e-mails from his administrative assistant at the Las Vegas practice Murray ran and various other documents.

    A sealed search warrant approved by a Houston judge and later made public allowed authorities to seek "property or items constituting evidence of the offense of manslaughter that tend to show that Dr. Conrad Murray committed the said criminal offense."

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• US Army fights Afgan Herion

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    KABUL – U.S. Marines and Afghan forces have found and destroyed hundreds of tons of poppy seeds, opium and heroin in southern Afghanistan this month in raids that a top American official said show the new U.S. counter narcotics strategy in Afghanistan is working.

    U.S. and NATO troops are attacking drug warehouses in Afghanistan for the first time this year, a new strategy to counter the country's booming opium poppy and heroin trade. NATO defense ministers approved the targeted drug raids late last year, saying the link between Taliban insurgents and drug barons was clear.

    U.N. officials say Taliban fighters reap hundreds of millions of dollars from the drug trade each year, profits used to fund the insurgency.

    The U.S. announced last month it would no longer support the destruction of individual farmers' poppy plants, and instead would increase attacks on drug warehouses controlled by powerful drug lords — a wholesale change in strategy.

    U.S. Marines, British troops and Afghan forces supported by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration have increasingly targeted drug warehouses in Helmand and Kandahar provinces — the largest opium poppy growing region in the world.

    Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama's envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said early evidence indicated the new strategy was working.

    "This administration set out to reverse the counter narcotics program by de-emphasizing crop eradication and emphasizing interdiction," Holbrooke told The Associated Press on Saturday. "The forces in the south are actually making that a reality. It's a historic change if it's successful, and the first indications were very, very promising."

    Seizures made this summer illustrate the huge quantities of drugs the military can destroy.

    Marines in Helmand working alongside DEA-mentored Afghan police seized 297 tons of poppy seeds, 77 pounds (35 kilograms) of heroin and 300 pounds (135 kilograms) of opium in raids in mid-July. Some 1,200 pounds (550 kilograms) of hashish and 4,225 gallons (16,000 liters) of chemicals used to convert opium to heroin were also seized.

    "This wasn't an accident. This was planned interdiction," Holbrooke said.

    Bomb-making materials, rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s were also seized, underscoring what the U.S. Embassy said was "the connection between drug trafficking and the insurgency."

    "We consider the link between narcotics trafficking and the insurgency to be a security and force protection threat, and therefore a legitimate target," said U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker. "The narcotics industry has a corrosive influence across all aspects of Afghan society and inhibits our work to provide a secure environment."

    For years the U.S. strategy has centered on training Afghan forces to eradicate farmers' poppy fields by hand. But such efforts never destroyed a significant portion of the crops. Farmers complained that the program targeted small, helpless poppy growers and passed over more powerful land owners. And the forces came under constant attack by militants.

    Holbrooke said the U.S. efforts cost about $44,000 to eradicate 1 hectare (2.5 acres) of poppies. Overall the U.S. spent about $45 million a year on eradication, he said. Holbrooke has called eradication efforts a waste of money.

    Mohammad Ibrahimi Azhar, deputy minister of Afghanistan's Counter Narcotics Ministry, said he was "very happy" with the new U.S. strategy but that his ministry would continue eradication efforts. He said farmers needed to be fearful their crops might be cut down.

    "Many years we have done this activity. If we stop, all 34 provinces would cultivate" poppies," Azhar said.

    Governors across Afghanistan, particularly in the more peaceful regions, lead poppy eradication efforts. The governors are paid $135 for each hectare, or about 2.5 acres, destroyed, a program funded in part by Britain.

    Azhar said 98 percent of Afghanistan's poppy crop is grown in five southern insurgency-plagued provinces, where the government has little or no control. That is where U.S., Afghan and British forces have been destroying drug warehouses.

    On July 14, U.S. coalition and Afghan forces searched compounds in Kandahar and found bomb-making materials, mortar rounds, AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of opium.

    In early June, British forces destroyed 12,125 pounds (5,500 kilograms) of opium paste during two helicopter-borne assaults. The operation destroyed 10 narcotic manufacturing facilities, 485 pounds (220 kilograms) of morphine and 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of heroin.

    The operation was backed by British and Canadian helicopters and U.S. jets that flew in from the Persian Gulf.

    In the latest Afghan violence, a U.S. service member died Saturday during a clash with insurgents in the south, the U.S. military said Sunday, bringing to at least 39 the number of U.S. troops killed this month.

    July has been the deadliest month for U.S. and NATO forces in the Afghan war. Some 60,000 U.S. forces now operate in Afghanistan — a record number.

    Also Sunday, one of President Hamid Karzai's vice presidential running mates in next month's election escaped injury when his convoy came under fire in northern Afghanistan.

    Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the former commander of the Northern Alliance that helped oust the Taliban in 2001, was traveling from Kunduz to Takhar province when militants opened fire on his 30-vehicle convoy, said Kunduz Gov. Mohammad Omar.

    A Karzai aide, Abdul Jalal, said one cameraman working for the campaign was wounded and Fahim's armored car was struck by bullets but the candidate was not hurt.

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• Gates moves on from arrest

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    BOSTON – Black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. says he's ready to move on from his arrest by a white police officer, hoping to use the encounter to improve fairness in the criminal justice system and saying "in the end, this is not about me at all."

    After a phone call from President Barack Obama urging calm in the aftermath of his arrest last week, Gates said he would accept Obama's invitation to the White House for a beer with him and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley.

    In a statement posted Friday on The Root, a Web site Gates oversees, the scholar said he told Obama he'd be happy to meet with Crowley, whom Gates had accused of racial profiling.

    "I told the president that my principal regret was that all of the attention paid to his deeply supportive remarks during his press conference had distracted attention from his health care initiative," Gates said. "I am pleased that he, too, is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment, and if meeting Sergeant Crowley for a beer with the president will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige."

    It was a marked change in tone for Gates, who in the days following his arrest gathered up his legal team and said he was contemplating a lawsuit. He even vowed to make a documentary on his arrest to tie into a larger project about racial profiling.

    In an e-mail to the Boston Globe late Friday, he said: "It is time for all of us to move on, and to assess what we can learn from this experience."

    In a statement to The Associated Press, Gates promised to do all he could so others could learn from his arrest.

    "This could and should be a profound teaching moment in the history of race relations in America," Gates said. "I sincerely hope that the Cambridge police department will choose to work with me toward that goal."

    Gates, 58, did not say in his statement if he planned to file a lawsuit.

    Crowley did not return a telephone message seeking comment Saturday.

    The outcry began Monday, when word broke that Gates had been arrested five days earlier at the two-story home he rents from Harvard.

    Supporters called the arrest an outrageous act of racial profiling. Public interest increased when a photograph surfaced of the handcuffed Gates being escorted off his porch amid three officers.

    Cambridge police moved to drop the disorderly conduct charge on Tuesday — without apology, but calling the case "regrettable."

    Obama, who had said Cambridge police "acted stupidly" in arresting Gates, sought to tamp down the uproar Friday. He spoke to Crowley and Gates during separate telephone calls and declared that Crowley was a good man.

    Obama invited the officer and the professor to the White House for a beer. He conceded his words had been ill-chosen, but he stopped short of a public apology.

    A trio of Massachusetts police unions released a joint statement shortly after Obama's latest comments, saying Crowley had a friendly and meaningful conversation with the president.

    "We appreciate his sincere interest and willingness to reconsider his remarks about the Cambridge Police Department," according to the statement. "It is clear to us from this conversation, that the President respects police officers and the often difficult and dangerous situations we face on a daily basis."

    Gates added that he hoped his arrest would lead to a greater understanding about racial profiling in America.

    "If my experience leads to the lessening of the occurrence of racial profiling, then I would find that enormously gratifying," Gates said on The Root. "Because, in the end, this is not about me at all; it is about the creation of a society in which 'equal justice before law' is a lived reality."

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• Tenet nixed cia secret plans

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    WASHINGTON – As CIA director in 2004, George Tenet terminated a secret program to develop hit teams to kill al-Qaida leaders, but his successors resurrected the plan, according to former intelligence officials.

    Tenet ended the program because the agency could not work out its practical details, the officials told The Associated Press. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.

    Porter Goss, who replaced Tenet in 2005, restarted the program, the former officials said. By the time Michael Hayden succeeded Goss as CIA chief in 2006 the effort was again flagging because of practical challenges.

    CIA Director Leon Panetta drove the final stake into the effort in June after learning about the program. He called an emergency meeting with the House and Senate Intelligence committees the next day, informing lawmakers about the program and saying that as vice president Dick Cheney had directed the CIA not to inform Congress about the operation.

    The CIA declined to comment on the officials' comments.

    One former senior intelligence official said Wednesday that the idea never quite died because it was a capability — the details of which remain classified — that the CIA wanted in its arsenal. But as time wore on, the official said, its need became less urgent.

    Another former official said that the CIA's reliance on foreign intelligence services and on drone-launched missile strikes proved over time to be less risky yet effective in targeting al-Qaida chiefs for death or capture. President George W. Bush authorized the killing of al-Qaida leaders in 2001.

    According to one congressional official, the agency spent more than $1 million over the eight years that the CIA considered launching the hit teams. The official would not detail the exact amount or how it was spent.

    The House Intelligence Committee is laying the groundwork for a possible investigation of the program and its concealment from Congress. In late June it asked the CIA to provide documents about the now-canceled program to kill al-Qaida leaders.

    Agency officials say it is complying with the request. Panetta has at the same time ordered a thorough internal review of the program.

    The committee will try to establish how much was spent on the effort, whether any training was conducted and whether any officials traveled in association with the program, a committee official said. Those factors would determine whether the program had progressed enough to require congressional notification.

    House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, is expected to decide as early as this week whether to press ahead with a full investigation.

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• 9 christians arrested Lampur

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – Malaysian police have arrested nine Christians accused of trying to convert Muslim university students — a serious crime punishable by prison in this Muslim-majority country, a lawyer said Wednesday.

    The suspects have denied the allegation, which could aggravate complaints by religious minorities that authorities are increasingly ignoring their rights in favor of Islam.

    Proselytizing of Muslims by members of other religions is forbidden in Malaysia, though the reverse is allowed. Muslims, who comprise nearly two-thirds of Malaysia's 28 million people, are also not legally permitted to change religion.

    Police detained the nine in a hostel room at the Universiti Putra Malaysia near Kuala Lumpur late Tuesday, said Annou Xavier, a lawyer who handles cases involving religion. He spoke to The Associated Press by phone from the police station where the nine are being held.

    They claimed they were visiting friends, but a Muslim student apparently filed a police complaint accusing them of trying to convert Muslims, Xavier said.

    "These allegations are baseless and untrue," Xavier said.

    The identities of the nine were not immediately clear. The Malaysian Insider independent news Web site said they were students belonging to a Malaysian Christian organization.

    Zahedi Ayob, the police chief of Sepang district near Kuala Lumpur, said he could not immediately confirm the arrests.

    Cases of non-Muslims preaching to Muslims are rare in Malaysia. Penalties differ for various states, but most provide for prison terms of at least two years. One northern state also prescribes a punishment of six lashes with a rattan cane.

     

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• MJ owes huge Tax BILL IRS

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
  • Description:

    The Tax Man is in the mirror for the estate of the late King of Pop.

    Creditors and heirs of Michael Jackson hoping for a cut of his musical empire will have to line up with the Internal Revenue Service, which could lay claim to $80 million or more in federal estate taxes.

    To settle his tax bill, the executors of his estate may have to sell or borrow against lucrative but hard-to-value assets or ask the IRS for a multi-year extension. That could allow the estate to pay the tab over time with earnings from Jackson's share in rights to songs by the Beatles and his own music — prized properties whose value will likely make the estate's tax bill only bigger.

    "The government is not going to take a Beatles record as payment. They want to be paid in cash," said Roy Kozupsky, a veteran estate lawyer in New York who has worked on behalf of several wealthy clients.

    Given the convoluted nature of Jackson's finances, coming up with the cash won't be easy. Technically, the tax bill is due nine months after the date of death. In special cases, estates can spread out the payments for a period of up to 14 years. Once paid, the tax bill could dramatically shrink the inheritance passed on to the pop star's heirs — his 79-year-old mother and three children.

    "It's going to mean less money going to the beneficiaries," said Lawrence Heller, a partner in the tax and estate practice of the law firm Bryan Cave in Santa Monica, Calif. "They're the ones that are going to suffer."

    The estate's tax dilemma highlights the cost and complexity of dying wealthy in America. Ironically, had Jackson died six months later, his estate may have had to pay no estate tax at all.

    Under current law, the estate tax is set to be lifted for one year starting Jan. 1, 2010. However, most experts expect Congress to overturn the one-year suspension before the end of 2009, meaning the estate tax would remain in place.

    Established in the early 1900s, the so-called "death tax" assesses up to a 45 percent tax on individual estates worth more than $3.5 million.

    As in a bankruptcy case, Jackson's creditors will jockey for first crack at his fortune. But the estate's initial obligation will be to pay the late star's taxes, said Beth Kaufman, a Washington-based attorney specializing in estate tax issues.

    "There is no question that the U.S. government has first priority," she said.

    To calculate the amount owed, subtract an estate's debts from its assets and set aside 45 percent of what's left for the IRS. The first $3.5 million is exempt. The IRS also allows unlimited, tax-free transfers of assets to a spouse and charities, as well as deductions for funeral expenses, attorneys' fees and other administrative costs.

    The current value of Jackson's estate isn't known, making it impossible to know how much he'll owe in federal estate tax.

    According to documents obtained by The Associated Press, he claimed $567.6 million in assets as of March 31, 2007, including Neverland and his share of the Sony/ATV Music Publishing catalog, which holds the rights to songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and other artists. The documents also show that Jackson had $331 million in debt.

    That would leave him with a net worth about $236 million at the time. Based on that number, Jackson's federal estate tax bill could exceed $83 million after exemptions. California, where Jackson lived at the time of his death, has no estate tax, but some states do.

    Representatives of Jackson's estate declined to comment.

    The pop icon died June 25 of what his family said was cardiac arrest. According to his will, all of Jackson's assets will go into a trust. The twice-divorced entertainer left 20 percent of his estate to charities. That could leave 80 percent of his net estate subject to "a very sizable" death tax, said Randy Godshall, an estate attorney at Los Angeles-based Sheppard Mullin law firm.

    "But there will no doubt be a lot of negotiation with the IRS on that, because his assets are hard to value," Godshall said.

    The IRS is not required to accept the estate's appraisal of Jackson's assets, and very likely will conduct its own audit, he said.

    "They'll often come back with their own, higher values — I've never heard of them coming back and saying, 'You overvalued this'," he said.

    The IRS declined to comment, citing federal rules prohibiting it from discussing individual taxpayers.

    If the two sides can't agree, the case would go into litigation. In rare cases, the IRS can seize assets to cover a tax bill, but usually settlements are reached.

    Worries over estate tax were a big factor in the lengthy legal battle over the estate of singer James Brown, who died of heart failure on Christmas Day, 2006. A judge in May approved a settlement that gives nearly half of his assets to a charitable trust, about a quarter to his wife and young son, and the rest to Brown's adult children. The IRS won't say how much tax is owed on his estate.

    The federal estate tax affects less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. It will generate an estimated $26 billion this year — only about 1 percent of federal tax revenue. Still, the estate tax has become the subject of political debate in recent years.

    In Washington, some Republican lawmakers want to abolish it. Others have called for exempting estates up to $10 million from the tax. They also want estates larger than that to be taxed at a 35 percent rate.

    As it stands now, the threshold for the estate tax is set to fall back to $1 million in 2011, but the Obama administration is expected to change that so the tax will still kick in at $3.5 million.

    None of the proposed changes would impact Jackson's estate, whose tax bill is technically due March, 25, 2010. Experts say it's likely the IRS will grant a multi-year extension. But even then, the estate would still have to begin paying interest in March.

    Jackson's estate may have planned for a big estate tax bill. He had an insurance trust in his name as of Aug. 26, 2003, according to a financial document addressed to the singer and obtained by the AP. Insurance trusts are often set up by estates to pay federal estate tax.

    One possible wild card: Jackson's estate could claim that his debt exceeds his assets, in which case he'd owe no estate tax.

    But "it would be hard to incur that kind of liability," Kozupsky said, noting that creditors would be wary of such debt-ridden borrowers. He noted we may never learn the amount of Jackson's estate tax bill since the IRS isn't required to say.

    "It could remain a mystery for quite a while," Kozupsky said.

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• Bush spying was massive

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
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    The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.

    The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

    Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."

    The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.

    Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."

    The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

    According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program.

    The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.

    Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

    Bush brought the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.

    The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.

    The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."

    The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.

    The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.

    Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.

    Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.

    "He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.

    Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."

    In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.

    Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.

    Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.

    The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.

    The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.

    Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.

    "The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.

    House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.

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• Iran ok's recount vote valid

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
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    State television reported that the Guardian Council presented the conclusion in a letter to the Interior Minister following a recount of a what was described as a randomly selected 10 percent of the almost 40 million ballots cast June 12.

    The "meticulous and comprehensive examination" revealed only "slight irregularities that are common to any election and needless of attention," Guardian Council head Ahmed Jannati said in a letter, according to the state TV channel IRIB.

    Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi claims he, not incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was the rightful winner and has called for a new election, something the government has repeatedly said it will not do. "From today on, the file on the presidential election has been closed," Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei said on state-run Press TV.

    Mousavi supporters have taken to the streets in protest after the election, outraged by official results that gave Ahmadinejad the victory by a roughly 2-1 margin. Police and the feared Basij militia have taken increasingly harsh measures against the demonstrators, prompting widespread international criticism.

    The recount conducted Monday had appeared to be an attempt to cultivate the image that Iran was seriously addressing fraud claims, while giving no ground in the clampdown on opposition. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Council already had pronounced the results free of major fraud and insisted that Ahmadinejad won by a landslide. And even if errors were found in nearly every one of the votes in the recount Ahmadinejad, according to the government's count, still would have tallied more votes than Mousavi.

    U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday questioned the recount's utility.

    "They have a huge credibility gap with their own people as to the election process. And I don't think that's going to disappear by any finding of a limited review of a relatively small number of ballots," she told reporters in Washington. Asked if the United States would recognize Ahmadinejad as Iran's legitimate president, she said "We're going to take this a day at a time."

    News of the partial recount comes as Ahmadinejad on Monday ordered an investigation of the killing of a young woman on the fringes of a protest. Widely circulated video footage of Neda Agha Soltan bleeding to death on a Tehran street sparked outrage worldwide over authorities' harsh response to demonstrations.

    Ahmadinejad's Web site said Soltan was slain by "unknown agents and in a suspicious" way, convincing him that "enemies of the nation" were responsible.

    The developments appear to show that Iran's leaders are concerned about international anger over the election and opposition at home that could be sustained and widespread — but is trying to portray the country as victimized by foreign powers.

    Throughout the postelection turmoil, Iranian officials have bristled at even mild criticism from abroad. But the tensions escalated Sunday when Iran announced it had detained nine local employees of the British Embassy on suspicion of fomenting or aiding protests. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi said Monday that five of the Iranian embassy staffers had been released and the remaining four were being interrogated.

    Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseini Ejehi Monday claimed he had videotape showing some of the employees mingling with protesters, and said the fate of those who remain in custody now rests with the court system in a country where supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's word is law.

    Qashqavi played down the dispute, saying officials were in written and verbal contact with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and that Iran had dismissed the idea of downgrading relations, saying "Reduction of diplomatic ties is not on our agenda for any country, including Britain."

    The statement did not mollify Britain, whose Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday that Iran's actions were "unacceptable, unjustified and without foundation."

    Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi said Group of Eight leaders meeting next week in Italy will discuss possible sanctions against Iran.

    Ejehi boasted that Iran had overcome attempts at an uprising like the Velvet Revolution, the peaceful 1989 mass demonstrations that brought down then-Czechoslovakia's Communist regime.

    "I can surely say that such a thing will not happen in our country. But if the question is whether the enemy was after this or not, the answer is that it certainly was," he said in remarks shown on state television.

    The regime has implicated protesters and even foreign intelligence agents in Soltan's death. But an Iranian doctor who said he tried to save her told the BBC last week she apparently was shot by a member of the volunteer Basij militia. Protesters spotted an armed member of the militia on a motorcycle, and stopped and disarmed him, Dr. Arash Hejazi said.

    Basij commander Hossein Taeb on Monday alleged that armed impostors were posing as militia members, Iran's state-run English-language satellite channel Press TV reported.

    Authorities have cracked down hard on dissent, most recently on Sunday, when riot police clashed with up to 3,000 protesters near the Ghoba Mosque in north Tehran. It was Iran's first major post-election unrest in four days.

    Witnesses told The Associated Press that police used tear gas and clubs to break up the crowd, and said some demonstrators suffered broken bones. They alleged that security forces beat an elderly woman, prompting a screaming match with young demonstrators who then fought back. North Tehran is a base of support for opposition Mousavi.

    The reports could not be independently verified because of tight restrictions imposed on journalists in Iran.

    Also Monday, the human rights watchdog organiization Amnesty International expressed concern that prominent opposition figures arrested since the protests broke out could be subjected to torture. In a statement, it said three senior political leaders are believed to be held in a prison run by the Intelligence Ministry where torture reportedly is widely used.

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• NKorea stocking in guns no foo

  • From: CRYSTALCHRIS
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    A North Korean ship suspected of carrying illicit weapons cruised through waters off Shanghai on Tuesday en route to Myanmar, a news report said, as regional military officials and a U.S. destroyer kept a close eye on the vessel.

    Washington's top military commander in South Korea, meanwhile, warned that the communist regime is bolstering its guerrilla warfare capacity.

    Gen. Walter Sharp, who commands the 28,500 U.S. troops positioned in South Korea, said the North could employ roadside bombs and other guerrilla tactics if fighting breaks out again on the Korean peninsula. The two Koreas technically remain at war because their three-year conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953.

    North Korea is believed to have begun boosting its urban, nighttime and special operation capabilities in the wake of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, South Korea's Defense Ministry said. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, North Korea claimed it would be the next target.

    With 1.2 million troops, North Korea's army is one of the world's largest. Some 180,000 are special operation forces.

    Last Wednesday, a North Korean-flagged vessel left the port of Nampo and was being trailed by a U.S. destroyer, a U.S. official said. It the first ship being monitored under the U.N. sanctions imposed earlier this month following North Korea's defiant underground nuclear test in May. The new resolution seeks to strengthen efforts to stop North Korea from developing its nuclear and missile programs and selling its technology.

    The Kang Nam, accused of transporting illicit goods in the past, is believed to be carrying banned small arms to Myanmar, a South Korean intelligence official said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.

    However, analysts say a high-seas interception — a move North Korea has said it would consider an act of war — is unlikely.

    The resolution calls on U.N. member states to inspect North Korean vessels if they have "reasonable grounds" to believe that its cargo contains banned weapons or materials. But it must first get the consent of the nation whose flag the ship is flying — in this case, North Korea's.

    The North, however, is unlikely to allow any inspection of its cargo, said Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank outside Seoul.

    If Pyongyang refuses, authorities must direct the vessel to a port. U.N. members have been ordered not to provided suspected ships with services such as fuel.

    In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said China will "strictly observe" and implement the resolution. He urged other nations to also heed the U.N. guidelines.

    "Under the current circumstances, we call upon all parties to refrain from acts that might escalate the tension," he said Tuesday.

    Singapore, the world's busiest port and a top refueling center, said officials would "act appropriately" if asked to confront a North Korean ship believed to be carrying banned cargo.

    "Singapore takes seriously the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery and related materials," a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman said Tuesday on condition of anonymity according to ministry policy. "If the allegation is true, Singapore will act appropriately."

    The South Korean broadcaster YTN said the ship was traveling in waters 200 nautical miles (230 miles; 370 kilometers) southeast of Shanghai at a speed of about 10 knots (11.5 miles per hour; 18.5 kilometers per hour).

    The Kang Nam is expected to dock at Myanmar's Thilawa port, some 20 miles (30 kilometers) south of Yangon, in the next few days, according to the Irrawaddy, an online magazine operated by independent exiled journalists from Myanmar, citing an unidentified port official.

    North Korea is believed to have sold guns, artillery and other small weapons to Myanmar, said Kim Jin-moo, an analyst at Seoul's state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.

    An American destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, is relatively close to the North Korean vessel but had no orders to intercept it, a senior military official told The Associated Press last week on condition of anonymity.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. and North Korea's neighbors were discussing how to deal with the increasingly defiant country amid signs it may be preparing a long-range missile test.

    Ambassador Kathleen Stephens said the U.S. "remains willing and eager to engage North Korea" through diplomacy. But she said Washington and its allies have begun outlining defensive measures should the North continue with provocative acts.

    "We're committed to do what is necessary to protect" the American people and their allies, she said at a Seoul forum also attended by ambassadors from China, Japan and Russia.

    The vice defense ministers of Japan and South Korea also met Tuesday in Seoul, nuclear envoys from South Korea and Russia were slated to hold talks Wednesday in Moscow and a U.S. defense official was in the region for talks this week in Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo.

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