Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with his wife Callista, bow their heads in prayer during a campaign event at the The Villages, Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012, in Lady Lake, Fla. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke))
Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with his wife Callista, bow their heads in prayer during a campaign event at the The Villages, Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012, in Lady Lake, Fla. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke))
PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) ? Newt Gingrich's personal and political baggage is giving even the most hard-core Republicans pause in a conservative swath of the state.
"Not Gingrich" is how Annette Purvis says she plans to vote. "I've never liked Gingrich. Never. Never in the history of Gingrich."
She's turned off by what she calls his moral and ethical issues. He's been divorced twice, is an admitted adulterer and was the first House speaker to be reprimanded by his colleagues for ethical misconduct. All that has Purvis, a 49-year-old wife and mother from Laurel Hill near the Alabama border, looking elsewhere. "I'll probably do Romney," she adds, her hesitation apparent.
Marty Upfield, a 64-year-old retiree from Pensacola, seems equally uneasy with Gingrich. She, too, pointed to Gingrich's political record and personal background as a problem. She's considering voting for Mitt Romney, who she says isn't conservative enough, even though her political views are more in line with Gingrich's positions.
"But it is about trust," says Upfield. "I need to have a little more certainty that he's changed in some ways."
This deep reluctance to back Gingrich was voiced by many of the dozen and a half people interviewed last week in this city in the Florida Panhandle that borders the Gulf of Mexico to the south and west and Alabama to the north. Gingrich's past, it seemed, was heavily influencing decisions about who to back. Many said they were resigned to choosing Romney.
In one of the most conservative parts of the state, many of those interviewed said they see their political philosophy more in line with Gingrich ? who led the GOP revolution that took control of the House in 1994 ? than with Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who in the past has espoused more moderate positions on social issues. But many also said they're considering voting for Romney, or already did during the state's early voting period, because they fear that Gingrich's history ? both personally and professionally ? will hurt him in a general election match up against President Barack Obama.
"I really like him. He's one of the finest speakers. He's got fantastic memory and recall," said Tim Fuller of Gingrich.
But Fuller, 68, and wife Vicki, 67, didn't pick him.
"We voted for the more electable candidate," Fuller said, adding that they chose Romney ? "the lesser of two evils."
On the minds of many interviewed: Gingrich's ethics case while serving as House speaker, the $1.65 million his businesses made off Freddie Mac before he criticized the mortgage giant during his campaign, and his three marriages.
"I like him. I like his mannerisms. I just don't think I can vote for him. There's too much out there," said Bonnie Meenen, 64. Romney may get her vote because of that.
Some also were put off by Gingrich's personality.
"I think Newt's temper is too short," said David Nobles, 57, who voted for Romney. "It came down to Newt and Mitt, and Mitt just seems like more presidential material than Newt."
That Gingrich, who has emerged as the more conservative alternative to Romney, doesn't have a lock on this part of the state, regardless of his flaws, may not bode well for his prospects in other, more diverse parts of Florida ahead of Tuesday's pivotal primary. And the reluctance among some Republicans here to embrace Gingrich indicates that Romney's strategy to raise questions about Gingrich's character may be working.
Over the past week, Romney and his allies have castigated Gingrich on the campaign trail and in TV ads blanketing the state.
"While Florida families lost everything in the housing crisis, Newt Gingrich cashed in," says a Romney campaign ad airing in this state. The commercial says that Gingrich collected more than $1.6 million from "the scandal-ridden agency that helped create the crisis."
Romney's team has taken a more subtle approach in attacking Gingrich for his flawed personal life. He has been emphasizing his own 42-year marriage to the same woman, as well as his five sons and numerous grandchildren, as a way to contrast himself to Gingrich. And an outside group backing Romney has run ads mentioning Gingrich's "baggage."
A Quinnipiac University poll released Friday showed Romney leading Gingrich, 38 to 29 percent. Among voters who identify as conservative, Romney and Gingrich are in a virtual tie.
Pythons that have entered the Everglades after escaping or being released by pet owners are destroying the parks native mammal populations, a new report has found. ?
Sixteen-foot-long pythons aren't just frightening movie concepts, they are a real-life threat in the Everglades where they are annihilating the park's mammal populations to unrecoverable numbers, researchers now say.
Skip to next paragraph A family in South Florida had to call in animal control experts after discovering a 13-foot Burmese python in their backyard pool.
The pythons entered the park from?households that kept the snakes as pets, and may also have been set loose by hurricanes in the '90s, researchers say. Rangers started noticing the python's presence in 2000, when two snakes were removed from national lands. The?number of pythons has skyrocketed, with more than 300 pythons being removed from the Everglades every year since 2007. Researchers don't know their true numbers but estimate at least tens of thousands of the giant snakes inhabit the National Everglades Park.
"They turn up all over the U.S., but now they are established and reproducing and apparently doing very well in South Florida," said study researcher Michael Dorcas, of Davidson College in North Carolina. "It's 11 years later, and we are already recording a?hugely devastating impact." Dorcas is co-author of the book "Invasive Pythons in the United States" (The University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Snake effects
The researchers studied records of mammal deaths on roads from 1993 to 1999, before the pythons were commonly found in the Everglades. In addition, over 51 nights in 1996 and 1997, they drove along National Park roads and tallied live and dead mammals along the road. [See photos of the invading pythons]
They compared these results with animal numbers tallied from 2003 through 2011, the time after which pythons became common. These numbers were also gleaned from more than 35,000 miles of road surveys.
In areas where pythons had been present the longest, between 2003 and 2011, populations of raccoons dropped 99.3 percent, opossums 98.9 percent and bobcats 87.5 percent. Marsh and cottontail rabbits, as well as foxes, though common before the pythons were seen in the area, were not seen at all in these surveys.
In areas where pythons had recently taken root, the mammal decreases were smaller; in areas where pythons hadn't been spotted mammal numbers were similar to those in the Everglades' pre-python years.
Future of the Everglades
Carla Dove, a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution who wasn't involved in the study, said the results of this survey were "much worse than expected" and noted that the?pythons don't just eat mammals?? they can also eat birds and other reptiles (even huge alligators). Her own soon-to-be published research indicates that birds, and their eggs, are also being preyed upon by the python populations in the Everglades. [Image Gallery: Invasive Species]
While Dorcas' survey focused on common mammals, "it raises lots of disconcerting questions about [other] species that are rare and endangered," Dorcas said. "We don't yet know about those species and if similar impacts are occurring in those species as well, but it certainly warrants further investigation."
To try to?limit the spread of invasive pythons, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently (finalized Jan. 17) banned the import and transport between states of the Burmese python and three other large snakes into the U.S. as pets. These regulations may be too late to save the wildlife in the Everglades, Dorcas said.
"What was most striking to me was the magnitude of the observed changes in mammal numbers," Gordon Rodda, of the U.S. Geological Survey, Fort Collins Science Center, told LiveScience in an email. "These are not incremental changes but nearly complete removal of some very key components of the Everglades ecosystem," said Rodda, who was not involved in the current study.
Snakes are hard to hunt, especially in wild areas like the Everglades, because they are extremely secretive. "It makes it really difficult to suppress their populations under most circumstances," Dorcas said.
The study was published today (Jan. 30) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
You can follow LiveScience staff writer Jennifer Welsh on Twitter @microbelover. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter?@livescience?and on?Facebook.
LONDON ? World markets fell Monday on concerns that Greece's financial problems will not be solved by a tentative deal to cancel part of its debt, while European leaders met to find ways to revive the region's ailing economy.
The leaders meeting in Brussels will likely focus on how to stimulate economic growth and create jobs at a time when huge government spending cuts threaten to push many countries back into recession.
Latest data showed that Spain was one step closer to recession ? technically defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction ? after its economy shrank in the last three months of 2011.
Experts say Europe's efforts to cut its high levels of debt will be for nothing if its economies remain uncompetitive. The leaders will also discuss a new treaty on tightening budget controls and setting up a permanent bailout fund.
But the meeting will be dominated by another topic that is not officially for discussion ? Greece's debt problem.
Greece is said to be close to a deal with its private creditors that could avert a disastrous default this spring. Investors holding euro206 billion ($272 billion) in Greek bonds would exchange them for bonds with half the face value. The replacement bonds would have a longer maturity and pay a lower interest rate. When the bonds mature, Greece would have to pay its bondholders only euro103 billion.
But because Greece has been in recession for years, some experts fear it could need more rescue loans from its bailout partners ? other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund ? if it is to remain solvent.
Richer countries like Germany, however, are losing patience with giving Athens loans, saying the Greek government is not implementing reforms and austerity cuts quickly enough.
A German official even proposed to have an EU official directly oversee Athens' government spending. The idea was quickly rejected, however, by the European Commission and Greek leaders initially as well as by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the summit on Monday.
Despite progress in Greece's debt talks with private creditors, the continued uncertainty over its finances pushed markets lower Monday.
Britain's FTSE 100 fell 1.2 percent to 5,664.19 and Germany's DAX lost 1.3 percent to 6,430.16. France's CAC-40 shed 1.4 percent to 3,272.71. Wall Street also fell on the open, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 0.8 percent to 12,554 and the S&P 500 was down 0.9 percent to 1,303.
Sentiment, which has been relatively buoyant so far this year on hopes for a recovery in the U.S., was also dented by Fitch Ratings agency's announcement late Friday that it had downgraded five eurozone countries, including Italy and Spain.
A bond auction by Italy saw the country's borrowing rates drop, though demand was modest, while corporate were unremarkable ? airline Ryanair beat expectations but electronics giant Philips disappointed.
In Asia, most indexes closed lower as investors there reacted to Friday's release of data showing the U.S. economy grew more slowly than expected in the last three months of 2011. The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the October-December quarter, lower than the 3 percent that economists were expecting.
Japan's Nikkei 225 index shed 0.5 percent to close at 8,793.05. South Korea's Kospi was 1.2 percent lower at 1,940.55 and Hong Kong's Hang Seng dropped 1.7 percent to 20,160.41. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.4 percent at 4,272.70.
Benchmarks in mainland China, Singapore, Indonesia, India and the Philippines also fell. Taiwan and New Zealand rose.
Japan's Mitsubishi Electric Corp. plummeted 14.8 percent after the Defense Ministry and the Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center said they would not sign contracts with the electric machinery manufacturer, which acknowledged it had overcharged on defense and space-related projects, Kyodo News agency reported.
Traders are awaiting more data this week for clues about which way the U.S. economy is headed. On Wednesday, the Institute for Supply Management will release its manufacturing index for January and the U.S. Labor Department will release monthly employment data Friday.
"Because the market has been expecting rather good economic data from the U.S. ... I am afraid if those figures disappoint the market, it may trigger further correction in the stock market," said Louis Wong, dealing director of Phillip Securities Ltd.
Benchmark oil for March delivery was down 54 cents to $99.02 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 14 cents to end at $99.56 per barrel on the Nymex on Friday.
In currencies, the euro fell to $1.3093 from $1.3208 late Friday in New York. The dollar fell to 76.57 yen from 76.72 yen.
___
Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.
CLAY, Ala. ? Survivors still haunted by memories of last year's tornado outbreak that killed 250 in Alabama are writing checks, donating diapers and standing over hot grills to help victims of the latest twisters to pummel the state.
The April 27 outbreak of 62 tornadoes that swept across the state in waves caused more than $1 billion in damage, hurt more than 2,000 people and destroyed or damaged nearly 24,000 homes. The storms leveled neighborhoods and virtually wiped out some towns. The latest outbreak of at least 10 tornadoes this week ravaged central Alabama, killing two people near Birmingham and destroying or badly damaging more than 460 homes.
Rick Johnson is still living with relatives and friends after two tornadoes last year killed four people and splintered his home in rural Cordova, where the downtown area is still in shambles. When the latest twisters hit this week, Johnson stepped up. He volunteered to cook 200 pounds of donated chicken and help deliver hot meals to volunteers, workers and storm victims in Center Point, about 45 miles from his hometown.
"You know what they're going through. You know what they feel. It's hard to describe," said Johnson, 55.
Leaders from President Barack Obama on down praised the generosity and volunteering spirit of Alabamians after last year's deadly tornado outbreak. The people who needed help last year, many of whom are still removing debris and rebuilding, have been among those lending a hand this time around. The Alabama Emergency Management Agency said 2,511 victims of last year's storms were still living in temporary housing.
For Leah Bromley, helping out victims of the latest twisters is all about repaying kindness. Mountains of donated clothes and furniture flooded her hometown of Tuscaloosa after a twister killed nearly 50 people there last year.
"I just really believe in paying it forward," said Bromley, who started Rebuild Tuscaloosa, a nonprofit organization formed after last year's twisters to solicit donations and distribute money and services for relief. Now, it's helping out in communities far from Tuscaloosa.
A University of Alabama sorority from Tuscaloosa gave donations to help victims of the latest twisters northeast of Birmingham, and a group brought more from Cullman, which also got slammed last year. A school in a Walker County town that was hard hit last year donated supplies and made sandwiches for survivors in Oak Grove, which was battered both in 2011 and 2012.
Mary Foster couldn't go home for weeks after a tornado badly damaged her home in Tuscaloosa, and she's just now settling back into a normal routine nine months later. That didn't stop her from writing a check to a relief fund this week.
Foster said she was compelled to help because so many people helped her last year, including Bromley's organization and Habitat for Humanity, which helped fix her home.
"I was glad to be able to be a blessing to them because so many people were a blessing to me," Foster said.
Foster's house in east Tuscaloosa was badly damaged when a twister cut a wide swath through the city of nearly 90,000 last year, forcing her and her two daughters to move in first with a brother, then into a motel. Her home is now repaired, but broken trees and splintered, vacant homes dot the rolling hills all through her Alberta City neighborhood, providing a constant reminder of the terror that day.
"When I came out and saw people scream and hollering. ... Oh, my," said Foster, her voice trailing off.
Thanks to contributions from people in tornado-scarred towns and elsewhere, the gym is now full at Bridge Point Church in Clay, which opened a distribution center after a twister last Monday slammed neighborhoods including one where a 16-year-old girl was killed and scores of homes were destroyed or damaged. A steady stream of storm victims came by on Wednesday gathering items off of a gym floor covered with tables full of cleaning supplies and buckets, baby food and diapers, tarps and canned foods.
Pastor Mark Higdon said the outpouring of donations has been gratifying, particularly considering how many Alabama families are still struggling to recover from the tornadoes last year, which leveled entire neighborhoods and virtually wiped out some towns. The church's gym was empty at 8 a.m. Tuesday, a day after the twisters struck, and it was overflowing 24 hours later.
"The generosity of people is unbelievable," Higdon said. "They're just more than willing to give back."
A few minutes after Higdon spoke, two trucks and a trailer loaded with donations pulled into the church parking lot with donations from Rebuild Tuscaloosa, Bromley's group. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of Alabama and the date of last year's twisters, Brian DeWitt helped unload boxes of food, kitchen supplies and other items. DeWitt's home was spared, but friends lost theirs and he's been helping with the relief.
DeWitt said news of the January twisters stirred up a lot of emotions from last year. Sitting back and letting someone else help wasn't an option.
"The tornadoes last April 27 kind of shook Tuscaloosa up pretty well," he said. "We all got a renewed sense of community, which is not only the people you live around and love but also anyone else you can touch in your everyday life. I knew it was important after hearing about the tornado to get up here and do what we can."
TOKYO (Reuters) ? A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.5 jolted eastern Japan on Saturday morning, but there were no immediate reports of injury or damage and no tsunami warning was issued.
The focus of the tremor was 20 km (12 miles) below the surface of the earth, in Yamanashi prefecture, west of Tokyo, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
The quake, at 7:43 a.m., was also felt in the capital.
Earthquakes are common in Japan, one of the world's most seismically active areas. The country accounts for about 20 percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.
On March 11, 2011, the northeast coast was struck by a magnitude 9 earthquake, the strongest quake in Japan on record, and a massive tsunami, which triggered the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years since Chernobyl. The disaster left up to 23,000 dead or missing.
(Reporting by Chris Gallagher, editing by Matthew Lewis)
Walter Isaacson has unleashed a torrent of new books about Steve Jobs and Apple. But nobody has written anything quite like Caleb Melby's The Zen of Steve Jobs, a graphic novel that charts Jobs' relationship with a Buddhist priest called Koby Chino Otogawa. The book is a both a visual and textual delight and I couldn't resist inviting Melby, who also writes for Forbes, into our New York City studio to talk about Zen and the art of Steve Jobs.
NEW YORK ? A judge overstepped his authority when he tried to ban enforcement around the world of an $18 billion judgment against Chevron Inc. for environmental damage in Ecuador, a federal appeals court said Thursday as it explained why it lifted the ban last year.
The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the judge has authority to block collection if Ecuadorean plaintiffs move against Chevron in New York, but law does not give him authority "to dictate to the entire world which judgments are entitled to respect and which countries' courts are to be treated as international pariahs."
The judgment came last February after nearly two decades of litigation that stemmed from the poisoning of land in the Ecuadorean rainforest while the oil company Texaco was operating an oil consortium from 1972 to 1990 in the Amazon. Texaco became a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron in 2001.
Chevron obtained an order from U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan last March blocking Ecuadorean plaintiffs from trying to collect the $18 billion until he could stage a trial to determine if the judgment was obtained fairly.
"It is a particularly weighty matter for a court in one country to declare that another country's legal system is so corrupt or unfair that its judgments are entitled to no respect from the courts of other nations," the 2nd Circuit wrote. "In such an instance, the court risks disrespecting the legal system not only of the country in which the judgment was issued, but also of other countries, who are inherently assumed insufficiently trustworthy to recognize what is asserted to be the extreme incapacity of the legal system from which the judgment emanates."
It added that the court issuing such a ban "sets itself up as the definitive international arbiter of the fairness and integrity of the world's legal systems."
The appeals court said Kaplan had not addressed the legal rules that would "govern enforceability of an Ecuadorean judgment under the laws of France, Russia, Brazil, Singapore, Saudi Arabia or any of the scores of countries, with widely varying legal systems, in which the plaintiffs might undertake to enforce their judgment."
A message seeking comment from Chevron was not immediately returned. A representative for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs said a statement would be issued later in the day.
Today, Verizon welcomes the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX to its Android smartphone stable. You can pick it up for $299 on contract. (Or a whopping $649 outright.) We're going to be doing a full Droid RAZR MAXX review, of course, but here's the gist: It's a Motorola Droid RAZR with a 3300 mAh battery. Thank you, goodnight, we'll see you in the funny papers.
And you know what? It might well be the best 4G LTE phone on Verizon thus far. Sure, we tend to say that with every release, but Verizon's 4G devices certainly have been trending up since they debuted a year ago.
Launches with Android 2.3.5, will be upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced display
qHD resolution (540x960)
8MP rear-facing camera; 1.3MP front-facing camera
4G LTE data
3300 mAh battery for up to 21. hours' talk time, 380 hours' standby time
Motorola user interface
Smart Actions
From our hands-on time with the Droid RAZR MAXX at CES earlier this month, it was easy to see that indeed you're really just looking at a beefed up phone. Bigger battery, with everything else the same. And the slightly increased thickness makes the phone a little nicer to hold -- it was almost too lanky in its earlier form, too thin considering how wide it is. The phone's still 8.99 mm at its thickest, which is more than respectable. And having nearly double the battery life is a must considering that it's not removable -- there's now swapping in a new one.
Anyhoo, stay tuned for our complete Droid RAZR MAXX review, and go out and get yourself one of these guys, if it's your thing.
ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2012) ? As the reality and the impact of climate warming have become clearer in the last decade, researchers have looked for possible engineering solutions -- such as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or directing the sun's heat away from Earth -- to help offset rising temperatures.
New University of Washington research demonstrates that one suggested method, injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere, would likely achieve only part of the desired effect, and could carry serious, if unintended, consequences.
The lower atmosphere already contains tiny sulfate and sea salt particles, called aerosols, that reflect energy from the sun into space. Some have suggested injecting sulfate particles directly into the stratosphere to enhance the effect, and also to reduce the rate of future warming that would result from continued increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
But a UW modeling study shows that sulfate particles in the stratosphere will not necessarily offset all the effects of future increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Additionally, there still is likely to be significant warming in regions where climate change impacts originally prompted a desire for geoengineered solutions, said Kelly McCusker, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences.
The modeling study shows that significant changes would still occur because even increased aerosol levels cannot balance changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation brought on by higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
"There is no way to keep the climate the way it is now. Later this century, you would not be able to recreate present-day Earth just by adding sulfate aerosols to the atmosphere," McCusker said.
She is lead author of a paper detailing the findings published online in December in the Journal of Climate. Coauthors are UW atmospheric sciences faculty David Battisti and Cecilia Bitz.
Using the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Community Climate System Model version 3 and working at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the researchers found that there would, in fact, be less overall warming with a combination of increased atmospheric aerosols and increased carbon dioxide than there would be with just increased carbon dioxide.
They also found that injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere might even suppress temperature increases in the tropics enough to prevent serious food shortages and limit negative impacts on tropical organisms in the coming decades.
But temperature changes in polar regions could still be significant. Increased winter surface temperatures in northern Eurasia could have serious ramifications for Arctic marine mammals not equipped to adapt quickly to climate change. In Antarctic winters, changes in surface winds would also bring changes in ocean circulation with potentially significant consequences for ice sheets in West Antarctica.
Even with geoengineering, there still could be climate emergencies -- such as melting ice sheets or loss of polar bear habitat -- in the polar regions, the scientists concluded. They added that the odds of a "climate surprise" would be high because the uncertainties about the effects of geoengineering would be added to existing uncertainties about climate change.
The research was funded by the Tamaki Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Washington, via Newswise. The original article was written by Vince Stricherz.
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Journal Reference:
Kelly E. McCusker, David S. Battisti, Cecilia M. Bitz. The climate response to stratospheric sulfate injections and implications for addressing climate emergencies. Journal of Climate, 2011; 111202114757001 DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00183.1
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
The Federal Reserve plans to introduce changes to its communications policies to the public on Wednesday, making it easier for the central bank to move ahead with another round of asset purchases later this year by helping to explain the need for additional stimulus.
Hot Feature: The Mystery of Wall Street Pay
However, officials have said that it has no plans for further easing so long as the economy continues to recover. The Fed has lately been able to focus on communication in large part because it no longer must devote all of its energy to crisis management. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has waited five years to make these improvements.
Central to the new policies is the plan to publish the predictions of senior Fed officials about the level at which they intend to set short-term interest rates over the next three years, including when they expect to end their commitment to keep rates near zero.? The Fed also will describe the expectations for the management of the central bank?s investment portfolio.
After a two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, which will begin Tuesday, the Fed will publish the first forecast, and may also publish a statement describing the its goals for the pace of inflation and level of unemployment, neither of which has ever been formalized.
By being more transparent, the Fed hopes to garner more public support for its policies. But several Fed officials have said they are hesitant to support new efforts to improve growth because they think monetary policy has exhausted most of its power since the last recession began. They have also expressed concern about inflation.
?Steady even if unspectacular growth accompanied by inflation in the neighborhood of 2 percent justifies some reluctance to change, in either direction, the F.O.M.C.?s accommodative policy,? said Dennis P. Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
However, the persistence of high unemployment requires that the Fed keep thinking about doing more, added Lockhart, though Fed officials have made clear that high unemployment in itself is insufficient cause for additional action, at least as long as inflation remains near 2 percent.
Don?t Miss: France, Germany Will Implement Basel III
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To contact the editor responsible for this story: Damien Hoffman at editors@wallstcheatsheet.com
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People gather around a statue of Joe Paterno outside Beaver Stadium on the Penn State University campus after learning of his death Sunday, Jan. 22, in State College, Pa.
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Doug Pensinger / Getty Images
Head coach Joe Paterno and the Penn State Nittany Lions look on before facing the Iowa Hawkeyes at Beaver Stadium on Oct. 23, 2004, in State College, Pa. According to reports from family, Paterno was taken off of life support and died at the age of 85 on Jan. 22.
CollegeFootballTalk reports:
The legendary former Penn State head coach was surrounded by family and friends, who had been summoned to the on-campus hospital when Paterno?s health took a turn for the worse recently.
?It is with great sadness that we announce that Joe Paterno passed away earlier today,? a statement from the family read.??His loss leaves a void in our lives that will never be filled. He died as he lived. He fought hard until the end, stayed positive, thought only of others and constantly reminded everyone of how blessed his life had been. His ambitions were far reaching, but he never believed he had to leave this Happy Valley to achieve them. He was a man devoted to his family, his university, his players and his community.?
A steady stream of people visited the Joe Paterno statue at Penn State to pay their respects to the late coach. NBC's Michelle Franzen reports.
This past weekend, New York City's subway system experienced four deaths in less than 24 hours. The Associated Press reports that all of the incidents took place on Saturday, and police say none of the victims were related.
The first death occurred on Saturday morning at 2:01 a.m. at an R train station in Elmhurst, Queens. According to The Wall Street Journal, the victim is believed to have fallen down the stairs. The AP adds that he was reportedly in his 60s.
About six hours later, the AP reports that a man in his 20s was struck and killed by an L train on 14th Street in Manhattan. Daily Intel adds that he was standing on the tracks between 3rd Avenue and Union Square. The Wall Street Journal identified the victim as Brian O'Mara of Garden City, N.Y., and put his time of death at 8:25 a.m.
The third fatality occurred on the A line Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn at the Nostrand Avenue station. The Wall Street Journal writes that a little after 4 p.m., an MTA employee spotted a body on the tracks within the subway tunnel.
On Saturday evening, the fourth death took place on the L line in Manhattan. The New York Daily News reports that at about 10 p.m., a man's head was spotted between a subway car and platform within the Sixth Avenue station.
NEW YORK ? Credit reports are now on sale in Spanish.
The company behind the most widely used credit scores, Fair Isaac Corp., plans to announce Tuesday that its consumer website and products are available in Spanish for the first time.
FICO says the prices and products are the same as on the English version of the site.
The Spanish language version, which went live for testing in October, was designed to mirror the English language version, said Amber Minson, general manager of FICO's consumer scores. She said the financial educational materials on the site are direct translations as well.
The rollout of the myFICO en Espanol comes at a time when the Hispanic population is expanding rapidly.
Over the past decade, census figures show that Hispanics have accounted for more than half the U.S. population increase and now make up 16 percent of the population, up from 13 percent a decade ago.
To accommodate the growing number of bilingual customers, FICO says visitors to its site can now toggle between the English and Spanish versions of its site. The site is available at espanol.myFICO.com or by clicking the "Espanol" tab in the top right corner of the myFICO.com homepage.
Visitors to the site will want to carefully review their options before making any purchases. FICO offers several products that differ significantly in price, so customers should first determine the level of credit monitoring they want.
The most basic option on myFICO is to purchase a FICO score and report for $20; that includes an explanation of the positive and negative factors affecting the score.
But the site also offers more elaborate credit monitoring services, with monthly packages that require at least three-month subscriptions. A Suze Orman package, which includes three FICO scores and three credit reports, costs $49.95.
If a Spanish translation isn't a must, consumers should take advantage of their rights to a free annual credit report from each of the credit reporting agencies before paying for any credit products. The reports can be accessed at www.annualcreditreport.com.
Those who are in the market for a loan may also get free copies of their credit scores from lenders, depending on the type of loan they're applying for and the terms they're given. Credit reports and scores are also available for free from other sources.
The credit monitoring website CreditKarma.com, for example, offers users unlimited access to free scores and reports. Users do not have to give their credit card information; the site makes money through credit card advertising.
The scores provided by CreditKarma.com are VantageScores, rather than the widely used FICO scores. But a VantageScore can give borrowers an idea of where their credit stands.
___
Candice Choi can be reached at www.twitter.com/candicechoi.
Fruit flies don't have noses, but a huge part of their brains is dedicated to processing smells. Flies probably rely on the sense of smell more than any other sense for essential activities such as finding mates and avoiding danger.
UW-Madison researchers have discovered that a gene called distal-less is critical to the fly's ability to receive, process and respond to smells.
As reported in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists also found evidence that distal-less is important for generating and maintaining self-renewing stem cells in the large brain structure that's responsible for processing odors and carrying out other important duties.
The corresponding gene in mammals and humans, called Dlx, is known to be important in the sense of smell. The Dlx gene has also been implicated in autism and epilepsy. By studying how distal-less works in fruit fly neurons, the scientists also hope to expand understanding of Dlx.
"We're really interested in knowing at a very fundamental level what distal-less is doing in the fly olfactory system and how it's doing it," says senior author Dr. Grace Boekhoff-Falk, associate professor of cell and regenerative biology at the School of Medicine and Public Health. "We're also hoping that what we learn in flies can give us a better understanding of how Dlx works in vertebrates, including humans."
Studying distal-less is much easier than studying Dlx, she adds, partly because mice and humans have six Dlx genes while flies have only one distal-less.
Odors enter fruit flies through nerve cells designed to receive smells--olfactory receptor neurons. From receptor neurons, projection neurons relay olfactory information to the large brain structure called the mushroom body (MB), which then triggers the animals to move in the right direction?towards the fragrance of food, for example, or away from the odor of a predator.
Boekhoff-Falk and her group have studied distal-less (dll) for years, previously investigating its role in the fruit fly hearing system and its limb development.
The current studies of the olfactory system were done in larvae rather than the more typically studied adult flies. Dissecting the younger, smaller flies demands the steadiest of hands, but the payoff is that larvae offer a substantially simpler view of brain development and wiring as well as insights into events occurring extremely early in development.
The researchers found dll was required for the development and growth of multiple cell types in the olfactory system, including those that receive, relay and process olfactory information. Dll must work for normal olfactory behavior to occur in larvae. And when dll is defective, the sense of smell is not present.
Zeroing in on the MB, the UW researchers also discovered an essential relationship between dll and the longest-living and most prolific neural stem cells found in fruit flies.
Boekhoff-Falk's team found that in flies with a mutated version of dll, these neural stem cells failed to proliferate. No other scientists have observed such strong defects in these cells at such an early stage.
The scientists identified markers that will allow them to learn how the stem cells decide which specialized cells they will become and how their growth may be regulated.
"We want to identify the niche, or the stem cell microenvironment, and the cells there that supply growth inputs needed to keep the stem-ness of the cells," she says.
Boekhoff-Falk believes the parallels to human stem cell biology may be strong. "Our model may be useful for further analysis of how this gene regulates stem cells," she says.
The experiments also opened the door to a better understanding of the evolution of the sense of smell.
"The prevailing view is that fly and mammal olfactory systems evolved independently, multiple times over history," says Boekhoff-Falk, who has a long-standing interest in evolutionary biology. "But our work challenges that view. We think that when it comes to the olfactory system there may be a common ancestor shared by flies and mammals."
Earlier work by others had shown that the "wiring diagrams," or the arrangements of nerves, involved in olfaction in flies and mammals are similar. However, this was attributed to convergent evolution, the process by which unrelated organisms independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments, rather than shared ancestry.
The new work from Boekhoff-Falk's group suggests that the underlying genetic mechanisms used in the developing olfactory systems of flies and mammals are similar.
"This supports the idea that the last common ancestor already had some form of olfactory system," she says, "and that the overall architecture and key elements of the underlying genetics have been well conserved over time."
The long-shared similarity makes studies of fly genes in the olfactory system more relevant to human disease than previously thought, she says.
All told, the findings make the fruit fly a powerful model for investigating dll function.
"We think these studies have the potential to be highly relevant to human biology," says Boekhoff-Falk.
###
University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://www.wisc.edu
Thanks to University of Wisconsin-Madison for this article.
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COMMENTARY | Not only Republicans are outraged over Obama's decision to once more, stall the XL Pipeline, unions are too. Yet, undeterred by the pleas of job-hungry Americans the Obama administration has said no. Citing concerns for the environment, the president has once more placed his political agenda over the needs of our country.
Let's face it, America runs on oil. We all like the idea of getting away from dependence on fossil fuels, but we are not there yet. Society is not ready to give up everything it has and embrace the Chevy Volt. Even if we were, the need for oil still exists. There are factories, power companies, military needs and an entire nation of people that depend on the black gold. For the near future, America will rely on oil. It makes good sense to get it from a friendly neighbor instead of depending on oil from volatile nations.
America needs jobs. It has been reported the pipeline would bring 20,000 new jobs to the U.S. Obama's decision to stall the project has directly caused thousands of Americans to suffer. Logic and common sense clearly dictates the positive effects the pipeline would bring. Putting people to work, less dependence on oil from the middle east, a more substantial tax base, just to name a few.
Canada took considerable steps to ensure the environmental sanctity of the areas the pipeline would run through. Our northern neighbor has bent over backwards in its attempts to satisfy the needs of everyone involved. With Obama's rejection of the pipeline, Canada will probably sell the oil to China. That would insure our continued dependence on Middle East oil, and that would be ironic and foolish.
President Obama has thrown opportunity for our country out the window in favor of his own selfish ideals. It is unconscionable to forsake the needs of the many to pursue one's own desire, but this is exactly what Obama has done. His mind is living in a fantasy world of green that cannot be accomplished, and he does not care. He has abandoned his oath of office, and ignored the pleas of the entire nation in hopes that it all will somehow be OK.
ATHENS (Reuters) ? Greece and its creditors are continuing negotiations on a debt swap on Saturday after late-night talks edged them closer to a vital deal but failed to clinch an agreement.
Athens is anxious to strike a deal before a meeting on Monday of euro zone finance ministers, just in time to set in motion the paperwork and approvals necessary to receive a new injection of aid to avoid a messy bankruptcy in March.
"The elements of an unprecedented voluntary PSI are coming into place," the Institute of International Finance said in a statement after Friday's three-hour evening negotiation session, referring to the bond swap scheme.
"Now is the time to act decisively and seize the opportunity to finalize this historic deal and contribute to the economic stability of Greece, the euro area and the world economy."
The statement seemed to be addressing Greece's official lenders, the EU and the IMF, who have driven a hard bargain behind the scenes of the negotiations, insisting that the deal must slash Greece's debt substantially, sources in Athens said.
IIF chief Charles Dallara, who negotiates in the name of the private bondholders, will resume talks with senior Greek officials on Saturday. No time was set yet for the meeting.
"We will not know anything for sure before Monday," said a banking source close to the talks. "The euro zone ministers will examine the proposal and say whether we have a deal. If they say we don't, we're back to the negotiating table."
Private bondholders will likely take a hit of 65 to 70 percent on their holdings, with Greece's new bonds featuring 30-year maturity and a progressive coupon, or interest rate, averaging out at 4 percent, another banking official close to the talks told Reuters.
A 15 percent cash sweetener will be made up of short-term bonds from Europe's temporary bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), two sources told Reuters.
"It will be near cash-equivalent short-term EFSF bonds," one of the sources said.
Haggling over the coupon had held up the long-running talks as Greece raced to wrap up an agreement, raising the prospect of a messy default when Athens faces 14.5 billion euros ($18.5 billion) of bond repayments in March.
"The two sides are still discussing the coupon and some technical details," a Greek banker close to the talks said on Saturday. "After Friday's meeting, we are in a better position and closer to a deal, but I don't think we should expect any announcement today."
ECB'S ROLE
Another source close to the talks said the European Central Bank's part in the deal was also discussed.
"We expect them to make an effort as well. It could be through a special deal, as you would expect for a body like the ECB," the source said.
Greece needs to have a deal in the bag before funds are doled out from a 130 billion euro rescue plan that the country's official lenders, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, drew up in October.
The IMF insists that the debt swap deal must cut Greece's debt burden enough to bring it down to 120 percent of GDP by 2020 from 160 percent now, as agreed in October, which is made even more difficult by the fact that Athens' economic prospects have deteriorated since.
Senior EU, ECB and IMF officials from the "troika" of foreign lenders began meetings with the government on Friday to discuss reforms and plans to finalize that bailout package.
"The deal must be completed. There is no more time left," said a Greek government official who requested anonymity.
The paperwork alone is expected to take weeks, meaning failure to secure a deal soon could put Athens at risk of a chaotic default in March, which in turn could jolt the financial system and tip the global economy into recession.
(Writing by Deepa Babington and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Alison Birrane)
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia ? Gunmen in the Ethiopia's arid north attacked a group of European tourists, killing five, wounding two and kidnapping two, an Ethiopian official said Wednesday.
Ethiopian Communications Minister Bereket Simon said the gunmen came from neighboring Eritrea and attacked the tourist group before dawn on Tuesday. Two Ethiopians were also taken hostage. Eritrea denied it was involved.
Austrian, Belgian, German, Hungarian and Italian nationals were among those in the tourist group, Simon said.
Ethiopian officials could not immediately say with certainty which countries the victims were from.
Ethiopian state television reported on Tuesday that there had been eight tourists in the targeted group, but Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Peter Launsky-Tiefenthal said late Tuesday that two groups totaling as many as 22 people may have been attacked, though he said the numbers were not confirmed.
The tourists were visiting a volcanic region in Ethiopia's northern Afar region, which lies below sea level and is known for its intense heat and picturesque salt flats.
Bereket said that "some groups trained and armed by the Eritrean government" attacked the tourists about 20 to 25 kilometers (12 to 15 miles) from the Eritrean border.
Eritrea's ambassador to the African Union, Girma Asmerom, said Ethiopia's allegations are an "absolute lie" and that the attack is an internal Ethiopian matter.
Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war from 1998 to 2000,claiming the lives of about 80,000 people. Tension between the neighboring East African countries rose last year when a U.N. report claimed that Eritrea was behind a plot to attack an African Union summit in Ethiopia.
Launsky-Tiefenthal said there was an Austrian Foreign Ministry travel warning in effect for the region since 2007 "because of several incidents involving attacks on tourist groups ... in some case politically motivated in others criminally motivated."
In 2007, five Europeans and 13 Ethiopians were kidnapped in Afar. Ethiopia accused Eritrea of masterminding that kidnapping, but Eritrea blamed an Ethiopian rebel group. All of those hostages were released, though some of the Ethiopians were held for more than a month.
In 2008, Ethiopia foiled a kidnapping attempt on a group of 28 French tourists in the area.
"The problem is, there is no infrastructure in the area, no telephone lines, satellite phones barely work," Launsky-Tiefenthal said, describing the remote area to "the surface of Mars."
___
Associated Press writer George Jahn in Vienna contributed to this report.
Program led to lower crime, fewer violent incidents among kidsPublic release date: 17-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Laura Bailey baileylm@umich.edu 734-647-1848 University of Michigan
ANN ARBOR, Mich.A program built around the concept that kids can and want to reduce violence and improve their neighborhoods led to lower crime rates, better upkeep on homes and more students who said they learned to resolve conflicts without violence.
The afterschool and summer program, called Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities (YES), is a University of Michigan School of Public Health case study that included seventh and eighth grade students at select schools in Flint, Mich. The study co-authors are Thomas Reischl, associate research scientist at the U-M School of Public Health, and Susan Morrel-Samuels, managing director of the Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center and the Prevention Research Center of Michigan.
The goal of the program, developed by the U-M School of Public Health and the Prevention Research Center of Michigan, is to empower YES participants to develop and carry out neighborhood improvement and beautification projects with adult support. Reischl and Morrel-Samuels predicted the program would have positive results for participants and the community.
Middle school students were randomly assigned to the YES program, including those with poor academic and disciplinary records. Over two years, neighborhood and community projects ranged from murals to trash pickup to, in one case, cleaning and beautifying an entire public park. Researchers measured outcomes at the community level, such as crime and beautification of homes and lots near the project sites. The study also assessed outcomes on the individual level among the kids who participated.
The most promising result at the community level was a 50 percent reduction in violent crime near the Rosa Parks Peace Park renovation projectthe most involved community project planned and completed by the YES kids, Reischl said. Landscaping and lawn maintenance near several of the project sites also improved.
Results also were encouraging at the individual level, he added. Kids who participated in the YES program were much more likely to report nonviolent conflict avoidance and resolution than those who did not participate. YES participants also reported fewer instances of victimization.
"The effect on the kids was really impressive," Reischl said. "These results are very encouraging."
Previous studies have suggested the promise of youth empowerment strategies for violence prevention, but this is the first case study to really put a curriculum to the test, said Reischl, who attributed the positive outcomes, though modest, to a multilayered approach.
"Youth violence is not just a matter of changing the kids," Reischl said.
Rather, it's a matter of empowering kids, with adult supervision, to change the community in which the violence happens, he said.
"We feel it's a very promising strategy," he said.
Despite some limitations, the study and its promising results have led to a five-year National Institutes of Health grant that will allow U-M School of Public Health researchers to conduct controlled studies to test YES in eight middle schools in Flint and surrounding areas. Student recruitment is currently underway.
###
Marc Zimmerman, professor and chair of the U-M Health Education and Health Behavior program, is the principal investigator on the project. Zimmerman is also director of the Prevention Research Center of Michigan and co-director of the Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center. The paper, "Youth Empowerment Solutions for Violence Prevention," will appear in Adolescent Medicine State of the Art Reviews.
U-M Health Behavior and Health Education: http://www.sph.umich.edu/hbhe/
U-M School of Public Health: http://www.sph.umich.edu/
To download the free YES curriculum, scroll to the bottom of the following page: http://www.sph.umich.edu/prc/projects/yes/index.html
For a Findings magazine feature on two Flint teens in YES: http://www.sph.umich.edu/news_events/findings/fall08/features/one.htm
EDITORS: A slideshow of YES projects can be found at: http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/slideshows/20155-program-led-to-lower-crime-fewer-violent-incidents-among-kids
The University of Michigan School of Public Health has been promoting health and preventing disease since 1941, and is ranked among the top public health schools in the nation. Whether making new discoveries in the lab or researching and educating in the field, SPH faculty, students and alumni are deployed around the globe to promote and protect our health.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Program led to lower crime, fewer violent incidents among kidsPublic release date: 17-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Laura Bailey baileylm@umich.edu 734-647-1848 University of Michigan
ANN ARBOR, Mich.A program built around the concept that kids can and want to reduce violence and improve their neighborhoods led to lower crime rates, better upkeep on homes and more students who said they learned to resolve conflicts without violence.
The afterschool and summer program, called Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities (YES), is a University of Michigan School of Public Health case study that included seventh and eighth grade students at select schools in Flint, Mich. The study co-authors are Thomas Reischl, associate research scientist at the U-M School of Public Health, and Susan Morrel-Samuels, managing director of the Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center and the Prevention Research Center of Michigan.
The goal of the program, developed by the U-M School of Public Health and the Prevention Research Center of Michigan, is to empower YES participants to develop and carry out neighborhood improvement and beautification projects with adult support. Reischl and Morrel-Samuels predicted the program would have positive results for participants and the community.
Middle school students were randomly assigned to the YES program, including those with poor academic and disciplinary records. Over two years, neighborhood and community projects ranged from murals to trash pickup to, in one case, cleaning and beautifying an entire public park. Researchers measured outcomes at the community level, such as crime and beautification of homes and lots near the project sites. The study also assessed outcomes on the individual level among the kids who participated.
The most promising result at the community level was a 50 percent reduction in violent crime near the Rosa Parks Peace Park renovation projectthe most involved community project planned and completed by the YES kids, Reischl said. Landscaping and lawn maintenance near several of the project sites also improved.
Results also were encouraging at the individual level, he added. Kids who participated in the YES program were much more likely to report nonviolent conflict avoidance and resolution than those who did not participate. YES participants also reported fewer instances of victimization.
"The effect on the kids was really impressive," Reischl said. "These results are very encouraging."
Previous studies have suggested the promise of youth empowerment strategies for violence prevention, but this is the first case study to really put a curriculum to the test, said Reischl, who attributed the positive outcomes, though modest, to a multilayered approach.
"Youth violence is not just a matter of changing the kids," Reischl said.
Rather, it's a matter of empowering kids, with adult supervision, to change the community in which the violence happens, he said.
"We feel it's a very promising strategy," he said.
Despite some limitations, the study and its promising results have led to a five-year National Institutes of Health grant that will allow U-M School of Public Health researchers to conduct controlled studies to test YES in eight middle schools in Flint and surrounding areas. Student recruitment is currently underway.
###
Marc Zimmerman, professor and chair of the U-M Health Education and Health Behavior program, is the principal investigator on the project. Zimmerman is also director of the Prevention Research Center of Michigan and co-director of the Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center. The paper, "Youth Empowerment Solutions for Violence Prevention," will appear in Adolescent Medicine State of the Art Reviews.
U-M Health Behavior and Health Education: http://www.sph.umich.edu/hbhe/
U-M School of Public Health: http://www.sph.umich.edu/
To download the free YES curriculum, scroll to the bottom of the following page: http://www.sph.umich.edu/prc/projects/yes/index.html
For a Findings magazine feature on two Flint teens in YES: http://www.sph.umich.edu/news_events/findings/fall08/features/one.htm
EDITORS: A slideshow of YES projects can be found at: http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/slideshows/20155-program-led-to-lower-crime-fewer-violent-incidents-among-kids
The University of Michigan School of Public Health has been promoting health and preventing disease since 1941, and is ranked among the top public health schools in the nation. Whether making new discoveries in the lab or researching and educating in the field, SPH faculty, students and alumni are deployed around the globe to promote and protect our health.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
LOS ANGELES -- Jorge Alvarado, a Good Samaritan shot in the back of the head while trying to stop a robbery in Lynwood, is clinging to life, relatives said Monday.
The incident happened Sunday afternoon at Crystal Produce and Meat Market in the 11800 block of Atlantic Avenue.
"He is a strong man. He works hard for us," said the victim's daughter, 10-year-old Lizzet, adding that her father worked two jobs to support her and her three siblings, ages 10-16.
For more, visit NBCLosAngeles.com
During the alleged robbery, a female cashier ran next door to a restaurant where her brother-in-law Francisco Rojas worked.
Rojas and Alvarado ran into the market to confront the alleged robber.
"He was saving the cashier because she was a girl," Lizzet said.
Rojas, 39, spoke to NBC LA in his native Spanish language. He said he took a knife he had been using to cut food and stabbed the suspect in the neck, dodging a bullet in the process.
The alleged gunman kept firing even with the knife blade stuck in his neck, Rojas said. One of the bullets hit Alvarado in the back of the head. Rojas said his right hand was injured by glass that shattered from one of three gun shots. The suspect then fled in a white vehicle waiting for him in the alley behind the store, Rojas said.
Five years ago, both Rojas and Alvarado attempted to foil a robbery at the same store. In that case, Rojas suffered only minor injuries, he said.
Detectives from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department combed the area Monday morning, closing down parts of the Freeway 105 looking for a white Chevrolet Astro Van and three suspects.
The alleged shooter Kyle Henderson, 30, was detained at Arcadia Hospital where he had been dropped off for his injury hours after the robbery, according to investigators.
Henderson and 47-year-old Terrance Fair, both parolees, and Ischa Criner, 42, are being charged with murder and held without bail.
Fair was the alleged driver of the getaway car; Criner is believed to be an accomplice in the crime. All three suspects are Lynwood residents.
The murder charges are due to the fact the victim is not expected to survive, according to the sheriff's office.
Lizzet and her family are praying that her father can recover.
"God needs to send him an angel so he can be better because he is doing bad right now. He is not breathing well. The doctors say there is nothing they can do for him," Lizzet said.
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Public release date: 17-Jan-2012
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