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LOS ANGELES – Rodney Sokoloski used to get up before dawn three times a week and drive two hours from his high desert home to the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance to get hooked up to a dialysis machine.

The blood-cleansing treatment was time-consuming and often left him feeling drained even before his workday began.

Not anymore. After four months of shuttling back-and-forth, the 61-year-old last year switched to doing dialysis at home every night while he sleeps. He starts it after dinner, wheeling the dialysis machine — the size of a carry-on suitcase — into the living room where he can watch TV or chat with his wife.

"It makes you feel like you're in control of your life," said Sokoloski, whose combination of diabetes and high blood pressure led to kidney disease.

Yet only about 8 percent of kidney patients do dialysis at home. Many don't know they can. Others are afraid to try it. And a LIMITED number of places around the country offer training and support for home dialysis.

New Medicare payment rules that just went into effect could change that. The changes give dialysis clinics more motivation to control costs and raise the amount centers get to teach do-it-yourself dialysis.

As for the patients, Dr. Leslie Spry of the National Kidney Foundation says, once they "experience the difference between home and in-center dialysis most will not return to in-center treatment."

There are two types of dialysis that can be done at home. The older and more widely used method — peritoneal dialysis — uses the lining of the abdomen to clean out waste. Patients pour a fluid into a tube in their belly and drain it out several times a day, or a machine handles that while the patient rests — the approach Sokoloski uses.

A second, newer method is home hemodialysis. Blood is drawn through a tube from the arm and pumped through a portable machine where it is cleansed and returned to the body. Patients do this four to seven days a week for about 2 1/2 hours each time.

People who prefer home dialysis say it's more convenient, allowing them to set their own schedules and even travel with their dialysis machine. They also like the idea of cleansing their blood of toxins more often because they feel better and don't need to take as many drugs.

Dialysis clinics used to bill Medicare separately for costly medications such as the anti-anemia drug Epogen and often made a profit on it. Under the new payment system, centers get a flat rate for dialysis treatments, and certain lab tests and drugs including Epogen.

This bundling may spur the industry to take a closer look at home therapy since people who dialyze in their living rooms tend to take fewer drugs than those in centers, cutting costs, according to the kidney foundation and some doctors.

Slightly higher reimbursement to centers to do home training and to health care providers who tell patients about their choices may also help send more patients home, they say.

LeAnne Zumwalt, vice president of DaVita Inc., which runs 1,600 dialysis clinics, said the company already provides home training to patients who meet the criteria. Zumwalt doesn't think the ranks of home dialysis patients will expand significantly unless Medicare reimburses for more treatments, especially for those on home hemodialysis, which requires more supplies and is costlier to support.

Home dialysis isn't for everyone. It can be scary. People who are frail, squeamish about blood or who don't have family support at home are not good candidates.

It requires weeks of intensive training and involves some risk: There's potential for infection and the chance of getting an air bubble into the bloodstream, which could lead to death in rare instances. Patients are trained what to do in such emergencies. Many dialysis centers require that spouses or other family members also get schooled as backups.

Eugene Abbott bypassed in-center dialysis and started home hemodialysis last summer after five weeks of training. It's been a learning curve. Sometimes the machine's alarm goes off and he's had to stay calm and troubleshoot.

"It's mind-boggling. There's a lot of things to learn," said the 58-year-old machinist from Lincoln, Neb.

He now does dialysis at home six days a week for about three hours each session. During college football season, he skips Saturdays so he can go to games.

The outlook is good for the future of home dialysis. Research published last year in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that patients who do it themselves fare as well as those who went to dialysis centers.

"The biggest challenge in this country is that most patients don't know they have the choice to dialyze at home," said Dr. Rajnish Mehrotra of Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center who led the study. "Many people would prefer to dialyze at home, but they're afraid."

Nearly a quarter of Mehrotra's patients now do home dialysis — a number that has grown because nurses explain the home dialysis option on a patient's first visit.

Lois Lucci was among Mehrotra's patients who chose home dialysis in 2008. Lucci does it while she sleeps so her days are free when she's not working part-time as a nurse.

"I can go shopping. I can run errands. I can pretty much do anything except go swimming," said the 53-year-old from Redondo Beach, Calif. She takes the dialysis machine with her twice a year to visit family on the East Coast.

Sokoloski, who works in the high-performance automotive industry, hopes to travel soon. He recently bought a vintage Chevrolet hot rod and plans to take his dialysis machine and supplies with him on the road to car shows around the country this year.

"Some people, when they find out they have kidney failure, just curl up in a ball. That's not me," he said.

ACAPOR and the Pirate Bay are up to budding heads over Anti Piracy measures in Portugal

ACAPOR is without doubt the most active anti-piracy outfit in Portugal. Last year the movie industry representatives made the news when they filed a complaint against The Pirate Bay with the General Inspection of Cultural Activities, a department of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture.

The group asked for The Pirate Bay to be censored in Portugal through an Internet filter, but instead their actions led to the uncensoring of their internal communications. As part of Anonymous’ Operation Payback, ACAPOR was shamed when their website was hacked, revealing hundreds of personal email messages in the process.

Despite this setback ACAPOR is continuing their quest undeterred. Two weeks ago the group announced that it would overload the judicial system with complaints against file-sharers in an attempt to raise awareness of the devastating effect they claim piracy has on their industry. And so it happened.

This week the group personally delivered several boxes of complaints to the Attorney General’s Office, wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Piracy is Illegal.†The movie industry group claims to have gathered 970 IP-addresses of ‘illegal’ file-sharers and is demanding action from the authorities.

In addition, 30 complaints were ‘filed’ containing the IP-addresses that republished the emails that leaked after the Operation Payback hack.


ACAPOR delivering the complaints


Posted Image“We are doing anything we can to alert the government for the very serious situation in the entertainment industry,†ACAPOR commented on their actions, adding that “1000 complaints a month should be enough to embarrass the judiciary system.â€

However, as with their previous revolt against The Pirate Bay, it may be that ACAPOR are the ones that will be embarrassed. Shortly after the group delivered the boxes to the Attorney General’s Office, Portugal’s Pirate Party came out with a statement claiming that ACAPOR’s actions are illegal.

The Pirate Party says that ACAPOR is not authorized by the National Data Protection Authority to collect IP-addresses as evidence, and has decided to file several individual complaints. In addition the Pirates have filed a criminal complaint for gaining improper access to the Attorney General’s Office.

The Pirate Party argues that ACAPOR’s actions violated the privacy of 1000 ordinary Portuguese citizens and hopes that the responsible authorities will take the necessary actions to prevent this from happening again in the future. ACAPOR was quick to deny the allegations and its President believes that no laws were broken.

EDINBURGH (AFP) – Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang will inspect a Scottish wave power plant as part of a study of the country's renewable energy sector during a visit to Scotland, where he arrived on Sunday.

The Chinese official is due to hold talks with Scottish First Minister Salmond followed by meetings with ministers and business leaders, a Scottish government spokeswoman told AFP.

The agenda is to focus on Scotland's renewable and low carbon energy industry and the delegation will visit a wave power station in the Scottish capital, she said.

Salmond, who has led several trade missions to China in the past two years, said it is important to "advance our relationship" with Beijing.

"I am delighted that the Vice Premier will begin his state visit in Edinburgh and will learn more about Scotland's rapidly growing renewable energy sector," he said in a statement.

"China already has the largest deployment of on-shore renewable technology, and Scotland is a world leader in pioneering the technology and application of clean, green off-shore energy."

The Chinese statesman is in Scotland at the start of a four-day trip to Britain aimed at boosting political and trade ties between the two countries, the spokeswoman said.

The visit will also see Li, widely tipped to be China's next premier, hold talks with British Prime Minister David Cameron and visit several businesses, but it is likely to be shadowed by human rights issues.

Li, who is on a European tour which has already taken in Spain and Germany, is coming to Britain just two months after Cameron visited China with a team of his top ministers and business chiefs.

Cameron will welcome Li at his Downing Street office in London on Monday and the Chinese official will also give a speech to a China-British Business Council event attended by top e businessmen from both countries.

The Chinese ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, said ahead of the visit that ties between Britain and China were "flourishing", the official Xinhua news agency reported.

"The new British government has continued to pursue a positive China policy, and Sino-British relations have achieved a smooth transition and sustainable development," it quoted Liu as saying.

Bilateral trade between the two countries reached a record 40.2 billion dollars (31.1 billion euros) between January and October 2010, an increase of 30 percent on the same period in 2009, he said.

Cameron said earlier in the week that "stronger relations with China offered a real opportunity for Britain in terms of trade, jobs, and economic growth."

"Vice-Premier Li's visit to the UK will build on the momentum created by my visit to China last year."

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who is also due to meet Li, said that "no subject will be off limits" during the talks.

On his trip to Beijing Cameron was understood to have privately raised the case of jailed dissident and Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo with Premier Wen Jiabao and also urged "greater political opening" on human rights in China.

Li's trips to Germany and Spain have focussed on business.

In Berlin, Li said China and Germany, the world's top two exporters, should deepen their economic cooperation both in traditional areas such as machinery and cars but also in low-carbon technologies and energy efficient industry.

While in Madrid Li said Beijing was willing to buy around six billion euros worth of Spanish debt, daily El Pais quoted government sources as saying.

After eurozone members Greece and Ireland were forced to seek bailouts worth tens of billions of euros last year, Spain, together with Portugal, have been seen as next in line in the 17-country currency union to need help.

ACAPULCO, Mexico – The image of this beach mecca has taken a new hit from Mexico's drug violence, with 27 people killed in less than a day, including 14 men whose bodies were found with their heads chopped off at a shopping center.

Acapulco has seen fierce turf wars between drug gangs, and the bloodshed is scaring some vacationers away even though little of the violence happens in tourist areas.

The decapitation slayings and most of the other killings that occurred in a stretch of just a few hours from Friday night into Saturday also occurred in non-tourism areas. But two police officers were shot to death on a major bayside avenue in front of visitors and locals.

The 14 headless bodies, and a 15th intact corpse, were found by police on a street outside a shopping center accompanied by written warnings from a drug cartel, authorities said.

Handwritten signs left with the bodies were signed by "El Chapo's People," a reference to the Sinaloa cartel, which is headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, said Fernando Monreal Leyva, director of investigative police for Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located.

The narco-messages indicated the Sinaloa cartel killed the 15 men for trying to intrude on the gang's turf and extort residents.

Mexico's drug cartels have increasingly taken to beheading their victims in a grisly show of force, but Saturday's discovery was the largest single group of decapitation victims found in recent years.

In 2008, a group of 12 decapitated bodies were piled outside the Yucatan state capital of Merida. The same year, nine headless men were discovered in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo.

Also killed Saturday in Acapulco were the two police officers; six people who were shot dead and stuffed in a taxi, their hands and feet bound; and four others elsewhere in the city. Two police officers were wounded when armed men attacked a police post in the city's Emiliano Zapata district.

"We are coordinating with federal forces and local police to reinforce security in Acapulco and investigating to try to establish the motive and perpetrators of these incidents," Monreal said.

The wave of violence in one of Mexico's biggest resorts was condemned by the federal government.

"Reprehensible acts of violence such as these underscore the need to fight with determination against organized crime," a statement from the Interior Ministry said.

At least 30,196 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against cartels in late 2006.

Also Saturday, authorities said a small-town mayor was found dead in northern Mexico.

Saul Vara Rivera, mayor of the municipality of Zaragoza, was reported missing by family members Wednesday, Coahuila state prosecutors said in a statement. His bullet-ridden body was discovered Friday in neighboring Nuevo Leon state.

There were no immediate arrests.

At least a dozen mayors were killed nationwide last year in acts of intimidation attributed to drug gangs.

TUCSON, Ariz. – A gunman targeted Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as she met with constituents outside a busy supermarket Saturday, wounding the Democrat and killing Arizona's chief federal judge and five others in an attack that left Americans questioning whether divisive politics had pushed the suspect over the edge.

The assassination attempt left the three-term congresswoman in critical condition after a bullet passed through her head. A shaken President Barack Obama called the attack "a tragedy for our entire country."

Giffords, 40, is a moderate Democrat who narrowly won re-election in November against a tea party candidate who sought to throw her from office over her support of the health care law. Anger over her position became violent at times, with her Tucson office vandalized after the House passed the overhaul last March and someone showing up at a recent gathering with a weapon.

Police say the shooter was in custody, and was identified by people familiar with the investigation as Jared Loughner, 22. U.S. officials who provided his name to the AP spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release it publicly.

His motivation was not immediately known, but Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described him as mentally unstable and possibly acting with an accomplice.

Dupnik said Giffords was among 13 people wounded in the melee that killed six people — including 9-year-old Christina Greene, 30-year-old Gifford aide Gabe Zimmerman, and U.S. District Judge John Roll. The 63-year-old judge had just stopped by to see his friend Giffords after attending Mass. Dupnik said the rampage ended only after two people tackled the gunman. Also killed were 76-year-old Dorthy Murray, 76-year-old Dorwin Stoddard, and 79-year-old Phyllis Scheck, investigators said.

The sheriff blamed the vitriolic political rhetoric that has consumed the country, much of it occurring in Arizona.

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," he said. "And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Giffords expressed similar concern, even before the shooting. In an interview after her office was vandalized, she referred to the animosity against her by conservatives, including Sarah Palin's decision to list Giffords' seat as one of the top "targets" in the midterm elections.

"For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC.

In the hours after the shooting, Palin issued a statement in which she expressed her "sincere condolences" to the family of Giffords and the other victims.

During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

"I don't see the connection," between the fundraisers featuring weapons and Saturday's shooting, said John Ellinwood, Kelly's spokesman. "I don't know this person, we cannot find any records that he was associated with the campaign in any way. I just don't see the connection.

"Arizona is a state where people are firearms owners — this was just a deranged individual."

Law enforcement officials said members of Congress reported 42 cases of threats or violence in the first three months of 2010, nearly three times the 15 cases reported during the same period a year earlier. Nearly all dealt with the health care bill, and Giffords was among the targets.

A 19-year-old volunteer at the event, Alex Villec, described how the violence unfolded.

Villec, a former staffer for the congresswoman, told The Associated Press that the man who later turned out to be the suspect arrived at the event wearing a black cap and baggy pants and asking for the congresswoman.

"I told him ... she'll be more than happy to talk to you as your turn comes," Villec said. The man walked away, but returned just minutes later and burst through a table separating Villec and Giffords from the public. Villec said he saw him raise an arm, and then he heard gunfire.

The gunman fired at Giffords and her district director and started shooting indiscriminately at staffers and others standing in line to talk to the congresswoman, said Mark Kimball, a communications staffer for Giffords.

"He was not more than three or four feet from the congresswoman and the district director," he said, describing the scene as "just complete chaos, people screaming, crying."

The shooting cast a pall over the Capitol as politicians of all stripes denounced the attack as a horrific. Capitol police asked members of Congress to be more vigilant about security in the wake of the shooting. Obama dispatched his FBI chief to Arizona.

Giffords, known as "Gabby," tweeted shortly before the shooting, describing her "Congress on Your Corner" event: "My 1st Congress on Your Corner starts now. Please stop by to let me know what is on your mind or tweet me later."

"It's not surprising that today Gabby was doing what she always does, listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbors," Obama said. "That is the essence of what our democracy is about."

Doctors were optimistic about Giffords surviving as she was responding to commands from doctors. "With guarded optimism, I hope she will survive, but this is a very devastating wound," said Dr. Richard Carmona, the former surgeon general who lives in Tucson.

Giffords spokesman C.J. Karamargin said besides the aide Zimmerman, who was killed, two other Giffords staffers were shot but expected to survive. Zimmerman was a former social worker who served as Giffords' director of community outreach. Giffords had worked with the judge in the past to line up funding to build a new courthouse in Yuma, and Obama hailed him for his nearly 40 years of service.

Greg Segalini, an uncle of Christina, the 9-year-old victim, told the Arizona Republic that a neighbor was going to the event and invited her along because she had just been elected to the student council and was interested in government.

Christina, who was born on Sept. 11, 2001, was involved in many activities, from ballet to baseball. She had just received her first Holy Communion at St. Odilia's Catholic Church on in Tucson, Catholic Diocese of Tucson officials told The Arizona Daily Star.

The suspect Loughner was described by a former classmate as a pot-smoking loner, and the Army said he tried to enlist in December 2008 but was rejected for reasons not disclosed.

Federal law enforcement officials were poring over versions of a MySpace page that included a mysterious "Goodbye friends" message published hours before the shooting and exhorted his friends to "Please don't be mad at me."

In one of several Youtube videos, which featured text against a dark background, Loughner described inventing a new U.S. currency and complained about the illiteracy rate among people living in Giffords' congressional district in Arizona.

"I know who's listening: Government Officials, and the People," Loughner wrote. "Nearly all the people, who don't know this accurate information of a new currency, aren't aware of mind control and brainwash methods. If I have my civil rights, then this message wouldn't have happen (sic)."

In Loughner's middle-class neighborhood — about a five-minute drive from the scene — sheriff's deputies had much of the street blocked off. The neighborhood sits just off a bustling Tucson street and is lined with desert landscaping and palm trees.

Neighbors said Loughner lived with his parents and kept to himself. He was often seen walking his dog, almost always wearing a hooded sweat shirt and listening to his iPod.

Loughner's MySpace profile indicates he attended and graduated from school in Tucson and had taken college classes. He did not say if he was employed.

"We're getting out of here. We are freaked out," 33-year-old David Cleveland, who lives a few doors down from Loughner's house, told The Associated Press.

Cleveland said he was taking his wife and children, ages 5 and 7, to her parent's home when they heard about the shooting.

"When we heard about it, we just got sick to our stomachs," Cleveland said. "We just wanted to hold our kids tight."

High school classmate Grant Wiens, 22, said Loughner seemed to be "floating through life" and "doing his own thing."

"Sometimes religion was brought up or drugs. He smoked pot, I don't know how regularly. And he wasn't too keen on religion, from what I could tell," Wiens said.

Lynda Sorenson said she took a math class with Loughner last summer at Pima Community College's Northwest campus and told the Arizona Daily Star he was "obviously very disturbed." "He disrupted class frequently with nonsensical outbursts," she said.

In October 2007, Loughner was cited in Pima County for possession of drug paraphernalia, which was dismissed after he completed a diversion program, according to online records.

"He has kind of a troubled past, I can tell you that," Dupnik said.

Giffords was first elected to Congress amid a wave of Democratic victories in the 2006 election, and has been mentioned as a possible Senate candidate in 2012 and a gubernatorial prospect in 2014.

She is married to astronaut Mark E. Kelly, who has piloted space shuttles Endeavour and Discovery. The two met in China in 2003 while they were serving on a committee there, and were married in January 2007. Sen. Bill Nelson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Space and Science Subcommittee, said Kelly is training to be the next commander of the space shuttle mission slated for April. His brother is currently serving aboard the International Space Station, Nelson said.

Giffords is known in her southern Arizona district for her numerous public outreach meetings, which she acknowledged in an October interview with The Associated Press can sometimes be challenging.

"You know, the crazies on all sides, the people who come out, the planet earth people," she said with a following an appearance with Adm. Mike Mullen in which the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was peppered with bizarre questions from an audience member. "I'm glad this just doesn't happen to me."

Details of suspect in Ariz rampage slowly emerge

TUCSON, Ariz. – An initial portrait of a the man accused of shooting Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head in an attack that also killed six people outside a Tucson grocery store slowly began to emerge Saturday, as authorities described a young man with a troubled past and neighbors recalled a 22-year-old who often kept to himself.

One former classmate said the accused gunman, Jared Loughner, often did his own thing. Another described him as a student who disrupted class with occasional outbursts.

Neighbors said Loughner wasn't hostile toward anyone but certainly didn't warm up to anyone, either.

"He was a guy in high school who definitely had his opinions on stuff and didn't seem to care what people thought of him," said Grant Wiens, 22, who told The Associated Press he went to high school and had a class at Pima Community College with Loughner.

Loughner was in custody Saturday after authorities said he opened fire outside a grocery store as Giffords, a Democrat, met with voters. The rampage left the congresswoman wounded. Arizona's chief federal judge, a 9-year-old girl and four others were killed.

Authorities said the accused gunman targeted the three-term congresswoman, but an exact motivation was not immediately known. Many questioned whether the nation's polarized political climate had played a role, even as Loughner's political views remained unclear late Saturday.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described the gunman as mentally unstable and said he possibly acted with an accomplice.

Federal law enforcement officials poured over versions of a MySpace page that belonged to Loughner and over a YouTube video published weeks ago under an account "Classitup10" and linked to him. The MySpace page, which was removed within minutes of the gunman being identified by officials, included a mysterious "Goodbye friends" message published hours before the shooting and exhorted his friends to "Please don't be mad at me."

On his MySpace page, Loughner spoke of how he liked to read and he also wrote repeatedly about literacy, complaining that the rate was especially low in the congressional district where he lived.

"The majority of people, who reside in District-8 are illiterate hilarious. I don't control your English grammar structure, but you control your English grammar structure," he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Wiens also said Loughner used to speak critically about religion. He also talked about how he liked to smoke pot.

"He wasn't really too keen on religion it seemed like," Grant Wiens, 22, told The Associated Press. "I don't know if floating through life is the right term or whatever, but he was really just into doing his own thing."

Loughner's MySpace profile indicated he attended and graduated from school in northwest Tucson and had taken college classes. He did not say if he was employed.

Tamara Crawley, director of the Marana Unified School District in Tucson, said Loughner attended Mountain View High School in Tucson for three years but withdrew after completing his junior year in 2006. Crawley did not know why Loughner had withdrawn from Mountain View High and it was not clear if he had transferred to another school in the area.

Lynda Sorenson said she took a math class with Loughner last summer at Pima Community College's Northwest campus and told the Arizona Daily Star he was "obviously very disturbed."

"He disrupted class frequently with nonsensical outbursts," she said.

In a Dec. 15 YouTube video, Loughner describes himself as a U.S. military recruit.

The Army released a statement indicating Loughner was not accepted.

In October 2007, Loughner was cited in Pima County for possession of drug paraphernalia, which was dismissed after he completed a diversion program, according to online records.

A year later he was charged with an unknown "local charge" in Marana near Tucson. That charge was also dismissed following the completion of a diversion program in March 2009, the Daily Star reported.

Ryan Miller, 19, was a sophomore at Mountain View when Loughner was a senior. He said Loughner was seemed like a normal kid.

"I was in shock," he said, describing his reaction to the shooting. "I didn't know what possessed someone our age to do something like this."

WASHINGTON – Investigative documents in the WikiLeaks probe spilled out into the public domain Saturday for the first time, pointing to the Obama administration's determination to assemble a criminal case no matter how long it takes and how far afield authorities have to go.

Backed by a magistrate judge's court order from Dec. 14, the newly disclosed documents sent to Twitter Inc. by the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Va., demand details about the accounts of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who's in custody and suspected of supplying WikiLeaks with classified information.

The others whose Twitter accounts are targeted in the prosecutors' demand are Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator; Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp; and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Gonggrijp and Appelbaum have worked with WikiLeaks in the past.

Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller declined comment on the disclosure in the case, which intensified following WikiLeaks' latest round of revelations with the posting of classified State Department diplomatic cables. The next day, Nov. 29, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed that anyone found to have violated U.S. law in the leaks would be prosecuted.

Assange said the U.S. move amounted to harassment, and he pledged to fight it.

"If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," he told The Associated Press in an e-mail.

Legal experts have said one possible avenue for federal prosecutors would be to establish a conspiracy to steal classified information.

"They are trying to show that Manning was more than a source of the information to a reporter and rather that Assange and Manning were trying to jointly steal information from the U.S. government," said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor on computer crime and espionage cases in the Justice Department.

The problem is distinguishing between WikiLeaks as a news organization and those who re-published the same classified information, like The New York Times, said Rasch, director of cybersecurity and privacy consulting at CSC, a Falls Church, Va., technology company.

"How do they prosecute?" asked Rasch. "The answer is by establishing a unity of interest between Manning and Assange. Make it a theft case and not just a journalist publishing information case."

The demand by prosecutors sought information dating to Nov. 1, 2009, several months before an earlier WikiLeaks release.

Manning is in a maximum-security military brig at Quantico, Va., charged with leaking video of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver. WikiLeaks posted the video on its website in April of last year. Three months later, WikiLeaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records on the war in Afghanistan, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

The main target of the prosecutors' document demands is most likely the IP addresses of the Twitter users, said Stanford University law professor Larry Lessig, founder of the Center for Internet & Society, Stanford.

Getting a list of IP addresses — specific numerical address that can identify individual computers as they interact over the Internet — could help prosecutors an effort to draw specific connections between individuals, their computers, and the information they share.

"It's not very hard for an investigator to put these things together and come back and identify a specific individual," Lessig said.

In a statement about the demand to Twitter for information, WikiLeaks said it has reason to believe Facebook and Google, among other organizations, have received similar court orders. WikiLeaks called on them to unseal any subpoenas they have received.

The document demand ordered Twitter to hand over private messages, billing information, telephone numbers, connection records and other information about accounts run by Assange and the others.

A copy of the demand, sent to the AP by Jonsdottir, said the information sought was "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation" and ordered Twitter not to disclose its existence to any of the targets.

But a second document, dated Jan. 5, unsealed the court order. Although the reason wasn't made explicit in the document, WikiLeaks said it had been unsealed "thanks to legal action by Twitter."

Twitter declined comment on the matter, saying only that its policy is to notify its users, where possible, of government requests for information.

Neither Facebook Inc. nor Google Inc. immediately returned messages Saturday.

The Obama administration volunteered little new information about its criminal investigation against Assange and WikiLeaks after news of its subpoena leaked. Under rules governing grand jury investigations — in which U.S. prosecutors present evidence and testimony to selected private citizens behind closed doors to seek their approval to formally file charges — government lawyers are not allowed to discuss the case until charges are announced publicly.

It was not immediately clear how the data being requested would be useful to investigators. Twitter's logs could reveal the Internet addresses that Assange and WikiLeaks supporters have used, which could help track their locations as they traveled around the world. The information also might identify others with official access to WikiLeaks' account on Twitter who so far have escaped scrutiny.

Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, said targeting Twitter showed how desperate U.S. officials were to pin a crime on the WikiLeaks founder.

Stephens told the BBC it was an attempt to "shake the electronic tree in the hope some kind of criminal charge drops out the bottom of it."

Jonsdottir said in a Twitter message that she had "no intention to hand my information over willingly." Appelbaum, whose Twitter feed suggested he was traveling in Iceland, said he was apprehensive about returning to the U.S.

"Time to try to enjoy the last of my vacation, I suppose," he tweeted.

Gonggrijp praised Twitter for notifying him.

"It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."

The news of the subpoena follows months of angry back and forth between U.S. officials and WikiLeaks, which has released reams of secret U.S. military documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently, thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

U.S. officials say posting the military documents put informers' lives at risk, and that revealing diplomatic cables has made other countries reluctant to deal with American officials.

WikiLeaks denies that its postings put any lives at risk and says Washington merely is acting out of embarrassment over the revelations contained in the cables.

WikiLeaks and its tech-savvy staff have relied on American Internet and finance companies to raise funds, disseminate material and get their message out.

WikiLeaks' frequently updated Facebook page, for example, counts 1.5 million fans and its Twitter account has a following of more than 600,000. Until recently, the group raised donations via U.S. companies PayPal Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Visa Inc., and hosted material on Amazon.com's servers.

But the group's use of American companies has come under increasing pressure as it continues to reveal U.S. secrets. PayPal and the credit card companies severed their links with site and Amazon.com booted WikiLeaks from its servers last month.

The actions sparked a cyberfight with WikiLeaks sympathizers, who attacked the company's sites for days.

Assange is currently out on bail in Britain, where he is fighting extradition to Sweden on sex crimes allegations. His next hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The Trans Alaska Pipeline shut down on Saturday after a leak was discovered at the intake pump station at Prudhoe Bay, constricting supply in one of the United States' key oil arteries.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the operator of the 800-mile (1,280 kilometre) line which runs from the Prudhoe Bay oilfield to the tanker port of Valdez, said the leak was discovered Saturday morning. Oil producers are in the process of cutting output to 5 percent of the normal rate of around 630,000 barrels per day.

There is no estimate yet of how long the pipeline -- which carries about 12 percent of U.S. oil production -- will be shut down or when normal production can resume, said Alyeska spokeswoman Michelle Egan.

So far, shipments from the port of Valdez, the terminus of the pipeline, are unaffected and tankers are being loaded on schedule. Oil produced during the shutdown will be stored at Prudhoe Bay until the pipeline reopens.

There is no estimate of how much oil leaked, but Alyeska said no oil has been found to have escaped beyond concrete encasing the pipeline.

"The concrete encasement is why we don't believe there's any environmental impact," said Egan. "Until we can excavate, we won't be able to say that definitely."

Alyeska is owned by oil companies with interests on Alaska's North Slope, the third-largest U.S. oil producing region after the Gulf of Mexico and Texas. Major owners in the region are BP, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil Corp.

BP, which operates the Prudhoe Bay field, has started the process of reducing production, said company spokesman Steve Rinehart.

"I can't give you an estimate of how long it will take to get down to 5 percent, but we are working quickly and safely to do that," he said. Tasks include freeze-protecting lines and facilities, he said.

The leak was discovered in the basement of a building that holds booster pumps for Pump Station 1, the intake station for the oil artery, Egan said. The booster pumps are housed in a building separate from the main pump building, and the leak appears to be in a concrete-encased pipeline on the exterior, she said.

The last time the pipeline was shut down unexpectedly was in May, when a power outage at a pump station triggered a series of events that caused an estimated 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) of crude oil to spill out of the storage tank at Pump Station 9, located about 105 miles south of Fairbanks.

The spill, which shut the pipeline for 79 hours, was the biggest in Alaska since the 212,252-gallon spill in 2006 from a corroded transit pipeline at the Prudhoe Bay field.

Alyeska has been automating and centralizing operations, part of its plan for coping with reduced throughput and dramatically increased cost per barrel shipped. Oil flow through the line peaked in 1988 at over 2 million barrels a day, but output from Prudhoe Bay and other maturing North Slope fields has dwindled significantly since then.

Critics argue that Alyeska's operational changes pose safety risks, and they directed much of their ire at former Alyeska President Kevin Hostler, who retired in September.

To replace Hostler, Alyeska's owners hired retired U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thomas Barrett, the former head of the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration. Barrett officially started at Alyeska on Jan 1.

WASHINGTON – The FBI is investigating whether the suspect in Saturday's shooting rampage in which a congresswoman was critically wounded was the same person who posted a rambling Internet manifesto accusing the government of mind control and demanding a new currency.

Jared Lee Loughner, 22, of Tucson, was taken into custody moments after the shooting at a political meeting held by Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a supermarket parking lot. At least five people died and Giffords was left fighting for her life with a head wound.

In a series of YouTube videos, a person identifying himself Jared Lee Loughner complains about government mind control, treasonous laws, illiterate dreamers and the U.S. currency.

"The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," the person wrote in one of the videos, which contain only music and white text on a black background.

"No! I won't pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver. No, I won't trust in God."

The postings describe no coherent political ideology, said Mark Potok, an investigator with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks violent extremists. Loughner was not in the Center's database of hate groups and radicals.

"He certainly sounds like he's gone off the deep end, but at the same time, he is mouthing some rhetoric that is quite reminiscent of the anti-government movement ... It's hard to know what to make of his ideology."

A federal law enforcement official said the FBI was trying to establish whether the shooting suspect was the same person who posted the videos.

In a biographical sketch on the site, Loughner writes that he attended Tucson-area schools and says his favorite books include Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto," and Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," set in an insane asylum.

"My favorite activity is conscience dreaming: the greatest inspiration in my political business information," the writer of the post says.

WASHINGTON – Postal workers who returned to work Saturday said a package that ignited at a government mail facility conjured painful memories of the anthrax attacks that killed two of their colleagues in 2001.

The fiery package found Friday, which was addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, followed two packages that ignited Thursday in Maryland state government mailrooms. It halted government mail until bomb-sniffing dogs could sweep the D.C. facility.

Mail processing resumed Saturday morning after a meeting with workers, the local postmaster and the workers' union.

Postal workers union President Dena Briscoe said that the meeting was helpful but that the fiery package worried many employees. She said most of the postal workers also were sorting D.C. mail back in 2001, when letters containing anthrax were sent to lawmakers and news organizations as the nation was still reeling from the 9/11 attacks.

"One of the ladies was crying because these episodes are bringing those feelings and those emotions and those memories back," Briscoe said. "We want them to feel safe and secure and be able to trust management to respond properly if this were to happen again." Postal officials installed new sensors and other safety equipment in the wake of the anthrax mailings.

When the popping and smoking package was discovered Friday, postal service managers failed to follow proper safety procedures, Briscoe said.

The evacuation process was "very sloppy," she said, because workers in the back of the building had no idea they were supposed to evacuate. Managers should have made an announcement on the public address system, she said.

Helen Lewis, a mail processing clerk at the D.C. facility, said co-workers told her management had trouble deciding whether to evacuate the building and wanted to wait for postal inspectors or police to decide. A worker ended up flagging down a police car, and workers said police evacuated the building.

"That's not good enough," she said. "This is not a suspicious package. This is a package that went off."

People in the back of the building didn't know about the ignited package until police arrived, Lewis said.

"We have two employees who passed" because of anthrax, she said, adding that workers need information in an emergency to keep themselves safe. "Something is wrong with that picture right there. We must do better."

Workers said they should have been given mandatory talks on safety procedures early Friday because the Maryland packages had been sent through the U.S. mail system.

The area the package ignited in was properly isolated, though, and the emergency response improved as more agencies got involved, Briscoe said.

Washington Postmaster Gerald Roane met with about 40 workers early Saturday and acknowledged some things could have been handled better, Briscoe said. A U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Employees let him know that this brings them back to the anthrax experience" when workers felt their safety wasn't a priority, Briscoe said. "Safety needs to be much more effective in the Postal Service."

Workers at the postal facility where two workers died had sued the Postal Service for failing to protect them, but a federal judge ruled in 2004 that the service is immune.

By Saturday, postal workers had each been given a photograph of the original Maryland package and were briefed on how the package addressed to Napolitano was similar. Briscoe also was urging Roane to establish worker safety committees to better prepare employees. At least one worker asked for thicker gloves to protect their hands.

The Maryland packages burned the fingers of state workers as they were opened. The packages carried a message railing against highway signs that urge motorists to report suspicious activity. The message read: "Report suspicious activity! Total Bull----! You have created a self fulfilling prophecy."

In July, Napolitano launched a nationwide "see something, say something" campaign similar to the signs, reminding commuters to report suspicious behavior.

Authorities fear there could be more packages.

"We've got to make sure we go after this person and get them off the street and get them behind bars, because these kinds of things are very, very dangerous," Maryland State Police Col. Terrence Sheridan said Friday.

Police in D.C. and Maryland on Saturday had not identified a suspect or where the packages originated. Investigators were searching for disgruntled people who've made threats against the government.

Anyone arrested would be charged with possession and use of an incendiary device, which includes a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, authorities said.

Dangerous devices sent through the mail remain extremely rare, postal inspectors said, with 13 such cases reported since 2005.

That's not much comfort for Leroy Richmond, 66, who retired from the postal service after two of his co-workers died in the anthrax attacks. The postal facility that had been contaminated has since been renamed in honor of those who died — Joseph Curseen Jr., 47, and Thomas Morris Jr., 55.

The fiery packages were much different than the anthrax letters, but workers must remain vigilant, he said.

"I'm truly worried because I know initially when the anthrax bacteria went through ... it seemed as though the post office was more concerned about moving the mail and not losing money, as opposed to not losing people's lives," Richmond said. "I don't want that to ever happen again because I lost two friends that way."

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The silhouetted bodies moved in waves through the night, climbing out of crumbled homes and across mounds of rubble. Hundreds of thousands of people made their way to the center of the shattered city by the thin light of a waning crescent moon. There was hardly a sound.

It took a few moments to recognize the great white dome bowing forward into the night. Another had fallen onto itself, its peak barely visible over the iron gate. The white walls of the 90-year-old mansion were crushed, the portico collapsed. Haiti's national palace was destroyed.

It was clear from the first, terrible moments after the quake, when I ran out of my broken house to find the neighborhood behind it gone, that Haiti had suffered a catastrophe unique even in its long history of tragedy.

But it was not until reaching the Champ de Mars plaza at the center of the capital, more than six hours later, that I understood what it meant. Not just homes and churches had succumbed. Haiti's most important institutions, the symbols and substance of the nation itself, had collapsed atop the shuddering earth.

The people came to the palace in droves seeking strength and support. Some wondered if President Rene Preval might emerge — or his body. They were looking for a leader, a plan, some secret store of wealth and aid.

But there was no news, no plan, no help that night. The president was not there. Nobody was in charge.

In the year since, crisis has piled upon crisis. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear.

There was hope that the quake would bring an opportunity to break the country's fatal cycle of struggle, catastrophe and indifference. But promises were not kept, and no leader emerged, within Haiti or outside.

What little center there had been simply disappeared, and the void was never filled.

___

Among those gazing at the collapsed palace that night was Aliodor Pierre, a 28-year-old church guitarist and father of two. Until that moment, he had lived in the slum of Martissant. His friends called him "Ti-Lunet," little glasses, for the wire-rimmed pair he wore.

He was drinking beer at a corner store when the earth began to move. He tried to walk into the street but the force knocked him down. A roar filled the air, like a thousand trucks crashing through a mountain forest. A friend tried to bolt but Aliodor shouted "No!" and held him back. They lay together on the ground until it stopped.

Aliodor picked up his head. His apartment, a five-story building, was flat. Everything he owned was buried inside. He didn't know where his wife and children were.

Then the screaming began all around him.

Aliodor ran to his parent's house a few blocks away. It had fallen. He shouted and an answer came from inside. He smashed a window and pulled out his mother, hurt but alive. Neighbors rushed to help rescue other relatives. Still his wife and children were missing.

His heart raced. He and a friend ran through the neighborhood, pushing off concrete and slicing through barbed wire with pliers. In one doorway, they found a young girl who had nearly escaped before the house fell forward onto her lower leg. "Save me!" she screamed. Aliodor looked for a hacksaw to cut her free, but she died in front of him.

Dazed, he followed the crowd through the falling light to the central plaza. People were shouting: The national palace, Roman Catholic cathedral and Episcopal cathedral — where Aliodor sometimes played guitar — were gone. He looked for the white domes, but couldn't see them.

He sat down near a statue of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the liberator and first president of Haiti.

____

Hours later Aliodor had still not found his wife, Manette Etienne, their 7-year-old daughter, Sama, or their 3-year-old son, Safa. Pain wrenched his stomach as he pictured them dead. He didn't know what had happened to the nursing school his wife attended.

He started walking toward his neighborhood. As he reached a gas station, suddenly there was Manette, walking toward him. The children had been saved by a teacher who ran them out of school when the shaking began. They had thought he was dead, too. They held each other and for a moment the broken city disappeared.

"It was like the earthquake never happened," he said.

By morning, people began carving up the lawns and plazas, marking space with blankets, umbrellas and bits of cardboard to sleep on. Some thought being near the government might mean being closer to the aid. But there was no government there. When Preval came out of hiding, he set up shop at a police station that backed directly onto the airport runway. Maybe he was leaving, people mused.

They wanted to leave. The Champ de Mars plaza reeked. Stagnant fountains became toilets, washing pits for clothes and wells for bath water. Bodies trapped under the rubble started to smell. Those survivors who could got surgical masks. Others painted toothpaste mustaches under their noses.

Two days after the quake, roaring gray helicopters dropped onto the rubble-strewn lawn outside the palace. American soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division jumped out with their rifles, packs and armor — the vanguard of what President Barack Obama called one of the largest relief efforts in U.S. history.

The soldiers took over the airport and stood guard as U.N. peacekeepers handed out rice, beans and water to a desperate crowd. Fights broke out and pepper spray filled the air. Aliodor lined up once for food, then swore never to do it again.

He asked the soldiers why they had come with guns. A young private told him they had been on their way to Iraq when they were told to go to Haiti instead. Aliodor asked why he wasn't carrying food, water or something to help people build houses.

"He said to me, 'I'm just a sharpshooter. I'm very good at shooting,'" Aliodor recalled. "But I said, 'Haiti's not at a war.'"

____

On the last day of March, donors at a United Nations conference pledged nearly $10 billion for the reconstruction of Haiti, with its almost 10 million people. The United States alone promised $1.15 billion for 2010, the largest one-year pledge.

Days later, word spread that the national palace would be torn down. Radio reports said the government of France had agreed to help build a new one. On April 8, people came to see the demolition begin.

The palace was the backdrop for the famous statue of the Neg Mawon, the escaped slave blowing a conch shell to call others to fight for freedom. But the palace's history, like Haiti's, was never simple.

The Beaux Arts mansion, designed in 1915, was torched while still under construction by a mob bent on assassinating the president, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. It was completed under the U.S. occupation that followed his death, and was the scene of successive coups and ousters. Eventually, it became a symbol of terror under the father-son dictatorship of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Presidents ceased living in the palace after Jean-Claude's 1986 overthrow, but it continued to host world leaders in its salons — and protests and coup attempts on the lawn.

The people of the Champ de Mars watched as the backhoes tore down what was left of the portico and, for the first time in most of their lives, they got a glimpse of the grand salon and the crystal chandeliers inside.

Then the machines stopped. A Preval aide said there were disagreements over how reconstruction should proceed. Demolition came to a halt.

On the plaza, aid groups had handed out plastic tarps and put in portable latrines. Shacks went up across every open space. Someone tied a tarp to the side of the Neg Mawon.

Aliodor scraped together most of the money he had — about $51 — to buy wood, sheets and tarps to put up a little shack, a few feet (meters) from where he had sat down the first night.

The bonhomie and spirit of sharing that had prevailed in the days after the quake cracked, and then broke. Mugging, robbery and rape became facts of life. Aliodor sent his children to his quiet hometown in the rural south to live with relatives.

Without a government to organize them, the people began organizing themselves. In settlements all over the capital, camps set up organizing committees in an intricate bureaucracy. Aliodor's Place Dessalines was the largest. He was named spokesman for its central committee.

"I'm one of those guys who has little money but I have a lot of strength," he explained.

___

There was, at one point, a plan.

As the homemade camps swelled beyond 1.5 million people, the government said it would relocate 400,000 to the capital's outskirts. Officials set up card tables around the Champ de Mars to register people who talked excitedly about getting new homes, better than the slums where they had lived before.

In April the first camp was ready in the open desert north of the capital, designed by U.S. military, U.N. engineers and aid groups. About 7,500 people living on a golf course were chosen to move, encouraged by their camp's manager, actor Sean Penn.

It was a disaster. There were no trees and the site was too remote. Also, it turned out that the parcel belonged to Nabatec Development — whose president was head of the relocation commission. And so the company stood to gain government compensation for its land.

Over the summer, a storm ripped through a quarter of the camp's tents. People screamed and cried as, again, they lost their homes.

Only one more relocation camp was built. The rest of the project was abandoned.

In May, an old smell returned to the Champ de Mars: Tear gas. Parliament dissolved because an election could not be held to replace expiring seats. Its last act was to grant emergency powers to Preval and create a reconstruction commission co-chaired by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Clinton was already the U.N. Special Envoy for Haiti. Aliodor and others wondered if he was now their governor.

When Preval announced that he might extend his term beyond February 2011, opponents marched to the palace. Police and U.N. peacekeepers fired rubber bullets and tear gas at rock-throwing demonstrators and into the camp.

Then Haiti settled in for a summer break. The World Cup was on.

In July, exactly six months after the quake, big cars pulled up to the palace. The government was moving back in. News conferences, once held under a mango tree at a police station, would now be in a new wooden gazebo. A defiant Preval said the lack of massive disease outbreaks and violence was proof that the quake response had gone better than people were saying.

Then came the medals. Twenty-three honorees — including Penn and Clinton — received certificates deeming them Knights of the National Order of Honor and Merit. There was no mention of the dead, or the giant shantytown a few hundred feet (meters) away.

The officials then announced that the previous six months of grinding inaction had merely been the emergency-recovery phase. Now, they said, reconstruction would begin.

___

Aliodor and Manette were losing weight. Food was scarce and there was no work. The shack boiled in the summer heat.

Every day Aliodor woke up in their cramped bed and walked out to the sight of a big rubber bladder, wider than his shack, that aid groups sometimes filled with treated water. Above it stood the statue of Dessalines on a horse, waving to his left.

The sun beat down until it gave Aliodor a headache. He had an eye infection. He was starting to get angry.

"The government, the ones who are responsible for us, don't really want us to go because while we are in misery they are enjoying themselves," he said. "Every day they are making money on top of our heads."

The aid groups promised they would do this and that, fix a toilet, bring more food. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. The committee squabbled. People stole what they needed.

Behind Aliodor's shack, the backhoes and bulldozers at the national palace had been sitting idle for months.

"The country needs to have a national palace. But if it's under these guys who are in power now, the palace will never be built," Aliodor said.

He looked at Dessalines again, waving on his horse. Maybe he was trying to leave, too.

___

Rumors had been spreading for weeks. A strange disease was killing people in the countryside: like diarrhea, but it could kill you in hours.

In mid-November, it arrived on the Champ de Mars. A woman everyone said was crazy walked into her tent one day and did not leave. In two days, the tent gave off a nauseating smell. A brave soul opened the tarp and found her lying dead in her own filth. A fight broke out between neighbors and police about who would clear her out.

The next day a young man was found dead in a toilet. Word came in from the Cite Soleil slum that dozens of children were dropping dead. The foreigners called it cholera.

Then the news spread that U.N. peacekeepers might have brought the disease to Haiti.

"I'm not supposed to be here, waiting for cholera to kill me in a public park," Aliodor said, jutting out his lower teeth.

As the year drew to a close, the international community pushed for a presidential election. Donor countries provided $29 million, including $14 million from the United States. Black-and-white pictures of the 19 candidates were hung on the palace gates.

The Nov. 28 election was, by most measures, a failure. Hundreds of thousands who had died in the earthquake were still on the rolls, and untold thousands of survivors were turned away because of disorganization or alleged fraud. There was violence and voter intimidation. Nearly all the major candidates called for the vote to be canceled.

When results were announced days later, the city was shut down with flaming barricades. Gunmen wearing shirts of the ruling-party candidate called for people on the Champ de Mars to come out and celebrate. Then they opened fire. Up to three people were killed and several injured. Aliodor and others took turns keeping lookout at night.

Nearly 3,000 people died of cholera and more than 100,000 were infected.

Clinton's commission had approved billions of dollars in projects, but many remained unfunded. Less than $900 million of the donors' conference pledges was delivered.

The United States delayed the bulk of its $1 billion pledge of reconstruction money until 2011. So far, it has sent $120 million to a reconstruction fund and provided about $200 million in debt relief.

___

The guys hanging in front of Aliodor's house still call him Ti-Lunet, but his glasses are long gone. His hair has receded.

The afternoons are still baking hot, and tire fires from a daily protest burn black, acrid smoke nearby. Aliodor has criticism for everyone. He asks me to deliver a message to my country:

"I blame this on the United States, because the United States is the world power," he says. "Why would you accept for us to be living in poverty?"

If Dessalines were alive today, Aliodor says, he would lead the people in a revolution against the government, foreign soldiers and other foreigners who aren't helping. He hopes the spirits of the ancestors will come back and teach Haitians to be independent again.

"God is the only one we have hope in," he adds.

Aliodor pulls out a photo album from under the bed and flips through pictures taken before the quake. There is Manette, in a nursing uniform. And there he is, fit and muscular, a gold cross hanging from his neck and nearly brushing the guitar in his confident hands.

He looks down at his stringy arms. They look like someone else's.

Afternoon shadows come upon the tens of thousands of tents in the central plaza. Soon the people will be shrouded in darkness, just as they were on that night almost a year ago.

Beside them, the national palace lies cracked upon the lawn. There's a gaping hole in the middle.

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida – An outbreak of intestinal illness among passengers on Royal Caribbean International's Radiance of the Sea cruise ship has delayed the next sailing so the ship can be sanitized, the company said in a statement on Saturday.

Radiance of the Seas returned to the Port of Tampa Saturday morning from a five day cruise to Costa Maya and Cozumel in Mexico and was scheduled to leave Saturday night for the same ports. Royal Caribbean said the sailing would be delayed by five hours while the ship is cleaned.

"During Radiance of the Seas' last sailing, a number of guests experienced some gastrointestinal illness," Royal Caribbean said. "In an abundance of caution, we will conduct some enhanced sanitizing on board the ship and within the cruise terminal to help prevent any illness from affecting the next sailing.

"If you have experienced any gastrointestinal symptoms during the past three days, we ask that you please consider rescheduling your cruise," the company told passengers.

The ship can hold 2,500 passengers.

BERLIN – German investigators have found excessive levels of cancer-causing dioxin in chicken — the first such confirmation of tainted meat since the discovery that German farm animals had eaten contaminated feed, possibly for months.

Three chickens — out of 15 samples of chicken, turkey and pork sent to the EU Commission — showed a dioxin concentration twice as high as legally allowed, an Agriculture Ministry spokesman said Saturday.

The spokesman said the chicken meat had not been sold but eating it would not have been harmful in the short term since the contamination levels were so low. He declined to be named in line with government policy.

Excessive dioxin levels were previously discovered in German eggs.

Germany had frozen sales of poultry, pork and eggs from more than 4,700 farms to stem the spread of food that could have been contaminated with dioxin. On Saturday, Lower-Saxony state's ministry lifted the ban for 500 dairy farms after tests on milk, butter and cheese showed no dioxin contamination.

Investigators are probing the German firm Harles & Jentzsch GmbH, which had produced fat used in the tainted feed pellets. Samples of the fat contained up to 73 times the approved amount of dioxin, according to tests published Saturday by the Schleswig-Holstein state agriculture ministry. Earlier tests on Friday had found a concentration 77 times above the legal limit.

The state ministry said it had proof the firm had been producing tainted fat for months.

Dioxins are contaminants that often result from industrial combustion, and exposure to them at high levels is linked to an increased incidence of cancer.

The scandal broke after regular random testing revealed excessive dioxin levels in eggs in western Germany.

South Korea and Slovakia on Friday banned the sale of some German imports, while Britain, Italy and the Netherlands launched investigations into food safety.

In Britain, supermarkets giants Tesco, Morrison's and Sainsbury's removed cakes, quiches and other egg products from their shelves after confirming that eggs contaminated with dioxins had been used to produce them.

The British Food Standards Agency said the supermarkets had already sold most of the affected food, which had a short shelf life, but added the risks to humans were minimal.

"There is no food safety risk from eating these products," the agency said on its website.

Italian Health Minister Ferruccio Fazio said his ministry had asked all farmers who import eggs, milk or meat from Germany to check on dioxin levels, but said no Italian farmers had imported the contaminated feed.

NEW YORK – To fight dwindling camera sales, manufacturers are slashing prices for point-and-shoots — often below $100 — and offering more features for the money.

Camera makers unveiled dozens of models this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the largest gadget show in the U.S. Here's what to look for once they go on sale over the next few months.

Lower prices

It used to be nearly impossible to buy a digital camera for $100. Now, Casio America Inc., Canon Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Olympus Corp. all sell them, and other big brands just jumped on the bandwagon.

Sony Electronics Inc., a company not known for discounted cameras, will sell the Cybershot DSC-W510 ($100), a 12-megapixel camera with a 4X optical zoom — more than what you'll find on most entry-level cameras.

Canon, the market leader, will sell the 10-megapixel Powershot A800 for $89, albeit with a bare-bones 3X zoom.

Kodak has two budget offerings: the credit card-sized EasyShare Mini ($100) and the EasyShare Sport, an $80 camera that can be immersed in up to 10 feet of water, which is the kind of durability normally found in a $200 camera.

Fujifilm NA Corp.'s FinePix AV200 ($90) shoots 720p (1280 x 720) high-definition video, another rarity for cameras this cheap.

HD video standard

It's not unusual for whiz-bang features to trickle down into lower-end products. Face detection, for example, used to be reserved for high-end cameras; today, shoppers have come to expect it. Now, high-definition movie recording is becoming a typical feature on point-and-shoots.

With the exception of some of those $100 cameras, almost every model Canon, Fujifilm, Kodak, Panasonic Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony announced this week records HD movies at 720p or even 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution.

Fujifilm's $90 HD number takes the cake in terms of value, but Canon's Powershot A2200IS ($140) also records HD video for a still-reasonable price.

While we can't vouch for the quality of these movies, the boost in resolution is an improvement because the videos will look sharp on high-definition televisions.

New ways to share photos

We've noticed several companies experimenting with new ways to free photos from the camera.

Samsung's SH100 ($200) isn't the first camera with built-in Wi-Fi, but it is unique in that it can send photos directly to a smart phone. Photographers can also use the Wi-Fi-enabled camera to back up their photos to websites such as Facebook.

People can also use their smart phone as a remote-control to trigger their camera's shutter, as long as they're within a Wi-Fi network. Here's the catch: The camera only does this with Samsung's own line of Galaxy smart phones, which run Google Inc.'s Android software.

Across its product line, Kodak has been emphasizing a sharing feature that lets people select photos stored on the camera to be automatically uploaded to sites such as Facebook when the camera is connected to a computer.

Eye-Fi Inc.'s memory cards can already wirelessly send photos from a camera to a PC or to websites such as Flickr. Now, they can also send photos to smart phones, tablets and other devices. It requires a one-time setup to connect the Eye-Fi card to the gadget over Wi-Fi. Android phone or tablet owners then download an app to see the photos.

Eye-Fi won't say if other devices, such as iPads and iPhones, will be supported. The new feature will be available as a free update to people who already own one of Eye-Fi's X2 cards, which start at $50 for 4GB of storage space.

More megapixels

For a while, camera makers had seemingly called off the megapixel arms race, taking a break from one-upping each other with higher and higher resolution. Now, they're at it again, cramming as many as 14 or 16-megapixels into new models.

This isn't necessarily a good thing: The more megapixels a camera has, the smaller each sensor is, meaning they can collect less light in dim shooting situations. Nighttime photos might also look grainer with more megapixels. This is all especially true of compact point-and-shoots, which have relatively small sensors to begin with.

But with higher resolution come cutting-edge extras, such as advanced image stabilization technologies, panorama shooting and the ability to shoot in slow motion, something the new Fujifilm FinePix HS20 EXR ($500) can do.

If you want those features, go for it. If you happen to see a 16-megapixel camera that costs $30 or $40 more than a similar one with lower resolution, though, pick the cheaper one. Even the cheapest cameras today have 10-megapixel resolution, which is more than enough to produce crisp 8 x 10 prints.

TUNIS – At least one man has been killed in clashes with police in a Tunisian provincial town, a hospital source and witnesses told Reuters, in the latest in a series of riots across the north African country.

Officials declined a request to comment on the latest clashes, which witnesses said took place on Saturday in Thala, about 200 km (125 miles) southwest of the Tunisian capital and near the border with Algeria.

Riots have been breaking out in towns and cities across Tunisia for nearly a month. Protesters say they want jobs and investment, but Tunisian officials say the unrest is the work of a minority of extremists set on damaging the country.

An employee at a hospital in Thala, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said several people had been admitted to the hospital after the clashes. "At least one was killed," the source said.

People who said they witnessed the clashes, local trade union sources and neighbours of the victims, also told Reuters by telephone from Thala that at least one person died after being shot in the confrontation.

Witnesses said police fired their weapons after using water cannon to try to disperse a crowd which had set fire to a government building and threw stones and petrol bombs at police.

Separately, witnesses in the nearby town of Gassrine, the provincial center, told Reuters by telephone there were violent clashes there as well and that a number of people had been hurt.

Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has said the violent protests are unacceptable and could harm Tunisia's interests by discouraging investors and tourists who provide a large part of the country's revenues.

Tunisian authorities say police have used force only where necessary to stop protesters endangering life and ransacking government buildings.

The United States said on Friday it had called in Tunisia's ambassador in Washington to express its concern about the protests

Protests traditionally have been rare in Tunisia, which has had only two presidents since independence from France 55 years ago. The country has in the past been praised by Western allies as a model of stability and prosperity in the Arab world.

For many a man, few things deflate his passion faster than the sight of a woman crying. But tears may do more than visually tell a man it's not time for romance. A woman's tears contain substances that reduce men's sexual arousal, a new study indicates. It's the first evidence that human tears contain chemical signals.

Tears have largely been considered just a visual signal among people: Studies have shown that people looking at a sad face perceive it as sadder when tears are added. In contrast, some animals seem to use their waterworks to communicate chemically. The tears of male mice, for example, contain a protein that makes females more receptive to mating. But given that people, unlike rodents, don't preen each other, researchers assumed that we rarely come in close enough contact to perceive chemical cues in tears.

Cry me a signal. A female volunteer collects her tears in a vial as she watches a sad scene from the film The Champ.
Credit: Noam Sobel, Weizmann Institute of Science.
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Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, wasn't convinced. Human tears shed under duress differ chemically from those shed to clear the eye of irritants, and he wondered whether human tears might also carry messages for the opposite sex.

To find out, he recruited two women who claimed they could cry on demand. He showed them a sad film—a scene from Franco Zeffirelli's 1979 film The Champ, in which a son cries over the body of his dying father, a boxer—and collected their tears in vials (see video). Within minutes, the vials were handed to 24 men, aged 23 to 32, who took 10 deep breaths over the open receptacles. Researchers also stuck a tear-soaked cotton square under each man's nose for the duration of the experiment. As a control, Sobel and his team did the same with saline solution, which they trickled down the women's cheeks to account for perfumes and face creams they might have been wearing.

The men were then asked to judge the emotion and attractiveness of images of women's faces that had been made emotionally ambiguous by morphing together happy and sad faces. The men couldn't smell the difference between tears and saline, and the tears did not influence how sad they thought the faces seemed. Nevertheless, the men found the women less attractive after smelling the tears, the researchers report online today in Science.

The men's heart and breathing rates, skin temperature, and testosterone levels also sank, indicating a drop in sexual arousal. Peering into the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers found that on average the regions of the brain that usually light up when an individual is aroused, the hypothalamus and fusiform gyrus, responded normally to moderately erotic images. However, this neural activity was dampened when the men were exposed to the tears.

Shedding tears is just another way, along with pheromones and body language, that the sexes can communicate, says Sobel. Women shed tears significantly more often during menstruation, when there is a low chance of conceiving, he notes. "This makes perfect sense because it is signaling that sexual activity is inappropriate from an evolutionary point of view," says Sobel.

The study's results expose "a hidden, underlying origin" for tears, says Adam Anderson, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Tears originally functioned to simply shed irritants from the eyes. They were then co-opted to contain chemosignals and then perhaps further co-opted to express sadness, Anderson says.

But many questions remain, says Kazushige Touhara, a molecular biologist at the University of Tokyo who works on biochemical signaling among mice. The substances that dampen male arousal remain unidentified, and it's not clear whether the men sensed them with their olfactory system or through their skin. Without knowing such details, says Touhara, it is difficult to know how important tears are as a biochemical signaling route in human interactions.

AFGOYE, Somalia – Dr. Hawa Abdi has treated sick and wounded Somalis since 1983, through famine and civil war. But it only took one day for Islamist rebels to wreck her life's work.

And only a week for her to rediscover an older, more civil Somali society that has survived despite the horrors that have beset her east African homeland.

Speaking to The Associated Press, Abdi recalled the attack in stark detail:

It was the morning of May 5. Bullets from automatic rifles tore through the concrete walls and woven grass screens. A woman crawled away from her bed in the middle of giving birth. Another burst her stitches from a Cesarean birth as she ran, blood spilling from her body. Mothers were forced to tear IV tubes from their babies' arms as they fled into the thorny bush.

"They just started shooting," she said. "There was screaming everywhere."

The rebels smashed the four glass incubators, the only ones in Somalia. In their looting spree they pried open the metal containers of the centrifuges used for blood tests, looking for cash. They bent the doors and windows out of their frames and carried them off. Food, medicine, equipment were stolen or destroyed. A guard and a bystander lay dead.

Abdi, 64, was imprisoned in her house, with gunmen stationed outside her bedroom door and. A black flag, the banner of the militant group Hizbul Islam, was hoisted outside.

There things may have stayed — one more brief episode in a civil war whose chaos and cruelty have lasted 20 years. But this time was different.

Abdi and her daughters are known throughout Somalia as healers and protectors who don't distinguish among clans, religions or political creeds. Abdi has offered tens of thousands of people refuge on the 400-square-kilometer (150 square-mile) farm, where she has built her hospital. So news of the attack raced through Somalia and its far-flung diaspora.

Somalia's clan system mobilized — a curse when warlords are battling for primacy, but a powerful blessing when the weak can call on their ties to the strong. Former patients began to make calls. Their friends and relatives, both inside and outside Somalia, made calls. And phones belonging to Hizbul Islam began to ring.

After a week, the leader of Hizbul Islam, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys — a man designated a terrorist by the U.S. State Department — ordered Abdi's release and his organization sent her a written apology.

The gunmen, who were already camped on her property before mounting the attack, were searching for food, medicines and cash. They are still in the area. Sullen teenage fighters among them told Abdi that as a woman she should not be operating the hospital.

Now, eight months later, Abdi is internationally renowned, traveling abroad, and honored by Glamour, the U.S. magazine, as a woman of the year. She spoke to the AP in neighboring Kenya, where she is resting on her doctors' orders.

Abdi got her medical degree in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, then allied with Somalia. She became one of the country's first foreign-trained woman doctors. Then famine and civil war engulfed Somalia, and Abdi opened her farm to refugees from the fighting. She believes some 10,000 famine victims are buried on her farm.

"My mother made a lot of sacrifices and never gave up helping her people," Amina, her daughter, said as she walked through the ruins of the hospital with an Associated Press photographer recently. "I remember in 1993, when people had nothing to eat, she was selling her golden necklaces and rings to feed the hungry."

Even when the rebels moved onto her land last year, Abdi continued to work, turning aside threats with a smile or an admonishment from the Quran.

"I told them the Quran says you cannot enter someone's house without their permission and I did not give you permission to be in my house," she recalled.

Now she is slowly beginning to rebuild what was lost in the May assault, helped by her two daughters, who also are doctors and work at the hospital.

She has visited international donors to appeal for money, if only a fraction of the millions the international community spends on military support for the weak, corrupt Somali government. Some Somali expatriates are also trying to help.

Italy, once the colonial ruler of this part of Somalia, gives Abdi money to buy medicine. The U.N. World Food Program, which had suspended aid because it could not be protected, has resumed shipments, sending food for 800 malnourished children and 440 patients in Abdi's care.

The hospital lies at Afgoye, along the main road to the seaside capital of Mogadishu, a corridor that forms one of the world's largest concentrations of displaced people — more than 410,000. Their gumdrop-shaped huts are often little more than rags tied to a few sticks.

The hospital served as a focal point, distributing food, encouraging mediation in clan disputes and treating the sick. Last year, it treated more than 162,000 people and helped more than 14,000 malnourished children, according to figures provided by Doctors Without Borders, which used to support the clinic but pulled out this year.

Abdi says the hospital must now perform brutal triage to determine who is most in need of help. Where there were once 400 beds, the hospital now has only 150. It still receives more than 250 patients a day, including about 15 women a day arriving to give birth.

"We send cars out to come and pick them up but we can't take everyone," she said.

She and her daughters also run an education program for 850 children and lessons for women that include sewing and literacy. They encourage refugees camped on their land to grow vegetables. They mediate in disputes.

For women like 41-year-old Shukri Abdulkadir Mumin, the hospital is a lone bright spot in a life of misery. After her husband was paralyzed by shrapnel in fighting in the capital, the couple fled here with their seven children. The youngest, 7-month-old Maryan, has watery diarrhea, the same condition that killed her sibling.

"My child was very ill when I came to the hospital. She could not open her eyes but now she is recovering," said Mumin, cradling her baby. "Thanks to Allah and to the staff members at Hawa Abdi medical facility."

NEW ORLEANS – Federal investigators are pushing back against criticism they aren't doing enough to keep companies involved in the Gulf oil spill away from any hands-on role in the forensic analysis of a key piece of equipment that failed to keep crude from entering the sea.

Rep. Edward J. Markey sent a letter Friday to the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement detailing what he said are new concerns about conflicts of interest in the blowout preventer testing.

Markey's letter said a Cameron International employee was allowed to operate components of the blowout preventer during the same week that an ocean energy bureau spokeswoman insisted company representatives are not involved in testing the 300-ton device. Markey's concerns are similar to those expressed recently by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.

However, the same spokeswoman, Melissa Schwartz, said Saturday the Cameron worker, Ray Fain, wasn't doing testing of the blowout preventer, but rather was involved in flushing the pods to keep them from eroding, a procedure that is being done periodically and requires proprietary Cameron computer equipment and a technician to operate.

Schwartz said the parties involved in the testing agreed months ago, in consultation with a federal judge, that the procedure was necessary and may need to be conducted every few months.

Representatives for Cameron, BP PLC, Transocean Ltd., the Justice Department and lawyers for plaintiffs in lawsuits over the disaster have been allowed to monitor the examination of the blowout preventer at a NASA facility in New Orleans since testing began Nov. 16.

A Norwegian firm was hired to do the testing under the supervision of a federal investigation team.

But the safety board, and now Markey, D-Mass., said employees from Transocean and Cameron have been getting preferential and sometimes hands-on access to the blowout preventer. That would pose a conflict of interest because Transocean was responsible for maintaining the blowout preventer before the disaster and Cameron made the device.

The board has said it wants the testing halted until Transocean and Cameron officials are removed from any hands-on role in the examination. Markey said in his letter that he wants an investigation of the conduct of any federal investigators or officials who allowed Cameron and Transocean employees improper access to the blowout preventer.

Following the safety board complaints, Transocean denied it had acted improperly. It also has suggested that the safety board doesn't have jurisdiction to participate in the investigation. A Cameron spokesman did not respond to a Saturday request for comment.

Following the April 20, 2010, rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the blowout preventer used with BP's well failed to do its job: stopping the flow of oil to the sea. Eleven workers were killed in the blast, and some 200 million gallons of oil were released by BP's undersea well, according to government estimates that BP disputes.

The device was raised from the seafloor on Sept. 4, and it sat at the NASA facility for two months before testing began.

JERUSALEM – Bulldozers demolished a hotel in an Arab east Jerusalem neighborhood Sunday to make way for a new Israeli enclave, moving ahead with a plan that has angered the Palestinians and the U.S.

The Shepherd Hotel, purchased by a Jewish American millionaire in 1985, is to be replaced by 20 apartments for Israelis. Workmen and earth-moving equipment were knocking down the structure in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a frequent flashpoint of protests over Israeli policies.

Peace talks are currently stuck over Israeli construction in east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as their future capital. The Palestinians say they will not renew talks without an Israeli settlement freeze that includes the area, which was captured along with the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.

Israeli and Palestinian envoys are heading to Washington this week in an attempt to move talks forward, but the Palestinians say the envoys will not talk directly to each other.

Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman, refused to discuss the Shepherd Hotel project but called on the Palestinians to return to talks.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat condemned the project. "As long as this government continues with settlement and acts like the demolition of the Shepherd Hotel there will be no negotiations," Erekat said.

The Shepherd Hotel project is funded by Jewish American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, a longtime patron of Jewish settlers.

The people behind the project "want to settle here and make the situation in Jerusalem even more problematic than it is now," said Mossi Raz, an Israeli peace activist and former lawmaker, at the demolition site.

In recent years, settler groups have been moving more Israeli families into Palestinian neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, attempting to ensure the city will not be divided in a future peace deal. Several thousand settlers now live in Arab neighborhoods of the city under heavy guard.

That presence has led to tensions, and unrest in those neighborhoods has recently been on the rise.

Sheikh Jarrah is the scene of a weekly protest against the evictions of Palestinians to make way for settlers.

Israel says it has the right to build anywhere in the city, including east Jerusalem, which it annexed in 1967 in a move that has not been internationally recognized. Officials also note the Shepherd Hotel project is private, and the property was purchased legally.

Since capturing east Jerusalem, Israel has built large Jewish neighborhoods there that are now home to 200,000 people, more than a quarter of the city's population. An additional 300,000 Israelis live in the city's western sector.

The 250,000 Palestinians who live in east Jerusalem consider the Jewish neighborhoods to be illegal settlements.

BOSTON – For the first time in at least a century, U.S. fishermen won't take too much of any species from the sea, one of the nation's top fishery scientists says.

The projected end of overfishing comes during a turbulent fishing year that's seen New England fishermen switch to a radically new management system. But scientist Steve Murawski said that for the first time in written fishing history, which goes back to 1900, "As far as we know, we've hit the right levels, which is a milestone."

"And this isn't just a decadal milestone, this is a century phenomenon," said Murawski, who retired last week as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service.

Murawski said it's more than a dramatic benchmark — it also signals the coming of increasingly healthy stocks and better days for fishermen who've suffered financially. In New England, the fleet has deteriorated since the mid-1990s from 1,200 boats to only about 580, but Murawski believes fishermen may have already endured their worst times.

"I honestly think that's true, and that's why I think it's a newsworthy event," said Murawski, now a professor at the University of South Florida.

But fishermen and their advocates say ending overfishing came at an unnecessarily high cost. Dave Marciano fished out of Gloucester, an hour's drive northeast of Boston, for three decades until he was forced to sell his fishing permit in June. He said the new system made it too costly to catch enough fish to stay in business.

"It ruined me," said Marciano, 45. "We could have ended overfishing and had a lot more consideration for the human side of the fishery."

An end to overfishing doesn't mean all stocks are healthy, but scientists believe it's a crucial step to getting there.

When fishermen are overfishing a species, they're catching it at a rate scientists believe is too fast to ensure that the species can rebuild and then stay healthy. It's different from when a species is overfished, which is when scientists believe its population is too low.

Murawski said it's a nearly ironclad rule of fishery management that species become far more abundant when they're being fished at the appropriate level, which is determined after considering factors such as a species' life span and death rates.

A mandate to end overfishing by the 2010 fishing year — which concludes at different times in 2011, depending on the region — came in the 2007 reauthorization of the nation's fisheries law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Murawski said the U.S. is the only country that has a law that defines overfishing and requires its fishermen not to engage in it.

"When you compare the United States with the European Union, with Asian countries, et cetera, we are the only industrialized fishing nation who actually has succeeded in ending overfishing," he said.

Regulators say 37 stocks nationwide last year were being overfished (counting only those that live exclusively in U.S. waters); New England had the most with 10. But Murawski said management systems that emphasize strict catch limits have made a big difference, and New England just made the switch.

Fishermen there now work in groups called sectors to divide an annual quota of groundfish, which include cod, haddock and flounder. If they exceed their limits on one species, they're forced to stop fishing on all species.

About two-thirds into the current fishing year, which ends April 30, federal data indicated New England fishermen were on pace to catch fewer than their allotted fish in all but one stock, Georges Bank winter flounder. But Murawski said he didn't expect fishermen would exceed their quota on any stock.

In other regions with overfishing — the South Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean — regulators project catch limits and other measures will end overfishing this fishing year. Already, South Atlantic black grouper and Gulf of Mexico red snapper are no longer being overfished.

The final verification that overfishing has ended nationwide, at least for one fishing year, will come after detailed stock assessments.

It will be a "Pyrrhic victory" in hard-hit New England, said Brian Rothschild, a fisheries scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He said regulators could legally loosen the rules and allow fishermen to safely catch more fish, but regulators have refused to do it, and fishermen have needlessly been shut out from even healthy stocks.

The science is far from perfect, Marciano said. Regulators believed fishermen were overfishing pollock until new data last year indicated scientists had badly underestimated its population, he said. And some stocks, such as Gulf of Maine cod, have recovered even when fishermen were technically overfishing them.

"To say you can't rebuild stocks while overfishing is occurring is an outright lie. We did it," Marciano said.

Tom Nies, a fisheries analyst for regional New England regulators, said stocks can sometimes be boosted by variables such as strong births in a given year, but they'll inevitably decline if overfishing continues on them.

Peter Shelley, senior counsel of the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental group, said the industry's problems are rooted in years of overfishing, especially during the 1980s, not regulation.

"It was a bubble," he said. "Fishermen were living in a bit of a fantasy world at that point, and it wasn't something you could sustain."

That's why Murawski's projection about the end of overfishing is "a very big deal," he said.

"I think we're just starting to see signs of a new future," Shelley said.

What fisherman Steve Arnold, 46, sees in his home port of Point Judith, R.I., are fewer boats, older fishermen and "a lot of frowns on people's faces."

Overfishing might end this year, but the fleet has suffered and has an uncertain future, he said.

"I believe we can get to a better place, but the work isn't done," Arnold said. "We're living through something that we're learning as we go. It's not a comfortable feeling."

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—Now, for a change, some good news on the environmental front. Global efforts launched in 1989 to stem emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—volatile chemicals, used as refrigerants and propellants in spray cans, that break down ozone—have borne fruit not only by protecting ozone in the atmosphere but also by preventing even more dramatic atmospheric heating. That's because, like carbon dioxide, CFCs in the atmosphere trap heat. New studies, presented here last month at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show that had humanity not cut this pollution, Earth would have experienced as much as 1.5ºC of additional global warming by 2070. Moreover, the new projections show, CFC pollution would have thinned the layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere, which blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation, even more than scientists expected, as a result of an unforeseen "feedback" effect.

Although some countries had begun sooner, Western nations began phasing out CFCs en masse with the passage of the Montreal Protocol in 1989. The main rationale was the chemicals' harmful effects on the ozone layer, the thin chemical shell that protects the planet from ultraviolet radiation. Halogen atoms that make up the chemicals, which are key ingredients in spray bottles and refrigerators, offer catalytic surfaces in the upper atmosphere that accelerate the destruction of ozone. In 1989, CFC emissions were growing by 3.5% a year.

Scientists have long known that CFCs are also potent greenhouse gases. But it wasn't known how damaging they would have been had their emissions continued to grow. Using a climate model run on a supercomputer, Rolando Garcia of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and colleagues showed that had that 3.5% annual increase in CFC levels continued unabated, Earth would have experienced as much as 1.5ºC of additional warming by 2070. That's on top of the roughly 1ºC of warming that's expected because of the buildup of atmospheric CO2 under a standard business-as-usual scenario that Garcia's team modeled. In the "world avoided" scenario, the modeling suggested, low-rainfall areas are spread across the Mediterranean and Western North America, worsening trends that scientists are expecting in coming decades.

Meanwhile, in data also presented at the meeting, colleagues used an atmospheric model focused on the effect on the ozone layer. Although its depth fluctuates with pressure, the ozone layer is the equivalent of roughly 2 centimeters thick over the equator and thinner over the poles. The modeling showed that the layer's thickness over the equator would be cut in half by the middle of the century had people gone on using CFCs as before. That's because of an effect that scientists had underestimated: More CFCs meant less ozone, but the accumulating ozone increases the trapping of heat in the lower atmosphere, robbing the upper atmosphere of heat and therefore warming it. (This effect has been apparent for decades, but more ozone would enhance it.) Certain chemical reactions that destroy ozone, it turns out, are enhanced by clouds formed at the cooler temperatures, creating a feedback loop. "By 2070, you essentially have a global ozone hole," said Garcia.

Such thinning of the ozone layer would triple the amount of radiation expected to strike the planet by 2065. From the Mediterranean Sea south to Antarctica, for example, the planet would experience an ultraviolet (UV) index of nearly 50. For reference, said Paul Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the ozone layer work, "a blond guy gets a sunburn in about 15 minutes with a UV index of just 10." The presumed effect on the incidence of skin cancer would also be dramatic.

The modeling drives home the point that the ban on CFCs constitutes a monumental environmental success story. "There's a tendency of people sometimes to say, 'Did we need to do this?' " says atmospheric scientist Darryn Waugh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who didn't collaborate on the research. Had the world not clamped down on CFCs, "these are pretty dramatic things that would have occurred." Applaud humanity for doing the smart thing—or quake at the thought of the bullet we unwittingly dodged.

Link
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/01/measures-to-save-ozone-stemmed-a.html?rss=1