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Los Angeles (E! Online) –
If nothing else, Pete Doherty certainly knows how to bookend a week.
Just days after Babyshambles' ever shambolic frontman was fined by Swiss police for being intoxicated and in possession of a hypodermic needle on a recent flight, the rocker found himself back in police custody this morning after getting arrested on—surprise, surprise—suspicion of drug possession, among other indiscretions.
“At approximately 12:30 a.m. on June 11, officers on patrol in Eastgate Street, Gloucester, saw a car being driven erratically,” a police spokeswoman said.
Police arrested the 30-year-old Doherty on suspicion of drunken driving, possession of Class A drugs, driving without a license or insurance and dangerous driving after failing to stop for police.
Doherty and an unidentified female were arrested and taken for questioning to a police station in Gloucester, located in western England. The former Libertine had performed a solo show in the town earlier last night.
While Doherty was being questioned, police reportedly raided his nearby home; it's unknown what they were looking for or whether they found anything incriminating.
Police have remanded Doherty in custody and will not release him until he faces a judge.
The rocker is due to appear in Stroud Magistrates Court tomorrow morning.
His female companion was also arrested for drug possession but has since been released without charge.
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As a French nuclear submarine arrived off the coast of Brazil to join the effort to locate the black box from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, aviation experts stressed the necessity of recovering those cockpit recorders in order to learn what exactly brought down the Airbus A330 and the 228 people on board. In past inquiries into airline disasters, investigators have been able to figure out the cause by piecing together clues from the wreckage itself, sometimes without information from the black box. But after 10 days of searching, the authorities combing what’s believed to be Flight 447′s crash site, some 700 miles (1,125 km) out to sea, have come up with only 41 bodies and relatively little of the plane’s wreckage. And that, experts say, is not nearly enough.
“Based on what has been recovered thus far, you really can’t expect investigators to come up with much about how and why the plane came down,” says Vincent FavÉ, an aeronautic engineer and judicial expert who has participated in past French aviation investigations. “What they do have supports the obvious hypothesis that the plane broke up while still in the air. But with so little debris and few victims recovered this late, they’ll really need to get the black box to have any chance of finding out what happened.” (See pictures of the search for Flight 447.)
FavÉ and other air-safety experts warn that rough seas and worsening weather in the search area are already lowering the chances of finding more significant evidence. That, they say, increases the value of the 24 automated alerts the A330 emitted just before it vanished on June 1. Those warnings signaled electrical problems, reduced cabin pressure, considerable turbulence and, above all, conflicting information from the three Pitot tubes, devices that help pilots determine the plane’s speed. Based on the alerts, one of the leading theories now is that malfunctioning sensors may have prevented the crew from correctly gauging the plane’s velocity as it entered a turbulent zone. Traveling too fast in such conditions could have caused the A330 to break up; insufficient speed could have caused it to fall from the sky. (Read “What Brought Down Air France Flight 447?”)
“At those kind of altitudes, the gap between excess speed and stalling narrows, especially when you factor in complications like turbulence,” says Paul Hayes, director of the London-based Ascend Worldwide fleet consultancy, which advises global airlines and air-transport companies. Without the black box, Hayes adds, the alerts could provide some answers, but not all of them. “Correctly sequencing the cascade of technical reports the plane sent should give investigators clues into what was going wrong as it flew into difficult weather,” he says. “At this point, the limited remains of the plane and its passengers recovered will probably be most helpful to investigators to determine which parts of the aircraft began breaking up and falling to the sea first.”
Despite the paucity of evidence, the inquiry is still young – and past air-disaster inquests have successfully solved the causes of crashes even after long and confounding investigations. Most notable of those was the investigation into TWA Flight 800 from New York City to Paris, which exploded off Long Island, New York, in 1996. Though that plane’s flight recorder was found, the blast caused it to stop operating along with the rest of the craft, rendering it basically useless. However, much of the plane’s remains were recovered, and once a large part was reassembled, it allowed experts to conclude that the explosion was the result of an accidental mixture of air and fuel fumes that ignited in a central tank.
If enough of it is found, physical evidence can be as helpful as black boxes, or even more helpful, to air-disaster investigators in figuring out what went wrong. Painstaking examination of the wreckage of a New York City–Geneva Swissair flight that mysteriously crashed into the Atlantic in 1998 ultimately revealed a swiftly spreading electrical fire as the cause. Hayes also notes that after the Pan Am 747 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the discovery of metal fragments and an examination of the type of damage to one section of the plane pointed experts to a small bomb as the source of the calamity. Forensics has also cleared up questions in otherwise obvious accidents, such as the fuel-tank explosion of an Air France Concorde in 2000 that killed 113 people. During that thorough inquiry, experts not only discovered where and how the tanks caught fire but even located the origin: a metal strip that had fallen off a Continental Airlines plane, setting off a fatal chain of events when it burst the Concorde’s tires at takeoff. (See pictures of the Concorde.)
“Everyone knew what happened – there were photos of the Concorde on fire and blowing up – but examination of the remains allowed investigators to trace the entire sequence of events back to the accident’s smoking gun,” says Jean Guerry, a former pilot and current assistant director of the Bourget Air and Aerospace Museum, outside Paris. “The current Air France investigation will be much harder, since little debris has been recovered, and the material that has – because it floats – will only tell one part of the story at best. Getting the black box is very important.”
That’s why, with 20 or so days left before Flight 447′s black box stops its sonar pinging, the French sub and two radar-equipped ships from the U.S. and the Netherlands have joined the hunt. Their job is daunting. “Experts in the TWA and Swissair inquiries did absolutely excellent work, but they recovered sea wreckage in depths of 100 to 130 ft. [30 to 40 m], while the Air France search is in waters of about 12,000 ft. [3,600 m],” says aeronautic engineer FavÉ. “With most of Flight 447 that far underwater, French investigators are at a real disadvantage – even if they do find the black box.”
See pictures of the Hudson plane crash.
See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.
View this article on Time.comRelated articles on Time.com: What Might Have Made the Air France Flight Disappear Over the Atlantic? Could a Computer Glitch Have Brought Down Air France 447? A Past Flight May Offer Clues to Air France 447

Today, President Obama hosted a town-hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin to sell his ideas on health-care reform. During the Q&A portion, the president and father of two also wrote a note excusing one 10-year-old audience member from school.
Before asking the president a question, John Corpus told Obama that his 10-year-old daughter was “missing her last day of school.”
“Oh no! Do you need me to write a note?” asked the president, who began walking back to the podium. Obama then took a pen out of his jacket, saying “Go ahead. I’ll start writing.” When the president asked for her name, Mr. Corpus gave his own again, “No. HER,” said the president, to much laughter.
Then in a feat of multi-tasking, Obama held onto the microphone while writing a note and listening to Mr. Corpus’ long-winded question. He then began answering the question, while walking off the stage and into the audience to hand the note to Mr. Corpus’ daughter, Kennedy.
What did the now most-famous school excuse say?
“To Kennedy’s teacher – Please excuse Kennedy’s absence. She’s with me. (signed) Barack Obama.”
Not a bad reward for skipping school.

- Lili Ladaga
Yahoo! News bloggers compile the best news content from our providers and scour the Web for the most interesting news stories so you don’t have to.

Web creator job ‘beyond politics’
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told the BBC that the job he has been given by Gordon Brown is an important one that goes beyond party politics.The inventor of the world wide web has been asked by the Prime Minister to help open up access to government data. “I think there’s a public demand for transparency. This is way beyond party politics and beyond global borders,” Sir Tim said. He said taxpayers’ money paid for the data so it should be available to them. Public demandThe Prime Minister told MPs on Wednesday that he was asking the creator of the web “to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming months.” Speaking from Boston in the United States, where he is based, Sir Tim told the BBC that he saw a growing public demand for access to government data. “This is our data, this is our taxpayers’ money which has created this data so I would like to be able to see it please,” he said. Campaigners have pressed for a wide range of public data, from mapping information to MPs’ expenses, to be made available on the web. Sir Tim refused to be specific about which items of data he would help make public, but said he was interested in suggestions from bloggers about what they would like to see. Last weekend, Sir Alan Sugar was appointed as Competitiveness Czar by Mr Brown. Asked whether he was concerned that he might be among a number of public figures used as window-dressing by the government, Sir Tim said: “I am not comparing myself with Sir Alan Sugar in any way, in any dimension.” He stressed that he had campaigned for some time for more transparency of data on the web. He also explained he had recently given a speech about the subject in California: “I had the audience chanting ‘raw data now!’ about government data. This is an important thing to be involved, independent of the politics of the moment.”

Source:BBC

UK ‘suffers slump in wine sales’
Wine consumption in the UK fell 2% in 2008, according to industry analysts.Mintel says public concern over binge drinking and rises in alcohol duty have caused a slump in sales which has put an end to years of growth. It suggests wine companies will have to expand the market among 25 to 34-year-olds to ensure future growth. However, the charity Alcohol Concern says little can be read into the figures because the fall comes against a backdrop of record consumption. A report released in January by industry body Vinexpo revealed the UK was the world’s biggest importer of wine, with 1.6bn bottles being brought into the country during 2007. It said the economic downturn had led sales to drop 3.5% in the first nine months of last year and predicted market growth would halve to 6% by 2012. However, Mintel said consumption had fallen by 30m litres to 1.16bn litres in 2008 – the equivalent of 40 million bottles.
Senior Drinks Analyst Jonny Forsyth said: “People are starting to drink less in the UK, which runs counter to what people think when they read reports about binge drinking. “People are increasingly more sensitive to healthy lifestyles and the government is using taxes and awareness campaigns to crack down on the effects of drinking.” Duty on a bottle of wine had increased 28p to 1.61 since 2007, he said. Mr Forsyth did not blame the recession for the sales slump but said the wine industry would have struggled to maintain growth in any case. He believes suppliers must target younger drinkers, aged 24 to 35, to encourage brand loyalty. This age group had helped boost sales of rose, which increased its market value from 110m to 527m over four years, thanks to its “accessibility” – it is seen as less confusing for those who are not regular wine drinkers. However, Nicolay Sorensen, director of policy and communications at Alcohol Concern, said people were still drinking too much. “Even though consumption may have gone down, the strength of wine has gone up over the years so it’s probably having the same effect on people’s health.” The charity is pressing for a mandatory alcohol sales code to force retailers to improve information available to customers and prevent them using loss-leading promotions, such as selling three bottles of wine for 10. On the topic of targeting younger drinkers, he added: “This is exactly what was happening about 10 years ago when marketing companies identified female drinkers as a potential growth group. “We have seen consequently women’s drinking go up and their alcoholic liver disease also go up to above the rate for the rest of Europe.”

Source:BBC

Government ‘must back insulation’
By Roger Harrabin
Environment analyst, BBC News
The winner of a clean energy prize says government must show much greater urgency in insulating people’s homes.Kirklees Council has won the prestigious Ashden award for its massive home refurbishment programme. It says the UK government could save families 200 a year and cut greenhouse gases if it guaranteed the cash for a nationwide “refurb”. The government says it plans a nationwide scheme based on Kirklees – and says the criticisms are misguided. Homes are the unnoticed polluters: they produce about a third of our greenhouse gases – and home energy bills are a burden for many. Kirklees Council tackled both issues at once by sending hit squads of workers street to street, offering everyone free loft and cavity wall insulation with no conditions. It says it is the most effective way of getting homes refurbished, and that it saves a third of the cost if work is done on a street-by-street basis. It also says it removes the social stigma of having to apply for a means-tested government grant and the problem of having to find a trustworthy contractor. Energy savingsSo far, 25,000 homes have been made over. Kirklees says the average saving in energy bills is 200 a year. One key factor is that the council guarantees the work as a protection against cowboy builders. Nearly 100 full-time jobs and 60 part-time roles have been created as a result of the scheme. Installations are proceeding at a rate of 600 a week, making this easily the UK’s largest refurbishment scheme. The government, which will soon breach its own Warm Homes Act mandating insulation standards for poor households, says it plans a great British “refurb” modelled on Kirklees.
It agrees a major initiative is vital because only 1% of housing stock is renewed every year. If existing homes are not radically improved, it will be impossible for the UK to meet climate change targets. A government spokesman said: “We’d agree that up-scaling to a door-to-door approach is going to be needed. Under our existing schemes, we’re aiming for loft and cavity wall insulation in all appropriate homes by 2015.” Questions remain, though, about funding and delivery. The Treasury has resolved that energy companies will have to take responsibility for delivering refurbishment schemes. This leaves government money untouched but it will act as an indirect levy on electricity bills. Government argues that it will save everyone money in the long run. Dr Phil Webber, who runs the Kirklees scheme, says the government hasn’t committed enough cash to get it started. “Every home capable of having it should get free loft or cavity wall insulation,” he says. “But funding levels (with energy company schemes known as CERT and CESP) are not sufficient to enable the current schemes to scale up. “Also between 30 and 70% of homes – depending on the area – have solid walls. We’ve got to do something about them, too.” ‘Upfront financing’Kirklees has trialled an external render-based product that is approved by English Heritage and mimics the look of brick, stone render or even Yorkshire stone. It water-proofs – and insulates better than cavity wall filling. But costs are significantly greater at 6-10k per house. A government spokesman said: “The need for more expensive adaptations like solid wall insulation is what our Great British Refurb proposals are all about. We want to make financing available upfront with repayments made over a long period. “Repayments would pass from one property owner to the next. The intention is to enable a full property re-fit in seven million homes by 2020, every home by 2030.” But Dr Webber said the government’s ambitions would fail through a lack of capital. “The government should find the capital,” he said. “It is the major shareholder in banks and it should insist that the banks put up the money for this – it’s a safe bet that actually saves money. “And the government could underwrite it. The Treasury needs to be bolder – why they don’t do it, I don’t know. We have got the car-scrapping scheme in very quick time – I don’t understand why it hasn’t happened in the energy field.” The government spokesman said the whole refurb programme was under consultation to run from 2012 and was beyond current spending programmes. But campaigners are also baffled that this sort of labour-intensive home insulation has not been more of a priority in the recent fiscal stimulus as it creates so many “shovel-ready” jobs. It is the sort of stimulus recommended by the former chief Treasury economist Lord Nicholas Stern. They are also dubious that the power suppliers – who have been tasked with delivering the refurbishment – are up to the task. Andrew Warren from the industry lobby group the Association for Conservation of Energy says many power suppliers have decided to give away low-energy light bulbs rather than attempt to get people to insulate their homes better. “This is a cop-out,” he told BBC News. “The firms aren’t even forced to monitor whether the bulbs are even used or whether they are left in the box. The government is letting the power firms determine the pace of improvement to our housing stock – and the power firms have an incentive for us to keep using electricity.” And Dr Webber said that to be successful, schemes had to be locally guaranteed and facilitated: “You’ve got to make it easy for people. If there’s no loft hatch we’ll put one in for you. “If you need scaffolding we’ll do it – at no extra cost… we don’t send you off to get a builder. We have a consultant on renewables, so you know what the best options are. These are complicated matters and I think the government hasn’t understood how much help people need.”

Source:BBC

Los Angeles (E! Online) –
David Carradine's family was right all along: The actor's death was not the result of suicide.
In a video statement today, brothers Keith and Robert Carradine announced that Dr. Michael Baden, the forensics expert they independently hired to carry out a second autopsy on the actor, determined that their sibling did not take his own life.
“The autopsy findings and the evidence thus far available demonstrate that Mr. Carradine's death was not the result of suicide,” Baden said.
The chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police conducted the autopsy in California, after the body arrived from Bangkok earlier this week.
An initial postmortem was done in Thailand, but officials there said the results would not be back for one or two more weeks.
In their statement, the brothers of the late 72-year-old thanked fans for support during what has been a “profoundly painful time.”
“First of all, we would like to thank everyone for their heartfelt expressions of love and sympathy for what we are going through,” said Keith Carradine.
“Until we have all of the pending results of the investigation we respectfully ask that we be allowed to lay our beloved brother, husband and father, grandfather and great-grandfather to rest in peace and with dignity,” Robert added.
They also thanked both Thai and U.S. authorities who have been working in conjunction on investigating Carradine's mysterious death.
The Kill Bill star was found dead in his luxury hotel room exactly one week ago. Police said the actor was hanging naked in his closet, a rope tied to his neck and genitals, leading to the suspicion that his death may have been the accidental result of autoerotic asphyxiation.
No funeral arrangements have yet been announced.
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) –
Conan O'Brien ruled late-night television in his first week hosting “The Tonight Show,” but viewers deserted him as the days progressed, complete ratings numbers released on Thursday showed.
O'Brien averaged 6.1 million viewers a night last week during his much-hyped opening stand on NBC's “The Tonight Show,” compared to an average of 3.5 million viewers for his main competitor, CBS' “Late Show with David Letterman.”
O'Brien's predecessor, Jay Leno, averaged 7.0 million viewers in his last week, ended May 29. O'Brien's debut on June 1 attracted 9.2 million viewers, the program's biggest Monday-night audience in four years. But by Friday, his number fell to 4.5 million viewers.
And preliminary data showed Letterman this past Tuesday beat “The Tonight Show” for the first time since October, attracting a 3.4 rating in households compared to a 2.9 rating for O'Brien.
O'Brien was back on top on Wednesday night, and ratings experts said they expect a back-and-forth race between O'Brien and Letterman in future months.
“It's not about one week, it's about how do you hold the audience season after season,” said Larry Gerbrandt, a principal at Media Valuation Partners.
Letterman, 62, has agreed to stay on as host of “Late Show” through the 2011-12 television season, a source close to the situation said on Thursday.
Meanwhile, fourth-ranked NBC has lauded O'Brien's performance and touted the 46-year-old comedian's ability to bring in younger viewers. In his first week on “The Tonight Show,” O'Brien increased the program's performance in the advertiser-friendly adults 18-49 demographic to a 2.3 rating, compared to an average 1.4 rating when Leno was hosting.
“Clearly (O'Brien's) come into his own as a late night host and obviously NBC has to be thrilled with the performance,” Gerbrandt said.
The late-night picture is expected to get more uncertain for O'Brien in September, when Leno begins hosting a new comedy show in the 10 p.m. time slot on NBC. Leno hosted “The Tonight Show” for 17 years, and experts have suggested that some of O'Brien's current viewers could opt for Leno's show before calling it a night.
(Editing by Dean Goodman)

Los Angeles (E! Online) –
This is why you should never fall asleep first at sleepovers! When this famous mom passed out in Cabo on her birthday, one of her daughters got creative with an eyeliner and gave her a mustache.
What a nice present!
The recipient stars in a reality TV show, and the daughter who defaced her just got her own spinoff from the original series.
Think you know who the victim is? Find out…
It's Kris Kardashian, and the perp was none other than Khloe!
The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star even blogged about the prank she pulled on her mom…nice.
We doubt Kim would have been as understanding about the joke!
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Chastity Bono, gay-rights activist and child of performer Cher and the late entertainer and politician Sonny Bono, is in the early stages of transitioning from a female to a male and will be known as Chaz, his spokesman said Thursday.
Activist Chastity Bono is transitioning from female to male and will be known as Chaz.more photos »
“Chaz, after many years of consideration, has made the courageous decision to honor his true identity,” Howard Bragman said in a written statement. “He is proud of his decision and grateful for the support and respect that has already been shown by his loved ones. It is Chaz’s hope that his choice to transition will open the hearts and minds of the public regarding this issue, just as his ‘coming out’ did nearly 20 years ago.” Someone’s decision to transition does not necessarily mean they are undergoing gender reassignment surgery, and in many cases they do not, said Mara Keisling, executive director of the Washington-based National Center for Transgender Equality. “The whole media fixation on surgery is kind of misplaced,” she said. “Almost no transgender people ever have surgery. We don’t have any idea how many do.” iReport.com: Do you have a transgender story? An estimated one-quarter to one-half percent of the American population is transsexual, however, Keisling said. “It’s sort of a general term that encompasses both or either a social transition or a medical transition.” Keisling said she was unaware of the specifics in Bono’s case, but speaking generally, a transition means that he will now want to be “known, seen, viewed” as a male. “The actual details depend on his needs and wants and his doctor’s needs and wants,” she said. Bragman asked that the media “respect Chaz’s privacy during this long process, as he will not be doing any interviews at this time.”
Now 40, Bono as a little girl made regular appearances on her parents’ show, “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.” As an adult, he has been a longtime gay-rights advocate and been closely associated with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. See more photos from Chastity Bono’s life » Bono’s father, Sonny Bono, was a U.S. representative from California when he was killed in a skiing accident in January 1998.
Source:CNN

A woman and three children were killed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when a suspected robber fleeing in a car jumped a curb and struck them, police said Thursday.
Four people were killed after a car fleeing police struck a home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.
“He literally cut a tree in half,” Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said, “then hit the 1-year-old, [who] was in a stroller. The other individuals were on the front porch of their own home. He struck with such force that it knocked the concrete steps loose.” Latoya Smith, 22, died Thursday from injuries in the crash, which occurred shortly after 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Fentonville area of north Philadelphia, police Capt. James Clark said. Smith’s daughter, Remedy Smithwho would have turned 1 on Fridaydied at the scene, as did Alicia Griffin, 6, and Gina Rosario, 7, Clark said. Video of the scene showed a crumpled silver Pontiac on the sidewalk, pushed up against the front steps of a house and wedged against a tree. Watch police commissioner describe carnage » Donta Cradock, 18, the alleged driver of the gray Pontiac, faces charges for theft of a motorcycle, the crime that allegedly triggered his flight, police said. Other charges are pending approval from the district attorney’s office, police said. “We’re hopeful that it will be four counts of murder,” Clark said. Cradock and an alleged accomplice, Ivan Rodriguez, 20, stole a motorcycle at gunpoint around 7:30 p.m., he said. Rodriguez fled the scene on the motorcycle, while Cradock drove away in the Pontiac, Clark said. An unidentified person told a traffic police officer in the area about the alleged robbery and pointed out the Pontiac, he said. The police officer followed the car and tried to stop it at a traffic light, Clark said. “At that point the Pontiac fled at a high rate of speed,” he said. The officer followed the vehicle, but lost sight of it, Clark said. The officer was not close enough to chase the car, police said, but eventually came across what Clark called a “horrific accident.” Cradock was thrown from the Pontiac and is in the hospital, Clark said. He said a gun was recovered on the suspect. Rodriguez was arrested at his home, Clark said, and faces a theft charge. Both men have “very extensive criminal histories,” Ramsey said.
Bench warrants were out on them at the time of their arrest, Clark said. It was not immediately clear if the two had retained attorneys.
Source:CNN

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
U.S. lawmakers accused the Treasury and Federal Reserve on Thursday of using threats and intimidation to force Bank of America (BAC.N) to take over Merrill Lynch, a charge Bank of America Chief Executive Ken Lewis denied.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson effectively put “a gun to the head” of Lewis to close the deal quickly amid the worsening U.S. banking crisis in late 2008, according to Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Bernanke and Paulson will be asked to testify at a later date before the panel.
Edolphus Towns, Democratic chairman of the committee, said the Merrill deal was pushed through behind closed doors, and through “coded messages and private e-mails”, evidence of a deeper malaise in financial supervision.
“Basically, the regulators and the financial institutions seemed to be making up the rules as they went along,” Towns said, adding that the incident should help shape financial regulatory reforms that Congress is exploring.
Lewis told his board the Fed and Treasury would remove the board and bank management if it did not complete the purchase of Merrill Lynch despite growing financial losses there, according to board minutes cited at Thursday's hearing.
“If that isn't a threat, I don't know what is,” Democrat Elijah Cummings said.
But Lewis was also hammered by lawmakers who said he must have known earlier than he claimed about heavy losses at Merrill, which lost $15.84 billion in the 2008 fourth quarter.
Asked if the bank's consideration of triggering a clause to pull out of the deal should have been relayed to shareholders, Lewis said: “I'd leave that decision to our securities lawyer and our outside counsel.”
LEWIS: NO UNDUE THREAT
Lewis agreed there had been pressure to proceed with the purchase of Merrill but declined, despite repeated questioning, to characterize the stance of Bernanke and Paulson as improper or an undue threat.
Lewis, who kept his answers brief and smiled and laughed at times during three hours of grilling, said Bernanke and Paulson never asked him to keep information secret that the bank wanted to disclose to shareholders.
“I would say they strongly advised and they spoke in strong terms but I thought it was with good intentions,” he said.
“It was in the context of them thinking it was in the best interests of Bank of America and the financial system.”
Bank of America is regulated by the Federal Reserve. A Fed spokesman had no immediate comment on the hearing.
Lewis agreed to buy Merrill Lynch in a deal put together with Treasury's assistance as Wall Street and the U.S. economy fell into a deep tailspin. Shareholders of Bank of America and Merrill voted in favor of the merger last December 5.
The acquisition went ahead on January 1 but was followed later that month by $20 billion in taxpayer aid to help Bank of America absorb Merrill Lynch.
Lewis has said it was only later in December that he learned how fast Merrill was deteriorating, and then threatened to pull out of the merger, with officials of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve pushing for completion of the deal.
“This transaction took place in a climate of fear and intimidation by government officials,” said Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio.
Towns, the panel chairman, said he would not draw any final conclusions until Bernanke and Paulson testified.
“Did Paulson and Bernanke abuse their authority by ordering Mr. Lewis to go through with the Merrill acquisition, or did Mr. Lewis threaten to back out in order to squeeze more money out of the federal government?,” Towns asked.
Democrat Dennis Kucinich said Lewis, who testified under oath, might have committed perjury during the hearing. Lawmakers would have to hear from Fed officials before deciding, he added.
Bernanke's term as chairman of the Fed expires at the end of January. Paulson, who headed Goldman Sachs (GS.N) before President George W. Bush named him treasury secretary, is now with Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
In April, Bank of America shareholders voted to oust Lewis as chairman but the board expressed support for him to remain as chief executive.
(Writing by John Whitesides; Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

LONDON (Reuters) –
The youngest detainee held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, seized when he was just 14 years old, has been released after seven years in captivity, his lawyers said on Thursday.
Mohammed El Gharani, a Chadian citizen, was set free five months after a U.S. federal judge ordered him released after reviewing the evidence against him and ruling that it did not prove he was ever an “enemy combatant.”
Gharani has already returned to Chad, his lawyers said. There was no immediate confirmation from U.S. authorities of his release.
“It is great news that Mohammed has at last been released, but he will never get back the teenage years that were spent in Guantanamo based on shamefully shoddy intelligence,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer and the director of Reprieve, a human rights group that has fought for his release.
“The idea that it took seven years and a federal judge to sort this out demonstrates just how failed an experiment Guantanamo Bay is.”
Gharani was seized in Pakistani in 2001 when a mosque he was attending was raided by Pakistani security forces. He was ultimately turned over to the U.S. military in Afghanistan and held at a prison at Bagram air force base outside Kabul.
Two months later he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where Reprieve said he was subjected to a range of abuses, including being kept tightly shackled to the ground in a hunched position for hours on end and subjected to loud music and strobe lights.
The U.S. government had accused Gharani of staying in an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, of fighting in the battle of Tora Bora, serving as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives, and being a member of a London-based al Qaeda cell.
But the government failed to prove any of the allegations in court and U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled in January that Gharani should be freed. Most of the accusations were based on unreliable information given by other detainees at Guantanamo, Leon said.
Gharani's release comes six months after U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to shut down Guantanamo within a year, one of the first declarations he made as president.
About 230 detainees remain at the prison, but the United States is struggling to find places to return them to.
Seventeen Uighurs, who come from China's largely Muslim region of Xinjiang in the far west of the country, have been released in the past two days, with some set to go to Bermuda and others to the Micronesian island of Palau.
(Reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Alison Williams)

GREEN BAY, Wisconsin (Reuters) –
President Barack Obama took his push for healthcare overhaul to the U.S. heartland on Thursday, calling the current system unsustainable and vowing not to tolerate “endless delay” before acting to fix it.
Hosting a townhall-style meeting, Obama stuck to his view that a government-sponsored insurance plan must be part of a healthcare revamp, despite opposition to the idea from Republicans, private insurers and even the influential American Medical Association doctors' group.
“We have reached a point where doing nothing about the cost of health care is no longer an option. The status quo is unsustainable,” the Democratic president said. He insisted, however, he was not seeking a “government takeover” of the troubled system.
Obama's drive on healthcare comes as lawmakers seek to craft a bill and pass it through the Senate before their summer break. Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives also hope to pass legislation by August.
“As Congress moves forward on healthcare legislation in the coming weeks, I understand there will be different ideas and disagreements … I welcome those ideas,” he said. “But what I will not welcome is endless delay.”
Underscoring a sense of urgency, he said, “If we don't get it done this year, we're probably not going to get it done.”
COSTS
Obama acknowledged public concerns about the cost of extending coverage to tens of millions of people who do not have health insurance at time when the government is spending heavily on economic recovery programs and financial bailouts.
“That's why I have already promised that reform will not add to our deficit over the next 10 years,” he said.
“To make that happen, we have already identified hundreds of billions worth of savings in our budget — savings that will come from steps like reducing Medicare overpayments to insurance companies and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in both Medicare and Medicaid,” he said. “I will be outlining hundreds of billions more in savings in the days to come.”
But with some estimates putting the cost of healthcare reform at $1.2 trillion, Obama conceded those savings will not be enough.
“That's why I've proposed that we scale back how much the highest-income Americans can deduct on their taxes back to the rate that existed under the Reagan years and we can use that money to help finance health care,” he said.
Back in Washington, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing on a plan that would prohibit insurers from denying coverage or charging more due to medical history.
Many congressional Republicans have criticized Democratic proposals for including a public insurance program that would compete with private insurers.
Defending that idea, Obama said, “The reason is not because we want a government takeover of health care … But we want some competition. If the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it will keep them honest and help keep prices down.”
(Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Anthony Boadle)

US ‘prefers talks’ over N Korea
The US envoy to North Korea has said Washington is addressing a growing threat from Pyongyang but still hopes for a diplomatic solution.Stephen Bosworth told a Senate hearing that the Obama administration’s strong preference was to engage in “serious, effective diplomacy”. The UN Security Council agreed a draft resolution to expand sanctions against North Korea on Wednesday. It was responding to Pyongyang’s recent nuclear and missile testing. “The United States and our allies and partners in the region will need to take the necessary steps to assure our security in the face of this growing threat,” Mr Bosworth said on Thursday. “In the interest of all concerned, we very much hope that North Korea will choose the path of diplomacy rather than confrontation.” The US envoy said that North Korea had so far spurned diplomatic advances, but that Washington was willing to resume negotiations at any stage.
“There is no evidence [the North Koreans] are prepared to do that now but I believe they will eventually come back to the table,” he said. The draft UN resolution agreed this week calls on all member states to carry out inspections of North Korean ships that may be carrying equipment related to weapons of mass destruction. It also reasserts a UN ban on North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile tests and calls on Pyongyang to retract its decision to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). In recent weeks, North Korea has fired a long-range and several short-range missiles, and tested a nuclear device in defiance of the UN Security Council. On Tuesday, North Korea said it would use nuclear weapons in a “merciless offensive” if provoked.

Source:BBC

DENVER – Special prison restrictions will be lifted next week for the man who tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes, a federal prosecutor said.
Convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid is serving a life sentence in Florence, Colo., at the maximum-security facility known as Supermax — the most secure prison in the federal system.
Reid said in a 2007 complaint that restrictions placed on him after he arrived at the prison in 2003 denied him the ability to practice his Muslim faith, to participate in educational and recreational activities and to contact reporters. Federal prisons can impose so-called special administrative measures on inmates to deter the risk of violence or terrorism.
Reid has said he was denied access to religious materials and group prayers at the prison, whose inmates include Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Reid also said he had limited access to an imam, in violation of his First Amendment rights.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Prose wrote in documents filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court that the restrictions will expire next Wednesday and won’t be renewed.
Federal authorities have required airline passengers to remove their shoes for inspection since Reid failed to detonate a bomb in his sneakers on a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001.

If it's really something to fear, this flu pandemic seems like it's taking its time.
We first heard about “swine flu” in April. Now we're supposed to call it the new H1N1 strain of influenza A.
We first heard that the new flu was wildly fatal in Mexico. Yes, most of the deaths – 108 of the 144 worldwide deaths as of this afternoon, per the World Health Organization (WHO) – so far have been there and every death is a tragic loss, but that nation's overall fatality rate is 1.7 percent.
Worldwide, the virus currently has a 0.5 percent fatality rate. For comparison, 10 percent to 20 percent of the victims of the “Spanish flu” of 1918-1919 died. It killed an estimated 50 million people in 18 months.
And today, after two months of caution and counting cases, the WHO has declared that this latest influenza outbreak is a pandemic.
At this point, many people may be burned out on the coverage of this flu virus and barely fazed by this new development. Should we be?
What does 'pandemic' mean?
The WHO today elevated its global risk assessment for the new swine flu from Phase 5 to Phase 6, the top of a six-point scale. Phase 6 is a full pandemic – which is defined as community outbreaks in two countries in two separate regions of the world. Phase 5 designated human-to-human spread of a virus into at least two countries in just one region of the world.
There are currently 28,774 cases in 74 countries, according to the latest WHO statistics. (There are 13,217 cases in the United States, with 27 deaths.)
Declaring a pandemic is a big official deal, so big that this is the first global flu epidemic in 41 years (the last one was the “Hong Kong flu” which killed 1 million people). A pandemic is something like a global version of an epidemic, which is a disease outbreak in a specific community or region or population.
Health agencies work together worldwide to define the word “pandemic” to avoid controversy over how to make this call, said Dr. George T. DiFerdinando Jr., a physician epidemiologist and professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-School of Public Health.
Once there is rapid human-to-human transmission, there is no question that a pandemic is occurring, DiFerdinando said. The 1918 Spanish flu was a good example of a rapid pandemic – it spread in a period of four to six weeks across every state in the United States.
The U.S. government has already taken aggressive action, preparing earlier this spring for what was correctly predicted to be an imminent pandemic. Customs officials began checking travelers for illness upon entry to the nation's territories. Millions of doses of anti-viral and other medications from a federal stockpile are being distributed.
The latest WHO designation triggers officials worldwide to dedicate more money and other resources to victims and afflicted regions.
What's next
There will be a second wave of this flu, Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, said today, adding that so far this pandemic is “of moderate severity.”
“Countries where outbreaks appear to have peaked should prepare for a second wave of infection,” she said.
Most Americans and others who've had the new flu say it was mild (by contrast, the regular seasonal flu kills about 30,000 U.S. residents every year). Another question is whether this virus will mutate to become a more virulent killer in the coming months, especially in the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Flu viruses are known to evolve very quickly.
“We are in the earliest days of the pandemic,” Chan said. “The virus is spreading under a close and careful watch … We know, too, that this early, patchy picture can change very quickly. The virus writes the rules and this one, like all influenza viruses, can change the rules, without rhyme or reason, at any time.”
Another cause for concern: Previous pandemics typically spread worldwide within six to nine months. The current flu spread worldwide within two months, probably as a result of all the air travel we do nowadays. Germs spread faster and more easily when people travel a lot across vast distances.
The latest trends – flu prefers young
Now that there are some decent statistics on this flu, some other trends are clear, Chan said:
This new H1N1 virus preferentially infects younger people. In nearly all areas with large and sustained outbreaks, the majority of cases have occurred in people under the age of 25 years.
In some of these countries, around 2 percent of cases have developed severe illness, often with very rapid progression to life-threatening pneumonia.
Most cases of severe and fatal infections have been in adults between the ages of 30 and 50 years.
This pattern is significantly different from that seen during epidemics of seasonal influenza, when most deaths occur in frail elderly people.
Many, though not all, severe cases have occurred in people with underlying chronic conditions. Based on limited, preliminary data, conditions most frequently seen include respiratory diseases, notably asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, and obesity.
Around one third to half of the severe and fatal infections are occurring in previously healthy young and middle-aged people.
Pregnant women are at increased risk of complications. This heightened risk takes on added importance for a virus, like this one, that preferentially infects younger age groups.
The vast majority of cases have been detected and investigated in comparatively well-off countries. It is unclear if the virus will behave differently and make people more or less sick in the developing world, Chan said.
History of declaring pandemics
Back in the 1970s, the general medical thinking was that pandemics occurred every 10 years on average, since there had been a previous flu pandemic in 1968 and another in 1957. The experts were wrong. Until today, there hadn't been a flu pandemic since 1968.
That 10-year thinking is part of what threw medical experts off in 1976 when a swine flu outbreak emerged in 1976 at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The national response to that event taught some hard lessons about efforts to head off a pandemic. The federal government initiated a vaccination campaign – some 40 million were inoculated. But a pandemic failed to materialize. Instead, some people got sick from something else – possibly the vaccine itself (and some of them died).
“Predicting pandemics turns out to be imprecise in the medical and public health community,” DiFerdinando said.
For instance, many medical professionals expected avian flu to become a human pandemic at some point in the past 10 years, but that has not occurred yet.
“If you can figure out what the frequency is [for flu epidemics] – you'd be quite famous,” DiFerdinando said.
And that helps to explain why the WHO didn't jump the gun on declaring the new H1N1 flu a pandemic. The agency had long ago arrived at a definition of “pandemic” and waited until it felt that the data were in to justify using that word.
Video – The Truth About Pandemics
More Flu News & Information
Flu Basics
Original Story: Don't Panic, It's Just a Pandemic
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ISLAMABAD – The footage was chilling — a woman crying out in pain, held face-down on the ground, as a man with a long beard flogged her in front of a crowd.
It could be the video that changed Pakistan.
That two-minute clip, purportedly shot in the Swat Valley where the Taliban held sway until a recent military offensive, has come to represent the militants and their extreme form of Islam. The footage is increasingly seen here as a turning point — perhaps even more persuasive than all the bombings, beheadings and other violence, most recently Tuesday’s suicide attack on a luxury hotel.
The circumstances of the beating are murky, no one is sure where exactly it happened, and the woman’s identity remains unclear more than two months after the whipping was shown repeatedly on TV.
No matter. She remains irrevocably linked with the Taliban, an instant icon the government has used to ask Pakistanis if this is what they want for their country.
The answer from many seems to be no.
There are no scientific polls, but in informal interviews by The Associated Press with more than three dozen Pakistanis across the country Wednesday and Thursday, not a single person expressed sympathy or allegiance toward the Taliban. The most common answer was the militants should be hunted down and killed.
Many people told the AP they used to support the Taliban but no longer do so. The finding is supported by those of Pakistani analysts and commentators, who say they detect a similar shift in public opinion recently against the Taliban.
Certainly, the militants retain some support, particularly in the lawless tribal regions bordering Afghanistan that the Taliban and al-Qaida have used as sanctuary. The extremists would likely retreat to these areas if they continue to suffer defeats elsewhere.
But the change in public mood is empowering the army in its offensive against the militants — a campaign supported by the Obama administration, which believes security in Pakistan is vital to defeating the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.
Now the army says it has the Taliban on the run, helped by tips from residents in villages under fire. It’s quite a change from several months ago, when the Taliban was on the march within 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad, and there was talk of the entire country falling to the militants.
“Like all of us, I was welcoming the Taliban in the beginning,” said Abdul Jabbar Khan, a 52-year-old shopkeeper. Khan now lives with eight family members in a relief camp in Mardan, along the northwest border with Afghanistan. They said they were forced from their home by fighting in Mingora, Swat’s biggest town.
“When Maulana Fazlullah started giving sermons on the radio, he was talking about good things — heaven and Islamic teachings,” Khan said, referring to the Taliban leader in Swat.
“Now we have the result,” he continued. “It is very miserable, painful for all of us. We had a good life there. We had a good home and everything. Now we are begging for even daily meals. These people are responsible. They betrayed us and played with our religious emotions.”
Nadeem Ahmad Awan, a 31-year-old bookseller in the southwestern city of Quetta, said the army should “kill each and every Taliban.”
“No Taliban should go unharmed,” agreed Asma Arshad, 23, a college student in the central city of Multan. “The killing of Taliban is good for Islam and it is good for Pakistan.”
A majority of Pakistanis have always opposed Islamic extremists. Previous army offensives against the militants, however, have resulted in public backlashes as many people concluded the only way to end the bloodshed and destruction was for the weak central government to strike a deal with the extremists.
That may be changing.
“The mood has changed toward the Taliban even among those who had empathy with them,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired military officer. “Now I don’t think they can talk openly in favor of the Taliban. They will be stoned or something.”
Attacks like Tuesday’s bombing of the Pearl Continental hotel in Peshawar that killed at least nine people, including two U.N. workers, also have hardened people’s resolve.
“I get the sense that setting off bombs on any civilian target in the North West Frontier Province — particularly in a place like Peshawar, which might otherwise be a hotbed of support for the insurgency — is fairly obviously a counterproductive strategy,” Shah said.
The militants’ efforts to expand their sway beyond Swat also appear to have been a miscalculation. Under a February peace deal signed with the government, they imposed sharia, or Islamic law — the whipping in the video appeared to be punishment for an offense — and have been accused of murders, rapes and pillaging.
Sufi Muhammad, an influential Taliban cleric, further stirred outrage with a speech in which he denounced democracy and elections — an unpopular pronouncement in a country that recently has emerged from a decade of military rule.
When the Taliban advanced from Swat into the neighboring Buner district in April, the deal collapsed and the government sent the army to oust the militants from the region.
The rising public sentiment against the militants has played into the government’s efforts to build support for offensives against the Taliban that started, with strong encouragement from Washington and other allies, in Swat and may yet head for tougher targets in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan.
Sheik Maqsood, a 47-year-old social worker in Multan, said he used to like and respect the Taliban, but that over the years their atrocities in the tribal regions have changed his mind.
“These Taliban are unpopular to such an extent that not a single person is willing to utter even one word in their favor,” Maqsood said.
The sea change in sentiment appears to have started with the video, said Mehdi Hasan, a journalism professor and political commentator.
The two-minute video, widely aired on local television in early April, shows the woman face down on the ground with two men holding her arms and feet. Her all-enveloping burqa has been hitched up to expose a pair of pink trousers.
A third man in a black turban with a long beard whips her backside more than a dozen times, causing her to scream repeatedly and shout “Stop it, stop it! It is painful!” A crowd of men watches silently in the background.
“After the flogging of the girl in Swat, the people of the country’s mood changed,” Hasan said. “Before that, the public attitude was apologetic and defensive because of the word Islam.”
The Taliban’s other actions had an impact, too.
“The militants were blasting saloons, destroying girls’ schools. They were stopping women from coming out of their homes or going to the doctor,” Hasan said. “People became fed up with this. They are reclaiming Islam. … For the first time in Pakistan, they are taking a strong stand against the Taliban and the extremists.”
Zahid Omar, 37, a local trader in the eastern city of Lahore, said people had been forced to see the Taliban’s “ugly faces.”
Zafar Hilaly, a former Pakistani ambassador, wrote in the influential daily The News that the Taliban’s actions already have cost them any chance of destabilizing the government.
“They helped the public make up its mind,” he wrote. “They helped the army do what it should have done much earlier, which was to fight. They encouraged parliament to acquire some spunk. Pakistan’s victory in the present war against the Taliban is preordained for no other reason than the nation is finally united against the enemy.”
The government has shown more savvy than in previous offensives against militants that left civilians dead. They appear to have been careful to avoid collateral damage as much as possible this time, though it’s impossible to know for sure because the military has severely restricted access to the combat zones.
In addition, there has been a nearly monthlong pause in U.S. drone-fired missile strikes against militant targets near the Afghan border. Such strikes are unpopular in Pakistan, though U.S. officials say the lull was not timed to allow the government to build good will.
The Pakistani army — whose reputation took a beating under former military leader Pervez Musharraf — says it’s succeeding in Swat partly because it has more public support. Many residents are now more helpful in tipping off security forces to Taliban presence, military officials say.
The military also quickly dispatched helicopter gunships to the Upper Dir region in support of a citizens’ militia that sprang up after the bombing last week of a mosque that was blamed on the Taliban. Some similar efforts have foundered for lack of government support.
Still, critics say the Pakistani army does not have the will or ability to vanquish the militants, given its close links to extremist groups.
While the peace deal with the Taliban was widely criticized at the time as a capitulation, President Asif Ali Zardari says he signed off on it because he knew the militants would violate it and show their true colors.
The flogging and other Taliban actions seemed to resonate with Pakistanis because Swat is much more a part of the Pakistan they’re familiar with than the tribal areas. People who live in Punjab have vacationed in Swat and gone there to honeymoon. The tribal areas, on the other hand, are like another planet.
The surge in support for the offensive still could end if the government fails to address the more than 2 million people displaced by the fighting or to hold Swat once it’s cleared. Bringing law and order to that stretch of the northwest is critical to preventing the Taliban’s re-emergence.
Residents in the troubled Bajur tribal region cursed the Taliban in interviews with the AP — but also complained the government did nothing for them after a successful military operation last year against the Taliban.
When the militants were in power, “we were facing threats from the Taliban but at least we could still live in our homes,” said Dost Mohammed, one of thousands who fled their town of Mamund during the fighting — only to return to find their homes and crops destroyed.
Mohammed still favors army action against the Taliban. But he said that the government should help those who pay a heavy price for the war on terror.
___
Associated Press writers Nahal Toosi, Kathy Gannon and Rohan Sullivan in Islamabad, Babar Dogar in Lahore, Abdul Sattar in Quetta, Khalid Tanveer in Multan, Riaz Khan in Mardan and Pamela Hess in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON – The Marine Corps commandant says that all but a few dozen of the 16,000 Marines now in Iraq will be out by next spring, putting a solid end date on a long-anticipated exit for the corps.
Gen. James T. Conway says his Marine commanders are already moving equipment out of Anbar Province, where his forces have largely been concentrated. But the larger exodus will begin shortly after the Iraqi national elections in December.
Conway told a National Press Club audience that he sees the number of Marines in Iraq going down to essentially zero. He says the only exception will be about 30 Marines who will be working with Iraq’s own fledgling Marine Corps securing oil platforms in the south around Basra.
All U.S. combat forces are scheduled to be out of Iraqi cities by the end of this month, and out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

LOS ANGELES – Chastity Bono is having a sex change to become a man. A spokesman for the daughter of Sonny and Cher says Bono “has made the courageous decision to honor his true identity” and began the sex-change process earlier this year.
Publicist Howard Bragman said Bono “is proud of his decision” and hopes “that his choice to transition will open the hearts and minds of the public regarding this issue.”
The 40-year-old writer, activist and reality-TV star came out as gay 20 years ago.

DES MOINES, Iowa – Looking out the 11th floor window of her law office, Jane Wiggins did a double take and grabbed her camera. The dark, undulating clouds hovering outside were unlike anything she’d seen before.
“It looked like Armageddon,” said Wiggins, a paralegal and amateur photographer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change.”
They dissipated within 15 minutes, but the photo Wiggins captured in June 2006 intrigued — and stumped — a group of dedicated weather watchers who now are pushing weather authorities to create a new cloud category, something that hasn’t been done since 1951.
Breaking into the cloud family would require surviving layers of skeptical international review. Still, Gavin Pretor-Pinney and his England-based Cloud Appreciation Society are determined to establish a new variety. They’ve given Wiggins’ photo and similar pictures taken in different parts of the world to experts in England, and are discussing the subject fervently online.
“They (the clouds) were the first ones that I noted of this type and I was unsure which category to put them under,” said Pretor-Pinney, author of “The Cloudspotter’s Guide.” “When we put pictures up online we list the category, and I wasn’t sure how to categorize it.”
Some scientists are skeptical. They argue that researchers who have long watched the sky haven’t seen anything distinctly new for decades.
There are three main groups of clouds: cumulous, cirrus and stratus. Each has various sub-classifications built on other details of the formation.
Brant Foote, a longtime scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said the clouds photographed by Wiggins already fit into the existing cumulous classification.
But Pretor-Pinney, who never studied meteorology, believes the clouds merit their own cumulus sub-classification. He proposes they be called altocumulus undulatus asperatus. The last word — Latin for roughen or agitate — is a reference to the clouds’ undulating surface.
“Not necessarily gentle or steady, but quite violent-looking, turbulent, almost twisted in its appearance,” he said.
The group has compiled several photographs documenting the formations from the billowy, rolling clouds shot by Wiggins in Iowa to ones from New Zealand that were much more menacing, hanging lava-like in the sky.
Foote said it would be “very unusual” for such a formation to be recognized as a new variety of cloud.
“People have been looking at clouds for hundreds of years and the general cloud classification is well defined,” Foote said. “It’s not as if someone discovered a new plant in the Amazon. It’s what you’ve seen every day. There was no atmospheric condition that caused a new kind of cloud to form.”
Pretor-Pinney is working with the Royal Meteorological Society in Reading, England, to prepare his case. If that group signs off, the proposal will go to the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.
Society executive director Paul Hardaker said a small panel within the society is gathering evidence to review. Their efforts include talking with those who took the submitted photos to determinine when, where and amid what weather they were taken. Hardaker said meteorologists tend to be skeptical of such proposals.
“We like to believe that just about everything that can be seen has been, but you do get caught once in a while with the odd, new, interesting thing,” Hardaker said. “By this stage we think it’s sufficiently interesting to explore it further and we’re optimistic about the information we’ve got.”

After stints as a guard in the jails of Washington, D.C., and on the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, Stephen Tyrone Johns had settled in to a job he liked at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, family members said.
Security officer Stephen Johns reportedly opened the door for the man police say was his killer.more photos »
“It seemed to be kind of laid-backit didn’t seem to be that dangerous,” Leroy Carter, the stepfather who helped raise Johns since he was 3, told CNN affiliate WUSA-TV in Washington. “He had wanted to be on the Metro Police force or places like that, but I would have rather him been where he was. “But it just backfired.” Johns, 39, was shot and killed while on duty Wednesdayallegedly gunned down by an 88-year-old white supremacist who stepped into the museum with a rifle and began firing. Johns is remembered by friends and family as a “gentle giant”he stood 6 feet 6 inches, according to Carter. And he lived up to the moniker to the very end. One of his last acts was reaching out and opening the door for the man who shot him, police said. Watch museum officials pay tribute »
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James von Brunn, an outspoken Holocaust denier who had served six years in prison for a 1981 kidnapping attempt, was shot and wounded by Johns’ fellow officers. He remained in critical condition Thursday at George Washington University Hospital. Johns, a six-year veteran of the museum’s security staff, was a resident and native of Temple Hills, Maryland. In the hours following the shooting, friends and co-workers repeatedly remembered “Big John” for his quiet, friendly nature. “To look at him initially he was very intimidating,” said Alan Burkee, a friend and former co-worker at the museum. “But he was very shy. … He had a great demeanorvery pleasant, very courteous to all the visitors that came in and the staff that worked there.” Friends said Johns was an avid Washington Redskins fan and loved to travel, but lived just 10 minutes away from where his mother and stepfather raised him. He had an 11-year-old son, Stephen Jr., and recently had remarried, according to friends. “He was a pretty great guy,” Stephen Johns Jr., known as “Little Stephen” to family, told WUSA. “He was always there for me when I was down or sad.” Carter had picked up Stephen after school to tell him the news of the shooting, and the two were on the way to the hospital when Johns died. Steve Maritas is organizing director with the International Union of Security, Police and Fire Professionals of Americaof which Johns was a member. He said the way Johns and his fellow officers responded Wednesday saved livesand it flies in the face of the stereotype of the run-of-the-mill security guard. “If that was the case, there would have been 50 people shot yesterday,” said Maritas, whose organization represents more than 30,000 officers nationally and about 5,000 in the Washington area. “These guys are very highly trained, highly paid officers. It’s not like they’re just there wearing a uniform.” Johns had worked for Wackenhut Security Inc. since 2003. Maritas said Johns and his colleagues trained for days like Wednesdaywhen years of safety and quiet give way to a sudden burst of terror. “Hopefully, you’ll never have to use your gun,” he said. “But you get a situation where you get a crazy guy like thisit happens within two or three seconds.” For Carter, there will always a clear reminder of the stepson he raised as his own. Little Stephen, he said, looks and acts just like his father did at that age.
Carter said he takes comfort knowing that the roughly 2,000 people visiting the Holocaust museum at the time of the attack were able to walk away unharmed. “That guy wouldn’t have stopped until he was stopped,” Carter said.
Source:CNN

GREEN BAY, Wisconsin (Reuters) –
President Barack Obama took his push for healthcare overhaul to the U.S. heartland on Thursday, calling the current system unsustainable and vowing not to tolerate “endless delay” before acting to fix it.
Hosting a townhall-style meeting, Obama stuck to his view that a government-sponsored insurance plan must be part of a healthcare revamp, despite opposition to the idea from Republicans, private insurers and even the influential American Medical Association doctors' group.
“We have reached a point where doing nothing about the cost of health care is no longer an option. The status quo is unsustainable,” the Democratic president said. He insisted, however, he was not seeking a “government takeover” of the troubled system.
Obama's drive on healthcare comes as lawmakers seek to craft a bill and pass it through the Senate before their summer break. Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives also hope to pass legislation by August.
“As Congress moves forward on healthcare legislation in the coming weeks, I understand there will be different ideas and disagreements … I welcome those ideas,” he said. “But what I will not welcome is endless delay.”
Underscoring a sense of urgency, he said, “If we don't get it done this year, we're probably not going to get it done.”
COSTS
Obama acknowledged public concerns about the cost of extending coverage to tens of millions of people who do not have health insurance at time when the government is spending heavily on economic recovery programs and financial bailouts.
“That's why I have already promised that reform will not add to our deficit over the next 10 years,” he said.
“To make that happen, we have already identified hundreds of billions worth of savings in our budget — savings that will come from steps like reducing Medicare overpayments to insurance companies and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in both Medicare and Medicaid,” he said. “I will be outlining hundreds of billions more in savings in the days to come.”
But with some estimates putting the cost of healthcare reform at $1.2 trillion, Obama conceded those savings will not be enough.
“That's why I've proposed that we scale back how much the highest-income Americans can deduct on their taxes back to the rate that existed under the Reagan years and we can use that money to help finance health care,” he said.
Back in Washington, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing on a plan that would prohibit insurers from denying coverage or charging more due to medical history.
Many congressional Republicans have criticized Democratic proposals for including a public insurance program that would compete with private insurers.
Defending that idea, Obama said, “The reason is not because we want a government takeover of health care … But we want some competition. If the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it will keep them honest and help keep prices down.”
(Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Anthony Boadle)

GENEVA – Swine flu is now formally a pandemic, a declaration by U.N. health officials that will speed vaccine production and spur government spending to combat the first global flu epidemic in 41 years.
Thursday’s announcement by the World Health Organization doesn’t mean the virus is any more lethal — only that its spread is considered unstoppable.
Since it was first detected in late April in Mexico and the United States, swine flu has reached 74 countries, infecting nearly 29,000 people. Most who catch the bug have only mild symptoms and don’t need medical treatment.
WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan made the long-awaited declaration after the U.N. agency held an emergency meeting with flu experts and said she was moving to phase 6 — the agency’s highest alert level — which means a pandemic is under way.
“The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century,” Chan said in Geneva.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, the new head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Atlanta that he does not expect widespread public anxiety in the United States as a result of the declaration, noting it came nearly two months after the virus was identified.
For many weeks, U.S. health officials have been treating it as a pandemic, increasing the availability of anti-viral flu medicines and pouring money into a possible vaccination program. And scientists have grown to understand that the virus is generally not much more severe than the seasonal flu.
“That helps to tamp down any fears that may be excessive,” Frieden said at a news conference — his first as CDC director.
But the virus can still be deadly and may change into a more frightening form in the near future, and so people should not be complacent, he added.
So far, swine flu has caused 144 deaths, compared with ordinary flu that kills up to 500,000 people a year.
The pandemic decision might have been made much earlier if WHO had more accurate information about swine flu’s rising sweep through Europe. Chan said she called the emergency meeting with flu experts after concerns were raised that some countries, such as Britain, were not accurately reporting their cases.
Chan said the experts unanimously agreed there was a wider spread of swine flu than was being reported.
She would not say which country tipped the world into the pandemic, but WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda said the situation from Australia seemed to indicate the virus was spreading rapidly there — more than 1,300 cases were reported by Thursday.
In Chile, authorities have identified almost 1,700 cases to WHO.
Many health experts said the world has been in a pandemic for weeks but WHO became too bogged down by politics to declare one. In May, several countries urged WHO not to declare a pandemic, fearing it would cause social and economic turmoil. At the time, WHO said it would rewrite its pandemic definition to avoid announcing one.
But with the recent surge in cases across Europe, Chile, Australia and Japan, the agency was under increasing pressure to acknowledge a pandemic.
“This is WHO finally catching up with the facts,” said Michael Osterholm, a flu expert at the University of Minnesota.
David Ropeik, an expert in risk perception and communication at Harvard University, says the word pandemic is less frightening than when emerged during worries about bird flu a few years ago.
He said the “soft buildup” to declaring swine flu a pandemic has been helpful.
“That allows people to get used to what is otherwise a scary word, understand the particulars of the disease, and that should mean reaction will be a little more information-based and a little less emotional,” Ropeik said in an e-mail.
WHO will now recommend that pharmaceutical companies make swine flu vaccine. The agency typically recommends which flu strains drug companies should use in the vaccines. In a global outbreak, WHO also advises whether companies should make pandemic vaccine.
The decision to make pandemic vaccine is a gamble. Most flu vaccine makers cannot make both regular seasonal flu vaccine and pandemic vaccine at the same time. That means they must decide which one the world will need more.
Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC said it could start commercial production of pandemic vaccine in July but that it would take months before large quantities are available.
Glaxo spokesman Stephen Rea said the company’s first doses of vaccine would be reserved for countries who had ordered it in advance, including Belgium, Britain and France. He said Glaxo would also donate 50 million doses to WHO for poor countries.
Pascal Barollier, a spokesman for Sanofi-Aventis, said they were also working on a pandemic vaccine but WHO had not yet asked them to start making mass quantities of it.
WHO described the pandemic as “moderate.” Fukuda said people should not get overly anxious about the virus. “Understand it, put it in context, and then you get on with things,” he said.
Still, about half of the people who have died from swine flu were previously young and healthy — people who are not usually susceptible to flu. Swine flu is also crowding out regular flu viruses. Both features are typical of pandemic flu viruses.
Swine flu is also continuing to spread during the start of summer in the northern hemisphere. Normally, flu viruses disappear with warm weather, but swine flu is proving to be resilient.
“What this declaration does do is remind the world that flu viruses like H1N1 need to be taken seriously,” said U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, warning that more cases could crop up in the fall.
Now that a pandemic has been declared, some countries might be prompted to devote more money to containing the virus. Many developed countries have pandemic preparedness plans that link spending to a WHO declaration.
The U.N. is keen to avoid panic. “We must guard against rash and discriminatory action, such as travel bans or trade restrictions,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Fear has already gripped Argentina, where thousands have flooded hospitals this week, bringing emergency health services in Buenos Aires to the brink of collapse during winter weather. Last month, a bus arriving in Argentina from Chile was stoned by people who thought a passenger had swine flu.
China has quarantined travelers, including New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, on the slightest suspicion of contact with an infected person.
The U.S. government has already increased the availability of flu-fighting medicines and authorized 1 billion for developing a new swine flu vaccine. In addition, new cases seem to be declining in many parts of the country, U.S. health officials say, as North America moves out of its traditional winter flu season.
Still, New York City reported three more swine flu deaths Thursday, including a child under 2, a teenager and a person in their 30s.
“Countries where outbreaks appear to have peaked should prepare for a second wave of infection,” Chan warned.
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AP Medical Writers Maria Cheng reported from London and Michael Stobbe contributed from Atlanta. Jordans reported from Geneva. Michael E. Miller in Mexico City, Edith Lederer in New York, Dikky Sinn in Hong Kong, Vincente L. Panetta in Buenos Aires, and Bradley S. Klapper and Eliane Engeler in Geneva also contributed.