Elderly and abandoned, 84 Haitians await death

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The old lady crawls in the dirt, wailing for her pills. The elderly man lies motionless as rats pick at his overflowing diaper.

There is no food, water or medicine for the 84 surviving residents of the Port-au-Prince Municipal Nursing Home, barely a mile (1 1/2 kilometers) from the airport where a massive international aid effort is taking shape.

"Help us, help us," 69-year-old Mari-Ange Levee begged Sunday, lying on the ground with a broken leg and ribs. A cluster of flies swarmed the open fracture in her skull.

One man had already died, and administrator Jean Emmanuel said more would follow soon unless water and food arrive immediately.

"I appeal to anybody to bring us anything, or others won't live until tonight," he said in the morningmotioning toward five men and women who were having trouble breathing, a sign that the end was near. Hours later, an elderly woman succumbed.

The dead man was Joseph Julien, a 70-year-old diabetic who was pulled from the partially collapsed building and passed away Thursday for lack of food.

His rotting body lies on a mattress, nearly indistinguishable from the living around him, so skinny and tired they seemed to be simply waiting for death.

With six residents killed in the quake, the institution now has 25 men and 60 women camped outside their former home. Some have a mattress in the dirt to lie on. Others don't.


Madeleine Dautriche, 75, said some of the residents had pooled their money to buy three packets of pasta, which the dozens of pensioners shared on Thursday, their last meal. Since there was no drinking water, some didn't touch the noodles because they were cooked in gutter water.

Dautriche noted that many residents wore diapers that hadn't been changed since the quake.

"The problem is, rats are coming to it," she said.

Though very little food aid had reached Haitians anywhere by Sunday, Emmanuel said the problem was made worse at the nursing home because it is located near Place de la Paix, an impoverished downtown neighborhood.

The hospice, known as "Hospice Municipal," is in the Delmas-2 neighborhood, near a rundown soccer stadium, stuck between the port and Bel-Air, traditionally one of Haiti's most violent and dangerous slums.

Thousands of homeless slum dwellers have pitched their makeshift tents on the nursing home's ground, in effect shielding the elderly patients from the outside world with a tense maze of angry people, themselves hungry and thirsty.

"I'm pleading for everyone to understand that there's a truce right now, the streets are free, so you can come through to help us," said Emmanuel, 27, one of the rare officials not to have fled the squalor and mayhem. He insisted that foreign aid workers wouldn't be in danger if they tried to cross through the crowd to reach the elderly group.

Violent scuffles erupted Saturday in the adjacent soccer stadium when U.S. helicopters dropped boxes of military rations and Gatorade. But none of this trickle of help had reached the nursing home residents, who said some refugees have robbed them of what little they had.

Dautriche, who was sitting on the ground because of her broken back, held out an empty blue plastic basin. "My underwear and my money were in there," she said, sobbing. "Children stole it right in front of me and I couldn't move."

The area was an eery corner of silence within the clamor of crying babies and toddlers running naked in the mud. Guarding the little space was Phileas Julien, 78, a blind man in a wheelchair who shouted at anybody approaching to turn back.

During moments of lucidity, Julien said he was better off than other pensioners because the medicine he was taking provided sustenance. A moment later, he threw his arms out to hug a passer-by he mistook for his grandson.

Also trying to guard the center was Jacqueline Thermiti, 71, who couldn't stand because of pain but who brandished her walking stick when children approached.

"Of all the wars and revolutions and hurricanes, this quake is the worst thing God has ever sent us," Thermiti said.

Initially, Thermiti and others believed their relatives would come to feed them, because many live in the slums nearby. "But I don't even know if my children are alive," she said.

Thermiti was surprisingly feisty for someone who hadn't eaten since Tuesday. She attributed that to experience with hunger during earlier hardships.

"But I was younger, and now there's no water either," she said.

She predicted that unlike other pensioners, she could still hold out for at least another day.

"Then if the foreigners don't come (with aid)," she said, "it will be up to baby Jesus."

One of the struggling residents had died by nightfall Sunday, when Associated Press journalists returned to the nursing home. Tsida-Edith Andre, about 90, had been too old and too weak to hold out through the afternoon heat, said Nixon Plantain, a hospice cleaner who was planning to spent the night there.

Next to him, Michele Lina, 22, was spoon-feeding boiled rice to her paralyzed grandfather in a wheelchair. Plantain said she was the first relative to have come with food. He helped Lina give out tiny mouthfuls to others.

That food, along with a carton of water bottles brought by an AP reporter, was the only aid the residents received Sunday, Plantain said.

An medical orderly waves flies off an old man asleep on the ground outside his nursing home in Port-au-Prince, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010. More than 100 old men and women were living outside the home, that was damaged during Tuesday's earthquake, with no food or care other than an occasional bath from two orderlies who remained to help.

The cleaner-turned-caretaker tried to pour a trickle of water into the mouth of Mesalia Joseph, one of a small group he said probably wouldn't make it through the night.

"Don't give me any," Joseph mumbled, saying she was too hungry to drink.

Curled in a fetal position, she seemed to have already given up.

Source: http://www.sacbee.com/830/story/2468636.html

Network flaw causes scary Web error

Alarming network glitch makes the Internet lose track of who is who on Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.

The glitch -- the result of a routing problem at the family's wireless carrier, AT&T -- revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn't appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers' warnings that there are many ways online information -- from mundane data to dark secrets -- can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It's not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

"The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook," said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page Saturday morning.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smart phone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn't look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page's owner.

"He's white -- I'm not," she said with a laugh.

Sawyer logged off and asked her sister, Mari, 31, her partner in a dessert catering company, and their mother, Fran, 57, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones.

Mari landed inside another woman's page.

Fran's phone -- which had never been used to access Facebook before -- took her inside yet another stranger's page, one belonging to a young woman from Indiana. They sent an e-mail to one of their own accounts to prove it.

They were dumbfounded.

"I thought it was the phone -- `Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it,'" said Candace Sawyer.

The women, who live together in East Point, Ga., outside Atlanta, had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T.

Sawyer contacted The Associated Press after reporting the problem to Facebook and AT&T.

The problem wasn't in the phones. It was a flaw in the infrastructure connecting the phones to the Internet.

That illuminates a grave problem.

Generally Web sites and computers are compromised from within. A hacker can get a Web page or computers to run programming code that they shouldn't. But in this case, it was a security gap between the phone and the Web site that exposed strangers' Facebook pages to the Sawyers. Misconfigured equipment, poorly written network software or other technical errors could have caused AT&T to fumble the information flowing from the Sawyers' phones to Facebook and back.

Fortunately, Hamiel said, the vulnerability would be of limited use to a hacker interested in pulling off widespread mayhem, because this hole would let him access only one account at a time. To do more damage the criminal would have to pull off the unlikely feat of gaining full control of the piece of equipment that routes Internet traffic to individual users.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in "a limited number of instances" and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed.

The Sawyers experienced a different glitch. Coe said an investigation points to a "misdirected cookie." A cookie is a file some Web sites place on computers to store identifying information -- including the user name that Facebook members would enter to access their pages. Coe said technicians couldn't figure out how the cookie had been routed to the wrong phone, leading it into the wrong Facebook account.

He also said AT&T could confirm only that the problem occurred on one of the Sawyers' phones, possibly because they had logged off Facebook on the other two before reporting the incident.

Facebook declined to comment and referred questions to AT&T.

Some Web sites would be immune from this kind of mix-up, particularly those that use encryption. A Web browser would have trouble deciphering the encryption on a page that a computer user didn't actually seek, said Chris Wysopal, co-founder of Veracode Inc., a security company.

Sensitive sites and those used for banking and e-commerce generally use encryption. But most other sites, including some Web-based e-mail services, don't use it. One way of checking: The Web addresses of encrypted sites begin with "https" rather than "http." Facebook uses encryption when user names and passwords are entered, to cloak the sign-on from snoops, but after the credentials are entered the encryption is dropped.

It's unclear how many people were affected by the problem the Sawyers discovered, and whether it was limited to Facebook.

The reason all three women experienced the glitch is a function of the way cellular networks are designed. In some cases, all the mobile Internet traffic for a particular area is routed through the same piece of networking equipment. If that piece of equipment is misbehaving or set up incorrectly, strange things happen when computers down the line receive the data.

Usually that means a Web site simply won't load, said Alberto Solino, director of security consulting services for Core Security Technologies. In the Sawyers' case, "somehow they got the wrong user but they could keep using that account for a long period of time. That's what's strange," he said.

The AP tried to contact two of the people whose Facebook pages were exposed to the Sawyers, but the calls and e-mails were not returned. It's unclear whether they are also AT&T customers, though security experts said that's likely the case.

Indeed, it was the case in a similar incident in November.

Stephen Simburg, 25, who works in marketing, was home for Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Wash., when he logged onto Facebook from his cell phone. He didn't recognize the people who had written him messages.

"I thought I had gotten really popular all of a sudden, or something was wrong," he said. Then he saw the picture of the account owner: A young woman.

He got her e-mail address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message. He asked whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account.

"No," she wrote back, "but I was just telling my family that I ended up in your profile!"

Simburg and the woman figured out they were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones. (AT&T had no comment because the incident wasn't reported to the company.)

"I felt like I had been let down by the phone company and by Facebook," he said.

He says he has put the incident behind him. But one piece of it remains: He and the young woman are now Facebook friends.

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/AP-Exclusive-Network-flaw-apf-3043392874.html?x=0

Escaped prisoner Craig Lynch finally caught after mocking police on Facebook

One of the first pictures posted by Craig Lynch after absconding from prison

The long arm of the law has finally caught up with Britain’s most famous middle finger.

Craig “Lazie” Lynch, 28, became a global internet star during four months of running from police while he mocked officers with insults and clues to his whereabouts on Facebook.

He was arrested by the Metropolitan Police in Kent this morning after spending New Year’s Eve in London watching a fireworks display and enjoying a traditional lunch on Christmas Day.

He posted a seasonal photograph online last month that showed him holding the cooked turkey and wearing a strand of tinsel while raising his middle finger to the camera. Below the image, a caption read: “Here's proof. How could I get my hands on a bird like this in jail. ha ha.”

Lynch absconded in September from Hollesley Bay open prison, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, where he was serving a seven-year jail term for aggravated burglary.

As a low-rent Bonnie and Clyde for the social networking generation, the escapee became known all over the world attracting 40,000 members to his Facebook profile under the name “Maximus Justice”.

His page was shut down after police contacted Facebook looking for information on where he might be hiding out and updating the site.

Once his original page was closed he set up a new one and began an even bolder string of appearances, boasting: "Guess who's back?"

This year he posted: "I got a fantastic video, me watchin the London firework display surrounded by thousands of incompetent pigs. I'm even recorded asking police for directions. Let's get this show back on the road."

Other messages include: “Craig ‘Lazie’ Lynch needs to get up and get motivated, too many things to do today!” and “Craig ‘Lazie’ Lynch Is thinkin, which lucky girl will be my first of 2010!!”

Another entry reads: “Craig ‘Lazie’ Lynch just nearly wrote my motor off again. F***** ice everywhere i went round the corner and ended up halfway on someones driveway!!”

Under “personal information” he wrote on his Facebook page: “You’ll have a laugh with me but it will end in tears. It always does.”

This morning he appeared at Bexleyheath Magistrates’ Court charged with escaping from lawful custody.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6986256.ece

Thousands feared dead in Haiti quake; many trapped

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after a powerful earthquake flattened the president's palace, the cathedral, hospitals, schools, the main prison and whole neighborhoods. Officials feared thousands — perhaps more than 100,000 — may have perished but there was no firm count.

Death was everywhere in Port-au-Prince. Bodies of tiny children were piled next to schools. Corpses of women lay on the street with stunned expressions frozen on their faces as flies began to gather. Bodies of men were covered with plastic tarps or cotton sheets.

President Rene Preval said he believes thousands were killed in Tuesday afternoon's magnitude-7.0 quake, and the scope of the destruction prompted other officials to give even higher estimates. Leading Sen. Youri Latortue told The Associated Press that 500,000 could be dead, although he acknowledged that nobody really knows.

"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed," Preval told the Miami Herald. "There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them."

Even the main prison in the capital fell down, "and there are reports of escaped inmates," U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.

The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was missing and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince was dead.

"The cathedral, the archbishop's office, all the big churches, the seminaries have been reduced to rubble," Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the apostolic envoy to Haiti, told the Vatican news agency FIDES.

The parking lot of the Hotel Villa Creole was a triage center. People sat with injuries and growing infections by the side of rubble-strewn roads, hoping that doctors and aid would come.

The international Red Cross said a third of Haiti's 9 million people may need emergency aid and that it would take a day or two for a clear picture of the damage to emerge.

At first light Wednesday, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter evacuated four critically injured U.S. Embassy staff to the hospital on the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the military has been detaining suspected terrorists.

President Barack Obama promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort, adding that the U.S. commitment to its hemispheric neighbor will be unwavering.

"We have to be there for them in their hour of need," Obama said.

A small contingent of U.S. ground troops could be on their way soon, although it was unclear whether they would be used for security operations or humanitarian efforts. Gen. Douglas Fraser, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said roughly 2,000 Marines as part of an expeditionary unit might be deployed aboard a large-deck amphibious ship. Fraser said the ship could provide medical help.

Other nations — from Iceland to Venezuela — said they would start sending in aid workers and rescue teams. Cuba said its existing field hospitals in Haiti had already treated hundreds of victims. The United Nations said Port-au-Prince's main airport was "fully operational" and open to relief flights.

The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson, is under way and expected to arrive off the coast of Haiti Thursday. Additional U.S. Navy ships are under way to Haiti, a statement from the Southern Command said.

Aftershocks continued to rattle the capital of 2 million people as women covered in dust clawed out of debris, wailing. Stunned people wandered the streets holding hands. Thousands gathered in public squares to sing hymns.

U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said it was possible that the death toll "will be in the thousands."

"Initial reports suggest a high number of casualties and, of course, widespread damage but I don't have any figure that I can give you with any reliability of what the number of casualties will be," Holmes said.

People pulled bodies from collapsed homes, covering them with sheets by the side of the road. Passers-by lifted the sheets to see if loved ones were underneath. Outside a crumbled building, the bodies of five children and three adults lay in a pile.

The prominent died along with the poor: the body of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, 63, was found in the ruins of his office, said the Rev. Pierre Le Beller of the Saint Jacques Missionary Center in Landivisiau, France. He told The Associated Press by telephone that fellow missionaries in Haiti had told him they found Miot's body.

Preval told the Herald that Haiti's Senate president was among those trapped alive inside the Parliament building. Much of the National Palace pancaked on itself.

The international Red Cross and other aid groups announced plans for major relief operations in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

Many will have to help their own staff as well as stricken Haitians. Taiwan said its embassy was destroyed and the ambassador hospitalized. Spain said its embassy was badly damaged and France said its embassy also suffered damage.

Tens of thousands of people lost their homes as buildings that were flimsy and dangerous even under normal conditions collapsed. Nobody offered an estimate of the dead, but the numbers were clearly enormous.

"The hospitals cannot handle all these victims," said Dr. Louis-Gerard Gilles.

Medical experts say disasters such as an earthquake generally do not lead to new outbreaks of infectious diseases, but they do tend to worsen existing health problems.

Haiti's quake refugees likely will face an increased risk of dengue fever, malaria and measles — problems that plagued the impoverished country before, said Kimberley Shoaf, associate director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters.

Some of the biggest immediate health threats include respiratory disease from inhaling dust from collapsed buildings and diarrhea from drinking contaminated water.

With hospitals and clinics severely damaged, Haiti will also face risks of secondary infections. People seeking medical attention for broken bones and other injuries may not be able to get the help they need and may develop complications.

Dead bodies piled on the streets typically don't pose a public health risk. But for a country wracked by violence, seeing the dead will exact a psychological toll.

An American aid worker was trapped for about 10 hours under the rubble of her mission house before she was rescued by her husband, who told CBS' "Early Show" that he drove 100 miles (160 kilometers) to Port-au-Prince to find her. Frank Thorp said he dug for more than an hour to free his wife, Jillian, and a co-worker, from under about a foot of concrete.

An estimated 40,000-45,000 Americans live in Haiti, and the U.S. Embassy had no confirmed reports of deaths among its citizens. All but one American employed by the embassy have been accounted for, State Department officials said.

Even relatively wealthy neighborhoods were devastated.

An AP videographer saw a wrecked hospital where people screamed for help in Petionville, a hillside district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians as well as the poor.

At a destroyed four-story apartment building, a girl of about 16 stood atop a car, trying to see inside while several men pulled at a foot sticking from rubble. She said her family was inside.

"A school near here collapsed totally," Petionville resident Ken Michel said after surveying the damage. "We don't know if there were any children inside." He said many seemingly sturdy homes nearby were split apart.

The U.N.'s 9,000 peacekeepers in Haiti, many of whom are from Brazil, were distracted from aid efforts by their own tragedy: Many spent the night hunting for survivors in the ruins of their headquarters.

"It would appear that everyone who was in the building, including my friend Hedi Annabi, the United Nations' secretary-general's special envoy, and everyone with him and around him, are dead," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on RTL radio.

But U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy would not confirm that Annabi was dead, saying he was among more than 100 people missing in its wrecked headquarters. He said only about 10 people had been pulled out, many of them badly injured. Fewer than five bodies had been removed, he said.

U.N. peacekeeping forces in Port-au-Prince are securing the airport, the port, main buildings and patrolling the streets, Le Roy said.

Brazil's army said at least 11 of its peacekeepers were killed, while Jordan's official news agency said three of its peacekeepers were killed. A state newspaper in China said eight Chinese peacekeepers were known dead and 10 were missing — though officials later said the information was not confirmed.

The quake struck at 4:53 p.m., and was centered 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of only 5 miles (8 kilometers), the U.S. Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti.

Video obtained by the AP showed a huge dust cloud rising over Port-au-Prince shortly after the quake as buildings collapsed.

Most Haitians are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of buildings were shoddily built and unsafe normally.

The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and in eastern Cuba, but no major damage was reported in either place.

With electricity out in many places and phone service erratic, it was nearly impossible for Haitian or foreign officials to get full details of the devastation.

"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official in Port-au-Prince. "The sky is just gray with dust."

Edwidge Danticat, an award-winning Haitian-American author was unable to contact relatives in Haiti. She sat with family and friends at her home in Miami, looking for news on the Internet and watching TV news reports.

"You want to go there, but you just have to wait," she said. "Life is already so fragile in Haiti, and to have this on such a massive scale, it's unimaginable how the country will be able to recover from this."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/cb_haiti_earthquake

MagicJack's next act: disappearing cell phone fees

The company behind the magicJack, the cheap Internet phone gadget that's been heavily promoted on TV, has made a new version of the device that allows free calls from cell phones in the home, in a fashion that's sure to draw protest from cellular carriers.

The new magicJack uses, without permission, radio frequencies for which cellular carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive licenses.

YMax Corp., which is based in Palm Beach, Fla., said this week at the International Consumers Electronics Show that it plans to start selling the device in about four months for $40, the same price as the original magicJack. As before, it will provide free calls to the U.S. and Canada for one year.

The device is, in essence, a very small cellular tower for the home.

The size of a deck of cards, it plugs into a PC, which needs a broadband Internet connection. The device then detects when a compatible cell phone comes within 8 feet, and places a call to it. The user enters a short code on the phone. The phone is then linked to the magicJack, and as long as it's within range (YMax said it will cover a 3,000-square-foot home) magicJack routes the call itself, over the Internet, rather than going through the carrier's cellular tower. No minutes are subtracted from the user's account with the carrier. Any extra fees for international calls are subtracted from the user's account with magicJack, not the carrier.

According to YMax CEO Dan Borislow, the device will connect to any phone that uses the GSM standard, which in the U.S. includes phones from AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA. At a demonstration at CES, a visitor's phone with a T-Mobile account successfully placed and received calls through the magicJack. Most phones from Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. won't connect to the device.

Borislow said the device is legal because wireless spectrum licenses don't extend into the home.

AT&T, T-Mobile and the Federal Communications Commission had no immediate comment on whether they believe the device is legal, but said they were looking into the issue. CTIA — The Wireless Association, a trade group, said it was declining comment for now. None of them had heard of YMax's plans.

Borislow said YMax has sold 5 million magicJacks for landline phones in the last two years, and that roughly 3 million are in active use. That would give YMax a bigger customer base than Internet phone pioneer Vonage Holdings Corp., which has been selling service for $25 per month for the better part of a decade. Privately held YMax had revenue of $110 million last year, it says.

U.S. carriers have been selling and experimenting with devices that act similarly to the wireless magicJack. They're called "femtocells." Like the magicJack, they use the carrier's licensed spectrum to connect to a phone, then route the calls over a home broadband connection. They improve coverage inside the home and offload capacity from the carrier's towers.

But femtocells are complex products, because they're designed to mesh with the carrier's external network. They cost the carriers more than $200, though some sell them cheaper, recouping the cost through added service fees. YMax's magicJack is a much smaller, simpler design.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/us_tec_gadget_show_magicjack

2010 Prediction: The Year of the Paid Subscription

This year the Web turns 21. So it's somewhat ironic that 2010 will also be the year the place finally sobers up.

Many of the startups and media sites that define the e-commerce ecosystem are, at long last, making serious plans to make serious money. Hulu, the slick portal that picked up where TiVo left off in killing the idea of "appointment television," is the free site likeliest to begin charging in 2010. Chase Carey, a top executive of News Corp., which owns 27 percent of Hulu, announced in October that "it's time to start getting paid for broadcast content online" and "Hulu concurs with that." Comcast's recent purchase of NBC Universal, Hulu's other founding network, makes a pay-model future only more likely. Hulu hasn't made any official announcements yet, and it may continue to offer ad-supported versions of some programming, but expect to start using your credit card when you need your Arrested Development fix.

Music is headed toward the same fate. Cloud-based, streaming music is poised to replace the mp3, and Spotify, Last.fm, Pandora, and Rhapsody are the big names that currently dominate the format. Most of these sites have a free-to-users, ad-supported model, but the labels are starting to grumble that too much money is being left on the table. Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" was one of the most popular songs on Spotify in Europe, but she reportedly earned just $167 for a million listens through the service. (Spotify disputes the figure.) Naturally, record companies want to improve these terms. Reportedly, in their negotiations with Spotify leading up to the service's U.S. launch, they have insisted that Spotify scrap its free version altogether and require subscriptions across the board.
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The biggest music retailer in the world, Apple, may be gearing up for a similar switch. The secretive company certainly hasn't said as much, but a recent acquisition suggests its head is in the cloud. In December, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company purchased Lala, a streaming music service, for something shy of $100 million. Lala has negligible revenues; what Apple really bought were its talented engineers and their cloudy expertise. And a subscription-based iTunes wouldn't be just for music. Apple is reportedly in talks with major outlets like Disney and CBS to start an online TV subscription service. The "millennial" generation is already shunning the cable box and relying on their computers for television viewing; an Apple venture along these lines could cause a stampede away from Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable providers.

Finally, there are the print dinosaurs, which are roaring louder than ever, led by prickly velociraptor in chief Rupert Murdoch. The News Corp. boss, who owns a globe-spanning collection of newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, wrote recently that "the old business model based mainly on advertising is dead." He has openly averred that many, if not all, of his remaining ad-supported news sites could go behind a pay wall this year. That would open the door for competitors to make the same move. The New York Times, for instance, is debating the wisdom of charging for online content too. If Murdoch's plan proves successful, emboldened newspapers and magazines across the country would begin erecting their own digital pay walls.

This is dismaying news to many consumers, especially Pirate Bay–surfing teens who think free content is a human right only slightly less essential than oxygen. But as the Web becomes the center of our multimedia world, the only way to ensure that the future will offer us more Arrested Developments, Lady Gagas, and Wall Street Journal investigations is to ante up. As NEWSWEEK's Dan Gross puts it, paid is the new free, and more expensive is the new cheap. In 2010, the 21-year-old Internet will finally pick up the tab.

Source: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2010/01/08/2010-prediction-the-year-of-the-paid-subscription.aspx?GT1=43002

H&M and Wal-Mart destroy and trash unsold goods

This week the New York Times reported a disheartening story about two of the largest retail chains. You see, instead of taking unsold items to sample sales or donating them to people in need, H&M and Wal-Mart have been throwing them out in giant trash bags. And in the case that someone may stumble on these bags and try to keep or re-sell the items, these companies have gone ahead and slashed up garments, cut off the sleeves of coats, and sliced holes in shoes so they are unwearable.

This unsettling discovery was made by graduate student Cynthia Magnus outside the back entrance of H&M on 35th street in New York City. Just a few doors down, she also found hundreds of Wal-Mart tagged items with holes made in them that were dumped by a contractor. On December 7, she spotted 20 bags of clothing outside of H&M including, "gloves with the fingers cut off, warm socks, cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor, men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.”

The New York Times points out that one-third of the city's population is poor, which makes this behavior not only wasteful and sad, but downright irresponsible. Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, acted surprised that these items were found, claiming they typically donate all unworn merchandise to charity. When reporters went around the corner from H&M to a collections drop-off for charity organization New York Cares, spokesperson Colleen Farrell said, “We’d be glad to take unworn coats, and companies often send them to us."

After several days of no response from H&M, the company made a statement today, promising to stop destroying the garments at the midtown Manhattan location. They said they will donate the items to charity. H&M spokeswoman Nicole Christie said, "It will not happen again," and that the company would make sure none of the other locations would do so either. Hopefully that's the final word.

Source: http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/beauty/h-m-and-wal-mart-destroy-and-trash-unsold-goods-562909/

Kentucky couple win $128M Powerball prize

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – A central Kentucky autoworker is lucky he held on to the $128 million Powerball ticket he bought on Christmas Eve during some last-minute shopping — after all, it was printed by mistake.

Lottery officials said Rob Anderson and his wife, Tuesday, were winners of the largest jackpot in the state's history.

On Wednesday the couple was introduced at the state lottery headquarters in Louisville. The Andersons said they didn't initially believe they had won the $128.6 million jackpot after buying lottery tickets together for 12 years.

"We didn't hit it, that's not us," Rob Anderson said he told his wife after showing her the winning ticket the morning after the Dec. 26 drawing. "Something's not right!"

Rob Anderson, 39, said the winning ticket was a misprint that he decided to keep while buying stocking stuffers at a Georgetown, Ky., gas station. He wanted to buy $1 lottery tickets for three people, but the clerk goofed.

"The clerk ran the $3 Quick Pick but he put it all on one ticket, and I was like, doggone it, I needed three separate tickets," Anderson said.

The clerk asked him if he wanted to keep the ticket, which had three sets of random numbers.

"Yeah, I got a couple extra dollars," Anderson said, and he bought three more tickets to give as gifts.

When he arrived at home, he tossed the ticket on his dresser and didn't think about it until the Sunday morning after the drawing. When he remembered it, he checked the Powerball numbers and they matched one of the sets of numbers on the botched ticket: 32-36-37-41-53 and Powerball 30.

The couple, who work at a plant building seats for Toyotas, said they were hesitant to go public about the winnings. They declined to say if they had children.

"We're really grounded people," Rob Anderson said. "My wife taught me well, so to speak, to hang on to that dollar and see how far it gets you. We'll still clip coupons and still look for the clearance rack."

He said they would like to go back to school. His proposed major? Finance.

Tuesday Anderson said they have a dream of visiting Hawaii and she wants a new car.

The couple said they haven't decided if they'll return to work and whether they'll take a lump sum payment, which would be worth about $63 million.

Prior to this jackpot, the largest ever won in Kentucky was $89.3 million in 1996.

Rob Anderson, right, kisses his wife Tuesday as they were presented a representational check for $128.6 million for winning the Kentucky Powerball jackpot in Louisville, Ky., Wednesday Jan. 6, 2009. They live in Georgetown, Ky. Kentucky Lottery CEO and President Arch Gleason, left, looks on.
Source http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100107/ap_on_re_us/us_powerball_winner

Salvation Army left short of cash by fake SC check

CHARLESTON, S.C. – The Salvation Army thought it had received a grand gift ahead of Christmas — a $25,000 check. But the donation turned out to be an expensive hoax that may force the charity to cut back on winter assistance for the needy.

Investigators said Wednesday that more than a dozen Charleston-area charities received fake checks before Christmas purporting to be gifts from a genuine local company.

None of the other charities cashed theirs, but the Salvation Army deposited its check. It went ahead and spent some of the money on food and toys for about 100 families, counting on the check to clear.

The bank called two days before Christmas to say the check had bounced, and the agency was left with less money than planned to help the needy this cold January.

"It's a matter of counting on that so we would have a cushion," said Kiki Cooper, the director of development for the local chapter. She said the single check represented about 10 percent of what the Salvation Army typically raises during the holiday season.

The check and accompanying letter appeared to come from Force Protection Inc., an armored vehicle manufacturer in Ladson. The letter said the company had enjoyed success and wanted to share with local charities.

Other charities called the company about the unsolicited donations and Force Protection sent out a memo Dec. 17 — the same day the Salvation Army deposited their check — saying it had been the victim of a holiday scam.

Officers were investigating but there had been no arrests in the case as of Wednesday, said Maj. John Clark of the Charleston County Sheriff's Department.

Tommy Pruitt, a spokesman for Force Protection, said the checks were written on a company bank account that had been closed months ago. He said he did not want to speculate on who might be responsible.

Cooper said the check arrived at the busiest time of year for the charity.

"People say why don't you check every check? We have old ladies who send us a dollar and we're talking at this time of year we have anywhere from 500 to 1,000 checks coming in a week," she said.

Cooper said people were already offering to help offset the loss.

"We've actually had a couple of people walking in dropping off $20. We have that at Christmas, never in January," she said.

Nationally, the Salvation Army raises about $500 million each holiday season — about 40 percent of its yearly donations.

Gift checks sometimes bounce or credit card charges get rejected, said Jennifer Byrd, a spokeswoman for the national organization. "But it's so inconsequential in the overall giving we receive."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_fake_checks_charities

New visa proposal to help create the next big thing

A proposal that will make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs in the US to start the next Google or Yahoo will be debated in the new year.

Investors worry the US is not doing enough to entice founders here
Congressman Jared Polis has proposed a start-up visa to entice "foreigners with good ideas" to stay in the US.

The issue has been gathering steam in Silicon Valley where half of all tech company founders are immigrants, according to Duke University research.

The idea is part of a proposed overhaul of the US immigration system.

"Every day the American economy is losing ground - not to mention high-tech jobs and technologies - to India and China because foreign-born entrepreneurs cannot secure a visa to stay in the US," he said.

Lost opportunity

Eric Diep, who has just turned 22, could be regarded as one entrepreneur who got away.

He came to Silicon Valley as a student like many immigrant founders who have helped start companies such as Google and PayPal.

Mr Diep was one of the first developers to get into social games with his application called Quizzes, initially launched on the social networking site Facebook.

Google, Pfizer, Yahoo and eBay were in-part founded by immigrants
Over a year ago he started to apply for a visa to allow him to carry on working in the Valley, but he soon encountered problems.

"The reason it was so difficult for me was because I dropped out of university and the stipulation for a lot of visas is undergraduate experience. My age also seemed to be an issue for the attorneys

"At the beginning it wasn't the expense in terms of legal fees but the big problem soon became one of distraction. I was trying to spend as much time working on perfecting my product but then I would have to go away and figure out the legalities of applying for the visa," Mr Diep told BBC News.

In the end, Mr Diep decided to base himself in his native Canada and travel back and forth to Silicon Valley.

"The flying is so tiring between the two places and it's expensive. At one point, I had no money left in my bank account but at the last minute money came in and now I feel pretty fortunate that I can still do this.

"It was a pretty close call," he added.

He backs a start-up visa because, for him, being in Silicon Valley is where he needs to be.

"Being there at the time really launched me. I would never have spotted the social gaming opportunity had I not been there."

Visa details

The start-up visa is aimed at streamlining the country's EB-5 visa system which was initially introduced in 1990 to attract foreign capital to the US.

Each year 10,000 EB-5 visas are available but to get one, applicants need to invest $1m and create 10 full-time jobs.

Mr Polis said he wants "a new class of eligibility" with the start-up visa.

The new visa would require $100k-$250k in venture capital funding
It would be granted to foreign entrepreneurs if their business plan attracts either $250,000 from a venture capital operating company that is primarily US based or $100,000 from an angel investor.

They must also show that the business will create five to ten jobs or generate a profit and at least $1m in revenue.

Some of these requirements may well be changed when the bill goes to committee in the new year.

"Immigration reform is a big discussion in Washington," said supporter Brad Feld, who is also a managing director with venture company the Foundry Group.

"We think the start-up visa is an easy thing to talk about and get consensus around in terms of having a positive spin on entrepreneurship and creating jobs."

Job creation

Some critics fear that making it easier for entrepreneurs to set up shop will hurt Americans by taking jobs away from them.

"I feel incredibly strongly that that is a misinterpretation of the proposal," said Eric Ries a venture advisor and author.

Start-up companies are needed to boost economy say backer of the visa
"Some people have called those opposed to new immigration reform xenophobes and that is why I think it is important we craft this proposal so it addresses those concerns. This is not a new visa category but reform of an existing but flawed category," he told BBC News.

The proposal's backers say that far from taking away jobs, new jobs will emerge that were never there in the first place.

"If the capital is available for the market, we should jump to bring those people here. Those jobs only get created once the founders get funded. This is a market driven decision," said Dave McClure, an internet entrepreneur, investor and start-up advisor.

YouNoodle is a start-up company founded by two British entrepreneurs. It tracks the start-up sector and said the figures speak for themselves.

"If just ten thousand start-up visas were made available this would mean over 3000 additional new innovative and funded companies would be based in the US every year," said Kirill Makharinsky, YouNoodle co-founder.

"They would generate more than 10,000 jobs on average every year. In the first 10 years that would add up to over 500,000 highly-skilled new jobs

"So the upside is huge and the downside is negligible because no jobs are being taken away from US citizens," Mr Makharinsky told BBC News.

And for Mr McClure, the consequences of not establishing a start-up visa class are obvious.

"We will lose out because we are not being competitive with the rest of the world," he said.

"There are similar programmes in Canada, the UK and Australia. They are all vying for the top entrepreneurs and if we only look at our own citizens, we are only taking 10-20% of the world's talent into consideration here. That would be short-sighted in the extreme."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8417510.stm

FDA approves Crestor for people who have no health problem to correct

Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don't need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It's all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients -- things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.

The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a "preventive" medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.

This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.

All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we've yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of "preventive pharmaceuticals" is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you're supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don't forget your anti-Alzheimer's pill, too.

Medications are not vitamins
The very idea that these drugs can somehow prevent a person from becoming sick in the future strains the boundaries of scientific credibility. Only natural therapies like nutrition can prevent the onset of disease, not patented chemicals that don't belong in the human body in the first place.

The logical argument of the drug companies who push these "preventive" prescriptions is essentially that the human body is deficient in pharmaceuticals, and that deficiency can only be corrected by taking whatever brand-name drugs they show you on television. Forget about deficiencies in zinc, or vitamin D, or living enzymes; what your body really needs is more synthetic chemicals!

The FDA agrees with this loopy logic. And why wouldn't it? Subscribing to this pharmaceutical delusion is an easy way to instantly expand Big Pharma's customer base by tens of millions. Overnight, the market for Crestor ballooned from a few million people with high cholesterol to the entire U.S. population of 300 million people.

If Crestor can help healthy people be healthier (which it can't, but let's play along with this delusion for the sake of argument), then it's only a matter of time before they start adding Crestor to infant formula. I mean, why not? If it's so good for healthy people, then it must make babies healthier, too, right?

So let's add Crestor to sports drinks. Let's sprinkle it into the iodized salt supply. Let's drip it into the municipal water! (Don't laugh: This idea of dripping cholesterol drugs into the water supply has already been suggested by more than one doctor.) Let's merge the pharmaceutical supply with the food supply and charge people prescription drugs prices for "functional" foods laced with these chemicals!

Pharmaceutical deficiency
That's really where all this is headed. When medicines are approved as preventive "nutrients" for the human body, it's only a matter of time before the industry starts talking about your "pharmaceutical deficiency."

Not taking any medications? You have a pharmaceutical deficiency, and it needs to be corrected by taking more prescription drugs. But don't bother with actual nutrition, because nutrients have absolutely no role in preventing disease, the FDA claims. No nutrient has ever been approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of any disease whatsoever.

The message from the FDA is quite clear on this: Nutrients are useless, and you should eat medications as if they were vitamins.

Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/027834_Crestor_marketing.html

Rare New Year's Eve 'blue moon' to ring in 2010

LOS ANGELES – Once in a blue moon there is one on New Year's Eve. Revelers ringing in 2010 will be treated to a so-called blue moon. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don't expect it to be blue — the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor.



A full moon occurred on Dec. 2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown.

"If you're in Times Square, you'll see the full moon right above you. It's going to be that brilliant," said Jack Horkheimer, director emeritus of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of a weekly astronomy TV show.

The New Year's Eve blue moon will be visible in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. For partygoers in Australia and Asia, the full moon does not show up until New Year's Day, making January a blue moon month for them.

However, the Eastern Hemisphere can celebrate with a partial lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve when part of the moon enters the Earth's shadow. The eclipse will not be visible in the Americas.

A full moon occurs every 29.5 days, and most years have 12. On average, an extra full moon in a month — a blue moon — occurs every 2.5 years. The last time there was a lunar double take was in May 2007. New Year's Eve blue moons are rarer, occurring every 19 years. The last time was in 1990; the next one won't come again until 2028.

Blue moons have no astronomical significance, said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"`Blue moon' is just a name in the same sense as a `hunter's moon' or a `harvest moon,'" Laughlin said in an e-mail.

The popular definition of blue moon came about after a writer for Sky & Telescope magazine in 1946 misinterpreted the Maine Farmer's Almanac and labeled a blue moon as the second full moon in a month. In fact, the almanac defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a season with four full moons, not the usual three.

Though Sky & Telescope corrected the error decades later, the definition caught on. For purists, however, this New Year's Eve full moon doesn't even qualify as a blue moon. It's just the first full moon of the winter season.

In a tongue-in-cheek essay posted on the magazine's Web site this week, senior contributing editor Kelly Beatty wrote: "If skies are clear when I'm out celebrating, I'll take a peek at that brilliant orb as it rises over the Boston skyline to see if it's an icy shade of blue. Or maybe I'll just howl."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091230/ap_on_sc/us_sci_blue_moon

Detroit scare sparks debate on full-body scanners

Technology exists that might have detected explosives hidden in the underwear of a Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit, but cost and privacy worries have until now prevented its widespread use.

A sign explains the procedure for going through the whole body scan machine, or millimeter wave machine as passengers wait in line at a security check point at the Salt Lake International Airport in Salt Lake City, Utah, March 10, 2009.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is suspected of trying to ignite an explosive called PETN using a chemical-filled syringe as Northwest Flight 253 approached Detroit on Christmas morning.

He had passed through security checks in Lagos and Amsterdam, where standard metal detector archways failed to spot his weapon.

Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport has at least 15 full-body "millimeter wave" scanners that see underneath passengers' clothes to detect suspicious packages or weapons.

The problem: their use has been only voluntary because of concerns that the scans reveal passengers "naked" to the operators and anyone else passing by the machine's screen.

The costs are also substantial. Whereas a traditional archway metal detector runs up to $15,000, more intensive whole-body scanners cost about 10 times as much.

"I don't anticipate myself that there'll be a rush to buy new equipment because airport operators are strapped for cash at the moment and the equipment itself, whilst good, is not a solution to the problem," said Kevin Murphy, product manager of physical security for Qinetiq Group, a British-based defense and security technology group.

"Some passengers are reassured that there's new technology there and are prepared to give up some measure of their privacy for it, and others have been outraged by it."

Airport operators need effective security plans, behavioral modeling and hiring processes just as much as they need advanced hardware, he told Reuters. Qinetiq is focusing its efforts on "standoff screening" that scans passengers even before they reach security checkpoints.

SEEING UNDER CLOTHES

Both "millimeter wave" and "backscatter X-ray" scanners try to do roughly the same thing -- see under clothes and identify unusual objects by their different densities relative to the human body.

Industry experts say public fears about radiation from the X-ray machines are unwarranted. But stronger than the health concerns are the privacy fears, in the United States and especially in Europe.

Germany's interior ministry, which sets the standards for domestic airport security, declined to use body scanners last year after it decided they were an invasion of privacy, although their usefulness and safety are still being tested.

"They were rejected as going too far into the private sphere of travelers," said Verena Meyer, spokeswoman for the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, an independent parliamentary watchdog.

An interior ministry spokeswoman said on Tuesday that certain conditions had to be fulfilled, including masking people's intimate details and making explosives more easily recognizable.

In Britain, Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: "We intend to be at the cutting edge of all this new technology and to ensure that we put it in place as quickly as possible."

But progress until now has been slow. A spokesman for Manchester airport said it was running trials but had made no decision on implementation, while Heathrow operator BAA said it was not using body scanners at all.

The European Parliament has consistently opposed body scanners on privacy and health grounds and has asked for more studies in both these areas.

Nonetheless, "there are no EU rules preventing member states from using them if they want to," a spokesman for the Commission said on Tuesday.

NO GUARANTEES

Speculation about increased demand has boosted shares of scanner makers this week. Some smaller companies such as ICX Technologies and OSI Systems, worth only a few hundred million dollars to begin with, rose 10 percent or more on Monday.

Larger players like Smiths Group and L-3 Communications have also benefited, with their machinery already in trials in airports around the world.

Schiphol's chief operating officer and director of security said on Monday they intend to make millimeter wave scanners mandatory once they get EU approval. Schiphol officials rejected X-ray machines as too unsafe for the public for regular use.

They stressed repeatedly that no matter what technology they chose, they could not be certain last week's outcome would have been any different.

"There is no 100 percent guarantee we would have caught him," Schiphol Group COO Ad Rutten said of Abdulmutallab.

The industry was quick to praise Schiphol's decision but just as quick to add that it might not be enough.

"Absolutely without a shadow of doubt this is a good thing. But one solution will not address every vulnerability. It needs to be a set of solutions," said Jane's Aviation analyst Chris Yates.

($1=.6256 Pound)

Source: http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5bs24z-us-security-airline-scanners/

Passengers help foil attack on Detroit-bound plane

By JIM IRWIN, Associated Press Writer Jim Irwin, Associated Press Writer – 6am ET

ROMULUS, Mich. – An attempted terrorist attack on a Christmas Day flight began with a pop and a puff of smoke — sending passengers scrambling to subdue a Nigerian man who claimed to be acting on orders from al-Qaida to blow up the airliner, officials and travelers said.

The commotion began as Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying 278 passengers and 11 crew members from Amsterdam, prepared to land in Detroit just before noon Friday. Travelers said they smelled smoke, saw a glow, and heard what sounded like firecrackers. At least one person climbed over others and jumped on the man, who officials say was trying to ignite an explosive device.

"It sounded like a firecracker in a pillowcase," said Peter Smith, a passenger from the Netherlands. "First there was a pop, and then (there) was smoke."

Smith said one passenger, sitting opposite the man, climbed over passengers, went across the aisle and tried to restrain the man. The heroic passenger appeared to have been burned.

Afterward, the suspect was taken to a front-row seat with his pants cut off and his legs burned. Multiple law enforcement officials also said the man appeared badly burned on his legs, indicating the explosive was strapped there. The components were apparently mixed in-flight and included a powdery substance, multiple law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said.

The White House said it believed it was an attempted act of terrorism and stricter security measures were quickly imposed on airline travel. The incident was reminiscent of Richard Reid, who tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes, but was subdued by other passengers.

Multiple law enforcement officials identified the suspect in Friday's attempted attack as Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. He was described as Nigerian.

One law enforcement official said the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil, but other law enforcement officials cautioned that such claims could not be verified immediately, and said the man may have been acting independently — inspired but not specifically trained or ordered by terror groups.

All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

The man was being questioned Friday evening. An intelligence official said he was being held and treated in an Ann Arbor, Mich., hospital. The hospital said one passenger from the flight was taken to the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, but referred all inquiries to the FBI.

Melinda Dennis, who was seated in the front row of the plane, said the man involved was brought to the front row and seated near her. She said his legs appeared to be badly burned and his pants were cut off. She said he was taken off the plane handcuffed to a stretcher.

One law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mutallab's name had surfaced earlier on at least one U.S. intelligence database, but he was not on a watch list or a no-fly list.

The suspect boarded in Nigeria and went through Amsterdam en route to Detroit, Rep. Peter King, the ranking GOP member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN. A spokeswoman for police at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam declined comment about the case or about security procedures at the airport for Flight 253.

Schiphol airport, one of Europe's busiest with a heavy load of transit passengers from Africa and Asia to North America, strictly enforces European security regulations including only allowing small amounts of liquid in hand luggage that must be placed inside clear plastic bags. After the attempted attack, passengers to the U.S. were being frisked at the gate as an added security measure, said airport spokeswoman Mirjam Snoerwang.

A spokesman for the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Akin Olukunle, said all passengers and their luggage are screened before boarding international flights. He also said the airport in Lagos cleared a U.S. Transportation Security Administration audit in November.

"We had a pass mark," Olukunle said. "We actually are up to standards in all senses."

Delta Air Lines Inc., which acquired Northwest last year, said a passenger caused a disturbance, was subdued, and the crew requested that law enforcement officials meet the flight.

Passenger Syed Jafri, a U.S. citizen who had flown from the United Arab Emirates, said the incident occurred during the plane's descent. Jafri said he was seated three rows behind the passenger and said he saw a glow, and noticed a smoke smell. Then, he said, "a young man behind me jumped on him."

"Next thing you know, there was a lot of panic," he said.

Federal officials said there would be heightened security for both domestic and international flights at airports across the country, but the intensified levels would likely be "layered," differing from location to location depending on alerts, security concerns and other factors.

Passengers can expect to see heightened screening, more bomb-sniffing dog and officer units and behavioral-detection specialists at some airports, but there will also be unspecified less visible precautions as well, officials said.

The FBI and the Homeland Security Department issued an intelligence note on Nov. 20 about the threat picture for the holiday season, which was obtained by The Associated Press. At the time, officials said they had no specific information about attack plans by al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

President Barack Obama was notified of the incident and discussed it with security officials, the White House said. Officials said he is monitoring the situation and receiving regular updates from his vacation spot in Hawaii.

___

Associated Press Writers Lara Jakes in Baghdad, Iraq, Jon Gambrell in Lagos, Nigeria, Arthur Max in Amsterdam, and Larry Margasak and Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report.

Found at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091226/ap_on_re_us/us_airliner_attack

'Extremely Dangerous' Blizzards Move Into Midwest

Fierce wind, heavy snowfall, icy roads threatening Upper Midwest as 'monster' storm moves east

A fierce winter storm was leaving dangerous ice, heavy snow and vicious winds in its wake as it slogged eastward Wednesday, threatening to wreak havoc on commuters in the Upper Midwest and closing schools across New England.

More than a foot of snow was expected in parts of Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa, where the National Weather Service warned of "extremely dangerous blizzard conditions" and near whiteout driving conditions. Wind gusts of up to 50 mph could build snow drifts between 8 and 15 feet tall.

Parts of New England also girded themselves for bone-chilling wind gusts and snow accumulations of up to a foot by the end of the day.

"It's horrible out there," said Todd Lane, an assistant manager of a Quik Trip convenience store in Des Moines, where several inches of new snow was reported overnight.

Although business was fairly normal overnight, it nearly all came from snow plow drivers — most looking for coffee and energy drinks, he said.

"Outside of the city there's 15-foot drifts and people are stuck in them," Lane said the drivers told him. "It sucks and it just keeps on coming."

Between 4 and 6 inches of snow fell in western and central Michigan, while blizzard warnings also covered parts of Nebraska, Kansas and Minnesota.

"For the most part, we're telling people to stay home," said Roger Vachalek, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Des Moines. He said if motorists get stranded, "you might end up being out there for quite a while."

In the West, pounded by rain and snow earlier this week, bitter wind chills as low as 40 below were sweeping across portions of southern Montana. The biting winds also were moving across Wyoming and South Dakota, according to the National Weather Service.

By the time the storm moves off the Maine coast Thursday night, it may have affected as much as two-thirds of the country, said Jim Lee, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Des Moines.

"It's a monster of a storm," Lee said.

Maine and New Hampshire could see snow accumulations of 6 to 10 inches capped off by rain and sleet in the evening. In northern New York, as much as a foot of snow was expected to accumulate Wednesday and more than 3 feet was expected by the week's end near the Great Lakes.

Hundreds of schools across New York's eastern half were closed or delayed the start of classes Wednesday. Schools also were closed in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Hundreds of flights were canceled at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on Tuesday; all departures were canceled out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and only a few were scheduled at Des Moines International Airport.

The storm drenched California with rain, blanketed the mountain West with snow and brought 100 mph winds to New Mexico earlier this week. More than 20 inches of snow fell over Flagstaff, Ariz. — more than four times the record of 5 inches set in 1956.

At least five deaths were blamed on the weather, including an Arizona hunter who was killed Monday night when a large pine tree snapped and crushed him as he slept in a tent. The driver of a sport utility vehicle that plunged 90 feet off an icy road into the Texas Panhandle's Palo Duro Canyon also died.

Heavy rain hit some parts of the South with more than 4 inches reported in spots in New Orleans. A possible tornado was reported near Lake Pontchartrain, the National Weather Service said.

Cold temperatures also were threatening California crops, where only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the navel and mandarin orange crops have been harvested, said Bob Blakely, director of industrial relations for the California Citrus Mutual.

"We've got a lot on the line," Blakely said. "Both of them combined you're probably looking at over a billion dollars in fruit hanging out there on the trees."

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=9287108