Two dead in US school shooting after online warnings

LOS ANGELES - A US student who had issued chilling warnings on Twitter opened fire in a school cafeteria on Friday, killing at least one person and critically injuring three before taking his own life.

Terrified classmates dived for cover as the gunman, identified by media reports and fellow students as Jaylen Fryberg, launched his attack in a school in the northwestern state of Washington.

Police said the investigation was still ongoing and would likely continue into the early morning Saturday.

"This continues to be an active homicide investigation. We want to make sure we do this right and have all of the right answers," local police spokesman Robb Lamoureux told a press conference late Friday.

As with previous such shootings, the episode revived debate on gun control, even though the gun involved was legally acquired.

"I heard one loud bang and I was wondering what it was. Then I heard about four or five more. People started screaming and people started getting to the ground and going for the nearest exit," said a student identified as Jordan.

"So I hit the ground. But after he'd already put some bullets into the backs of students," he told CNN.

The shooting, just the latest in a long line of such rampages in the United States, erupted in Marysville, 35 miles (55 kilometers) north of Seattle.

Lamoureux declined to identify the shooter or comment on online suggestions, including on Fryberg's social media posts, that the attack might have been triggered by a failed romance.

"The shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound," he said earlier in the day.

Television footage showed swarms of police descending on the Marysville-Pilchuck High School as students, some with hands on heads, came out of the sprawling campus, which has some 2,500 students.

A student identified as Austin told KING 5 television how the gunman was initially "quiet" before opening fire on fellow diners.

"There was just a big group of kids... He was quiet. He was just sitting there. Everyone was talking. All of a sudden I see him stand up, pull something out of his pocket," he said.

"At first I thought it was just someone making a really loud noise with like a bag, like a pretty loud pop until I heard four more after that, and I saw three kids just fall from the table like they were falling to the ground dead."

source: interaksyon.com

Man goes after spider with blowtorch, burns down house

SEATTLE -- A Washington state resident who tried to kill a spider using a makeshift blowtorch managed instead to set his house on fire, causing $60,000 worth of damage, Seattle fire officials said on Wednesday.

The man told investigators that he spotted a spider in the laundry room of his West Seattle rental home on Tuesday night and tried to kill it using a lighter and a can of spray paint, according to Seattle Fire Department spokesman Kyle Moore.

The spider crawled into a hole in the wall, and the man, who was not identified but was described as being in his 20s, followed it with the blowtorch, setting the room ablaze, Moore said.

The man attempted to throw water on the growing fire, but the flames spread quickly to the attic and tore through the roof. The blaze ripped through the home, causing $40,000 worth of damage to the building and another $20,000 of damage to the contents.

“There were giant clouds of smoke just pouring out of the windows,” neighbor Kaitlin Sharp told KIRO-TV.

Both the man and his mother, with whom he shared the rental home, have been displaced, authorities said. The man was not facing criminal charges and the fire was considered accidental, Moore said.

“He has to live with the fact that he set fire to the house he was living in,” Moore said, adding that it was unlikely the spider survived the blaze.

source: interaksyon.com

8 dead, 18 missing after Washington state landslide

OLYMPIA, Washington - Eight people were dead and at least 18 were still missing nearly two days after a landslide in Washington state buried homes and cars under mud and tangled debris up to 15 feet deep, authorities said.

The search for victims was due to resume early on Monday after dangerous, quicksand conditions forced rescue workers to suspend their efforts at dusk on Sunday. Some workers had to be dragged to safety after becoming mired in mud to their armpits.

The landslide was triggered after rain-soaked embankments along State Route 530 near Oso, Washington, about 55 miles northeast of Seattle, gave way on Saturday morning, washing away at least six homes.

A spokesman for the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office said eight bodies had been found in the square mile (2.6 square km) of tangled debris, rocks, trees and mud by Sunday evening. A further eight people were hurt in the landslide.

"We didn't find anybody alive. There was no sign of life" after a search of much of the area on foot, Snohomish County Fire District 21 chief Travis Hots told a news conference on Sunday, adding that the tally of the missing was likely to grow.

A press briefing was slated for 9 a.m. PDT on Monday.

"I have a sense that we're going to have some hard news here," Washington Governor Jay Inslee said after flying over the affected area on Sunday.

The slide in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains along the Stillaguamish River piled mud, rock and debris up to 15 feet deep in some places.

It blocked the flow of the river, creating floods and a backup of water behind a natural dam of mud and debris, but the threat to people downriver had begun to ease, Inslee said.

The highway was closed in both directions, with no timeline for it to be reopened, he said.

The Snohomish County sheriff's office has asked people affected by the slide to report to the Red Cross so an accurate count can be made of the missing.

Washington state Lieutenant Governor Brad Owen has declared a state of emergency in Snohomish County. (Additional reporting and writing by Kevin Murphy in Kansas City, Missouri)

source: interaksyon.com

Smithsonian rolls out 'Bionic Man'

WASHINGTON -- A first-ever walking, talking "bionic man" built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.

The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum was built by London's Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.

"This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development," museum director John Dailey said.

The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, "The Incredible Bionic Man," airing on Sunday.

A "bionic man" was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show "The Six Million Dollar Man" showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.

The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.

"The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today -- one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?" said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.

The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.

"It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy," said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.

The robot has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.

The bionic creation's artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.

"The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," he said. "So, he's not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with."

Assembly began in August 2012 and took three months to finish.

The robot made its US debut last week at New York's Comic Con convention. It will be on display at the museum throughout the fall.

source: interaksyon.com

US govt shuts down

The United States lurched into a dreaded government shutdown early Tuesday for the first time in 17 years, triggering agency closures and hundreds of thousands of furloughs as Congress missed a deadline to pass a budget.

Ten minutes before midnight bells rang throughout a deeply divided Washington, and after a day of furious brinkmanship President Barack Obama's Democrats and rival Republicans, the White House ordered federal agencies to initiate their shutdown procedures.

"We urge Congress to act quickly to pass a Continuing Resolution to provide a short-term bridge that ensures sufficient time to pass a budget for the remainder of the fiscal year," Management and Budget director Sylvia Mathews Burwell said in a memo to agencies.

Lawmakers had hardly haggled over budgetary matters in the final frantic hours before the deadline -- the end of the fiscal year. Instead, they argued over whether to link the budget pact with efforts to delay Obama's health care law.

"This is an unnecessary blow to America," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor two minutes after the witching hour.

As a mood of crisis enveloped Washington no compromise emerged to head off the first such disaster since 1996.

Instead, the Democratic-led Senate and Republican House of Representatives played a futile game, sending funding bills between them that were doomed to fail.

Obama accused Republicans of holding America at ransom with their "extreme" political demands, while his opponents struck back at his party's supposed arrogance.

Around 800,000 government workers are expected to be sent home, government services are to be slashed and monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and national parks will close.

The crisis is rooted in an attempt by "Tea Party" Republicans in the House to make passage of a new government budget conditional on thwarting Obama's signature health reform law.

The Democratic-led Senate and the president have repeatedly rejected this strategy and urged Republicans to pass an extension to government funding to temporarily stave off the shutdown.

In a deeper sense, the shutdown is the most serious crisis yet in a series of rolling ideological skirmishes between Democrat Obama and House Republicans over the size of the US government and its role in national life.

"One faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government doesn't get to shut down the entire government just to re-fight the results of an election," Obama said, referring to his own re-election.

"You don't get to extract a ransom for doing your job, for doing what you're supposed to be doing anyway," he said, in a stern televised statement at the White House.

But on a day of accelerating brinkmanship, Republicans doubled down on their bid to gut Obamacare, as the health care law, the most sweeping social legislation in decades, is known.

With just three hours to go, House lawmakers passed a bill that would delay the individual mandate, which forces all Americans to buy health insurance under the new law, for a year.

"It's a matter of fairness for all Americans," said Republican House speaker John Boehner, who has struggled to control the riotous anti-government Tea Party faction of his caucus.

But the Senate, which must also sign off on budget measures, immediately rejected the bill.

That led House leaders, less than an hour before midnight, to move to go to conference, meaning the two chambers would appoint formal negotiators to thrash out a budget deal.

That process was already showing signs that it would take hours to coordinate, and Reid sent the Senate into recess until 9:30 am Tuesday.

"We said we'd go to conference if they wouldn't shut the government down, but they're shutting the government down," number two Senate Democrat Dick Durbin told AFP.

Obama warned that a government shutdown could badly damage an economy which has endured a sluggish recovery from the worst recession in decades.

"A shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people, right away. Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy significantly," Obama said.

Consultants Macroeconomic Advisors said it would slow growth, recorded at a 2.5 percent annual pace in the second quarter.

A two-week shutdown would cut 0.3 percentage point off of gross domestic production.

It would also have a painful personal impact on workers affected -- leaving them to dip into savings or delay mortgage payments, monthly car loan bills and other spending.

Stocks on Monday retreated as traders braced for the shutdown. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 128.57 points (0.84 percent) to 15,129.67.

Markets are likely to be even more traumatized if there is no quick solution to the next fast approaching crisis.

Republicans are also demanding Obama make concessions in the health care law to secure a lifting of the current $16.7 trillion debt ceiling, without which the United States would begin to default on its debts for the first time in history by the middle of October.

Polls show more Americans would blame Republicans for the shutdown than Democrats, leaving Boehner torn between his party's wider political interests and a vocal section of his own party.

source: interaksyon.com

Divorce just as much a hurdle as marriage for US gays

WASHINGTON - It's hard enough for same-sex couples to marry in the United States, but divorce is a headache as well, and one that supporters of gay marriage hope the US Supreme Court can resolve.

"Divorce is the new frontier for gay couples," said Susan Sommer of Lambda Legal, a legal advice service for homosexuals. "They had to fight to be together, and they have to fight to get a divorce."

Like marriage, divorce laws are determined by each of the 50 states, only nine of which -- in addition to the federal capital Washington -- so far allow couples of the same sex to wed.

"If a couple is living in New York City... they can get a divorce in New York City," said Sommer, who is Lambda Legal's director of constitutional litigation and senior counsel.

But complications arise when couples relocate to a state where their marriage is not legally recognized, said Stuart Gaffney, media director of the lobbying group Marriage Equality USA.

Thus, a couple living in Utah, where gay marriage is not recognized, can marry in Massachusetts, where it is legal and where newlyweds are not obliged to live in the state.

If the couple returns to Utah and their marriage falls apart, however, they would have to go to another state to petition for a divorce -- which requires a period of residence of six months to two years, depending on the state.

There are also local particularities. In Wyoming, for instance, same-sex couples cannot marry but they can seek a divorce.

"It's a mess," Sommer told AFP.

A Marriage Equality USA activist who requested anonymity to speak freely said such a situation left her in a state of stress and uncertainty as to how to legally and financial separate from her partner, whom she married in Canada.

"It made for a very difficult, untenable situation," she said.

"Within less than a year, after several years of uncertainty, we made the decision to end the relationship and begin the process of a divorce. I was very fortunate to be able to get divorced.

"Unfortunately, other US citizens who get married in Canada, or in other locations where same-sex marriage is legalized, rarely have this right," she said. "They are left in perpetual legal limbo.

According to the Williams Institute, which conducts research on the gay community, one percent of same-sex marriages -- of which there were about 50,000 in 2011 -- end in divorce every year, half the proportion for heterosexuals.

But even happily married couples who live in a state that recognizes gay marriage have to face "nightmare" complications, with divorce being the ultimate problem, Gaffney said.

That's because, under the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government recognizes only straight marriages -- with hundreds of repercussions involving such areas as income tax and retirement benefits.

LGBT activists are thus eagerly awaiting how the US Supreme Court will rule on DOMA after its justices hear both sides of the legal argument on March 26-27.

"Non-gay couples are treated as what they are -- married -- no matter where they are living, traveling, or divorcing," said Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry, another group that campaigns for marriage equality.

"But gay couples experience a patchwork of respect, uncertainty and discrimination, depending on where they are," he said.

"That's why all couples should have -- the freedom to marry and divorce no matter where they live or find themselves."

source: interaksyon.com

US Energy Department hacked, says no classified data was compromised

WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy’s electronics network was attacked by hackers in mid-January but no classified data was compromised, the agency said in a letter to employees.

The attack “resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of employee and contractor Personally Identifiable Information,” the Energy Department said in the letter, which was received by employees at its headquarters in Washington late on Friday and obtained by Reuters on Monday.

The department said it was working with federal law enforcement to gather more information on the nature and scope of the attacks and assess the potential impact on staff and contractors. “Based on the findings of this investigation, no classified data was compromised,” the letter said.

Government agencies are required to disclose details when confidential personal data has been hacked. But there are no laws requiring them to disclose information when classified data is raided by hackers.

It was not clear which divisions at the agency’s headquarters were breached in the attack, and it was also uncertain who the hackers were or where they were based.

A department spokesman declined to comment, and a spokesman for the Energy Information Administration, which publishes data that helps keep oil, gas and electricity markets stable, deferred to DOE headquarters.

Government agencies and contractors handling classified information are supposed to use special safeguards to protect classified information from disclosure.

The most highly classified information, such as intelligence information, is supposed to be stored on systems that are completely isolated from the Internet.

Over the years, flaws in the systems for handling classified information have emerged, however. In the past, Energy Department installations that design and build nuclear weapons, including the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, have faced scandals over alleged mishandling of classified information.

In 2006, for example, after raiding a house trailer containing a suspected small methamphetamine lab, local police found three computer memory sticks containing classified information downloaded from the Los Alamos lab’s computers.

One of the largest security scandals in modern U.S. history, the leaking of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and military reports to the website WikiLeaks, allegedly occurred because, in an effort to share intelligence more widely with operations in the field, agencies sent classified reports electronically to battlefield intelligence units, where data protection measures were lax.

Among the material obtained by WikiLeaks, however, not a single document that has surfaced to date was classified higher than “secret” – a fairly low-grade classification. Intelligence officials were not particularly alarmed by the WikiLeaks leaks because none of their truly sensitive material was leaked.

In late 1999, a Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist born in Taiwan, Wen Ho Lee, was arrested and indicted for allegedly mishandling classified information from the lab. However, prosecutors ultimately dropped all but one charge against him, to which he pleaded guilty, and the case ended with Lee receiving settlement payments from the government and some news organizations.

The Energy Department said in its letter that it was increasing monitoring across its networks and deploying tools to protect sensitive assets.

source: interaksyon.com

Obama, PNoy To Hold Talks

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will meet with Philippine President Benigno Aquino III on June 8 at the White House as the United States steps up support to the ally locked in disputes with China.

The White House said on Friday Obama looks forward to discussing the strategic, economic and "people to people" ties between the US and the Philippines and their cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region.

Obama has said the US needs to deepen its engagement in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region, calling it critical to the nation's security and economic prosperity. The Philippines is a longtime ally of the United States.

The talks are the latest sign of a growing alliance after a rare joint visit to Washington by the Philippine foreign and defense ministers at the end of April.

"The Philippines is a long-standing friend and ally of the United States, and the president looks forward to discussing with President Aquino the close strategic, economic and people to people ties between our two countries, and our cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region," a White House statement said.

"The two leaders will also discuss ways to deepen bilateral cooperation."

The Obama administration has put a renewed focus on Southeast Asia, stepping up ties to the economically dynamic region where several countries are embroiled in territorial disputes with a growing China.

The Philippines has had particularly rocky relations with China. The two countries have both been posting non-military ships in disputed Scarborough Shoal to exert their claims.

The United States has been helping to upgrade the notoriously antiquated Philippine military and Aquino has agreed to let a greater number of US troops rotate through the country.

But both Aquino and the Obama administration have said that they do not plan a permanent military presence in the Philippines, which would be politically sensitive in the former US colony.

Malacañang on Saturday confirmed President Aquino’s visit to Washington.

"We are confirming the announcement of the US government that President Obama will be receiving President Aquino in June," Deputy Presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said on government radio dzRB.

Valte said the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) will conduct a briefing on the President's itinerary for his foreign trips this week.

The trip to the White House will follow Aquino's state visit to the United Kingdom from June 4 to 6.

He will be in Washington D.C. until June 10 before making a short visit to Los Angeles on his way home.

Vice President Jejomar C. Binay will also be in Washington D.C. early June to speak before the 5th Global Housing Finance Conference at the World Bank Headquarters.

Binay is expected to meet with World Bank Executive Director Rogerio Studart.

The Vice President is expected back in the Philippines to prepare for his visit to London. (JC Bello Ruiz, AP and AFP)

source: mb.com.ph

90% of Americans eat too much salt: study

WASHINGTON — About 90% of Americans eat too much salt every day, and the top food offenders include cheeseburgers, pizza, bread, deli meat and potato chips, U.S. health officials say.

The average American eats about 3,300 milligrams of sodium per day, and that does not include salt added from the shaker on the table, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vital Signs report.

U.S. guidelines recommend that people limit sodium to less than 2,300 milligrams per day.

High risk populations—including African-Americans, people 51 and older and those with with high blood pressure, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease—should stick to 1,500 milligrams daily.

“Too much sodium raises blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke,” said CDC director Thomas Frieden.

“These diseases kill more than 800,000 Americans each year and contribute an estimated $273 billion in health care costs.”

The report pointed to 10 types of food that add up to more than 40% of the nation’s sodium intake.

Poultry, soups, cheese, pasta dishes, meatloaf rounded out the top 10.

Some 65% of Americans’ sodium comes from food sold in stores, and 25% comes from meals in restaurants.

The CDC urged people to check labels for salt content, eat more fresh vegetables without sauce, and limit consumption of processed foods.

source: japantoday.com