Downtown property owners fight MTA subway tunnel plans

As the MTA moves closer to starting construction on a subway tunnel in downtown Los Angeles, some property owners have dug in for a fight.

The big landlords fear that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's plans to build a massive trench on Flower Street will disrupt their businesses for years, costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The four-story-deep canyon planned by the MTA would travel through more than two busy city blocks of the financial district, which includes popular destinations such as the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the Central Library and the City National Plaza office and retail complex.

Predictably, this clash of potent forces — transportation and real estate — has spawned lawsuits that threaten to delay the project and potentially add millions to the cost.

Influential landowners said they want the city to do more of the work underground to connect separate subway lines into one seamless system. The MTA said it was technologically impossible because of some unusual construction barriers.

What's clear is that the subway has put some of the city's most civic-minded property owners, who helped spawn downtown's renaissance, in the awkward position of opposing a highly popular project that they, in fact, want.

"The connector is very important for the community, and so is the existence of businesses located along the connector route," said Gary L. Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. "We were very hopeful there could be a win-win solution. It doesn't look like they have gotten to that point."

The $1.4-billion Regional Connector subway is a top MTA priority because it would eliminate a major bottleneck in the system caused by a lack of interconnections between rail lines. Upon completion in 2019, riders would be able to travel from Azusa to Long Beach or from East Los Angeles to Santa Monica without changing trains twice, as the current system requires.

It also would help speed workers and visitors to the financial district, a major benefit for landlords and tenants.

"We agree the connector will facilitate ridership on the transit system," said Paul S. Rutter, co-chief operating officer of Thomas Properties Group. "We are not objecting to the line or its route."

The problem, as far as property owners are concerned, is how construction would be carried out.

Most of the 1.9-mile subway from Little Tokyo to the 7th Street/Metro Center station would be built underground with tunnel-boring machines.

But the MTA plans to finish the line's last section— 4th Street to south of 6th Street — with "cut and cover" construction.

That means digging a deep, wide trench on Flower Street, laying train tracks and then refilling the trench on top of the new subway tunnel. During most of the construction, the street would be accessible to traffic because of metal plates placed over the hole.

Thomas Properties, the owner of City National Plaza, one of Southern California's largest office complexes, is a leading voice of opposition. The company would like to see tunneling continue south on Flower Street two more blocks to 6th Street.

"We're concerned that the MTA is not taking into account adequately the stakeholders on Flower Street," Rutter said.

The MTA has proposed stopping the tunneling at 4th Street. The transit agency has said a longer tunnel would be too costly and isn't feasible because of underground obstacles left by builders of past projects.

During construction of the Bonaventure, City National Plaza and other skyscrapers in the 1960s and 1970s, builders drove hundreds of steel cables, called tiebacks, deep into the ground to support the underground garage walls made during excavation.

Those cables are no longer structural supports for the buildings, but they are still under the surface and would tangle the maws of digging machines, according to the MTA.

"It's not possible to tunnel through the tiebacks," said Diego Cardoso, an MTA executive officer. "A review by tunnel experts concurs with us."

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Connecticut school shooting: 18 children among at least 24 dead

At least one gunman attacked a suburban Connecticut elementary school Friday, killing at least two dozen people, including 18 children, law enforcement sources said.

At a televised news conference from Newtown, Conn., State Police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance refused to give an exact number pending notification of the families. Other reports place the number of dead at Sandy Hook Elementary at 27, including the children.

“There were several fatalities at scene, students and staff,” Vance said. “There will be no other information until families are told.”

PHOTOS: Shooting at Connecticut elementary school

The gunman was dead at the scene, Vance said, adding that there was no longer any danger to the public.

“It’s still an evolving crime scene and it’s just hours old,” Daniel Curtin, a FBI special agent in Connecticut, said. “And it’s obviously very tragic. All we’re saying is that the FBI and our agents have a presence there to assist in any way possible. Because right now it’s a Connecticut state and local investigation at this point. But in times of trial like this we work together.”

Law enforcement sources in Washington said the gunman was in his early 20s and was the father or another relative of one of the children.  He had four or more weapons and was wearing a bulletproof vest.

A weapon was recovered at the scene.

According to sources, the event began with an argument with the principal. Some of the staffers were shot first, then the gunman advanced on a classroom, shooting.

TIMELINE: Deadliest U.S. mass shootings

In Washington, President Obama was briefed on the shooting, spokesman Jay Carney said.

Carney wouldn't say whether the shooting would make gun control a higher priority on the president's agenda, but he said there would be a day for discussion on that policy issue.

“But I don't think today is that day,” he said.

At least three wounded have been taken to a hospital in Danbury, Newtown Mayor Mark D. Boughton confirmed.

“I can’t discuss who they are but some injuries are serious,” Boughton said.

In a statement posted on its website, Danbury Hospital said: “To date, three patients have been transported to Danbury Hospital from the scene.

"Out of abundance of caution and not because of any direct threat our building is under lockdown. This allows us simply to focus on the important work at hand,” the hospital stated.

Officials were still investigating the incident, which began at about 9:40 a.m. EST at the school in Newtown, a town of about 27,000 people.

Within hours, officials were reporting that the gunman was found dead and two handguns were recovered at the scene.

Stephen Delgiadice told reporters that his  8-year-old daughter heard two big bangs and teachers told her to get in a corner. His daughter was fine.

“It's alarming, especially in Newtown, Conn., which we always thought was the safest place in America,” he said.

The superintendent's office said the district had locked down schools in Newtown, about 60 miles from  New York City. Nearby schools also were locked down as a security measure.

michael.muskal@latimes.com

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Owner of Rivera plane being investigated by DEA

PHOENIX (AP) — The company that owns a luxury jet that crashed and killed Latin music star Jenni Rivera is under investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and the agency seized two of its planes earlier this year as part of the ongoing probe.

DEA spokeswoman Lisa Webb Johnson confirmed Thursday the planes owned by Las Vegas-based Starwood Management were seized in Texas and Arizona, but she declined to discuss details of the case. The agency also has subpoenaed all the company's records, including any correspondence it has had with a former Tijuana mayor who U.S. law enforcement officials have long suspected has ties to organized crime.

The man widely believed to be behind the aviation company is an ex-convict named Christian Esquino, 50, who has a long and checkered legal past. Corporate records list his sister-in-law as the company's only officer, but insurance companies that cover some of the firm's planes say in court documents that the woman is merely a front and that Esquino is the one in charge.

Esquino's legal woes date back decades. He pleaded guilty to a fraud charge that stemmed from a major drug investigation in Florida in the early 1990s and most recently was sentenced to two years in federal prison in a California aviation fraud case. Esquino, a Mexican citizen, was deported upon his release. Esquino and various other companies he has either been involved with or owns have also been sued for failing to pay millions of dollars in loans, according to court records.

The 43-year-old California-born Rivera died at the peak of her career when the plane she was traveling in nose-dived into the ground while flying from the northern Mexican city of Monterrey to the central city of Toluca early Sunday morning. She was perhaps the most successful female singer in grupero, a male-dominated Mexico regional style, and had branched out into acting and reality television.

It remained unclear Thursday exactly what caused the crash and why Rivera was on Esquino's plane. The 78-year-old pilot and five other people were also killed. Esquino was not on the plane.

The late singer's brother, Pedro Rivera Jr., said that he didn't know anything about the owner or why or how she ended up in his plane.

Esquino told the Los Angeles Times in a telephone interview from Mexico City that the singer was considering buying the aircraft from Starwood for $250,000 and the flight was offered as a test ride. He disputed reports that he owns Starwood, maintaining that he is merely the company's operations manager "with the expertise."

Esquino is no stranger to tangles with the law. He was indicted in the early 1990s along with 12 other defendants in a major federal drug investigation that claimed the suspects planned to sell more than 480 kilograms of cocaine, according to court records. He eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal money from the IRS and was sentenced to five years in prison, but much of the term was suspended for reasons that weren't immediately clear.

He served about five months in prison before being released.

Cynthia Hawkins, a former assistant U.S. attorney who handled the case and is now in private practice in Orlando, remembered the investigation well.

"It was huge," Hawkins said Thursday. "This was an international smuggling group."

She said the case began with the arrest of Robert Castoro, who was at the time considered one of the most prolific smugglers of marijuana and cocaine into Florida from direct ties to Colombian drug cartels in the 1980s. Castoro was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to life in prison, but he then began cooperating with authorities, leading to his sentence being reduced to just 10 years, Hawkins said.

"Castoro cooperated for years," she said. "We put hundreds of people in jail."

He eventually gave up another smuggler, Damian Tedone, who was indicted in the early 1990s along with Esquino and 11 others in a conspiracy involving drug smuggling in Florida in the 1980s at a time when the state was the epicenter of the nation's cocaine trade.

Tedone also cooperated with authorities and has since been released from prison. Telephone messages left Thursday for both Tedone and Castoro were not returned.

Esquino eventually pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of concealing money from the IRS.

Joseph Milchen, Esquino's attorney at the time, said Thursday the case eventually revolved around his client "bringing money into the United States without declaring it."

However, Milchen acknowledged that a plane purchased by Esquino was "used to smuggle drugs."

He denied his former client has ever had anything to do with illegal narcotics.

"The only thing he has ever done is with airplanes," Milchen said.

Court filings also indicate Esquino was sentenced to two years in federal prison after pleading guilty in 2004 to committing fraud involving aircraft he purchased in Mexico, then falsified the planes' log books and re-sold them in the United States.

Also in 2004, a federal judge ordered him and one of his companies to pay a creditor $6.2 million after being accused of failing to pay debts to a bank.

As the years passed, Esquino's troubles only grew.

In February this year, a Gulfstream G-1159A plane the government valued at $500,000 was seized by the U.S. Marshals Service on behalf of the DEA after landing in Tucson on a flight that originated in Mexico

Four months later, the DEA subpoenaed all of Starwood's records dating to Dec. 13, 2007, including federal and state income tax documents, bank deposit information, records on all company assets and sales, and the entity's relationship with Esquino and more than a dozen companies and individuals, including former Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank-Rhon, a gambling mogul and a member of one of Mexico's most powerful families. U.S. law enforcement officials have long suspected Hank-Rhon is tied to organized crime but no allegations have been proven. He has consistently denied any criminal involvement.

He was arrested in Mexico last year on weapons charges and on suspicion of ordering the murder of his son's former girlfriend. He was later freed for lack of evidence.

The subpoena was obtained by the U-T San Diego newspaper.

A Starwood attorney listed on the subpoena, Jeremy Schuster, declined Thursday to provide details.

"We don't comment on matters involving clients," he said.

In September, the DEA seized another Starwood plane — a 1977 Hawker 700 with an insured value of $1 million — after it landed in McAllen, Texas, from a flight from Mexico.

Insurers of both aircraft have since filed complaints in federal court in Nevada seeking to have the Starwood policies nullified, in part, because they say Esquino lied in the application process when he noted he had never been indicted on drug-related criminal charges. Both companies said they would not have issued the policies had he been truthful.

Another attorney for Starwood has not responded to phone and email messages seeking comment, and no one was at the address listed at its Las Vegas headquarters. The address is a post office box in a shipping and mailing store located between a tuxedo rental shop and a supermarket in a shopping center several miles west of the Las Vegas Strip.

___

Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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Paper Links Nerve Agents in ’91 Gulf War and Ailments

Reviving a 20-year debate over illnesses of veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, a new scientific paper presents evidence that nerve agents released by the bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons depots just before the ground war began could have carried downwind and fallen on American troops staged in Saudi Arabia.

The paper, published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, tries to rebut the longstanding Pentagon position, supported by many scientists, that neurotoxins, particularly sarin gas, could not have carried far enough to sicken American forces.

The authors are James J. Tuite and Dr. Robert Haley, who has written several papers asserting links between chemical exposures and gulf war illnesses. They assembled data from meteorological and intelligence reports to support their thesis that American bombs were powerful enough to propel sarin from depots in Muthanna and Falluja high into the atmosphere, where winds whisked it hundreds of miles south to the Saudi border.

Once over the American encampments, the toxic plume could have stalled and fallen back to the surface because of weather conditions, the paper says. Though troops would have been exposed to low levels of the agent, the authors assert that the exposures may have continued for several days, increasing their impact.

Though chemical weapons detectors sounded alarms in those encampments in the days after the January 1991 bombing raids, they were viewed as false by many troops, the authors report.

But a significant number of medical experts have cast doubts on the sarin gas theory over the years, and several said Thursday that the new paper did little to change their minds.

Dr. John Bailar, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago who led a group that studied gulf war illnesses in 1996, said there was still no clear evidence that troops might have been exposed to levels of sarin significant enough to have a biological effect.

Dr. Bailar said that the stress of war rather than chemical agents might be a more likely cause of the veterans’ problems. “Gulf war syndrome is real,” he said, using the term for a constellation of symptoms. “And the veterans who have it deserve appropriate medical care. But we should not kid ourselves about its causes or about the most effective means of treatment.”

Nearly half of the 700,000 service members who were deployed in 1990 and 1991 for the gulf war have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and more than 85 percent of those have been granted benefits, the department has reported.

Many of those veterans have reported long-lasting problems, including chronic pain, memory loss, persistent fatigue and diarrhea, some of which had no clear causes. Many veterans insist that their problems are not the result of stress but have a biological basis.

Paul Sullivan, a gulf war veteran who has advocated for more research into the illnesses, said the new paper provided “overwhelming scientific evidence” that exposure to chemical agents sickened those troops and that the Department of Veterans Affairs should ensure that all receive health care and benefits.

Panels of medical experts have come down on both sides of the issue, with one group in 2000 questioning whether low levels of sarin could cause long-term health problems and another in 2004 concluding that toxic chemicals had caused neurological damage in many troops.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that the postwar demolition of a chemical weapons depot at Kamisiya, in southern Iraq, may have exposed 100,000 troops to nerve gas. But the military has said it was unlikely that nerve gas caused long-term illnesses in troops, a position it reiterated on Thursday.

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Popular YouTube gaming channel Machinima lays off about 20

Popular YouTube video-game lifestyle channel Machinima is laying off about 10% of its staff as part of a reorganization.

The company issued a statement Friday saying it is adjusting staffing to position the company to capitalize on its global growth. About 20 employees of the company's 200 were laid off as part of the reorganization, even as Machinima is hiring across key divisions including sales, marketing and product. The job cuts are in the L.A. area.

"This is growing pains. Machinima has grown a lot in a short amount of time. We had to look at the business, look at where we're focusing," Machinima Editor-in-Chief Rob Smith told the game publication Joystiq. "It has hit the editorial group, but we are still doing editorial coverage in a slightly different way."

Machinima ranks among the 10 most popular channels on YouTube, attracting more than 5 million subscribers and almost 1 billion video views. Its success in building online audiences around entertainment that would appeal to video-game aficionados led to a $35-million round of investment earlier this year, in which YouTube parent Google Inc. joined the existing backers Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital.

The channel got its start in 2000 as a website for filmmakers using video-game environments and characters to create original stories. In 2005, brothers Allen and Philip DeBevoise acquired the website and turned it into a destination for gaming and gaming culture.

Machinima has reached beyond its roots. It introduced live-action programs, including the zombie apocalypse show "Bite Me" and the retro "X-Files"-ish  show "RCVR." 

The channel has achieved success with long-form content, first with the Warner-Bros. produced “Mortal Kombat: Legacy,” based on the epic game franchise. That series alone delivered over 50 million video views, making it one of the most successful web series of all time.

This year, “Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn,” a five-part series based on the popular Microsoft game franchise, attracted 27 million views.

Employees turned to Twitter to report the job cuts. 

"Effective immediately I am no longer at Machinima," tweeted Justin Fassino. "Would love to send an official email with my contact info but they took my computer."

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Angels reportedly agree to deal with outfielder Josh Hamilton

One day after General Manager Jerry Dipoto said he didn’t feel like a major move was "imminent, pressing or required," the Angels reportedly made a major move on Thursday.

ESPN Dallas is reporting that highly sought free-agent outfielder Josh Hamilton has informed the Texas Rangers that he's signing with the Angels.

Multiple reports, the first by Joe McDonnell of Fox Sports West, said the Angels have been in “serious” negotiations with Hamilton on a five-year, $125-million deal, a move that would free up the team to use a young outfielder such as Mark Trumbo or Peter Bourjos in a trade for a pitcher.

Among the possible trade targets under such a scenario would be New York Mets knuckleballer R.A. Dickey, who won the 2012 National League Cy Young Award but has been unable to reach an agreement on a contract extension with the club.

Dipoto has said throughout the winter that he was pleased with his position-playing club, which features slugging first base baseman Albert Pujols and star outfielder Mike Trout, but the addition of the left-handed-hitting Hamilton would provide more balance to a predominantly right-handed-hitting lineup.

Hamilton, 31, was the first overall pick in the 1999 draft by the Tampa Bay Rays, but injuries and an addiction to drugs and alcohol derailed his career for several years beginning in 2001, and he was on baseball’s restricted list from 2003 through 2005.

When he finally reached the big leagues in 2007, Hamilton quickly emerged as a star, batting .304 with 32 home runs and 130 runs batted in for the Rangers in 2008 and winning American League most valuable player honors in 2010, when he hit .359 with 32 homers and 100 RBIs.

Hamilton, who was also being pursued by Texas, Seattle and Philadelphia, hit .285 with 43 homers and 128 RBIs this past season, which included a torrid April in which he hit .395 with nine homers and 25 RBIs and a memorable May 8 game in Baltimore, when he became the 16thplayer in major-league history to hit four home runs in a game.

But after hitting .308 with 27 homers and 75 RBIs in the first half, Hamilton cooled considerably in the second half, hitting .259 with 16 homers and 53 RBIs. He also had a career-high 162 strikeouts on the season, and for much of July, August and September, left-handed pitchers often retired him with ease.

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Selling flak jackets in the cyberwars

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When the Israeli army and Hamas trade virtual blows in cyberspace, or when hacker groups like Anonymous rise from the digital ether, or when WikiLeaks dumps a trove of classified documents, some see a lawless Internet.

But Matthew Prince, chief executive at CloudFlare, a little-known Internet start-up that serves some of the Web’s most controversial characters, sees a business opportunity.

Founded in 2010, CloudFlare markets itself as an Internet intermediary that shields websites from distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks, the crude but effective weapon that hackers use to bludgeon websites until they go dark. The 40-person company claims to route up to 5 percent of all Internet traffic through its global network.

Prince calls his company the “Switzerland” of cyberspace – assiduously neutral and open to all comers. But just as companies like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have faced profound questions about the balance between free speech and openness on the Internet and national security and law enforcement concerns, CloudFlare‘s business has posed another thorny question: what kinds of services, if any, should an American company be allowed to offer designated terrorists and cyber criminals?

CloudFlare’s unusual position at the heart of this debate came to the fore last month, when the Israel Defense Forces sought help from CloudFlare after its website was struck by attackers based in Gaza. The IDF was turning to the same company that provides those services to Hamas and the al-Quds Brigades, according to publicly searchable domain information. Both Hamas and al-Quds, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are designated by the United States as terrorist groups.

Under the USA Patriot Act, U.S. firms are forbidden from providing “material support” to groups deemed foreign terrorist organizations. But what constitutes material support – like many other facets of the law itself – has been subject to intense debate.

CloudFlare’s dealings have attracted heated criticism in the blogosphere from both Israelis and Palestinians, but Prince defended his company as a champion of free speech.

“Both sides have an absolute right to tell their story,” said Prince, a 38-year old former lawyer. “We’re not providing material support for anybody. We’re not sending money, or helping people arm themselves.”

Prince noted that his company only provides defensive capabilities that enable websites to stay online.

“We can’t be sitting in a role where we decide what is good or what is bad based on our own personal biases,” he said. “That’s a huge slippery slope.”

Many U.S. agencies are customers, but so is WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization. CloudFlare has consulted for many Wall Street institutions, yet also protects Anonymous, the “hacktivist” group associated with the Occupy movement.

Prince‘s stance could be tested at a time when some lawmakers in the United States and Europe, armed with evidence that militant groups rely on the Web for critical operations and recruitment purposes, have pressured Internet companies to censor content or cut off customers.

Last month, conservative political lobbies, as well as seven lawmakers led by Ted Poe, a Republican from Texas, urged the FBI to shut down the Hamas Twitter account. The account remains active; Twitter declined to comment.

MATERIAL SUPPORT

Although it has never prosecuted an Internet company under the Patriot Act, the government’s use of the material support argument has steadily risen since 2006. Since September 11, 2001, more than 260 cases have been charged under the provision, according to Fordham Law School’s Terrorism Trends database.

Catherine Lotrionte, the director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Law, Science and Global Security and a former Central Intelligence Agency lawyer, argued that Internet companies should be more closely regulated.

“Material support includes web services,” Lotrionte said. “Denying them services makes it more costly for the terrorists. You’re cornering them.”

But others have warned that an aggressive government approach would have a chilling effect on free speech.

“We’re resurrecting the kind of broad-brush approaches we used in the McCarthy era,” said David Cole, who represented the Humanitarian Law Project, a non-profit organization that was charged by the Justice Department for teaching law to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is designated by the United States as a terrorist group. The group took its case to the Supreme Court but lost in 2010.

The material support law is vague and ill-crafted, to the point where basic telecom providers, for instance, could be found guilty by association if a terrorist logs onto the Web to plot an attack, Cole said.

In that case, he asked, “Do we really think that AT&T or Google should be held accountable?”

CloudFlare said it has not been contacted about its services by the U.S. government. Spokespeople for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, told Reuters they contracted a cyber-security company in Gaza that out-sources work to foreign companies, but declined to comment further. The IDF confirmed it had hired CloudFlare, but declined to discuss “internal security” matters.

CloudFlare offers many of its services for free, but the company says websites seeking advanced protection and features can see their bill rise to more than $ 3,000 a month. Prince declined to discuss the business arrangements with specific customers.

While not yet profitable, CloudFlare has more than doubled its revenue in the past four months, according to Prince, and is picking up 3,000 new customers a month. The company has raked in more than $ 22 million from venture capital firms including New Enterprise Associates, Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.

Prince, a Midwestern native with mussed brown hair who holds a law degree from the University of Chicago, said he has a track record of working on the right side of the law.

A decade ago, Prince provided free legal aid to Spamhaus, an international group that tracked email spammers and identity thieves. He went on to create Project Honey Pot, an open source spam-tracking endeavor that turned over findings to police.

Prince’s latest company, CloudFlare, has been hailed by groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists for protecting speech. Another client, the World Economic Forum, named CloudFlare among its 2012 “technology pioneers” for its work. But it also owes its profile to its most controversial customers.

CloudFlare has hosted 4Chan, the online messaging community that spawned Anonymous. LulzSec, the hacker group best known for targeting Sony Corp, is another customer. And since last May, the company has propped up WikiLeaks after a vigilante hacker group crashed the document repository.

Last year, members of the hacker collective UgNazi, whose exploits include pilfering user account information from eBay and crashing the CIA.gov website, broke into Prince’s cell phone and email accounts.

“It was a personal affront,” Prince said. “But we never kicked them off either.”

Prince said CloudFlare would comply with a valid court order to remove a customer, but that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has never requested a takedown. The company has agreed to turn over information to authorities on “exceedingly rare” occasions, he acknowledged, declining to elaborate.

“Any company that doesn’t do that won’t be in business long,” Prince said. But in an email, he added: “We have a deep and abiding respect for our users’ privacy, disclose to our users whenever possible if we are ordered to turn over information and would fight an order that we believed was not proper.”

Juliannne Sohn, an FBI spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted computer crimes, said U.S. law enforcement agencies may in fact prefer that the Web’s most wanted are parked behind CloudFlare rather than a foreign service over which they have no jurisdiction.

Federal investigators “want to gather information from as many sources as they can, and they’re happy to get it,” Sussmann said.

In an era of rampant cyber warfare, Prince acknowledged he is something of a war profiteer, but with a wrinkle.

“We’re not selling bullets,” he said. “We’re selling flak jackets.”

(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; editing by Jonathan Weber and Claudia Parsons)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Documents: Prisoner plotted to kill Justin Bieber

LAS CRUCES, N.M. (AP) — An imprisoned man whose infatuation with Justin Bieber included a tattoo of the pop star on his leg has told investigators in New Mexico he hatched a plot to kill him.

Court documents in a New Mexico district court say Dana Martin told investigators he persuaded a man he met in prison and the man's nephew to kill Bieber, Bieber's bodyguard and two others not connected to the pop star.

He told investigators that Mark Staake and Tanner Ruane headed east, planning to be near a Bieber concert scheduled in New York City. They missed a turn and crossed into Canada from Vermont. Staake was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Ruane was arrested later.

The two men face multiple charges stemming for the alleged plot.

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World’s Population Living Longer, New Report Suggests

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than in Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organizationfinanced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women in this country formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said.

The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which measured disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published Thursday in the Lancet, a British health publication.

The one exception to the trend was sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternal causes of death still account for about 70 percent of all illness. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death there rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared to a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The change means that people are living longer, an outcome that public health experts praised. But it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “It’s not something that medical services can address as easily.”

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Stocks lower as investors watch Washington

Stocks slipped Thursday on Wall Street after more signs of tension emerged from federal budget talks in Washington.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 70 points at 13,174 just after 1 p.m. EST. The Standard & Poor's 500 index was down 10 points at 1,418. The Nasdaq composite index was down 24 points at 2,989.

In Washington, House Speaker John Boehner said that the White House was so resistant to cutting government spending that it risked pushing the country off the “fiscal cliff.”

The “cliff” is tax increases and government spending cuts that take effect Jan. 1 unless Congress and the White House reach a deal to avert them. Economists have warned that the “cliff” could eventually lead to a recession in the United States.

President Barack Obama said that a deal was “still a work in progress.” Asked about Boehner's assertion that he was waiting to hear more from the president, Obama said only, “Merry Christmas.”

Stocks fell despite the fourth straight weekly drop in applications for unemployment benefits. Applications fell 29,000 last week to 343,000, the second-lowest this year, the Labor Department reported.

On Wall Street, energy and health care stocks fell the most, and telecommunications stocks were down only slightly. All 10 categories of stock in the S&P 500 index were lower.

Best Buy shot up $1.86, or 15 percent, to $14.04 after a newspaper reported that the founder of the troubled electronics chain will make a bid of up to $6 billion for the company by the end of the week.

CVS Caremark climbed 97 cents, or 2 percent, to $48.51 after issuing a profit prediction for next year that was ahead of Wall Street expectations. The company also raised its dividend.

On Wednesday, the Dow Jones industrial average declined for the first day in five. Stocks rallied in the afternoon after the Federal Reserve tied its pledge of super-low interest rates to an improvement in the unemployment rate, but the rally faded.

The Fed said it would hold interest rates super-low until the unemployment rate drops below 6.5 percent, a threshold the Fed believes may not be breached until the end of 2015. The rate is 7.7 percent today.

The Dow's close Wednesday of 13,245 put it within a point of its close on Election Day. After the election, stocks slid 5 percent as investors began to fret about the “fiscal cliff,” but stocks have drifted back higher recently.

“I don't think anyone expected the markets to hold up this well as we get closer and closer to the deadline,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives for Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas.

“Two possibilities: Either the markets are convinced that they'll reach some sort of agreement, or the markets don't care,” Frederick said.

Among individual stocks:

— Google gained $5.26, or 0.8 percent, to $702.82 after releasing an updated map application for the iPhone. Google Maps came pre-loaded on previous iPhones but was dropped for the much-derided Apple Maps earlier this year.

— SolarCity, which installs rooftop solar panels, began trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol SCTY. Shares were priced at $8 and shot to $12. Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, is the company's chairman.

— Clearwire, a struggling provider of mobile Internet access services, jumped 40 cents to $3.15 in heavy trading after Sprint Nextel offered to buy out the minority shareholders of the company for $2.1 billion, giving Sprint total control.

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