Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts

Florida Sinkhole Growing as Engineers Investigate

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Chris O'Meara/Associated Press


An engineer wore a safety line Saturday outside the house in Seffner, Fla., where a bedroom and its occupant fell into a sinkhole.







SEFFNER, Fla. (AP) — Engineers worked gingerly on Saturday to find out more about a slowly growing sinkhole that had swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom, believing the entire house could succumb to the unstable ground.




Jeff Bush, 37, was in his bedroom on Thursday night when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five other people were in the house but escaped unharmed. Mr. Bush’s brother jumped into the hole to try to help, but he had to be rescued by a sheriff’s deputy.


Engineers returned to the property on Saturday morning to do more tests after taking soil samples and running tests there all day Friday. They said the entire lot was dangerous, and no one was allowed in the house.


“I cannot tell you why it has not collapsed yet,” said Bill Bracken, the owner of an engineering company called to assess the sinkhole. He described the earth below as a “very large, very fluid mass.”


“This is not your typical sinkhole,” said Michael Merrill, the Hillsborough County administrator. “This is a chasm. For that reason, we’re being very deliberate.”


The hole had grown to 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide by Friday night, and officials said it was still expanding and “seriously unstable.”


Officials delicately addressed another sad reality: Mr. Bush was likely dead, and the family wanted his body.


“They would like us to go in quickly and locate Mr. Bush,” Mr. Merrill said.


Two neighboring houses were evacuated, and officials were considering further evacuations. Members of the media were moved from a lawn across the street to a safer area a few hundred feet away.


“This is a very complex situation,” said the Hillsborough County fire chief, Ron Rogers. “It’s continuing to evolve, and the ground is continuing to collapse.”


Sinkholes are so common in Florida that the state requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger. While some cars, homes and other buildings have been devoured, it is extremely rare for a sinkhole to swallow a person.


Florida is highly prone to sinkholes because of the underground prevalence of limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, creating caverns.


“You can almost envision a piece of Swiss cheese,” Taylor Yarkosky, a sinkhole expert from Brooksville, Fla., said while gesturing to the ground and the sky-blue house where the earth opened in Seffner. “Any house in Florida could be in that same situation.”


A sinkhole near Orlando grew to 400 feet across in 1981 and devoured five cars, most of two businesses, a three-bedroom house and the deep end of an Olympic-size swimming pool.


More than 500 sinkholes have been reported in Hillsborough County alone since the government started keeping track in 1954, according to the state’s environmental agency.


The sinkhole that swallowed Mr. Bush caused the home’s concrete floor to cave in around 11 p.m. Thursday as everyone in the Tampa-area house was turning in for the night. It gave way with a loud crash that sounded like a car hitting the house and brought Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeremy, running.


Jeremy Bush said he had jumped into the hole but could not see his brother before the ground crumbled around him. A sheriff’s deputy reached out and pulled him to safety.


“The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn’t care — I wanted to save my brother,” Jeremy Bush said through tears Friday in a neighbor’s yard. “But I just couldn’t do nothing.”


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Kerry Criticizes Turkish Prime Minister Over Zionism Remark

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ANKARA, Turkey — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that Turkey’s prime minister had made “objectionable” remarks when he cast Zionism as a crime against humanity in comments earlier this week.




Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a United Nations meeting in Vienna on Wednesday, “Just as with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it has become necessary to view Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”


Mr. Kerry indirectly chastised the Turkish leader for the statement in his opening remarks following a meeting with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, saying that it was important for all leaders to encourage a spirit of tolerance.


But Mr. Kerry was more pointed when asked about the comments during a joint news conference with Mr. Davutoglo. “We not only disagree with it. We found it objectionable,” he said in response to a question.


Turkey is the fifth stop on Mr. Kerry’s nine-nation tour and the first Muslim-majority nation he has visited as secretary of state.


Mr. Davutoglu, for his part, appeared unrepentant in his news conference with Mr. Kerry. The Turkish foreign minister insisted that Turkey was not hostile toward Israel and said that the downturn in relations was Israel’s fault, referring to the 2010 episode in which eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent were killed when Israeli commandos boarded the lead ship of a pro-Palestinian activist flotilla that was trying to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.


“What did those nine individuals do so that with an army they were attacked as if they were aboard a hostile ship on open waters?” Mr. Davutoglu asked.


“If Israel wants to hear positive statements from Turkey it needs to reconsider its attitude both towards us and towards the West Bank,” he said. A senior State Department official, who spoke under ground rules that he not be identified by name on Mr. Kerry’s flight to Ankara, expressed the American position on the Turkish comments in less diplomatic terms than Mr. Kerry, saying that the pattern of Turkish denunciations of Israel was having a “corrosive effect” on American-Turkish relations.


“This was particularly offensive, frankly, to call Zionism a crime against humanity,” the official said, referring to Mr. Erdogan’s remarks. “It complicates our ability to do all of the things that we want to do together when we have such a profound disagreement about such an important thing.”


The official said that the United States wanted to foster a thawing in relations between Turkey and Israel, but that the current ties between those two nations were “frozen.”


“We want to see a normalization, not just for the sake of the two countries but for the sake of the region and, frankly, for the symbolism,” the official added. “Not that long ago you had these two countries demonstrating that a majority Muslim country could have very positive and strong relations with the Jewish state.”


Efforts to revive the Middle East peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and the conflict in Syria are also subjects on Mr. Kerry’s agenda here.


On Thursday, Mr. Kerry promised food and medical supplies for the armed Syrian resistance fighting to depose President Bashar al-Assad and $60 million in additional assistance to the opposition coalition’s political wing at a conference in Rome.


Mr. Kerry’s first stop here was a ceremony at the American Embassy where he paid tribute to Mustafa Akarsu, the Turkish security guard who was killed in a Feb. 1 attack by a suicide bomber at the embassy compound. Mr. Akarsu’s wife and children were in attendance as were two other Turkish guards wounded in the attack.


After his meeting with Mr. Davutoglu, Mr. Kerry headed to dinner with Mr. Erdogan. Arriving at the prime minister’s residence, Mr. Kerry apologized for being a little late, noting that he had had long discussions with the Turkish foreign minister.


Mr. Erdogan said through an interpreter that the two diplomats “must have spoken about everything so there is nothing left for us to talk about.”


“There’s a lot to talk about,” Kerry said. “We actually didn’t talk about everything.”


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Study Finds Genetic Risk Factors Shared by 5 Psychiatric Disorders

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Their study, published online Wednesday in the Lancet, was based on an examination of genetic data from more than 60,000 people world-wide. Its authors say it is the largest genetic study yet of psychiatric disorders. The findings strengthen an emerging view of mental illness that aims to make diagnoses based on the genetic aberrations underlying diseases instead of on the disease symptoms.


Two of the aberrations discovered in the new study were in genes used in a major signaling system in the brain, giving clues to processes that might go awry and suggestions of how to treat the diseases.


“What we identified here is probably just the tip of an iceberg,” said Dr. Jordan Smoller, lead author of the paper and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “As these studies grow we expect to find additional genes that might overlap.”


The new study does not mean that the genetics of psychiatric disorders are simple. Researchers say there seem to be hundreds of genes involved and the gene variations discovered in the new study only confer a small risk of psychiatric disease.


Steven McCarroll, director of genetics for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., said it was significant that the researchers had found common genetic factors that pointed to a specific signaling system.


“It is very important that these were not just random hits on the dartboard of the genome,” said Dr. McCarroll, who was not involved in the new study.


The work began in 2007 when a large group of researchers began investigating genetic data generated by studies in 19 countries and including 33,332 people with psychiatric illnesses and 27,888 people free of the illnesses for comparison. The researchers studied scans of peoples’ DNA, looking for variations in any of several million places along the long stretch of genetic material containing three billion DNA letters. The question: Did people with psychiatric illnesses tend to have a distinctive DNA pattern in any of those locations?


Researchers had already seen some clues of overlapping genetic effects in identical twins. One twin might have schizophrenia while the other had bipolar disorder. About six years ago, around the time the new study began, researchers had examined the genes of a few rare families in which psychiatric disorders seemed especially prevalent. They found a few unusual disruptions of chromosomes that were linked to psychiatric illnesses. But what surprised them was that while one person with the aberration might get one disorder a relative with the same mutation got a different one.


Jonathan Sebat, chief of the Beyster Center for Molecular Genomics of Neuropsychiatric Diseases at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the discoverers of this effect, said that work on these rare genetic aberrations had opened his eyes. “Two different diagnoses can have the same genetic risk factor,” he said.


In fact, the new paper reports, distinguishing psychiatric diseases by their symptoms has long been difficult. Autism, for example, at was once called childhood schizophrenia. It was not until the 1970s that autism was distinguished as a separate disorder.


But, Dr. Sebat, who did not work on the new study, said that until now it was not clear whether the rare families he and others had studied were an exception or whether they were pointing to a rule about multiple disorders arising from a single genetic glitch.


“No one had systematically looked at the common variations,” in DNA, he said. “We didn’t know if this was particularly true for rare mutations or if it would be true for all genetic risk.” The new study, he said, “shows all genetic risk is of this nature.”


The new study found four DNA regions that conferred a small risk of psychiatric disorders. For two of them, it is not clear what genes are involved or what they do, said Dr. Smoller. The other two, though, involve genes that are part of calcium channels, which are used when nerves send signals in the brain.


“The calcium channel findings suggest that perhaps – and this is a big if – treatments to affect calcium channel functioning might have effects across a range of disorders,” Dr. Smoller said.


There are drugs on the market that block calcium channels – they are used to treat high blood pressure – and researchers had already postulated that they might be useful for bipolar disorder even before the current findings.


One investigator, Dr. Roy Perlis of Massachusetts General Hospital, just completed a small study of a calcium channel blocker in 10 people with bipolar disorder and is about to expand it to a large randomized clinical trial. He also wants to study the drug in people with schizophrenia, in light of the new findings. He cautions, though, that people should not rush out to take a calcium channel blocker on their own.


“We need to be sure it is safe and we need to be sure it works,” Dr. Perlis said.


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On First Day at Pentagon, Hagel Warns of Budget Cuts

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WASHINGTON — After surviving a long and bruising Senate confirmation battle, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel started his first day at the Pentagon on Wednesday morning by warning that looming cuts in military spending were one of the biggest challenges facing the Defense Department, but that the United States must continue to “engage with the world.”




Mr. Hagel did not speak at length about the budget on Wednesday. But, he said, the cuts are coming. “We need to deal with this reality,” he told an audience in the Pentagon auditorium.


Hours after being sworn in as the 24th defense secretary, Mr. Hagel struck a folksy tone in an auditorium filled with both military and civilian Defense Department employees, with some of the military’s top brass populating the front rows.


Eschewing the podium, he walked in front of the audience like a candidate at a town-hall-style meeting and played up his roots as an Army infantryman.


He called the United States a “force for good,” but said that it should not dictate its agenda to the world and must strive to build alliances among countries with common interests.


Mr. Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, will be the first defense secretary in more than a decade to have to preside over deep cuts in the Pentagon’s budget, which has ballooned in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Even if automatic budget cuts do not go into effect at the end of the week, Mr. Hagel will still have to find ways to slash billions of dollars in Defense Department spending by September.


The Senate confirmed Mr. Hagel in a 58-to-41 vote on Tuesday, with only four Republicans supporting their former colleague. It was the smallest margin for a defense secretary since the position was created in 1947, according to Senate records. He succeeds Leon E. Panetta.


It remains to be seen whether the Senate confirmation battle — during which Republican senators accused him of not being tough enough on Iran and criticized past remarks that they said made him seem insufficiently supportive of Israel — has permanently crippled his ability to negotiate the cuts with lawmakers.


Mr. Hagel said that shortly after he was sworn in he visited the Pentagon’s memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and “reflected a bit on what happened that day.” Recalling a phrase once used by Winston Churchill, he called the attacks “a jarring gong” that set in motion more than a decade of war.


As a senator, Mr. Hagel became a vocal critic of the Iraq war, and during his confirmation fight he was challenged by Republican senators about his opposition to the troop "surge" ordered by President George W. Bush.


Mr. Hagel did not raise this criticism during his speech on Wednesday, saying only that American foreign policy is fallible.


"We make mistakes. We've made mistakes. We'll continue to make mistakes," he said.


Mr. Hagel referred to his combat service in Vietnam several times during his remarks, and a soldier who introduced him pointed out that Mr. Hagel “knows the costs of war.”


“I’ll never ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do,” Mr. Hagel said at one point during the speech.


Mr. Hagel is the first defense secretary to have served in combat as an enlisted soldier, and he said that at times he still had the mind-set of an infantryman.


He joked that while the Army’s chief of staff, General Raymond T. Odierno, made him shake a bit, it was the sergeant major of the Army who “scares the hell out of me.”


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DealBook: Wall Street Pay Rises – for Those Who Still Have a Job

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It’s nice work – if you can get it.

Wall Street has cut thousands of jobs over the past year or so. On Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase, one of the country’s biggest banks, announced that it was eliminating 4,000 more jobs through layoffs and attrition, adding its name to a string of large banks that continue to cut jobs to reduce expenses.

The good news? For the employees who remain, pay is up, according to a report released Tuesday by the New York State comptroller.

This may seem surprising given the outcry over high compensation during the financial crisis. In recent years, however, faced with greater regulation, a slow economic recovery and the loss of once big moneymaking businesses like selling products tied to mortgages, the banks have tried instead to cut people rather than pay, which they argue is needed in order to retain talent that might otherwise leave for better paying jobs at hedge funds or elsewhere.

The average cash bonus for people employed in New York City in the financial industry rose by roughly 9 percent, to $121,900, in 2012 and cash bonuses in total are forecast to increase by roughly 8 percent to $20 billion this year, said Thomas P. DiNapoli, the comptroller.

In recent years some firms have deferred cash payments to employees, and Mr. DiNapoli said part of the increase in the 2012 numbers was cash promised in recent years was actually paid out in 2012. He said that it was “tough” to break out what percentage of the total are deferrals but he believed that it was still a small part of the total.

All told, the average pay package for securities industry employees in New York was $362,900 in 2011, the last year for which data is available, almost unchanged from 2010.

Wall Street jobs are harder to get than they were just a few years ago, but for those who can get their foot in the door finance remains the best paying sector in New York City, Mr. DiNapoli told reporters during a confernce call

“Profits and bonuses rebounded in 2012, but the industry is still restructuring. Despite its smaller size, the securities industry is still a very important part of the New York City and New York state economies,” he said.

The current economic recovery, he said, is being driven by industries other than Wall Street, which he said has regained only 30 percent of the jobs lost during the downturn. The securities industry in New York City lost 28,300 jobs during the financial crisis and has added only 8,500 since, a net loss of 19,800 jobs. New York City financial industry employment totaled 169,700 at the end of 2012.

Before the start of the financial crisis, business and personal income tax collections from Wall Street related activities accounted for up to 20 percent of New York State tax revenues. In 2012, that contribution fell to just 14 percent.

“Wall Street is still in transition, but it is very slowly adjusting to changes in its economic and regulatory environment,” he said.

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Time Inc. and Meredith Prepare to Join Magazine Businesses

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Mary Chind/The Des Moines Register


Meredith, a magazine company, is headquartered in Des Moines.







When Jack Griffin, the former president of the magazine company Meredith, took the reins at Time Inc., he threw a holiday party for his staff on the 34th floor of the Time & Life Building. For many employees at the famously hierarchal company, their first visit to the rambling executive suites that inspired the sets of “Mad Men” became known as “The Miracle on 34th.”




Mr. Griffin lasted just six months at Time before he was asked to leave by Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of its parent company, Time Warner, who publicly rebuked Mr. Griffin, saying that his “leadership style and approach did not mesh with Time Inc. and Time Warner.”


As bankers and media executives hammer out the details of creating a new publicly traded company to house the magazine titles of the Meredith Corporation and the lifestyle titles of Time Inc., employees at both companies have been wondering how executives will take on the harder task of merging two very different corporate cultures.


Meredith’s headquarters in Des Moines have an open floor plan; the executives have their offices on the first floor and favor early-morning meetings. A recent lunch at one of Meredith’s magazines featured kale salad and rosemary-infused cucumber lemonade. Time executives tend toward lunches at Michael’s, where the dry-aged steak is a highlight, and after-work cocktails at the Lamb’s Club.


And then there are the postrecessionary approaches to travel: Meredith’s chief executive turned its corporate jets into shuttles with open seating, while Time still allows staff members to expense hotel rooms at the Four Seasons.


“It’s like the Yankees’ farm team taking over the Yankees,” according to a current Time Inc. executive who, like many who talked about the merger, declined to be identified while criticizing bosses or potential bosses.


The merger news appears to be more troubling to employees at the long revered Time Inc., whose lucrative titles like People and InStyle have been essentially sold off by Time Warner and are likely to be overseen by Meredith’s chief executive, Stephen M. Lacy. Time Inc. employees have made cracks about Des Moines and shared more sobering fears about the merger.


And unanswered questions swirl around the offices: Will Time Inc.’s Cooking Light and its fierce rival at Meredith, Eating Well, be expected to share intelligence? Can celebrity titles like People and InStyle flourish sharing a publisher with Wood magazine? And, most important of all, how many former Time Inc. executives might be moved to Iowa?


Press officers for both Time and Meredith declined to comment about any specific negotiations. But an earlier effort to blend Meredith’s folksy culture with the titans of Time failed quickly.


In August 2010, Mr. Griffin became the first chief executive to join Time Inc. from outside the company. His efforts to restructure some of the company’s entrenched hierarchy and infuse his management experiences from Meredith were largely rebuffed. While he garnered praise for the holiday party, staff members bristled when Mr. Griffin, a marathon runner, introduced 7:30 a.m. breakfast meetings — similar to the daily meetings he attended at Meredith, but a shock to the culture at Time Inc., where late nights on deadline are typical.


But this time, Time and Meredith are blending the titles that magazine industry executives say are more compatible. Time is holding onto the older titles that gave the company its gravitas, like Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. The new company will include titles it created or purchased in recent decades, like the cash cows People and InStyle and smaller titles like Southern Living and This Old House.


Both companies also have major workforces beyond their home cities. Only 3,000 of Time Inc.’s nearly 8,000 employees are based in New York City, with offices in London and Birmingham, Ala. Meredith has its 1,000 magazine employees split evenly between its midtown offices on Third Avenue and its headquarters in Des Moines.


“If you take Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated from the mix, you have much greater similarity to the titles that are left than differences,” said Peter Kreisky, who worked as a senior adviser to Mr. Griffin at Time Inc. and who also has advised Meredith in the past.


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Karzai Orders U.S. Forces Out of Afghan Province

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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's president on Sunday ordered all U.S. special forces to leave a strategically important eastern province within two weeks because of allegations that Afghans working with them are torturing and abusing other Afghans.




The decision seems to have caught the coalition and U.S. Forces Afghanistan, a separate command, by surprise. Americans have frequently drawn anger from the Afghan public over issues ranging from Qurans burned at a U.S. base to allegations of civilian killings.


"We take all allegations of misconduct seriously and go to great lengths to determine the facts surrounding them," the U.S. forces said in a statement.


Also Sunday, a series of attacks in eastern Afghanistan showed insurgents remain on the offensive even as U.S. and other international forces prepare to end their combat mission by the end of 2014.


Suicide bombers targeted Afghanistan's intelligence agency and other security forces in four coordinated attacks in the heart of Kabul and outlying areas in a bloody reminder of the insurgency's reach nearly 12 years into the war.


Presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi said the decision to order the American special forces to leave Wardak province was taken during a meeting of the National Security Council because of the alleged actions of Afghans who are considered linked to the U.S. special forces.


He said all special forces operations were to cease immediately in the restive province next to Kabul, which is viewed as a gateway to the capital and has been the focus of counterinsurgency efforts in recent years.


The Taliban have staged numerous attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces in the province. In August 2011, insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter, killing 30 American troops, mostly elite Navy SEALs, in Wardak. The crash was the single deadliest loss for U.S. forces in the war.


Afghan forces have taken the lead in many such special operations, especially so-called night raids.


"Those Afghans in these armed groups who are working with the U.S. special forces, the defense minister asked for an explanation of who they are," Faizi said. "Those individuals should be handed over to the Afghan side so that we can further investigate."


A statement the security council issued in English said the armed individuals have allegedly been "harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people."


Ceasing all such operations could have a negative impact on the coalition's campaign to go after Taliban leaders and commanders, who are usually the target of such operations.


Faizi said the issue had already been brought up with the coalition.


The U.S. statement said only that the announcement was "an important issue that we intend to fully discuss with our Afghan counterparts. But until we have had a chance to speak with senior Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan officials about this issue, we are not in a position to comment further."


The brazen assaults, which occurred within a three-hour timespan, were the latest to strike Afghan forces, who have suffered higher casualties this year as U.S. and other foreign troops gradually take a back seat and shift responsibility for security to the government.


The deadliest attack occurred just after sunrise — a suicide car bombing at the gate of the National Directorate of Security compound in Jalalabad, 125 kilometers (78 miles) east of Kabul.


Guards shot and killed the driver but he managed to detonate the explosives-packed vehicle, killing two intelligence agents and wounding three others, according to a statement by the intelligence agency. Provincial government spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai confirmed the casualty toll and said the building was damaged in the attack.


A guard also shot and killed a man in an SUV filled with dynamite that was targeting an NDS building on a busy street in Kabul, not far from NATO headquarters. The explosives in the back of the vehicle were defused. Blood stained the driver's seat and the ground where security forces dragged out the would-be attacker.


Shortly before the Jalalabad attack, a suicide attacker detonated a minivan full of explosives at a police checkpoint in Pul-i-Alam on the main highway between Kabul and Logar province. One policeman was killed and two others were wounded, along with a bystander, according to the NDS.


Also in Logar province, which is due south of Kabul, a man wearing a suicide vest was stopped by police as he tried to force his way into the police headquarters for Baraki Barak district, said Din Mohammad Darwesh, the provincial government spokesman. The attacker detonated his vest while being searched, wounding one policeman, according to Darwesh and the NDS.


Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the Jalalabad attack and two others in the eastern province of Logar in an email to reporters. He did not address the attempted assault in Kabul.


____


Associated Press writers Heidi Vogt, Rahim Faiez and Kim Gamel contributed to this report from Kabul.


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North Korea Threatens U.S. Over Military Drill

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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Saturday warned the top American military commander in South Korea that if the United States pressed ahead with joint military exercises with South Korea scheduled to begin next month, it could set off a war in which American forces would “meet a miserable destruction.”




The warning came as the United States and South Korean militaries planned to kick off their Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint war games, beginning early next month. The allies regularly conduct such joint military drills, and whenever they happen, North Korea warns of war and threatens to deliver a devastating blow to American and South Korean troops.


North Korea’s harsh reaction, though not unusual, came amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula after the North’s third nuclear test on Feb. 12. Washington and its allies are pushing for more sanctions against North Korea while the North vows to take unspecified steps to retaliate against such sanctions.


“If your side ignites a war of aggression by staging the reckless joint military exercises Key Resolve and Foal Eagle again under the cover of ‘defensive and annual ones’ at this dangerous time, from that moment your fate will be hung by a thread with every hour,” Pak Rim-su, chief delegate of the North Korean military mission to the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom, said Saturday in a message to Gen. James D. Thurman, the American commander in South Korea. “You had better bear in mind that those igniting a war are destined to meet a miserable destruction.”


The text of the message, dictated through the telephone at Panmunjom, was carried by the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency. There was no immediate reaction from the United States military.


Panmunjom, a village straddling the western border between the Koreas, remains the sole contact point between North Korea and the United States military. The United States fought on South Korea’s side during the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula technically at war. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea.


North Korea and the United States military exchange messages through Panmunjom, established at the time of the Korean War armistice. The United States military uses the Panmunjom channel to inform North Korea of its planned annual military drills with South Korea, which it says are for defensive purposes.


Although North Korea’s state-run news media have always carried official statements condemning the exercises as rehearsals for invasion, it was unclear how often the North has also responded directly through Panmunjom. The last time it did so was in August, when the United States and South Korea conducted a joint military exercise.


After its December satellite launching and its subsequent nuclear test, North Korea has stepped up its bellicose language. In past three days, North Korean news media have reported that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has been making a round of visits to military units. During one of those visits, Mr. Kim vowed that if war broke out, his troops would “blow away the bastion of aggression without a trace,” K.C.N.A. reported Saturday.


When the United States and South Korea conduct joint military drills, North Korea counters with its own military exercises. Anti-American messages, already a daily fare in the North, increase at those times as the leadership uses a sense of crisis to strengthen popular support.


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In Drought-Stricken Heartland, Snow Is No Savior

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Matthew Staver for The New York Times


Thin mountain snow in Colorado and across the West could signal another summer of drought and wildfire.







DENVER — After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the country’s parched heartland had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck.




Across the West, lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states now have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.


Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.


“We’re worse off than we were a year ago,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center.


This week’s blizzard brought a measure of relief to the Plains when it dumped more than a foot of snow. But it did not change the basic calculus for forecasters and officials in the drought-scarred West. Ranchers are straining to find hay — it is scarce and expensive — to feed cattle. And farmers are fretting about whether they will have enough water to irrigate their fields.


“It’s approaching a critical situation,” said Mike Hungenberg, who grows carrots and cabbage on a 3,000-acre farm in northern Colorado. There is so little water available this year, he said, that he may scale back his planting by a third, and sow less thirsty crops, like beans.


“A year ago we went into the spring season with most of the reservoirs full,” Mr. Hungenberg said. “This year, you’re going in with basically everything empty.”


National and state forecasters — some of whom now end phone calls by saying, “Pray for snow” — do have some hope. An especially wet springtime could still spare the western plains and mountains and prime the soil for planting. But forecasts are murky: They predict warmer temperatures and less precipitation across the West over the next three months but say the Midwest could see more rain than usual.


Water experts get more nervous with each passing day.


“We’re running out of time,” said Andy Pineda of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. “We only have a month or two, and we are so far behind it’s going to take storms of epic amounts just to get us back to what we would think of as normal.”


Parts of Montana, the Pacific Northwest and Utah have benefited from a snowy winter. But across Colorado, the snowpack is just 72 percent of average as of Feb. 1, which means less water to dampen hillsides and mountains vulnerable to fire, less water for farms to use on early season crops and less to fill lakes and reservoirs that ultimately trickle down into millions of toilets, taps and swimming pools across the state.


Heavy rains and snow have recently brought some hope to the parched states of Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, where the drought is easing. But 55.8 percent of the United States remains locked in drought, according to the government’s latest assessments. And states like Nebraska and Oklahoma are facing precipitation deficits of as much as 16 inches. Without damp soil, many wheat crops will have trouble growing come March and April when they should be in full bloom, and corn and soybeans could be stunted after they are planted this spring. In a year when farmers are planning another record planting, some might be forced to sow fewer seeds because there is not enough soil moisture to go around.


In southwestern Kansas, Gary Millershaski said the wheat on his 3,000 acres was as dry as it had ever been after two years of drought. But as snow fell around him, he was smiling, a guarded optimist for this year’s planting. “If we get above average rainfall from here on, we’re going to raise a wheat crop,” he said. “But what are the odds of that?”


Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, put it this way: “Mother Nature is testing us.”


But Washington is also posing a challenge.


Mr. Udall, Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, and other members of Colorado’s Congressional delegation are seeking $20 million in emergency funds to help restore watersheds in Colorado ravaged by last year’s wildfires. So far, there has been little action on the measure. Western politicians are also urging the Forest Service to move more quickly to modernize the shrinking and aging fleet of tanker planes it uses to douse wildfires.


John Eligon contributed reporting from Kansas City, Mo.



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15 G.O.P. Senators Ask Obama to Withdraw Hagel Nomination

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WASHINGTON — A group of 15 Republican senators is calling on President Obama to withdraw the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary, the latest move in a contentious battle to block the confirmation of their former colleague.


But even as Republican senators tried to throw up another obstacle, Senate Democrats were pushing ahead with plans to hold a vote on Mr. Hagel’s nomination by Tuesday.


While Mr. Hagel seems likely to be confirmed, Republicans signaled in a letter to Mr. Obama on Thursday that they would not let the issue die quietly.


Saying that Mr. Hagel’s confirmation would be “unprecedented” because of near-unanimous opposition from Republicans, the senators urged Mr. Obama to pick another candidate.


“Over the last half-century, no secretary of defense has been confirmed and taken office with more than three senators voting against him,” they wrote. “The occupant of this critical office should be someone whose candidacy is neither controversial or divisive.”


Signing the letter were John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican; Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott of South Carolina; Roger Wicker of Mississippi; David Vitter of Louisiana; Ted Cruz of Texas; Mike Lee of Utah; Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania; Marco Rubio of Florida; Dan Coats of Indiana; Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; James E. Risch of Idaho; John Barrasso of Wyoming; and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.


Members of the group cited a litany of objections, including Mr. Hagel’s unimpressive showing at his confirmation hearing, which drew criticism from members of both parties, and what they said was his “dangerous” posture toward dealing with Iran.


The level of derision directed at Mr. Hagel from Republicans has been striking not just because defense secretaries are usually confirmed on a simple up-or-down vote, but also because Mr. Hagel, a Republican, served with many of them in the Senate until 2008.


“Senator Hagel’s performance at his confirmation hearing was deeply concerning, leading to serious doubts about his basic competence to meet the substantial demands of the office,” they said.


Senate Republicans narrowly blocked a vote on Mr. Hagel’s confirmation last week, forcing Democrats to put the matter off until senators return from recess next week.


Republicans have been using the filibuster to prevent final consideration of his nomination by refusing to end debate on it, a procedural step that requires 60 senators to vote in the affirmative.


But some Republicans, including two of Mr. Hagel’s most outspoken critics, Mr. Graham and Senator John McCain of Arizona, have since said that they will drop their objections and allow a final vote.


Because Mr. Hagel has the support of Senate Democrats, who control 55 seats, he is likely to clear a final vote.


Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama on Thursday became the third Republican to state publicly that he would vote to confirm Mr. Hagel, joining Senators Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Mike Johanns of Nebraska.


If Senate Democrats move ahead with a vote as planned, and no further obstacles surface, Mr. Hagel could be confirmed as early as Tuesday. If Democrats get the votes they need to end debate, Republicans could still delay the vote until Wednesday.


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Pistorius Defense Undermines Police Testimony at Bail Hearing

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PRETORIA, South Africa — What began on Wednesday as a day for the prosecution to solidify what it had described as an irrefutable case of premeditated murder against Oscar Pistorius, the Paralympic champion, turned into a near-rout by the defense, which attacked the testimony of the state’s main witness, the chief police investigator.




It was the second full day of a hearing to decide whether Mr. Pistorius, the double amputee nicknamed Blade Runner who made Olympic history by running with able-bodied athletes in the 2012 Games in London, should be given bail as he awaits trial for shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the early morning hours last Thursday. Mr. Pistorius claimed in an affidavit read in court on Tuesday that he had mistaken Ms. Steenkamp for a burglar and had shot her out of fear.


But what was supposed to be merely a bail hearing took on the proportions of a full-blown trial, with sharp questions from the presiding magistrate, Desmond Nair, and a withering cross-examination that left the prosecution’s main witness, Detective Hilton Botha, grasping for answers that did not contradict his earlier testimony.


At first, Detective Botha’s testimony seemed to go well. He explained how preliminary ballistic evidence supported the prosecution’s assertion that Mr. Pistorius had been wearing prosthetic legs when he shot at the bathroom door, behind which hid Ms. Steenkamp. Mr. Pistorius claimed in his affidavit that he had hobbled over from his bedroom on his stumps, and felt extremely vulnerable to an intruder as a result.


As Detective Botha described how bullets had pierced Ms. Steenkamp’s skull and shattered her arm and hip bones, Mr. Pistorius sobbed with his head in his hands.


“A defenseless woman, unarmed, was gunned down,” Detective Botha said.


Using a schematic diagram of the bedroom, the prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, asked Detective Botha to walk Magistrate Nair through the crime scene. The detective explained that Ms. Steenkamp’s slippers and overnight bag were on the left side of the bed, next to the sliding balcony door that Mr. Pistorius claimed he got up in the middle of the night to close. He also said the holster of Mr. Pistorius’s 9-millimeter pistol was found under the left side of the bed, next to where Ms. Steenkamp would have been sleeping. That called into question Mr. Pistorius’s statement that he thought Ms. Steenkamp was still in bed when he heard the sound of a burglar, the detective said.


“If the girl was on the bed, that is where the holster was found,” Detective Botha said.


Detective Botha said investigators had found two boxes of testosterone along with syringes and needles in Mr. Pistorius’s bedroom. Testosterone is a banned substance for most professional athletes, and is known to increase aggression in people who take supplements of it.


Asked by Mr. Nel what he would have done had he suspected that an intruder was in his bedroom, Detective Botha replied, “I would get my girlfriend and try to get her out of the room.”


He said he had interviewed witnesses who said that they heard shouting in the house, and that the lights were on, contradicting Mr. Pistorius’s statement that it had been too dark to see anything in the bedroom.


A neighbor, he said, heard “two people talking loud at one another, it sounded like a fight,” between 2 and 3 a.m.


Other witnesses spoke about hearing two or three shots, then a woman’s scream, followed by more shots, Detective Botha said.


He also described previous violent incidents involving Mr. Pistorius. He had threatened to assault a man in an altercation about a woman at a racetrack, Detective Botha said. He told another man that he would “break his legs,” Detective Botha testified.


Detective Botha also testified that Mr. Pistorius had foreign bank accounts and a house in Italy, which made him a flight risk.


“I believe he knew that she was in the bathroom,” said Detective Botha. “And that he shot four shots through the door.”


Barry Roux, a lawyer for Mr. Pistorius, cross-examined Detective Botha, seeking to poke holes in his account.


The substance found, Mr. Roux said, was not testosterone at all but a herbal supplement called testocomposutim coenzyme, which is used by many athletes and not banned by anti-doping agencies. Asked if the substance had been tested, Detective Botha said tests had not yet been completed.


“I didn’t read the whole name” on the container, Detective Botha admitted.


He acknowledged that the witness who claimed to have heard the two arguing, he said, had lived almost 2,000 feet away, possibly out of earshot. Under questioning by the prosecutor, he later revised the estimate to 1,000 feet.


Detective Botha also acknowledged that there were no signs that Ms. Steenkamp had defended herself against an assailant, and that the police had no evidence that the couple’s relationship was anything but loving.


Mr. Roux accused the prosecution of selectively taking “every piece of evidence and try to extract the most possibly negative connotation and present it to the court.”


Detective Botha was forced to admit that the police forensic team had missed a shell casing that the defense lawyers later found in the toilet bowl, and that he had entered the crime scene without covering his shoes because the police had run out of shoe covers.


Eventually, Detective Botha conceded that he could not rule out Mr. Pistorius’s version of events based on the existing evidence.


Magistrate Nair seemed skeptical that Mr. Pistorius was a flight risk.


“Do you subjectively believe that he would take the option, being who he is, using prostheses to get around, familiar as he is, to flee South Africa if he were granted bail?” Magistrate Nair asked Detective Botha.


“Yes,” he replied.


The court was adjourned, and final arguments in the bail hearing are to be heard Thursday morning.


Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.



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U.S. General Picked for Top NATO Military Post Will Retire

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WASHINGTON — General John R. Allen, who served until earlier this month as the top United States commander in Afghanistan, will retire from the military to focus on “health issues within his family,” President Obama said Tuesday.




In January, General Allen was officially cleared of misconduct by the Pentagon after an investigation into his exchange of e-mails with a socialite in Tampa, Fla., and Mr. Obama had nominated him to be the supreme commander of NATO.


“I told General Allen that he has my deep, personal appreciation for his extraordinary service over the last 19 months in Afghanistan, as well as his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “John Allen is one of America’s finest military leaders, a true patriot, and a man I have come to respect greatly.”


General Allen, a highly decorated officer, was caught up in the scandal that led to the resignation of David H. Petraeus as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. General Allen had gotten to know the socialite, Jill Kelley, when he was head of the Central Command in Tampa.


General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. succeeded General Allen as commander of both the American and intermational military forces in Afghanistan in a ceremony in Kabul on Feb. 10.


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Mike Johanns Won’t Seek Re-Election to Senate

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WASHINGTON — Senator Mike Johanns, a Republican from Nebraska who is in his first term, announced Monday that he will not seek re-election next year, the fifth lawmaker to bow out of a Senate that has become increasingly polarized and dysfunctional.







Alex Wong/Getty Images

Senator Mike Johanns, pictured here in 2011, announced on Monday that he will not seek re-election.







Mr. Johans, a soft-spoken former Nebraska governor and secretary of agriculture in the George W. Bush administration, appeared well positioned to be re-elected and was not on any Democratic target list. But last year, he angrily criticized conservative groups that tried to step in and influence the Senate election in his state. And his efforts as part of the “Gang of Eight” to broker a bipartisan deficit reduction accord proved fruitless.


“With everything in life, there is a time and a season. At the end of this term, we will have been in public service over 32 years,” Mr. Johanns wrote in a letter to his constituents with his wife, Stephanie. “Between the two of us, we have been on the ballot for primary and general elections 16 times and we have served in eight offices. It is time to close this chapter of our lives.”


With his announcement, Mr. Johanns joined Senators Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa; Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia; John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia; and Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, in heading for the exits. With former Senator John Kerry’s move to secretary of state, the rash of retirements will hasten a wholesale makeover of a Senate that was once far more stable.


“Words are inadequate to fully express our appreciation for the friendship and support you have given us over the past three decades,” the Johannses wrote.


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Israel Ex-Official Avigdor Lieberman’s Trial Starts

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JERUSALEM — Israel’s tough-talking former foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, pleaded not guilty on Sunday to charges of fraud and breach of trust in a criminal case that leaves his political future hanging in the balance.




An outspoken hard-liner and senior political partner of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Lieberman made his plea, through a lawyer, in a short court appearance that was mainly procedural as his trial opened. He is accused of having promoted Israel’s former ambassador to Belarus for another post after the ambassador had provided the foreign minister with classified information relating to a police investigation into Mr. Lieberman’s financial affairs.


As the trial opens, Mr. Netanyahu is engaged in delicate negotiations to form a new governing coalition after the January elections in which Mr. Lieberman ran as Mr. Netanyahu’s No. 2 on a joint rightist ticket.


“We are very pleased; we’ve passed the preliminaries,” one of Mr. Lieberman’s lawyers, Jacob Weinroth, told reporters after Sunday’s session, adding, “We want this to end quickly and we want it to end well.” The next four court sessions were set for late April and early May.


Mr. Lieberman will not be eligible for a ministerial post unless he is acquitted, but he has indicated that he intends to clear his name and return to the cabinet, preferably as foreign minister. Earlier this month he told Israeli television that the foreign affairs portfolio would remain with Mr. Netanyahu pending the conclusion of the trial.


Mr. Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who rose to prominence as the leader of the ultranationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu, is currently serving as a member of Parliament and as temporary chairman of Parliament’s prestigious Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. But if he is convicted of offenses that include a finding of moral turpitude or receives a prison sentence of three months or more, he is likely to be forced to quit political life for several years.


Critics of the former foreign minister are asking how employees of the Foreign Ministry who may be called as witnesses by the prosecution can be expected to testify against Mr. Lieberman given the possibility that he may return to the ministry as their boss.


Israelis have almost gotten used to the spectacle of seeing senior public figures on the witness stand. A former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was acquitted last year of corruption charges in two major matters but was convicted of breach of trust in a third episode. He remains embroiled in another corruption case having to do with the construction of a huge residential complex while he was the mayor of Jerusalem. Moshe Katsav, a former president, is serving a seven-year prison term after being convicted of rape.


A highlight of the Lieberman trial is likely to be the testimony of the prosecution’s central witness — Danny Ayalon, who served as deputy foreign minister under Mr. Lieberman. Mr. Lieberman then dumped Mr. Ayalon from the party’s ticket shortly before the elections, for reasons that were not publicly specified.


Mr. Lieberman’s case is expected to rest partly on the argument that he did not intervene to promote the diplomat to the post of ambassador to Latvia but that the diplomat was the best candidate for the job.


According to the prosecution, Mr. Lieberman instructed Mr. Ayalon, who led the Foreign Ministry’s Appointments Committee, to advance the appointment of the diplomat to the post in Latvia and Mr. Ayalon did as he was asked.


Since his unexpected exclusion from the new Parliament Mr. Ayalon has become critical of Mr. Lieberman and his policies as foreign minister. On Saturday, Mr. Ayalon said in speech at a regional forum that Mr. Lieberman had tried to push through inappropriate diplomatic appointments that Mr. Ayalon said he had resisted, according to the newspaper Haaretz. He also said that Mr. Lieberman had failed to win the trust of foreign governments and should not serve another term as foreign minister.


“Anyone who wants to hear the testimony of outgoing Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon against Lieberman is going to have to order tickets,” Shalom Yerushalmi, a commentator, wrote Sunday in the newspaper Maariv. He added, “Ayalon is brimming with revenge.”


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Julian Newman’s Age and Size Stand Out, but So Does His Talent

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Gary Bogdon for The New York Times


Newman plays and practices with intensity, sinking 100 free throws, 200 floaters and 200 jump shots every day.







ORLANDO, Fla. — The Downey Christian School varsity basketball team bursts from the locker room in single file, led by a boy 14 inches shorter than the next smallest player, four years younger than the next youngest.




His jersey straps are twisted and bound with plastic ties to prevent them from slipping down his bony 4-foot-5, 70-pound frame. Tricolor socks with pastel waves cover his feet, conveying the notion that he might be a stylish student manager.


At road games, the boy, point guard Julian Newman, is asked, “Are you on the team?” Here, in the Patriots’ gymnasium, there is no doubt.


The grand marshal of the player parade, Julian, an 11-year-old fifth grader, guides his team into warm-ups, bouncing two balls at once. He glides into a pregame routine that shuffles through jab steps, hesitation moves and effortless dribbles — between his pipestem legs, behind his back, rapid crossovers. The scene is incongruous enough to seem computer-animated.


Not long ago, Newman was a mere curio in the compact circle of sports programs at small Christian schools in Central Florida. But his age, his size and the wild contrast of his stature on the court with relative giants have brought global attention through Internet videos. The most watched clip of Julian has generated more than 1.27 million views on YouTube. It has prompted a visit from “Inside Edition,” an appearance on “Steve Harvey,” comments on Twitter by Baltimore Ravens players, coverage by news agencies from as far as China and a performance at an Orlando Magic game.


ScoutsFocus of Greenville, N.C., which evaluates and ranks high school players, helped put together the viral video that was filmed by a Patriots assistant.


“He’s a very talented kid and comes from a great family,” Joe Davis, the national recruiting coordinator for ScoutsFocus, said of Julian. “He’s smaller, so that’s going to be his main obstacle, but he has a great future once he hits a growth spurt or two.”


Two nights before his N.B.A. halftime performance, Julian said between bites of chicken tenders ordered from a children’s menu that he was working on a routine involving three basketballs. Despite his fame, he has maintained the same degree of obsession. There is little, if any, room for it to grow.


Julian fills his days by spending time in a gym or at the hoop in his front yard, where his father, Jamie, the Downey Christian coach, has painted lines to approximate a court. Julian sinks 100 free throws, 200 floaters and 200 jump shots every day. On 3-point attempts, he leans into the shots slightly, as if to guide the ball telepathically.


The process, on a good day, requires three hours, not that he is in a hurry. The neighbors have complained, Jamie said, that the thwonk of the ball has awakened them as late as 1 a.m.


Nor does bedtime necessarily close the book on his regimen. Lying on his bed, with 13 N.B.A. jerseys along with posters of Magic Johnson and LeBron James decorating the walls, with basketballs worn out within weeks scattered about, Julian soft-tosses a ball toward the ceiling, always perfecting his form, until nodding off.


By Julian’s reckoning, he has never taken off longer than two straight days, and then only to mend a sprained ankle. Before the Newmans go on vacations, he insists that a park or recreation center with a rim be nearby.


His mother, Vivian, was almost asked to leave a department store because Julian could not resist fetching a ball from sporting goods and dribbling it down the aisle. His wish lists for gifts are basketball-centric.


His scarce time on a computer is usually spent on the YouTube channel Superhandles. Operated by a former college player whose father exposed him at an early age to footage of Pete Maravich, as Julian was by his father, Superhandles features videos of dribbling drills and masterly moves. Julian commits them to memory, then goes to the closest court and mimics them.


The Newmans portray him as self-driven, a prodigy of sorts, eager to meet their basic requirements in order to pursue his. He earns straight A’s, they say, motivated by a policy effective enough to be every parent’s dream: homework before hoops. That explains why Julian used to knock out assignments during recess so he could start knocking down shots immediately after school.


His parents decline to impose time restrictions on basketball during weekends, holidays and summers.


“People say don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Jamie said. “But it helps you.”


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The Lede: Answering Readers' Questions About the Meteor Strikes

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You asked us great meteor questions, readers, ones that went beyond the mere fact of the seriously cool video coming from all over Russia. But we wanted to give you a deeper look at the science behind bombardments from space, so we called in a respected source to help.

Clark R. Chapman is a senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and a pioneer in the field of asteroid threat assessment. He is co-author of the 1989 book, “Cosmic Catastrophes,” with David Morrison, a senior scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

This is an unusual strike. It will take a while for analysis of the videos, and presumably of the seismic records of the explosion, before we can estimate the size of the projectile. I’m guessing it’s a once-in-a-decade kind of event.

Why unusual?

It’s unusual in the sense that it’s rare. It’s not the kind of event that happens very often. Also, they’re talking about maybe 1,000 people injured and some in the hospital. I’m not aware of a strike that has caused that much injury. That’s because it hit in a somewhat populated part of Russia, instead of the ocean or the desert or the middle of Siberia where relatively few people would have got hurt.

These things happen continually. This one was probably a few meters in diameter but they’re flying by the Earth all the time. And they hit – ones this big – maybe once in a decade. Things that would really devastate a city if they hit would occur maybe once every few centuries. It happens on a scale (of meteors small and large). Anyone living out in the countryside or a rural area, if the skies are clear, can look up at night and see apple-seed-size meteors hitting every few minutes, or at least every few hours.

Conceivably it could be part of a swarm, but it’s not associated with DA14 [the big asteroid that is to fly close by the Earth on Friday]. They’re on totally different trajectories. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but their orbits are totally different. They both intersect the Earth, more or less, but the asteroid is moving maybe south to north and the Russian meteorite west to east. They’d have to be coming in the same direction to be part of a swarm. It’s a remarkable coincidence that what may be the most damaging meteor strike in modern history would happen on the same day as the closest passage of an asteroid as big as DA14.

How big is DA14?

It’s about 100 feet across.

Should we be scared? What can we do?

The estimated danger from a large impact has dropped in recent decades because of telescopic observations and sky surveys. We should continue to monitor the skies for undiscovered large asteroids and for very much smaller ones that could still be quite dangerous, depending on where they hit. We should continue to look.

No space telescope now searches for such threats. Would such a device help?

That kind of project wouldn’t find what hit Russia (as the asteroid was too small) but it would find ones that are much more dangerous. And once they were detected, we could warn people. We could say, “It’s going to hit such an area at a certain time on a certain day and you should stay away from the windows.” You could provide warning of impacts that could be dangerous.

Could we divert a planetary threat?

If it’s found early enough – quite a few years in advance of its hitting – then NASA and the European Space Agency and other space agencies have the technology to divert the asteroid so it would miss the Earth.

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DealBook: Buffett to Pay $23 Billion for Heinz, as Big Mergers Revive

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10:12 a.m. | Updated

Warren E. Buffett has found another American icon worth buying: H. J. Heinz.

Berkshire Hathaway, the giant conglomerate that Mr. Buffett runs, said on Thursday that it would buy the food giant for about $23 billion, adding Heinz ketchup to its stable of prominent brands.

The proposed acquisition, coming fast on the heels of a planned $24 billion buyout of the computer maker Dell and a number of smaller deals, heralds a possible reemergence in merger activity.  The number of deals and the prices being paid for companies are still a far cry from the lofty heights of the boom before the financial crisis.  But an improving stock market, growing confidence among business executives and mounting piles of cash held by corporations and private equity funds all favor a return to deal-making. 

Mr. Buffett is teaming up with 3G Capital Management, a Brazilian-backed investment firm that owns a majority stake in a company whose business is complementary to Heinz’s: Burger King.

Under the terms of the deal, Berkshire and 3G will pay $72.50 a share, about 20 percent above Heinz’s closing price on Wednesday. Including debt, the transaction is valued at $28 billion.

“This is my kind of deal and my kind of partner,” Mr. Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. “Heinz is our kind of company with fantastic brands.”

In many ways, Heinz fits Mr. Buffett’s deal criteria almost to a T. It has broad brand recognition – besides ketchup, it owns Ore-Ida and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce – and has performed well. Over the last 12 months, its stock has risen nearly 17 percent.

Mr. Buffett told CNBC that he had a file on Heinz dating back to 1980. But the genesis of Thursday’s deal actually lies with 3G, an investment firm backed by several wealthy Brazilian families, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

One of the firm’s principal backers, Jorge Paulo Lemann, brought the idea of buying Heinz to Berkshire about two months ago, this person said. Mr. Buffett agreed, and the two sides approached Heinz’s chief executive, William R. Johnson, about buying the company.

“We look forward to partnering with Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital, both greatly respected investors, in what will be an exciting new chapter in the history of Heinz,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement.

Berkshire and 3G will each contribute about $4 billion in cash to pay for the deal, with Berkshire also paying $8 billion for preferred shares. The rest of the cost will be covered by debt financing raised by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Mr. Buffett told CNBC that 3G would be the primary supervisor of Heinz’s operations, saying, “Heinz will be 3G’s baby.”

The food company’s headquarters will remain in Pittsburgh, Heinz’s home for over 120 years.

Heinz’s stock was up nearly 20 percent in morning trading, at $72.51, closely mirroring the offered price. Berkshire’s class A stock was also up slightly, rising 0.64 percent to $148,691 a share.

Heinz was advised by Centerview Partners, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. A transaction committee of the company’s board was advised by Moelis & Company and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

Berkshire’s and 3G’s lead adviser was Lazard, with JPMorgan and Wells Fargo providing additional advice. Kirkland & Ellis provided legal advice to 3G, while Berkshire relied on its usual law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson.

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Movie Review: ‘A Good Day to Die Hard,’ With Bruce Willis

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“It’s not 1986 anymore,” a sneering Russian villain (one of several in “A Good Day to Die Hard”) says to John McClane. “Reagan is dead.”




McClane is in no position to argue at just that moment, though you can be sure he will have the last word. (It’s not “Yippee ki-yay,” which is reserved for a different Russian villain and which has somehow joined “Make my day” and “I’ll be back” in the lexicon of deathless action-movie catchphrases.) But the bad guy’s remark pays oblique homage to the longevity of the “Die Hard” franchise, which made a movie star of Bruce Willis in 1988, and also perhaps to its patriarchal, populist politics.



Back then McClane was an avatar of embattled American masculinity, a regular working stiff whose essential good humor was challenged by Japanese corporations, bureaucratic red tape, feminism and a nasty Euro-nihilist with a fancy suit and a silky accent. That those days are gone is signaled by the portrait of Barack Obama on the wall of the shooting range where we first encounter McClane in this movie, the fifth in the series.



McClane himself has evolved from angry Everyman to weary, worried dad. He travels to Moscow to help his son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who at first looks like a bad seed but turns out to be a chip off the old block. Some dads take their boys fishing or to the ballgame or to a movie like this one, but the McClanes prefer a more primal form of bonding — killing miscreants, though Pop McClane uses a more evocative word.



And there is never a shortage. The cold war may be a fading memory, and C.I.A. superspies (like the younger McClane) may have displaced big-city cops (like his dad) in the pop-culture pantheon. But this off-the-shelf blend of car chases, fireballs and the rat-a-tat, thunk-a-thunk of automatic weapons fire is not likely to go out of style. Style, sad to say, is precisely what is missing from “A Good Day to Die Hard,” the latest entry in the flourishing geezer-action genre. Directed by John Moore (“Max Payne,” “Behind Enemy Lines”), it consists of a handful of extended set pieces — each more elaborate and therefore somehow less exciting than the last — linked by a simple-minded plot and a handful of half-clever lines, most of them muttered by Mr. Willis.



It’s hard to hear the words over the noise of weapons, vehicles and Marco Beltrami’s bludgeoning score, but I’m pretty sure that McClane refers to a beautiful Russian woman named Irina (Yulia Snigir) as “Solzhenitsyn,” though he might be referring to her father, Komarov (Sebastian Koch), who looks a bit more literary. The relationship between those two — Komarov is a former mogul at odds with the Russian government; Irina is an avid consumer of lipstick — might have made an interesting parallel to the McClane father-son drama, but interesting is the last thing this movie wants to be.



Though it will most likely scare up some domestic business in the pre-Oscar lull (happy Valentine’s Day!), “A Good Day to Die Hard” is squarely aimed at the overseas marketplace. About a third of the dialogue is already subtitled, and the rest would take a competent translator about 15 minutes to render.



The movie’s real idiom is the Esperanto of violence — sex is a more culturally sensitive issue, so there’s none of that — and sweaty machismo. Mr. Willis himself is something of a universal language, or at least a popular international brand. There’s a newish Rolling Stones song playing over the end credits.



This is what the new global cinema looks like. The special effects sequences are put together with some ingenuity, though the last one (spoiler alert: Mr. Willis drives a truck off the back of a helicopter in Chernobyl) shows signs of sloppy digital overkill. But everything that made the first “Die Hard” memorable — the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit — has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely. I’m not saying I wish it was the ’80s again — or maybe I am. If that makes me a grumpy old man, it’s John McClane’s fault.



“A Good Day to Die Hard” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Yippee ki-yay, my friends.



A Good Day to Die Hard



Opens on Thursday nationwide.



Directed by John Moore; written by Skip Woods and Jason Keller; director of photography, Jonathan Sela; edited by Dan Zimmerman; music by Marco Beltrami; production design by Daniel T. Dorrance; costumes by Bojana Nikitovic; produced by Alex Young and Wyck Godfrey; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.



WITH: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Jai Courtney (Jack McClane), Sebastian Koch (Komarov), Rasha Bukvic (Alik), Cole Hauser (Collins) and Yulia Snigir (Irina).


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Olympics Moves to Drop Wrestling in 2020

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  Wrestling, one of the most ancient and traditional Olympic sports, was dropped from the Summer Games in a stunning and widely criticized decision Tuesday by the International Olympic Committee.







Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling will be contested at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, but they may be excluded from the 2020 Summer Games.







Freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling will be contested at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, but they will be excluded from the 2020 Summer Games, for which a host city has not yet been named, the Olympic committee said Tuesday.


The decision to drop wrestling was made by secret ballot by the committee’s 15-member executive board at its headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. The exact vote and the reasons for the decision were not given in detail.


There is a chance that the Olympic committee can reverse that decision in May, when it considers a 26th sport to add to the 2020 Games. A final decision will be made in September, but wrestling’s Olympic future seems doubtful, said veteran observers of the Games.


In recent years the I.O.C. has expressed concern about the size of the Summer Games and wanted to cap the number of athletes at about 10,500. It has also said it wants to enhance its modernity by drawing younger viewers among the international television audience. On Tuesday the Olympic committee said in a statement that it wanted to ensure that it remained “relevant to sports fans of all generations.”


Olympic-style wrestling, with its amateur roots and absence of visibility except during the Games, lacks superstars with widespread international acclaim like Lionel Messi in soccer, Kobe Bryant in basketball and Tiger Woods in golf. And the popularity of Olympic-style wrestling in the United States is far surpassed by the staged bombast of professional wrestling.


Sports like snowboarding have been added to the Winter Games to broaden the audience. Golf and rugby will be added to the 2016 Rio Games. Among the sports that wrestling must compete with for future inclusion are climbing, rollerblading and wakeboarding.


The committee may have also grown frustrated that Greco-Roman wrestling did not include women, experts said. Women began participating in freestyle wrestling at the 2004 Athens Games.


Politics also play an inevitable role in the workings of the I.O.C. Among the sports surviving Tuesday’s vote was modern pentathlon, also threatened and less popular internationally than wrestling. But modern pentathlon, a five-event sport that includes shooting, horseback riding and running, was invented by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Games. And it is supported by Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., son of the former Olympic Committee president and a member of its board.


Mark Adams, a spokesman for the I.O.C., told reporters in Lausanne that Tuesday’s vote was a “process of renewing and renovating the program for the Olympics.” He also said: “In the view of the executive board, this was the best program for the Olympic Games in 2020. It’s not a case of what’s wrong with wrestling, it is what’s right with the 25 core sports.”


Wrestling’s world governing body, known by its initials as FILA and based in Switzerland, said it was “greatly astonished” by Tuesday’s decision and would take “all necessary measures” to persuade the I.O.C. to keep the sport in the Summer Games.


The dropping of wrestling faced immediate and widespread criticism.


“I think this is a really stupid decision,” the Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said. Wrestling, he said, “was in the ancient Olympics.” He added: “It has been in the modern Olympics since 1896. In London, 29 different countries won medals. This is a popular sport.”


Wrestling seemed in many ways to be the perfect Olympic sport. It is as fundamental as running; held in 180 countries from the United States to Russia to India to Iran; and contested in a small area that is easily followed on television. And, unlike soccer and basketball, the Olympics are considered the sport’s ultimate competition.


“When you think of the Olympics, you think of wrestling,” said Cael Sanderson, the wrestling coach at Penn State and a 2004 Olympic champion. “It was a marquee event in ancient Greece and in the modern Games. After running, it was the next sport to be part of the Games. Like track and field, the Olympics are the highest level. Some sports, it’s just not as special.”


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