News Headlines
Sunni leaders mostly shun Arab League summit, reflecting suspicions on Iraq, fractured region
BAGHDAD (AP) — Sunni Muslim rulers largely shunned an Arab League summit hosted by Shiite-led Iraq on Thursday, illustrating how powerfully the sectarian split and the rivalry with Iran define Middle Eastern politics in the era of the Arab Spring.
The crisis in Syria is the epicenter of those divisions. The one-day summit closed with a joint call on Syrian President Bashar Assad to stop his bloody crackdown on an uprising seeking his ouster. But the final statement barely papered over the differences among the Arab nations over how to deal with the longest-running regional revolt.
“What disturbs the breeze of our Arab Spring and fills our hearts with sadness is the scenes of slaughter and torture committed by the Syrian regime against our brothers and sisters in Syria,” said Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, leader of Libya’s National Transitional Council.
In a snub to Iraq, only 10 heads of state from the Arab League’s 22 members attended, with the rest sending lower-level officials. Especially notable were the absences of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and most other Gulf countries, as well Morocco and Jordan — all of them headed by Sunni monarchs who deeply distrust the close ties between Baghdad’s Shiite-dominated government and their top regional rival, Iran.
The Gulf countries also see Iraq as too soft on Syria. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have talked of arming Syria’s opposition, apparently eager to bring the fall of Assad and break the Sunni-majority country out of its alliance with Iran.
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Going negative: Romney team’s primary ad strategy could offer a preview to general election
NEW YORK (AP) — Rick Santorum doesn’t care about the unemployment rate. Newt Gingrich has “more baggage than the airlines.” Both are Washington insiders who have bent their principles for money and influence.
So say Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his allies.
That advertising playbook has helped make Romney his party’s likely presidential nominee and could offer a preview of what awaits President Barack Obama in this summer’s general election campaign.
Voters in early primary states have seen plenty of this ad strategy already: a torrent of attacks on Romney’s opponents along with a few positive spots about the GOP front-runner’s biography and business experience. The strategy, devised by Romney’s campaign and an allied independent group, has been focused and unforgiving, all but eviscerating the former Massachusetts governor’s rivals while portraying the candidate as an effective manager and devoted family man.
“The ads have been very effective,” says Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, a conservative-leaning super political action committee. They’ve catapulted Romney “into a very strong position in the Republican primary without going so far that he’s alienated swaths of independent voters.”
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Chinese workers assemble Apple products on illegal overtime, independent labor auditor finds
NEW YORK (AP) — The Chinese workers who often spend more than 60 hours per week assembling iPhones and iPads will have their overtime curbed and their hourly wages raised after a labor auditor hired by Apple Inc. inspected their factories.
The Washington-based Fair Labor Association says Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the Taiwanese company that runs the factories, is committing to reducing weekly work time to the legal Chinese maximum of 49 hours.
That limit is routinely ignored in factories throughout China. Auret van Heerden, the CEO of the FLA, said Hon Hai is the first company to commit to following the legal standard.
Apple’s and FLA’s own guidelines call for work weeks of 60 hours or less.
The FLA found that many workers at the Hon Hai factories want to work even more overtime, so they can make more money. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn, told the FLA that it will raise hourly salaries to compensate workers for the reduced hours.
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Assad pledges cooperation with UN plan, demands rebels end attacks as 2 colonels gunned down
BEIRUT (AP) — Syria’s President Bashar Assad said Thursday he will spare no effort to make U.N. envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan a success, but demanded that armed opponents battling his regime commit to halting violence.
In brazen attacks, gunmen kidnapped a high-ranking military pilot outside the capital and assassinated two army colonels in the country’s business hub, in what appeared to be part of a stepped-up campaign by the battered opposition against the symbols of Assad’s power.
The violence Thursday underlined the Syrian government’s predicament: Acceptance and implementation of the U.N. plan, which calls for a full cease-fire, risks spelling the end of an autocratic regime which has relied largely on brute force to stay in power over the past four decades.
Assad’s condition of an express promise from the opposition to stop attacks could complicate Annan’s attempts to bring an end to more than a year of violence that the U.N. says has killed more than 9,000 people.
The opposition has cautiously welcomed Annan’s six-point plan, but it is also deeply skeptical Assad will carry it out, believing he has accepted it just to win time while his forces continue their bloody campaign to crush the uprising. Armed rebels are unlikely to stop fighting unless offensives by security forces halt. It is also difficult for rebel forces to uniformly stop fighting since there is no central command structure.
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Video raises doubts about gunman’s story in Trayvon Martin case; defense says it’s too grainy
MIAMI (AP) — Newly released police video of a handcuffed George Zimmerman may be important for what it doesn’t show: No obvious cuts, scrapes, blood or bandages. No clearly broken nose. No plainly visible evidence of a life-and-death struggle with Trayvon Martin.
As the furor over race and self-defense raged on in Florida and around the U.S. on Thursday, Martin’s family and supporters seized on the footage to dispute Zimmerman’s claim that he shot and killed the unarmed black teenager after the young man attacked him.
While cautioning that the video is grainy and far from conclusive, some legal experts agreed it does raise questions about Zimmerman’s story. The video was made about a half-hour after the shooting Feb. 26.
“It could be very significant,” said Daniel Lurvey, a former Miami-Dade County homicide prosecutor. “If I were the prosecutor, it would certainly be Exhibit A that he did not suffer any major injury as a result of a confrontation with Trayvon Martin.”
Zimmerman attorney Craig Sonner said on NBC’s “Today” show that the footage appears to support his client’s story in some respects.
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Supreme Court has a wide range of options in ruling on Obama’s health care overhaul law
WASHINGTON (AP) — The arguments are done and the case has been submitted, as Chief Justice John Roberts says at the end of every Supreme Court argument. Now the justices will wrestle with what to do with President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. They have a range of options, from upholding the law to striking it down in its entirety. The court also could avoid deciding the law’s constitutionality at all, although that prospect seems remote after this week’s arguments.
Here is a look at six potential outcomes, from the simpler to the more complicated possible rulings:
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Q. What if the Supreme Court upholds the law and finds Congress was within its authority to require most people to have health insurance or pay a penalty?
A. A decision in favor of the law would end the legal fight and allow the administration to push forward with implementing its provisions over the next few years, including the insurance requirement, an expansion of Medicaid and a ban on private insurers’ denying coverage to people with pre-existing health problems.
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House OKs GOP budget but battle shows difficulties in bridging divisions over tougher problems
WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided House approved a $3.6 trillion Republican budget on Thursday recasting Medicare and imposing sweeping cuts in domestic programs, capping a battle that gave both political parties a campaign-season stage to spotlight their warring deficit-cutting priorities.
But the partisan divisions over the measure, which is dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate, also underscores how tough it will be for lawmakers to achieve the cooperation needed to contend with a tsunami of tax and spending decisions that will engulf Congress right after this fall’s elections.
“This is very easy,” Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates debt reduction, said of House passage of a budget that will go no further in Congress. “When you get to the budget bomb at the end of the year, it’s for real. You’re going to actually have to pass something.”
The fiscal plan the House passed Thursday by a near party-line 228-191 vote would reshape and squeeze savings out of Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health insurance programs for the elderly and poor. It would force deep cuts in a wide range of spending, including rail projects, research and Pell Grants for low-income college students.
It would block President Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes on couples earning above $250,000 a year. Instead, it would collapse the current six income tax rates into just two, with a top rate of 25 percent — well below the current 35 percent ceiling — while erasing tax deductions and other breaks that the GOP plan failed to specify.
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Autism in US more common than previously thought; wider screening, better diagnosis cited
ATLANTA (AP) — One child out of 88 is believed to have autism or a related disorder, an increase in the rate attributed largely to wider screening.
Advocacy groups seized on the new number as further evidence that autism research and services should get more attention.
“Autism is now officially becoming an epidemic in the United States,” said Mark Roithmayr, president of Autism Speaks, at a news conference where the new figures were released Thursday.
The previous estimate was 1 in 110. The new figure is from the latest in a series of studies that have steadily raised the government’s autism estimate. This new number means autism is nearly twice as common as officials said it was only five years ago, and likely affects roughly 1 million U.S. children and teens.
Health officials attribute the increase largely to better recognition of cases, through wider screening and better diagnosis. But the search for the cause of autism is really only beginning, and officials acknowledge that other factors may be helping to drive up the numbers.
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Judge in Los Angeles ends Lindsay Lohan’s supervised probation, gives back her freedom
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lindsay Lohan’s days as a criminal defendant could be over — if she can behave herself.
A judge on Thursday ended the long-running probation of the problem-prone actress in a 2007 drunken driving case after a string of violations, jail sentences and rehab stints.
The 25-year-old actress will remain on informal probation for taking a necklace without permission last year, but will no longer have a probation officer or face travel restrictions and weekly shifts cleaning up at the morgue.
Lohan, wearing a powder blue suit and black blouse, let out a sigh of relief as she left Judge Stephanie Sautner’s courtroom, possibly for the last time.
“I just want to say thank you for being fair,” Lohan told the judge. “It’s really opened a lot of doors for me.”
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Big programs tackling big issues meet at Final Four with national championship on the line
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Looking for those charming underdog stories? Go find the DVD from last year.
This year’s Final Four brings together an ensemble of big-name schools, all saddled with their typically big-time issues — a reminder that everything in college sports is not as pure as the NCAA and its “student-athletes” would like us to believe.
In the national semifinals Saturday, Kentucky plays Louisville and Ohio State meets Kansas. All the schools have made headlines for a variety of off-the-court reasons over the last several months, including the proliferation of one-and-done players, stories about coaches in courtrooms and a handful of financial misdeeds involving recruits, players, coaches and even ticket managers.
And so, while there are no little vs. big stories this year — the way tiny Butler or overlooked VCU beat the odds last season to make it to basketball’s pinnacle — we’re regaled with tall tales of redemption and resurrection: Teams and coaches that overcame their problems and got everyone thinking about basketball instead of the underside of a business driven by a $10.8 billion TV contract.
“There are a lot of good players out there who are performing right now,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said.
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