The Morning News

“It’s just the sickness. I can’t get rid of it. It just keeps coming back,” said Bouffanie, 27, who was pregnant with her now 15-month-old daughter, Lexi, while living in the trailer. “I’m just like, `Oh God, I wish like this would stop.’ If I had known it would get her sick, I wouldn’t have stayed in the trailer for so long.”

The girl, diagnosed with severe asthma, must inhale medicine from a breathing device.

Records show roughly 40,000 troops have been diagnosed with the illness, also known as PTSD, since 2003. Officials believe that many more are likely keeping their illness a secret.

“I don’t think right now we … have good numbers,” Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker said Tuesday.

The threat of flooding from dozens of lakes swelling behind walls of mud and rubble that have plugged narrow valleys in parts of the disaster zone is adding a new worry for millions of survivors.

More than 30 villages were emptied and the people were being sent to camps like the one outside Jiangyou, where an Associated Press reporter saw 12-15 people crammed into each of about 40 government-issued tents pitched on a hillside overlooking the river.

The president’s own popularity is bottom-of-the-barrel low. Even allies privately fret that he’s an albatross for the Republican looking to succeed him. Voters are crying out for change amid a prolonged Iraq war and a weakened economy.

But Bush also is beloved among GOP loyalists. He’s a proven campaigner who can raise serious money. Those are huge assets as Arizona Sen. McCain works to rally the Republican base and fill his coffers while facing the Democrats’ unrivaled enthusiasm and record-breaking fundraising.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas released on Tuesday showed prices of previously owned homes fell 2.2 percent in March, deepening their year-on-year decline.

Separately, the Conference Board said its consumer confidence index slumped to 57.2 this month from 62.8 in April as rising gasoline costs and falling home prices made Americans increasingly nervous both about current conditions and the future.

Seven government officials went to the lakeside Yangon home that has been Aung San Suu Kyi’s prison for most of the last 18 years and delivered the news during a 10-minute afternoon meeting, a state official said.

“Her detention was extended by one year,” the official told AFP.

Small groups of international experts, together with much larger teams of Myanmar workers, headed into the region to assess the scale of the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis, which left 133,000 dead or missing.

The vast majority of people still waiting for aid live in the delta, which the spokeswoman for the UN’s disaster response agency called a “logistic nightmare” where “some places are only reachable by inflatable boats.”

A “transient event” knocked out UHF radio transmissions between Phoenix and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which relays data and instructions between the Phoenix and Earth, said Fuk Li, the Mars Exploration Program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The problem forced the mission to delay starting the deployment of the spacecraft’s 2.35-meter (7.7-foot) backhoe-like arm, to be used to dig into the icy soil of the Martian arctic to collect samples.

If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, known as “the God Particle.”

The “Higgs,” named after the eminent British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos.

Every time the local gas station raises the price at the pump, consumers’ wallets are getting pinched – something that could affect impulse purchases this summer, such as for ice cream or jewelry. At the same time, businesses are trying to pass on their higher costs for everything from PVC tubing to steel bars. Such changes may go beyond the short term: Some Americans are now making lifestyle changes, most of them involving belt-tightening.

Economists are divided, however, over whether the price of oil has skyrocketed enough to push the economy into a recession. The optimists see Americans making adjustments, scrimping when they can to make up for the extra cost of gasoline.

The answer now lies in the hands of the Texas Supreme Court, and how it rules will help resolve a major church-state clash that began when Texas officials last month took some 460 minors from the sect’s Yearning for Zion ranch after receiving phone calls from an alleged underage spouse complaining of physical abuse. That complaint, it turns out, was almost certainly a hoax – the first in a series of bad news for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS).

It also now appears that evidence about the sect’s belief system that the state collected during the raid – and presented to a district court to justify its temporary removal of the children – is probably flawed. In the DFPS’s biggest setback so far, a Texas appeals court on May 22 overturned the district court’s decision to keep the children in state custody temporarily.

In a recent report, the Defense Department inspector general estimates that nearly half of the military’s $316 billion weapons budget went unchecked last year because the IG’s office lacked the manpower. Whereas 10 years ago when a single auditor would have reviewed some $642 million in defense contracts, individual investigators are now charged with auditing more than $2 billion in spending.

The IG also has been stretching its staff to investigate corruption and fraud cases overseas, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan where the military is hiring contractors to help run operations.

In letters to the two companies, the senators demanded information about methodologies and specific data used to establish interchange fees. The letters are dated May 23 and demand the information by June 3

The letters were signed by Democrats Richard Durbin of Illinois and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin and Republicans Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

The Cradle of Liberty Council currently pays $1 annually for the space, but the city has given it until Saturday to open their membership to gays or start being charged fair-market rent.

The federal suit filed Friday accuses the city of censorship for targeting the Scouts but maintaining free or nominal leases with other groups that limit membership, such as Baptist and Roman Catholic church groups and The Colonial Dames of America.

Most of the debate surrounding the global food crisis has focused on boosting aid to poorer countries, but there is also concern about the potential for violence as people become desperate for food, said Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Kellenberger, whose agency serves as the guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the rules of war, said fallout from rising prices has already sparked violence, alluding to food riots that erupted in Haiti, Egypt and Somalia.

The winners in the new food economy include crop farmers selling corn and wheat for near-record highs after years of crushingly low prices. Ingredient makers like Cargill and ADM are rife with profits. Fertilizer and tractor companies are cashing in. Hedge funds who made big bets on rising wheat, soy and corn were spectacularly correct. Oil and gas companies, too – it takes natural gas to cook those Wheaties and diesel to haul them around the country.

Travel along the nation’s food chain and you’ll find some of the biggest profits closest to the land. The nation’s farmers, who raise everything from cows to cucumbers, saw their average household income climb about 7 percent last year to more than $83,000. But in grain-rich states, the results were dramatically higher. In Minnesota alone, the median income for crop farmers soared 80 percent to $95,000.

The report by Save the Children UK, based on field research in southern Sudan, Ivory Coast and Haiti, describes a litany of sexual crimes committed by peacekeepers and international relief workers against children as young as 6.

It said some children were denied food aid unless they granted sexual favors; others were forced to have sex or to take part in child pornography; many more were subjected to improper touching or kissing.

Morris Talansky’s testimony offered an unflattering portrait of Olmert just as the already unpopular Israeli leader seeks to rally reluctant public support for peace talks with Syria and the Palestinians.

Police suspect Olmert illicitly took up to $500,000 from Talansky in illegal campaign contributions or bribes before becoming prime minister in 2006. Olmert, who denies wrongdoing, says the funds were legal contributions but has promised to step down if indicted.

But a bitter fight between the government and the country’s Olympic committee and sports federations is putting Iraq at risk of being banned from World Cup qualifying matches and this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing.

The feud is mired in politics. The government accuses the National Olympic Committee of corruption, while supporters of the group charge that officials really want to control the independent sports groups so they can install their own people in lucrative and prestigious posts.

“We have suspended negotiations with the government and pulled out our candidates,” said Salim al-Jibouri, spokesman for The Accordance Front. He said the decision was taken after Maliki objected to one of their proposed candidates for a cabinet position.

The Accordance Front pulled out of the national unity government last August, demanding the release of mainly Sunni Arab detainees in Iraq’s jails and calling for a greater say in security matters.

The nomination, agreed at a late-night meeting of coalition leaders, means that U.S.-backed Siniora will be appointed to head the new cabinet in which the Hezbollah-led opposition is guaranteed effective veto power.

The ‘March 14’ coalition will officially inform Suleiman of its choice when he consults parliament on Wednesday. The president has to appoint the prime minister nominated by a majority of MPs.

The petrol bombing of a Chinese-owned business in Eastern Cape province, which has largely escaped the xenophobic violence, undermined the confidence expressed by the government on Monday that the unrest had been contained.

Fifty-six people have been killed and tens of thousands left homeless, mainly around the economic capital Johannesburg, in two weeks of attacks.

The White House earlier this year proposed slashing the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, which helps local law enforcement officials deal with violent crime and serious offenders, to $200 million in the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1 .

In 2002, the year before the Iraq war, the program received $900 million .

The announcement came on the heels of several emergency measures taken by Mexico and other Latin American nations to ensure that anger over rising food prices does not spill onto streets and perhaps send a new wave of immigrants northward.

Pointing to what he said was a 68 percent rise in global food prices in the first three months of 2008, IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno said that the price of rice doubled, corn was up 128 percent and wheat jumped 163 percent.

It is the first of two civil cases New York has brought against 27 gun dealers in five states — Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia — on the grounds that their sales practices allowed criminals to buy guns and then bring them into the city.

All but one dealer in the first lawsuit — Jay Wallace — has settled out of court. Wallace, 51, owner of a sporting goods store in the Atlanta, Georgia, suburb of Smyrna, vowed to fight on, likening his battle to David versus Goliath.

The Arizona senator also took a fresh swipe at potential Democratic general election foe Barack Obama, over his offer to talk to the leaders of US foes like Iran, Syria and Cuba.

McCain has previously taken a tough line on Russia, even calling for Moscow to be thrown out of the Group of Eight industrialized nations club, over an erosion of democracy.

Protesters had gathered inside and outside the Supreme Court without prior authorization on January 11, the sixth anniversary of the “war on terror” prison, as part of the “Witness Against Torture” movement.

They face charges of either “unlawful free speech” or “causing a harangue,” or in some cases, both. The counts each carry a maximum of 60 days in jail.

The world’s largest economy has grown at a sluggish 0.6 percent pace, on an annualized basis, during the past two quarters and some economists believe a recession is on the cards.

Several new surveys on home sales and consumer confidence suggest economic concerns are becoming more pressing to Americans, who are concerned about their home values, job security and rising fuel bills.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said about “four or five dozen” journalists and technical personnel from domestic and international news organizations would be allowed onto the base for the June 5 arraignment.

The reading of the charges is expected to mark the first public appearance of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, since his capture in Pakistan March 1, 2003.

President Bush’s influence is diminishing quickly, Sen. John McCain has not yet established himself as the party’s leader, and Senate Republicans are worried more about their own reelection prospects than they are about the need to stand by either man.

“The Senate has already basically decided to disregard Bush,” said one GOP Senate aide.

But in joining Democrats in voting to override Bush’s veto of the Farm Bill and to approve Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb’s expansive new GI Bill, a substantial number of Senate Republicans also disregarded McCain. The Arizona senator has said he would have vetoed the Farm Bill if he were president, and he opposes Webb’s GI Bill in favor of a less expensive version of his own.

The question facing Senate Republicans: Are they ready to embrace their presidential nominee’s more liberal ideas for climate change ideas like a cap-and-trade system, or will they stick to the conservative, hands-off approach to global warming backed by President Bush?

It’s a debate that may very well divide Senate Republicans and show voters yet another fissure in an already beleaguered party. Democrats don’t seem eager to offer a smooth path toward any bipartisan compromise that would give McCain political cover on the issue, and a key procedural vote has already been scheduled for June 2.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them – and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides – Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff – “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

With Americans losing sleep over rising inflation and tight credit, the housing market is unlikely to rebound soon, spelling more pain for the economy.

“The consumer has no more money to spend,” said Dan Alpert, managing director at the investment bank Westwood Capital. “The only way the economy is not going to recede is if someone cooks the books.”

Citigroup cut GM shares to “hold” from “buy” and lowered its outlook for industrywide sales in the United States, the world’s largest vehicle market, for both 2008 and 2009. The bank also cut its target price for GM shares to $21 from $32 and lowered Ford’s stock price target to $7 from $8.50.

Citigroup analyst Itay Michaeli said the surge in gas prices, credit constraints and the costly shift by consumers away from higher-margin trucks, a segment that Detroit automakers have dominated, made it a “new world” for the carmakers and their suppliers.

“This is not the 1970s, but we can’t let it get to be the 1970s. Our behavior is critical to that. We have to be the barrier” to high inflation, Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, told reporters after a speech.

Although data showing more economic weakness almost certainly lies ahead, that would not make an automatic case for more rate cuts — though rate increases could be some ways off, she said.

The source also said the board of directors for Belgian brewer InBev has not yet voted on whether it will proceed with an overture to Anheuser, the No. 1 brewer in the United States with brands like Budweiser and Michelob.

InBev has not yet decided, the source said, whether it would look at acquiring other companies in the event an Anheuser deal falls through, as was reported over the weekend by the Financial Times.

The 70,000-member American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or AFTRA, opened talks with the studios on May 7, a day after separate negotiations between the studios and SAG, which represents 120,000 actors, hit a stalemate.

The contracts for both unions expire June 30, and Hollywood is nervous that the actors might go on strike, paralyzing the entertainment industry much as a 100-day walkout by screenwriters did earlier this year.

As French riot police cleared blockading fishermen from an oil depot, in London hundreds of angry haulage truckers drove their lorries in a rolling protest through the centre of the capital, horns blaring, before handing in a petition to Downing Street demanding a rebate in fuel tax.

In Spain lorry drivers joined striking fishermen in calling for the government help to cover soaring fuel costs, before road transport firm bosses meet transport ministry officials to air their grievances.

Chairman Daniel Bouton, who has resisted heavy pressure to resign over the scandal, was booed down when he insisted that rogue trader Jerome Kerviel’s multi-billion euro (dollars) trades were “concealed” from management.

“The employee was jailed but it is the bosses who should have gone,” said one man to loud applause, charging that management had turned the bank into a “casino.”

Several months of talks that raised tension within Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition ended in support for the state of Lower Saxony, which is also backed by the trade union IG Metall.

A draft law approved by the government Tuesday would preserve Lower Saxony’s minority blocking position within VW since strategic decisions would require approval by a majority of 80 percent or more, and the state where it is based owns 20 percent.

Until then, the three-man crew will have to make do with a jury-rigged system when they need to urinate.

While one of the crew was using the Russian-made toilet last week, the toilet motor fan stopped working, according to NASA. Since then, the liquid waste gathering part of the toilet has been working on-and-off. Fortunately, the solid waste collecting part is functioning normally. Russian officials don’t know the cause of the problem and the crew has been unable to fix it.

The lawsuit maintains that the Environmental Protection Agency ignored the recommendation of a key advisory panel of scientists who had recommended more stringent smog standards.

The suit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by Earthjustice on behalf of a number of environmental and conservation groups and the American Lung Association.

While the new repellants aren’t likely to be available commercially for a few years, early tests on cloth were promising, with some chemicals repelling mosquitoes for as long as 73 days and many working for 40 to 50 days, compared to an average of 17.5 days with DEET, according to a study in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Biting insects such as mosquitoes and ticks can spread diseases such as encephalitis, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, malaria and dengue Fever.

Some experts have linked a decline in migratory shore birds to the over-fishing of horseshoe crabs, which come ashore every spring to lay their eggs, so Delaware, New Jersey and other nearby states turned their attention to boosting crab numbers.

Until the last few years, the crabs were harvested in their millions by commercial fishermen who used them as bait for conch and eel. But with ornithologists warning that the red knot, a robin-sized shore bird, was in imminent danger of extinction because of the lack of crab eggs, the states where the crabs spawn have banned or restricted the harvest.

Some 26 years ago, a group of investigators reported finding more left-handers among migraine patients than other people. Now, Dr. Katrin Biehl and colleagues, at the University of Munster, report in the medical journal Cephalalgia that they found no significant difference in the frequency or grade of left-handedness between people who have migraine and those who do not.

The researchers assessed handedness — whether one favors the left- or right-hand — in 100 migraine patients and another 100 people without migraine who were of similar age and gender.

Air quality in the capital was rated as “heavily polluted” due to a sandstorm from Mongolia, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau said on its website (www.bjepb.gov.cn).

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Beijing’s pollution has already proved a major concern for athletes, with twice Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie, who suffers from asthma, pulling out of the men’s marathon out of concern for his health.

Minc, the 56-year-old former environment secretary for the state of Rio de Janeiro, replaces a greatly respected minister, Marina Silva, who unexpectedly stepped down early this month after losing a series of inter-ministry fights over the future of the Amazon.

His nomination was seen as part of an effort by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to restore confidence in Brazil’s ecological credentials generally and its management of the Amazon specifically.

“This campaign provides a set of simple tips to reduce CO2 emissions and save money, simply by driving more intelligently,” said EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs, launching the industry backed “Save more than Fuel” campaign.

“Learning a few tricks will help EU citizens to keep more fuel in their tanks, more money in their pockets and more CO2 out of the atmosphere”, he added.

“This sale is premature due to the absence of a completed Beaufort Sea management plan that would protect sensitive habitats, which polar bears, beluga and bowhead whales need for their survival,” Peter Ewins, director of species conservation at WWF-Canada, said in a statement.

“In addition, there is no proven technique for recovering oil spills in such dangerous iced waters.”

Previous estimates had ranged from 750 billion solar masses to up to 2 trillion. Lately, researchers have been leaning toward the higher figure. But now astronomers have used a more refined method to conclude that our galaxy’s mass is slightly less than 1 trillion solar masses.

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The new estimate is based on a large sample of stars in the galactic halo, a relatively sparse sphere of stars that surrounds our galaxy’s main disk. The speeds of stars in the halo reveal the mass of the galaxy by allowing astrophysicists to infer the amount of gravity required to keep those stars in orbit.

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“These data provide strong, longitudinal evidence that public schools are at least as effective as private schools in boosting student achievement,” said researcher Christopher Lubienski of the University of Illinois.

Combined with other, yet-unpublished studies of the same data, which produced similar findings, “we think this effectively ends the debate about whether private schools are more effective than publics,” said Lubienski, whose research has dealt with all aspects of alternative education.

With powerful thrashes and kicks, these concealed weapons can readily draw blood, scientists now reveal.

Do these claws bring the X-Men’s Wolverine to mind – a comic-book superhero armed with claws that pop out from his limbs?

A new study reveals a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs some 230 million to 65 million years ago did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land.

Until now, paleontologists pictured the so-called “winged lizards” or pterosaurs as skim-feeders. In this vision, the creatures would have flown over lakes and oceans grabbing fish from the water’s surface, much as gulls do today.

TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks.

To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do.