News article:

Thirty-three years ago, Peter Brosnan heard a story that seemed too crazy to be true: buried somewhere along California’s rugged Central Coast, beneath acres of sand dunes, lay the remains of a lost city. According to his friend at New York University’s film school, the remains of a massive Egyptian temple, a dozen plaster sphinxes, eight mammoth lions, and four 40-ton statues of Ramses II were all supposedly entombed in the sands 150 some-odd miles north of Los Angeles.

 “It was an absolutely cockamamie story,” Brosnan says. “I thought he was nuts.” The ruins weren’t authentic Egyptian ones, of course. They were the 60-year-old remains of a massive Hollywood set—the biggest, most expensive one ever built at the time. The faux Egyptian scenery had played the role of the City of the Pharaoh in one of Hollywood’s first true epics, Cecil B DeMille’s 1923 film The Ten Commandments. The set had required more than 1,500 carpenters to build and used over 25,000 pounds of nails. The production nearly ruined DeMille and his studio. When the shoot wrapped, the tempestuous director supposedly strapped dynamite to the structures and razed the whole set, burying it in the sands near Guadalupe, California, to ensure no rival director could benefit from his vision.

 Bullshit, Brosnan thought. But then his buddy pointed him to a line in DeMille’s posthumously published autobiography. “If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe,” the director teased, “I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization…extended all the way to the Pacific Coast.”

 By 1982, Brosnan had graduated from film school and was earning a living as a freelance journalist, but he couldn't shake his friend's story. The film student in him was enchanted by the idea of uncovering and preserving a forgotten bit of Hollywood’s history. That summer, Brosnan and his friend drove across the country, from New York City to a stretch of coast near Santa Barbara, to see the ruins for themselves. The whole affair, he thought, would make for a hell of a documentary.

 “We were young, wannabe filmmakers, and I thought this was golden,” Brosnan says today. “We’ll find some archeologists, we’ll find the set, we’ll dig it up. The story writes itself.”

 The City of the Pharaoh was not so much a movie set as it was a monument to the man who built it. DeMille was already a towering star in the early days of Hollywood, but in 1922 he was recovering from a streak of critical flops. He had gained a reputation for his sense of spectacle in films like Joan the Woman and Male and Female, and The Ten Commandments was to be his comeback.

 Delivering DeMille’s blockbuster meant deploying a barrage of special effects, at least by the standards of the day. In 1923, set design was the only way to visually transport viewers to the Sinai in the time of Moses. The “desert” DeMille chose for his Israelites to wander, while certainly more convenient than filming on location in Egypt, presented a logistical nightmare. There were no nearby cities, no paved roads, and no place for his cast of thousands to stay. The 22,000 acres of sand dunes that separated the small farming town of Guadalupe from the Pacific Ocean was harsh and desolate. The sharp-grained sand that gives the wind there its added sting is devoid of nutrients, and, combined with constant salt sprays from the sea, makes life a rarity in the dunes. For DeMille, it was perfect.

 “Your skin will be cooked raw,” DeMille told his army of 3,500 actors and extras, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter on the scene. “You will miss the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history. I expect of you your supreme efforts.”

 The costs were mounting even before DeMille arrived in Guadalupe to begin shooting. Preproduction expenses were already approaching $700,000—an astronomical sum in the early days of Hollywood. More than a million pounds of statuary, concrete, and plaster were used to construct the 120-foot-tall, 800-foot-long temple and surrounding structures, and whole plaster sphinxes were sculpted and loaded onto trucks bound for the dunes. Every day on location meant feeding and housing the thousands of workers and animals. DeMille drove his construction team to work faster. Paramount Studios, the film’s backer, began sending DeMille increasingly desperate letters demanding that he cut costs. One receipt, for $3,000 spent on a “magnificent team of horses” for the pharaoh, pushed the studio over the edge, according to Sumiko Higashi, a professor emeritus at The College at Brockport, SUNY, and author of Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: the Silent Era, a biography of DeMille.

 “You have lost your mind,” telegraphed Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures. “Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once.” DeMille refused. He took out a personal loan and waived his guaranteed percentage of the movie’s gross to ensure the production continued. “I cannot and will not make pictures with a yardstick,” he wired back to the studio. “What do they want me to do?” he was rumored to have said, according to Higashi. “Stop now and release it as The Five Commandments?”

 Despite the warnings, DeMille pushed on. Bugles sounded every morning to 4:30 a.m. to wake the 5,000 workers and actors that populated the 24-square-mile tent city he’d built in the dunes. (It earned the nickname the City of DeMille.) His workers raised the 109-foot-tall Great Gate—an archway covered in intricate busts of rearing stallions—and buttressed it with two 35-foot-tall clay-and-plaster statues of the Pharaoh. They erected a “city wall”—built 750 feet long because DeMille refused to work with painted backgrounds or limit his cinematic choices. Five mammoth sphinxes, weighing over five tons each, lined the entrance to the ersatz Egyptian city.

 Filming was done at a madcap pace and condensed into a mere three weeks, according to Scott Eyman’s biography, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille. But even with the Exodus in the can, one more problem loomed. According to a prior agreement with the landowners, DeMille’s monumental set had to be dismantled before he left. Production costs had already ballooned to over $1.4 million, more than any other film previously made. DeMille considered reneging on the deal, Brosnan says, but likely worried about another issue: If he left is city standing, rival directors from other studios could easily swoop into Guadalupe and produce an epic on the cheap. DeMille would not have that. Rather than pay workers to take the set down, he settled on a faster method. Dynamite was supposedly strapped to the great temple he had built, and the City of the Pharaoh was brought down. According to legend, he ordered bulldozers to mound sand over the scattered remains and quickly left town.

 Sixty years later, in 1983, Brosnan arrived at the dunes like the Children of Israel before him—completely lost. He knew the set was buried somewhere, but the dunes stretched nearly 30 miles, across two counties. Looking for clues, he called the Air Force base that occupied much of the coastline. (“Sir,” he says the sergeant on the other end of the line told him, “There is no Egyptian city buried at Vandenberg Air Force Base.”) He haunted local libraries. He hounded municipal politicians. No one could provide hints about the set’s exact location.

 Then he stumbled upon an old ranch hand at a local tavern who had run cattle through the dunes for decades. On a cold and dark morning, after a savage storm had rearranged the topography of the dunes, Brosnan and the rancher hiked the sea of hundred-foot-high peaks, making their way a mile toward the pounding surf of the Pacific. Eventually they spied what locals called “the dune that never moves"—the sandy tomb that covered DeMille’s set—and saw a chunk of Plaster of Paris statuary poking through.

 The discovery made headlines around the world and Brosnan fielded calls from The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and People magazine. His documentary idea, which had seemed pie-in-the-sky a few months earlier, looked promising. And his pitch—that the lost city is the oldest existing Hollywood set left; that props from more modern shoots have already been preserved for posterity; that early set design was, in a sense, an American art form—struck a chord in the industry. Brosnan tentatively called his documentary project The Lost City.

 Charlton Heston, star of DeMille’s 1956 remake of the film, publicly wished the project well, and local archaeologists volunteered their time to help in the excavation. A curator at the Smithsonian expressed interest in acquiring some pieces, once the dig wrapped. Promises for funding came in from Paramount Pictures and Bank of America. Brosnan moved to Hollywood with the intention of pursuing a career in the ‘biz. But first, he had to start digging.

 “This will be a scientific exploration by highly trained personnel,” said a Cambridge-educated archaeologist who signed on in 1983. “Not a case of simply digging up stuff like potatoes. And if we're serious about documenting movie history, then let's do it properly.”

 The excavation and documentary progressed, but Brosnan constantly faced two problems: funding and permitting. When he had the money, the county wouldn’t let him touch the environmentally sensitive area. (The western snowy plover, a federally protected species that nests along california’s coast, keeps the dunes off limits to people for half the year during breeding season.) By the time he got permission to dig, seven years later, funding had dried up. In 1990, several organizations, including the Smithsonian and the DeMille Family Trust, agreed to partially fund the project, and Brosnan and an archeologist used ground-penetrating radar to show that much of the set remained intact. But he couldn’t raise enough money to excavate the actual ruins. He needed $175,000 for an archeological dig to recover 60-year-old fake relics. “We don't see this as a fake Egypt,” Brosnan told a reporter at the time. “We see this as real cinema history.”

 But by the mid-1990s, Brosnan had been scraping by in the movie business for a decade, writing scripts and directing small projects. Lacking the money, he gave up the dig.

 That DeMille’s ruins have survived intact to this day, albeit buried in the sands, is a quirk of geography. The dunes, which cover some 35 square miles of the coast here, formed about 15,000 years ago, according to Doug Jenzen, executive director of the non-profit Dunes Center in Guadalupe. Jenzen and his team run a small museum out of a craftsman on the town’s main (and only) drag and head up conservation efforts for the Dunes preserve. It’s a charming little museum that seems out of place among the shuttered movie theater and boarded up buildings of Guadalupe, but the Dunes and DeMille are the only source of tourism dollars in this largely agricultural area, Jenzen says.

 Thousands of years ago, rivers swept mineral-dense rocks and boulders from the nearby coastal range down to the sea, eventually pummeling the earth into fine grain sand. “One of the reasons the movie set is preserved so well is because of the minerals in the sand,” Jenzen says. “You know how when you order something mail order and it comes with the silica packets? The sand actually acted as a natural desiccant that preserved the plaster for the statues.”

 For 15 years, the ruins were left undisturbed. Every few years a reporter or a researcher would call and Brosnan would humor him or her with details of his odyssey in the dunes. Each time, he hoped the new round of publicity would inject dollars into the effort, but nothing ever came through.

 In 2010, though, after the Los Angeles Times ran yet another piece on his unfinished dig, a woman—who wishes to remain anonymous—contacted Brosnan and offered to put up the money needed to finish the film. But by then he was married with children and had been away from the project for two decades. “My first response was a moment of panic,” Brosnan says. “There’s no way I could do this.”

 But Brosnan hired a producer and an editor, and last fall, with the help of a Santa Barbara County grant, a team of archeologists excavated most of a sphinx. Brosnan was on hand to film it. “We had always wanted to end with a shot of the sphinx being found. And we got it,” he says. Using his early footage shot in the 1980s, Brosnan has pulled together a rough cut and has an editor working on a final draft. He says he’s looking for distributors and considering the film festival circuit soon.

 In the Dune Center, Jenzen and his team display parts of one of the large plaster sphinxes and smaller relics that have been successfully pulled from the sand. “All of the statues were made of plaster,” he says. “They were built to last two months—92 years ago. I don’t think this could have happened anywhere else on earth.”

 However, Jenzen says the ruins may not survive another 92 years. Powerful storms in the last few years have shifted the sands of the dunes dramatically—more of the set is now exposed to the elements than ever before. The Dunes Center needs $100,000 to unearth another sphinx to add it to the display, Jenzen says, before it’s too late. “It’s disappearing so fast,” he says, “Archeologists originally thought it’d last until 2090—but every time we go out, more is gone.” ||||| There is a search underway for more artifacts buried deep in the sands of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Instead of digging, archeologists are first taking to the sky to find these treasures.

 Flying high above vast mountains of sand on the San Luis Obispo-Santa Barbara County line, photographers are snapping detailed pictures of the topography below. Their goal is to to pinpoint a large camp, built specifically for a Hollywood movie production of The Ten Commandments nearly a century ago.

 In recent years, a sphinx statue was unearthed in the dunes dating back to the same movie directed by Cecil B. DeMille in the early 1920s. It's currently on display at the Dunes Center in Guadalupe.

 Now, a company called Applied Earthworks is helping the center in its search to find even more.

 M. Colleen Hamilton is an archaeologist working on the project and said roughly 25-hundred people lived in the camp for several months during the film's production.

 "We have one historical photograph of the camp itself and we're trying to align that with features that are currently on the ground to relocate the location," said Hamilton.

 Hamilton said the studio had a contract to return the area to its natural state once the filming was complete but evidence shows that didn't happen.

 Applied Earthworks expects to do at least one more flyover in the coming weeks and then eventually take the search back down to the ground. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Thou shalt restore the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes to their natural state once filming wraps up. That’s the commandment given to movie director Cecil B. DeMille, who filmed his epic The Ten Commandments in the sand dunes on the Central California coast in the early 1920s, KCBX reports. Apparently, though, he didn’t follow through. Now, archaeologists are using aircraft to get a bird’s-eye view of the dunes to unearth more treasures of the movie’s set—a giant sphinx was found earlier this year, but plenty more remains from a "lost city" that boasted a huge temple, four more of those sphinxes, massive statues, a 750-foot-long wall, and amenities for somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 people who worked on the film. DeMille reportedly called the spot “perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history,” according to Outside. After another flyover in the next few weeks by the company Applied Earthworks, the search will resume on the ground, archaeologist M. Colleen Hamilton tells KCBX. "We have one historical photograph of the camp itself and we're trying to align that with features that are currently on the ground," says Hamilton. Doug Jenzen of the nonprofit Dunes Center in Guadalupe tells Outside that minerals in the sand—“a natural desiccant”—have preserved the artifacts remarkably well. However, he says, the sands of the dunes are shifting, leaving the old movie props endangered. “It’s disappearing so fast,” he says. As for the commandment that DeMille restore the area after filming: Instead, per Outside, he supposedly blew it up with dynamite to spite rival directors. (In the real Egypt, archaeologists are pretty excited about what might be a hidden room in King Tut's tomb.)


Article:
Balearic techno, a style of dance music born on the tropical shores of Ibiza, is optimized for going out of your mind on the dance floor, oblivious to everything but the rhythm.

 That could be why Polish cybersecurity researcher Krzysztof Szczypiorski saw club music as the perfect genre to serve as a vehicle for Morse code-like messages, hidden in nearly imperceptible changes in tempo. Basically, he turned tunes that were designed to put people in a druggy trance into a method of sending secret messages across an entire open-air beach rave, without most people noticing what they’re really listening to.

 The basic system is this: just like Morse code, letters are ascribed a dot-and-line series, but the “dot” is a slight increase in tempo, and the “line” is a slight decrease. By modulating the tempo ever so slightly, an entire sentence can be communicated over time. To decode the messages, you could use an algorithm that analyzes the beats per minute or simply listen very closely, if your ear is finely tuned enough.

 "For the live mixing it is just usage of tempo slide on the DJ controller—limited only by manual skills of a DJ"

 “It is very easy—it is just tuning the tempo which is visible as a curve in [Digital Audio Workstations like Logic],” Szczypiorski wrote me in an email. “The shape of this curve could be changed by a mouse and follow adopted Morse mode or any coding scheme. For the live mixing it is just usage of tempo slide on the DJ controller—limited only by manual skills of a DJ.”

 In a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, which hasn’t been peer reviewed, Szczypiorski describes two experiments with the system, which he called StegIbiza, after the technical term for hiding messages in other media, steganography. In the first experiment, twenty people—half of which had musical backgrounds—listened to dance music that Szczypiorski had manipulated to contain messages. When the tempo was changed by less than one percent, “none of them could identify a difference in the audio,” he wrote.

 The second experiment is sure to be a bit more familiar to people who actually enjoy Balearic dance music: Szczypiorski DJ’d an open-air summer party with about 70 people in attendance. He reported similar results to the more controlled first experiment, but wrote that after he manipulated the tempo too much, the experiment had to stop “because the rest of the party did not care about the music.”

 For all of his expertise, it looks like Szczypiorski didn’t know that there’s nothing worse than a DJ who just won’t stop screwing with the tempo.

 It’s worth noting that music steganography is a very old practice, and Szczypiorski points out in his paper that hiding messages in musical compositions and scores goes back at least 500 years—but not with club music, which is way more fun than whatever the kids were bumping when people were still drilling into skulls to cure bad humors.

 Next time you’re at a rave, keep a keen ear out. The DJ might just be trying to send you a hidden message. ||||| Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain. |||||Summary:

– There is a long and melodious history of hiding secret messages in song—so-called musical steganography—that dates back at least 500 years. But now a cybersecurity expert from Poland has revealed a new way to send messages that are otherwise undetectable through song: tiny adjustments in tempo. To test this, Krzysztof Szczypiorski turned to club music for its trance-like repetition and happily packed his bags for Ibiza off the coast of Spain, arguably the dance-club capital of the world, reports Vice. (Hey, somebody's gotta do it.) Szczypiorski reports in the open journal arXiv (it has not yet been peer reviewed) that in experiments DJing for dancers, he was able to adjust a song's tempo up or down by as much as 2% without anyone noticing any change. By having a faster tempo represent a dash and a slower one a dot, he used Apple's Logic Pro X digital audio workstation to manipulate the speeds of songs like "Rhythm Is a Dancer" by Snap (normally 130 beats per minute) and randomly encode the message "Steganography is a dancer" in Morse code, reports MIT Technology Review. So long as the change in tempo was subtle enough, nobody was the wiser. (Listen here.) His conclusion: It would be pretty simple to develop software that automatically encodes or decodes messages sent this way. An algorithm could be used to decode the message, though it's possible that some very careful listeners could do so on their own. (Music might also help your beer taste better.)


Here is a news article: Sycamore, Illinois (CNN) The man convicted in the oldest cold case ever brought to court broke into a wide grin as a judge ordered him released from prison Friday and granted him a new trial.

 Jack McCullough, 76, was serving a life sentence for the 1957 murder of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph. Judge William Brady threw out the conviction after a prosecutor found "clear and convincing evidence" that McCullough was wrongly found guilty.

 He was freed shortly after the hearing and was whisked away in a car driven by a family member.

 After the judge's ruling, McCullough turned toward his stepdaughter, Janey O'Connor, and flashed her a private signal that she says means "I love you." She was seated behind him and broke into tears but managed a big smile back.

 Maria Ridulph's murder went unsolved for half a century. Then detectives pursued a tip, and a man was brought to trial and convicted in the 1957 murder of the 7-year-old in Sycamore, Illinois. Now that man is free. Ann O'Neill's 2013 series on the case, "Taken," raised questions about whether the trial was unfairly one-sided.

 Across the aisle, Charles Ridulph, the older brother of the victim, frowned and bowed his head. More than 58 years ago, he helped search for Maria after she vanished from a street corner near their home while playing in the snow with a friend.

 McCullough's lawyers and DeKalb County state's attorney Richard Schmack argued that McCullough's conviction was based on false testimony, improper legal rulings controlling the evidence presented, and a timeline that was tweaked some 50 years after the fact to rule out McCullough's alibi.

 McCullough has long insisted that he couldn't possibly have abducted and killed the child because he was 40 miles away in Rockford, Illinois, talking to recruiters and trying to enlist in the U.S. Air Force when she was taken.

 He repeated the alibi when he spoke with CNN in prison in March 2013.

 "They proved nothing," he said at the time. "I am in here for murder. A murder I would not, could not have done."

 McCullough said that when Maria was kidnapped, the telephone in his home in Sycamore was ringing.

 "And I was on the other end of that phone, in Rockford, three minutes before she was kidnapped. Try and make that happen. Only Scotty could make that happen, if he beamed me up."

 Jack McCullough, in prison after his 2012 conviction. Now a judge has ordered him freed.

 An Illinois appeals court upheld his conviction last year. But McCullough made a last-ditch appeal in a jailhouse motion last December, saying police and prosecutors buried evidence supporting his alibi. He asked a judge to find him innocent.

 Schmack, who inherited the case from predecessor Clay Campbell, was placed in the position of having to defend the conviction. He launched a six-month investigation that included a review of some 4,500 pages of documents -- old police and FBI reports, grand jury transcripts, trial transcripts, affidavits for search and arrest warrants, and even CNN's five-part series on the case, "Taken," which raised questions about whether the courtroom reconstruction of history was unfairly one-sided.

 Schmack concluded that he'd found "clear and convincing evidence" that McCullough had been convicted of a crime he didn't commit.

 The precise time of Maria's abduction has been in dispute almost from the beginning.

 JUST WATCHED Taken: The coldest case ever solved Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Taken: The coldest case ever solved 02:18

 The dark-haired second-grader with big brown eyes was with her playmate, Kathy Sigman, on December 3, 1957 when they were approached by a stranger who said his name was Johnny. He gave Maria two piggyback rides, Sigman told police at the time. Sigman, now a grandmother known as Kathy Chapman, said she went home to fetch her mittens. When she returned, Maria and Johnny were gone.

 More than 600 volunteers combed the fields and woods around Sycamore in search of Maria, at times walking hand-in-hand in a grid pattern. And within 24 hours, dozens of FBI agents descended on the small farming community about 65 miles west of Chicago.

 Agents interviewed some 200 possible suspects -- including McCullough, who passed a polygraph test about his alibi and was cleared. Despite the work of nearly three-dozen FBI agents, the investigation turned up no solid leads to Maria's whereabouts.

 Her body was discovered 144 days later by a couple looking for mushrooms near the Iowa border. She was under a fallen tree, some 100 miles from home.

 Because Maria apparently never left Illinois, the FBI pulled out of the investigation and the case went cold for half a century.

 The Illinois State Police began to look into the Ridulph case again in 2008, after McCullough's half sister, Janet Tessier, emailed a tip. She said her dying mother had pulled her close some 14 years earlier and whispered, "Those two little girls, and the one that disappeared, John did it. John did it, and you have to tell someone."

 McCullough was questioned in Seattle and arrested in late June 2011. A judge hearing the case without a jury found McCullough guilty after a week-long trial.

 Schmack, the state's attorney, said he sat through the trial and always doubted whether there was enough evidence to support the conviction. In his review of the case, he said he found new evidence that verified McCullough's long-standing alibi.

 He subpoenaed records from AT&T and found that a collect call had indeed been placed at 6:57 p.m. to McCullough's home in Sycamore from a pay phone at the post office in downtown Rockford on on December 3, 1957 -- just as McCullough said he had done.

 At his sentencing, McCullough vehemently professed his innocence.

 "Look in the box. The truth is in the box," he said, pointing to a cardboard box in the courtroom. It was filled with old FBI reports and other documents that the judge, James Hallock, kept from the trial, saying it was inadmissible hearsay.

 Prosecutor Richard Schmack reviewed the case and asked for McCullough to go free.

 Schmack did look at those documents. He built a timeline based on the statements of 21 people -- Maria Ridulph's family members, friends, neighbors and passersby -- that confirmed the FBI's original timeline ruling out McCullough as a suspect.

 Maria was taken that day some time between 6:45 and 7 p.m. -- and not as early as 6 p.m., as alleged during McCullough's trial.

 It would have been impossible for him to have been in two places at once.

 Campbell, the state's attorney who brought the case, was defeated by Schmack in an election just weeks after McCullough was convicted. Campbell has declined to comment since Schmack released his findings.

 Cold cases are particularly difficult to prosecute because evidence is often lost or destroyed, memories fade and witnesses die. And so questions have lingered over the evidence used to convict McCullough -- and whether it was strong enough.

 No physical evidence ties him to the crime. ||||| SYCAMORE, Ill. --A 76-year-old man from Washington state who a prosecutor says was wrongly convicted in the abduction and killing of a 7-year-old Illinois schoolgirl in 1957 will be released from prison, a judge ordered Friday.

 WATCH: "48 Hours:" Cold as Ice

 The hearing, presided over by Judge William P. Brady, was held in Sycamore, about 70 miles west of Chicago and near where Maria Ridulph was abducted as she played in the snow. Forest hikers found the girl's remains five months later.

 In 2012, another judge convicted Jack McCullough in Maria's death, in one of the oldest unsolved U.S. cases ever to go to trial. McCullough was sentenced to life in prison.

 McCullough, in handcuffs, appeared shaken by the judge's decision at first, rocking back and forth, then taking a deep breath. Family members behind him hugged and cried. Moments later, McCullough looked back and smiled broadly.

 On the other side of the room, Maria's brother and sister displayed little emotion as the hearing ended.

 Brady said McCullough would be released Friday.

 The judge pointed to several factors in his decision, including records that support McCullough's long-held contention that he was about 40 miles away from Sycamore when Maria was abducted. That evidence included newly discovered phone records.

 It wasn't clear until the last minute the Brady would rule as he did.

 "Rest assured I am not trying this case ... You will not hear the words, 'Mr. McCullough is guilty' or 'Mr. McCullough is not guilty' coming from my mouth."

 Brady's ruling was prompted by a six-month review of evidence conducted by DeKalb County State's Attorney Richard Schmack after the 2012 conviction. Schmack concluded that McCullough could not have killed Maria.

 Maria's disappearance made headlines nationwide in the 1950s, when reports of child abductions were rare.

 She had been playing outside in the snow with a friend on Dec. 3, 1957, when a young man approached, introduced himself as "Johnny" and offered them piggyback rides. Maria's friend dashed home to grab mittens, and when she came back, Maria and the man were gone.

 At trial, prosecutors said McCullough was Johnny, because he went by John Tessier in his youth. They said McCullough, then 18, dragged Maria away, choked and stabbed her to death.

 Schmack, who wasn't involved in McCullough's case and was elected to the state's attorney post as McCullough's trial came to an end, filed a scathing report with the court last month that appeared to pick the case apart, point-by-point.

 McCullough's long-held alibi was that he was in Rockford, attempting to enlist with the U.S. Air Force at a military recruiting station, on the night Maria disappeared.

 Schmack said newly discovered phone records proved McCullough had, as he long-claimed, made a collect call to his parents at 6:57 p.m. from a phone booth in downtown Rockford - which is 40 miles northwest of where Maria was abducted between 6:45 p.m. and 6:55 p.m.

 Schmack also reviewed police reports and hundreds of other documents, including from the Air Force recruitment office, which he said had been improperly barred at trial. In his review he said the documents contained "a wealth of information pointing to McCullough's innocence, and absolutely nothing showing guilt."

 He also noted that Maria's friend had identified McCullough as the killer five decades later from an array of six photographs; McCullough's picture stood out, partially because everyone but him wore suitcoats and their photos were professional yearbook pictures.

 Maria's murder haunted the Sycamore for decades, and McCullough's conviction four years ago seemed to bring some closure. Those wounds now threaten to reopen.

 Her family remains convinced that McCullough is guilty and have sought the appointment of a special prosecutor in an attempt to keep him behind bars. Maria's brother, 70-year-old Charles Ridulph, still lives in Sycamore and has said in recent weeks that his family feels let down by the state prosecutor's office about-face. |||||
A summary of this is?

– A man convicted four years ago in the oldest cold case ever tried was freed Friday after an Illinois judge vacated his conviction and subsequent life sentence, CNN reports. According to CBS News, 76-year-old Jack McCullough was convicted of kidnapping a 7-year-old girl, choking her, and stabbing her to death in 1957. The case was reopened in 2008, and McCullough was arrested in 2011 and convicted the following year. After an appeal by McCullough, Illinois state's attorney Richard Schmack launched a six-month investigation that found what he calls "clear and convincing evidence" that McCullough is innocent. While the judge Friday vacated McCullough's conviction, he stopped short of declaring him innocent, and a new trial will be held, the Chicago Tribune reports. McCullough, who lived in the same neighborhood as the kidnapped girl, says he was 40 miles away at an Air Force recruiting center at the time of the kidnapping. It's an alibi that passed a polygraph test in 1957 and made it impossible for him to be the culprit based on the FBI's original timeline for the kidnapping. That timeline was later changed by police, and Schmack says documents—including phone and Air Force records—supporting McCullough's alibi were wrongly not allowed at his trial. A friend of the kidnapped girl picked McCullough out of a photo lineup when the case was reopened. But his was the only non-yearbook photo in the lineup, and she picked a different man out of a photo lineup 50 years earlier. That info wasn't allowed at McCullough's trial either. No physical evidence was ever found to support McCullough's conviction.


Article:
Who caused a nursing-home outage that forced 20 patients to be moved to hospitals? An iguana that wandered onto a power line.

 The iguana was electrocuted and set off a fire on a power pole, knocking out the electricity to The Palms Care Center in Lauderdale Lakes, according to Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue.

 Firefighters checked in on the nearby nursing home at 3370 NW 47th Terrace.

 They realized the facility was running on generator power and that “the power being supplied was only cooling half of the facility effectively,” said Battalion Chief spokesman Michael Kane.

 Firefighters arranged for backup help and began moving residents who were without air conditioning to parts of the building that had working A/C. Still, because of overcrowding, 20 patients were moved from the facility to area hospitals.

 It was done as a precaution. “None of the patients removed were in distress,” Kane said.

 Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue An iguana was electrocuted and set off a fire on a power pole, knocking out the electricity to The Palms Care Center in Lauderdale Lakes, according to Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue. An iguana was electrocuted and set off a fire on a power pole, knocking out the electricity to The Palms Care Center in Lauderdale Lakes, according to Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue. (Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue)

 Firefighters first responded about 5:30 p.m. to the call about the pole on fire. Electricity to the building was restored shortly before 11 p.m.

 After they’ve been evaluated, the patients at the hospitals were set to be taken back to the nursing home by late Friday night or early Saturday.

 State records show the facility is licensed for 120 beds.

 sswisher@sunsentinel.com, 561-243-6634 or @SkylerSwisher ||||| LAUDERDALE LAKES, Fla. (AP) — An iguana wandered onto a power line and knocked out electricity to a Florida nursing home, sending 20 patients to the hospital.

 Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue Spokesman Michael Kane says the iguana was electrocuted and set off a fire on the power pole, which knocked out electricity to The Palms Care Center in Lauderdale Lakes on Friday afternoon.

 Kane told the South Florida Sun Sentinel the facility was running on generator power but only half of it was being cooled effectively.

 Residents who lost air conditioning were moved to parts of the facility where cooling units were working. Kane said 20 patients were moved to hospitals as a precaution.

 Electricity was restored throughout the nursing home late Friday. State records show the facility is licensed for 120 beds.

 ___

 Information from: Sun Sentinel , http://www.sun-sentinel.com/ |||||Summary:

– An iguana wandered onto a power line and knocked out electricity to a Florida nursing home, sending 20 patients to the hospital, the AP reports. Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue Spokesman Michael Kane says the iguana was electrocuted and set off a fire on the power pole, which knocked out electricity to The Palms Care Center in Lauderdale Lakes on Friday afternoon. Kane told the South Florida Sun Sentinel the facility was running on generator power but only half of it was being cooled effectively. Residents who lost air conditioning were moved to parts of the facility where cooling units were working. Kane said 20 patients were moved to hospitals as a precaution. Electricity was restored throughout the nursing home late Friday. State records show the facility is licensed for 120 beds.


Summarize this article:

The Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Egyptian Islamist opposition group is plagued by rifts between young and old, reformist and hard-liner, and between big city deal-making politicians, and conservative rural preachers. Charles Levinson explains.

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 CAIRO—Moaz Abdel Karim, an affable 29-year-old who was among a handful of young activists who plotted the recent protests here, is the newest face of the Muslim Brotherhood. His political views on women's rights, religious freedom and political pluralism mesh with Western democratic values. He is focused on the fight for democracy and human rights in Egypt.

 A different face of the Brotherhood is that of Mohamed Badi, 66-year-old veterinarian from the Brotherhood's conservative wing who has been the group's Supreme Guide since last January. He recently pledged the Brotherhood would "continue to raise the banner of jihad" against the Jews, which he called the group's "first and foremost enemies." He has railed against American imperialism, and calls for the establishment of an Islamic state.

 Enlarge Image Close Guy Martin for the Wall Street Journal Activist Moaz Abdel Karim in Cairo

 After Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on Friday amid the region's most dramatic grassroots uprising since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Brotherhood became poised to assume a growing role in the country's political life. The question for many is: Which Brotherhood?

 It was Mr. Karim and his younger, more tolerant cohorts who played a key role organizing the protests that began on Jan. 25 and ultimately unseated a 29-year president. But it's the more conservative, anti-Western old guard that still make up by far the bulk of the group's leadership.

 Mr. Badi, the current leader, wrote an article in September on the group's website in which he said of the U.S. that "a nation that does not champion moral and human values cannot lead humanity, and its wealth will not avail it once Allah has had His say."

 He wrote in that same article that "resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it... We say to our brothers the mujahideen in Gaza: be patient, persist in [your jihad], and know that Allah is with you..."

 On Monday, meanwhile, Mr. Karim stood shoulder to shoulder at a press conference with youth leaders from half a dozen mostly secular movements, to lay out their vision for how Egypt's transition to democracy should proceed and to praise the Army for cooperating. Their top demand: a unity government that includes a broad swath of opposition forces.

 WSJ's Farnaz Fassihi reports on continued clashes between the Iranian government and the opposition. Also, January retail sales figures will influence markets. Plus, a quick a quick look at man vs. machine on "Jeopardy!"

 The Brotherhood, whose leaders Mr. Karim butted heads with in recent weeks, put out a similar message on Saturday calling for free and fair elections. Seeking to allay fears that it would make a power grab, the Brotherhood also said it wouldn't run a candidate in presidential elections or seek a majority in parliament.

 Both Egyptians and outsiders, however, remain wary. They are unsure about how the group will ultimately harness any newfound political gains and whether its more-moderate wing will, in fact, have lasting clout.

 "It's never entirely clear with the Brothers," says Josh Stacher, a political science professor at Kent State University who spent years in Egypt studying the organization. "It's a big group, with lots of different points of view. You can find the guy always screaming about Israel and then you got the other guys who don't care about Israel because they're too busy worrying about raising literacy rates."

 Israel, which shares a long and porous border with Egypt, fears that if a moderate wing of the Brotherhood exists—and many in Israel's leadership are skeptical that it does—it could be shoved aside by more extreme factions within the group.

 The Brotherhood's conservative wing has for years put out anti-Israel comments and writings, and helped fund Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. It has also spoken out in support of attacks against U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 "If the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, through elections or some other way, that would be a repeat of 1979 in Iran," when moderate governments installed after the shah gave way to the ayatollahs, says a senior Israeli official. "It's something we're looking at with great caution."

 Enlarge Image Close Associated Press Mohamed Badi, from the Brotherhood's conservative wing, pledged the group would 'continue to raise the banner of jihad' against the Jews.

 The U.S. appears to be taking a wait-and-see approach, with officials saying in recent days it should be given a chance. President Barack Obama, in an interview with Fox News, acknowledged the group's anti-American strains, but said it didn't enjoy majority support in Egypt and should be included in the political process. "It's important for us not to say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people," he said.

 The outlawed Islamist opposition group is plagued by rifts between young and old, reformist and hard-liner. There are big city deal-making politicians, and conservative rural preachers who eschew politics in favor of proselytizing Islam.

 Egypt's government has long highlighted the group's hard-line wing as a threat to the country. Yet its selective crackdowns have historically empowered the very hard-liners it has sought to undermine, analysts and Brotherhood members say.

 The conservative leadership's autocratic leadership style within the movement, its lack of tolerance for dissenting opinions and its preference to conduct business behind closed doors have all contributed to deep skepticism among outsiders about the Brotherhood leadership's stated commitment to democracy.

 In recent years, meanwhile, the group's pragmatic wing has forged a historic alliance with secular opposition activists. Their role in the unseating of Mr. Mubarak appears to have given them a boost in a struggle for influence with the Brotherhood's fiery old guard.

 "The Muslim Brotherhood as a whole doesn't deserve credit for this revolution, but certain factions within the movement absolutely do, generally those that have more modern views," says Essam Sultan, a former member of the group who left in the 1990s to form the moderate Islamist Wasat, or Centrist, Party. "That wing should get a massive bounce out of this."

 Enlarge Image Close Guy Martin for the Wall Street Journal Muslim Brotherhood youth leader Moaz Abdel Karim helped organize demonstrations against Mr. Mubarak.

 Whether that bounce will be enough to propel the more-moderate Brothers to a permanent position of influence—or what their legislative agenda would actually be—is one of the key unknowns in Egypt's political evolution.

 In many ways, this faction resembles conservative right-of-center politicians elsewhere in the Arab world. They espouse a view of Islam as a part of Egyptian heritage and argue that democracy and pluralism are central Islamic values. They are pious and socially conservative, and reject the strict secularism that is a feature of most Western concepts of liberal democracy.

 On Wednesday, when it was still unclear whether Mr. Mubarak would step down, Essam el-Eryan, one of the only reformists currently on the group's 12-member ruling Guidance Council, said in a statement that the group didn't seek the establishment of an Islamic state; believed in full equality for women and Christians; and wouldn't attempt to abrogate the Camp David peace treaty with Israel—all tenets espoused by Brotherhood leaders over the decades. Mr. el-Eryan said those Brothers who had suggested otherwise in their writings and public comments in recent days and years had been misunderstood or weren't speaking for the organization.

 Founded in the Suez Canal town of Ismailiya in 1928 by a 22-year-old school teacher, the organization used violence to battle the British occupation in the 1940s.

 The group allied with some young officers to overthrow the king in 1952 and bring Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, only to become implicated in an assassination attempt on Nasser two years later. He responded with a fierce crackdown, sending the group's leadership to prison for years, and its membership ranks into exile.

 The Muslim Brotherhood abandoned violence in the years that followed, formally renouncing it as a domestic strategy in 1972. But some of its offspring have taken a bloodier path. Some former members established the group responsible for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat in 1981, and others have allied with Al Qaeda.

 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, an older generation of leftist and Islamist student activists battled each other violently on college campuses. Egypt's opposition grew increasingly ineffective, partially as a result of those rifts.

 "We saw three successive generations of Brotherhood leaders fail to bring change, and we learned from their mistakes," says Mr. Karim, one of the leaders of the group's youth wing.

 Brotherhood and secular leaders say the seeds of the cooperation that drove this year's protests were planted in the early 2000s when Israel's crackdown on the second Palestinian uprising and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq brought secularists and Islamists alike into the streets to protest a common cause.

 Then, in 2005, the Brotherhood struck a key victory in the parliamentary elections, winning an all-time high of 88 seats. Though officially banned, the organization is tolerated and allowed to put up candidates as independents.

 Many of the Brotherhood lawmakers were pragmatists compared to the hard-line members of the group who preferred to stay out of politics. They were more open to working with other groups to forge compromises, and won plaudits from secular opposition leaders by focusing their legislative efforts on fighting an extension of the country's emergency law.

 They also stood up for the independence of the judiciary and pushed for press freedoms, and didn't work to ban books or impose Islamic dress on women—moves many critics had feared.

 "In the past, Muslim Brothers in parliament sometimes made noise about racy books or the Ms. Egypt beauty pageant, and it made a lot of us uncomfortable," says Osama Ghazali Harb, head of the National Democratic Front, a secular opposition party. "They didn't do this in the last five years."

 The regime responded to the Brothers' newfound parliamentary prowess with one of the most brutal crackdowns in the group's history. Instead of coming down on the organization's hard-line leaders, it focused on the movement's moderates.

 "The government wants them to be secretive, hard-line, because it makes them fulfill the role of the bogey man that they're propped up to be," says Kent State's Mr. Stacher. "You don't want soft and squishy huggable Islamists, and you don't want sympathetic characters. You want scary people who go on CNN and rail against Israel."

 Eighteen Brotherhood legislative staffers drafting education and health-care reform bills were among hundreds arrested. So, too, were the leading pragmatists on the movement's 12-man leadership bureau.

 The power vacuum was quickly filled by conservatives, who in 2007 put out a platform paper walking back many of the group's more-moderate views.

 It stated, for example, that neither women nor Christians were qualified to run for president. Casting further doubts on the organization's commitment to the separation of church and state, the paper called for a religious council to sign off on laws.

 Rifts between conservatives and reformers in the group began to flare into the open. The group's moderates argued that the paper was only a draft and never officially adopted.

 In the 2008 elections to the Brotherhood's Guidance Council, hard-liners nearly swept the field, according to people familiar with the group. Only one seat on the leadership council is held by a consistent reformist, say these people, as well as one of the two alternate members who would step in should someone be arrested or die.

 During this same period, Mr. Karim, from the Brotherhood's youth wing, says his relationships with activists in other groups were being cemented through online networks. "The new media allowed me to connect with the other" activists in Egypt, he says. "And I realized that there are things we agree on, like human-rights issues and political issues."

 Past partnerships between the Brotherhood and secular parties had been top-down short-lived agreements born of political necessity.

 This latest alliance formed more organically, say several young activists who are working with the Brotherhood.

 "We just got to know, trust and like each other, even—believe it or not—the Brothers," says Basim Kamel, a 41-year-old leader in Mohamed ElBaradei's secular movement.

 As conservatives were gaining influence within the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership ranks, Mr. Karim and his fellow youth cadres were growing impatient.

 He says they began arguing with their superiors, saying the group was losing credibility in the street because they weren't out protesting for democracy like the secular activists were.

 In November 2008, the Brotherhood's then-leader Mahdy Akef called for "establishing a coalition among all political powers and civil society" to challenge the "tyranny that Egypt is currently witnessing."

 Mr. Akef couldn't be reached for comment, but those familiar with the group's inner workings say the shift came as the leadership realized they risked losing their youth cadres, particularly after a series of high-profile defections by young Brotherhood activists.

 When Mr. ElBaradei returned to Egypt in February 2010 to lead an alliance of opposition groups, many of them youth-driven, the Muslim Brotherhood backed him, formalizing a partnership that had already gelled among the rank and file.

 The alliance was uneasy at times. When other opposition groups voted to boycott November's parliamentary elections, for example, the Brotherhood broke ranks and ran.

 After the uprising in Tunisia in January, Brotherhood youth, including Mr. Karim, met with the leaders of other youth movements and decided to plan a similar uprising in Egypt.

 A group of about 12 youth leaders, including Mr. Karim, met secretly over the course of two weeks to figure out how to plot a demonstration that would outfox security forces.

 The Brotherhood's senior leadership refused to endorse their efforts at first. They ultimately agreed to allow members to participate as individuals—and to forgo holding up religious slogans that the Brotherhood might have used in the past, such as "Islam is the solution," or waving Korans.

 —Summer Said in Cairo and Richard Boudreaux in Jerusalem contributed to this article.

 Write to Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com ||||| Cairo, Egypt (CNN) -- Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood will apply to become a political party, it announced Tuesday.

 The Brotherhood "envisions the establishment of a democratic, civil state that draws on universal measures of freedom and justice, with central Islamic values serving all Egyptians regardless of colour, creed, political trend or religion," it said in the statement.

 Although officially illegal, the Muslim Brotherhood is regarded as one of the most organized groups in Egypt.

 It has said it does not plan to run a candidate for president when elections are held to replace Hosni Mubarak, who resigned on Friday.

 Although officially illegal, the Muslim Brotherhood is regarded as one of the most organized groups in Egypt. Experts estimate the group has the support of anywhere from 10% to 30% of the population. It has said it does not plan to run a candidate for president when elections are held to replace Hosni Mubarak, who resigned on Friday.

 The group has sparked great controversy in the United States, where some see it as a non-violent, Islamic social welfare organization supportive of a democratic process while others call it a radical extremist group hellbent on creating a theocracy in Egypt.

 President Barack Obama recently downplayed the prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood playing a major role in Egypt, saying it is just one faction in Egypt that doesn't have majority support.

 "There are a whole bunch of secular folks in Egypt, there are a whole bunch of educators and civil society in Egypt that want to come to the fore as well," the president said in an interview with Fox News. "And it's important for us not to say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people."

 Others, however, distrust the Brotherhood's ultimate intentions.

 "They are a powerful force at present, but my fear is that Islamist groups outside Egypt, seeing the opportunity in the current chaos, will flood them with support if they back an extremist view," said CNN national security contributor Frances Fragos Townsend, who was President George W. Bush's counterterrorism advisor.

 And former CIA Director Mike Hayden said the Muslim Brotherhood, as the best organized opposition group in Egypt, could "enjoy a disproportionate power in shaping the new government. The question is: Will it become more radical?"

 Still, a current U.S. official characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as being "not as extreme as al Qaeda is."

 "It's an organization that supports a civil state which is based in large part on Islamic law," said the official. "But they do tend to eschew violence and work within the political process."

 The official cautioned about ambiguity when it comes to Egypt. "There are lots of unknowns now with Egypt," said the official. "You really can't make a call on anything, whether Mubarak is going or staying or how the Muslim Brotherhood figures into the political process.

 And in a recent article in the Daily Beast, former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel wrote that Americans should not fear the group.

 "They should not be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Living with it won't be easy, but it should not be seen as inevitably our enemy," said Riedel.

 The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 to oppose British control of Egypt with Its goal the creation of an independent Islamic state. Although it allegedly engaged in assassination and other violence against the British and supported the coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in 1952, the Brotherhood has been illegal since 1954, when it was convicted of attempting to assassinated Nasser, charges the group denied.

 Nasser ruthlessly suppressed the group, and his successors, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, continued the repression. The Brotherhood subsequently renounced violence, is engaged in providing social services to the populace, opposes the peace treaty with Israel and supports democratic elections.

 On its English language website, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood calls for establishing an Islamic state in accordance with the provision of Islamic Sharia law.

 Ed Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Muslim Brotherhood "ought to be a welcomed force within Egyptian politics" if it accepts full rights for women and for religious minorities.

 But his colleague at the council, Isobel Coleman, said the group hasn't done that, pointing to statements by the Brotherhood that neither a woman nor a non-Muslim could ever lead Egypt.

 But Republican Congresswoman Sue Myrick of North Carolina worried that the government did not see the danger.

 "I'm very concerned that they're using the peaceful protests in Egypt for a power grab and that we in the government doesn't seem -- we don't seem to grasp that threat in the way it concerns me," she said at a congressional hearing last week. "The Brotherhood isn't a danger just because they're terrorists, but because they push an extremist ideology that causes others to commit acts of terrorism."'

 The 83-year-old organization has never been placed on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist organizations and officially renounced violence in the 1970s. The organization was a minor player in the demonstrations that toppled Mubarak.

 But the U.S. chief intelligence officer raised a stir when he referred to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a "largely secular" organization in response to a question from Myrick at the hearing.

 "The term 'Muslim Brotherhood' is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam," said James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. "They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt."

 Clapper's office later clarified the director's comments.

 "In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood makes efforts to work through a political system that has been, under Mubarak's rule, one that is largely secular in its orientation -- (Clapper) is well aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular organization."

 CNN's Pam Benson contributed to this report |||||

– Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood promises not to run a candidate for president in the fall elections, but it made clear today it wants a voice in the new Egypt by announcing plans to form a political party, reports CNN. That's certain to get a charge out of the Brotherhood's worst critics in the West, who fear the rise of a virulent anti-American Islamist party. But as the Wall Street Journal explains, the same kind of youth movement that upended the old guard of the ruling party might have the same kind of effect within the Brotherhood. It contrasts two members of the group, one a 29-year-old pro-democracy activist named Moaz Abdel Karim who worked with other opposition leaders to coordinate the Tahrir Square protests. His focus is on human rights, not jihad. The other is a 66-year-old Brotherhood leader from the group's conservative wing named Mohammed Badi who rails against Israel and American imperialism. The once-banned Brotherhood is destined to play a sizable role in the nation's future. "The question for many," writes Charles Levinson, "is which Brotherhood?"


Write a summary based on this article:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif., left, accompanied by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nev., speaks to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Sept.... (Associated Press)

 WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking to avert a government shutdown, Republican leaders drove a bill blocking Planned Parenthood's federal funds through the House on Friday, hoping to contain conservatives' demands for a politically risky showdown with President Barack Obama by striking a quick blow against abortion.

 The nearly party-line 241-187 vote followed a no-holds-barred debate that included a graphic, poster-sized photo of a scarred, aborted fetus and underscored how abortion has resurfaced as a white-hot political issue. The battle has been rejoined just in time for the 2016 election campaign and next week's historic address to Congress by Pope Francis.

 The issue's re-emergence followed the release of secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood officials offhandedly discussing how they sometimes procure tissue from aborted fetuses for medical research.

 "What does it say about this Congress that today we're here on the House floor debating the killing and harvesting of aborted babies?" said Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind. "How can there possibly be two sides to this?"

 But Democrats said the true GOP goal was to whip up conservative voters with legislation that would make it harder for women to get health care. Planned Parenthood, whose clinics provide sexual disease tests, contraception and abortion, says it's done nothing illegal and is being victimized by misleadingly edited videos.

 "Enough is enough," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who chairs the Democratic National Committee. "Some of their members are willing to risk women's lives just to score political points."

 Planned Parenthood gets around $450 million yearly in federal payments, mostly Medicaid reimbursements for handling low-income patients. That's around one-third of the organization's $1.3 billion annual budget. Practically none of the federal money can be used for abortions.

 Beyond Friday's bill, some conservatives want to attach language halting Planned Parenthood's payments to broader legislation financing government agencies, which otherwise run out of money next Thursday. Those Republicans say a government shutdown fight would at least produce a veto battle that would show voters where Republicans stand.

 House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, a long-time abortion foe, and virtually all House Republicans favor halting the flow of federal dollars to Planned Parenthood. But Boehner and other GOP leaders say a shutdown battle would be fruitless because they lack enough votes to prevail in the Senate or overcome an Obama veto. They also say voters oppose a shutdown and would punish the GOP in next year's elections if one occurred.

 Long unhappy with Boehner and other GOP leaders for not being confrontational enough, some in his party have threatened to force a House vote on removing him from his post if he backs down on this or other upcoming fights over federal borrowing and spending.

 The legislation that was voted on Friday, proposed by Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., would end federal payments to Planned Parenthood for a year, diverting the money to thousands of community health centers. Republicans say those clinics could handle the displaced Planned Parenthood patients, but Democrats say the centers are overburdened and sometimes distant.

 Pressure from conservatives may ultimately force leaders to let Congress vote anyway on a bill that would avert a shutdown only if Planned Parenthood's federal dollars were stopped, a measure certain to die in the Senate. Once defeated, that would likely be followed by a measure temporarily financing government, perhaps into December, that would include Planned Parenthood funds and buy time to resolve disputes over spending, abortion and other issues.

 For now, Republican leaders are hoping that investigations by four congressional committees and other anti-abortion bills will relieve some of the pressure.

 Along those lines, the House voted 248-177 Friday for another measure, this one by Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., that would impose penalties of up to five years in prison plus fines on doctors who don't try to save infants born alive during abortions.

 And the Senate set a vote for Tuesday on a measure banning most late-term abortions, a bill that Democrats were poised to scuttle. Both of those bills also would face likely Senate defeat and an Obama veto threat.

 In Friday's House debate, both sides showed they had plenty of steam on the issue.

 Franks, who brought the fetus poster to the floor, said Congress' response to the Planned Parenthood videos "is vital to everything those lying out in Arlington Cemetery died to save."

 And House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., asked, "In the face of these videos, with all the alternatives women have for health, why would you want to force your constituents to pay for something so evil?"

 Firing back, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Republicans' were relying on deceptively edited videos and had "manufactured a witch hunt." Added Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., "Stop being so mean. Solve problems, do not create them." ||||| The same Republicans who campaigned on doing away with legislative crises are careening toward government shutdown in less than two weeks with still no concrete plan to stop it.

 It’s not that Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) leadership team is hiding their best hand. They have no trick up their sleeve, no ace in the hole — pick your cliché. Nearly everyone in House and Senate leadership recognizes a simple reality: At some point in the next two weeks, they will move on a bill free of provisions to strip Planned Parenthood of its government funding. It just depends how long it takes, how painful it is and whether Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) team stumbles into their second government shutdown in three years.

 Story Continued Below

 Twelve days remain until the government runs out of money, but the House and Senate are scheduled to be in session for just a fraction of that time. The showdown over Planned Parenthood is the epitome of crisis-fueled legislating. Senior Republican lawmakers and aides increasingly believe that the funding fight will come down to three-day dash – Sept. 28 through Sept. 30, the final day of the fiscal year.

 Asked Wednesday when his colleagues would get a glimpse at his bill to fund the government, Boehner said, “At some point.”

 Several House Republicans lawmakers said they don't expect to vote before the week of Sept. 30. The House is only scheduled to be in session three days that week before the government runs out of money.

 To top it off, the endgame will almost certainly result in a referendum on Boehner’s speakership. He's favored, but not guaranteed, to survive. But if he does it will be in a further weakened state.

 The path the funding fight will take is not yet clear to either Boehner or McConnell, according to senior aides to both men. But it’s shaping up to be extraordinarily messy.

 Top aides to McConnell and Boehner have been in close contact, discussing who will move first to pass a funding bill in their chamber. But the House has been paralyzed with indecision. A pack of House Republicans – mostly on Steve Scalise’s (R-La.) whip team – are worried about the expectations that will be set by passing a funding bill that strips funding from Planned Parenthood, only to relent in the end. Yet other forces in the conference want a vote on such a continuing resolution – and it’s possible, yet hardly certain, that GOP leadership will set one up for next week.

 House Republicans want to be first to move a funding bill, but McConnell is setting up his own process – a sign of how slow the House has been to take action.

 McConnell is nearly certain to bring up a so-called CR to fund the government next week that includes the language to defund Planned Parenthood, but Democrats will block its consideration. McConnell will then move a funding bill free of legislative riders. Republican leaders believe conservatives, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) will block it, but McConnell will be able to send it to the House by Sept. 29 at the latest. The Senate's plan could be put on hold if the House gets its act togther, aides caution.

 The House is also trying to send other anti-abortion measures to Obama’s desk and are considering standalone bills, including one to defund Planned Parenthood that would ride alongside the government funding bill, but not impede its passage in the Senate. If the House hasn’t passed a "clean" bill by Sept. 29, it will have one day to avoid a government shutdown by passing the Senate’s bill, or a comparable measure.

 “At some point in time you have to face reality,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a member of the Appropriations Committee who is close to Boehner, speaking about the need to pass a clean bill. “People say, ‘Oh, you didn't even try to do x.’ There are some things you can't do. We tried to repeal Obamacare 50-some odd times in the House and guess what? It didn't work. We probably should have figured that out after two or three.”

 House Republican leaders, meanwhile, are working behind the scenes to try to calm the troops. McCarthy and Scalise have privately told Republicans that they will try to use the majority-vote reconciliation process to deny funding to the women’s health group — they say that is the best way to get a bill to President Barack Obama's desk. GOP leaders have urged anti-abortion groups to speak out against a shutdown.

 At a closed party-wide meeting at the Capitol Hill Club on Thursday morning, GOP leaders presented lawmakers with an internal National Republican Congressional Committee poll showing overwhelming public opposition to shutting down the government to stop funding Planned Parenthood. The poll, conducted in 18 swing districts by the GOP firm The Tarrance Group, showed 64 percent of respondents would not favor a shutdown to try to stop the organization’s federal funding, compared to 30 percent who favor shutting the government. Among those who had seen videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing fetal tissue sales, 55 percent did not favor a shutdown, while 37 percent thought it was the right move.

 “We want to be more strategic because I think we are on more solid ground right now than we have before in raising these issues,” Rep. John Shimkus said (R-Ill.), who has a long record opposing abortion rights. “But there are some that say, 'Not a penny.' So, leadership is trying to work it out.”

 While much of this fight is about the government’s purported support of abortion, there’s a hefty anti-Boehner sentiment that’s spurring the opposition to the leadership’s plans. After Congress clears a clean government-funding bill, Boehner and McCarthy aides expect a hard-line conservative to put forward a motion that would, if successful, force the Ohio Republican from the speaker’s chair.

 Republican leaders do not expect the so-called motion to vacate, first filed by North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, to succeed. They say they would handily defeat it if it came to the floor. "Team Boehner," as it is called internally, is not actively preparing for the vote by whipping support in the GOP conference.

 But some of his allies privately say they have informally secured assurances from Democrats that they would support keeping Boehner as speaker, or vote present, which would lower the vote threshold. If all Democrats voted present, Boehner could win with as few as 124 Republicans. Recently, Boehner has even told some Republicans privately he would like to run for another term as speaker.

 Those looking to oust Boehner have not put forward an alternative to serve as speaker, and senior GOP leadership aides say the hardliners have no alternative for when the Senate and president reject their plan to defund Planned Parenthood. For example, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said Florida Rep. Daniel Webster could be the next speaker because he got “12 times as many votes as Kevin McCarthy.” McCarthy did not campaign for the job earlier this year. Webster garnered 12 votes total.

 “The Sept. 30 crisis is a crisis of our leadership's making,” Massie said. “They refuse to pass appropriations bills. Even the CR is not the way the government is supposed to be run. The American public knows that. What we need to do is get back to regular order.”

 --John Bresnahan contributed to this report

 Authors: ||||| WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans pushed bills targeting Planned Parenthood and curbing some abortion procedures toward House passage Friday, with party leaders hoping the legislation will help mollify fractious conservatives demanding a face-off with President Barack Obama that could trigger a federal shutdown.

 Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during the CNN Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015, in Simi... (Associated Press)

 House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif., left, accompanied by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nev., speaks to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Sept.... (Associated Press)

 Neither measure has much chance of becoming law, since Democrats have the votes to block them in the Senate and the White House has threatened vetoes. But Republicans pushed ahead anyway, citing secretly recorded videos showing Planned Parenthood officials casually describing how they provide researchers with tissue from aborted fetuses.

 One of the measures would block Planned Parenthood's federal funds for a year, while the other would inflict criminal penalties on doctors who don't try saving infants born alive during abortions. As Friday's debate raged, it underscored how the fight over abortion could affect next year's elections. It's an emotional hotspot among each side's most loyal partisans and could be pivotal as each party seeks female voters.

 Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., sponsor of the bill imposing criminal penalties on doctors, defended his legislation as he stood beside a poster-sized photo of a scarred, aborted fetus that survived.

 "Our response as a people and a nation to these horrors shown in these videos is vital to everything those lying out in Arlington Cemetery died to save," Franks said.

 Democrats said Franks' measure was unneeded because clinicians allowing born-alive babies to die would face murder charges. They said the GOP legislation had other goals.

 "It's real intent is to further undermine a woman's right to choose," said Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif.

 The anti-abortion activists who secretly recorded the videos say they show that Planned Parenthood is illegally profiting from organ sales. The organization says it's broken no laws and is being maligned by deceitfully edited recordings.

 The White House, in a statement released Thursday evening, said Obama called the shutdown threat "a game of chicken with our economy that we cannot accept."

 It was unclear if House approval of the two bills would help House Speaker John Boehner solve a political Rubik's Cube. The Ohio Republican's twin goals: avoiding a shutdown fight that GOP leaders warn would set voters against the party, while simultaneously appeasing conservatives who might try to oust him as leader for not adequately confronting Obama.

 "Our leaders wave the white flag every time there's a confrontation," said Rep. Mark Salmon, R-Ariz. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said Boehner wants to "implement what the lobbyists want, not what the constituents of our district want."

 At a closed meeting Thursday among House Republicans, leaders unveiled internal polling that attendees said showed most people would oppose a government shutdown — even those who have seen the videos and oppose financing Planned Parenthood.

 Many Republicans argued that the polling showed a shutdown fight would be damaging and unwinnable, especially since Senate Democrats already derailed a bill erasing Planned Parenthood's federal funds.

 "Pounding on the table doesn't turn 54 into 60 in the Senate," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., referring to the number of GOP senators and the number it would take to end Democratic filibusters.

 The bill by Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., would transfer Planned Parenthood's federal money to thousands of government-backed community health centers. Supporters say that would keep women's health care intact, but opponents say those centers are overwhelmed and often far from women who need them.

 Planned Parenthood gets around $450 million yearly in federal payments, mostly Medicaid reimbursements for handling low-income patients, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That's around one-third of the $1.3 billion yearly budget for the organization, which has nearly 700 clinics and provides sexual disease testing, contraceptives and abortions.

 Conservatives' determination to block Planned Parenthood's money has been partly fueled by the race for the GOP's presidential nomination. Several candidates used their Wednesday night debate to urge lawmakers to turn off that funding spigot.

 But spotlighting GOP divisions, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., wrote Thursday to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the presidential hopefuls. Cruz wants Republicans to oppose financing the government unless Planned Parenthood's money is cut off, defending his effort during the debate by saying, "I'm proud to stand for life."

 Ayotte, who faces her own tough re-election fight next year, wrote that she opposed risking a shutdown "given the challenges and threats we face at home and abroad" and asked, "What is your strategy to succeed in actually defunding Planned Parenthood?" ||||| President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress want to pass a clean, stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown and allow negotiators more time to reach a long-term budget deal.

 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made the announcement after meeting at the White House with Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to plot their strategy on the spending talks.

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 Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to pass a spending bill before government funding runs out.

 The biggest hurdle? Demands from House conservatives that even a short-term continuing resolution (CR) funding the government block money for Planned Parenthood.

 “The three of us agree that we want a short-term CR,” Reid told reporters after the 90-minute huddle in the Oval Office. “We want to make sure the riders are off that, we want to make sure the government will be running.”

 The top Democrats sought to present a united front in the contentious budget battle, even as Reid and Pelosi extended an olive branch to their Republican counterparts, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Speaker John Boehner (Ohio), to sit down and hammer out a comprehensive budget agreement.

 Reid said that he is prepared “to do something meaningful with spending” on a broader funding deal after the short-term measure is passed. But he would not reveal how much additional spending he wants.

 Pelosi stressed that she wants spending talks to proceed in a “timely fashion” so Congress can tackle other pressing issues, such as highway funding and a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank.

 “It’s important for us … to have not a very long CR, but one that enables us to have the time for the appropriators to write an omnibus bill,” she said. “The sooner we can agree on a number under which we can write the appropriations bill, the sooner we can get this job done and address some of the other issues.”

 Boehner and Pelosi met on Thursday to discuss a government funding bill, aides said. The meeting, which was first reported by Politico, lasted for about 20 minutes.

 Pelosi's lieutenant, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), on Wednesday said Democrats had "no idea" how Republicans were going to avoid a shutdown because they hadn't been included in the discussions.

 Democrats have been demanding negotiations on next year’s spending levels with Republicans, who are dealing with an internal rift over Planned Parenthood.

 After the release of a series of undercover videos that showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue, conservative Republicans have insisted federal money for the organization must be turned off.

 McConnell has warned against a standoff over the issue, arguing it would hurt the GOP brand just as the 2013 shutdown over ObamaCare damaged the party.

 “We’re going to fund the government,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday. “We’re not going to shut the government down and we will do that hopefully into late fall.”

 But the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn (Texas), said Thursday the Senate will at least vote on a defunding measure in relation to a government funding measure.

 In the House, Republican leaders are trying to convince the rank and file it would be unwise to risk a shutdown over defunding the organization.

 During a closed-door meeting Thursday, leaders showed members polling data indicating Republicans would be blamed if the government shuts down.

 Reid agreed that Republicans would bare the brunt of the damage. The Democratic leader said the GOP took control of the Senate last year in spite of, and not because of, the shutdown in 2013.

 “They know what happened last time,” he said. “They know they got a gift.”

 If a short-term deal can be worked out, Congress will still have to work out the terms for a longer funding plan that would last through the next fiscal year.

 Democrats are demanding that any final deal lifts spending ceilings on defense and non-defense spending. Some Republicans are open to increasing the ceilings for defense, but most want to avoid any hike to non-defense spending.

 Peter Sullivan contributed. This story was last updated at 6:29 p.m. ||||| The U.S. House of Representatives voted Friday, Sept.18 to defund Planned Parenthood for a one-year period. The vote was 241-187, with nearly all Republicans and two Democrats supporting the legislation. (Reuters)

 This story has been updated.

 The House passed two abortion-related bills Friday, including one that would strip federal health-care funding from Planned Parenthood for one year, but it remains unclear whether the votes would appease conservatives who have threatened a government shutdown over the organization.

 The votes followed months of intense focus on Planned Parenthood prompted by undercover videos released by an activist group claiming they show violations of federal laws prohibiting the sales of fetal tissue for profit and restricting certain abortion procedures. Planned Parenthood has denied any wrongdoing and claimed the videos have been unfairly manipulated as it has fought off attempts to end its federal support.

 But neither bill is likely to become law as Senate Democrats have filibustered similar measures, and President Obama has indicated he would veto both bills.

 That’s why the move is unlikely to stave off growing fears of a government shutdown on Oct. 1. Since House conservatives know the bill to defund Planned Parenthood is unlikely to be enacted, they’re unlikely to back off their desire to attach it to a must-pass government spending measure to keep the government open. But again, neither Senate Democrats nor Obama will accept such language, triggering the standoff.

 Nonetheless, House Republicans hoped to appease conservatives with the abortion-related votes.

 One bill passed Friday, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, would impose criminal penalties on medical personnel who fail to aid an infant born after an attempted abortion. The other, the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, imposes a one-year moratorium on federal funding for the group, which Republicans say will allow for a thorough investigation of its practices. Any funding, supporters said, would be redirected to clinics that do not offer abortions.

 Congress must pass a budget before Sept. 30, or it faces partially shutting down the government for the second time in two years. Here's how we got to another potential shutdown. (Jayne W. Orenstein/The Washington Post)

 [Wary of shutdown, GOP leaders try to refocus abortion debate]

 “Most people think that is common sense,” said Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), sponsor of the defunding bill. “If there is reason to investigate, then there is reason to withhold taxpayer dollars during that period of time. The American taxpayer has been clear for a very long time that they do not want federal funds spent on abortion.”

 Democrats pointed out that Planned Parenthood has long been prohibited from spending federal money on abortions, thanks to appropriations riders dating back to the 1970s. And in a floor debate Friday, they called the bill an attack on women’s health care and noted that other health-care providers would be unable to absorb all of Planned Parenthood’s hundreds of thousands of patients.

 “This bill is dumb, it’s foolish, and it’s mean-spirited,” said Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.). “The bill is based upon lies and exaggerations. If you want to have a truthful debate, then let’s talk about the 400,000 Pap smears, the 500,000 breast exams, the 4.5 million STD and HIV tests that Planned Parenthood does each year.”

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 Planned Parenthood’s affiliated clinics are together the country’s largest provider of abortions. But they also perform other women’s health and family planning services, which are funded through Medicaid and Title X federal grants totaling about $450 million a year.

 The organization decried the vote Friday. “These bills are a callous attempt to insert politics into women’s health, and we’re grateful that the Senate and the president will stop them from becoming law,” said Eric Ferrero, a spokesman for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

 Republicans and Democrats sparred over the undercover videos, which have been released by the Center for Medical Progress over the course of the summer. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) called them part of a “coordinated, broad-based smear campaign full of distortions and misinformation.” Key context was edited out of the videos, she said, including footage of exculpatory comments from Planned Parenthood executives.

 During the second round of GOP debates, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said "shame on us" if lawmakers don't stop a bill from passing that funds Planned Parenthood. (CNN)

 But Republicans said the videos spoke for themselves and lambasted Democrats for trying to undermine their content: “If they want to send one taxpayer dime to Planned Parenthood after watching them, shame on them,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.).

 The votes broke down mostly along party lines, with the Planned Parenthood bill passing 241 to 187 and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act passing 248 to 177.

 While public attention has been focused on the Planned Parenthood bill, anti-abortion activists believe the vote on the survivor protection bill, sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), could be even more politically significant in the long run.

 Democrats say current law is already sufficient to prevent the abuses that activists fear, and they pointed to objections from medical groups, such as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which said the bill represents “gross legislative interference into the practice of medicine.” But activists believe those opponents have assumed an extreme position that could become a liability in future campaigns.

 “The votes this afternoon are evidence of just how wedded to the idea of abortion on-demand, at any time, for any reason, that the Democratic Party has become,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, noting only five of 188 Democrats voted in favor. “Where is the compassion and concern for ‘the little guy,’ the abortion survivor, whose heart is beating and alive?”

 The bills were brought to the House floor amid in order to create leverage with President Obama and congressional Democrats given the nearing deadline to fund the government. But neither have indicated a shutdown would force them to blink.

 The Senate took an August test vote on a Planned Parenthood defunding bill, which fell well short of the 60 votes necessary to advance controversial legislation. Senators are expected to take a procedural vote Tuesday on a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in a related effort to demonstrate the political hurdles facing any bill restricting abortion rights.

 On the House side, GOP leaders have sought to tamp down demands to link Planned Parenthood funding to the spending deadline. They have made both political and practical arguments: In a Thursday morning meeting at Republican National Committee headquarters, party leaders presented polling numbers showing Republicans would be blamed for a shutdown in key battleground districts. And they told members that due to the vagaries of federal appropriations and funding cycles, the kind of short-term funding bill that is likely to pass ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline would do little to affect Planned Parenthood.

 “In the short term, you might feel better, but the money’s already out the door,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), an Appropriations Committee member and leadership ally. “Let’s do the hearings. Let’s find out what the case is. Let’s try to craft something that’s a little more nuanced and precise than just, ‘if you don’t do what we want, we’ll shut down the government.’ “ |||||

– Twelve days remain in the fiscal year, and the threat of a second government shutdown in three years remains very much in play. The big problem remains a showdown over funding for Planned Parenthood, with conservative Republicans who are upset about recent undercover videos demanding that the group lose all federal funds. With the clock ticking, party leaders still have "no concrete plan" to avoid the shutdown, reports Politico. One possibility is to pass a temporary measure before the end of the month to allow more time for negotiations in the fall, but that's not a slam dunk—because House conservatives demand that even such a continuing resolution block Planned Parenthood funding, reports the Hill. They're also threatening to try to oust John Boehner—who opposes abortion and Planned Parenthood but doesn't want to hand Democrats a potential gift in the form of a shutdown—as speaker if he backs down. The AP sees a possible way out of what it calls this "political Rubik's Cube." House leaders are pushing through a number of abortion-related measures, including one that passed today to defund Planned Parenthood for a year. The measures stand virtually no chance of becoming law, but leaders hope they will be enough to mollify the conservative rank-and-file. It "remains unclear" whether that will be the case, however, notes the Washington Post. Lawmakers are in session only five more days until the deadline, and about the only safe bet is that the drama will go down to the final day, if not hour.