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 Former Secretary of State Colin Powell blasted Donald Trump as a “national disgrace” and criticized repeated investigations into the 2012 attack in Benghazi as a “witch hunt” in personal emails leaked online by hackers.

 Powell, a retired 4-star general and a Republican, confirmed the authenticity of the emails to NBC News.

 "The hackers have a lot more," he added.

 The contents of the emails were first reported by Buzzfeed News. It said the messages had been obtained by the website DCLeaks.com, which a federal law official told NBC News is believed to have ties to Russian intelligence services.

 Powell called Trump a "national disgrace" and "international pariah" in a June 17 email to a former aide, saying the Republican presidential contender was "in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him."

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 A subsequent email to the same former aide on Aug. 21 slammed Trump for spurring the "racist" so-called "birther" movement — the consistently debunked rumor that President Barack Obama was born in another country.

 "Yup, the whole birther movement was racist," Powell wrote, according to Buzzfeed. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim."

 There was no immediate response from the Trump campaign to the emails.

 Powell in another email the same day dismissed Trump’s stated overtures to African-American voters. "There is nothing he can say that will sway black voters so he might as well say it to white folks," Powell wrote.

 "He takes us for idiots," Powell, who is black, said in the email. “He can never overcome what he tried to do to Obama with his search for the birth certificate hoping to force Obama out of the Presidency. Or, demanding his school transcripts to see how he got into Harvard — (eg, affirmative action )."

 Powell didn’t restrict his criticism to Trump. In a Dec. 17 email to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Powell said "Benghazi is a stupid witch hunt."

 Led mostly by Republicans, eight Congressional investigations have been launched into the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate and another facility in Libya that left four Americans dead, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens.

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 The House Select Committee on Benghazi report released in June found an array of bureaucratic miscues and inter-agency blunders but does not specifically blame former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

 Powell, in the 2015 email to Rice, said: "Basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am ok in this very vulnerable place. But blame also rests on his leaders and supporters back here. Pat Kennedy, Intel community, DS and yes, HRC."

 The revelations mark the latest in a string of headlines around Powell's email correspondence. His online activity has figured heavily of late into the controversy around Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

 Powell expressed frustration about his name being linked to Clinton's email issues, writing in another leaked email: "I have told Hilleary’s [sic] minions repeatedly that they are making a mistake trying to drag me in, yet they still try," Powell wrote.

 In July of 2015, Powell complained to his broker at Merrill Lynch that questions raised about Clinton’s email and speaking fees impacted his life — Powell said he had to disclose his past use of emails, and "I had a gig cancelled because the client, a public university, caught hell from overpaying HRC."

 "HRC is the gift that keeps on taking," Powell wrote in the July 1, 2015 email, according to the leaked documents.

 And Powell in a 2014 email said during a conversation about Hillary Clinton "I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect."

 Powell, not referring to Clinton by name, then went on to apparently describe her as having "unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational" along with some colorful references to her husband's rumored philandering, rumors he attributed to the New York Post.

 While Powell has described himself as a lifelong Republican, he twice endorsed Obama — a Democrat — for president. ||||| Congressional Democrats are scrambling to assess the scope of a leak that revealed the personal data of nearly 200 current and former House Democrats, and they are bracing for more leaked data. Ionic Security CEO Adam Ghetti explains how the FBI deals with data breaches. Photo: Getty

 WASHINGTON—Two websites created in recent months and whose operators are believed to have ties to the Russian government now serve as portals for leaking sensitive and at times embarrassing information about the Democratic Party and its supporters.

 Some computer experts and Democrats in Congress believe both websites—the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress page and DCLeaks.com—have ties to Russian intelligence services and that the sites are using hacked information to try to influence the November elections.

 ... ||||| Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell salutes the audience. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

 The Daily Caller can exclusively reveal that two years worth of emails have been stolen from former secretary of state Colin Powell’s personal email account.

 The emails range from between June 2014 to August 2016. The most recent emails are dated August 19, 2016.

 When asked for comment regarding the apparent hack, Powell replied: “I wasn’t aware of any infiltration of my Gmail account. If accurate my privacy has been violated.”

 “As a private citizen I would hope journalists would respect that privacy,” he added.

 The emails were given to hacktivist group DCLeaks by unnamed hackers. They emails are currently password protected. DCLeaks puts the total number of hacked Powell emails in their possession at around 30,000.

 The Daily Caller was able to examine some of the hacked emails, which cover topics such as Donald Trump’s feud with the Khan family and Hillary Clinton’s email server.

 The hacked emails reveal some people close to Powell expect him to endorse Hillary Clinton before the Nov. 8 election.

 Former New Jersey governor Christie Whitman — a Republican who has said she will vote for Clinton over Trump — sent Powell an email in late July with the subject line, “Hillary.”

 “Have you endorsed her yet?” the one line email said.

 “Nope,” Powell replied. “By the way, if you have a WSJ today take a look at my piece on immigration. I can send it you missed. On Oped pages.”

 “You’ll recall that in 2008 and 2012 I waited until early fall,” he added.

 Powell confirmed the email chain’s legitimacy to TheDC.

 On July 30, Powell emailed several people a link to a Huffington Post article on Trump’s then-budding feud with the Khans.

 On August 2, longtime Powell friend and adviser Harlan Ullman asked Powell, “when are you going to throw the knock out blow?”

 “I try not to bother someone who is beating himself and the GOP up. And please, don’t start bugging me like every newsie and getter in town,” Powell replied. “If and when I do it will be known.”

 This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

 Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson |||||Summary:

– The emails of a former United States secretary of state are again making headlines in the 2016 race, and this time Donald Trump is the one who won't be pleased. Hackers got into the personal account of Colin Powell, and the former secretary of state is revealed to have called Trump a "national disgrace" and an "international pariah" who peddles racist sentiment, reports BuzzFeed. The website says the emails were obtained by the site DCLeaks.com, which is suspected to have ties to Russian intelligence services, per the Wall Street Journal. A June 17 email calling him a "national disgrace" was to a former aide in which Powell adds that Trump was "in the process of destroying himself"—thus sparing Democrats lots of work. In another email to that same former aide on Aug. 21, Powell went after Trump as racist, citing his previous push to try to show Obama wasn't a US citizen. "Yup, the whole birther movement was racist," Powell wrote. "When Trump couldn't keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim." In another, Powell tells CNN's Fareed Zakaria that he's reluctant to call out Trump publicly because it would backfire. “To go on and call him an idiot just emboldens him.” The former secretary of state confirmed the emails' authenticity to NBC News and said the hackers have more to come. In fact, the Daily Caller reports that hackers stole two years of Powell's emails, from June 2014 to August of this year.


News article:

As the Secret Service boosts security after a man was able to jump the White House fence and go through the North Portico doors, Rep. Peter King on Sunday demanded a full investigation and indicated that Congress could hold hearings on the issue.

 “This is absolutely inexcusable,” the New York Republican said on “Fox News Sunday.”

 “This demands a full investigation into what happened, why it happened and what needs to be done to make sure it never happens again,” he said.

 (WATCH: Sunday shows in 90 seconds)

 King, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, also said that the committee would likely hold hearings on the security breach.

 “There can be a lot of conspiracies against the president — a lot of very complex assassination plots. This is the most basic, the most simple type of procedure, and how anyone, especially in the days of [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] … can actually get into the White House without being stopped is inexcusable,” King said.

 A man who had a knife was arrested on Friday for jumping over the fence and darting across the lawn into the White House. The first family was not there at the time.

 Read more about: White House, Peter King ||||| With 49ers defensive lineman Ray McDonald arrested for domestic abuse and still in the team’s lineup for Sunday's game, Sen. Dianne Feinstein urged the National Football League to adopt a zero-tolerance policy.

 “I think I can speak for all of the women in the Senate when I say we are very surprised, amazed and very resolute to do something about it,” the California Democrat and former mayor of San Francisco said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Having said that, I’m an old 49er fan. I remember the glory days. … What’s happened is a tremendous growth in violence.”

 (WATCH: Sunday shows in 90 seconds)

 “There is no place for this. Period," she said. "I believe very strongly that if a player is arrested, he should be suspended, and if they’re convicted, that ends it. I know there are contracts. This has gone on too long, and this is getting too bad. These teams need to set an example for the rest of society. The NFL is a great league … but there has to be a strength in the league, and they have to project the values of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

 Read more about: Senate, Dianne Feinstein, California, Football, NFL, San Francisco, Sports, San Francisco 49ers |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– The White House fence-jumper was an "absolutely inexcusable" security breach, and Politico reports that Peter King wasted no time today in calling for a "full investigation into what happened, why it happened and what needs to be done to make sure it never happens again." The New York Republican wants to bring the matter before his Homeland Security Committee, because, he says, while the president may face "a lot of very complex assassination plots," Friday's breach represents "the most basic, the most simple type of procedure and how anyone especially in the days of (ISIS) can actually get into the White House without being stopped is inexcusable." Elsewhere on your Sunday dial: Robert Gates on ISIS: I think that destroying (ISIS) is a very ambitious mission. I think our goal ought to be pushing (ISIS) back out of Iraq, denying them a place where they can have a permanent foothold. We’ve been at war with al-Qaeda for 13 years, we haven’t destroyed it." Tony Blair on ISIS: "The president is absolutely right to take on (ISIS) and to build the broadest possible coalition. He and Secretary Kerry have put together about 50 countries now in this coalition. We’ve got absolutely no choice but to do this and not just in order to destroy the onward march of (ISIS) but to send a very strong signal to the other terrorist groups operating in the region. We intend to take action and see it though." Dianne Feinstein on violence and the NFL: "I think I can speak for all of the women in the Senate when I say we are very surprised, amazed and very resolute to do something about it. There is no place for this. Period. I believe very strongly that if a player is arrested, he should be suspended, and if they’re convicted, that ends it. I know there are contracts. This is gone on too long, and this is getting too bad. These teams need to set an example for the rest of society."


Write an article based on this summary:

– Three down, nine to go. Harry Reid made his three picks for the bipartisan "super committee" that will try to come up with $1.2 trillion of cuts in about 3 months. Reid picked Patty Murray, who will serve as co-chair with a yet-to-be-named Republican, along with John Kerry and Max Baucus. Politico sees the choices as a sign that the Senate majority leader is serious about getting a deal struck. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Nancy Pelosi will each add three picks of their own. At least seven of the 12 will need to agree on a proposal by Thanksgiving if they hope to have it signed by the president by Dec. 23, notes the National Journal. Failure triggers across-the-board cuts. Click to read how Daily Intel wishes the first three were announced, or here to see Jon Stewart's take on the committee.

In the first of what will be a closely watched selection process for a powerful new deficit panel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, Max Baucus of Montana and John Kerry of Massachusetts as his three choices for a super committee charged with finding more than $1 trillion in spending cuts by the end of this year.

 Murray will serve as co-chairwoman of the 12-member panel. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will select a member to co-chair the committee and two other panelists, as required by the debt-limit agreement signed into law by President Barack Obama last week. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will each select three additional members.

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 “The Joint Select Committee has been charged with forging the balanced, bipartisan approach to deficit reduction that the American people, the markets and rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s are demanding,” Reid said in a statement. “To achieve that goal, I have appointed three senators who each posses an expertise in budget matters, a commitment to a balanced approach and a track record of forging bipartisan consensus.”

 Reid’s three picks are loyal to the majority leader and are intended to show the Nevada Democrat is serious about forging a bipartisan deal to head off $1.2 trillion in spending cuts required under the debt deal. The super committee was Reid’s contribution to the bipartisan agreement to end the debt-limit fight.

 A senior appropriator and Budget Committee member, Murray is also the chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has made the GOP’s focus on overhauling Medicare a centerpiece of the 2012 campaign. Baucus is the chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, while Kerry — the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee — has been lobbying for a spot.

 But the choice of Murray has already spawned anger from Republicans, who called it a blatantly political move aimed at filling coffers for the Democratic campaign committee. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called on Reid to withdraw the appointment immediately.

 “The select committee is no place for someone whose top priority is fundraising and politics,” Priebus said.

 Reid and Pelosi had been considering whether to install candidates who will draw a hard-line against deep entitlement cuts, particularly if Republicans don’t bend on new taxes. The Democratic leaders want loyalists who won’t give the panel majority support for a cuts-only approach, which could target popular programs like Medicare and Social Security.

 “The No. 1 criteria should be someone who fights for revenues, and if Republicans continue to rule out revenues, then the Democrats have to play proper defense in response,” said a senior Democratic aide.

 In a joint statement, Kerry, Baucus and Murray said they are serious about answering the call to “step beyond partisanship and politics” and achieve a “balanced, pragmatic and practical” solution to the soaring national debt.

 In an email sent to her colleagues Monday evening, Pelosi said her caucus is committed to “protecting” Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — and said that the new panel should deliberate in public settings so that it achieves a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction.

 “Many of you have expressed your interest in serving on the joint committee,” Pelosi told her colleagues. “I have and will be reaching out to each of you before making any decision.” ||||| Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi.

 What’s in the data set:

 Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011

 Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011

 Number of captures: 2,713,676,341

 Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159

 Number of hosts: 29,032,069

 The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa’s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites.

 However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed.

 We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available “warts and all” for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content.

 If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you’re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say “yes” to all requests, since we’re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered. |||||


Article:
Suppose you dug a tunnel through the center of Earth, jumped in, and let gravity pull you through. How long would it take you to reach the other side of the planet? For decades, physics students have been asked to calculate that time and have been taught that the correct answer is 42 minutes. Now, a more realistic analysis has lopped 4 minutes off that estimate.

 "This is the kind of paper we love," says David Jackson, a physicist at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and editor of the American Journal of Physics, a publication of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The new calculation, which appears in the March issue of the journal, doesn't merely add more detail about the structure of Earth, he notes. It also explains why you can replace one overly simple assumption with another equally crude one and still get a much more accurate answer. "That's what makes this so much fun to think about," Jackson says.

 The gravity tunnel problem is a staple of introductory physics courses because it simultaneously demonstrates both striking features of Isaac Newton's law of gravity and a common but very important type of cyclical motion. To solve it, students must calculate how the force of gravity on an object changes as the thing falls through the tunnel.

 Here's where the usual unrealistic assumption enters. Students assume that, like a billiard ball, Earth has the same density throughout: roughly 5500 kilograms per cubic meter. In that case, the strength of the gravitational force pulling you toward Earth's center varies in proportion to the distance from the center. That's because as you descend through the tunnel, the amount of mass at an altitude lower than yours decreases, whereas the mass at an altitude higher than yours no longer has any effect on you—as students calculate using a bit of mathematics called the shell theorem.

 Because the force pulling you toward the center is proportional to the distance from the center, you zip back and forth through Earth exactly as a weight on a spring bobs up or down or a pendulum swings back and forth. The gravity tunnel problem is used in teaching precisely because it produces such simple harmonic motion.

 In reality, of course, Earth does not have a uniform density, but has a less dense crust and mantle and a more dense core. So Alexander Klotz, a graduate student in physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, started thinking about what a more realistic analysis would yield. Klotz says he isn't sure why he started mulling over the problem. But he sometimes answers physics questions on the website reddit. "I've sort of engaged in a bit of educational outreach," Klotz says, "and that [question] comes up quite a lot."

 To get a more realistic mass distribution for Earth, he relied on the Preliminary Reference Earth Model, which is based on seismic data. It traces Earth's density from about less than 1000 kilograms per cubic meter at the surface to roughly 13,000 kilograms per cubic meter at the center of the core 6371 kilometers below, including a dramatic jump at the edge of the outer core, 3500 kilometers from the center. Solving the problem numerically, Klotz found that an object should fall through Earth in 38 minutes and 11 seconds, instead of the 42 minutes and 12 seconds predicted assuming a uniform planet.

 Curiously, Klotz found that he got almost exactly the same answer—38 minutes flat—if he simply assumed that the force of gravity remained constant and equal to the value at the surface as an object plummeted toward the center. Such a constant force would require a different density distribution, one that increases steadily as the distance to Earth’s center falls—so that when the distance to the center is halved, the density doubles—and peaks to infinity at the center. (The real distribution simply plateaus in the core, and the force of gravity diminishes to zero at the center of the core.)

 So why does the constant-force approximation work so well? Because of the mass distribution in Earth, the force of gravity remains roughly constant—and actually increases slightly—down to the outer core, Klotz explains. From there on in, the force of gravity falls with distance much as in the original problem. But by that point, the object is moving so fast that it actually spends very little time passing through the core, where the constant-force approximation is obviously wrong. So in the end, the approximation is good enough.

 It's that surprising explanation that makes the new analysis gratifying, Jackson says. "The classic problem needs to stay," he says. "But this is a nice addition to the classic problem." For his part, Klotz says that, in this day of big science, his experience shows that "with the right idea it's still possible to make, not a monumental discovery, but an incremental one." ||||| Abstract

 This paper examines the gravity tunnel using the internal structure of Earth as ascertained from seismic data. Numerically, it is found that the time taken to fall along the diameter is 38 min, compared to 42 min for a planet with uniform density. The time taken to fall along a straight line between any two points is no longer independent of distance but interpolates between 42 min for short trips and 38 min for long trips. The brachistochrone path (minimizing the time between any two points) is similar in shape to the uniform-density solution but tends to reach a greater maximum depth and takes less time to traverse. Although the assumption of uniform density works well in many cases, the simpler assumption of a constant gravitational field serves as a better approximation to the true results. ||||| A composite image of the Western hemisphere of the Earth. Credit: NASA (Phys.org)—Alexander Klotz a student at McGill University in Canada has calculated a new answer to the commonly asked physics question, how long would it take a person to fall all the way through the Earth? Instead of the commonly accepted 42 minutes, he claims it is 38. He has published his reasoning, math and conclusions in a paper published in The American Journal of Physics.

 If someone were to drill a hole all the way through the planet, and then somehow manage to fall into it, how long would it take them to arrive on the other side? That is a physics question put to students every year, and those who give it expect the answer to be 42 minutes. But is that answer correct? Klotz says no and has the math to prove it, Science reported.

 The accepted answer of 42 minutes takes into account the constantly changing impact that gravity will have (and ignoring drag due to the presence of air) on the person falling, becoming less and less of a factor as the center of the Earth is approached then growing stronger and stronger as the person heads "up" against gravity on the other side. It is accepted that the speed attained during the descent on the first half of the journey would be significant enough to cause the person to continue moving against gravity on the other side of the planet, right up until the surface is reached.

 But Klotz argues that it is time to start taking the different densities of the Earth's layers into consideration—after all, a lot of research has shown that our planet is a lot denser at the center than at the crust for example—and that of course would have an impact on the person falling through. He has used seismic data to calculate the different densities at different depths and has used that data to give a more accurate answer to the falling man question, stating that it would in fact, take just 38 minutes (and 11 seconds) to fall all the way through, not 42 and (12 seconds).

 Interestingly, Klotz also notes that if gravity were to be assumed to be at a surface level constant throughout the duration of the trip, the math shows it would take just 38 minutes as well.

 Explore further: Are astronauts really weightless?

 More information: The gravity tunnel in a non-uniform Earth, Am. J. Phys. 83, 231 (2015); dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.4898780 . On Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/1308.1342

 Abstract

 This paper examines the gravity tunnel using the internal structure of Earth as ascertained from seismic data. Numerically, it is found that the time taken to fall along the diameter is 38 min, compared to 42 min for a planet with uniform density. The time taken to fall along a straight line between any two points is no longer independent of distance but interpolates between 42 min for short trips and 38 min for long trips. The brachistochrone path (minimizing the time between any two points) is similar in shape to the uniform-density solution but tends to reach a greater maximum depth and takes less time to traverse. Although the assumption of uniform density works well in many cases, the simpler assumption of a constant gravitational field serves as a better approximation to the true results.

  |||||Summary:

– It's a common hypothetical in physics classrooms: How long would it take to fall through a tunnel from one side of the Earth to the other? The new answer: 38 minutes and 11 seconds, reports Science. The result is courtesy of McGill University graduate student Alexander Klotz, whose calculations take four minutes off the previously accepted answer and appear in the American Journal of Physics. The reason for the shorter time? Unlike previous calculations, Klotz's take into account that the Earth's layers have different densities, and those differences would affect the hypothetical falling man, notes Phys.org. "The way the Earth is structured, the gravity increases slightly as you go deeper towards the dense core, to about 110% of its surface value, before getting weaker as you move through the core, reaching zero at the center,” says Klotz, as quoted in Forbes. (If it's all a little too hypothetical, try physics-inspired pasta instead.)


Here is a news article: Records show that two heart transplant patients who had fungal infections and died over the past year stayed in the same room where mold was recently found in the UPMC Presbyterian cardiothoracic intensive care unit, according to a statement Thursday.

 VIDEO: Watch Paul Van Osdol's report

 One of the patients had lichtheimia and died in October 2014; the other had rhizomucor and died in June, said UPMC chief quality officer Tami Minnier.

 "Although the role that the mold may have played in their deaths cannot be definitively determined, we have notified their families of the suspected link to the mold in our CTICU. Transparency with patients is one of our guiding principles, and we are very sorry for the loss of these loved ones," Minnier said in a written statement.

 The discovery of mold in toilets and behind walls earlier this month prompted the hospital to shut down the cardiothoracic ICU for cleaning and analysis by UPMC infection prevention experts and an private remediation company. It's unclear when the unit may reopen.

 Dr. Cyril Wecht, a former Allegheny County medical examiner, said mold is rarely fatal.

 "It is not common to find molds in lungs, and therefore not common to find molds contributing to or causing death," he said. "I can't remember the last case I ever had in which a mold infection was the cause of death."

 Just a rotten fruit or vegetable would have been enough to introduce mold into the ICU, Wecht said.

 "As far as mold in a wall is concerned, that is a total mystery," he said.

 The discovery of mold in the unit was made after a patient tested positive for mold in his lung tissue on Sept. 3, according to UPMC spokeswoman Wendy Zellner. It's unclear what prompted that patient to be tested.

 The contaminated patient was moved out of the cardiothoracic unit right away as were a few other patients in the immediate vicinity of the mold, which was also discovered in some of the unit's walls. Fifteen patients remained in the ICU until they were removed last week upon the discovery of more mold in the 20-bed unit.

 Zellner said the hospital has yet to determine what caused the mold contamination.

 News of the mold outbreak and the two deaths came as a shock to the relatives of some patients Thursday.

 "Very concerned right now. I did not know that," said Jessica Beckelheimer, whose fiance is in the hospital. "That's what he came in here for -- his lungs."

 "It's a hospital, and you bring people here to get well, not to get sick and die," said Mary Dixon, the wife of another patient.

 In her statement, Minnier said, "Some might ask why we did not find this problem sooner. Given the very complicated nature of these patients' illnesses and the sporadic and very limited scope of these infections, we marvel at the care and detective work that found this pattern at all. Of course, we wish that no patients had been harmed."

 Wecht said he wants to know more.

 "Were autopsies done on these two patients? I believe they should have been done," he said. "I believe if they had any suspicion these patients had acquired infections, those cases should have been reported to the medical examiner's office."

 The mold cases under review at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital are under jurisdiction of Pennsylvania's health department. Allegheny County's health department declined comment on the case. It can speak, however, to the bigger picture concerning mold and public health.

 "Mold is typically not a serious health risk," said David Namey, program chief of housing and community environment for the county health department. "The most common health risk for healthy people are those that have allergic reactions to mold. And that would be runny nose, watery eyes or nasal congestion, those types of things," he said. "People who are severely immuno-compromised could be at a higher risk," he said.

 Namey said those with severely compromised immune systems should take precautions.

 "They need to be careful. They need to be aware if there is mold in their surroundings and take action to remediate those situations," he said. "It's a rare circumstance when you see people who are infected with a mold infection or a fungal infection. And it's typically not going to be in one's home, especially if they're otherwise healthy individuals."

 Transplant patients are on drugs that suppress their immune systems to prevent organ rejection. ||||| UPMC is investigating whether the deaths of two heart transplant patients are linked to fungal infections they may have contracted in UPMC Presbyterian's cardiothoracic intensive care unit, hospital officials said Thursday.

 Earlier this week, UPMC insisted that there was just one ICU patient who had contracted an infection from mold. That patient survived and is being treated. The ICU was closed Sept. 3, the day the case was confirmed, and its 18 patients were relocated.

 But Thursday’s surprising disclosure, three days after word leaked out about the closure of the ICU, was not due to “not being transparent,” said Tami Minnier, UPMC’s chief quality control officer. “It was because of the clinical complexity” of their cases.

 “We firmly believe we should have talked to the [two] families [of the deceased patients] first” before telling the public, which occurred later this week, she said.

 The case is confounding, Ms. Minnier said, because not only does UPMC not yet know what role the infections may have played in the two patients’ deaths, it does not know the source of the mold and whether it came from the ICU.

 Complicating the investigation is that preliminary testing shows that all three patients contracted a different, but related, fungal infection: rhizopus for the first patient, a heart transplant patient who died in October; rhizomucor in another heart transplant patient who died in June; and still another, lichtheimia, in the most recent patient, a lung transplant patient whose case was detected two weeks ago and who is still being treated.

 All three molds are in the same fungi phylum, called zygomycetes, and they are related.

 However, they are not the same as the mold that investigators found in the drywall in the ICU after the latest confirmed case on Sept. 3, though UPMC would not identify the mold found in the drywall.

 “It’s very unusual to find those types of fungi there” in a hospital building, said Herb Laymen, owner of U.S. Micro-Solutions in Greensburg, an environmental laboratory that helps investigate fungi and other special pathogens in buildings, including hospitals. “You’ve got to have water someplace” for those molds to flourish.

 Another common cause of mold outbreaks, he said, is construction, or deconstruction projects, both of which have occurred at UPMC Presbyterian in recent years, including the deconstruction of the old Children’s Hospital building, which adjoined Presbyterian.

 “Any time you tear a building down, there are a lot of things that can come out of it,” Mr. Laymen said.

 Andy Streifel, a health care environmentalist at the University of Minnesota and one of the world’s leading authorities on fungal outbreaks, said he was called in by UPMC after it did some of that deconstruction at UPMC Presbyterian.

 “They were very proactive,” Mr. Streifel said of UPMC. “They did everything they could think of. We took all sorts of precautions [in response to the deconstruction.] I don’t think [UPMC] was negligent here.”

 When he was told how UPMC closed down its ICU when it confirmed a fungal infection on Sept. 3, Mr. Streifel said: “Closing that ICU down is an extremely proactive approach. That’s extremely difficult for a hospital” to close an ICU.

 But should UPMC have disclosed the first two cases when they occurred in October and June, particularly since the cardiothoracic ICU had never had a mold problem before?

 Ms. Minnier said that “one infection usually doesn’t trigger us to go into this depth” and investigate the cause.

 Even the second, June case would not necessarily have triggered a full-scale investigation, she said, because it and the first, October case “had a different bug.”

 “And with the time in between — October to June — they weren’t close together. They have to be temporal; they have to be close,” she said.

 It was only after a physician detected the most recent case — the fungal infection in a lung transplant patient — that the same physician saw a possible tie to the two earlier cases, she said. That triggered the full review of every patient’s case over the last year and closure of the 20-bed ICU.

 The review found that there had been 56 patients in the ICU over the prior year, eight of them transplant patients. Three of those transplant patients had been infected and five had not. The other 48, non-transplant patients, were not infected.

 As part of UPMC’s recent disclosure to patients and the public, it launched an online blog on which it says it will report new information about its investigation as it occurs.

 You can see it here — http://insideupmc.upmc.com/upmc-presbyterian-closes-cardiothoracic-intensive-care-unit-investigates-mold/

 “We’ve never done it before. I’ve never done it before,” Ms. Minnier said. “I may regret it.” |||||
A summary of this is?

– A Pittsburgh hospital says it is in the midst of "a very active investigation" after two patients died in its cardiothoracic intensive care unit, which was later found to contain mold. UPMC Presbyterian Hospital's quality control chief Tami Minnier says a fungal infection first appeared on the leg of a heart transplant patient last October. A second infection was found on the buttocks of another transplant patient this past June, reports the AP; both patients died, though doctors aren't sure whether the infections caused the deaths. Hospital officials didn't connect the two cases because they occurred so far apart and the molds in each case were different, but related. Only when a third type of fungal infection was discovered in a lung transplant patient two weeks ago did hospital workers connect the dots and the ICU was closed on Sept. 3, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Though investigators found mold in toilets and behind the walls of the unit, per WTAE, experts aren't sure if it played a role in the deaths as it was a different type than those found in patients. "It's just heartbreaking," Minnier says. "I can't tell you how many hours we have already spent trying to understand it." Minnier says a total of 56 patients have stayed in the ICU over the past year. The three patients infected were among eight transplant patients. The unit's remaining 18 patients have been removed to another part of the hospital while a remediation company clears up the mold, per the Gazette. "It's a hospital, and you bring people here to get well, not to get sick and die," says the wife of a patient. A mold expert says it’s "very unusual" to see the types of fungi found in the patients in a hospital, but it's possible recent construction projects at UPMC caused an outbreak.


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 Next 31 Jan. 2018, the Moon will offer an amazing total eclipse, well visible from Australia and western USA. As in the past, the Virtual Telescope Project will partner with some great astro-imagers there to bring to you the stunning beauty of such a unique event. Yes, it will be somewhat unique: the 31 Jan, 2018 Full Moon will be a Supermoon and will be a Blue Moon, too!

 So far, the Super Blue Moon Total Eclipse team is as below:

 astrophotographer: Dean Hooper (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia);

 astrophotographer: John Stevenson (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia);

 astrophotographer: Chris Stockdale (Latrobe Valley Astronomical Society, “Hazelwood Observatory”, near Morwell, Victoria, Australia)

 astrophotographer: John W. Johnson, Nebraska, USA

 astrophotographer: Andrew Wall, Adelaide, South Australia

 astrophotographer: Ron Delvaux, Arizona, USA

 astrophotographer: James McCue, New Mexico, USA

 astrophotographer: Gerard Lazarus, Australia

 coordinator and live comment: astrophysicist Gianluca Masi (The Virtual Telescope Project, Italy).

 We will also use “Pearl” the amazing telescope available at Tenagra Observatories, in the framework of our partnership. The online, free lunar total eclipse session is scheduled for 31 Jan. 2018, staring at 11:30 UT.

 But this is NOT enough! Later the same day, we will show the Supermoon rising above Rome, something which made us very popular worldwide. We will show the SuperBlueMoon rising above the legendary monuments of Rome on 31 Jan. 2018, starting at 16:00 UT.

 Both the events are

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 , featuring our unique images of the stars above the legendary monuments of Rome!

 comments ||||| The moon turns blood-red in this image of a total lunar eclipse from 2004. A total eclipse of a "blue moon" will occur on Jan. 31, 2018.

 The first eclipse of 2018 will be a lunar one that comes at the very end of the month, on Jan. 31.

 It will be a total eclipse that involves the second full moon of the month, popularly referred to as a Blue Moon. Such a skywatching event hasn't happened for more than 150 years.

 The eclipse will take place during the middle of the night, and the Pacific Ocean will be turned toward the moon at the time. Central and eastern Asia, Indonesia, New Zealand and most of Australia will get a fine view of this moon show in the evening sky. Heading farther west into western Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the eclipse will already be underway as the moon rises. [Super Blue Blood-Moon 2018: When, Where and How to See It]

 To the east, Alaska, Hawaii and northwestern Canada will see the eclipse from start to finish. Moonset will intervene for the rest of North and Central America, however.

 Below, we provide a timetable for the main stages of the moon's passage through the Earth's shadow for six time zones — one for Hawaii (HST), one for Alaska (AKST) and four across the U.S and Canada: Pacific (PST), Mountain (MST), Central (CST) and Eastern (EST). All times are a.m.

 Timetable for the main stages of the Jan. 31, 2018, blue moon total lunar eclipse, for six time zones. Credit: Joe Rao/Space.com

 Along the U.S. West Coast, the total phase begins at 4:51 a.m. PST. The farther east you go, the closer the start of the partial phases will coincide with moonrise. Along the U.S. Atlantic Seaboard, for instance, the moon will have only just begun to enter the darkest part of Earth's shadow, the umbra, at 6:48 a.m. EST when it will disappear from view below the west-northwest horizon. The duration of the total phase is 77 minutes, with the moon tracking through the southern part of the Earth's shadow. So, during totality, the moon's lower limb will appear much brighter than the dark upper limb. [In Photos: The Snow Moon Lunar Eclipse & Comet 45P Encounter]

 How unusual are Blue Moon eclipses? To answer that question, we consulted the reference book Canon of Lunar Eclipses, 1500 B.C. - A.D. 3000, by Bao-Lin Liu and Alan D. Fiala (Willmann-Bell Inc., 1992).

 This NASA chart by eclipse expert Fred Espenak details the visibility range and times for the Jan. 31, 218 total lunar eclipse, which also occurs during a blue moon and near a supermoon. Credit: NASA

 After this year, the next time that a Blue Moon passes through Earth's umbra will be on Dec. 31, 2028, and, after that, on Jan. 31, 2037. Both of these eclipses will be total. Before 2017, there was an 8 percent partial eclipse on Dec. 31, 2009, but, for a total eclipse of a Blue Moon, we have to go all the way back to March 31, 1866.

 So, the upcoming eclipse on Jan. 31 will be the first total eclipse of a Blue Moon in nearly 152 years!

 We will have more to say about January's eclipse here at Space.com in the coming weeks.

 Editor's note: If you capture an amazing photo of the Jan. 31 total lunar eclipse and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or gallery, send images and comments to: spacephotos@space.com.

 Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for Verizon Fios1 News, based in Rye Brook, NY. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com. ||||| Visible supermoons—full moons that appear when the moon is at its closest orbital point to Earth—aren’t very rare. Having three in a row certainly is.

 And that’s exactly what astronomy fans are being treated to this winter.

 The first supermoon appeared when the moon swung by Earth 26,500 km (approximately 16,500 miles) closer than usual on Dec. 3. It will reappear as a visible supermoon on New Year’s Day 2018 and again on Jan. 31.

 Visible supermoons appear 14% bigger and 30% brighter than full moons that occur at the farthest point in the moon’s orbit. If you only have time to catch one episode of the trilogy, NASA recommends catching the last one, which will be extra special.

 Not only is the second full moon of a month considered a blue moon, the Jan. 31 supermoon will also feature a total lunar eclipse, with totality visible from eastern Asia across the Pacific to western North America. During the eclipse, the moon will slowly lose its brightness and take on a reddish hue because of the way the atmosphere bends the light, says NASA. As a result, totally eclipsed moons are sometimes also called “blood moons.”

 When can I see the supermoons and the lunar eclipse?

 The best time to enjoy either supermoon is right after moonrise and before sunrise, when the moon is sitting on the horizon. It will appear its biggest and brightest because of a “moon illusion” effect that’s created when you are able to compare the lunar body to other objects for scale, like buildings and foliage. Check your local moonrise time here.

 Don’t worry if you miss the moonrise—you can continue to enjoy a larger-than-average moon for a few more days. It just won’t be a full moon.

 On the night of Jan. 31, the lunar eclipse will begin at 11:48am UTC and reach its maximum at 1:30pm UTC. That means viewers who live in eastern North America will need to wake up early to catch the partial eclipse. Here’s a map of where you can see the eclipse.

 Ruaraidh Gillies/Wikimedia Commons From supermoon to blood moon.

 Can I see the supermoon and lunar eclipse without going outside?

 If it’s too cloudy, or too cold to go outside, there are options to beam either celestial event straight to your living room. The Virtual Telescope project provides a livestream of the Jan. 1 supermoon rise over Rome’s skyline, beginning at 4:00pm UTC, and the Jan. 31 eclipse from Australia, beginning at 11:30am UTC.

 What’s the best way to photograph the supermoon or lunar eclipse?

 To take a picture of the supermoon or the lunar eclipse with a smartphone, tap on the moon on the screen and hold your finger in place to lock the camera’s focus. Then adjust the exposure slider that appears next to your finger to get the right balance of light for your shot.

 If you’re using a DSLR, NASA’s senior photographer Bill Ingalls recommends that you use the daylight white balance to adjust for the sunlight being reflected off the moon. He says that it’s important to keep in mind that the moon is a moving object. “It’s a balancing act between trying to get the right exposure and realizing that the shutter speed typically needs to be a lot faster.”

 Bill Ingalls/NASA A supermoon behind the Colorado State Capitol Building on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2015.

 To get an original shot, Ingalls suggests taking a picture that puts the moon in context of a local landmark, something that gives your photo a sense of place. “Don’t make the mistake of photographing the moon by itself with no reference to anything,” say Ingalls. “Everyone will get that shot.”

 Do I need special glasses to watch the supermoon or the lunar eclipse?

 Fortunately, unlike the solar eclipse, the supermoon and the lunar eclipse are safe to view with the naked eye! There’s nothing to worry about if you find yourself enthralled and staring up into the sky for a very long time. |||||
A summary of this is?

– Look up at the sky on Jan. 31 and you may witness a sight unseen for 150 years. For the first time since 1866, a total lunar eclipse will occur with the blue moon, or second full moon of the month, which—like the one visible on New Year's Day—will also be a supermoon. Got all that? When the moon is at or near the closest point to Earth in its orbit (aka, a supermoon), it appears 14% bigger and 30% brighter than full moons that occur at the farthest point in the moon's orbit, though the moon will lose brightness as it enters Earth's shadow, according to NASA. Because of the way Earth's atmosphere bends light, the eclipsed moon will take on a reddish hue, something often referred to as a blood moon, making this rare celestial event "a super blue blood moon eclipse," according to the Miami Herald. The next blue moon eclipse won't occur until 2028. The eclipse will last for 3.5 hours, with the total eclipse stretching for 77 minutes, reports Sky & Telescope. Those along the Pacific Rim from Alaska and northwestern Canada to central and eastern Asia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Australia will get the best view of totality during the middle of the night. However, partial phases of the eclipse should be visible under a clear sky in central North America, western Asia, India, the Middle East and eastern Europe, per Space.com. North American viewers should look up as the moon sets on the morning of Jan. 31, while those on the opposite side of the world should see a partial eclipse as the moon rises. Not in an ideal viewing area? The Virtual Telescope plans to livestream the total eclipse from Australia, which you can watch here, per Quartz. (Bogus glasses damaged a solar eclipse viewer's eyes.)


Write a summary based on this article:

Hillary Clinton joins the race for president today. If you believe the leaks from her staff, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t, she’ll do it in a video released at noon as she herself flies high above the nation in a chartered plane. She and her top advisors, all smart people, must think it’s a good idea. It doesn’t feel like one.

 For months Clinton has run a front-porch campaign -- if by porch you mean Boo Radley’s. Getting her outdoors is hard enough; when she does get out it’s often to give paid speeches to people who look just like her: educated, prosperous and privileged. Needing desperately to connect with the broader public, she opts for the virtual reality of a pre-taped video delivered via social media. Go figure.

 Her leakers say she’ll head out on a listening tour like the one that kicked off her first Senate race. They say listening to real people talk about real stuff will make her seem more real. This too may be a good idea, but it made more sense when she was a rookie candidate seeking a lesser office in a state she barely knew. Running for president is different. So are the times. Voters are more desperate now, and in a far worse mood. If you invite their questions, you’d better have some answers. I’ll return to this point shortly.

 Her leakers say she’ll avoid big events, rallies, stadiums, that sort of thing. This is about 2008, when she and her tone-deaf team seemed to be planning a coronation. This time they say she doesn’t want to come off as quite so presumptuous. Yet next week she keynotes a ‘Global Women’s Summit’ cohosted by Tina Brown and the New York Times, at which “world leaders, industry icons, movie stars and CEOs convene with artists, rebels, peacemakers and activists to tell their stories and share their plans of action.” Orchestra seats go for $300.

 Clinton personifies the meritocracy that to an angry middle class looks increasingly like just another privileged caste. It’s the anger captured best by the old ‘Die Yuppie Scum’ posters and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s on the rise. Republicans love to paint Democrats as elitists. It’s how the first two Bushes took out Dukakis, Gore and Kerry -- and how Jeb plans to take out Hillary. When she says she and Bill were broke when they left the White House; when she sets her own email rules and says it was only for her own convenience; when she hangs out with the Davos, Wall Street or Hollywood crowds, she makes herself a more inviting target.

 During its long ramp-up, Democrats searched for signs that this Clinton campaign would be better than the last, a seething cauldron of rivalries and resentments run by D.C. consultants who made their real livings from corporate clients. Things do look better at the top. The chief of staff is John Podesta, a man whose core competency is competency. Pollster Joel Benenson is a huge step up from the fiercely anti-populist Mark Penn.

 Still, the leaks are a bad sign. All campaigns fall prey to them and it’s sometimes a good thing for the First Amendment that they do. All White House staffs leak to settle scores or advance agendas and careers. Bill Clinton’s White House added a new wrinkle -- leaks that elevated the leaker at Clinton’s expense. Often the leaker wanted only to prove his insider status and savvy; the result was to frame everything Clinton did as political even before he did it. Every modern president polled as much as Clinton but none was so scorned for it. Leakers had a lot to do with that.

 All political reportage is full of insider tales about how every link of sausage is made. When House Democrats resumed their push for a minimum wage hike, staff framed the initiative not as sound policy but as clever politics. Even if authorized, nearly all such leaks harm the principle. On Friday, Clinton’s campaign let slip its aim to raise $2.5 billion; maybe that's not the best way to say hello to a struggling middle class. Someone gabbed about the message of Hillary’s planned sit downs with average families, a sure fire way to make the families look and feel like props -- and to make the whole, hollow exercise look and feel like a hollow exercise.

 There are three problems that go far deeper than Hillary’s image or her campaign’s operations. Each is endemic to our current politics; all are so deeply connected as to be inseparable. You already know them. The first is how they raise their money. The second is how they craft their message. The third pertains to policy.

 To get the money they think they need candidates who crook the knee to moneyed interests. They spend vast sums on polls, focus groups and data mining to find out what messages to send and to whom, and vaster sums to send them. The need to serve their donors keeps them from solving real problems. With so little to show for their service, they must rely even more on paid propaganda. The emptier their ads, the more of them they need.

 The first thing to know about this system is how well it works for Republicans, most of whom would back the status quo with or without the money. Since they can’t afford to be too honest about policy anyway, consultants’ metaphors and themes suit them fine, as do the strict limitations of texts, tweets and ads.

 The opposite is true for Democrats. When they truckle to the status quo, they break sacred vows. Their base feels most betrayed ,but everyone notices and no one likes what they see. Convinced by their consultants that politics is all about metaphors and emotion, they treat issues as landmines and do everything possible to avoid stepping on one. They skip real debates to pursue what Obama consigliere David Axelrod calls ‘the politics of biography.’ Trading real reform for public policy vaporware, they lose all sense of purpose -- and eventually stop making sense.

 On Friday, Clinton’s campaign began the quick, quiet buildup to her Sunday announcement by placing a new epilogue to her last memoir in the Huffington Post. It’s mostly about how being a grandmother gives her new energy and insight. At the end of the piece she says it also inspires her to work hard so every child has as good a chance in life as her new granddaughter has. Her recent speeches, even those her leakers tout as campaign previews, say little more than that.

 Barring a Jeremiah Wright-level crisis, a presidential candidate gets just two or three chances to make her case to a big audience. Her announcement is often her best shot. That Hillary passed on hers is unsettling. If she thinks she doesn’t have to make her case real soon she’s wrong. If she thinks she can get by on the sort of mush Democratic consultants push on clients she’s finished. On Thursday the Q poll released three surveys. In two states, she now trails Rand Paul. In all three a plurality or majority said she is ‘not honest or trustworthy.’ You can bet the leak about her $2.5 billion campaign will push those negatives up a notch.

 Clinton seems as disconnected from the public mood now as she did in 2008. I think it’s a crisis. If she doesn’t right the ship it will be a disaster. In politics it’s always later than you think. Advisors who told her voters would forget the email scandals probably say this too will pass. If so, she should fire them.

 Leaders as progressive as Howard Dean and Barney Frank urge Democrats to circle the wagons and spare the party the bloodshed of a real contest, but this party needs to get its blood moving. Clinton needs a real challenge and a real debate, not just a sparring partner; not some palooka to dance her around the ring for a couple of rounds, but a real fighter. She needs the debate. We all do. But who will bring it?

 Underdogs always need to get an early start, so it’s surprising that Clinton beat all of her prospective primary opponents into the race. Some seem to be auditioning for the second spot on her ticket. Others may not make the race. If no champion emerges, progressives must mount their own debate and relearn some of the skills they applied so successfully back in the days before everybody had a PAC.

 The Democrats' third problem is policy. They don’t really have clear policies to deal with our biggest problems. It’s why Hillary won’t have the answers those Iowa families seek and why so few Democrats do. It’s why we need a real debate. It is Clinton’s misfortune to find herself master of a dying system.

 If she raises all that money it will ruin her. Fundraising nearly ruined her husband in 1996. He didn’t need all the money he raised then and God knows she doesn’t need all the money she wants to raise now. Even if raising the money doesn’t land her in hot water, if she spends it the way most Democrats do, that will ruin her.

 Like Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, this election is about the economy. But this one’s about how to reform the economy, not just jumpstart it. Our political system isn’t set up to debate whether or not our economic system needs real reform. It will take a very different kind of politics, and leader, to spark that debate. We’ll soon know whether anyone is ready, willing and able to fight.

 Bill Curry Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism. MORE FROM Bill Curry • FOLLOW BillCurryct Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism.

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 in your inbox every day Sign up for our free newsletter • • • ||||| There’s already plenty of bad punditry regarding the chances of Hillary Clinton — who officially announced her candidacy on Sunday — to become the 45th president. You can find Democrats boasting about their “blue wall” in the Electoral College and how hard this will make it for any Republican to win. Or Republicans warning that the Democratic Party rarely wins three elections in a row.

 Most of this analysis is flimsy. So is the commentary about the ups-and-downs in early swing state polls. And when you see some pundit declaring a minor misstep to be a “game changer,” find someone else to follow on Twitter.

 The truth is that a general election win by Clinton — she’s very likely to become the Democratic nominee — is roughly a 50/50 proposition. And we’re not likely to learn a lot over the rest of 2015 to change that. Here’s why:

 Incumbency and Obama’s Approval Rating. Start with the fact that there’s no incumbent president running. There actually haven’t been a lot of cases that precisely meet the circumstances voters will face next year: Barack Obama, assuming he serves out the rest of his term, will become just the fifth president limited by the 22nd Amendment from seeking an additional term in office. Still, the evidence we have from presidential elections and from other contexts like gubernatorial elections is that these cases default to being toss-ups.

 Clinton’s chances will be affected by Obama’s popularity as he exits office. The relationship between the popularity of the previous president and the performance of the new nominee from his party isn’t perfect — Al Gore (narrowly) lost in 2000 despite Bill Clinton’s popularity, for example — but it certainly matters some, especially given that Clinton served in Obama’s cabinet.

 However, Obama currently has an approval rating of about 45 percent, and a favorability rating of 48 percent — about average, in other words. If those numbers decline into the low 40s or climb into the 50s, they could matter more, producing either a “hangover effect” or “halo effect” for Clinton. But don’t bet on this: Obama’s approval ratings have been extraordinarily stubborn for most of his presidency, rarely deviating much from the mid-40s.

 The Economy. I’d warn against simplistic economic “fundamentalism,” the notion that the economy is pretty much the only thing that matters. We’ll save the technical discussion for later, but because of a problem known as overfitting, statistical models that claim to make remarkably precise predictions about election outcomes from economic variables alone (without looking at polls) have a mediocre track record.

 Still, the economy will matter a lot to voters, and a better economy will help Clinton, the candidate from the incumbent party. As Byron York points out, you should be wary of claims that 2016 will be a “foreign policy election.”

 Like Obama’s approval ratings, however, the performance of the American economy has been about average recently. GDP grew by 2.4 percent in 2014, adjusted for inflation, close to the historical average. Furthermore, we know relatively little about what economic growth will look like a year from now, when the general election campaign heats up. Historically, economists have shown almost no ability to predict the rate of economic growth more than six months in advance.

 The Electoral College And The “Emerging Democratic Majority.” What about that “blue wall” — the supposed advantage that Democrats hold in the Electoral College?

 Mostly, the “blue wall” was the effect of Obama’s success in 2008 and 2012, not the cause of it. If the economy had collapsed in the summer of 2012, Obama would probably have lost the election, and most of those blue states would have turned red.

 It’s true that in both elections, the “tipping-point state” (in both years it was Colorado) was slightly more Democratic than the country as a whole. That implies Obama would have won if the popular vote had been very close. But it would have had to be very close indeed — within a percentage point or two.

 That advantage is small enough that it might have been the result of circumstances peculiar to Obama and his campaign. If Clinton has an ever-so-slightly different coalition — say more working-class whites vote for her but fewer African-Americans — this small advantage could evaporate or reverse itself. (The Electoral College favored Republicans as recently as 2000, after all.) The same might be true if she isn’t as effective as Obama at mobilizing voters in swing states.

 Another theory — the so-called “Emerging Democratic Majority” — holds that demographic trends favor the Democratic Party. We’ll have a lot more to say about this theory between now and next November, but it’s probably dubious too. As Sean Trende has pointed out, it relies on a selective reading of the evidence — emphasizing 2012, 2008 and 2006 but ignoring 2014, 2010, and 2004. Perhaps more important, predictions made on the premise of “emerging” majorities have a miserable track record: Republicans were bragging about their “permanent” majority in 2004, for instance, only to get their butts kicked in 2006 and 2008.

 Clinton and the Republican Candidates. The factors I’ve described so far are sometimes referred to as the “fundamentals” — those things that matter regardless of the candidates and their campaigns. The closer these basic factors are, the more difference the candidates could make.

 Nonetheless, the candidates matter less in U.S. presidential elections than in just about any other type of electoral contest. The reason is that the arduous, 50-state nomination process (and the “invisible primary” before it) screens out most candidates who would be huge liabilities to their party. An underqualified or unvetted or politically extreme or profoundly unpopular candidate might win one primary or caucus, but voters and the political parties will move to stop him in his tracks after that, as Republicans did to Newt Gingrich in 2012.

 Consider the three measurable factors that our U.S. Senate model uses to evaluate candidates. One of them is their qualifications on a 4-point scale as measured by their highest elected office, where the highest rating goes to those candidates previously elected as governors or senators. Almost all presidential candidates — including Hillary Clinton and the viable Republican candidates this cycle — rate as extremely well qualified by that standard.

 Another factor is fundraising, which is important unto itself, but also as a proxy for a candidate’s organizational strength. We’re not breaking any news here, but Clinton and the Republican nominee are going to raise oodles of money — probably in excess of $1 billion each, beyond what Obama and Mitt Romney did in 2012. That’s well past the point of diminishing returns. The candidates may struggle to make good use of all the money they’ve raised, in fact, and if one brings in 10 or 20 percent more than the other, it’s not likely to matter very much at the margin.

 The third factor is a candidate’s ideology as measured on a left-right scale. “Extreme” candidates (like Barry Goldwater) suffer an electoral penalty, while moderate ones (like Dwight Eisenhower) usually perform well.

 But nominees like Goldwater (or George McGovern) are rare. So are those like Eisenhower, for that matter. Usually a party nominates a candidate closer to the median of its voters and elected officials.

 That’s part of why Clinton is such a safe bet to be the Democratic nominee. Her political positions are essentially those of a “generic Democrat.” She’s neither a true centrist, nor extremely far to the left, so she’s not especially vulnerable to a challenge from either flank of her party.

 Republicans have a choice between more moderate and more conservative candidates. Jeb Bush’s positions might be just moderate enough to give Republicans a slight advantage next November, other factors held constant, while Scott Walker’s might be conservative enough that they could harm Republicans.

 But the positions of the Republican candidates are likely to converge toward one another. Bush, in the primaries, will seek to prove his conservative credentials, while Walker, should he become the frontrunner after the first few primaries and caucuses, will work to reassure GOP elites that he’s an “electable” alternative and not the next Goldwater. By next November, the difference might boil down to the equivalent of couple of percentage points on the general-election ballot. It could matter in an a close election, but not one where the fundamentals have shifted strongly to one party by then.

 Finally we can look at what the polls say right now. If you’re going to do this, you should take the polls with whole tablespoons full of salt. And it’s probably best to look at the favorability ratings for each candidate rather than head-to-head polls, since favorability polls allow voters to say they don’t know enough about the candidates to have formulated an opinion. (Head-to-head polls taken this far out from the election will tend to favor candidates like Clinton with strong name recognition, by contrast.)

 In the chart below, I’ve compiled favorability rating averages for each candidate based on polls conducted since Jan. 1. The chart plots the candidates in two dimensions: the vertical axis indicates how popular the candidate is (how much the candidate’s favorable rating exceeds his or her unfavorable rating) while the horizontal axis plots how well-known the candidate is.

 Hillary Clinton is extremely well-known, but her favorability ratings are now only break-even: 46 percent favorable and 45 percent unfavorable. These are nearly identical to President Obama’s ratings, which are 48 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable.

 Clinton’s ratings are down sharply from her tenure as Secretary of State. However, as we’ve been warning Democrats for a long time, a lot of this was predictable. Clinton’s numbers have often been about break-even when she’s been a highly partisan figure — during the early stages of the 2008 campaign, for example — and better only when she’s been above the fray of day-to-day partisan politics.

 Break-even favorability ratings don’t look so bad, however, when compared to some of the alternatives. Vice President Biden’s are net-negative, for instance. On the Republican side, Walker and Marco Rubio aren’t all that well-known yet, but their ratings are also about break-even. Chris Christie’s are terrible (28 percent favorable, 46 percent unfavorable). Jeb Bush’s are quite poor too. His unfavorable rating is already as high as Clinton’s, 45 percent, but his favorable rating is just 31 percent.

 Clinton is so well-known, in fact, that it’s almost as if voters are dispensing with all the formalities and evaluating her as they might when she’s on the ballot next November. About half of them would like to see her become president and about half of them wouldn’t. Get ready for an extremely competitive election.

 Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect Clinton’s announcement of her candidacy this afternoon. ||||| Hillary Clinton, probably your 45th president. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

 Unless the economy goes into a recession over the next year and a half, Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election. The United States has polarized into stable voting blocs, and the Democratic bloc is a bit larger and growing at a faster rate.

 Of course, not everybody who follows politics professionally believes this. Many pundits feel the Democrats’ advantage in presidential elections has disappeared, or never existed. “The 2016 campaign is starting on level ground,” argues David Brooks, echoing a similar analysis by John Judis. But the evidence for this is quite slim, and a closer look suggests instead that something serious would have to change in order to prevent a Clinton victory. Here are the basic reasons why Clinton should be considered a presumptive favorite:

 1. The Emerging Democratic Majority is real. The major disagreement over whether there is an “Emerging Democratic Majority” — the thesis that argues that Democrats have built a presidential majority that could only be defeated under unfavorable conditions — centers on an interpretive disagreement over the 2014 elections. Proponents of this theory dismiss the midterm elections as a problem of districting and turnout; Democrats have trouble rousing their disproportionately young, poor supporters to the polls in a non-presidential year, and the tilted House and Senate map further compounded the GOP advantage.

 Skeptics of the theory instead believe that the 2014 midterms were, as Judis put it, “not an isolated event but rather the latest manifestation of a resurgent Republican coalition.” Voters, they argue, are moving toward the Republican Party, and may continue to do so even during the next presidential election.

 It has been difficult to mediate between the two theories, since the outcome at the polls supports the theory of both the proponents and the skeptics of the Emerging Democratic Majority theory equally well.

 A Pew survey released this week gives us the best answer. Pew is the gold standard of political polling, using massive surveys, with high numbers of respondents and very low margins of error. Pew’s survey shows pretty clearly that there was not a major change in public opinion from the time of Obama’s reelection through the 2014 midterms:

 Of course, Pew is not surveying actual voters. It’s surveying all adults. But that is the point. What changed between 2012 and 2014 was not public opinion, but who showed up to vote.

 2. No, youngsters are not turning Republican. The Emerging Democratic Majority thesis places a lot of weight on cohort replacement: Republicans fare best with the oldest voters, and Democrats with the youngest, so every new election cycle incrementally tilts the electoral playing field toward the Democrats.

 Skeptics have pushed back by claiming that the youngest voters — the ones entering their voting years since 2008 — are turning back toward the Republican Party. Their main evidence has been pollings of millennial voters by the Harvard Institute of Politics. Conservatives have given these results a great deal of attention — it suggests that the youngest voters, disillusioned by the Obama administration, have abandoned the liberal tendencies of their older brothers and sisters. But Harvard’s polling has not held up well; it predicted millennial voters would support a Republican Congress in 2014, which turned out to be extremely inaccurate.

 Pew’s more recent survey combs through the data and throws more cold water on the “younger millennials” thesis. As Nate Cohn notices, younger millennials lean Democratic at nearly the same rate as older ones:

 (Cohn does note that younger nonwhite millennials seem less Democratic than older nonwhite millennials, but young whites are far more Democratic than older ones, making the trade somewhat of a wash.)

 3. Clinton isn’t that unpopular. A more recent line of thought has settled on Clinton’s limits as a candidate. It is probably true that she lacks Obama’s talents as a communicator and a campaign organizer. A recent Quinnipiac poll showing her struggling in Iowa and Colorado attracted wide media attention and seemed to confirm that the email scandal has tarnished Clinton’s national image.

 It is true that Clinton has, inevitably, lost much of the popularity she won when she was serving as secretary of State and largely removed from partisan politics. Nonpartisan figures can attract broad support, while people engaged in political fights tend to revert toward the mean. Clinton’s support is, as it has been through most of her career, closely divided:

 On the other hand, Republicans are much less popular. Jeb Bush, who is probably the best known of the Republican contenders, has much worse favorable ratings:

 So there is little reason to think Clinton’s personal unpopularity will hold her back in a race against a Republican who is likely to have no more personal appeal, and possibly a lot less.

 4. Obama is trending up. One major question looming over the next election is whether the public feels satisfied with the Democrats’ policy direction or wants to give Republicans a chance. Importantly, President Obama’s job approval ratings have recovered since the midterm elections, when his net approval stood at minus ten, to about minus three. His approval ratings on handling the economy have risen even more sharply. Approval of Obama’s economic job performance has actually reached parity with disapproval for the first time since 2009:

 If the economy continues to expand between now and the 2016 election, Obama’s approval rating will probably rise a little higher. In the modern political world, strong popularity is not necessary to win; Obama won reelection with approval ratings below 50 percent. Voters make comparative choices, and all a candidate needs is to be superior to the alternative. But the economy is currently on a course, barring a slowdown, to leave the incumbent party in a stronger position.

 5. Is it time for a change? The one remaining ground for Republican optimism is the possibility that voters will decide three straight presidential terms for the Democratic Party is too much. Many political scientists (such as Alan Abramowitz) believe this exhaustion factor is real; after a second term, voters grow increasingly restless with the in-party and are more likely to decide it’s time for a change. If this is true, Clinton may face headwinds even in an otherwise favorable landscape.

 It may well be true. But there are reasons to doubt it. One reason is that models that detect voter impatience are based on a very small number of data points. Since World War II, there have been eight presidential elections in which the incumbent party has held office for two terms or more. It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions from such a limited number of events.

 A second reason is that nearly all of those elections took place in a very different kind of party system. The 20th century was a time of loose-knit parties with a great deal of ideological overlap. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, which created large constituencies to swing back and forth. Democrats won more than 60 percent of the vote in the 1964 election, and then Republicans did the same eight years later. That made sense in a world where the two parties seemed to share a lot of common assumptions. Voters who supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964 weren’t crazy to switch to Richard Nixon in 1972; Nixon had established the Environmental Protection Agency and supported universal health care and a basic income.

 The polarized electorate of today is a different place, and voters may not act the same way as they used to. There are fewer swing voters, and therefore conditions like a third straight term, or even a severe recession, may not budge as many of them from their normal partisan habits. We don’t know how deeply the partisan split has hardened into place; each party seems to be able to count on the support of at least 45 percent of the voters regardless of what is happening in the world.

 6. There’s no alternative. All of the above brings us back to the central challenge facing Clinton. She cannot promise her supporters a dramatic change or new possibilities; she is personally too familiar, and the near certainty of at least one Republican-controlled chamber of Congress suggests continued legislative stalemate. Her worry is that ennui sets in among the base and yields a small electorate more like the kind that shows up at the midterms, which is an electorate Republicans can win.

 The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Even if the relatively sober Jeb Bush wins the nomination, he will have to accommodate himself to his party’s barking-mad consensus. She is non-crazy America’s choice by default. And it is not necessarily an exciting choice, but it is an easy one, and a proposition behind which she will probably command a majority. |||||

– New York magazine doesn't beat around the bush: "Unless the economy goes into a recession over the next year and a half, Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election." But not everyone agrees. A sampling of what the pundits are saying: In New York, Jonathan Chait argues that "the United States has polarized into stable voting blocs, and the Democratic bloc is a bit larger and growing at a faster rate." That should put Clinton in the White House, though it's not guaranteed. "She cannot promise her supporters a dramatic change or new possibilities," Chait notes. "Her worry is that ennui sets in among the base and yields a small electorate more like the kind that shows up at the midterms, which is an electorate Republicans can win." But at Salon, a former aide for Bill Clinton is concerned about his wife's strategy so far. "Republicans love to paint Democrats as elitists. It’s how the first two Bushes took out Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry—and how Jeb plans to take out Hillary," Bill Curry writes. And Clinton isn't helping herself. "When she says she and Bill were broke when they left the White House; when she sets her own email rules and says it was only for her own convenience; when she hangs out with the Davos, Wall Street, or Hollywood crowds, she makes herself a more inviting target." Meanwhile, statistician Nate Silver acknowledges that Clinton is "very likely to become the Democratic nominee." As for the general election, he writes at FiveThirtyEight, it could go either way. Silver questions the so-called "Emerging Democratic Majority" that plays a role in Chait's thinking. Right now, Clinton's favorability ratings are "break-even," and she's "so well-known … that it’s almost as if voters are dispensing with all the formalities and evaluating her as they might when she’s on the ballot next November. About half of them would like to see her become president and about half of them wouldn’t. Get ready for an extremely competitive election." While the pundits debate, Clinton is heading out on the trail in a van named "Scooby."


– Students at MIT and Boston University are being investigated as possible accomplices in the massive leak of military documents posted on the Wikileaks site, according to officials. The FBI was apparently sicced on the schools in part by blogger Adrian Lamo. He did not reveal the students' names because he said at least one of them threatened his life, reports CNN. The students told Lamo they gave encryption software to soldier Bradley Manning and taught the Army private how to use it to obtain the secret documents he's suspected of providing to Wikileaks, Lamo claims. Lamo, who was working with a Wired reporter at the time, turned Manning into the feds after convincing the soldier to give him an interview. A "civilian" in the Boston area contacted by the New York Times said Army investigators quizzed him about his relationship with Manning, and offered him money to spy on Wikileaks. An MIT graduate told the Boston Globe he exchanged emails with Manning, but denied doing anything illegal. In a related development, Wikileaks editor Jacob Applebaum was detained and interrogated by customs officials and FBI agents over the weekend after he returned to the US from Europe, reports the Independent.

Expand this summary.

Lamo said he doubts Manning had the technical savvy to copy all the data on his own. He thinks Manning received help from hackers in the area who provided him with encryption software to send the classified information to WikiLeaks, and who helped him ensure those leaks were featured prominently on the website.

 Adrian Lamo, a former computer hacker who traded instant messages with Manning and later turned him in to authorities, said he knew of five people whom Army officials have interviewed over the past few months in the Boston area, including other MIT students and a student who recently left Boston University to attend Brandeis.

 “These are people that knew him and might know things about what he may have done,’’ the Pentagon official said.

 Another Pentagon official familiar with the investigation, who was also not authorized to speak publicly about the case, said law enforcement officials do not yet consider the individuals accomplices.

 A senior defense official confirmed yesterday that Army investigators, who are working with the FBI, interviewed several students in the Boston area with apparent ties to Manning. Officials at both the FBI and MIT declined to comment.

 The former student said he knows people who work for WikiLeaks, but he said he has never met or corresponded with Julian Assange, the website’s founder. “It’s impossible to be in this community and not know people in WikiLeaks,’’ he said, refer ring to computer hackers. The former student says his specialty is the study of secure information systems and how to penetrate them.

 “I did not help him or know about it before it happened,’’ he said.

 “I categorically deny that I had any role in helping Manning leak anything,’’ the former student said in a phone interview. He said he met Manning at MIT in January, when the private was on leave, and later exchanged as many as 10 e-mails with him about security issues.

 The Army arrested Manning in May and later charged him with providing a classified video of a US helicopter attack and more than 150,000 classified diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Military officials have also identified him as the chief suspect in last month’s disclosure of more than 90,000 classified documents from the Afghan war to the website.

 The 23-year-old graduate, who spoke on condition that his name not be published, said investigators from the US Army Criminal Investigations Division interviewed him several months ago to find out whether he or others in the local computer hacker community helped the primary suspect in the leaks, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.

 A recent MIT graduate acknowledged yesterday that he met and exchanged multiple e-mails with the Army private accused of providing thousands of classified war records to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, but he adamantly denied any role in the massive intelligence leak.

 “Manning’s a bright, young man, but he didn’t have the technical or political expertise to pull this off,’’ Lamo said in a telephone interview. “He had to depend on people state-side.’’

 Lamo said those in the area who he says helped Manning all work in the information security area, oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have ties to WikiLeaks. “For Manning to have almost a half-dozen friends with ties to WikiLeaks is a matter that has not escaped authorities,’’ he said. “There’s a whole lot of evidence pointing to the fact that it would have been very hard for him to act alone.’’

 Lamo, 29, who is originally from Boston, was arrested in 2003 and later convicted of hacking into the computer system of The New York Times. He said he was acquainted with those the Army investigators interviewed, but he declined to disclose their names publicly.

 “To a man, I think it’s safe to say that they would not be unhappy if the war was cast in a bad light,’’ he said.

 Lamo said he thinks the group in Boston provided Manning with software that allowed him to download thousands of documents without alerting network monitors at the Defense Department. He added that Manning had one of his associates in Boston physically provide WikiLeaks with documents he downloaded on CDs.

 “At least one of those acquaintances misled me and defense investigators as to how well he knew some of the people with ties to WikiLeaks,’’ said Lamo, who was criticized last month by WikiLeaks, along with a Wired News reporter, Kevin Poulsen, who broke the story about Private Manning’s arrest, as “notorious felons, informers, and manipulators.’’

 Officials at WikiLeaks did not return calls for comment.

 Lamo said he thinks Manning was motivated by ideology and by his access to Assange. “He was opposed to what he saw happening on the ground in Iraq and, and I think WikiLeaks played on his ego. He had access to a special server that allowed his leaks jumped to the top of the queue. I think he was made to feel special.’’

 For his part, the former MIT student said he thinks Manning was sufficiently intelligent to do it all by himself.

 He said that when they met at MIT last winter, Manning spoke about his work as an intelligence analyst and was “nimble’’ about what he could and could not disclose.

 “He managed to make his points very well, without compromising anything he wasn’t supposed to be talking about,’’ the former student said. “The fact that he ended up leaking this information is really ironic. He seemed quite sharp and quite capable of doing it on his own.’’

 When asked whether there might be additional secret documents in Boston, the former student said he doubts it.

 “If anyone had anything remotely incriminating,’’ he said, “I think they would be smart enough to take it outside and burn it.’’

 Bryan Bender, Shelley Murphy, and Tracy Jan of the Globe staff contributed to this report. David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

 © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company. ||||| (CNN) -- Adrian Lamo, the former computer hacker who tipped off federal authorities to WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning, says two men in the Boston area have told Lamo in phone conversations that they assisted Manning.

 Lamo said both men attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he refused to identify them because, he said, at least one of them has threatened him. One of these men allegedly told Lamo they gave encryption software to Manning and taught the Army private how to use it, Lamo said.

 Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, is being held in solitary confinement at a Virginia detention facility. He is charged with leaking an airstrike video that the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published in April, and Pentagon officials say he is the prime suspect in last week's disclosure of thousands of field reports from the war in Afghanistan to the site.

 Lamo claimed both men are working for WikiLeaks. Also, both men are Facebook friends with Lamo and Manning, and at least one continues to post Facebook messages on Lamo's wall, the former hacker said.

 Asked for comment about Lamo's allegation that men working for WikiLeaks assisted Manning, WikiLeaks responded in an e-mail: "As a matter of policy, we do not discuss any matters to do with allegations relating to the identity of sources."

 The New York Times reported Saturday that Army investigators looking into the document leak have expanded their inquiry to include friends and associates who may have helped Manning. Specifically, the Times spoke to two civilians interviewed in recent weeks by the Army's criminal division, who said that investigators apparently believed that the friends, who include students from MIT and Boston University, might have connections to WikiLeaks. The civilians, who the Times did not name, told the newspaper they had no connection to WikiLeaks.

 The Boston Globe interviewed a recent MIT graduate who it said acknowledged Saturday that he met Manning in January and exchanged as many as 10 e-mails with him about security issues. But the individual "adamantly" denied any role in the document leak, the Globe reported. The Globe also reported that this MIT graduate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was interviewed several months ago by Army investigators to find out whether he or "others in the local computer hacker community" helped Manning.

 A spokeswoman for MIT, Patti Richards, told CNN: "We are monitoring the situation closely, but are not commenting at this time."

 CNN has previously reported that the FBI is assisting the Defense Department in the WikiLeaks investigation of Manning. One FBI official told CNN the bureau is involved in the investigation of potential civilian co-conspirators who may have played a role in the leaking of the classified material.

 Attempts to reach an attorney for Manning have so far been unsuccessful.

 CNN's Ashley Fantz, Ashley Vaughan and Shirley Hung contributed to this report. ||||| A senior volunteer for Wikileaks in the US has been detained, questioned and had his phones seized when he returned to the country from Europe, as the FBI steps up its investigation into the leak of thousands of Afghanistan war secrets to the whistleblower website.

 Jacob Appelbaum, who has stood in for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange since he was advised not to travel to the US, spent three hours at a New York airport while customs officers photocopied receipts and searched his laptop, and he was again approached and questioned by FBI officers at a computer hackers conference in Las Vegas on Saturday.

 Two officers approached Mr Appelbaum after he had given a talk on how to subvert Chinese government internet surveillance at the annual DefCon conference. He declined to talk to them.

 The internet security researcher had returned to the US for the conference from the Netherlands on Thursday when he was detained. Border officials quizzed him on the whereabouts of Mr Assange, on his attitudes to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and on the philosophy behind Wikileaks.

 Mr Assange has not been to the US since Wikileaks published a secret video showing US military personnel in Iraq celebrating a helicopter attack in which 12 civilians were killed, including Reuters journalists. The controversy has escalated further since the site additionally published 90,000 field reports and other military documents from the war in Afghanistan, including some that contained the names of Afghan informants.

 Mr Appelbaum, who works with the Tor project, which helps internet users to obscure their identity online, has long been a senior spokesman for Wikileaks in the US. Last month he stood in for Mr Assange at a New York computer conference and used the event to ask for funding and volunteers. Fearing the authorities, instead of returning to the stage as promised after the helicopter video played, he left by a side entrance and used a decoy in a similar hooded top to walk out of the front.

 Since the seizure of his electronic equipment last week, Mr Appelbaum's voicemail now says "this telephone number is no longer an appropriate way to reach me".

 Talking to The Independent at DefCon at the weekend, he angrily rejected comments from the US joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who said of Wikileaks and its volunteers last week that "they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family" because insurgents could use information in the documents to launch reprisals.

 "When you have been waging war for 10 years, who are you to say that?" Mr Appelbaum said. "What are you thinking, writing these people's names down? And what are you doing in concrete terms to protect these people?"

 Both the FBI and the US military believe that the documents came from the same source as the helicopter video, and they have already charged a 22-year-old intelligence analyst working in Iraq, Bradley Manning, with that leak. Now they are examining Mr Manning's links with the hacker community.

 At DefCon, Mr Appelbaum refused to confirm or comment on his detention but defended Wikileaks' commitment to exposing information that governments around the world want suppressed. "All governments are on a continuum of tyranny," he said. "In the US, a cop with a gun can commit the most heinous crime and be given the benefit of the doubt. In the US, we don't have censorship but we do have collaborating news organisations." |||||