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Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Kinshasa, pictured in 1955, was at the centre of the pandemic, scientists say

 The origin of the Aids pandemic has been traced to the 1920s in the city of Kinshasa, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, scientists say.

 An international team of scientists say a "perfect storm" of population growth, sex and railways allowed HIV to spread.

 A feat of viral archaeology was used to find the pandemic's origin, the team report in the journal Science.

 They used archived samples of HIV's genetic code to trace its source, with evidence pointing to 1920s Kinshasa.

 Their report says a roaring sex trade, rapid population growth and unsterilised needles used in health clinics probably spread the virus.

 Meanwhile Belgium-backed railways had one million people flowing through the city each year, taking the virus to neighbouring regions.

 Experts said it was a fascinating insight into the start of the pandemic.

 HIV came to global attention in the 1980s and has infected nearly 75 million people.

 It has a much longer history in Africa, but where the pandemic started has remained the source of considerable debate.

 Family affair

 A team at the University of Oxford and the University of Leuven, in Belgium, tried to reconstruct HIV's "family tree" and find out where its oldest ancestors came from.

 The research group analysed mutations in HIV's genetic code.

 "You can see the footprints of history in today's genomes, it has left a record, a mutation mark in the HIV genome that can't be eradicated," Prof Oliver Pybus from the University of Oxford told the BBC.

 By reading those mutational marks, the research team rebuilt the family tree and traced its roots.

 Image copyright SPL

 HIV is a mutated version of a chimpanzee virus, known as simian immunodeficiency virus, which probably made the species-jump through contact with infected blood while handling bush meat.

 The virus made the jump on multiple occasions. One event led to HIV-1 subgroup O which affects tens of thousands in Cameroon.

 Yet only one cross-species jump, HIV-1 subgroup M, went on to infect millions of people across every country in the world.

 The answer to why this happened lies in the era of black and white film and the tail-end of the European empires.

 In the 1920s, Kinshasa (called Leopoldville until 1966) was part of the Belgian Congo.

 Prof Oliver Pybus said: "It was a very large and very rapidly growing area and colonial medical records show there was a high incidence of various sexually transmitted diseases."

 Sex and railways

 Large numbers of male labourers were drawn to the city, distorting the gender balance until men outnumbered women two to one, eventually leading to a roaring sex trade.

 Prof Pybus added: "There are two aspects of infrastructure that could have helped.

 "Public health campaigns to treat people for various infectious diseases with injections seem a plausible route [for spreading the virus].

 "The second really interesting aspect is the transport networks that enabled people to move round a huge country."

 Around one million people were using Kinshasa's railways by the end of the 1940s.

 The virus spread, with neighbouring Brazzaville and the mining province, Katanga, rapidly hit.

 Those "perfect storm" conditions lasted just a few decades in Kinshasa, but by the time they ended the virus was already starting to spread around the world.

 Image copyright SPL Image caption The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks the immune system

 Prof Jonathan Ball, from the University of Nottingham, told the BBC: "It's a fascinating insight into the early phases of the HIV-1 pandemic.

 "It's the usual suspects that are most likely to have helped the virus get a foothold in humans - travel, population increases and human practices such as unsafe healthcare interventions and prostitution.

 "Perhaps the most contentious suggestion is that the spread of the M-group viruses had more to do with the conditions being right than it had to do with these viruses being better adapted for transmission and growth in humans. I'm sure this suggestion will prompt interesting and lively debate within the field."

 Dr Andrew Freedman, a reader in infectious diseases at Cardiff University, said: "It does seem an interesting study demonstrating very elegantly how HIV spread in the Congo region long before the Aids epidemic was recognised in the early 80s.

 "It was already known that HIV in humans arose by cross species transmission from chimpanzees in that region of Africa, but this study maps in great detail the spread of the virus from Kinshasa, it was fascinating to read." ||||| A new, sophisticated analysis of hundreds of genetic sequences of HIV from different time points and locations adds fascinating insights to the origin of the AIDS epidemic. The study, which appears in this issue of Science (see p. 56), confirms earlier analyses that an HIV-infected person came to what today is Kinshasa around 1920, but it then shows for the first time how the virus went from there to two cities in the southeastern portion of the country, likely aided by the extensive rail system that then existed. The researchers also note that 13 documented cases exist of different simian viruses jumping from chimpanzees, gorillas, and monkeys into humans, but only one—known has HIV-1 group M—sparked a global epidemic. They show that group M and another strain, group O, expanded at the same rate until about 1960, but then group M nearly tripled its rate of spread. Possible reasons include public health campaigns that had contaminated needles and an increase in the number of clients of sex workers. ||||| LONDON Bustling transport networks, migrant labor and changes to the sex trade in early 20th-century Congo created a "perfect storm" that gave rise to an HIV pandemic that has now infected 75 million people worldwide, researchers said on Thursday.

 In an analysis of the genetic history of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, the scientists said the global pandemic almost certainly began its global spread in the 1920s in Kinshasa in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

 Here, a confluence of factors including urban growth, extensive railway links during Belgian colonial rule and changes in sexual behavior combined to see HIV emerge in Congo's capital and spread across the globe.

 Oliver Pybus, a professor at Oxford University's zoology department who co-led the research, said that until now most studies have taken a piecemeal approach to HIV's genetic history and looked only at certain HIV genomes in particular locations.

 "For the first time, we have analyzed all the available evidence using the latest phylogeographic techniques, which enable us to statistically estimate where a virus comes from," he said. "This means we can say with a high degree of certainty where and when the HIV pandemic originated."

 United Nations AIDS agency (UNAIDS) data show that more than 35 million people worldwide are currently infected with HIV, and some 1.5 million people died of AIDS-related illness in 2013.

 Since the HIV/AIDS pandemic began, it has killed up to 40 million people worldwide.

 The disease is spread in blood, semen and breast milk. No cure exists, but AIDS can be kept at bay for many years in people with HIV who take cocktails of antiretroviral drugs.

 Various strains of HIV are known to have been transmitted from primates and apes to humans at least 13 times in history, but only one of those transmissions - of a strain known as HIV-1 Group M - led to the current human pandemic.

 Pybus said the key questions centered on how this happened.

 "Why did most of (the HIV strains) die out, and why did some of them -- like HIV-2 -- go on to generate local epidemics in Africa, and why did only one go to become a global pandemic?" he said in a telephone interview.

 "To answer that, we needed to try to reconstruct the spread through space and time of the global pandemic strain."

 Pybus and an international team of researchers analyzed HIV-1 group M sequences from a major HIV sequence database and then combining these analyses with spatial and epidemiological data. Their study will be published in the journal "Science" on Thursday.

 Philippe Lemey, a professor at Belgium's University of Leuven who worked on the study, explained that genetic analysis had helped establish the time and place of the pandemic's origins. The team then compared that with historical data "and it became evident that the early spread of HIV-1 from Kinshasa to other population centers followed predictable patterns."

 A key factor, the analysis suggests, was the DRC's transport networks, particularly its railways, which made Kinshasa one of the best-connected of all central African cities.

 "Data from colonial archives tells us that by the end of 1940s over one million people were traveling through Kinshasa on the railways each year," said Nuno Faria of Oxford University, who also worked on the team.

 He said the genetic data showed that HIV rapidly spread across the DRC -- a country the size of Western Europe -- traveling with people along railways and waterways to reach Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in the extreme south and Kisangani in the far north between the end of the 1930s and early 1950s.

 The team's findings also suggest that along with transport, social changes such as the changing behavior of sex workers and public health initiatives against other diseases that led to the unsafe use of needles may have contributed to turning HIV into a full-blown epidemic.

 "We think it is likely that the social changes around the independence in 1960 saw the virus break out from small groups of infected people to infect the wider population and eventually the world," said Faria.

 (Reporting by Kate Kelland) ||||| A “perfect storm” of urban change that began in 1920s Kinshasa led to the catastrophic spread of HIV across Africa and into the wider world, according to scientists who used genetic sequencing and historical records to trace the origins of the pandemic.

 Though the virus probably crossed from chimpanzees to humans in southern Cameroon years earlier, HIV remained a regional infection until it entered the capital of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 From the 1920s until 1960, the pandemic HIV strain – there were others that fizzled out – spread from Kinshasa, crossed borders to other nations, and ultimately landed on distant continents. It has infected nearly 75 million people worldwide to date.

 When the virus arrived, Kinshasa was bustling. It was the largest and fastest growing city in the region with transport links reaching up and down the country. The busy Congo river curved north and east to Kisangani more than 600 miles away. The railway carried scores of workers southeast to Katanga, a mining province reliant on immigrant labour, and on to Lubumbashi more than 900 miles away.

 Records show that by the 1940s, more than a million people a year passed through Kinshasa on the railways alone. By 1960, the rate of new pandemic HIV infections outpaced the growth of the regional population, according to research published in Science.

 While boats and trains spread the virus far, other factors played their part. Records suggest Kinshasa had a relatively high proportion of men and a consequent demand for sex workers. Some doctors may have unwittingly spread the virus further, through unsterilised jabs at sexual health clinics.

 An international team of scientists led by the universities of Oxford in Britain and Leuven in Belgium reconstructed the history of the HIV pandemic using historical records and DNA samples of the virus dating back to the late 1950s. The DNA allowed them to draw up a family tree of the virus that traced its ancestry through time and space. Using statistical models they could push farther back than the 1950s and locate the origin of the pandemic in 1920s Kinshasa.

 People with HIV in central Africa at the time did not have specific symptoms that would have been written down in their medical records. The virus causes the immune system to collapse, leaving people open to all manner of infections. “For an epidemic like HIV where we’re trying to track back to before it was even discovered, genetics is the only source of information we have,” said Oliver Pybus, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and senior author on the study.

 The genetic data suggests that pandemic HIV spread rapidly through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country the size of western Europe. From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the virus spread by rail and river to Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in the south and Kisangani in the north. There the virus took hold and formed secondary reservoirs from where it spread to countries in southern and eastern Africa.

 At first, HIV was an infection confined to specific groups of people. But the virus seemed to break out into the general population and spread around the world after what was then known as the Republic of the Congo achieved independence in 1960.

 “Parts of the story can only be suggestive. Without a time machine it’s very difficult to prove causality. But we can be fairly sure we have the time and place where this happened,” Pybus said. “It seems a combination of factors in Kinshasa in the early 20th century created a perfect storm for the emergence of HIV, leading to a generalised epidemic with unstoppable momentum that unrolled across sub-Saharan Africa.”

 Different strains of HIV have almost certainly jumped from apes to humans – through hunting or handling bushmeat – scores of times throughout history. Only a dozen or so incidents have left their traces in the DNA of HIV strains around today. Some outbreaks infected hundreds of thousands of people in Africa but went no further. Only one, known as HIV-1 group M, went pandemic.

 “We all want to know how this happened, how we got here,” said Pybus. “We wanted to answer the question: why did this one turn into a pandemic?” |||||Summary:

– More than half a century before AIDS even had a name, the HIV virus was already spreading across Africa via the city now known as Kinshasa, researchers say. In the 1920s, the city was Leopoldville, capital of the Belgian Congo, and scientists say a "perfect storm" of conditions caused the pandemic to emerge, the BBC reports. The fast-growing city was full of transient male workers who visited prostitutes, researchers say. Sexually transmitted diseases were rife, and unsterilized needles at health clinics also helped spread the disease, according to a study published in the journal Science. Researchers studied HIV's genetic code as well as historical documents. The researchers note that strains of HIV have been transmitted from primates to humans at least 13 times, but only one has caused a global epidemic. They believe a key factor in the 1920s spread was the Congo's booming transport network early last century, which saw a million people travel through Kinshasa every year on the railways alone, reports Reuters. Researchers say the disease was at first confined to specific groups of people, but it started to spread into the general population and around the world after 1960, the Guardian reports. It took genetic research to track the pandemic back to its source because the disease hits the immune system, meaning victims died from any of a wide variety of infections, making the spread of HIV before it was identified hard to track through medical records, says the lead researcher, an evolutionary biologist. (HIV has infected 75 million people, but UN officials say real progress is being made and the epidemic could be over by 2030.)


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– In what Foreign Policy says could be a "startling development in naval warfare," the US Navy is looking into whether last month's crash of the USS John S. McCain, which killed 10 sailors, may have been the handiwork of hackers. Per the Washington Free Beacon, the Navy has dispatched its Cyber Command 10th Fleet to Singapore—its first time overseas—where the team will "look for and assess any anomalous activity that may exist onboard," Vice Adm. Jan Tighe said Thursday. That investigation could take months. The Navy is taking the possibility of its computers being compromised so seriously, in fact, that looking into cyberattacks will now be standard protocol after accidents, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Bill Moran told Congress last week, per USNI News. Hacking isn't, however, what investigators are looking into in the crash of the USS Fitzgerald, which ran into a container ship on June 17, killing seven sailors. In fact, no evidence of a cyberattack has emerged for the McCain crash, either—Moran says "just about every three letter agency in … DC" has looked into it. There's also the possibility the McCain wasn't the vessel hacked—it could've been the Alnic MC, the merchant ship it collided with, per Breaking Defense. The Navy simply wants to cover all its bases. What's worrisome is that both Navy ships are considered top of the line—meaning if there are problems with those two vessels, questions are now arising about the fleet's ability in general to face down a litany of possible threats in the Asia region. Tighe noted Thursday that the Navy has allotted $1.5 billion to bolster its defenses.

U.S. Navy Investigating if Destroyer Crash Was Caused by Cyberattack

 The military is examining whether compromised computer systems were responsible for one of two U.S. Navy destroyer collisions with merchant vessels that occurred in recent months, Vice Adm. Jan Tighe, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, said on Thursday.

 Naval investigators are scrambling to determine the causes of the mishaps, including whether hackers infiltrated the computer systems of the USS John S. McCain ahead of the collision on Aug. 21, Tighe said during an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

 Investigators are not, however, considering the possibility that the USS Fitzgerald collision, which took place on June 17, was the result of hacking.

 “With the McCain incident happening so close to the Fitzgerald,” questions immediately arose about whether computer manipulation could have been the cause of the crash, Tighe said. The Navy has no indication that a cyberattack was behind either of the incidents, but it is dispatching investigators to the McCain to put those questions to rest, she said.

 Tighe said the Navy plans to use the results of the McCain probe to look at cybersecurity in future investigations.

 The two collisions left a total of 17 sailors dead and the Navy humiliated. Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson ordered a temporary halt to operations after the second collision and called on the service to review safety protocols for its global fleet.

 While the idea of a cyberattack causing a collision remains purely speculative, U.S. intelligence officials have warned in recent years that this sort of digital threat could pose a major problem for the Navy’s sprawling armada. Tighe said on Thursday that the service has already set aside $1.5 billion between fiscal years 2014 and 2023 to improve defenses.

 The Fitzgerald and the McCain, both Arleigh Burke-class destroyers outfitted with a suite of advanced sensors and weapons, represent two of the most capable ships in the Navy’s arsenal. The collisions have raised troubling questions about the readiness of the American Pacific fleet at a time when it faces a number of threats in the region, from North Korean missile tests to China’s territorial claims over disputed islands.

 Early assessments of the two incidents have blamed both crew training and the growing demands of the Navy’s fleet of warships. Following the McCain collision in August, the Navy relieved the commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, citing a “loss of confidence in his ability to command.” The skipper of the Fitzgerald has also been dismissed, along with several of the ship’s officers, for losing “situational awareness” ahead of the June collision.

 If hackers breached the McCain’s digital defenses, it would represent a startling development in naval warfare. American intelligence officials have theorized that hackers working on behalf of an enemy state could conceivably hack into a ship’s computer systems and blind its commander by, for example, displaying an inaccurate location of the ship on its charts.

 Such a deception could conceivably result in a nighttime crash, such as the McCain‘s. The merchant vessel Alnic MC struck the ship’s left, or port, side and left a huge gash in its hull.

 Tighe said the Navy is preparing for potential digital warfare and said the service has to “be able to fight through” a cyberattack. Ships must monitor their own computer systems, she said, and if one method of communication is knocked out, naval forces have to be able to rely on other methods to relay commands and information.

 “Semaphores” — a system of communicating using hand-held flags — “are going to be really hard to hack,” Tighe said.

 “That’s a joke,” she quickly added.

 Photo credit: ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images ||||| WASHINGTON, D.C. — Probing potential cyber tampering and cyber intrusion will now be a standard part of U.S. Navy accident investigation following the Aug. 21 collision of guided missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) with a chemical tanker, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Bill Moran told Congress last week.

 As part of the investigation into McCain’s collision, a team from the Navy’s U.S. 10th Fleet cyber arm traveled to Singapore to see if a reported steering failure of the destroyer was a result of cyber tampering, USNI News reported last month.

 Vice Adm. Jan Tighe elaborated on the effort during a U.S. Naval Institute and CSIS maritime security dialogue on Thursday.

 “We will look for a couple of things. One, try to confirm cyber did not have anything to do with the collision and then how do we move forward in making sure these are a normal part of these investigations,” she said.

 “It is something that we think about a lot and we have to have both the authorities and the human capital ready to respond.”

 Last week, Moran told a joint hearing of the House Armed Services readiness and seapower and projection forces subcommittees that the possibility of a cyber intrusion to either

 “It’s relatively new ground for us. This is the first time we’ve sent a team from our cyber command here in Washington — commander 10th fleet — sent a team over there to pull as much data from that ship as possible, that records data to see if there were any disruption or interruptions that are abnormal,” Moran said.

 “I would also offer to you that just about every three letter agency in Washington, D.C. has looked to see if there were indications of an intent or a potential acknowledgement of a cyber attack. We have seen — I have personally not seen any evidence of that. But we’re not stopping there. The team is in place in Singapore today, has been for several days capturing all of the computer and network information to see if they can find any abnormalities or disruptions.”

 The effort, called Operation Orion’s Hammer, focused on the reported failure of the aft steering mechanism that early reports say helped cause the collision between McCain and a chemical tanker off the coast of Singapore on Aug. 21 resulting in the death of 10 sailors, several Navy officials have told USNI News.

 Much attention has been paid to the possibility that a cyber attack could have been responsible for not only McCain’s collision but also the June 17 collision between USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and a merchant ship off the coast of Japan that killed seven sailors. While investigations into both collisions have not revealed evidence of a cyber attack, the Navy promised to thoroughly investigate the possibility. To allay future concerns of intrusion, the Navy now intends to build in cyber looks into future accident investigations, Moran said.

 “This is the first time we’ve done this and we’re not stopping just — we’re — this is to try to institutionalize doing cyber as part of any mishap, aviation, submarine, you name it,” Moran told the panel.

 “We need to go look at it as an order of business and not hand wave it to it’s cyber. So that’s where we’re headed.” |||||


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– The mysteries of Old Faithful may soon be solved, thanks, in part, to something that looks like a giant hula hoop. American and Danish scientists have this week begun an aerial survey of Yellowstone that actually looks well into the earth, "visualizing" the geology and water as much as 1,500 feet below the surface, says Carol Finn. She's waited a decade to explore what she calls "a last frontier ... in Yellowstone," and the intention is to better map the flow of water that's feeding Old Faithful and rare but sometimes violent hydrothermal explosions. Over a four-week period, a helicopter will fly above, armed with electromagnetic technology that looks like a giant hula hoop. The AP explains it in layman's terms: "The device acts like an X-ray to determine where and how hot water flows beneath the surface." Scientists will use the data to determine whether solid earth, "rotten" sulfuric rock, or water lurks below, which could assist in identifying unstable areas, per Wyoming Public Media. But a press release frames the main quest like so: We know that the water that explodes from Yellowstone's geysers "originates as old precipitation, snow and rain that percolates down into the crust, is heated, and ultimately returns to the surface." We know that it can take as long as thousands of years for that process to run its course. What scientists are hoping to determine are the routes these waters take. "Does it travel down and back up? Does it travel laterally?" asks Finn. Right now, "nobody knows." (Archaeologists made a surprise find underneath a Mayan temple.)

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Scientists from the U.S. and Denmark are seeking to map out the plumbing system hidden inside the earth's crust that's responsible for the famous Old Faithful geyser and other hydrothermal features at Yellowstone National Park.

 Throughout November the research team will conduct flights over the park using a giant, hoop-shaped electromagnetic system suspended from a helicopter. The device acts like an X-ray to determine where and how hot water flows beneath the surface.

 The team also hopes to gain insights into the infrequent but sometimes massive hydrothermal explosions that occur in the park, said lead scientist Carol Finn with the U.S. Geological Survey.

 One such explosion, or possibly multiple explosions, that occurred roughly 13,800 years ago left a crater that measures 1-1/2 miles (2.6 km) across beneath at the bottom of Yellowstone Lake. It's believed to be the largest such crater in the world.

 Similar to the regular eruptions of Old Faithful, hydrothermal explosions occur when huge pockets of boiling water beneath the ground experience a sudden drop in pressure, causing the water to convert to steam and explode violently to the surface.

 Similar work elsewhere in the U.S. has helped reveal hazards from volcanoes.

 "Nobody knows anything about the flow paths" for the hot water that erupts from Yellowstone's geysers, Finn said. "Does it travel down and back up? Does it travel laterally?"

 The electromagnetic system was developed in Denmark to map out groundwater supplies in Denmark. It's able to discern between water and rocks to a depth of about 1,500 feet beneath the surface.

 In Yellowstone, a better understanding of the hydrothermal plumbing could help administrators plot out future development so tourists can enjoy the park's features without damaging them or being put into harm's way.

 The study is a collaboration between the U.S.G.S., Yellowstone National Park, the University of Wyoming and Denmark's Aarhus University. ||||| This week, a survey will begin to map the underground hydrothermal features of Yellowstone National Park for the first time.

 The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with the Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Wyoming, will use a helicopter carrying electromagnetic technology that resembles a giant hula hoop to record tiny voltage signals.

 The data will be able to tell the scientists if they are flying over solid earth, “rotten” sulfuric rock, or water. Carol Finn, one of the scientists on the surveying team, said she has been looking forward to this for ten years.

 “This is really kind of a last frontier if you will, in Yellowstone, of being able to look at a large part that’s underground that people that people have not looked at,” said Finn. “This survey can visualize the geology and the water down to about 500 meters, so 1500 feet.”

 The goal of the project is to fill in the gaps of knowledge about what causes geysers like Old Faithful and hydrothermal explosions by locating where all that heated water flows underground.

 “There’s just a lot we don’t know and this survey is really exciting because it’s going to be the first view of a large portion of the groundwater system, of the water underground that feeds all of these thermal features,” said Finn.

 The survey will also provide information that could help the park in the future by locating unstable ground. The researchers will fly the helicopter along the Mammoth-Norris corridor and take at least four weeks to complete. |||||


Image caption Bernard Glesser (left) and Michel Dheilly have been held captive at the Goodyear plant

 Workers at a Goodyear tyre factory in Northern France have been holding two managers captive in a dispute over plans to close the plant.

 The director of production at the plant in Amiens, Michel Dheilly and human resources chief, Bernard Glaser have not been allowed to leave the plant.

 Staff and management have been negotiating for years over how to deal with the loss-making plant.

 The union is pushing for a redundancy plan with more generous payoffs.

 Franck Jurek of the factory's works council described the atmosphere at the plant as a "calm".

 "If there is no buyer, (we want) a plan for voluntary redundancies for everyone with loads of money," he said.

 French workers have a history of holding managers captive, although so called "bossnappings" were more common during the height of the financial crisis.

 Companies including, 3M, Sony and Caterpillar were affected in 2009.

 Generally workers have not been prosecuted for holding their bosses captive.

 According to the CGT union, the two managers have been given water and still have their mobile phones.

 "This kind of initiative, always to be condemned, is especially inopportune and counterproductive at a time when we should concentrate on the future of employees affected by the restructuring, after several years looking for a solution," Goodyear said in a statement. ||||| PARIS (AP) — Two Goodyear bosses held captive by workers spent the night inside a factory in northern France that the company wants to close.

 A worker at the Goodyear tire factory guards the human resources chief, Bernard Glesser, left, and the firm's production manager Michel Dheilly, right, who have been blocked from leaving the plant in... (Associated Press)

 Workers of the Goodyear tire factory gather at the plant in Amiens, northern France, Monday, Jan. 6, 2014. Two Goodyear managers, production manager Michel Dheilly and Human Resources director Bernard... (Associated Press)

 The plant, which Goodyear has tried to sell or shutter for five years, has become an emblem of France's labor issues, and the seizure Monday morning of the two managers — the plant's director and human resources chief — resurrected the once-common practice of boss-napping.

 Sylvain Niel, a labor lawyer who has worked on similar issues, said the tactic fell away because any agreements under pressure were later voided in courts.

 "It's a reaction of despair," Niel said. "They have no room to maneuver in the closing of the factory."

 The Amiens plant has an especially contentious past. Goodyear's attempts to close it have been stalled by violent protests with huge tire bonfires, government concerns and France's prolonged layoff procedures.

 Boss-nappings typically have lasted from a few hours to a couple of days. They are punishable under French law by five years in prison and a 75,000-euro ($102,000) fine — as long as the boss goes free in under a week.

 But generally the workers are not prosecuted, and in many cases they have tried to make the manager's time in captivity more comfortable.

 Mickael Wamen, a union leader, told the Courrier Picard newspaper that the managers had refused offers of mattresses and blankets overnight.

 "Things were sometimes animated, sometimes calm, but without any meanness," Michel Dheilly, the captive plant manager, told reporters allowed inside the factory.

 The other captive manager, Bernard Glesser, was less sanguine, saying he would not give any statements under duress.

 Niel said police rarely get involved, hoping to avoid inflaming the situation.

 "These are basically honest people, in despair," he said. ||||| PARIS—Workers at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. factory in northern France prevented two managers from leaving the facility on Monday, the latest in a string of protests by union members who were accused by a U.S. executive last year of doing little work.

 The site director and the director of human resources at the Goodyear plant in Amiens were being held in a room whose access is controlled by union representatives and employees,... |||||

Write a summary.

– Furious French workers at a Goodyear tire factory have revived the practice of "boss-napping" and seized two managers amid a dispute over the plant's closure. The site's director of production and human resources chief are being held at the factory and union leaders say they won't be released until workers get a satisfactory response to their requests, which include more generous severance packages, the Wall Street Journal reports. The bosses were held overnight at the plant and refused offers of mattresses and blankets, the AP reports. "Things were sometimes animated, sometimes calm, but without any meanness," one captive plant manager told reporters, while the other said he would not give any statements under duress. Boss-napping was more common during the height of the financial crisis and while it is punishable by up to five years in prison, workers are rarely prosecuted for holding managers captive, the BBC notes.


JAYAPURA, Indonesia (AP) — An Indonesian passenger plane that went missing two days ago was destroyed when it slammed into a mountain, killing all 54 people on board, the country's top rescue official said.

 Relatives of passengers on the missing Trigana Air Service flight listen to a National Policies Disaster Victim Identification official at Sentani airport in Jayapura, Papua province, Indonesia, Monday,... (Associated Press)

 Relatives of passengers on the missing Trigana Air Service flight sit at Sentani airport in Jayapura, Papua province, Indonesia, Monday, Aug. 17, 2015. Rescue officials spotted an Indonesian airliner... (Associated Press)

 This photo released by the National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) of Indonesia Monday, Aug. 17,2015 shows the part of the wreckage that BASARNAS identified as of the missing Trigana Air Service... (Associated Press)

 Members of the National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) wait before leaving on a search for the missing Trigana Air Service flight at Sentani airport in Jayapura, Papua province, Indonesia, Monday,... (Associated Press)

 National Search And Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) chief F. Henry Bambang Soelistyo, left, looks at a map with Air Vice Marshal Sudipo Handoyo during a search operation for the missing Trigana Air Service flight... (Associated Press)

 Relatives of passengers on the missing Trigana Air Service flight wait for information at Sentani airport in Jayapura, Papua province, Indonesia, Monday, Aug. 17, 2015. Rescuers are making their way into... (Associated Press)

 In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, soldiers prepare to leave for the crash site of an Indonesian passenger plane for rescue operations at an air base in Jayapura, Indonesia Tuesday,... (Associated Press)

 In this photo taken Dec. 26, 2010, Trigana Air Service's ATR42-300 twin turboprop plane takes off at Supadio airport in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The same type of a Trigana airliner carrying... (Associated Press)

 This photo released by the National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) of Indonesia Monday, Aug. 17,2015 shows the part of the wreckage that BASARNAS identified as of the missing Trigana Air Service... (Associated Press)

 More than 70 rescuers reached the crash site only on Tuesday after being hindered by rugged, forested terrain and bad weather.

 The flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, the plane's "black boxes," were found in good condition, said Henry Bambang Soelistyo, the National Search and Rescue Agency chief. The data they contain could help explain what caused the crash.

 "The plane was totally destroyed and all the bodies were burned and difficult to identify," Soelistyo told The Associated Press.

 He said all 54 bodies had been recovered and will be taken to Jayapura, the capital of Papua province, so they can be identified.

 The Trigana Air Service plane was flying from Jayapura to the city of Oksibil with 49 passengers and five crew members on a scheduled 42-minute flight when it lost contact Sunday.

 Soelistyo said the wreckage was at an altitude of 2,600 meters (about 8,500 feet). Much of Papua is covered with impenetrable jungles and mountains. Some planes that have crashed in the past have never been found.

 The airline's crisis center official in Jayapura's Sentani airport, Budiono, said all the passengers were Indonesians, and included three local government officials and two members of the local parliament who were to attend a ceremony Monday in Oksibil marking the 70th anniversary of Indonesia's independence from Dutch colonial rule.

 Oksibil, about 280 kilometers (175 miles) south of Jayapura, was experiencing heavy rain, strong winds and fog when the plane lost contact with the airport minutes before it was scheduled to land.

 The victims' relatives, who had been waiting at the airport, broke down in tears when they heard the news. Many of them accused the airline of taking too long to give them information.

 "They are unprofessional ... they play with our feelings of grieving," said Cory Gasper, whose brother Jhon Gasper was on the plane.

 The airline released a public apology just after a search plane spotted the smoldering wreckage of the ATR42-300 twin turboprop on Monday.

 It was unclear what caused the caused the crash, Indonesia's transportation safety commission has opened an investigation.

 The passengers included four postal workers escorting four bags of cash totaling $468,750 in government aid for poor families to help offset a spike in fuel prices, Franciscus Haryono, the head of the post office in Jayapura, the provincial capital, told The Associated Press.

 Indonesia has had a string of airline tragedies in recent years. In December, all 162 people aboard an AirAsia jet were killed when the plane plummeted into the Java Sea as it flew through stormy weather on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, to Singapore.

 The sprawling archipelago nation of 250 million people and some 17,000 islands is one of Asia's most rapidly expanding airline markets, but it is struggling to provide enough qualified pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers and updated airport technology to ensure safety.

 From 2007 to 2009, the European Union barred Indonesian airlines from flying to Europe because of safety concerns.

 Trigana Air Service, which began operations in 1991, had 22 aircraft as of December 2013 and flies to 21 destinations in Indonesia. The carrier has had 19 serious incidents since 1992, resulting in the loss of eight aircraft and major damage to 11 others, according to the Aviation Safety Network's online database.

 The airline remains banned from flying to Europe along with other six Indonesian airlines.

 __

 Associated Press writers Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report. ||||| JAKARTA All 54 people on board a Trigana Air aircraft were killed in a crash two days ago in Indonesia's Papua province, the latest in a string of aviation disasters in the Southeast Asian archipelago, officials said on Tuesday.

 Major-General Heronimus Guru, operations director at Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency, told a news conference in the capital the passengers' remains were being put into body bags but poor weather had hampered efforts to recover them by air.

 Officials have declined to comment on the cause of Sunday's crash until the results of an investigation by the national transport safety committee are known, but Guru said the terrain in Indonesia's easternmost province may have been a factor.

 "There's a possibility the aircraft hit a peak and then fell into a ravine because the place that it was found in is steep," he said.

 The treacherous terrain of forest-covered ridges hampered rescuers' efforts to reach the site where the Trigana Air Service ATR 42-300 plane came down.

 The aircraft's black box flight recorder, which should provide investigators with some answers, was found in the early afternoon. The device will be taken to Oksibil town tomorrow, depending on the weather, Guru said.

 Television broadcast footage of rescuers in camouflage fatigues and surgical masks hacking through foliage and sifting through debris at the crash site as a helicopter hovered overhead.

 There were 44 adult passengers, five children and infants and five crew on the short-haul flight from provincial capital Jayapura south to Oksibil.

 The twin turboprop aircraft was also carrying about $470,000 as part of a village assistance program.

 Poor infrastructure in the province means aid money is often flown in by air, said Abu Sofjan, spokesman for the national postal service, four of whose workers were among the passengers.

 There was no suggestion the money was somehow linked to the crash.

 Five members of the Bintang Highlands district parliament and government were also on board, online news service detik.com reported. Reuters was not able to verify the report.

 All on board were Indonesian, officials have said.

 Officials of Trigana, placed on a European Union list of banned carriers since 2007 over safety or regulatory concerns, were not immediately available for comment.

 The aircraft made its first flight 27 years ago, online database Aviation Safety Network says. Trigana Air Service has a fleet of 14 aircraft, which are 26.6 years old on average, according to the airfleets.net database.

 Trigana has had 14 serious incidents since it began operations in 1991, Aviation Safety Network says. Besides the latest crash, it has written off 10 aircraft.

 Indonesia has a patchy aviation record, with two other major crashes in the past year.

 In December, an AirAsia flight went down in the Java Sea, killing all 162 on board. More than 100 people died in June in the crash of a military transport plane.

 Indonesia scored poorly on a 2014 safety audit by the U.N. aviation agency, largely because its Ministry of Transportation is understaffed, said two sources familiar with the matter, as the country struggles to cope with the rapid expansion of air travel.

 (Additional reporting by Fergus Jensen; Writing by Nicholas Owen; Editing by Robert Birsel and Alan Raybould) ||||| Story highlights No distress call was received, officials say

 The passenger plane lost contact with air traffic control on Sunday

 Villagers reported seeing it crash into a mountain

 Jakarta, Indonesia (CNN) Indonesian rescue workers have reached the crash site of a passenger plane that went down in a mountainous area with 54 people on board, a senior official said Tuesday.

 The teams on the ground have so far seen at least 38 bodies at the scene and haven't found any survivors, said Bambang Soelistyo, the head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency.

 Helicopters are being deployed to the densely forested area in the eastern Indonesian province of Papua to begin the evacuation process, he said.

 The airliner, operated by the Indonesian carrier Trigana Air Service, lost contact with air traffic control Sunday about half an hour into a short flight from the provincial capital to a town in the mountains.

 Search planes spotted debris on a mountainside Monday, but efforts to try to reach it on foot and by helicopter were suspended until Tuesday because of fog.

 Read More |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Dozens of rescuers have made their way to the mountainous area where an Indonesian passenger plane crashed on Sunday, but they haven't found anybody to rescue. Officials say all 54 people on board—44 adult passengers, five children, and five crew members—were killed when the Trigana Air Service ATR 42-300 crashed in Papua province, Reuters reports. "The plane was totally destroyed and all the bodies were burned and difficult to identify," Indonesia's top search and rescue official tells the AP. He says all 54 bodies have been recovered, along with the plane's black boxes, which are in good condition. The turboprop plane crashed into the mountain around 30 minutes into a 42-minute flight without making a distress call, CNN reports. The cause of the crash hasn't been determined, though officials believe the rugged terrain may have played a role. "There's a possibility the aircraft hit a peak and then fell into a ravine because the place that it was found is steep," a search and rescue official tells Reuters, which notes that Trigana has a very patchy safety record, with 14 serious incidents since it started flying in 1991, including 10 in which the aircraft was destroyed. The plane was also carrying $468,750 in cash, which was to be distributed to poor families.


Perhaps Google (Alphabet?) should have googled its new name before it decided to restructure the whole company.

 The New York Times reports that Google's new parent company, Alphabet, has encountered an issue with german automaker BMW, which owns a fleet services company with the same name and the domain Alphabet.com.

 A spokesperson for BMW told the Times the company isn't planning on selling its domain and that Alphabet was a large part of its business.

 See also: What Google has to gain by adopting the Alphabet

 With the major restructuring announcement yesterday, Alphabet launched abc.xyz as its domain name. Alphabet, led by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is now the parent company of Google, a move designed to separate the core products (search, Gmail, Android, etc.) from its more far reaching projects (Fiber, Calico, X, self-driving cars).

 While the move makes sense for Alphabet, it confused many.

 BMW is looking into whether Google's Alphabet has infringed on its trademark, with no legal action currently planned.

 Since the announcement, Alphabet.com has been down, likely due to the increased traffic it is undoubtedly receiving.

 Other companies also have the Alphabet name. Reuters notes that more than 100 companies have trademark registrations in the U.S. that incorporate the word alphabet in some capacity. For example, Alphabet, Inc. is an Ohio company founded in 1965 that manufactures electrical components for the auto industry, according to Bloomberg.

 Even the @Alphabet Twitter handle already has an owner. It belongs to a man named Chris Andrikanich, who is probably receiving a bit more attention than he's used to.

 Well, that was an interesting way to end a Monday... — Chris Andrikanich (@alphabet) August 10, 2015

 Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote a blog post saying it is an absolute must for companies to own the .com domain for their names just days before Google's announcement. While Graham says domains aren't as important for finding a company's online presence as they used to be, not owning the .com domain "signals weakness."

 This might not prove to be an issue for the new Alphabet, however. Google founder Page said Alphabet wouldn't be introducing products under its own name, so it wouldn't be a public facing name like Google.

 In any event, it's oddly comforting to know Google/Alphabet has the same problem many do when they're trying to purchase a domain for their own website. ||||| As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have. more

 We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.

 We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.

 Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.

 What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.

 Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We’ll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.

 This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google. A key part of this is Sundar Pichai. Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together. He has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google. I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that. Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation—continuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world’s information. Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube. Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.

 Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure.

 Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.

 For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google—the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products—the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.

 We are excited about…

 Getting more ambitious things done.

 Taking the long-term view.

 Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish.

 Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.

 Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.

 Making Google even better through greater focus.

 And hopefully… as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can.

 What could be better? No wonder we are excited to get to work with everyone in the Alphabet family. Don’t worry, we’re still getting used to the name too! ||||| Google has bought the alphabet.

 Not literally of course (if that's even possible), but it has acquired the domain name abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com, just a few days after Google officially became a subsidiary of Alphabet, its new holding company.

 The domain was created in 1999 and was updated on Wednesday when Google took control of it, according to domain database Whois. It is unclear how much it was bought for.

 Read More from CNBC: Why Investors Like Google's Alphabet News

 Google announced its restructuring in August in a bid to separate its core businesses such as search and Android from its "moonshots" like driverless cars. At the time, Google unveiled its website with a URL of abc.xyz.

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 The purpose of the new domain is unclear given that the page did not load on Thursday morning.

 "We realized we missed a few letters in abc.xyz, so we're just being thorough," a spokesman for the company told media.

 Google owns 18,095 other domains, data on Whois shows. It's the owner of Googl.com and Gogle.com, so if people misspell Google, they will still be redirected to the search engine.

 Sometimes, companies will make defensive acquisitions of user names in order to prevent them being embarrassed in the future. The U.S. tech giant also owns the domain GoogleSucks.com.

 Read More from CNBC: Alphabet to Back Symphony Messaging Tool

 The change to Alphabet has caused Google some headaches when it comes to domain names. It does not actually own alphabet.com because it's currently owned by German carmaker BMW. A report in the New York Times earlier this year suggested that BMW does not want to sell it.

 The news was first reported by DomainInvesting.com. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Guess Google execs are serious about that whole reorg under the Alphabet parent-company thing. Just days after Alphabet officially became Google's holding company, it scooped up a brand-new domain name: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com, which has been around since 1999 and was purchased for an unspecified amount, NBC News reports. The page isn't functional as of this post, and a company rep says, "We realized we missed a few letters in abc.xyz, so we're just being thorough." (Google set up that website in August.) It's hard to imagine Google directing the general public to use the site—would you want to type in all those letters every time?—and NBC notes the domain purchase may simply be a preemptive strike to keep others from usurping it for their own use. Two domains the company probably won't be able to get its hands on: ABC.com (for the American Broadcasting Company, owned by Disney) and alphabet.com, which BMW is unlikely to give up, notes Consumerist. If you'd been hoping to nab the domain for yourself, you can always try to cybersquat the site away when Google's hold on it expires in August 2018. (Alphabet has ditched its "Don't Be Evil" motto for one that's not as quirky.)


– It might be something like War & Peace or The Call of the Wild, except with more dancing and belated abstinence, but a new literary Wasillan has gone rogue. Amazon has a pre-order page for a 304-page Bristol Palin memoir, set to be released in September by HarperCollins. Gawker's Jim Newell takes a stab at the plot: "Part One: I was born. Part Two: I got pregnant. Part Three: I went dancing on teevee. Part Four: ??" Click for more on the book ... like its price tag.

Expand this summary.

I often feel guilt when I assign a story. This is partly a function of being a woman who would, if she had her way, please and comfort her entire universe of acquaintances, and partly a function of having been convinced at a relatively young age by the argument that Janet Malcolm famously made in The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

  ||||| Product Description

 The oldest daughter of Sarah Palin and single mother goes beyond the headlines, offering readers an inside look at her life, her world, and the things that matter most, including her family and the faith that keeps her centered. When her mother became the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in 2008, Bristol Palin was instantly propelled into the national spotlight, becoming the focus of intense public and national media scrutiny at the age of seventeen.

 In Not Afraid of Life, Bristol gives readers an intimate behind-the-scenes look at her life for the first time, from growing up in Alaska to coming of age amid the media and political frenzy surrounding her mother’s political rise; from becoming a single mother while still a teenager to coping as her relationship with her baby’s father crumbled publicly—not once, but twice. Bristol talks about the highs and lows of her appearance on ABC-TV’s Dancing with the Stars, including the aching hours of practice, the biting criticisms, and the thrill of getting to the show’s finals. She speaks candidly of her aspirations for the future and the deep religious faith that gives her strength and inspiration. Plainspoken and disarmingly down to earth, Bristol offers new insight and understanding of who she is and what she values most.

 A Look Inside Not Afraid of Life

 Click on the images below to open larger versions. ||||| Bristol Palin, 20, Set to Release Memoir

 In a morning radio interview in January, Bristol divulged she has a new beau and is "thrilled." She's also adjusting well to her Arizona home, having recently departed Alaska. "I love the town that I live in," Bristol said. "I love my house. [2-year-old son] Tripp's happy. He's healthy."Palin also had a sex talk at Washington University canceled due to student opposition. Bristol became pregnant at 17, and at 20, is now a single mother to her son. |||||


News article:

In this May 27, 2013 photo released by the National Weather Service, the ice jam on the Yukon River at Bishop Rock is shown in Galena, Alaska. Several hundred people are estimated to have fled the community... (Associated Press)

 A colossal river ice jam that caused major flooding in a remote Alaska town was starting to churn Wednesday as water finally chewed ice chunks away from the stubborn, frozen mass after most of the residents were forced to flee from the rising water.

 An aerial survey Wednesday afternoon revealed chunks of ice have broken off at the front of the 30-mile (50-kilometer) ice jam on the Yukon River, National Weather Service hydrologist Ed Plumb said. That means the jam will move soon and waters will begin to recede in the waterlogged town of Galena.

 The flooding lifted homes off foundations and has threatened to break a dike protecting the airport, virtually the only dry spot left in the community of 500 where floodwaters washed out roads and submerged homes. There are no reports of injuries.

 The National Guard flew 32 more people and 19 dogs to Fairbanks Tuesday night. Other residents were evacuated earlier.

 Now that the water is trying to push through the jam, conditions could change quickly. When the jam breaks, the downriver community of Koyukuk will be at risk of flooding.

 In an earlier flight Wednesday, Plumb said, the ice was locked firmly in place, despite temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 Celsius). The hot weather is expected to last a couple days before cooling slightly.

 The damage has left the town without power, fresh water and cell phone reception. When the ice jam knocked out the bridge leading to the airport, evacuees had to be taken there by boat or helicopter, according to Ray, who said the flooding began with a trickle Sunday. In a place where spring flooding is nothing new, many homes are built on stilts, but the fast rising water reached them, too.

 The disaster has left people feeling traumatized and vulnerable, Ray said.

 "We didn't have any idea how vast the flood was going to be," he said.

 Zidek said the damage is being assessed and a disaster policy cabinet will forward recommendations to Gov. Sean Parnell, who visited the area Tuesday. Recommendations are likely to include issuing a disaster declaration.

 ___

 Follow Rachel D'Oro at _https://twitter.com/rdoro ||||| Lookouts stood high on Koyukuk Mountain Wednesday, watching the Yukon River below with binoculars and hunting scopes.

 "We're looking at a flash flood. Something like a dam breaking," said Koyukuk Mayor Patrick Madros.

 Koyukuk sits about 14 miles downriver from the ice jam that caused massive flooding and a near-complete evacuation of Galena this week. It's the latest community to put life on hold as the annual river breakup winds down the Yukon.

 The ice dam began flooding Galena on Sunday and by Wednesday an estimated 300 or more people had fled by plane to Fairbanks, Anchorage or other villages. The local school district estimated 30 to 40 people stayed behind, camping with their dogs at the airport, taking shelter in former Air Force barracks and eating military-style "meals ready to eat."

 The jam showed signs of weakening by 11 a.m. Wednesday, and by 5 p.m. the Weather Service reported that part of the dam had peeled away. It was still blocking the river, but water levels had already began rising downstream, the agency said.

 The Weather Service expected the jam to break and water to began draining from Galena by late Wednesday or Thursday. When it does, a surge of water was expected to flood Koyukuk, where the service has issued a flood warning through 4 p.m. Thursday.

 The damage to Galena has been devastating, said Weather Service hydrologist Ed Plumb.

 Plumb has been stationed in Galena, where a dike surrounding the airport and a few government buildings has created a dry "island" in the middle of bobbing ice and debris.

 "There's a lot of cars that are totally submerged in water and floating around," Plumb said. "There are houses that are totally submerged in water up to the roof."

 "You can see sheens of fuel across the floodwaters and spilled fuel tanks," Plumb said. Water inundated the sewage lagoon, which "is just part of the flood now," he said.

 There is no power in the village, no working bathrooms and limited food. "All we've had is the shirt on our backs," Plumb said.

 The flooding began with a few fingers of water covering the roads, said Paul Apfelbeck, a teacher. Sometime on Monday afternoon it began to surge, seemingly climbing by a foot at a time. It sounded like Niagara Falls, he said.

 "People were scrambling all over the neighborhood, putting their cars up on higher ground."

 Apfelbeck flew to Fairbanks late Tuesday on an Alaska Air National Guard HC-130. The plane carried 32 people and 19 dogs. Alaska State Troopers flew another six people and seven pets to Fairbanks at about the same time.

 Some Galena residents, including schools superintendent Chris Reitan, said the state waited too long to help with widespread evacuations given the alarming surge of flood waters Monday night. No one has been killed or reported missing. Nearly every home in town has been damaged, residents said.

 Gov. Sean Parnell visited Galena Tuesday and members of his cabinet met Wednesday to discuss whether the state should declare a disaster emergency, said Jeremy Zidek, spokesman for the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

 A disaster declaration could unlock state relief money for the village, he said. The state Emergency Management team in Galena asked for additional supplies for those remaining in the community, including 10 cases of bottled water and 12 cases of MREs.

 In Koyukuk, a Koyukon Athabascan community about 30 miles downriver, residents were already preparing for the worst, Madros said.

 They hauled water and wood to higher ground. They prepared to shut the power off in the town of about 75 people and evacuated the sick and elderly Tuesday on a plane to Fairbanks. Madros, the mayor, stood on flood watch from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday.

 "This is the worst flood we've ever seen in Galena so we're expecting a lot of water once that dam breaks to come this way," he said.

 The Weather Service expects the surge to take about four hours to reach Koyukuk once the ice jam breaks. The water will arrive in a wave, the flood warning says.

 Twitter updates: twitter.com/adn_kylehopkins. Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334 or email him at khopkins@adn.com.

 Twitter updates: twitter.com/adn_kylehopkins. Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334 or email him at khopkins@adn.com. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– The remote Alaska town of Galena is accustomed to spring flooding, so much so that many of its homes are built on stilts, reports the AP. But it wasn't prepared for what it faced this week: a 30-mile ice jam that literally jammed the Yukon River and unleashed intense flooding on the town. The waters began to rise Sunday and by yesterday many of Galena's 500 residents had fled via plane, with a few holdouts camping at the airport, one of the only dry spots left. Homes have been ripped from their foundations, cell and electrical service is down, and the bridge to the airport was knocked out. A Weather Service hydrologist at the scene tells the Anchorage Daily News that bathrooms aren't functioning and "there are houses that are totally submerged in water up to the roof." Though no injuries or deaths have been reported, locals say just about every house has suffered damage. And with temps hitting the 80s, the jam is starting to break up—putting a community 14 miles downriver from the jam at risk. Says Koyukuk's mayor, "We're looking at a flash flood. Something like a dam breaking." The expectation is that when the jam breaks, it will send a wave of water toward Koyukuk, reaching it in about four hours.


Article:

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 This will NOT appear anywhere on Newser ||||| poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201703/1681/1155968404_5371823017001_5371796654001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Congress Republicans yank Obamacare repeal bill It's a staggering setback for President Donald Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan.

 Facing a growing rebellion within his own ranks, Speaker Paul Ryan pulled the Republican Obamacare replacement plan from the House floor on Friday just before a scheduled vote.

 The decision is a staggering defeat for Ryan and President Donald Trump in their first attempt to partner on major legislation and fulfill a seven-year Republican promise to repeal Obamacare. And it comes a day after Trump issued an ultimatum to House Republicans to vote for the bill or live with Obamacare.

 Story Continued Below

 GOP lawmakers decided they can, in fact, live with Obamacare, at least for now.

 A Republican leadership aide said Trump and Ryan spoke by phone at 3 p.m. and that the president asked the speaker to pull the bill. Ryan told reporters that his advice to Trump was to cancel the vote.

 But the reality is that Ryan and his leadership team had been bleeding votes all day and were not close to passing the American Health Care Act. The speaker went to the White House and told Trump as much just an hour earlier.

 Republicans were begging Ryan and party leaders to pull the bill to save them from having to vote on an unpopular measure. But Trump badly wanted to move ahead so he would "know who my friends are," he said, according to a Republican lawmaker who met with him. Democrats were unwavering in their opposition, and conservative outside groups despised the bill from the start.

 And while GOP leaders had called Trump "the ulimate closer," he wasn't able to move many votes, especially among hard-line conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus. Trump admitted after the bill was pulled that he was "10 to 15 votes" shy of victory, a stunning margin considering how much effort he and Ryan had put into their lobbying campaign during the last week.

 Ryan also knew, though, that if the bill had come up for a vote, it would have failed by a much larger margin than the whip counts. Once rank-and-file members knew it would fail, they'd reverse course and vote "no" in order to protect themselves politically, which their leaders would bless. That much larger margin of defeat would be an even bigger setback for Trump. In a sense, Ryan protected Trump from his own combative instincts, said GOP insiders.

 "I will not sugarcoat this, this is a disappointing day for us," Ryan said at a press conference following the stunning announcement. "This is a setback, no two ways about it."

 Ryan admitted that the Affordable Care Act, enacted seven years earlier almost to the day, "remains the law of the land... We're going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future."

 Ryan insisted Trump was not at fault for the failure.

 "The president gave his all in this effort," Ryan added. "He's been fantastic."

 The Freedom Caucus — the group that took down Speaker John Boehner — remained unwilling to compromise with Trump and Ryan, believing that their bill didn't do nearly enough to unwind Obamacare.

 "Some of the members of that caucus were voting with us, but not enough were," Ryan said. "I met with their chairman today, and he made it clear that the votes weren't going to be there from their team. And that was sufficient to provide the balance of votes to have this not pass."

 Democrats, for their part, were doing cartwheels in the Capitol. They've bloodied Trump, bashed Ryan, and showed that even in a GOP-run Washington, they still matter big time.

 “Today is a great day for our country," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "It's a victory. What happened on the floor is a victory for the American people — for our seniors, for people with disabilities, for our children, for our veterans."

 On the other side of the aisle, the internal GOP finger-pointing has already begun, showing the long-term damage inside the Republican Conference from this fight.

 Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), who helped craft the Republican health care legislation, was livid after the decision to pull the bill.

 "The architects of Obamacare, they own this damn thing," the Texas Republican said. "There were people who were not interested in solving the problem. They win today."

 Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), a member of the Freedom Caucus, said the bill's demise was a "good day for America."

 Despite Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows' central role in defeating the bill and thus leaving Obamacare as the law of the land, the North Carolina Republican insisted he still wanted to repeal the Democratic health care law.

 "I remain wholeheartedly committed to following through on this promise," Meadows said in a statement. "President Trump is committed to repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a system that works for American families, and I look forward to working with him to do just that."

 Trump has staked his early presidency on repealing and replacing Obamacare, embracing his image as a dealmaker and closer throughout the process. House leaders were happy to oblige as well, referring to Trump as “the ultimate closer” as he met with reluctant House members.

 “He’s left everything on the field when it comes to this bill,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Friday afternoon, describing Trump as working tirelessly to get the bill across the finish line. He added, “You can’t force someone to vote a certain way.”

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 As Ryan and his allies scrambled to convince wary colleagues to back their health care plan, they watched as conservative and moderates in their caucus began to declare their opposition. As defections mounted, Ryan traveled to the White House to reveal to Trump his faltering whip count – and to discuss whether to pull the bill. But the administration seemed intent on proceeding as planned.

 “We want the vote," a senior administration official said as Ryan made his way up Pennsylvania Avenue. "If they want to go against the president, they should do it on live TV."

 Ultimately, though, Ryan prevailed. Moderate Republicans such as Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock and Ohio Rep. David Joyce disclosed their opposition even as Ryan was meeting with Trump. It became clear early Friday afternoon that the bill was poised for defeat, as members on the fence broke against it.

 The bill met sharp resistance from both ends of the Republican caucus, as hard-line conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus contended it failed to do away with Obamacare’s core components and moderates argued that its curbs on Medicaid could harm vulnerable constituents. Ultimately, those competing pressures proved irreconcilable.

 Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), a moderate who came out against the bill two days ago, insisted that Friday's debacle was actually not a big deal and said it’s time to “move on."

 "There are a lot of people in this building who talk and say everything is catastrophic and cataclysmic, well we know that’s not the case," Dent said. "If you want to do health care reform, do it on a bipartisan basis…. We have to sit down and regroup.”

 Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) warned it wasn’t the end of Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare.

 “The game is not over, so it’s not a win or loss," he said. ”We’re gonna get back together after we get a weekend’s rest, we’re going to assess where we are. The votes were razor thin, from what I understand, so we’re close to where we need to be."

  ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. |||||
What is a summary?

– A House vote on the American Health Care Act was canceled just before it was scheduled to happen, avoiding what the AP says would have been a "humiliating defeat" for President Trump and GOP leaders while still being—according to Politico—a "staggering defeat" for Trump and Paul Ryan. On Thursday, Trump had demanded a vote on the Republican replacement for ObamaCare despite it appearing primed to fail. On Friday, CNN reports Trump called Ryan and asked him to pull the bill without a vote. Sean Spicer says Trump "left everything on the field" trying to make a deal to get the AHCA approved. Hospital and insurer stocks saw an immediate improvement with the news there would be no vote, according to Reuters.


Write an article based on this summary:

– A movie crew shooting a film about the life of singer Gregg Allman was hit by a train this week in Jesup, Georgia, killing one crew member and injuring seven others, the AP reports. The crew was working on the tracks without permission on Thursday afternoon—either on the trestle that bridges the Altamaha River or on the river's edge—when a train hit the crew and their equipment, killing 27-year-old Sarah Jones. One other crew member was hurt seriously enough to be flown to a hospital in Savannah. The crew had an arrangement with the railway, CSX Railroad, but didn't have permission to film on the tracks, said the top detective on the case. He told WTOC that the investigation will be considered a homicide for now, "to ensure that we err on the side of caution." The Open Roads Films project—Midnight Rider, starring William Hurt—will still be released but there's no release date just yet, Deadline reports. Meanwhile, messages and tweets are emerging that grieve for Jones' tragic death, reports AccessAtlanta. "Sarah, you will be missed dearly," wrote an actress who has worked with her. "Your smile and love for life ... your daily ambition to make others smile ... will be remembered as long as we live."

JESUP, Ga. (AP) — A movie crew was working on train tracks without permission from the railroad when a freight train crashed into the production team and its equipment, killing one and injuring seven others, a sheriff's investigator said Friday.

 The Savannah-based crew was shooting footage for "Midnight Rider," a film based on the life of singer Gregg Allman, when the crash happened Thursday afternoon. Wayne County sheriff's detectives were working Friday to piece together how and why it happened.

 The deadly collision took place at a railroad trestle that crosses the Altamaha River in the rural county about 60 miles southwest of Savannah. The tracks, owned by CSX Railroad, cross private land owned by forest-products company Rayonier, which has a nearby paper mill. Joe Gardner, the lead detective on the case, said the crew had Rayonier's permission to film on its property next to the train tracks.

 "CSX has told me they were aware they were out there, but they did not have permission to be on the train tracks," Gardner told reporters.

 The train struck and killed a woman identified by the sheriff's department as 27-year-old Sarah Elizabeth Jones of Atlanta. Gardner said he didn't know what job she performed on the film crew. Seven others were injured, one seriously enough to be taken by helicopter to a Savannah hospital. Further information on their conditions was not immediately available Friday.

 Trespassing onto railroad tracks is illegal under Georgia law and punishable as a misdemeanor.

 Production of "Midnight Rider," starring actor William Hurt as the Allman Brothers singer in his later years and All-American rejects vocalist Tyson Ritter as a young Allman, began this month in coastal Georgia. The film is based on Allman's 2012 memoir, "My Cross to Bear," with production based at Meddin Studios in Savannah.

 The film studio Friday referred calls to a Los Angeles publicist, Nadine Jolson, who did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment but emailed a brief statement.

 "All of us on the production team are devastated by the tragic accident that happened today," the studio's statement said. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of our crew member."

 CSX issued a statement saying the railroad company was "deeply saddened" by the crash and cooperating with investigators. It provided no further details other than to say the train involved was traveling to Savannah from Memphis, Tenn.

 A CSX spokeswoman, Kristin Seay, declined to comment further and would not confirm that film crew had no permission from the railroad to be working on the train tracks.

 Authorities provided few details about the collision. Gardner said it wasn't clear if crew members were actually on the trestle bridging the river or just on the tracks at the river's edge. He said the train smashed some of the crew's equipment, and it's possible some of the injuries were caused by flying debris. Among the items found on the tracks was what appeared to be a mattress for a bed, Gardner said.

 It also wasn't clear if the film crew was waiting to film a train or was caught unaware by one approaching, Gardner said.

 "That's a very active train track," he said. "There's probably anywhere from up to 10 trains a day that go through on those tracks." ||||| A movie about Greg Allman will proceed following the Thursday death of a filming crew member, despite earlier indications to the contrary, Deadline reports.

 "The company says it still plans to release the picture in the U.S. but does not have a release date set," it reported Friday, following earlier reports indicating Open Road Films would withdraw from the project.

 Sarah Elizabeth Jones, 27, of Atlanta was fatally struck by a train while working as a member of Savannah-based Meddin Studios on the movie, "Midnight Rider."

 Meddin released a statement: "Our hearts are heavy today, as we continue to keep the entire crew, as well as their families, in our thoughts and prayers. Thank you for doing the same."

 Wayne County Sheriff’s Det. Joe Gardner initially told WTOC in Savannah that the department would investigate the death as a homicide.

 "We treat any suspicious type of thing or serious accident as a homicide until we prove otherwise," he said. "And that reasoning is always, I guess, to ensure that we err on the side of caution."

 In its most recent statement about the incident, the department said "This investigation is ongoing and CSX Railroad personnel, Rayonier Mill personnel, and the film crew personnel are all cooperating in the investigation. Due to the ongoing investigation no further information can be released at this time."

 CSX has released a statement of condolences that said the company "is cooperating fully with authorities as they investigate."

 Rayonier spokesman Russell Schweiss told the AJC that while the film crew had been granted permission to access its property for the film shoot, they were on a CSX train trestle which is not part of the mill's property.

 "Our hearts go out ot the family of the victims," he said.

 A South Carolina native, Jones was a beloved member of Atlanta's growing yet tight-knit film community.

 Melissa Rutland, who has worked as an actress, stand-in/double and crew member on various area projects, posted a photo of herself with her late friend and a beautiful tribute:

 "Sarah, you will be missed dearly. Your smile and love for life...your daily ambition to make others smile...will be remembered as long as we live. You touched us all and today we work in your memory...enjoy the beauty of your new Heavenly Home as I know the angels will enjoy having your beautiful self there." ||||| 2ND UPDATE, 12:30 PM: The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office said today that the victim’s name is Sarah Elizabeth Jones from Atlanta. The investigation is ongoing, with railroad and film crew personnel cooperating. Here’s the official statement just released about the incident:

 Sheriff John Carter reports that on 02/20/2014 at approximately 4:30pm Deputies of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office along with other emergency personnel responded to a call of a train hitting persons on the Doctortown train trestle. Deputies arrived to find that there were several people from Open Road films and the Meddin Studios from Savannah, Georgia filming a movie called Midnight Rider in the area and had gotten onto the train tracks. A north bound train struck some of these persons. There was one fatality and seven others injured. One of the injured was flown to a Savannah hospital while others were taken to Wayne Memorial Hospital for treatment. The fatality was a 27 year old white female from Atlanta, Georgia. Her name is Sarah Elizabeth Jones. This investigation is ongoing and CSX Railroad personnel, Rayonier Mill personnel, and the film crew personnel are all cooperating in the investigation. Due to the ongoing investigation no further information can be released at this time.

 UPDATE, 9:10 AM: Open Road Films says it is not pulling out of the Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider: The Gregg Allman Story, despite information Deadline was told to the contrary by those involved with the film. According to spokesman Liz Biber, the company says it still plans to release the picture in the U.S. but does not have a release date set. We were told that the distributor was close to announcing its plans to pull out before yesterday’s tragic accident during production in Wayne County, GA, in which one female crew member was killed and seven others were injured when they were hit by a train while filming. So time will tell.

 Detective Joe Gardner of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department told Deadline that the crew was on the tracks filming a scene in Jesup, GA yesterday at about 4 PM local time and couldn’t get out of the way in time when a CSX train travelling from Memphis to Savannah arrived unexpectedly. The 27-year-old woman, who Variety reported was the second camera assistant, was killed after trying to remove a mattress from the tracks, and it did have permission to shoot in the location, Gardner said during a press conference yesterday. The 20-person crew was from Savannah, GA-based Meddin Studios. “All of us on the production team are devastated by the tragic accident that happened today,” the production said in a release sent late last night. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of our crew member.”

 Allman wrote the 2013 autobiography My Cross To Bear on which the film is based. Tyson Ritter, William Hurt, Wyatt Russell, Zoey Deutch, Chad Lindberg and Charles S. Dutton star in the pic, which Randall Miller is directing. Miller co-wrote the script with Jody Savin, who is also producing. Allman and his manager Michael Lehman are executive producing. |||||


News article:

Israel Police arrested a young woman who caused a fire in a Jerusalem gas station after a driver refused to give her a cigarette.

 The woman was at the Paz Gas station on Derech Bethlehem in Jerusalem on Tuesday. A security camera depicts her approaching a man filling his car's gas tank.

 She allegedly asked him for a cigarette, and he said no. Then she pulled a lighter out of her pocket and lit the handle of the fuel pump, which immediately caught fire.

 Gas station workers put out the fire.

 The suspect was arrested soon after the event by local police but denied the accusations while under investigation.

  ||||| Israeli police have arrested a woman caught on camera allegedly setting a petrol pump on fire while at a gas station in Jerusalem.

 CCTV footage of the astonishing scene shows a woman, believed to be in her mid thirties, come up to a man who is refilling his car on the forecourt. She briefly chats to the man before moving away. She then returns and appears to go near to where the pump is filling up the vehicle's tank.

 Suddenly, a fire begins around the pump and the woman runs away. The man, clearly shocked by the flames engulfing his vehicle, pulls the pump away from his car, yet this only makes the flames spread further, forcing the man to run out of view of the CCTV footage.

 Within just a matter of seconds the car is completely on fire. It later emerged that the driver's brother was seated inside the vehicle when the incident took place, but that fortunately he was not harmed.

 A police spokesman said in a written statement, "A woman approached a man while filling his petrol tank and asked for a cigarette, when he refused to give it to her she pulled out a lighter from her pocket and ignited the petrol pump. The car owner reacted quickly by pulling the pump that was on fire from his tank and fleeing.

 "Petrol station workers extinguished the fire."

 The woman in question was arrested shortly afterwards, and she denied any involvement in the incident. A court in Jerusalem has now extended her arrest by five days and sent her for psychological evaluations. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– A man who stopped for gas at a Jerusalem gas station yesterday saw his day go downhill in a flash when cops say a woman peeved that he didn't give her a cigarette set his car on fire, per Haaretz. Security footage shows the woman walking up to the guy as he fills his tank; she appears to say something to him, then momentarily walks away. But she's back in a couple of seconds—with a lighter, a police statement says, per the Independent—and as she holds her hand out to where the pump is connected to the car, the car ignites. The man was able to yank the pump out of the tank before he fled, and gas station workers put out the fire, the newspaper notes. The man's brother, said to be in the car at the time, was also reportedly unharmed. Israeli police arrested the woman, though she's apparently denying all accusations, Haaretz notes. (Cops say a California man returned to the gas station he robbed to apologize.)