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 Vice President Joe Biden has been hunkered down with advisers in his Delaware hometown, preparing to mount an energetic attack at Thursday night's debate. Mr Biden likely will home in on Mitt Romney's comments about the 47% of Americans he said pay no income taxes, believe they are victims and are dependent on the government.

 In a Florida hotel, meanwhile, Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and his advisers have been girding for precisely such an attack, and refining his argument that the country can't afford four more years of President Barack Obama's presidency.

 The single vice-presidential debate has taken on ... ||||| DANVILLE, Ky. — And now for the undercard.

 Paul Ryan will look to win for the Republican ticket tonight when he takes the debate stage at Centre College here against Joe Biden in the first national face-off in which he’s participated.

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 Biden — for whom expectations have been lowered over the constant refrain of “What about your gaffes?” — will try his best to triumph, providing Democrats with a strong night to change the momentum of a race that has shifted slightly toward Mitt Romney.

 (Also on POLITICO: Full coverage of the 2012 vice presidential debate)

 The best case scenario for each? A clear win. The worst case scenario for each? A clear loss. The murkiest scenario for each? A debate that gets fought to a draw, which the press will interpret in different ways but which also likely won’t stop the GOP ticket’s momentum.

 And of course, the debate’s subtext: Ryan and Biden are widely believed to be considering their own campaigns in 2016 (Ryan only if Romney loses).

 (PHOTOS: Scenes from the VP debate)

 Below, POLITICO’s five things to watch:

 1. Can Biden draw blood?

 Earlier this week, the congenitally quotable South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian predicted that Biden would take “the old meat-ax” to Ryan — a beating so one-sided that “the humane society” would have to be called in.

 It’s a hope shared by many Democrats — including President Barack Obama himself, who is publicly contrite over his passivity at last week’s Denver debate — flabbergasted by the prospect of the president standing by while Romney got away, in their minds, with 90 minutes of lies, mischaracterizations and manufactured positions contrary to his own history.

 (See also: Complete coverage of 2012 presidential debates)

 Biden, one of his staffers told POLITICO, is “eager to draw the contrast — and very capable of doing so.”

 But will it work?

 Ryan’s perceived weakness — his wonkery and penchant for speaking in numbers — may actually prove to be the congressman’s greatest asset, a rope-a-dope tactic that will take voters into the policy weeds and blunt Biden’s attacks on tax policy, spending and foreign affairs. Obama was momentarily captivated by the Wisconsin congressman earlier in his term, telling aides that he was one of the few members of the GOP congressional crew he actually respected on an intellectual level.

 But the vice president has his own arguments to make. Biden is likely to hammer away at the Medicare cuts Democrats claim are at the core of the Ryan budget passed by the GOP-controlled House, with polls showing older voters in key battlegrounds like Florida and Ohio deeply skeptical of the Republican approach. Biden, aides say, is also likely to emphasize Romney’s on-again, off-again support for Ryan’s plan — in an attempt to wedge the two apart. ||||| Thank goodness the Daily Caller has got some game for exposing conflicts of interest and really important stuff that other news sites are missing. The website known for saying that it has unearthed scandals said Wednesday it had unearthed the shocking news that the moderator of Thursday’s vice presidential debate once had someone named Barry Obama as a guest at the first of her three weddings.

 Now most of us in the political press have become far too complacent to backtrack even one wedding into the past of the debate moderators. So, of course, we would miss the glaring conflicts that can be exposed by journalists who dig really, really deep.

 The Daily Caller has revealed that debate moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC News had the self-same Obama at her wedding 21 years ago. And now we are less than 24 hours away from this obvious toady throwing out questions to the two men – Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan — who would like to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office that Obama now occupies.

 PHOTOS: Memorable presidential debate moments

 The Daily Caller article clearly suggests that Raddatz’s early 1990s interlude with the man later to be known as Barack should disqualify her from overseeing the contest between Biden and Ryan.

 Skeptics of the right-wing Daily Caller expose might note that Obama was only one of a bunch of Harvard Law School types at the wedding. And that his main connection to the event appeared to be as a friend of the groom, law school classmate Julius Genachowski. And that Raddatz and Genachowski divorced years ago.

 Those niceties would only be pointed out, though, by apologists for the hopelessly biased left-wing press corps.

 Raddatz might have moved on to a couple more marriages and an award-winning career as a White House and then foreign correspondent. But Peabody, Emmy and other awards can’t cover up the hard fact: She partied with the future president.

 You can almost feel the Daily Caller follow-ups: First, eyewitness accounts of Obama catching the Raddatz garter. Then the tell-all video: Raddatz and Obama, mere feet apart on the dance floor, boogieing as only undisciplined left-wingers can.

 PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

 Such associations certainly preclude one person from ever writing and reporting fairly about another. Surely, Raddatz should be forced from her position as senior foreign affairs correspondent for ABC. She may have made dozens of courageous trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. But how can she be fair about Obama’s role in those overseas wars after that glass of Mumm’s back in '91?

 Innocent Paul Ryan has no idea he is about to be blindsided by someone who once may or may not have danced the lambada with President Obama. A naïve Ryan spokesman, asked about the nefarious Raddatz, avowed to having “no concerns.”

 INTERACTIVE: Battleground states map

 Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

 james.rainey@latimes.com

 twitter.com/@latimesrainey

 MORE COMMENTARY FROM JAMES RAINEY

 Debate moderator "Silent Jim Lehrer" gets one last turn

 Presidential debate: Round One goes to Romney, by many measures

 Romney on a roll? Remember John Kerry, in debate, beat George W. Bush

  ||||| CNN will offer unrestricted access to Thursday's vice presidential debate coverage starting at 7 p.m. ET on CNN TV, CNN.com and via CNN's apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. Web users can become video editors with a new clip-and-share feature that allows them to share favorite debate moments on Facebook and Twitter. Follow CNN's live blog and visit the CNN debates page for instant updates and comprehensive coverage.

 Danville, Kentucky (CNN) -- Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's running mate, will share the stage in Danville, Kentucky, in their only debate. Biden and Ryan's debate follows the top of the tickets' first of three debates last week, in which Obama turned in a lackluster performance, upstaged by an aggressive and vibrant Romney.

 Here are five things to watch for on Thursday night:

 1. Will Biden go where Obama didn't?

 Biden is not shy on the campaign trail; the day after last week's first presidential debate, the vice president attacked Republican nominee Mitt Romney in a way that many Democrats had wished President Barack Obama would have done the night before.

 King: VP debate no game-changer, but could shift momentum

 How aggressive will Biden be in going after the man at the top of the GOP ticket rather than the man he'll share the debate stage with? Will Biden highlight the "47%" controversy, Bain Capital and Romney's tax returns?

 "The vice president likes laying out the contrast between the Romney-Ryan extreme agenda and the plans he and the president have to move this country forward and we fully expect that to continue Thursday night," an Obama campaign official told CNN.

 With the polls tightening both nationally and in key battleground states after last week's debate, the stakes for the showdown between the running mates have increased.

 7 questions you would ask at the VP debate

 "Biden needs to play offense, not defense," said Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Paul Begala, who is a senior adviser for a pro-Obama super PAC. "Attack the Romney-Ryan plan to cut taxes for the rich and raise them on the middle class. Dissect the Romney-Ryan plan to end Medicare as we know it. Point out that if Romney had been president, Osama bin Laden would be alive and GM would be dead. And be prepared to body-slam Ryan when -- not if -- he fibs."

 2. The wonk trap

 Paul Ryan likes to call himself "a numbers guy."

 Indeed, wonky budget talk is Ryan's calling card. It's the primary reason he has captured the hearts of conservative elites in Washington, who see him as the second coming of Jack Kemp.

 Ryan's debate prep as meticulous as he is

 But fiscal wonkery was quicksand for Obama during last week's debate. His dreary reliance on budget math over pointed political arguments contrasted sharply with Mitt Romney, who presented his ideas with vigor and clarity, despite obvious questions about the factual underpinnings of his ideas.

 Can Ryan avoid getting bogged down in the arithmetic that so thrills him? An adviser to the GOP vice presidential nominee told The National Review's Robert Costa this week that Ryan "may be over-preparing" for his showdown with Biden.

 By some accounts, Ryan has bristled at platitude-driven demands of the campaign trail. He'd rather be talking substance, on the road with a PowerPoint presentation about Medicare costs.

 The challenge for Ryan on Thursday, though, is to present the Romney vision to millions of voters without sounding too much like the Beltway think tank staffer he once was.

 He's done a solid job of that since Romney put him on the GOP ticket in August. Now, on the biggest stage of his career, he has to abandon some of the Capitol Hill tendencies that made him a star in the first place.

 Paul Ryan hasn't called Palin for advice

 3. Will Biden put Social Security in play?

 In the House, Paul Ryan has backed moving Social Security funds to private investment accounts as a way to make the popular entitlement program more solvent.

 Ryan's past proposals would seem to tee up what's usually a winning political argument for Democrats: that the Republican ticket wants to gut Social Security to help their old pals on Wall Street.

 But to the bewilderment of Democratic strategists, Obama appeared to take the issue off the table in the first debate.

 "I suspect that on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position," Obama said. "Social Security is structurally sound. It's going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. But it is, the basic structure is sound."

 CNN Money: Social Security, Where Obama and Romney stand

 The Obama campaign scrambled to clarify last week that yes, in fact, the two candidates have fundamentally different views on Social Security.

 "The choice is clear: President Obama will never privatize Social Security or undermine retirement security for middle-class Americans," read a post on the Obama campaign website that went up after the debate. "The same cannot be said for Romney."

 Will Biden try to score fresh points by raising the issue of Social Security privatization against Ryan? Or did the president already holster one of his party's most effective political attacks?

 4. The age gap

 "I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."

 So went Ronald Reagan's famous line in one of his 1984 debates against Democratic challenger Walter Mondale.

 Will Biden have a similar quip ready on Thursday?

 OK, Biden is not nearly as old as Reagan, who was 73 at the time of his re-election. But at 69, he has almost three decades on Ryan, his 42-year-old debate opponent.

 How Ryan sharpens debate skills

 Biden is also known for his exuberance and devilish charm, so perhaps the age gap won't be as apparent as it was in 2008, when 47-year-old Barack Obama shared a stage with 72-year-old John McCain. Or as it was in 1988, when 67-year-old Lloyd Bentsen debated his boyish vice presidential foe Dan Quayle.

 Stylistically, their birthdays might not matter much. But the age difference neatly crystallizes the arguments being presented by both campaigns.

 Will voters choose experience and decide to move forward on the path we're on? Or will they look to a pair of fresh-faced outsiders who offer a new direction?

 5. Ryan's role as commander in chief

 Just as Mitt Romney needed to prove last week that he's acceptable to Americans to serve as president, Ryan needs to convey that he's ready to fill in as president in case something happens to Romney. It's one of the top tasks for the challenger's running mate in a vice presidential debate.

 We'll be keeping a close watch on Ryan to see if he touts his ability to step in, if needed, to the leading role.

 The Romney campaign is confident that the congressman from Wisconsin will pass the test, thanks to Ryan's position as House budget chairman and his mastery of complex fiscal issues.

 "It will come down to his competency on the issues, his command of the issues," a Romney campaign official told CNN.

 But Republican strategist and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos thinks that this time around, passing the competency test is not as important.

 "There is very little pressure for either of these vice presidential candidates to prove they are ready to step into the office of president. Both their bosses are relatively young and in great health," Castellanos said.

 Opinion: Biden must deliver for Team Obama

 What questions would you ask the VP candidates? Share with us on CNN iReport |||||

– There's a whiff of desperation in the air over tonight's vice presidential debate—and a hint of controversy, too. The desperation, of course, comes from the blue team, which is desperate to halt the momentum Mitt Romney gained in the first debate, and expects Joe Biden to be especially aggressive in attacking Paul Ryan. The controversy? A conservative site has dug up evidence that President Obama may have attended moderator Martha Raddatz's wedding. Here's what you need to know: The Daily Caller has found that Obama had attended the first of Raddatz's three weddings, back in 1991—he was a Harvard Law classmate of groom Julius Genachowski, who he later named to head the FCC. But the LA Times is not impressed, writing snarkily that "most of us in the political press have become far too complacent to backtrack even one wedding into the past of the debate moderators." Everyone is expecting Biden to come out swinging. One Biden staffer tells Politico that the VP is "eager to draw the contrast—and very capable of doing so." Ryan himself told a radio station yesterday that he expects Biden to come at him like a "cannonball," according to USA Today. Expect Biden to go on the attack when it comes to Ryan's Medicare plan in particular. CNN also wonders if Biden will bring up Social Security. Ryan has advocated moving the funds into private investment accounts, an idea Democrats usually attack profitably—but Obama appeared to take it off the table in the first debate, saying he suspected he and Romney had "a somewhat similar position." Ryan's team also expects Biden to bring up Romney's 47% gaffe, and they tell the Wall Street Journal that they've specifically been prepping a response to it. On Ryan's end, everyone's wondering just how wonkish he'll be. CNN worries he'll get "bogged down in arithmetic," but Politico suspects it could be his "greatest asset, a rope-a-dope tactic that will take voters into the policy weeds." Of course, all this sound and fury might not signify much. "By tradition, the vice presidential debates have been like the vice presidency itself: well-publicized but largely inconsequential," quips the Washington Post, noting that Gallup studies found they'd never had a significant impact on the race.


Article:

I’m a bit obsessed with fortune cookies. I, an otherwise non-superstitious person, have no fewer than five incidentally meaningful ones stashed away in special places. I know I shouldn’t take them seriously — they’re not even Chinese! — but breaking open a cookie and attempting to find a higher truth is an inexplicably satisfying way to end a takeout meal. But just eating them wasn’t enough. I wanted to unlock their mysteries.

 Sure, we know how fortune cookies are made, but I wanted to break inside the dough and find out what could be learned from the wisdom within: the fortunes, the “lucky numbers” and even the lessons in Mandarin. So in the spirit of this earlier experiment with tarot cards, I set out on a data-driven mission.

 I bought 1,050 fortune cookies from an internet wholesaler. A week later, the FiveThirtyEight offices welcomed three bulk boxes of the purportedly portentous pastries; within yet another week, after assiduous disassembly, categorization, alphabetization and digitization, I was able to say with resounding confidence: Those jerks only sent 1,035 cookies. Despite the 15-cookie deficit, I had an intimidating sample size to crack wide open. Here’s what I found.

 How many fortunes are there?

 I bought the bulk cookies — Panda brand, with fortunes at times directing me to Wonton Food Inc.’s web page — expecting a random sample, but it turns out that buying in bulk gives you an entire slice of a production run. I bought enough that we got fortunes beginning with the letters “A” through “I,” and letters “W” through “Y.” There were 676 unique fortunes in the 1,035-cookie sample. The obverse side of the fortunes repeat more often; there were just 556 unique combinations of lucky numbers on the back of those fortunes, and 173 individual Mandarin vocabulary words and phrases.

 We can estimate a few things with this information. We know the general distribution of letters in the English language, but we also know the approximate distribution of first letters in sentences, thanks to cryptographers who need to keep such information handy. About 46 percent of sentences begin with the letters “A” through “I,” and about 8 percent begin with “W” through “Y.” And while the fortune cookie distribution differs from most English in a number of ways — for instance, way more sentences beginning with “You” — I’d venture, given our 54 percent coverage, that there could be roughly 1,200 to 1,600 fortunes in the overall corpus. So we’re far from a census here, but we have a decent sample.

 Are fortune cookie “lucky numbers” actually lucky?

 Lucky? Don’t be ridiculous, of course they’re —

 It’s complicated.

 In order to figure out if one set of six numbers was legitimately luckier than a random set of six numbers, we would need some sort of highly transparent, public-facing random number generation system carried out over years and years at organized intervals with specific monetary amounts allocated to specific chance outcomes. The logistics alone would be breathtaking. Such a study of luck could easily require a multi-state body to organize the venture and ensure that the game remained solvent.

 We only worked on this story for about a month, so instead of setting all that up, we let Powerball do the work for us. I took all the lucky numbers from the fortunes and compared them to the Powerball numbers stretching from Nov. 1, 1997, to May 27, 2017, and calculated what the winnings would be if a degenerate gambler bought one Powerball ticket for every single one of the allegedly lucky number combinations over all 2,043 drawings. Such an individual — buying one ticket for each batch of numbers, including repeats — would make $4.4 million on $4.2 million in ticket purchases. The expected value of that investment using “unlucky” randomized digits and assuming an average jackpot at each drawing? $1.7 million in winnings on $4.2 million in ticket purchases, based on multiplying the current probabilities of each event by the current prizes for each event across 2,043 drawings.

 It would appear that the lucky numbers are legit lucky:

 Obviously, this is weird as hell. It’s mainly thanks to several $1 million prize-winning jackpots with the numbers 19, 30, 55, 18 and 53 with the Powerball number 21. There are certainly logical explanations for this. Maybe the lucky numbers were added into the fortune cookies after those Powerball wins. Or, according to Occam’s razor, play several thousand lotteries with several thousand combinations, and you’ll hit a winner eventually. Plenty of people have won lotteries, even the Powerball, with fortune cookie insight.

 So I can’t say they’re lucky, but I’m pretty confident we can’t claim the numbers are unlucky .

 How much of the language can one learn from the backs of fortunes alone?

 Anyone who tried to pick up Mandarin from our 1,035 fortunes in some bootleg flashcard stratagem would be in decent luck. At 173 words, we’re talking the vocabulary of a highly precocious 2-year-old or a late-blooming toddler. You won’t be carrying on any particularly insightful conversations; with 21 verbs at your disposal — mostly exercise-, eating- and illness-based — an adept student could eat, find a doctor and roller-skate (assuming tenses are no object). Intensifiers and modifiers are very much in the cards; with 21 adjectives in your arsenal, you could order that food cheap, delicious or even blue. It’s with the 124 nouns that your vocabulary range sings — assuming you’re hungry.

 Seventy-four of the 173 words you’d learn pertain primarily to food, so the cookie has educated you just enough to keep you trapped in a restaurant. We’re talking lesson two, maybe three of the Mandarin Rosetta Stone set. If you can’t bear the course cost, downing 1,035 snacks with the approximate nutritional value of Froot Loops could do the trick.

 But what are the fortunes telling us?

 Only about a fifth of fortunes had predictive or forward-looking statements about what may or will occur in the misty future, but a majority hit the most delightful topic of all: you. Based on some laborious topical tagging, more than half of the unique fortunes mentioned “you,” your character, your strengths, your weaknesses. Outside of those two main themes, there was not a ton of consensus in terms of topics covered (again, I coded these by hand).

 Fortune cookies aren’t really about the future; they’re all about you THEME SHARE OF FORTUNES Mentions “you” 52.9% – Predicts the future 22.3 – Success, failure and happiness 10.0 – Work, education and doing things 8.1 – Intellect, curiosity and creativity 7.6 – Character traits 7.3 – Journeys, beginnings and change 6.9 – Friends and people 4.8 – Love, beauty and romance 4.0 – Chance, fortune and fate 3.7 – Based on an analysis of 676 unique fortunes from 1,035 Panda brand fortune cookies, which were not quite sampled randomly. All fortunes begin with the first letter “A” through “I” or “W” through “Y” because of the way the cookies were packaged for bulk purchasing.

 Are all the fortunes innovative and unique? Of course not. I have qualms about “Everyone agrees you are the best.” Perhaps “Dance like nobody’s watching,” and “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” feel a bit glib for “wisdom.” It’s a bold move to crib from Yoda and write, “Do or do not, there is no try,” but good god It’s an extremely bold move to straight-up rip off Jesus with, “Do onto others as you wish others do onto you” and try to pass it off as an original fortune.

 Beyond this, we can perhaps look at the words that appear disproportionately in fortunes compared with the standard English corpus — lots of action words and positivity, like “good,” “life,” “go,” “never,” “make” and “always” — but, of course, the real fun comes in when smashing them together and creating brand-new tokens of wisdom with bots like this one. Even though I equipped my bot with hundreds of fortunes to draw on — it builds a fortune by randomly selecting subsequent words based on how often they succeed the previous pair of words — it may not be perfect, and all the Markov-bot-generated fortunes may not be winners. Some of the algorithmically generated advice that can now be found at @FortuneBot538 is terrible.

 But I’ll never forget when, wrist-deep in a box of shattered shortbreads sometime around fortune number 863, a wise cookie told me, “You may be disappointed if you fail. But you are doomed if you don’t try.”

 Tweets by FortuneBot538 ||||| Tweet with a location

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What is a summary?

– Imagine you're so obsessed with fortune cookies, and the destinies they claim to foretell, that you order more than 1,000 of them to "unlock their mysteries." That's exactly what data journalist Walt Hickey did for FiveThirtyEight.com, picking through the prognostications (676 unique ones among his 1,035-cookie sample), the "lucky numbers" included on each slip of paper, and even the Mandarin vocab printed on the reverse sides. Despite his inventory being 15 cookies short of what he ordered (did anyone really think someone in love with data wouldn't count every single cookie?), he made some fascinating and surprising finds. Here, a sample: Those lucky numbers aren't not lucky. Hickey calls this discovery "weird as hell," but he admits that, after comparing the numbers on the fortunes to winning Powerball numbers over a nearly 20-year stretch, the value of playing the fortunes' numbers over that time period would have left a hypothetic gambler with a slight profit (just under $175), while playing random numbers would leave that same gambler with a $2,540 deficit. He's got some common-sense explanations for why that may be. What do the fortunes really tell us? They don't so much tell our fortunes as appeal to our egos and sense of good citizenship, apparently. Only 22.3% of the themes enclosed within the cookies actually dabbled in prophesy: The vast majority (52.9%) included the word "you" and spit out praise or criticism of one's strengths and weaknesses, while others included basic life advice and well-worn wisdom like "Do onto others as you wish others do onto you." Hickey even built his own online bot to see what randomly generated fortunes it would churn out. Check it out here. Break open the steamed dumplings and read more on what the FiveThirtyEight analysis turned up.


– Positive news is hard to come by when it comes to the mudslide that wiped out a Washington state community, but footage is making the rounds today of a helicopter crew rescuing a 4-year-old boy from the muddy wreckage. Jacob Spillers was home with his two sisters, age 5 and 2, his stepfather, and his 13-year-old half-brother when the slide hit. The home was destroyed, and all were trapped inside, according to the Seattle Times. Everyone except Jacob is still missing; the boy escaped because he was on the second floor. "Jacob told me he got out when nobody else was able to get out," his half-brother's father says. Jacob's mother, however, is alive and well, because she wasn't home at the time. The footage was shot Saturday, the day the slide hit; no survivors have been found in the days since. Other heartbreaking tales from survivors: Gary "Mac" McPherson, 81, survived the landslide—even as it claimed his wife of 46 years, Linda, who was sitting right next to him, the LA Times reports. McPherson says he awoke sitting in the same chair, now crushed, with a ceiling beam across his lap, his house having been pushed 150 yards away. "He was able to dig a hole and see the sky," his daughter says. "The whole time, he was calling for my mom ... but she never responded." US Navy Cmdr. L. John Regelbrugge III's body was found by his two brothers yesterday morning, his sister-in-law tells the Seattle Times. The 32-year veteran's remains were alongside his dog's. "His brother Greg put a work shirt over him. They said he had massive injuries, so at least he didn't suffer." His wife was found a short time later.

Expand this summary.

Footage from 22 March of the mudslide in Oso, in the US state of Washington, shows a young boy being carried away by a helicopter rescue team.

 Authorities say they have recovered the bodies of two more people killed in a massive mudslide in the US state of Washington, bringing the total to 16.

 The officials said they thought they had located eight more bodies under the mud but were unable to retrieve them. ||||| Originally published March 25, 2014 at 11:50 AM | Page modified March 26, 2014 at 11:18 AM

 Rescuers expanded their search Tuesday and found additional bodies in the muck of a massive mudslide in Snohomish County.

 Use an interactive tool to see the landslide’s deadly path.

 Interactive map: A detailed view of the neighborhood hit by the landslide

 Read about the lives of the victims.

 Use an interactive to see how, even as warnings mounted, homes kept being built in slide-prone Steelhead Haven.

 A collection of stories and visuals about the disaster, why it may have happened and the people it affected.

 On a day with no shortage of grim news, the family of Navy Cmdr. L. John Regelbrugge III found the smallest measure of solace amid the wreckage of what four days ago was a thriving community.

 Two of Regelbrugge’s brothers, joining in Tuesday’s expanded search for survivors of the Oso-area mudslide, found the body of the 32-year Navy veteran on his shattered property on Steelhead Drive, said his sister-in-law, Jackie Leighton of Vacaville, Calif.

 “His brother Greg put a work shirt over him. They said he had massive injuries, so at least he didn’t suffer,” Leighton said.

 The body of Regelbrugge’s wife, Kris, a mother of five, was found later.

 Both were among the victims that officials said were found Tuesday during a difficult search that can no longer be labeled anything but a recovery. Chief Travis Hots of Snohomish County Fire Districts 21/22 said two more bodies were recovered Tuesday, bringing the official death toll to 16.

 But Hots said searchers believe they have located eight more bodies that have not been recovered.

 John Pennington, the county’s emergency-management director, said during a morning briefing that he remained hopeful for a miracle and the possibility a survivor may be found. But he also pointed out that a state mortuary-assistance team had been called in to assist.

 “I think that speaks for itself,” Pennington said.

 The number of those unaccounted for remains at 176, a figure officials are still trying to ratchet downward by verifying names, Pennington said.

 He said three Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies who specialize in missing persons are helping sort through the names. He hoped to have a more accurate number Wednesday.

 For a community mindful that no survivors have been found since the first few hours after Saturday’s mudslide, the bad news is unrelenting.

 “We all grew up here. We all spent 99 percent of our life here, or more. It’s devastating. It’s just devastating,” said Teresa Hathaway, 55, of Arlington.

 Guard, FEMA help

 Tuesday’s search was conducted amid worsening weather conditions, but was aided by the arrival of teams from the Washington Army National Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

 Dozens spent the day carefully maneuvering through shattered trees and the unrecognizable debris of homes and twisted propane tanks, searching with specially trained dogs and a variety of technologies such as sonar.

 “It’s almost like walking in ice in places,” Hots said of the difficult terrain.

 Describing a visit to the mudslide, the veteran firefighter said the damage was worse than he imagined.

 He said he initially believed that people who had been swallowed by the slide while driving on Highway 530 would be buried in their cars and could be rescued. But those “vehicles are like twisted and tore up in pieces. ... It’s just amazing, the magnitude of what this slide has done,” Hots said.

 Officials stationed in Darrington augmented their search teams Tuesday with community volunteers eager to help in any way they could. Many had already risked arrest by conducting unauthorized searches in the days after the hillside gave way and buried a community in up to 20 feet of mud and debris.

 Gov. Jay Inslee joined a morning meeting of the Darrington Fire District with the new volunteers, saying afterward that “this remains an aggressive rescue effort.”

 Officials did have good news for those in Darrington, east of where the slide took place: Phone and Internet services were restored and a second road into town, the Mountain Loop Highway, should open Thursday.

 “Awful” noise

 The Sheriff’s Office released recordings of the 911 calls reporting the slide and several hours of harrowing — even heartbreaking — exchanges between dispatchers and the first-responders on the scene.

 The first was made by a woman who reported that water was running across Highway 530 and that there appeared to be a roof from a home or barn in the middle of the road. The calls grew increasingly frantic as the magnitude of the disaster comes into sharper focus.

 One panicked woman called to say her neighbors’ houses were gone and that people were screaming for help.

 Minutes later, a man called to say his neighbors’ home was buried, but that he could “hear them tapping underneath” the roof, which was sticking out of the muck.

 That caller, Michael Lincoln, 50, and his wife were sleeping in Saturday when his son’s girlfriend, who had been on their front porch, pounded on the door, saying trees and mud were racing up their driveway along Highway 530.

 Lincoln bolted awake and saw earth and vegetation rumbling toward his home.

 “The noise was awful,” he told The Seattle Times on Tuesday. “She said it sounded like the end of the world. It was the sound of tens of thousands of things hitting each other.”

 The river of debris slowed and finally settled. Lincoln ran out to the highway and sunk to his waist in mud.

 His neighbor’s house was gone. Another home, owned by Linda McPherson and her husband, Gary “Mac” McPherson, had been split in two. Linda McPherson was killed.

 Lincoln started yelling. Another man showed up and also started yelling.

 They heard a voice in the rubble — Gary McPherson. They also heard him tapping.

 Lincoln called 911. Others showed up to help. They ran and grabbed tools and started demolishing the McPhersons’ roof.

 “We grabbed chain saws and axes and big crowbars,” he said. “We just started cutting through two-by-fours.”

 Eventually they saw his fingers sticking up.

 Emergency crews arrived in time to extricate McPherson, who was in his easy chair, trapped by a log.

 The McPhersons’ daughter Kate McPherson said the couple had been drinking coffee, separated only by a living-room end table, when the slide shattered the house and shoved what remained about 150 feet.

 Gary McPherson is recovering with relatives in Everett.

 Watching carefully

 Based on aerial photographs, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the size of the slide at about 175 million cubic feet.

 Engineers hope to install laser instruments to monitor the slide’s motions, but aren’t sure when that will be possible.

 The slide is likely to keep creeping, and it’s tough to say whether another large slide could follow on its heels, said University of Washington landslide expert David Montgomery.

 The massive slide relieved pressure within the slope and drained away the water that contributed to the failure, which lowers the risk of another large slide, he said. But at the same time, the failure creates new stresses and weakens the slope, which means more slides are not out of the question.

 “It’s certainly something you would want to be watching very carefully,” Montgomery said.

 The director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network discounted speculation that a tiny quake March 10 might have triggered the slide.

 The quake measured 1.1 on the magnitude scale, said John Vidale. Very small quakes are hard to locate precisely, but the epicenter seems to have been about 2.5 miles underground and about a mile northeast of the slope that failed.

 But the shaking from a 1.1 quake is so slight that even someone standing right on top of the epicenter probably wouldn’t have felt it, Vidale said.

 “That earthquake wouldn’t have triggered anything.”

 It’s even possible the seismic signal was caused not by a quake, but by the ground in the vicinity shifting before the slide, he added.

 Seattle Times staff reporters Craig Welch, Sandi Doughton, Sara Jean Green, Mike Carter, Lynn Thompson and Jack Broom and Times news researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this story. Reporters Brian M. Rosenthal and John Higgins reported from Arlington. Reporter Alexa Vaughn reported from Darrington.

 Want unlimited access to seattletimes.com? Subscribe now! ||||| Originally published March 24, 2014 at 11:36 AM | Page modified March 24, 2014 at 11:45 PM

 Photo by Ted S. Warren /The Associated Press; Graphic by The Seattle Times

 Officials said they have received 176 reports of people missing as rescuers continue to search the debris from a milewide mudslide in Snohomish County.

 Dec. 14-15, 2006: Hanukkah Eve Windstorm blamed for at least 14 deaths in Western Washington, including eight who died of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

 May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens in Skamania County erupted, following a magnitude 5.1 earthquake. The heat melted glaciers and caused massive mudflows, killing 57 people and destroying more than 200 homes.

 Oct. 12, 1962: The Columbus Day Windstorm claimed 46 lives as it moved from Northern California through Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, with winds gusting over 100 mph.

 Jan. 13, 1950: Blizzard and high winds dumped 21 inches of snow on the Seattle area, claiming 13 lives.

 Aug. 20-Sept. 9, 1910: The Great Fire of 1910 burned about 3 million acres in Northeast Washington and Northern Idaho, killing 85 people, 72 of them firefighters.

 March 1, 1910: Stevens Pass Avalanche killed 96 people after it swept two trains down a ravine. It remains the deadliest avalanche in U.S history, and Washington’s worst natural disaster.

 Use an interactive tool to see the landslide’s deadly path.

 Interactive map: A detailed view of the neighborhood hit by the landslide

 Read about the lives of the victims.

 Use an interactive to see how, even as warnings mounted, homes kept being built in slide-prone Steelhead Haven.

 A collection of stories and visuals about the disaster, why it may have happened and the people it affected.

 Rescuers Monday found six more bodies in a milewide swath of mud and debris that plunged from a Snohomish County hillside, as reports of those still missing jumped to 176.

 So far, 14 people have been confirmed dead after the massive mudslide came down from above the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, crossed over it, plowed through homes and onto Highway 530 about 11 a.m. Saturday.

 Search conditions are dismal. Crews have at times been kept from the area out of fear more of the cliff above might crumble. And when they can look, “in areas it’s like quicksand. Sometimes it takes five minutes to walk 40 or 50 feet and get our equipment over these berms,” said Travis Hots, chief of Snohomish County Fire Districts 21 and 22.

 The National Guard is expected to arrive early Tuesday to aid the search.

 As the search progressed, the names of the missing reported to authorities increased dramatically.

 Sunday, there were reports of 18 people missing. Monday morning, John Pennington, who heads the county’s Department of Emergency Management, said they were sorting through a list of 108 reports, with obvious duplicates removed. By Monday evening, that number had reached 176.

 Pennington said that sounds discouraging, but he emphasized that some reports are vague and it is likely there are several about the same person. He encouraged people to continue calling in with names, photos and descriptions of people who might have been in the mudslide’s path.

 “Candidly, the 176 names ... I believe very strongly is not going to be a number that we’re going to see in fatalities. I believe it’s going to drop dramatically,” Pennington said. “But it doesn’t make the process any easier.”

 Rescuers Monday used aircraft, hovercraft, heat-sensing equipment and dogs to look through mud 20 feet deep in places and contaminated by chemicals and bacteria. “It’s very tedious and slow-going,” Hots said.

 They are working in areas where there are most likely to be survivors, such as in houses and cars.

 “When we do find a void space, it’s difficult to search because buildings have been collapsed and crushed,” Hots said. He said the mud is so compressed in houses that it’s like concrete.

 Pennington said there are 59 vacant lots in the slide area, and 49 more lots had structures — meaning a house, a cabin or some type of possible dwelling. Of all the structures, 25 were likely occupied full-time.

 Dayn Brunner, after fighting the urge to dig through the mudslide wreckage Sunday, gave in to the temptation Monday along with his sons, brothers, cousins and friends. His sister, Summer Raffo, 36, is missing somewhere in the mud. “I can’t stay at home not doing anything,” Brunner said.

 He said officials told them they had to leave, but they refused. “They said just be careful and call us if you need us.”

 Other family members and friends of the missing gathered in the nearby towns of Darrington and Arlington, awaiting news and talking about loved ones. Often, they spoke in the past tense.

 Nobody has been found alive in the debris since Saturday.

 “Most of us in these communities believe that we will not find any individuals alive,” Pennington said Monday evening. “But I’m a man of faith, and I believe in miracles.”

 Still, he said, “we are moving toward a recovery operation” rather than a rescue.

 Hope gone

 Pete Bellomo, of Bellevue, spent the day in Arlington, trying to find out any information about his daughter, Shelley, and her longtime partner, Jerry Logan. He did not hold out hope they would be found alive.

 “No, no, I don’t think there’s any chance of that ... but I haven’t been informed of anything yet,” he said.

 Shelley Bellomo, 54, “loved living by that river,” where she could watch the bald eagles flying by, her father said.

 “It was a beautiful location. I never thought [a mudslide] could fall all the way across 530,” he said.

 Logan was “an all-around handyman” who helped one neighbor build a barn and installed a deck for another, Pete Bellomo said.

 Also missing is 13-year-old Jovon Mangual, his half-sisters Kaylee Spillers, 5, and Brooke Spillers, 2, and his stepfather, Billy Spillers.

 The children’s mother, Jonielle Spillers, a nursing assistant, and Jovon’s 4-year-old half-brother, Jacob Spillers, are alive.

 The Spillers moved from Seattle to Oso about two years ago, said Jovon’s father, Jose Mangual, a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army.

 Billy Spillers, a chief petty officer in the Navy, is stationed at Naval Station Everett and the family liked Oso “because it was more countrylike and they liked the house,” Mangual said.

 Billy Spillers and the children were apparently watching TV when the mudslide happened, according to Mangual, who said he spoke with Jacob about what happened. The boy said he’d been on the second floor.

 “Jacob told me he got out when nobody else was able to get out,” Mangual said.

 Jonielle Spillers was working when she learned of the slide. Blocked from reaching home because of the slide, she called hospitals, which is how she found Jacob.

 Thomas Durnell, 65, was at his Oso home when it was destroyed by the slide.

 Deb Durnell, his wife, was working Saturday morning and is safe, according to her daughter, Pam Keller.

 Carrie Milburn, a friend of the couple, said they moved there after marrying in 2010.

 Seth and Christina Jefferds have lived in their house in Oso for years .

 Seth Jefferds, a volunteer firefighter, was not home at the time of the slide and arrived to find his house flattened and his wife and her 4-month-old granddaughter, Sanoah Huestis, missing, said his brother-in-law, Dale Petersen.

 Sanoah Huestis lived with Christina and Seth Jefferds.

 Sanoah is just “a very, very cute child,” said Seth’s father, Peter Jefferds.

 He described Christina Jefferds as “very charismatic, loving. A great woman.”

 Northwest Smile Design, a dental office in Marysville where Christina Jefferds worked, posted on its website Monday that she and Sanoah Huestis had died, calling her “a steadying and calming force in times of stress ... a true friend.”

 Nichole Webb Rivera said she frantically called and texted her parents, her daughter and her daughter’s fiance when the massive hillside collapsed.

 Rivera said her parents, Thom and Marcy Satterlee, lived in the center of the slide, and she doesn’t think they made it out. She said her 20-year-old daughter, Delaney Webb, and Webb’s fiance were visiting the older couple at the time.

 Rivera lives in Houston but traveled to Washington after the slide. She said Monday: “We’ve lost four.”

 Seven people injured in the slide were being treated at area hospitals Monday.

 At Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, 22-week-old Duke Suddarth was in critical condition but improving. His mom, Amanda Skorjanc, 25, was in satisfactory condition.

 Three men, ages 81, 58 and 37, were all in serious condition there, though their names were not released.

 At Cascade Valley Hospital in Arlington, one woman was in satisfactory condition. Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon reported a 68-year-old man was in stable condition.

 Monday night, Darrington Mayor Dan Rankin said the closed Mountain Loop Highway, which connects Darrington to the outside world from the north, could reopen Tuesday or Wednesday. It has been closed for the winter.

 Times staff reporters Alexa Vaughn, Janet Tu, Bob Young, Lynn Thompson, John Higgins, Erik Lacitis, Brian M. Rosenthal and Nancy Bartley contributed to this report. Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.

 Four weeks for 99 cents of unlimited digital access to The Seattle Times. Try it now! ||||| Footage released of US mudslide rescue

 Updated: 04:41, Thursday March 27, 2014

 Dramatic footage has been released of the moment a four-year-old boy was rescued from the mudslide in Washington state that has left at least 24 people dead.

 Jacob Spillers is seen being attended to by rescuers who have flown in on a helicopter just hours after thousands of tons of mud flattened dozens of houses in Oso.

 He was one of only two people in his family to survive after his house took a direct hit.

 His stepbrother, father and two other siblings are still missing. His mother who was not at the house and survived.

 Sixteen people were confirmed dead on Tuesday. Emergency services said overnight that they had located what they thought was another eight bodies, increasing the death toll.

 As many as 176 others are missing but authorities do not know whether they are people who have not been in touch, or are under the debris.

 Residents of a nearby town of Darrington have now been allowed to help emergency services comb through the wreckage.

 Emergency workers have been using dogs and specialist electronic equipment to try to find survivors and bodies.

 Their search has been hampered by the weather and the sheer amount of debris, much of which can only be removed by hand, in one of the worst such disasters in the United States.

 'Unfortunately, we did not find any signs of life today, we didn't locate anybody alive, so that's the disappointing part,' Snohomish County fire district chief Travis Hots said.

 He said the emergency operation was still focused on finding survivors as well as recovering bodies.

 'We haven't lost hope that there's a possibility that we can find someone,' he said.

 The mudslide smashed through the small community, about 55 miles (90km) north of Seattle, on Saturday morning.

 Mr Hots said some 50 more searchers had been brought in to sift through the disaster zone in hopes of a miracle.

 'This makes up over 200 responders that are here on site working very hard to locate victims and hopefully find somebody that is still alive. That is still our number-one priority out there,' he said.

 Around 30 homes were destroyed and dozens more damaged as much of the riverside village was swept away. Eight people were injured.

 The torrent of mud was unleashed after the hillside above the village became saturated by rain.

 Reports suggest that authorities may have known about the potential for deadly landslides in the area.

 A 2010 report commissioned by Snohomish County found that some neighbourhoods were at especially high risk because of the gradient of the hills and the soil type, according to the Seattle Times.

 President Barack Obama has signed an emergency declaration ordering US government assistance to add to state and local relief efforts in the area.

 'We hope for the best, but we recognise this is a tough situation,' he said.

 The disaster already ranks as one of the deadliest landslides in recent US history.

 In 2005, 10 people died when a hillside gave way and engulfed homes in La Conchita, California. ||||| Stunning video emerged Wednesday of a 4-year-old boy plucked from the muck by a helicopter rescue team in the aftermath of the devastating mudslide that pulverized a rural community in Washington.

 Jacob Spillers was saved Saturday after being trapped in the mud that destroyed dozens of homes and killed at least 16 people. Rescuers believe they have also spotted the bodies of eight victims of the Saturday landslide.

 The boy was at home with his father, Billy Spillers, and three siblings when the mudslide tore through Oso, a town 55 miles northeast of Seattle. Jacob is the only known survivor of the group.

 Jacob Spillers, 4, was rescued from the mudslide in Oso, Wash., on Saturday. This photo was taken on July 7, 2012.

 Up to 176 people remain missing in the wake of the mud wave.

 Search crews continued the grim task of rescue and recovery Wednesday, wading through the mess of earth, trees, ice and foul waste water as hopes dimmed of finding survivors. Emergency workers used search dogs, bulldozers and bare hands to slog through the square-mile debris field.

 (L-R): Kaylee Spillers, baby Brooke Spillers, Jacob Spillers (wearing blue), Jovon Spillers, father Billy Spillers, mother Jonielle Spillers. Up until Saturday, only Jacob and Jonielle were known to be safe after Saturday's mudslide in Washington. Snohomish County Helicopter Rescue Team The 4-year-old boy, Jacob Spillers, was trapped in the mud after the landslide destroyed his family’s Oso home on Saturday. Central Pierce Fire and Rescue The little boy survived the deadly disaster, but authorities were still searching for his father and three siblings. Marcus Yam/AP Authorities said they are searching for up to 176 people who have been missing since the mudslide swept through the rural town about 55 miles northeast of Seattle on Saturday. Previous Next

 Enlarge

 Authorities said some victims may be left entombed in the treacherous terrain because attempts to recover every body would be dangerous.

 With News Wire Services

 jkemp@nydailynews.com |||||


Article:

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne listens during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., January 9, 2017. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

 DETROIT (Reuters) - Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCHA.MI) (FCAU.N) Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday that the company’s chances of hitting 2018 financial targets are “significantly greater than 50 percent,” according to a person present at the meeting.

 The targets from Fiat Chrysler’s five-year plan ending in 2018 were initially set in 2014 and updated in January 2016. They include 136 billion euros ($144 billion) of revenue and adjusted net profit of between 4.7 billion euros and 5.5 billion euros.

 Fiat Chrysler had no comment on the remarks made by Marchionne at the analyst meeting.

 Last January, the company raised it targets for 2018, and also forecast adjusted operating profit of 8.7 billion to 9.8 billion euros, and adjusted operating margins of 6.4 percent to 7.2 percent.

 Many analysts expressed doubts about the company achieving the targets when they were set and then upgraded.

 In Milan, the company’s shares closed Wednesday at 10.47 euros, up 21 percent since the end of December, and in New York, shares closed at $11.09, up 21.6 percent this year.

 Marchionne confirmed on Monday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit that he will retire at the end of 2018. ||||| Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV was accused of violating pollution laws with 104,000 diesel vehicles, sending the shares plunging on the prospect the automaker may follow Volkswagen AG in facing billions of dollars in fines.

 The Environmental Protection Agency alleged Fiat Chrysler put software in Jeep Grand Cherokee and Ram 1500 models that allows them to exceed pollution limits. The EPA stopped short of calling the software a “defeat device” but said the carmaker failed to disclose their use. Fiat Chrysler said it meets all applicable regulatory requirements and will work with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration to contest the allegations.

 Fiat Chrysler becomes the second automaker in less than three years the EPA has accused of violating the law by using software to pass laboratory emissions tests. Volkswagen, which admitted to using defeat devices in September 2015, agreed Wednesday to pay a $4.3 billion fine, boosting the cost of the scandal to about 20.5 billion euros ($21.9 billion).

 Fiat Chrysler’s case is “completely different” from Volkswagen’s, Chief Executive Officer Sergio Marchionne said in a call with reporters Thursday. He called the timing of the EPA’s notice of a violation “very strange” and said the Italian-American automaker rescued by the Obama administration in 2009 had discussed emissions with the EPA for more than a year.

 “I am really ticked off,” Marchionne said. Fiat Chrysler fell as much as 18 percent, the biggest intraday drop since the stock began trading in October 2014. The shares pared losses after the CEO’s conference call, trading down 10 percent to $9.95 as of 4:15 p.m. in New York.

 Fiat Chrysler’s alleged violations could result in fines of as much as $44,539 per vehicle, Cynthia Giles, the EPA’s enforcement chief, said Thursday. The total potential penalty could be as much as $4.6 billion, based on the cost per vehicle and the number of 2014 through 2016 model year SUVs and trucks. When the EPA first revealed Volkswagen’s wrongdoing in September 2015, the company faced punishment of up to $18 billion.

 ‘Clear Violation’

 “Our meetings with Fiat Chrysler to date have not produced a viable explanation” for the software, Giles said during a conference call the EPA hosted with reporters. “This is a clear violation of the Clean Air Act.”

 New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office will investigate the EPA’s claims against Fiat Chrysler, saying in a statement he was “deeply troubled” and would work with state and federal partners.

 Fiat Chrysler plans to work with the Trump administration to “present its case and resolve this matter fairly and equitably,” the automaker said in a statement.

 The company’s bonds also fell. Its $1.47 billion of 5.25 percent coupon notes due in 2023 sank 4 cents to 99.7 cents at 11:19 a.m. in New York, according to Trace, the bond-price reporting system of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. That’s the biggest decline since the notes were sold in July 2015.

 Read More: FCA Suppliers Tumble After EPA Allegations

 Enhanced Testing

 The EPA says it discovered Fiat Chrysler’s allegedly illegal software while conducting enhanced testing of other diesel vehicles in the wake of Volkswagen’s scandal. The agency said it’s now up to Fiat Chrysler to demonstrate the software was not a defeat device.

 “Chrysler’s alleged misbehavior -- rigging its trucks, VW-like, to increase pollution of our lungs and lying about it -- is appalling,” Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, said in an e-mailed statement.

 The EPA’s violation notice said Fiat Chrysler’s diesel engine system had eight control devices changing the emissions of the vehicles under certain conditions that the company didn’t disclose.

 Not all such systems are cheat devices like Volkswagen used, according to John German, senior fellow at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a Washington-based non-profit that conducts technical and scientific analysis. ICCT played a central role in exposing Volkswagen’s cheat devices.

 Devices Allowed

 The government allows control devices, but they can’t be used to change emissions to meet testing requirements and they must be disclosed, German said.

 “The EPA is still investigating whether these are cheat devices,” he said in a phone interview. “VW got hit hard because they lied, covered it up and didn’t have a fix.”

 Marchionne said he presumes the U.S. Justice Department also is investigating the company. Fiat Chrysler’s software wasn’t used to bypass emissions tests or operate differently during evaluations than in real-world use, he said, calling such allegations “absolute nonsense.”

 “This software doesn’t look for anything,” he said. “It just runs.” ||||| Columbus Day seems like a fitting debut for Fiat Chrysler on the New York Stock Exchange, don't you think? This is an Italian-American success story after all.

 Shares of Fiat Chrysler began trading on the NYSE Monday under the ticker symbol FCAU. Fiat Chrysler opened at $9 and quickly moved as high as $9.55 before pulling back a bit.

 Chrysler hasn't been publicly traded in the United States in more than seven years. At that time it was known as DaimlerChrysler. Daimler (DDAIF) agreed to sell Chrysler to private equity firm Cerberus in 2007.

 Fiat's stock had previously traded as Fiat SpA (FIATY)in Milan and the United States. Those shares have outperformed GM (GM) and Ford (F) so far this year, largely due to the resurgence of Chrysler -- the smallest of Detroit's Big Three.

 Chrysler reported a sales increase of 19% in the United States last month compared to a year ago. That is Chrysler's 54th consecutive month of year-over-year sales gains.

 The company has done particularly well with larger vehicles, which are becoming more popular again as gas prices fall. Jeep sales are surging, as are sales of Chrysler's Ram trucks.

 Related: Ford shares shift into reverse

 Chrysler has turned its fortunes around since Fiat, led by enigmatic CEO Sergio Marchionne, took control of the company following its 2009 bankruptcy. Fiat initially purchased a 20% stake in Chrysler and now owns the whole company. The combined business is profitable as well, no small feat given how bad things got during 2008 and 2009.

 But can Fiat Chrysler grow further? Right now, it still is just the seventh-largest automaker in the world by sales. In addition to trailing Ford and GM, it's also smaller than Toyota (TM), Volkswagen (VLKAF), Renault-Nissan and Hyundai-Kia.

 Marchionne hinted in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that there could be more consolidation in the auto industry and that Fiat Chrysler could be a buyer.

 There has been chatter over the past few years about the possibility of a combination between Fiat and Honda (HMC) or Suzuki (SZKMF). Fiat also announced a partnership with Mitsubishi Motors last month in which Mitsubishi will produce new midsized pickup trucks for Fiat in Europe and Latin America. Could a full-blown merger of the two be next?

 Any of these would be a bold deal that could catapult Chrysler ahead of Ford in the global sales rankings.

 Marchionne has said that he plans to step down as Fiat Chrysler CEO in 2018. So if he wants to do another huge deal to make the company even bigger, he's only got a few years to add to his legacy. ||||| DETROIT (AP) — The U.S. government is accusing Fiat Chrysler of failing to disclose software in some of its pickups and SUVs with diesel engines that allows them to emit more pollution than allowed under the Clean Air Act.

 The Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement Thursday that it issued a "notice of violation" to the company that covers about 104,000 vehicles including the 2014 through 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Ram pickups, all with 3-liter diesel engines. The California Air Resources Board took similar action.

 The EPA scheduled a news conference Thursday to explain details of the case.

 "Failing to disclose software that affects emissions in a vehicle's engine is a serious violation of the law, which can result in harmful pollution in the air we breathe," said Cynthia Giles, EPA assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance.

 The agency said it will continue to investigate the "nature and impact" of the devices. The agency said FCA may be liable for civil penalties for the alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The EPA is investigating whether the auxiliary emission control devices constitute "defeat devices," which are illegal because they turn off pollution controls.

 Fiat Chrysler's shares fell more than 16 percent after the news was announced to $9.29.

 The announcement comes one day after Fiat rival Volkswagen pleaded guilty in federal court to criminal charges related to widespread cheating involving emissions tests with its "Clean Diesel" line of vehicles. Six high-ranking VW executives have been charged in the scandal. VW agreed to pay a record$4.3 billion penalty for cheating on emissions tests. ||||| NEW YORK/DETROIT (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday accused Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV of illegally using hidden software to allow excess diesel emissions to go undetected, the result of a probe that stemmed from regulators’ investigation of rival Volkswagen AG.

 Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne listens during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., January 9, 2017. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

 FCA shares plummeted as the maximum fine is about $4.6 billion. The EPA action affects 104,000 U.S. trucks and SUVs sold since 2014, about one-sixth the vehicles in the Volkswagen case.

 The EPA and California Air Resources Board told Fiat Chrysler it believes its undeclared auxiliary emissions control software allowed vehicles to generate excess pollution in violation of the law and each issued notices of violation.

 The U.S. Justice Department is investigating, Fiat Chrysler said Thursday. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement he is “deeply troubled” by the EPA findings and “will investigate the claims against Fiat Chrysler and stands ready to work with our state and federal partners.”

 Fiat Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne angrily rejected the allegations at a hastily-assembled conference call with reporters, saying there was no wrongdoing and the company never attempted to create software to cheat emissions rules by detecting when the vehicle was in test mode.

 He characterized the dispute as whether the automaker had completely disclosed software that protects the engine, adding the company was planning updated software to address EPA concerns.

 He said the EPA and the company could have settled the issue in “a more efficient way” without the EPA announcement, and he said “I’m really pissed off” about reports that equate FCA’s issues with VW’s.

 “The way that it has been described, I think, has been unfair to FCA, and that is the thing that disturbs me most,” Marchionne said.

 He also suggested regulators had a “belligerent” view of automakers. “We don’t belong to a class of criminals,” he said. “We’re not trying to break the bloody law.”

 The company has no plans to stop selling 2016 U.S. diesel models.

 EPA has reviews ongoing of other automakers’ emissions systems, but it is not clear if they have found any additional wrongdoing.

 A woman walks past a logo of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) in Turin March 31, 2014. REUTERS/Giorgio Perottino

 Regulators said FCA failed to disclose engine management software in 104,000 U.S. 2014-2016 Jeep Grand Cherokees and Dodge Ram 1500 trucks with 3.0-liter diesel engines. The undisclosed software results in increased emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx).

 Cynthia Giles, an EPA official, said Fiat Chrysler had an obligation to disclose the “illegal software” but has not decided whether to label them “defeat devices.”

 The EPA said it found at least eight undisclosed pieces of software that can alter how a vehicle emits air pollution. Fiat Chrysler had recalled vehicles for one of the undisclosed software.

 By contesting the charge, FCA will push the case into the administration of President-elect Donald Trump. It is not clear how Trump’s EPA will handle this or similar issues. Trump has nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a critic of federal environmental regulation, to lead EPA.

 Efraim Levy, analyst with CFRA, said FCA stands to “get a fresh start with the Trump administration.”

 SHARES SLIDE

 U.S.-listed shares were last down 10 percent, cutting their earlier losses. Milan-listed shares closed down 16 percent, weighing on European stock markets.

 The EPA announcement comes amid closer scrutiny of automakers after Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) admitted to cheating diesel emissions tests in 580,000 U.S. vehicles.

 In 2015, EPA said it would review all U.S. diesel vehicles following an admission from Volkswagen that it installed software in cars allowing them to emit up to 40 times legally permissible level of pollution.

 On Wednesday, Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) agreed to pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil fines and plead guilty to three felonies for misleading regulators and selling polluting vehicles.

 Fiat Chrysler could face fines of $44,539 per vehicle if it is proven that it violated emissions rules.

 European regulators have also raised questions about Fiat Chrysler diesels.

 Last fall, Germany wrote a letter to the European Commission accusing FCA of using an illegal device to switch off exhaust treatment systems in diesel engines in Fiat and Jeep vehicles sold in Europe. ||||| CLOSE The U.S. government is accusing Fiat Chrysler of failing to disclose software in some of its pickups and SUVs with diesel engines that allows them to emit more pollution than is allowed under the Clean Air Act. (Jan. 12) AP

 2015 Grand Cherokees are on display at a Fiat Chrysler dealership in Doral, Fla. (Photo: Alan Diaz, AP)

 DETROIT — U.S. regulators accused Fiat Chrysler Automobiles of violating emissions standards in more than 100,000 diesel vehicles, spawning concerns that the company could become ensnared in a scandal like the one that engulfed Volkswagen Group.

 The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that Fiat Chrysler illegally installed software on about 104,000 pickups and sport-utility vehicles that spewed harmful pollutants while failing to disclose the technology.

 The allegations involve the 2014, 2015 and 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokee and light-duty Ram 1500 pickup trucks with 3-liter diesel engines.

 The EPA said the automaker installed eight different undisclosed software programs on the vehicles, collectively causing them to spew harmful nitrous oxide emissions, which can exacerbate respiratory conditions.

 "This is a clear and serious violation of the Clean Air Act," said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. "There is no doubt they are contributing to illegal pollution."

 Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne blasted the EPA in a quickly arranged media call, saying he was offended by the agency's "incredibly belligerent" attacks on the auto industry. He said his company had done nothing illegally, and to try to dispel comparisons to Volkswagen's crisis.

 "There is nothing in common between the VW reality and what we are describing here," he said. It's "absolute nonsense" to suggest so, he said, and anyone who disagreed with him is "smoking illegal material." Marchionne insisted that Fiat Chrysler has been forthright.

 "We're trying to do an honest job here. We're not trying to break the bloody law," he told reporters.

 Marchionne rejected the suggestion that rogue employees could have schemed to violate EPA laws. "If I found a guy like that, I would have hung them on a door," he said.

 Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) shares trading on the New York Stock Exchange were down about 9% after initially tumbling 14% on the news as investors fretted about the financial implications.

 New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office would investigate Fiat Chrysler. Marcionne said he believes the U.S. Justice Department is assisting the EPA with its investigation.

 Several analysts said the company's sin may have been solely of disclosure, not an intentionally deceptive act like that at VW.

 "Software which adjusts the emissions of an engine is standard practice across the industry," Evercore ISI analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said in a note to investors. "It is the failure to disclose which seems to be the primary cause of concern at the EPA."

 The EPA has the authority to fine automakers up to $44,539 per vehicle for the worst violations of the Clean Air Act. The agency threatened possible fines Thursday if it determines that the software installed on the vehicles qualifies as illegal "defeat devices" under U.S. laws.

 Kelley Blue Book analyst Rebecca Lindland said there was no indication that Fiat Chrysler intentionally cheated.

 "They're not meeting the standards, but right now, it doesn't appear to be the same type of deliberate act that Volkswagen admitted to," she said.

 Lindland said the mistake might have been a failure to mention the technology when requesting EPA certification to sell the vehicles.

 "It's like bringing a calculator to your math test — you're allowed to bring it, and it's one thing to have it on your desk, but it's another thing to have it in your lap," she said.

 Fiat Chrysler said in a statement that it offered to the EPA to develop software fixes to "further improve emissions performance" because it wants to "resolve this matter fairly and equitably."

 The vehicles were programmed with software that violated standards and was not disclosed to the EPA, Giles said. In lab testing, the vehicles met standards, but at high speeds and in extended driving, they violate regulations, the EPA's Giles said.

 "That means that the vehicles were sold illegally," she said.

 The EPA said it discovered the alleged violations after expanding its testing of on-road vehicle performance following the Volkswagen scandal.

 Volkswagen admitted to cheating emissions laws on more than half a million vehicles and has agreed to criminal and civil settlements totaling nearly $22 billion. Six VW executives were charged Wednesday with allegedly weaving a conspiracy to dodge regulations while the company pleaded guilty to similar charges on a corporate level.

 In Volkswagen's case, vehicles spewed NOx emissions at rates up to 40 times the U.S. standard. Giles declined to provide a comparable assessment for Fiat Chrysler.

 Marchionne sought to distance Fiat Chrysler from VW.

 "To be perfectly honest, I think it's being blown out of proportion," he said. "I find this to be a bizarre characterization of FCA's activities, and we will defend our behavior."

 Unlike VW, the EPA has not ordered Fiat Chrysler to halt sales of diesel vehicles accused of violations. Marchionne said he would not stop sales proactively.

 The Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Group sign at the Chrysler Group headquarters May 6, 2014, in Auburn Hills, Mich. (Photo: Bill Pugliano, Getty Images)

 It's not unusual for Marchionne to take a combative stance against a federal regulatory agency. Marchionne pushed back against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2013 when the agency initially recommended a recall of 2.7 million Jeep SUVs for potentially dangerous rear-mounted fuel tanks.

 Eventually, the agency agreed to allow FCA to reduce the recall to include 1.56 million Jeep Grand Cherokees for model years 1993 to 2004 and the Jeep Liberty model years 2002 to 2007.

 The following year, the NHTSA was again critical of the automaker for the slow repair rate of those Jeeps.

 Contributing:Brent Snavely, Detroit Free Press

 Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.

 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2jAdL6R |||||
What is a summary?

– Less than 24 hours ago, Fiat Chrysler was anticipating hitting its 2018 financial targets. On Thursday, the automaker came under fire from the EPA, per Reuters, with the agency alleging Fiat Chrysler cheated on diesel emissions—just a day after six Volkswagen honchos were indicted in that company's own scandal. In Fiat Chrysler's case, the EPA—which was to announce its findings in a Thursday morning conference call—believes the automaker's software permitted emissions beyond what's allowed by the law, in more than 100,000 SUVs and trucks sold since 2014. This reported violation "can result in harmful pollution in the air we breathe," an EPA assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance tells the AP. USA Today reports that the EPA has the ability to fine up to $44,539 for any vehicle that flouts the Clean Air Act, meaning Fiat Chrysler could have to cough up around $4.5 billion. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles shares were halted Thursday morning after the company's biggest intraday plummet since it began trading on the NYSE in 2014, with shares falling as much as 18% before settling at a 16% decline right before trading stopped just after 11am EST. Reuters' sources say Fiat Chrysler contests the EPA's take, but a statement offered by the automaker and cited on Bloomberg contends all of Fiat Chrysler's diesel vehicles meet "applicable regulatory requirements" and that the company will work with "the incoming administration to resolve this matter fairly and equitably."


Write a summary based on this article:

Jintu Gogoi's neighbourhood in Sadiya, Upper Assam, is no longer friendly. Over two weeks ago, an army of eight-legged freaks invaded it. It all happened in the evening on May 8. Most of the inhabitants of Chaulkhowa Nagaon village had been to a Bihu function. When the programme drew to a close, swarms of spiders suddenly descended from nowhere and started biting the people. The festive mood soon turned into one of panic with people bumping into each other and tripping over empty benches in their frantic bid to egress. Jintu was bitten by one of these critters.It all sounded like a scene from a Hollywood horror flick, but as Jintu showed his blackened, swollen finger, to TOI, it became clear that it was not some elaborate hoax created by some mischief-monger, it was something that happened for real. But the panic it triggered could have been certainly avoided had there been enough awareness among laymen and mandarins about arachnids.Jintu spent a day at the Sadiya Civil Hospital after he complained of excruciating pain and nausea. When he returned home, he had more terrifying stories to tell. Terror was still writ large on his face even two weeks after the incident, but he thanked his stars for being alive. His neighbour,Purnakanta Buragohain, was not that lucky. He died in the hospital after a spider allegedly bit him.The events that unfolded in the next few days left everyone baffled. Scores of people arrived in the Sadiya civil hospital with spider bites, some even carrying their tormentors to the hospital. Amid all this, another person, this time a schoolboy, died of an alleged spider bite. And the district administration panicked. They sounded an alert across Tinsukia district and asked people to stay indoors at night—the time the unknown critters would swarm all over the place. They talked about fogging the place with DDT to kill the arachnids but couldn't find any effective solution. What's worse: they even let the two bodies to be cremated without conducting any autopsy. Yet the spider menace continued. None had any answer as to what kind of a spider it was and how it made such a sudden appearance.Then on May 22, a team of life scientists from Dibrugarh University and Gauhati University arrived in Sadiya. Led by Dr L R Saikia, head, Department of Life Sciences, Dibrugarh University, the team camped in the trouble spot for two days and nights and collected specimens. "As of now, we cannot give a specific name. It's similar to the tarantula, but it could be a whole new species. There aren't any arachnologists in the northeast, so it will take us a while to identify it. But whatever the species, it is a highly aggressive spider. It leaps at anything that comes close. Some of the victims claimed the spider latched onto them after biting. If that is so, it needs to be dealt with carefully. The chelicerae and fangs of this critter are quite powerful; but it's too early to declare it a killer spider. In fact, we are yet to test its venom and find out the toxicity," says Dr Saikia."We cannot say for sure that the fatalities were due to the venom; it could have been because of allergic reaction to the venom, which triggered cardiac arrest in both the victims. But all the bite patients first went to witch doctors, who cut open their wounds with razors, drained out blood and burnt it. That could have also made them sick. Also, we didn't administer any antivenin dose, as we were not sure if the spider was venomous," says Dr Anil Phatowali, superintendent, Sadiya Civil Hospital.He adds that the hospital is ill-equipped to handle crises due to manpower crunch, erratic power supply and equipment shortage.Dr Ratul Rajkhowa of the zoology department of Cotton College, Guwahati, has seen the spider. In fact, one of the dead creatures has been preserved in the department laboratory. He echoes Dr Saikia's views but says it's too early to call it a tarantula. "It could be the black wishbone or a species related to it. Or may be a species related to the funnel-web spider.Whatever it is, it is definitely new to the area. Assam doesn't have venomous spiders, it never had any throughout history, or there would have been some document, text or art that depicted this spider. People wouldn't have panicked like this; they are scared because they have seen something like this for the first time and don't know how to deal with it. They are used to the common house spider, which runs away when you even snap your finger close to it. But this spider attacks if you try to scare it off. Those who were bitten have said that when they tried to shoo it off, it leapt at them and buried its fangs."If the spider is indeed the black wishbone, which is found in Australia, how did it come all the way to Assam? Or, if it is the funnel-web spider, how did it suddenly appear at a place that is not its usual habitat? These questions have baffled experts. "There is a lot of insect fauna that is still to be discovered. Therefore, this could be a big find. However, what is worrying is the way these arachnids surfaced all of a sudden and started biting everyone around. Its behaviour shows that it is not used to human presence; so, there is some ground to believe that this may have been accidentally or intentionally introduced to our eco-system.Usually, animals and insects behave differently if they are introduced to a different habitat; many show an aggressive strain, especially after they have mated with local species. The hybrid ones become stronger and more aggressive. For instance, the Africanized bee or the 'killer bee', which resulted after 26 Tanzanian queen bees escaped from an apiary in Brazil and mated with local bees, was a hybrid species that also killed 1,000 people in Brazil alone. Today, it has reached up to central United States," says an entomologist on condition of anonymity.He adds, "Sadiya is not alien to terror. The place was notorious for human sacrifice until the mid-19th century when the British stopped this barbaric practice. The place also suffered immensely during the 1897 and 1950 earthquakes. Then came insurgency. There were brutal gun battles in Dibru-Saikhowa National Park a few years ago between the Army and insurgents. Recently, four suspected Maoists were gunned down here. People so used to terror will not panic because of spiders unless there is something really scary about it. The government should delve into this issue and find out how these arachnids arrived here. Instead, they are doing blunder after blunder."On May 28, the spider allegedly appeared in Nalbari, Lower Assam—a good 600 km away from Sadiya—and bit a woman. The woman not only trapped the spider, she was also sane enough to come to a hospital instead of visiting a witch doctor. When TOI contacted the deputy commissioner, Lalit Gogoi, on May 31, he informed that the woman took the spider back home after treatment. It didn't occur to the babus that the specimen should have been retained and sent for lab testing.One thing that is unexplained is how the black spider appeared in swarms. "A certain anomaly in conditions may provoke an unusual surge in breeding populations. Swarms of spiders are rare, although they have been reported, usually after flooding when the spiders search for dry and higher ground," says British naturalist Dr Vejay K Singh, popularly known as Dr Venom. He has heard about the spider menace and says he would like to come down and check the spider himself.TOI had showed him an image of the spider, to which he responded: "This is indeed a theraphosid spider or more commonly called tarantula. Most likely from the genus selenocosmia or lyrognathus, but more probably the former. The spiders are nocturnal, which explains why the attacks took place at night. The selenocosmia are aggressive spiders and will bite readily when provoked. However, they are not a social spider like the poecilotheria (tree spiders) which occur in south India and Sri Lanka. So a suggestion of swarms is puzzling. Perhaps, it is more likely to be a freak case of a population sprawl in the area. And although aggressive by nature, these spiders are not considered dangerous with regards to toxicity, and are unlikely to cause a fatal bite in a healthy individual."Dibrugarh University has, meanwhile, sent spider specimens to Indian Society of Arachnology, Maharashtra, for identification. Their report pending and without any spider specialist visiting the region, the truth about the mysterious spider attacks in Assam continues to be covered by a cobweb.manimugdha.sharma@timesgroup.com ||||| The Indian town of Sadiya has been swarmed by deadly spiders that have killed two people, The Times of India reported.

 The spiders, species unknown, showed up May 8, interrupting residents as they took part in a Hindu festival, said The Times.

 More from GlobalPost: India's missing girls (VIDEO)

 Residents there fear a fresh onslaught of the "alien" spiders, reported The Hindustan Times.

 Sadiya resident Purnakanta Buragohain and an unidentified school boy both died after being bitten, reported NewsCore.

 Local hospitals were overwhelmed by people wounded by spider bites. A team of scientists arrived May 22 to investigate the incident and try to find an antidote, said The Times.

 Dr. Saikia of Dibrugarh University told The Times that scientists haven't been able to identify the spider yet, saying the creature is "similar to the tarantula, but it could be a whole new species."

 Whatever it is, Saikia described it as a "highly aggressive spider" that "leaps at anything that comes close," citing victims who said it "latched onto them after biting."

 He said its venom needs to be tested before it could be definitively called a killer spider.

 British naturalist Dr Vejay Singh told The Times that the swarming could be attributed to an environmental crisis. "Swarms of spiders are rare, although they have been reported, usually after flooding when the spiders search for dry and higher ground," he said.

 The town of Sadiya, located in the Assam region, is also home to a leading Maoist community, according to The Hindustan Times. |||||

– Venomous spiders have swarmed the Indian town of Sadiya, killing two people and flooding hospitals with spider bite victims, the Global Post reports. The previously unknown species, which resembles the tarantula, crawled in about a month ago and wreaked havoc at a Hindu festival. A man and a schoolboy have already died—apparently from the bites, if not from dubious treatment at the hands of witch doctors, reports the Times of India. "All the bite patients first went to witch doctors, who cut open their wounds with razors, drained out blood and burnt it," says a medical doctor. "That could have also made them sick." A team of scientists has arrived at the small town in north-east India, hoping to find an antidote and identify the mystery species. Whatever it is, one scientist says it's a "highly aggressive spider" that "leaps at anything that comes close" and remains "latched onto them after biting." (For a less scary story, see what musical silk one spider can spin.)


Here is a news article: Washington (CNN) US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

 The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.

 Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.

 Special counsel Robert Mueller's team, which is leading the investigation into Russia's involvement in the election, has been provided details of these communications.

 A secret order authorized by the court that handles the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) began after Manafort became the subject of an FBI investigation that began in 2014. It centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine's former ruling party, the sources told CNN.

 The surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence, according to one of the sources.

 The FBI then restarted the surveillance after obtaining a new FISA warrant that extended at least into early this year.

 Sources say the second warrant was part of the FBI's efforts to investigate ties between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives. Such warrants require the approval of top Justice Department and FBI officials, and the FBI must provide the court with information showing suspicion that the subject of the warrant may be acting as an agent of a foreign power.

 It is unclear when the new warrant started. The FBI interest deepened last fall because of intercepted communications between Manafort and suspected Russian operatives, and among the Russians themselves, that reignited their interest in Manafort, the sources told CNN. As part of the FISA warrant, CNN has learned that earlier this year, the FBI conducted a search of a storage facility belonging to Manafort. It's not known what they found.

 The conversations between Manafort and Trump continued after the President took office, long after the FBI investigation into Manafort was publicly known, the sources told CNN. They went on until lawyers for the President and Manafort insisted that they stop, according to the sources.

 It's unclear whether Trump himself was picked up on the surveillance.

 The White House declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Manafort didn't comment for this story.

 Manafort previously has denied that he ever "knowingly" communicated with Russian intelligence operatives during the election and also has denied participating in any Russian efforts to "undermine the interests of the United States."

 The FBI wasn't listening in June 2016, the sources said, when Donald Trump Jr. led a meeting that included Manafort, then campaign chairman, and Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law, with a Russian lawyer who had promised negative information on Hillary Clinton.

 That gap could prove crucial as prosecutors and investigators under Mueller work to determine whether there's evidence of a crime in myriad connections that have come to light between suspected Russian government operatives and associates of Trump.

 Origins of the FBI's interest in Manafort

 The FBI interest in Manafort dates back at least to 2014, partly as an outgrowth of a US investigation of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president whose pro-Russian regime was ousted amid street protests. Yanukovych's Party of Regions was accused of corruption, and Ukrainian authorities claimed he squirreled millions of dollars out of the country.

 Investigators have spent years probing any possible role played by Manafort's firm and other US consultants, including the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, that worked with the former Ukraine regime. The basis for the case hinged on the failure by the US firms to register under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law that the Justice Department only rarely uses to bring charges.

 All three firms earlier this year filed retroactive registrations with the Justice Department.

 It hasn't proved easy to make a case.

 Last year, Justice Department prosecutors concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to bring charges against Manafort or anyone of the other US subjects in the probe, according to sources briefed on the investigation.

 The FBI and Justice Department have to periodically seek renewed FISA authorization to continue their surveillance.

 As Manafort took the reins as Trump campaign chairman in May, the FBI surveillance technicians were no longer listening. The fact he was part of the campaign didn't play a role in the discontinued monitoring, sources told CNN. It was the lack of evidence relating to the Ukraine investigation that prompted the FBI to pull back.

 Renewed surveillance

 Manafort was ousted from the campaign in August. By then the FBI had noticed what counterintelligence agents thought was a series of odd connections between Trump associates and Russia. The CIA also had developed information, including from human intelligence sources, that they believed showed Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered his intelligence services to conduct a broad operation to meddle with the US election, according to current and former US officials.

 The FBI surveillance teams, under a new FISA warrant, began monitoring Manafort again, sources tell CNN.

 The court that oversees government snooping under FISA operates in secret, the surveillance so intrusive that the existence of the warrants only rarely become public.

 For that reason, speculation has run rampant about whether Manafort or others associated with Trump were under surveillance. The President himself fueled the speculation when in March he used his Twitter account to accuse former President Barack Obama of having his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower.

 The Justice Department and the FBI have denied that Trump's own "wires" were tapped.

 While Manafort has a residence in Trump Tower, it's unclear whether FBI surveillance of him took place there.

 Manafort has a home as well in Alexandria, Virginia. FBI agents raided the Alexandria residence in July. ||||| For the moment, Mr. Mueller’s team has shown a measure of deference to White House officials, sparing them grand jury subpoenas and allowing them to appear for voluntary interviews. Those sessions are expected to begin soon. Ty Cobb, a lawyer brought in to manage the White House response to the inquiry, has told administration officials that he wants to avoid any subpoenas from the special prosecutor.

 Staff members have been working long hours answering Mr. Mueller’s request for 13 categories of documents, including records related to Mr. Comey’s firing and Mr. Trump’s role in drafting a misleading statement about a June 2016 meeting between campaign officials and Russian-born visitors. Nonetheless, the demand for documents has provoked at least one angry confrontation between Mr. Cobb and Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, over whether certain documents should be withheld to protect the president’s right to confidentiality.

 But associates of both Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn have received more peremptory treatment. Instead of invitations to the prosecutor’s office, they have been presented with grand jury subpoenas, forcing them to either testify or take the Fifth Amendment and raise suspicions that they had something to hide. At least three witnesses have recently been subpoenaed to testify about Mr. Manafort: Jason Maloni, a spokesman who appeared before the grand jury for more than two hours on Friday, and the heads of two consulting firms — Mercury Public Affairs and the Podesta Group — who worked with Mr. Manafort on behalf of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the pro-Russia former president of Ukraine.

 Mr. Mueller’s team also took the unusual step of issuing a subpoena to Melissa Laurenza, a specialist in lobbying law who formerly represented Mr. Manafort, according to people familiar with the subpoena. Conversations between lawyers and their clients are normally considered bound by attorney-client privilege, but there are exceptions when lawyers prepare public documents that are filed on behalf of their client.

 Mr. Mueller took over the Russia investigation in May, after the F.B.I. had already spent nearly a year looking into connections between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russians. His team has occasionally been caught by surprise, hearing of possibly important information only when it is revealed in the news media.

 This was the case in July, when Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors learned about email exchanges between Donald Trump Jr. and an emissary for a Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch only after they were disclosed in The New York Times, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, set up the Trump Tower meeting to receive what he was told would be damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.

 Soon after his name surfaced, one of the Russian-born participants at the meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin, was ordered to testify before the grand jury, according to one of Mr. Akhmetshin’s associates. |||||
A summary of this is?

– The FBI was listening in on Paul Manafort's conversations long before he became chief of the Trump campaign and it wiretapped him again as part of the investigation of alleged Russian election meddling, source say. The insiders tell CNN that Manafort was initially wiretapped under a secret court order in 2014 in connection with his work as a consultant in Ukraine. That investigation was dropped last year, apparently because there wasn't enough evidence to bring charges, the sources say, but the wiretapping resumed under another secret order which, like the first, was issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It isn't clear when the second court order was issued, but the warrant extended until at least early this year, long after Manafort parted ways with the Trump campaign, the sources say. They say evidence collected suggests Manafort encouraged the Russians to help the Trump campaign—though the evidence is not conclusive. The New York Times, citing sources including lawyers and witnesses, reports that federal agents, apparently fearing Manafort would destroy evidence, picked a lock and entered without warning when they raided his Virginia home in July. The sources say that after the raid, special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutor warned Manafort that they planned to indict him. (Mueller has made a move that could be very bad news for Manafort.)