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Social media has dubbed Arturo, a polar bear living in an Argentinian zoo, the "world's saddest animal" and more than 200,000 people have signed an online petition asking that he be moved to a "better life" in Canada.

Photos of Arturo, 29, looking distressed and lying flat out on his stomach that circulated online have prompted the petition. The bear's enclosure mate, Pelusa, died two years ago, the BBC says.

According to The Telegraph, "Arturo is currently being kept in a cramped, concrete enclosure at Argentina's Mendoza Zoo, where temperatures can climb to 104F (40C), with just a 20-inch-deep pool for him to keep cool."

Even former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has gotten into the act, posting a video on his Facebook page urging people to sign the petition. However, as The Washington Post notes wryly, the only thing missing from the Gingrich post "was a link to the actual Change.org petition."

Where would you go, if you had a time machine? Ancient Egypt? Tang Dynasty China? The Globe Theater, in 1599? Or maybe to the 25th century, because who knows, Buck Rogers might actually be there.

Sadly, no one's likely to invent a working time machine any time soon. But that hasn't stopped the legions of writers who've been exploring time travel ever since H. G. Wells described his first Morlock. Slips and drops and nets and projections and paradoxes — writers have thought up a hundred ways to travel backwards and forwards in time. And that's one of the great things about literary time travel: the way every writer seems to invent the mechanism all over again, every time they put pen to paper.

“ You can change history or not change history, you can go as an observer, you can go where you actually become part of the past and help fulfill history, it's pretty limitless."

"I am not a political person by nature," Nadine Gordimer once said. "I don't suppose, if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics."

Gordimer was born in South Africa in the early 1920s, into a society divided and identified by the crime of apartheid. Official racial segregation and suppression was wound into everyday life.

Her mother mostly kept her home from school, so Gordimer began to write for companionship. She published her first short story in The Children's Sunday Express when she was 15 years old, and essentially wrote for a living until her death this week, at the age of 90.

Nadine Gordimer wrote 15 novels, a few of which were banned by the South African government, and when one of her short stories appeared in a British or U.S. magazine that reached South Africa, officials ripped out her pages.

The suppression intended to silence her and millions more only galvanized Nadine Gordimer, who became an anti-apartheid activist in an age when activism didn't just mean liking something on Facebook. She hid wanted anti-apartheid fighters in her home, and helped Nelson Mandela with the famous speech he gave from the defendant's dock in 1964, about the ideals for which he was prepared to die.

Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, and in her Nobel address she said human beings devised writing to explore why we are here.

"Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster," said Gordimer. "The oral story-tellers," she said, "began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life ... to make stories."

"Writers themselves don't analyze what they do," she said, "to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope."

Gordimer noted that, "Some of us have seen our books lie for years unread in our own countries, banned, and we have gone on writing." But she cited Flaubert, Strindberg, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie more than herself.

"There is a paradox," she added. "In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment. The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties."

International investigators say armed rebels have limited their inspection of the eastern Ukraine site of the downed Malaysian Airlines flight.

Some two dozen observers from the Organization of Cooperation and Safety in Europe say they were only allowed into a small area of the crash site for just over an hour, according to the BBC. One OCSE member said the team was confronted by a "visibly intoxicated guard" who fired shots into the air.

Meanwhile, the crash site and debris, which spreads over miles of fields and farmland, are still unsecured and bodies lie exposed to the elements — some still strapped to seat belts and wearing inflight headphones, CNN reports.

"Most everything is unguarded, there for the curious — or for the taking," write CNN reporters Phil Black and Ben Brumfield. "There are so many of them. Bodies lie by the roadside, some in fields, some intertwined with parts of the aircraft. And they are spread out so far."

All 298 aboard the Boeing 777 were killed. Flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. It crashed in a rebel-held area near Donetsk, likely shot down by a surface-to-air missile, U.S. officials have said.

Securing evidence at the site is crucial to determining the exactly who and what caused the plane to fall from the sky. Workers also need to recover and identify the bodies, but the OCSE observers are not trained for that job and local emergency workers say it's not their job either.

National Transportation Safety Board and FBI teams are on their way to the country, NPR's David Schaper tells our Newscast desk. However, they are likely to find the same barriers as the OCSE officials, Schaper says.

They will have to travel 90 minutes down a pothole-ridden road from Donetsk, past checkpoints run by a number of different local militias, CNN says. No central command is in charge of the area, and virtually no rule of law governs there. At least three separatist groups guard the crash site.

As former NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman tells NPR, "There are a lot of challenges here, I think chief among them is probably the war zone that they're in, and just the very nature what the people on the ground are facing."

The bodies are starting to bloat and decay and need to be recovered quickly, OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw tells the Guardian. "We will keep coming back tomorrow and the next day and the next day."

It isn't one of the largest federal agencies. Its Twitter following pales next to many other Cabinet departments.

But the Department of Interior's Twitter (@Interior) account — replete with stunning visuals, straightforward hashtags, and snappy captions — is nevertheless steadily building a devoted following.

With 191,000 followers, DOI trails far behind Education, Justice, HHS and the Defense, State and Energy departments. Yet its steady diet of breathtaking photographs of oceanic overlooks and sylvan sunsets on public lands regularly generates hundreds of retweets — and, not infrequently, thousands of them.

Beautiful wildflowers & snow capped mountains: two of the great things about @MountRainierNPS. pic.twitter.com/CYRpOJwfGf

— US Dept of Interior (@Interior) June 25, 2014

The play Dead and Breathing begins boldly. Sixty-eight-year-old Carolyn takes off her towel and steps into a bathtub completely naked. She's bathed by her chatty nurse, Veronika.

The wealthy, cantankerous woman is dying of cancer. Carolyn, played by Lizan Mitchell, wants to die sooner rather than later, and tries to convince the nurse (N.L. Graham) to help her do that.

It's one of the most talked-about new plays at this year's Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va., which runs through Aug. 3.

Playwright Chisa Hutchinson started writing Dead and Breathing about two years ago, not long after taking care of her own mother, who was dying of uterine cancer.

"I wound up having to stay with her for a little while, taking leave from work," says Hutchinson. "I mean, it's a trip having to change your mom's diaper, you know. It's a lot."

Beginning the play the way she does, with the bathing scene, Hutchinson disarms the audience. While she was writing, she sought feedback from John Eisner, artistic director of the Lark Play Development Center in New York.

Iran, the United States and five other countries have agreed to a four-month extension on negotiations toward a nuclear deal with Tehran.

The negotiations had a deadline of July 20. Secretary of State John Kerry released a statement Friday saying that, two days shy of the deadline, there are still "very real gaps on issues such as enrichment capacity at the Natanz enrichment facility." As a result, all seven nations involved have agreed that talks will continue in Vienna until Nov. 24.

The interim agreement governing these talks had allowed for an extension of up to six additional months, but as NPR's Peter Kenyon reported Thursday, both sides of the negotiations would prefer a shorter timeline.

Some sanctions against Iran will continue to be suspended, as they were during the original six months of negotiations, and Iran will have access to $2.8 billion of restricted assets.

Under the terms of the extension, Kerry's statement said, Iran will convert all its 20 percent-enriched uranium reserves into fuel — a step further than the terms of the original negotiation, which called for only half those reserves to be converted, and the other half diluted.

The beginning of Israel's ground invasion Thursday night was loud. Explosions lit up the sky to the north and east and boomed throughout the Gaza Strip.

But Friday started pretty quietly for Rashad Abu Tawila.

"It was before dawn," the Gaza resident recalls. "I went out on my balcony to have a glass of water and get a breath of fresh air."

There were explosions in the distance, but nothing that worried him.

And then, a rocket hit the bedroom where his daughters usually sleep.

Luckily, they stayed in the living room last night. No one was hurt. Everyone in the house — all 40 extended family members — rushed downstairs and outside.

"We divided people up and sent them different places. Some went to another neighborhood," he says. "The men and boys stayed outside. We sent most of the kids down the street to our cousins' house."

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Since late 2007, the U.S. labor force has shrunk significantly, raising questions about where former workers have gone and why.

Now the White House Council of Economic Advisers says it has found answers, and compiled them into a detailed research report released Thursday.

As it turns out, most of the missing workers have been hiding in plain sight. They are retiring baby boomers.

"In 2008, the U.S. economy collided with two historic forces. The first force was the Great Recession," the report said. And the second was "the demographic inflection point" when the oldest boomers, born in 1946, became eligible for Social Security early retirement benefits.

That age shift explains a lot about what's been happening with the labor force participants, defined as people who have jobs or want them. So a 62-year-old who retires would not be part of the country's available labor pool.

Over the last seven years, the labor force, as a share of the overall population, has fallen from 65.9 percent to 62.8 percent, a decline of 3.1 percentage points.

Economists have been arguing over the reasons for this dwindling labor supply, with some conservatives assigning nearly all of the blame to President Obama's economic policies.

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"It's worth noting that it didn't seem that this was a word that people knew we needed for a while," Finney Boylan says. She's a professor of English at Colby College and the author of several books, including Stuck in the Middle with You: Parenthood in Three Genders. She is now a writer-in-residence at Barnard College.

The book covers all ages, including a chapter about gender-nonconforming children written by Aidan Key. He's the founder of the family education and support organization Gender Diversity and co-founder of Seattle's Transgender Film Festival.

Key transitioned from female to male.

"I never felt female, and I don't fully feel male," he says. "And I'm not sure whether that's my innate sense of myself or just because of ... my socialized experience in life. But I do feel at peace and at ease with who I am, and when people ask me questions about my gender I say, 'I've got a lot of it!' "

The Palestinian-American teenager who relatives say was beaten by Israeli authorities returned home to Florida late Wednesday, saying he will never think of freedom in the same way again.

Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15, and his mother flew back to Tampa on a flight arriving from New York and were greeted by about 50 cheering supporters waving American and Palestinian flags. The Khdeirs had flown out of Israel earlier in the day.

I am only 15 but I will never think of freedom the same as I did two months ago," Tariq said upon arrival at Tampa International Airport. "No child, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, deserves to die."

The teenager said the thoughts and prayers of the supporters had helped him, adding "I got through these past two weeks because I knew you were all thinking of me."

Now, he said, he just wanted some relaxation and time with friends. "It feels so good to be back in Tampa. Can I even put it in words? I can't wait to go back to play with my friends and go fishing," he added, speaking only minutes.

Hassan Shibly, the teen's attorney and the executive director of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, had said Monday that Tariq suffered head trauma and had to receive stitches on his face when beaten two weeks ago as he was arrested during a protest. Supporters say Tariq's beating was videotaped. The Israeli justice ministry has said an investigation has been opened into the footage.

There were no immediately apparent signs of injuries to Khdeir on his arrival.

Israeli authorities released Tariq shortly after his arrest and sentenced him to nine days of house arrest while they investigated what they say was his participation in violent protests over the death of Tariq's cousin, 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir. His family denied that he participated in the protests. Palestinians suspect Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed by Israeli extremists exacting revenge for the abduction and killings of three Israeli teens in the West Bank last month.

His mother, Suha Khdeir, said Wednesday in Tampa that the last two weeks had been a "nightmare." She wiped tears from her eyes as she spoke and added she was "grateful" for the support she received at home in the Tampa area.

"I cannot begin to describe to you the pain I felt when I looked at his face for the first time after that beating," she said.

Friends and family have said Tariq went on a vacation to visit relatives he hadn't seen in about 10 years — not to be part of a conflict. They have described him as a good student who likes basketball, soccer and video games.

Tariq's arrest happened shortly before Israel attacked Gaza to stop Hamas members from launching rockets into its territory. Earlier Wednesday, Israel and Hamas agreed to a five-hour U.N. brokered "humanitarian" pause to their 9-day-long battle, offering the most encouraging sign yet that the fierce fighting could come to an end. Israel's bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 200 Palestinians, including four boys struck on a beach Wednesday by shells fired from a navy ship.

The attorney Shibly said Monday that a complaint has been filed with the Israeli government by the teen's father.

President Obama outlined a new package of sanctions against Russian firms and individuals on Wednesday.

"These sanctions are significant but also targeted," Obama said. "Russia will see that its actions in Ukraine have consequences."

The administration targeted large banks, as well as energy and defense firms. The sanctions stopped short of covering entire sectors of the Russian economy.

Obama said they were designed to inflict pain on Russia without harming U.S. companies or the nation's allies.

He said Russia had failed to heed calls that it stop weapons from flowing into Ukraine.

"So far, Russia has failed to take any of the steps that I have mentioned," Obama said. "In fact, Russia's support for the separatists and violations of Ukraine's sovereignty has continued."

The new sanctions bar American individuals and companies from trading in equities with those firms or extending them credit for periods longer than 90 days.

Among the firms targeted were Rosneft, the largest Russian oil producer; Novatek, a natural gas producer; Gazprombank, the financial arm of natural gas company Gazprom (though not Gazprom itself); and Vnesheconombank, or VEB, an economic development lender.

The administration also targeted eight state-owned defense firms and four Russian government officials, including an aide to President Vladimir Putin, the head of its Federal Security Service and the minister for Crimean affairs, as well as rump groups in breakaway areas within Ukraine.

The new sanctions go beyond earlier ones, which imposed travel restrictions on individuals and froze their assets.

"These are serious sanctions. They target major Russian energy companies and financial institutions," Steven Pifer, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told The Associated Press.

The Russian firms singled out by the administration will now be blocked from U.S. capital markets for financing medium and long-term debt. They will also have to look elsewhere to find dollars, which are an important financing tool.

"This is a significant step," a senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters. "Today's steps will only further exacerbate Russia's economic problems."

Administration officials emphasized that the Treasury Department, using authority granted by a series of executive orders signed by the president, could extend further sanctions.

European Union leaders, meeting Wednesday in Brussels, imposed fresh sanctions on Russia that did not match the scope of the latest moves by the Obama administration.

"There has been a little bit of a yin-yang where sometimes we're catching up with them and sometimes they're catching up with us," said another senior administration official.

Ask someone to guess the world's two most expensive cities and it's a safe bet that the capitals of Chad and Angola – two of Africa's more impoverished nations – won't leap to mind. Geneva, perhaps, the home of Rolex watches, or one of those moneyed Asian capitals – Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore or Tokyo – or maybe, if you're thinking Nordically, somewhere in Scandinavia, somewhere like, say, Oslo, where a beer in a pub can famously set you back $15.

But Luanda? N'djamena?

Neither city has any Michelin-starred restaurants, glitzy shopping precincts or Maserati dealerships.

Nevertheless these two cities – Luanda, capital of the former Portuguese colony of Angola, and N'djamena, the hot and dusty capital of Chad – sit atop a list of 211 of the world's priciest compiled by New York-based human resources consultant Mercer in its 2014 survey of the most world's expensive cities for expatriate workers.

The survey takes into account the average local prices of a basket of 200 everyday items, ranging from the cost of housing to the price of a cup of coffee. The info is used by multinationals and governments to calculate costs and compensation for expatriate workers. Karachi, in Pakistan, came up the cheapest for expatriates – ranking 211th on the list. New York, London and Paris didn't even make the top ten.

Luanda heads the list for the second year running, while N'djamena – fourth place last year – eclipsed last year's second-most expensive city, Moscow, to finish just behind Luanda in the rankings.

Why are these two cities so expensive? Easy. Oil. Both Angola and Chad are rich in black gold. As a result they've become magnets for oil companies and expat workers – none of whom wish to live like locals, with poor sanitation, high infant mortality and life expectancies thirty years less than expensive cities in the developed world. And so there are in effect two cities, sitting cheek to jowl – the down-at-the-heels one the locals know and the one with nightclubs and swanky gyms and gated communities.

With safe, secure, western-standard accommodation in short supply, and oil companies and their contractors known to have deep pockets, rents have soared to astronomical levels. A luxury three-bedroom home in Luanda can cost $15,000 a month compared with $12,889 for a similar place in Hong Kong – Luanda's nearest competitor in the rent stakes. The rent on a comparable house in (sixth-ranked) Geneva seems a mere snip at $6,477.

It isn't just housing that's expensive. The old Portuguese colony of Angola, still in rebuilding mode after a devastating 27-year-long civil war, is heavily reliant on imports, as is the land-locked sub-Saharan nation of Chad. Freight costs, import duties and profiteering – both countries rank high on Transparency International's list of the most corrupt places to do business – add greatly to the price of nearly everything.

Designer jeans and running shoes, CDs and international newspapers cost roughly double what they retail for in the U.S. or Europe, while a fast food meal in N'djamena – a club sandwich and a can of soda – will set you back $26, compared with the $14.18 you'll pay for a burger and fries in Zurich, Geneva or Bern – the three pricey Swiss cities ranked 5th, 6th and 8th respectively – and the $4.50 such a meal will cost you in the world's tenth most expensive city, Shanghai.

But some items are a bargain: in both Luanda and N'djamena, where life expectancies languish in the low 50s, beer and cigarettes are cheap. A packet of smokes in Luanda will set you back only about a quarter of New York City's $13 price tag.

Ask someone to guess the world's two most expensive cities and it's a safe bet that the capitals of Chad and Angola – two of Africa's more impoverished nations – won't leap to mind. Geneva, perhaps, the home of Rolex watches, or one of those moneyed Asian capitals – Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore or Tokyo – or maybe, if you're thinking Nordically, somewhere in Scandinavia, somewhere like, say, Oslo, where a beer in a pub can famously set you back $15.

But Luanda? N'djamena?

Neither city has any Michelin-starred restaurants, glitzy shopping precincts or Maserati dealerships.

Nevertheless these two cities – Luanda, capital of the former Portuguese colony of Angola, and N'djamena, the hot and dusty capital of Chad – sit atop a list of 211 of the world's priciest compiled by New York-based human resources consultant Mercer in its 2014 survey of the most world's expensive cities for expatriate workers.

The survey takes into account the average local prices of a basket of 200 everyday items, ranging from the cost of housing to the price of a cup of coffee. The info is used by multinationals and governments to calculate costs and compensation for expatriate workers. Karachi, in Pakistan, came up the cheapest for expatriates – ranking 211th on the list. New York, London and Paris didn't even make the top ten.

Luanda heads the list for the second year running, while N'djamena – fourth place last year – eclipsed last year's second-most expensive city, Moscow, to finish just behind Luanda in the rankings.

Why are these two cities so expensive? Easy. Oil. Both Angola and Chad are rich in black gold. As a result they've become magnets for oil companies and expat workers – none of whom wish to live like locals, with poor sanitation, high infant mortality and life expectancies thirty years less than expensive cities in the developed world. And so there are in effect two cities, sitting cheek to jowl – the down-at-the-heels one the locals know and the one with nightclubs and swanky gyms and gated communities.

With safe, secure, western-standard accommodation in short supply, and oil companies and their contractors known to have deep pockets, rents have soared to astronomical levels. A luxury three-bedroom home in Luanda can cost $15,000 a month compared with $12,889 for a similar place in Hong Kong – Luanda's nearest competitor in the rent stakes. The rent on a comparable house in (sixth-ranked) Geneva seems a mere snip at $6,477.

It isn't just housing that's expensive. The old Portuguese colony of Angola, still in rebuilding mode after a devastating 27-year-long civil war, is heavily reliant on imports, as is the land-locked sub-Saharan nation of Chad. Freight costs, import duties and profiteering – both countries rank high on Transparency International's list of the most corrupt places to do business – add greatly to the price of nearly everything.

Designer jeans and running shoes, CDs and international newspapers cost roughly double what they retail for in the U.S. or Europe, while a fast food meal in N'djamena – a club sandwich and a can of soda – will set you back $26, compared with the $14.18 you'll pay for a burger and fries in Zurich, Geneva or Bern – the three pricey Swiss cities ranked 5th, 6th and 8th respectively – and the $4.50 such a meal will cost you in the world's tenth most expensive city, Shanghai.

But some items are a bargain: in both Luanda and N'djamena, where life expectancies languish in the low 50s, beer and cigarettes are cheap. A packet of smokes in Luanda will set you back only about a quarter of New York City's $13 price tag.

NPR's Jason Beaubien is in Kailahun, Sierra Leone, covering the Ebola outbreak that began in March in Guinea and has spread to neighboring countries. This morning, he talked with us about a controversial burial, the impact of the "no touching" recommendation — and a sign of hope.

Yesterday you were planning to go to the funeral for a 70-year-old woman who died of Ebola. How was it?

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Discrimination against female workers who might get pregnant in the future, or have been pregnant in the past, is against the law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said this week. For the first time in 30 years, the agency has updated its rules against pregnancy discrimination.

The agency clarified several policies, including one that can require businesses to give pregnant workers light duty – and another that bans employers from forcing a pregnant worker to take leave, even in cases when she's able to continue on the job.

The policy also clarifies that lactation is a pregnancy-related medical condition, and so has all the protections of the law, including requirements for schedule flexibility and a private place to express milk.

On the subject of caregivers, the EEOC stated that employers who allow parental leave must provide it to men and women equally.

"If, for example, an employer extends leave to new mothers beyond the period of recuperation from childbirth, it cannot lawfully refuse to provide an equivalent amount of leave to new fathers for the same purpose," the agency said in a Q&A on its rules.

The update comes some 40 years after the Supreme Court ruled that pregnancy didn't constitute a sex-based classification – a decision that helped prompt Congress to pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978.

Interpretations of that law, as well as portions of the Americans with Disabilities Act, have varied widely, a situation that has led to complaints and lawsuits.

"The latest EEOC data show a 46 percent increase in pregnancy-related complaints to the EEOC from 1997 to 2011," the AP reports.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case of a UPS worker who was forced to take unpaid leave after she became pregnant.

As NPR's Yuki Noguchi reported about that case, the plaintiff had been seeking an alternative assignment like those her bosses had given people with conditions such as high blood pressure. Instead, she says she was told the company didn't make allowances for "off-work incidents."

Many employers have been uncertain about the federal law's requirements, and how they apply in their case. With its new rules, the EEOC is hoping to provide more clarity.

In announcing the new guidance, EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien said:

"Pregnancy is not a justification for excluding women from jobs that they are qualified to perform, and it cannot be a basis for denying employment or treating women less favorably than co-workers similar in their ability or inability to work. Despite much progress, we continue to see a significant number of charges alleging pregnancy discrimination, and our investigations have revealed the persistence of overt pregnancy discrimination, as well as the emergence of more subtle discriminatory practices."

In addition to the laws mentioned above, the EEOC also highlighted the Family and Medical Leave Act, which lets workers at businesses with more than 50 employees "take up to 12 workweeks of leave for, among other things, the birth and care of the employee's newborn child and for the employee's own serious health condition."

Syrian President Bashar Assad was sworn in Wednesday for a third seven-year term, amid a brutal civil war that has split his country.

National television broadcast what it called the live swearing-in ceremony from the presidential palace in the capital, Damascus.

"Syrians, three years and four months... have passed since some cried 'freedom,'" Assad said. "They wanted a revolution, but you have been the real revolutionaries."

He added: "Those who lost their way can now see clearly... the monstrous faces have been unveiled, the mask of freedom and the revolution has fallen."

As we reported last month, Assad won the presidential elections, which were criticized as a sham by outside observers, with 87.7 percent of the vote.

Assad's regime has fought a bloody 31/2-year civil war that erupted in the wake of the Arab Spring elsewhere in the region. But as other leaders such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak were ousted, Assad remains firmly in power. The civil war, meanwhile, has created a massive humanitarian crisis with more than a million Syrian refugees spread across the Middle East and Europe.

But as The Associated Press notes:

"Reflecting the security threat surrounding Assad, the inauguration ceremony was for the first time held at the presidential palace and not in the Syrian parliament as has been the tradition.

"Syrian TV announced Wednesday morning he would be sworn in at noon. His previous term in office was to expire on Thursday, and he had been widely expected to be sworn in then."

The House has passed a bill that adds 10 months worth of money into the Highway Trust Fund. The account runs dry next month unless Congress acts, which could jeopardize hundreds of projects.

Archie Andrews will die in Wednesday's installment of Life with Archie. He will be killed during an assassination attempt on his friend, an openly gay politician named Kevin Keller.

For the last week, the stories from the Middle East have been about death and destruction. The conflict between Israel and Gaza is in its ninth day, with no obvious end in sight. Amid the violence, some Israelis and Palestinians meet to share an end-of-fast meal.

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A most unusual regatta recently took place off Tuscany's southern coast: Vintage sailboats known as the Grandes Dames of the Sea — some more than 100 years old — plied the waters of Porto Santo Stefano, a fishing village known for ideal sailing conditions

Among the more than 40 yachts was one, Manitou, that was known as "the floating White House" when her owner was President John F. Kennedy.

The boat is made of mahogany — a 62-foot boat that weighs 30 tons, skipper Alex Tillery says proudly. In contrast, he says, a modern 62-footer would probably weigh 8 tons.

Manitou, designed by the legendary American yacht designer Olin Stephens, first launched in 1937. Sailing such vintage boats, says Tillery, requires different skills than sailing those built today.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — An accident involving asbestos forced a temporary closure of the House side of the Capitol on Thursday and prompted House leaders to delay the day's session for two hours.

A hazardous materials response team was in the building following an incident that began sometime around 2:30 a.m. to 3 a.m., Capitol Police said. There were no initial reports of any injuries.

By midmorning, most of the building was reopened and Capitol tours on the House side resumed. The Senate, at the other end of the building, seemed unaffected by the incident.

The East Grand Staircase, which runs from the first floor to the third floor inside the House side of the building, was blocked off, and more than a dozen workers were gathered there. Also closed was the Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. Room, a third-floor room near that staircase that was named for the late speaker and Massachusetts Democrat.

The office of the Architect of the Capitol, which oversees the Capitol and other nearby buildings, released a statement indicating the incident involves possible asbestos exposure.

"During ongoing asbestos abatement work there was a potential release affecting the House side of the Capitol," the statement read. "Samples have been collected to determine whether there was potential exposure."

The House planned to begin the day's session at noon instead of 10 a.m. because of "an industrial accident," according to a statement from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Even so, by midmorning a handful of tourists were sitting in the visitors' gallery, observing an otherwise empty chamber.

The Senate began its session as scheduled at 10 a.m.

As rival candidates both claim victory in Indonesia's presidential election, police have joined the country's outgoing leader in calling on supporters of the two camps not to celebrate the results until the political limbo is resolved.

While unofficial "quick counts," appear to give Jakarta's governor, Joko Widodo, a slim lead, former army Gen. Prabowo Subianto says some of the counts have him in the lead.

Current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is stepping down because the law does not allow him to run for a third term, tweeted (in a translation by the BBC): "(The president) asks both candidates' sides to show restraint, not to mobilise masses onto the streets to celebrate victory until the verdict of the Election Commission."

Presiden SBY minta kedua kubu capres/cawapres utk tahan diri, tdk lakukan pengerahan massa ke jalan rayakan kemenangan, hingga penetapan KPU

— S. B. Yudhoyono (@SBYudhoyono) July 9, 2014

WASHINGTON (AP) — Five California men who say they came under police scrutiny for innocent behavior sued the Obama administration Thursday over an information-sharing program designed by the federal government to help flag potential terrorist activity in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The men, including an accountant and a photographer of public art, say local law enforcement produced "suspicious activity reports" on them even though they had done nothing wrong. The reports were then disseminated in national counterterrorism databases and prompted the FBI in some cases to make house visits, run background checks or open up case files on them, the men allege.

One plaintiff, an accountant of Egyptian descent, said a "suspicious activity report" was filed about him after he tried to make a bulk computer purchase for work from Best Buy. Another man, a biotech industry worker of Pakistani descent, says he aroused suspicion simply while waiting for his mother — who was wearing a hijab, a formal head covering — outside a train station bathroom. A third plaintiff, 86-year-old James Prigoff, said he was visited at his California home by a member of joint-terrorism task force months after trying to photograph a piece of public art in Boston on a natural gas storage tank.

"Given my age, I lived through the McCarthy era, so I know how false accusations, surveillance and keeping files on innocent people can destroy their careers and lives," Prigoff said in a statement.

The lawsuit filed in San Francisco challenges the legality of the federally designed National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative — a joint effort of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local and state law enforcement launched after the 9/11 attacks.

It encourages local police departments, using guidance from the federal government, to create "suspicious activity reports" when encountering people whose behavior raises concerns that they might be engaged in terrorism plots. The reports are received, stored and analyzed at dozens of fusion centers nationwide largely operated by state and local governments.

According to its website, the program defines suspicious activity as behavior that is "reasonably indicative" of planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. The government says the definition was developed with input from privacy and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.

But the suit, brought by the ACLU and other groups, says the program encourages racial and religious profiling and sweeps up Americans engaged in legal behavior. It contends that the federal government's standard for reporting suspicious behavior is overly broad and should be struck down. The complaint names the Justice Department as a defendant because it issued standards governing the types of information that should be included in suspicious activity reports.

A 1978 Justice Department regulation prohibits the collection of intelligence information unless there's a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. But civil rights groups say the "suspicious activity" program also expressly permits intelligence gathering related to broad categories of behavior — such as requesting a specific hotel room or receiving multiple visitors to that room — where there's no basis to suspect criminal activity.

"We've long been concerned that the federal standards that we're challenging in this lawsuit are too loose because they allow the reporting of information even when there's no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity," Linda Lye, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, said in an interview.

John Cohen, a former homeland security official who helped develop the suspicious activity reporting program, said the ACLU's lawsuit is ironic because it attacks a program the civil rights group was deeply involved in.

"They are attacking a program that they helped to design, and they are criticizing language that they actually drafted and provided to the government," said Cohen, now a professor at Rutgers University's school of criminal justice.

It's not the first time nation's fusion centers — and the "suspicious activity" program — have come under scrutiny. A 2012 Senate report concluded that fusion centers had improperly collected information, produced little valuable intelligence on terrorism and ballooned out of control. And a Government Accountability Office report last year said more work was needed to ensure that the reports were effective.

"There's no disagreement that law enforcement actions should be focused only on those individuals exhibiting behaviors associated with criminal activity," Cohen said. "However, I fear the consequence of a successful ACLU action in this regard will be to eliminate the very tools and protections that are now in place to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans and at the same time aid police in protecting our communities."

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Associated Press writer Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.

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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

LOWELL, Mass. (AP) — Seven people died in a fast-moving Massachusetts apartment fire in the pre-dawn hours Thursday, officials said.

All seven victims were found in third-floor units of the three-story building that had businesses on the ground floor and apartments on the upper floors, fire officials said.

"It's a tragic day for the city of Lowell," Mayor Rodney Elliott said.

A police officer on routine patrol was the first to report the fire just before 4 a.m., while several tenants ran about 100 yards down the street to the nearest fire station to sound the alarm, Pitta said. But the building was fully involved by the time firefighters arrived. The fire eventually went to three alarms.

The victims' names were not immediately made public.

The cause and origin of the blaze remain under investigation, State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan said.

The building did not have a sprinkler system, but was not required to, Lowell Fire Chief Edward Pitta said. It did have an alarm system and whether that was working will be part of the investigation.

Authorities say 48 people lived in the building, which sustained heavy damage. The roof was entirely burned away, while the outer walls were charred and the siding melted.

Several people had to be rescued from upper floors and taken to the hospital. The exact number was not known.

Witnesses said tenants were jumping out of windows.

Neighbor Sarin Chun said she awoke to screams and saw someone hand a child out a window to another person on the street.

The Justice Department has declined to bring criminal charges against anyone at the CIA or the Senate Intelligence Committee in a dispute over access to documents about the enhanced interrogation program the U.S. deployed against detainees after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Prosecutors notified the Senate panel Thursday of their decision, a muted end to a power struggle that had undermined relations between the intelligence community and its chief overseers on Capitol Hill.

"The Department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation," said Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Justice Department's criminal division, in a prepared statement.

Background

Attorney General Eric Holder had given little public indication he wanted to wade into a clash over the separation of powers. Earlier this year, the CIA accused Senate panel staff members of improperly accessing sensitive documents about detainee mistreatment as part of their long-running congressional investigation into abusive detention and interrogation practices by the intelligence community.

Agency lawyers went so far as to refer the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation. Then, in March, the committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., appeared in the well of the Senate for a remarkable address in which she pointed a finger at the CIA for unauthorized snooping on a computer provided to her staff.

More than anything else, the notion that legislative aides who had spent years reviewing thousands of pages of "chilling" and gruesome material now faced criminal jeopardy seemed to set off Feinstein, who called the CIA criminal referral to prosecutors "a potential effort to intimidate this staff."

CIA Director John Brennan has refrained from most public statements, but he addressed the controversy earlier this year in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"As far as the allegations of CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that. I mean, that's just beyond the scope of reason," Brennan said. "I would just encourage some members of the Senate to take their time to make sure that they don't overstate what they've claimed, and what they probably believe to be the truth."

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and then legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler rushed to meet with Feinstein, one of their leading allies, to try to clean up the mess.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined comment on Thursday's Justice Department decision.

What Comes Next

But there's still one big shoe to drop. The White House is reviewing the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings about what Feinstein has described as torture of terrorism suspects in the years after Sept. 11, 2001. Capitol Hill staff members expect the report could be released publicly later this year.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, says the White House is in the middle of reviewing which parts of the executive summary, findings and conclusions need to be redacted to protect U.S. interests overseas.

"The president has been clear that he wants this process completed as expeditiously as possible and he's also been clear that it must be done consistent with our national security," Hayden said in a prepared statement. "An important goal that the administration and the committee share is the safety and security of our people overseas.

"So, prior to the release of any information..., the administration will also need to look at any potential security implications and take a series of steps to prepare our personnel and facilities overseas. We will do that in a timely fashion."

Feinstein has said her findings are meaningful not just as a chronicle of the recent past, but also a way forward.

"If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted," she said.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Federal Trade Commission is suing Amazon over charges that the company has not done enough to prevent children from making unauthorized in-app purchases, according to a complaint filed Thursday in federal court.

The move had been expected since last week, when Amazon said it wouldn't settle with the FTC over the charges. Amazon said in a letter to the FTC last week that it had already refunded money to parents who complained and was prepared to go to court.

On Thursday Amazon said its statements in the letter still apply and did not comment further.

The dispute is over in-app charges in children's games on Kindle devices, where it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate whether users are spending virtual or real currency to acquire virtual items. When it introduced in-app charges in 2011, a password was not required to make a purchase. That changed in 2012, when Amazon required a password for charges over $20. In 2013, the company updated password protection again, but in a way that allowed windows of time where children could still make purchases, according to the FTC complaint.

One woman cited in the complaint said her daughter racked up $358.42 in charges while playing a game.

The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring refunds to consumers for unauthorized charges. It also seeks to ban Amazon from billing account holders for in-app charges made without their consent.

The FTC settled with Apple over a similar matter for $32.5 million in January.

Apple complained at the time. CEO Tim Cook explained to employees in a memo that the settlement did not require the company to do anything it wasn't doing already but he added that it "smacked of double jeopardy" because Apple had already settled a similar class-action lawsuit in which it agreed to refunds.

Amazon said last week its parental controls already go beyond what the FTC required from Apple as part of the settlement.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Amazon's shares slipped 35 cents to $329.62 in afternoon trading.

Derek Jeter soaked in the adulation from fans and players during one more night on baseball's national stage, set the tone for the American League with a pregame speech and then delivered two final All-Star hits.

Mike Trout, perhaps the top candidate to succeed the 40-year-old Yankees captain as the face of the game, seemed ready to assume the role with a tiebreaking triple and later a go-ahead double that earned the 22-year-old MVP honors.

On a summer evening filled with reminders of generational change, the AL kept up nearly two decades of dominance by beating the National League 5-3 Tuesday for its 13th win in 17 years.

"I think let Mike be Mike. I don't think people have to necessarily appoint someone to a particular position," Jeter said. "He's got a bright future ahead of him. I don't know how much better he can get, but if he consistently does what he's doing, then he will be here for a long time."

Miguel Cabrera hit a two-run homer to help give the AL champion home-field advantage for the World Series.

No matter what else happened, from the start it seemed destined to be another special event for Jeter.

He made a diving stop on Andrew McCutchen's grounder to shortstop leading off the game and nearly threw him out at first, then received a 63-second standing ovation when he walked to the plate before his opposite-field double to right leading off the bottom half. He was given another rousing cheer before his single to right starting the third and 2 1-2 minutes more applause after AL manager John Farrell sent Alexei Ramirez to shortstop to replace him at the start of the fourth.

As Frank Sinatra's recording of "New York, New York" boomed over the Target Field speakers and his parents watched from the stands, Jeter repeatedly waved to the crowd, exchanged handshakes and hugs with just about every person in the AL dugout and then came back onto the field for a curtain call.

"It was a special moment and it was unscripted," Jeter said. "I was unaware of it."

NL manager Mike Matheny of the Cardinals didn't want it to stop.

"The guys on our side have the utmost respect for him and would like to have been standing out there for a little while longer," he said. "I think Derek was the one that was uncomfortable with it."

While not as flashy as Mariano Rivera's All-Star farewell at Citi Field last year, when all the other players left the great reliever alone on the field for an eighth-inning solo bow, Jeter tried not to make a fuss and to deflect the attention.

Even during his clubhouse speech.

"He just wanted to thank us," Trout said. "You know, we should be thanking him."

A 14-time All-Star who was MVP of the 2000 game in Atlanta, Jeter announced in February this will be his final season. His hits left him with a .481 All-Star average (13 for 27), just behind Charlie Gehringer's .500 record (10 for 20) for players with 20 or more at-bats.

While the Yankees are .500 at the break and in danger of missing the postseason in consecutive years for the first time in two decades, Jeter and the Angels' Trout gave a boost to whichever AL team reaches the World Series.

The AL improved to 9-3 since the All-Star game started deciding which league gets Series home-field advantage; 23 of the last 28 titles were won by teams scheduled to host four of a possible seven games.

Detroit's Max Scherzer, in line to be the most-prized free agent pitcher after the season, pitched a scoreless fifth for the win, and Glen Perkins got the save in his home ballpark.

Target Field, a $545 million, limestone-encased jewel that opened in 2010, produced an All-Star cycle just eight batters in, with hitters showing off flashy neon-bright spikes and fielders wearing All-Star caps with special designs for the first time.

With the late sunset — the sky didn't darken until the fifth inning, well after 9 o'clock — there was bright sunshine when Jeter was cheered before his first at-bat. He was introduced by a recording of late Yankees public address announcer Bob Sheppard's deep monotone. St. Louis pitcher Adam Wainwright left his glove on the mound and backed up toward second, clapping along with the crowd of 41,048.

"I tried to tell him to pick it up — let's go," Jeter said. "But he took a moment and let the fans give me an ovation which I will always remember."

When Jeter finally stepped into the batter's box, he took a ball and lined a 90 mph cutter down the right-field line for a double.

"I was going to give him a couple pipe shots just to — he deserved it," Wainwright said. "I thought he was going to hit something hard to the right side for a single or an out. I probably should have pitched him a little bit better."

After those in-game remarks created a stir on the Internet, Wainwright amended himself: "It was mis-said. I hope people realize I'm not intentionally giving up hits out there."

Trout, who finished second to Cabrera in AL MVP voting in each of the last two seasons, became the youngest All-Star MVP, about 3 1-2 months older than Ken Griffey Jr. was in 1992.

Playing in his third All-Star game, Trout followed Jeter in the first by tripling off the right-field wall. Cabrera's homer — just the fourth in the last six All-Star games — made it 3-0, but the NL tied it on consecutive RBI doubles by Chase Utley and Jonathan Lucroy off Jon Lester in the second and Lucroy's run-scoring double against Chris Sale in the fourth.

Trout put the AL ahead for good with an RBI double in the fifth — a bouncer over third base against Pat Neshek, the St. Louis reliever who grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs and started his career with the Twins. Jose Altuve followed with a sacrifice fly off Tyler Clippard.

Raised in New Jersey, Trout saw a lot of Jeter and said all week he felt honored to play alongside him.

"Growing up I was setting goals to myself that when I get — if I ever get the chance to get — to the big leagues, that's how I want to play," Trout said. "And the way he carries himself on and off the field, how he respects the game — always hustling, it doesn't matter what the score is. If they are down 10 runs, he is always running the ball out. That's how I want to play."

SEATTLE (AP) — Officials in Washington state are searching for the person who donated three human skulls to a thrift store in a Seattle suburb.

The King County medical examiner said in a statement on Wednesday that two of the skulls were from adults and appeared to have been used in a medical clinic or for instruction.

The third is very old and appears to have belonged to a Native American child.

State law requires the Native American skull be returned to its tribe. The medical examiner is asking whoever donated the skulls to provide some details, without penalty, so that can happen.

The skulls were donated last month to the Goodwill store in Bellevue. Workers there realized they were human remains and contacted the medical examiner's office and law enforcement.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany on Thursday demanded Washington's top spy in Berlin leave the country as a new round of allegations of U.S. espionage worsened the friction between the two allies.

The immediate trigger was the emergence of two new cases of alleged American spying. They inflamed a furor that erupted last year when it was learned that the U.S. was intercepting Internet traffic in Germany and eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone calls.

More broadly, the move to expel the CIA station chief appears to reflect a Germany out of patience with what it sees as a pattern of American disrespect and interference.

"The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the United States Embassy has been asked to leave Germany," German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.

"The request occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing investigation by federal prosecutors as well as the questions that were posed months ago about the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies in Germany," he added. "The government takes the matter very seriously."

U.S. officials described Germany's action as extraordinary.

While agents have been expelled from time to time, usually by unfriendly powers, a former U.S. official said he couldn't remember an instance since the end of the Cold War in which the ranking intelligence official was asked to leave a country.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss intelligence issues publicly.

Germany refused to identify the CIA station chief by name. In the United States, it is illegal to disclose the name of an undercover operative.

Shortly before Thursday's announcement, Merkel told reporters that Germany and the United States had "very different approaches" to the role of intelligence agencies, and she insisted that any spying on allies is "a waste of energy."

White House press secretary Josh Earnest wouldn't comment on Germany's decision but said the U.S. takes intelligence matters "very seriously."

"I don't want you to come away from this exchange thinking we take this matter lightly," he said, adding that the U.S. and Germany continue to have a strong partnership.

The reports last year that the National Security Agency had targeted Merkel and Internet traffic have triggered a German criminal investigation and a parliamentary probe.

On Wednesday, German police raided properties in the Berlin area in what Seibert said was a case involving "a very serious suspicion" of espionage.

German media reported that the man being investigated worked at Germany's Defense Ministry in a department dealing with international security policy, and he had aroused suspicion because of his close contacts to alleged U.S. spies.

Last week, a 31-year-old German intelligence employee was arrested on suspicion of spying for foreign powers since 2012. German media have reported that he spied for the CIA.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he could not comprehend why the U.S. would spy on his country.

"We speak to each other all the time, and nobody keeps their views secret," he said in an interview published Wednesday by the Saarbruecker Zeitung.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the political fallout appeared to outweigh any harm done to Germany by the alleged spying.

"If the situation remains what we know now, the information reaped by this suspected espionage is laughable," de Maiziere said in a statement. "However, the political damage is already disproportionate and serious."

Under the elaborate rules of international diplomacy, Germany's move to kick out the spy chief was a request two steps short of a formal expulsion.

In the past two years, Germany has also asked diplomats from Syria and Pakistan to leave the country.

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Geir Moulson in Berlin, and Nedra Pickler and Ken Dilanian in Washington contributed to this report.

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Follow Frank Jordans on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter

LOS ANGELES (AP) — At a time when election officials are struggling to convince more Americans to vote, advocates for the disabled say thousands of people with autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy and other intellectual or developmental disabilities have been systematically denied that basic right in the nation's largest county.

A Voting Rights Act complaint submitted Thursday to the U.S. Justice Department in Los Angeles goes to a politically delicate subject that states have grappled with over the years: Where is the line to disqualify someone from the voting booth because of a cognitive or developmental impairment?

The complaint by the Disability and Abuse Project argues that intellectual and developmental disabilities, including conditions such as Down syndrome, are not automatic barriers to participating in elections. It seeks a sweeping review of voting eligibility in Los Angeles County in such cases, arguing that thousands of people with those disabilities have lost the right to vote during the last decade.

"If somebody can articulate in whatever way ... that they want to vote, that they have an interest in voting, that's the only test that should be applied nationwide," Thomas F. Coleman, the group's legal director, said at a news conference outside the federal courthouse, echoing a recommendation from the American Bar Association.

At issue in the California case is access to the ballot box for adults who enter so-called limited conservatorships, legal arrangements in which parents or guardians assume the right to make certain decisions for people who lack the ability to manage their financial and medical affairs. In the course of taking that step in court, voting rights are routinely voided, according to the advocacy group.

California has over 40,000 such cases, and those covered by the arrangements usually live with their families or in group homes. A recent sample of 61 cases by the advocacy group in Los Angeles County found that 90 percent of the people covered by limited conservatorships had been disqualified from voting.

The complaint says judges in Los Angeles Superior Court use literacy tests to determine if adults in limited conservatorships should have voting rights, a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act. It also says that judges and court-appointed attorneys violate federal laws that allow people with disabilities to have assistance to complete voter-registration forms and cast ballots.

"Autism is a broad spectrum, and there can be low skills and there can be high skills. But what I observed was that people tend to just dismiss it as though they have no skills," Teresa Thompson, whose son has autism and whose case helped prompt the complaint, said in a videotaped statement.

Los Angeles Superior Court spokeswoman Mary Eckhardt Hearn said Wednesday she had not seen the complaint and declined comment.

The complaint could trigger an investigation by the Justice Department. It also asks Superior Court to rescind thousands of voter-disqualification notices it has issued in those cases over a decade.

For years, advocates brought attention to the obstacles to voting faced by the physically disabled. More recently, the focus has shifted to the mentally or developmentally disabled, who advocates say have long been stigmatized in the voting process.

In the past, advocates in Missouri sued to make it easier for people under guardianship for mental disabilities to vote, and New Jersey voters in 2007 stripped language from the state Constitution that held "no idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage."

All but about a dozen states have some type of law limiting voting rights for individuals based on competence. But how those laws are enforced varies widely, advocates say.

A 2007 Bar Association report concluded that "excluding the broad and indefinite category of persons with mental incapacities is not consistent with either the constitutional right to vote ... or the current understanding of mental capacity."

The California complaint could create a testing ground for such cases. State election law says a person is considered mentally incompetent and disqualified from voting if he or she cannot complete a voter-registration form, which the complaint argues is an illegal literacy test.

"There is this constant struggle to make sure everyone can vote privately and independently, regardless of disability," said Curtis Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network.

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Republicans in West Virginia are touting an accomplishment this week that has historical significance for the state. For the first time in more than 80 years, Democratic voter registration has dropped to below 50 percent.

Numbers from the West Virginia secretary of state's office show it's true — that number has dropped, but just barely.

The number of registered Democrats in West Virginia as of June 30 stands at 612,288. Of the 1,226,745 voters in the state, that's 49.9 percent.

"Democratic Party leaders, both in this state and Washington, have alienated themselves from conservative West Virginians," state Republican Party Chairman Conrad Lucas said in a press release. "They have voted against our interests and our traditional values. They have held back our great state and its people."

West Virginia Republicans are on the attack this year leading into November's midterm elections. On the state level, the House of Delegates is four seats from turning red for the first time since 1928.

Republicans also tout being able to fill the ballot for the first time since 2004. They have managed to find a Republican challenger for all 117 federal and state legislative races — the U.S. House and Senate, and the West Virginia House and Senate.

"The fact is Democrats still outnumber Republicans two-to-one," state Democratic Party Chairman Larry Puccio said in an email. "The numbers show that Democrats will continue to lead in registration and in the very near future, Independents will overtake Republicans."

The story the numbers don't tell, however, is the amount of registered Democrats who are choosing red in the privacy of the voting booth. Robert Rupp, a professor of political science at West Virginia Wesleyan College, said in an interview with West Virginia Public Broadcasting last fall that that's a phenomenon that's becoming more and more common.

"The state still has a 2-to-1 Democratic edge in registration, but the story in West Virginia is a state that's 2-to-1 Democratic is switching over to Republican," Rupp said.

"Now, what's even more interesting is that when you go down to Wyoming County, it's 7-to-1, 9-to-1 Democrats. Virtually everyone in that county is registered as a Democrat, but they're not voting as a Democrat."

Rupp pointed to the state's record on the federal level to support his statement. West Virginia hasn't been won by a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1996.

More and more, West Virginians are sending Republicans to Congress as well, with the exception of Sen. Joe Manchin, who Rupp said isn't a true Democrat in the country's understanding of the term.

"In America, there are three political parties," Rupp said. "There's the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and the West Virginia Democrats."

"[The Democratic Party in West Virginia] is a huge tent in which you can have very conservative members feel comfortable in the Democratic Party, as well as liberals."

The trend of a state changing political affiliation is one that historically trickles down, according to Rupp, starting at the federal level, working to the state and eventually local races.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Clayton Kershaw and batterymate A.J. Ellis were in agreement for nine innings, especially on one specific point: Losing the game would be much worse than seeing the Los Angeles Dodgers' ace lose his scoreless innings streak.

Chase Headley snapped Kershaw's streak at 41 innings with a tying homer in the sixth, but the two-time Cy Young Award winner finished with a three-hitter and 11 strikeouts in a 2-1 victory Thursday night over the San Diego Padres.

Kershaw (11-2) won his eighth straight start and came within 18 innings of the major league record set by Dodgers right-hander Orel Hershiser, who threw 59 consecutive shutout innings in 1988.

"I was barely thinking about the streak at all, and I know he wasn't," Ellis said. "I mean, we weren't close to anything that was worth starting to get excited about. We were more disappointed that the game was tied. So we had to bear down, keep the game where it was and hope we could scratch out another run."

Headley's seventh homer halted the longest scoreless streak in the majors since Brandon Webb went 42 innings for the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2007.

Kershaw's run tied Luis Tiant for the fifth-longest in the expansion era (since 1961).

"It was over the fence, so it was a mistake — and it tied the game," Kershaw said. "When it's a game like that, one mistake can kill you. Fortunately for me, that one mistake didn't."

The 26-year-old lefty became the third pitcher in the last 100 years to win eight straight starts in one season while striking out at least seven batters in each one. The others were Sandy Koufax (1966) and Juan Marichal (1967).

"It doesn't get more competitive than him," Ellis said. "He's every adjective you could think of. He's unique, special, just amazing out there. There's just a relentless will to win. He imposes his will on the opposing team."

Kershaw faced the Padres for the first time this season. Last year, he was 1-3 with a 3.33 ERA in four starts against them.

"He was tough all night," Headley said. "He threw me a slider that didn't have a whole lot on it. It stayed out over the plate and I was able to put a good swing on it. But he was tremendous again. He showed why he's one of the best pitchers in the game. It seems like he's throwing his breaking pitches more. Last year was more fastball and slider."

Kershaw missed five weeks because of a strained muscle in his upper back following his opening-day victory against the Diamondbacks in Australia. But he has a 1.98 ERA in 14 starts, giving him his most wins and lowest ERA before the All-Star break in his seven-year career.

"I think there's some level of consistency with my pitches," he said. "I'm just repeating my delivery and I know where the ball's going."

Headed to his fourth All-Star game in a row, Kershaw seems a strong choice to start the Midsummer Classic on regular rest Tuesday night in Minnesota.

Kershaw earned his 14th complete game in 196 career starts, helping the defending NL West champions increase their division lead to one game over San Francisco in the opener of a four-game series that will take them into the break.

Vying for his fourth consecutive major league ERA title, Kershaw highlighted his astounding streak with a no-hitter June 18 against Colorado. He limited the Rockies to two hits over eight innings in the rematch last Friday at Coors Field.

If Kershaw had enough innings to qualify for the ERA race, he'd be second in the majors behind Adam Wainwright's 1.79 mark for St. Louis.

During his streak, Kershaw allowed 17 hits, struck out 52 batters, walked six and stranded 23 runners — four at third base. He also retired the leadoff hitter in 36 of those innings.

The previous run against Kershaw came on an RBI double by Arizona's Aaron Hill in the third inning of Kershaw's 4-3 win June 13 at Dodger Stadium. His next outing was the no-hitter.

Odrisamer Despaigne (2-1) allowed two runs, seven hits and no walks over seven innings for the Padres. He struck out seven in his fourth big league start.

The 27-year-old right-hander got his first chance to face Cuban countryman Yasiel Puig in the majors and held him to one hit in four at-bats — a line-drive double that caromed off Despaigne's left leg and into left field in the fourth.

Scott Van Slyke hit a two-out single that drove in Puig from third. Adrian Gonzalez knocked in the go-ahead run with sacrifice fly in the sixth after Headley hit his seventh homer.

The Padres, who have lost five of six following a season-best, five-game winning streak, got two runners as far as second base.

NOTES: Hershiser pitched scoreless ball over the final six regular-season starts of his only Cy Young season. He broke the previous big league mark of 58 consecutive scoreless innings, set in 1968 by another former Dodger — Hall of Famer Don Drysdale. ... The only pitchers since 1961 with longer scoreless streaks than Kershaw were Bob Gibson (47) and Webb. Drysdale, Gibson and Tiant all had their streaks in 1968, the so-called "Year of the Pitcher." Major League Baseball lowered the mound from 15 inches to 10 the following season. ... Kershaw waved a TV cameraman from the Dodgers' flagship network, Time Warner Cable, away from the mound and off the diamond so he wouldn't encroach on his first-inning warmups. Time Warner's contract with the club is estimated to be worth $7 billion over the next two decades. ... Hershiser was 30 when he had his streak, and Drysdale was 32. ... Kershaw is 9-1 with a 0.97 ERA in 10 starts since May 17, when he gave up seven runs over 1 2-3 innings in an 18-7 loss at Arizona.

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July 10, 201412:47 PM ET

At least 89 people were killed Tuesday by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. It was the deadliest attack on civilians in that country for several years.

The attack occurred near a busy market and mosque in Urgun, a town in the eastern province of Paktika. In addition to the dead, 42 people were injured, according to the Defense Ministry.

"A man in a Toyota SUV was identified by police as a potential attacker, but when they ordered him to stop for checks, he set off the bomb," Nasar Ahmad, the deputy provincial police chief, told the Guardian, a British newspaper.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. The Taliban sent a statement to media denying involvement, saying they "strongly condemn attacks on local people."

The bombing comes at an anxious time for Afghanistan. Last weekend, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry helped broker a deal between the two Afghan presidential contenders, who have been arguing over the results of last month's runoff election. But there are signs that the deal may yet come unraveled.

Last week, the United Nations issued a report saying the number of civilian casualties in the country had increased by 24 percent during the first half of the year, reaching levels not seen since 2009.

There are now near-daily attacks in the country. In two incidents Tuesday that were separate from the Paktika blast, a roadside bomb in eastern Kabul killed two passengers in a minivan carrying employees of the media office of the presidential palace, while seven police officers and six border guards were killed by Taliban insurgents at the Pakistani border in Khost province, The Associated Press reports.

The Paktika blast was the deadliest suicide bombing in the country at least since a 2008 attack at an outdoor dog fighting competition.

"There was blood everywhere, and we could see hundreds of people shouting and crying, including women and children," an eyewitness told The New York Times. "The entire area seems like a graveyard with fresh blood on it."

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July 15, 201411:32 AM ET

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The new documentary, produced by Jeb Bush Jr., explores the topic of immigration reform through the lives of undocumented students who win an underwater robotics competition.

If kicking the can down the road were a competitive sport, the championship trophy would never leave Washington.

When the need to make a difficult choice collides with an unyielding deadline, the tendency in a city where partisan gridlock is the norm is to put the tough decisions off for another day.

That has happened once again with the short-term highway spending bill that Congress and President Obama have lined up behind because of their inability to agree on longer-term legislation.

Without new funding by Aug. 1, highway projects around the nation would be forced to stop, sidelining construction workers and potentially complicating commutes and vacation plans for millions of travelers.

The short-term bill to replenish the highway trust fund, which would fund highway spending through May 2015, is a Washington two-fer. Not only is it a classic example of can-kicking, it's a great illustration of how inventive policymakers can be in finding funds when a legislative majority can't be roused for raising taxes — an especially tough vote for many lawmakers during a mid-term election year.

With the highway legislation, lawmakers resorted to an accounting trick called "pension smoothing." By letting companies with traditional pensions delay required payments to those funds, companies will have higher profits, which will boost what they pay in taxes. The House plan would raise $10.9 billion, most of which is needed to pay for highway projects through the end of the year. About $6.4 billion of the total would come from pension smoothing.

The downside is that near-term smoothing could lead to long-term bumpiness; the trick could leave pensions underfunded in the future, resulting in higher costs to taxpayers if the federal government has to eventually step in to take over those pension funds.

It's the kind of budgetary sleight-of-hand that drives fiscal sanity types to distraction. "Lawmakers should not be using any gimmick, let alone a 'pay-for' that may increase future deficits," the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) said in a blog post.

Too late. The House approved the spending package on a 367-55 vote Tuesday afternoon. The Senate is expected to consider similar legislation soon.

The CRFB, by the way, provides a handy compilation of several of budgetary gimmicks used in recent years to can kick. The Washington Post also provided some examples of can-kicking.

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Nearly a million community college students don't have access to federal student loans, according to a new report.

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Germany has asked the top American spy in the country to leave, in the wake of two cases of espionage allegedly involving the U.S. and amid the fallout from the surveillance of Germans by the National Security Agency.

"The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the Embassy of the United States of America was asked to leave Germany," government spokesman Steffen Seibert said today in a statement.

The statement said that in the interests of security Germany sought close ties with its Western partners, especially the U.S., "But ... mutual trust and openness are necessary."

As we told you Wednesday, the German government is investigating a second spy case involving the U.S., just days after the arrest of a man who allegedly passed intelligence to the United States. The government has not officially said that the cases involved the U.S., but German news reports say the first arrest involved an official working for Germany foreign intelligence agency, BND, and the second case involved an official in the country's Defense Ministry.

The White House on Thursday declined to comment directly on the German decision to expel the top spy at the embassy, but spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told The Associated Press the U.S. viewed the security and intelligence relationship with Germany as very important.

The expulsion and the suspected cases of espionage come at a delicate time for U.S-German relations. Ties between the allies have been strained since revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the agency spied on Germans, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to be combat-ready next year. But the aircraft, which is already over-budget, failed to show up at the International Air Show in the UK. The show was to be its big overseas debut. Christopher Werth looks at what this means for the plane's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin.

July 10, 201412:47 PM ET

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

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NEW YORK (AP) — The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it is investigating steering problems in about 500,000 Ford cars.

The investigation covers 2004 to 2007 Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis and Marauder models.

NHTSA says a heat shield in the car can rust, dislodge and cause the steering shaft to jam. It has received 5 complaints about the issue and knows of one injury. In that case, the steering froze as a driver entered a high entrance ramp, causing the car to roll over and cause injuries.

Ford Motor Co. says it will cooperate with the NHTSA on the investigation.

Ford shares rose 14 cents to $17.34 in morning trading Friday. They have risen more than 11 percent in the past three months.

July 11, 201410:40 AM ET

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The Swiss chocolate maker Lindt has announced plans to buy Russell Stover. The Kansas City based company has a long history, a large distribution network and many loyal customers in the U.S., the world's largest chocolate market. Lindt specializes in higher-end brands like Ghiradelli, and Lindor. Analysts say the acquisition will round out Lindt's U.S. offerings.

LONDON (AP) — A lawyer representing people allegedly flown on CIA flights to Libya and tortured has accused Britain of covering up details of its involvement. Britain says its records are incomplete because of water damage.

Cori Crider, a lawyer from charity Reprieve which is investigating CIA flights through the Britain-administered island of Diego Garcia, said Thursday that the loss was strikingly convenient.

The U.S., which has a large military base on the Indian Ocean island, admitted using it in 2002 for its extraordinary rendition program.

Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds said logs of flights landing and taking off from the island in 2002 are "incomplete due to water damage."

Crider says "the government might as well have said the dog ate their homework."

Work is starting on the world's largest carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery project. It will capture about 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide annually from a coal-burning power plant near Houston. Then it will inject the CO2 into a nearby oil field. That should allow the companies to boost the oil field's output from 500 barrels of crude per day to 15,000.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany took the dramatic step Thursday of asking the top U.S. intelligence official in Berlin to leave the country, following two suspected cases of American spying and the yearlong spat over eavesdropping by the National Security Agency.

The move reflects growing impatience in Germany at what is perceived as U.S. nonchalance about being caught spying on a close ally.

"The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the United States embassy has been asked to leave Germany," government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.

"The request occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing investigation by federal prosecutors as well as the questions that were posed months ago about the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies in Germany," he added. "The government takes the matter very seriously."

Seibert said Germany continues to seek "close and trusting" cooperation with its Western partners, "especially the United States."

The U.S. government declined to comment directly on the decision. But White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the security and intelligence relationship with Germany was very important to the United States.

"It keeps Germans and Americans safe. It is essential that cooperation continue in all areas and we will continue to be in touch with the German government in appropriate channels," she said.

Shortly before the decision was announced, Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters that Germany and the United States had "very different approaches" to the role of intelligence agencies.

She stressed the need for greater trust between allies, a position she has repeatedly voiced since reports last year that the NSA eavesdropped on her cellphone.

In separate cases over the past 10 days, one man has been arrested and an investigation against another has been launched on suspicion that they worked for foreign intelligence. German media have reported that the men are suspected of passing secrets to the U.S.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the scope of the cases and who was involved are not yet clear, but talks are taking place with the United States at various levels.

"If the situation remains what we know now, the information reaped by this suspected espionage is laughable," de Maiziere said in a statement. "However, the political damage is already disproportionate and serious."

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Geir Moulson in Berlin and Nedra Pickler in Washington contributed to this report.

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Follow Frank Jordans on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/wirereporter

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks edged mostly lower Friday as investors assessed corporate news. The stock market is headed for its biggest weekly loss since April after ending the previous week at a record high.

KEEPING SCORE: The Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped two points, or 0.1 percent, to 1,962 as of 12:07 p.m. Eastern. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 31 points, or 0.2 percent, to 16,884. The Nasdaq composite gained four points, or 0.1 percent, to 4,400.

SALES MISS: Industrial and construction supplies company Fastenal dropped $2.27, or 4.7 percent, to $45.88 after reporting sales that fell short of analyst's expectations. The company said revenue climbed 12 percent to $949.9 million from $847.6 million in the same quarter a year ago. Analysts expected $951 million.

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE: Tobacco company Lorillard rose $2.28, or 3.6 percent, to $65.37, after rival Reynolds American confirmed it was in talks with Lorillard and British American Tobacco, its largest shareholder, about an acquisition. Reynolds fell 87 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $61.38.

THE EARNINGS TAPE: U.S. companies are starting to report their results for the second quarter, and investors are expecting to see more growth in profits. Earnings for S&P 500 companies are forecast to rise by 6.5 percent compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data from S&P Capital IQ.

THE QUOTE: "The market is looking for signs of strength and certainly earnings are going to figure pretty heavily," said Jim Russell, a regional investment director at US Bank.

JITTERY WEEK: The S&P 500 index is poised for its biggest weekly loss since April after closing out the previous week at a record high. Stocks retreated from all-time highs this week as investors worried the rally may have gone too far. Worries about the soundness of a Portuguese bank also spooked U.S. investors.

The S&P 500 has dropped 1.2 percent this week, its biggest fall since the week ending April 11, when investors sold stocks following disappointing bank earnings.

BONDS AND COMMODITIES: Bond prices rose. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which falls when prices climb, dropped to 2.52 percent from 2.54 percent late Thursday. The price of oil fell $1.44, or 1.4 percent, to $101.93.

For Latinos, family support can be crucial when facing mental disorders and suicide. We talk to a mental health social worker who discovered mental illness in his own family.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a California chemical engineer to 15 years in prison and fined him $28 million after his rare economic-espionage conviction for selling China the technology that creates a white pigment.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland said Liew had "turned against his adopted country over greed."

A jury previously convicted the 56-year-old Liew of receiving $28 million from companies controlled by the Chinese government in exchange for DuPont Co.'s secret recipe for making cars, paper and a long list of everyday items whiter.

White noted that U.S. authorities had managed to trace $22 million of that money to various Singapore and Chinese companies controlled by Liew's in-laws before losing the trail.

"We'll never get it," White said. "It has been spirited out of the country."

Liew and his wife, Christina Liew, launched a small California company in the 1990s aimed at exploiting China's desire to build a DuPont-like factory to manufacture the white pigment known as titanium dioxide. The Liews hired retired DuPont engineers and, according to the FBI, paid them thousands of dollars for sensitive company documents laying out a process to make the pigment.

Two former DuPont engineers have also been convicted of economic espionage. A third engineer committed suicide in early 2012 on the day he was to sign a plea bargain acknowledging his role in the conspiracy.

Except for a few months of release on bail, Liew has been in jail since his arrest in 2011. Wearing yellow jail garb and with his wife and family looking on from the gallery, Liew apologized for his actions.

"There are many things I would have liked to have done differently," Liew told the judge. "I regret my actions."

Liew's wife has pleaded not guilty to obstruction of justice and other charges.

In 2009, the Chinese government-controlled Pangang Group Co. Ltd. awarded the Liews' company a $17 million contract to build a factory that could produce 100,000 metric tons of the pigment a year. The same company had earlier awarded the Liews' company millions more in similar contracts for smaller projects.

Prosecutors allege that the operating Chinese factory was built with a detailed DuPont instruction manual stamped "confidential," which earlier was used to build DuPont's newest plant in Taiwan.

Robert Maegerle, a retired DuPont engineer, was convicted of economic-espionage charges along with Walter Liew in March. They are the first people to be convicted of economic espionage by a jury since Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act in 1996, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. About 20 other defendants have pleaded guilty to economic espionage charges before trial.

Federal officials say foreign governments' theft of U.S. technology is one of the biggest threats to the country's economy and national security.

"The battle against economic espionage has become one of the FBI's main fronts in its efforts to protect U.S. national security in the 21st century," said David Johnson, the FBI's special agent in charge of the San Francisco office.

Maegerle, 78, is to be sentenced later and remains free on bail.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two of the four U.S. deaths in Benghazi might have been prevented, military leaders say, if commanders had known more about the intensity of the sporadic gunfire directed at the CIA facility where Americans had taken refuge and had pressed to get a rescue team there faster.

Senior military leaders have told Congress in closed-door testimony that after the first attack on the main U.S. diplomatic compound on Sept. 11, 2012, they thought the fighting had subsided and the Americans who had fled to the CIA base about a mile away were safe. In fact, they were facing intermittent small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades around midnight and had returned fire. Then the attackers dispersed.

Hours later, at first light, an 11-minute mortar and rocket-propelled grenade attack slammed into the CIA annex, killing security contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

In hindsight, retired Gen. Carter Ham, then head of the U.S. military command in Africa, said he would have pressed Libyan contacts in the defense ministry and other officials to help speed up the evacuation of Americans from Benghazi.

Also, a special operations team that had been dispatched from Croatia to Sicily after the first attack might have made it to Benghazi, if a host of variables were ideal — a quick departure, wind direction and speed, and an unobstructed runway to land a U.S. aircraft.

Ham said "in a perfect world, with no other disruptions or distractions," it could have happened.

As it turned out, a six-man security team, including Special Forces personnel that arrived at Benghazi airport at 1:30 a.m., was held up there for hours by Libyan militia.

"In my view, that time delay, that inability of the team to get off of the Benghazi airport and get to the annex and back I think allowed sufficient time for the second attack to be organized and conducted," said Ham, who was in Washington at the time of the attacks.

Two House panels — Armed Services and Oversight and Government Reform — interviewed nine military officers earlier this year, and the testimony was released this week.

For the military, the fog of war shrouded Benghazi even before the night of Sept. 11.

The first assault, about 9:40 p.m. local time, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and communications specialist Sean Smith, was the first news to some military leaders that the U.S. even had a diplomatic mission in the Libyan port city — and that Stevens was there even though Benghazi was considered a dangerous, near-lawless city after the fall of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

In a very short time, many in the military, including Ham, would then learn about the CIA annex. In his testimony, Ham said he was certain that someone in his command knew of the existence of the facilities in Benghazi, but he acknowledged that the crisis was "not the ideal time to become aware of such facilities."

Throughout the night, the information relayed to military officers in Tripoli, up the chain of command to AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, and the Pentagon in Washington was incomplete and often contradictory. And that complicated efforts to mobilize personnel and aircraft to get Americans out of Libya.

"Omniscience is for God only," said a member of the U.S. Army who was operations director for the Special Operations Command Africa, and whose name was omitted from the testimony.

After the first attack, Ham and other military leaders were focused on a potential hostage situation, unaware that Stevens was already dead from smoke inhalation. They were under the impression that the Americans at the annex were safe, and none of the information they received suggested otherwise.

Vice Adm. Charles "Joe" Leidig Jr., who was Ham's deputy, said the Americans weren't requesting military reinforcements to respond to the sporadic gunfire, but rather were seeking a plane to get out.

"Once that indirect fire was over, they said we're going to get out of this annex, we're going to get to the Benghazi airfield, and now what they wanted was lift capability at Benghazi airfield," Leidig said.

A U.S. defense attache in Tripoli, who was relaying information up the chain of command that night, said he didn't learn of the nighttime gunfire until a day or two later.

Americans at the CIA base were confident they could deal with the gunfire. The intelligence official who was the chief of base told the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2012 that "until the mortar attack, we were pretty comfortable that we could stave off any type of ground assault on the annex."

Throughout the night, the military struggled to "level the bubble," ensuring that all had the same information from the disparate sources of cellphone calls, drone details and word from Libyan officials.

At the time of the second attack, the few military officers in Tripoli were helping evacuate the U.S. Embassy there, figuring out who could drive the armored vehicles to a classified site.

The testimony from nine military officials captures the difficulty for a military hamstrung by limited intelligence and far-flung U.S. forces. Officials grappled throughout the night with what they called the "tyranny of distance," and, according to the former operations director, the reality that "it was very foggy as to what were actual facts on the ground."

The testimony adds context to the bare-bones timeline the military released within weeks of the attack, but some questions remain unanswered.

Libya, after months of a U.S.-led air campaign and the fall of Gadhafi, was a nation of militias battling for turf and other Libyans helping provide security to U.S. personnel.

Alerted to the first attack, the U.S. military repositioned an unmanned drone from Derna, Libya, to Benghazi, but the dark of night made it difficult for the Predator to provide reliable information.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered two special operations teams — the one in Croatia and another in the United States — to get ready to deploy. He also issued a similar order to an anti-terrorism team in Rota, Spain.

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Associated Press writer Connie Cass contributed to this report.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian investigators say they have arrested and charged a Ukrainian air force pilot, whose plane was shot down during fighting, with killing two Russian journalists.

Ukraine has been rocked by fighting between pro-Russia rebels and government forces for over three months. The two Russian state-owned TV channel employees died in June after being hit by mortar fire in the Ukrainian city of Luhansk.

Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement Wednesday that pilot Nadezhda Savchenko is suspected of tipping off Ukrainian troops as to the whereabouts of the journalists who were in a rebel-held area.

Investigators say Savchenko is in a Russian detention center. But it's unclear how she got there: Moscow insists she crossed the border voluntarily but Ukraine says she was kidnapped by rebels and taken to Russia.

Kurdish security forces, the peshmerga, have taken over two major oil fields near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. The fields have the potential to put billions of dollars into the coffers of the Kurdish regional government.

But there's a hitch: Even if the Kurdish government has control of the oil, it doesn't necessarily mean it can export it — thanks to the Baghdad government and the U.S.

On May 22, about 4 million barrels of crude oil surged through a pipeline running from the autonomous region in northern Iraq, which is controlled by Kurds, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The crude was loaded into four tankers commissioned by the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG. One tanker, the United Leadership, sailed through the Mediterranean toward Morocco — where the first alleged buyer of the oil was, says Ben Lando, editor-in-chief of the Iraq Oil Report.

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FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (AP) — A Massachusetts man was injured when overhead wires pulled down by a passing truck wrapped around him and dragged him down the sidewalk.

Police say a truck hauling a modular home pulled down wires in Framingham at about 2:45 p.m. Wednesday. The man became tangled in the wires and was dragged to the next door neighbor's house.

Kathy Walsh tells WCVB-TV that her husband, Scott Canavan, was taken to the hospital with cuts, bruises and a sore back. She described the wires wrapping around him "like a cobra."

Walsh says the wires were telephone and cable wires and not high-voltage power lines.

Police tell The MetroWest Daily News the accident remains under investigation and the driver of the truck has not been cited.