Prosecutor: US soldier had blood of victims on him

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. (AP) — A caped figure captured on surveillance video came running out of the darkness to the edge of a remote Army outpost in southern Afghanistan. Blood was smeared on his face, prosecutors said, and soaked into his clothes.

Less than a mile away, 16 Afghans, including nine children, were dead, some of their bodies on fire in two villages.

As fellow soldiers stopped him at the base's gate, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was incredulous, prosecutors said. Then, as he was taken into custody, Bales said: "I thought I was doing the right thing."

The details, from a prosecutor as well as Bales' comrades, emerged Monday as a preliminary hearing in his case opened, offering the clearest picture yet of one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The attack on March 11 prompted the U.S. to halt combat operations for days in the face of protests, and it was a month before military investigators could reach the crime scenes.

Bales, 39, faces 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder. The hearing could last up to two weeks and will help determine whether the case goes to a court martial.

The defense did not give an opening statement.

Bales has not entered a plea. His attorneys have not discussed the evidence, but say Bales has post-traumatic stress disorder and suffered a concussive head injury during a prior deployment to Iraq.

The father of two from Lake Tapps, Wash., wore green fatigues and sat beside one of his civilian lawyers as an investigating officer read the charges against him and informed him of his rights.

When asked if he understood them, Bales said, "Sir, yes, sir."

Bales spent the March night before the raids at Camp Belambay, watching "Man On Fire," a fictional account of a former CIA operative on a revenge spree, with his fellow soldiers, said Lt. Col. Jay Morse, the prosecutor.

He seemed normal as they shared whiskey, discussed Bales' anxiety over whether he'd get a promotion and talked about another soldier who lost his leg a week earlier in a roadside bomb attack, Cpl. David Godwin testified.

Shortly before leaving the base, Bales told a Special Forces soldier that he was unhappy with his family life and that the troops should have been quicker to retaliate for the March 5 bomb attack, Morse said.

"At all times, he had a clear understanding of what he was doing and what he had done," said Morse, who described Bales as lucid and responsive.

Bales is accused of slipping away from the remote outpost with an M-4 rifle outfitted with a grenade launcher to attack the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, in a dangerous district.

Morse said Bales broke the killings into two episodes. Dressed in a T-shirt, Bales walked first to one village, return to the base and then slipped away again to carry out the second attack.

Between the episodes, Bales told a colleague about shooting people at one of the villages, Morse said. The soldier apparently took it as a bad joke and responded: "Quit messing around."

Prosecutors played for the first time the video captured by a surveillance blimp that showed the caped figure running toward the base, then stopping and dropping his weapons as he was confronted. There was no audio.

It wasn't immediately clear from where Bales got the cape.

As he stood outside the base, Godwin testified, Bales had asked him and another soldier: "Did you rat me out? Did you rat me out?"

Part of the hearing will be held overnight to allow video testimony from witnesses, including an estimated 10 to 15 Afghans, in Afghanistan.

Bales' attorney, John Henry Browne, said the hearing will give the defense a chance to see what the military can prove. He said they are expecting a court martial.

The Ohio native joined the Army in late 2001 — after the 9/11 attacks — as his career as a stockbroker imploded, including an arbitrator's $1.5 million fraud judgment against him and his former company.

Bales was serving his fourth combat tour after three stints in Iraq and his arrest prompted a national discussion about the stresses that soldiers face from multiple deployments.

His lawyers have said Bales remembers little or nothing from around the time of the attacks.

Emma Scanlan, one of his attorneys, declined to say to what extent the lawyers hope to elicit testimony that could be used to support a mental-health defense. Bales himself will not make any statements.

She said the Army had only recently turned over a preliminary DNA trace evidence report from the crime scenes, but defense experts have not had time to review it.

___

Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

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Apple sells 3 million iPads over first weekend

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Controversial Guns N' Roses promo being modified

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Las Vegas resort criticized for a suggestive ad campaign promoting Guns N' Roses shows is apologizing for the flap and changing the artwork.

Ads for the band's four-week run at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino depicted a disheveled woman who appeared to be sexually assaulted beneath the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign.

The artwork came to the attention of county commissioners after they temporarily renamed a street Paradise City Road in honor of the band's famous song.

Rape crisis groups decried the campaign, saying it glorified domestic violence and could re-traumatize victims.

The Hard Rock issued a statement saying it regrets that the campaign offended members of the community, and it started modifying the ads Friday.

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Study: Stem cells from strangers can repair hearts

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Researchers are reporting a key advance in using stem cells to repair hearts damaged by heart attacks. In a study, stem cells donated by strangers proved as safe and effective as patients' own cells for helping restore heart tissue.

The work involved just 30 patients in Miami, but proves the concept that anyone's cells can be used to treat such cases. Doctors are excited because this suggests that stem cells could be banked for off-the-shelf use after heart attacks, just as blood is kept on hand now.

Results were discussed Monday at an American Heart Association conference in California and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study used a specific type of stem cells from bone marrow that researchers believed would not be rejected by recipients. Unlike other cells, these lack a key feature on their surface that makes the immune system see them as foreign tissue and attack them, explained the study's leader, Dr. Joshua Hare of the University of Miami.

The patients in the study had suffered heart attacks years earlier, some as long as 30 years ago. All had developed heart failure because the scar tissue from the heart attack had weakened their hearts so much that they grew large and flabby, unable to pump blood effectively.

Researchers advertised for people to supply marrow, which is removed using a needle into a hip bone. The cells were taken from the marrow and amplified for about a month in a lab at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, then returned to Miami to be used for treatment, which did not involve surgery.

The cells were delivered through a tube pushed through a groin artery into the heart near the scarred area. Fifteen patients were given cells from their own marrow and 15 others, cells from strangers.

About a year later, scar tissue had been reduced by about one-third. Both groups had improvements in how far they could walk and in quality of life. There was no significant difference in one measure of how well their hearts were able to pump blood, but doctors hope these patients will continue to improve over time, or that refinements in treatment will lead to better results.

The big attraction is being able to use cells supplied by others, with no blood or tissue matching needed.

"You could have the cells ready to go in the blood bank so when the patient comes in for a therapy — there's no delay," Hare said. "It's also cheaper to make the donor cells," and a single marrow donor can supply enough cells to treat as many as 10 people.

Dr. Elliott Antman of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who heads the heart conference, praised the work.

"That opens up an entire new avenue for stem cell therapy, like a sophisticated version of a blood bank," he said. There's an advantage in not having to create a cell therapy for each patient, and it could spare them the pain and wait of having their own marrow harvested, he said.

The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Hare owns stock in a biotech company working on a treatment using a mixture of cells.

Juan Lopez received his own cells in the study, and said it improved his symptoms so much that at age 70, he was able to return to his job as an engineer and sales manager for a roofing manufacturer and ride an exercise bike.

"It has been a life-changing experience," said Lopez, who lives in Miami. "I can feel day by day, week by week, month by month, my improvement. I don't have any shortness of breath and my energy level is way up there. I don't have any fluid in my lungs."

And, he said happily, "my sex drive has improved!"

__

Online:

Heart Association: http://www.heart.org

JAMA: http://www.jama.ama-assn.org

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Everything you wanted to know about voting machines

Ever since punch-card voting machines produced the "hanging chads" that led to the Florida recount in the 2000 election, Americans have been looking for new and more reliable technology to use on Election Day.

One result: The Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.9 billion in federal funds for trading in punch-card and lever systems with either e-voting or optical scan systems. The act also stipulates that all polling places should make available a handicap-accessible voting device.

But while the country, for the most part, has moved on from the older, more unreliable machines, the new models present their own set of challenges. From shadowy conspiracy theories to genuine concerns about glitches, here's what you need to know about the machines that are supposed to make democracy work.

What kind of machines are used, and where?

Sixty percent of the country now supplies voters with optical scanners. To use them, voters shade in their choices on paper ballots (similar to how they would take an SAT test) before feeding it to the machines. These optical scanners, while not exactly a brand-new technology, are the state-of-the-art for both their accuracy in processing votes and their security against tampering.

But the same cannot always be said for the alternative, e-voting equipment (direct-recording electronic machines, or DREs), which is used in about 25 percent of the country. These are lined up in places like Georgia, Maryland, Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas.

E-voting machines come in three variants: push-button machines sporting a keypad; LCD touch-screens; and machines that use a rolling wheel to select and confirm a vote onscreen. All of these register votes on an electronic ballot. The absence of a paper trail, which is preserved by the optical scanners, has caused concerns since the inception of the machines.

VerifiedVoting.org provides more specifics on the history and different forms of voting technology, including a map showing the brand of election equipment for different states.

Does anyone still use punch-card or lever systems?

Four counties in Idaho still use punch-card ballots, while none in the country has used lever machines since 2010.

What are some of the examples of problems with e-voting machines?

In 2004, electronic votes were wiped from machines in New Jersey and North Carolina. But the much more ominous worries over the limits and liabilities of e-voting became clear in 2008, when a study by Princeton University revealed how easy it would be to hack into the Sequoia brand of e-voting machines (used chiefly in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana) to steal votes.

More disturbing is this quote from Roger Johnston, a computer science expert leading a subsequent test on Diebold AccuVote e-voting machines just last year: "I've seen high-school science fair projects that are more sophisticated than what is needed to hijack a voting machine." His crash course in vote-jacking went as follows: The equipment was hacked by inserting a very inexpensive homemade device into the voting machine, which could be remotely controlled from afar. In practice, when the voter attempted to mark her e-ballot, the hacker could intercept and alter the vote from one party to the other.

Despite these widely reported studies, as well as HBO's 2006 documentary "Hacking Democracy," there has not yet been any effort to address these sorts of problems with either the Diebold machines or the smaller malfunctions of e-voting machines more broadly. (It is, of course, also true that there have been problems with fraud and machine error with more traditional forms of voting technology.)

The software for the e-voting machines is proprietary, which means that only the companies that manufacture them have access to their design, which they have kept from examination through extended legal battles.

What's with stories about Tagg Romney owning voting machines?

In a tight election, even the most tenuous connections can be spun quickly into a web of conspiracy. That's not to say that there aren't genuine links between very enthusiastic Mitt Romney donors and Hart InterCivic, a large supplier of voting machines in Ohio—but the theories attempting to prove that Tagg Romney, the Republican nominee's eldest son, owns Ohio voting machines overstep the boundaries of available evidence.

As Rick Ungar reported in Forbes, two Hart InterCivic board members made direct donations to the Romney campaign; furthermore, several directors of H.I.G. capital, which owns Hart, are major money-raisers for the campaign. (Some of them were in the room during Romney's infamous "47 percent" remarks.)

But there is no evidence that Tagg Romney's private equity firm, Solamere Capital, invests, owns or controls voting machines made by InterCivic. The closest one gets by following the money is to find Solamere investing in H.I.G.'s medical fund, BioVentures, a wholly separate fund, as reported by Eugene Kiely and Lucas Isakowitz at Factcheck.org.

What will superstorm Sandy's impact be on voting in the Northeast?

In the back of people's minds, Sandy's effect on voting in the Northeast has been a quiet but pressing concern. As Thad Hall, a University of Utah political scientist and researcher for the Voting Technology Project, told the Associated Foreign Press, "Some voters will literally not be able to vote because they will have been evacuated from their local polling place and there is no provision for remote voting."

The voting machines themselves will be left operating on batteries, not an encouraging prospect as Election Day drags on longer in areas where debris and destruction have complicated the process and organization.

In New Jersey, the state is allowing residents to combat the aftermath of the storm by voting through absentee ballots by email or fax. And state officials in New York have said that residents may be granted an extra day to vote if Tuesday's turnout is below 25 percent.

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China's Communists endorse Bo Xilai's expulsion

BEIJING (AP) — China's ruling Communist elite have endorsed the expulsion of former high-flying politician Bo Xilai and approved final preparations for the party's upcoming congress, state media reported Sunday.

The closed-door meeting of the Central Committee that ended Sunday was the last before Communist Party leader Hu Jintao and others in his government begin to cede power to Vice President Xi Jinping and others at the congress, which opens Thursday.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the committee endorsed decisions to expel Bo and former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun from the Communist Party. Bo is accused of a range of misdeeds including covering up his wife's murder of a British businessman. Liu faces corruption charges.

The policy-setting committee also appointed two new vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, Xinhua said.

The Central Committee is comprised of about 370 people from the upper ranks of the party, government and military.

Bo's ouster earlier this year widened rifts within a leadership that likes to project an image of unity. It also complicated the bargaining over the roster of new leaders.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Lucas plans 'little personal films' in future

NEW YORK (AP) — George Lucas is done with "Star Wars," but not with filmmaking.

The "Star Wars" creator says he's looking forward to making his "own little personal films" that he doubts will be for the theater crowd.

Lucas spoke Friday night at Ebony magazine's Power 100 Gala, days after announcing the sale of his storied Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion. The deal would allow for more "Star Wars" films.

Lucas was "very sad" let Lucasfilm go but excited about his educational foundation, which will benefit from the sale. He also plans to make more movies. His last one was this year's "Red Tails," about the Tuskegee Airmen, but he said he barely got it in theaters. He said the movies he's working on now "will never get into theaters."

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Floods render NYC hospitals powerless

NEW YORK (AP) — There are few places in the U.S. where hospitals have put as much thought and money into disaster planning as New York. And yet two of the city's busiest, most important medical centers failed a fundamental test of readiness during Superstorm Sandy this week: They lost power.

Their backup generators failed, or proved inadequate. Nearly 1,000 patients had to be evacuated.

The closures led to dramatic scenes of doctors carrying patients down dark stairwells, nurses operating respirators by hand, and a bucket brigade of National Guard troops hauling fuel to rooftop generators in a vain attempt to keep the electricity on.

Both hospitals, NYU Langone Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital Center, were still trying to figure out exactly what led to the power failures Thursday, but the culprit appeared to be the most common type of flood damage there is: water in the basement.

While both hospitals put their generators on high floors where they could be protected in a flood, other critical components of the backup power system, such as fuel pumps and tanks, remained in basements just a block from the East River.

Both hospitals had fortified that equipment against floods within the past few years, but the water — which rushed with tremendous force — found a way in.

"This reveals to me that we have to be much more imaginative and detail-oriented in our planning to make sure hospitals are as resilient as they need to be," said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

The problem of unreliable backup electricity at hospitals is nothing new.

Over the first six months of the year, 23 percent of the hospitals inspected by the Joint Commission, a health care facility accreditation group, were found to be out of compliance with standards for backup power and lighting, according to a spokesman.

Power failures crippled New Orleans hospitals after Hurricane Katrina. The backup generator failed at a hospital in Stafford Springs, Conn., after the remnants of Hurricane Irene blew through the state in 2011. Hospitals in Houston were crippled when Tropical Storm Allison flooded their basements and knocked out electrical equipment in 2001.

When the Northeast was hit with a crippling blackout in 2003, the backup power at several of New York City's hospitals failed or performed poorly. Generators malfunctioned or overheated. Fuel ran out too quickly. Even where the backup systems worked, they provided electricity to only some parts of the hospital and left others in the dark.

Afterward, a mayoral task force recommended upgrading testing standards for generators and requiring backup plans for blood banks and health care facilities that provide dialysis treatment.

Alan Aviles, president of New York City's Health and Hospitals Corp., which operates Bellevue, said that after a scare last summer when Hurricane Irene threatened to cause flooding, Bellevue put its basement-level fuel pumps in flood-resistant chambers.

It still isn't clear whether water breached those defenses, but when an estimated 17 million gallons of water rushed through loading docks and into the hospital's 1-million-square-foot basement, the fuel feed to the generators stopped working. The floodwaters also knocked out the hospital's elevators.

For two days, National Guardsmen carried fuel to the generators, but conditions inside the hospital for patients and staff deteriorated anyway. The generators were designed to supply only 30 percent of the usual electrical load at the hospital, leaving a lot of equipment and labs hobbled. The hospital also lost all water pressure on Tuesday. Nearly 700 patients had been evacuated by Thursday afternoon.

"The precautions we had taken to date had served us well," Aviles said. "But Mother Nature can always up the stakes."

NYU Langone Medical Center had also tried to armor itself against floods.

All seven of the generators providing backup power to the parts of the hospital involved in patient care are only a few years old and are on higher floors. The fuel tank is in a watertight vault. New fuel pumps were installed just this year in a pump house upgraded to withstand a high flood, said the hospital's vice president of facilities operation, Richard Cohen.

"The medical center invested quite a bit of money to upgrade the facility," he said.

The pump house remained "bone dry," Cohen said. But water shoved aside plastic and plywood defenses and infiltrated the fuel vault, where sensors detected the potentially damaging liquid and shut the generators down. "The force of the surge that came in was unbelievable. It dislodged our additional protection and caused a breach of the vault as well," Cohen said.

The power at NYU went out in a flash, leaving the staff scrambling to evacuate 300 patients with no notice.

Dr. Robert Berg, an obstetrician, said that when he lost power in his apartment, he went to the hospital to charge his cellphone and was stunned to find it in chaos.

"It didn't really occur to me that the hospital was going to be in trouble," he said. Even after finding the lobby dark, "I thought, 'We'll have power upstairs. We're an operating room.'"

He wound up carrying two patients down flights of stairs on a "med sled."

"There was a Category 1 outside and a Category 4 inside," he said. "I can't say that they were very well prepared for it."

That has left only one hospital, Beth Israel Medical Center, functioning in the southern third of Manhattan. It is also on backup power, but brought in two huge new generators Thursday, just in case.

Aviles said Bellevue might be out of commission for at least two more weeks. NYU Langone's generators are operating again, but the hospital is waiting for Consolidated Edison to restore its power before it starts taking patients again. That could happen in a matter of days.

Flooding may pose less of a danger to the hospital's power supply in the future. Construction is under way on a new power plant, at a cost of more than $200 million, that will run on natural gas and supply all the hospital's power needs.

"It's a tremendous facility, with a lot of hardening built into it," Cohen said.

___

AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe contributed to this report.

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Florida's I-4 corridor: The mother road of swing voters

By Bob Sacha and Maisie Crow

Interstate 4 bisects the center of America's most notorious swing state, running 132 miles from Tampa, through Orlando and ending near Daytona Beach. Fifty-five percent of Florida voters live in the I-4 corridor. It is often where elections are decided in a state that has frequently switched sides, voting for Republicans seven times and Democrats three times in the past 10 elections, and voting for the winning presidential candidate 90 percent of that time.

For the final installment of our Road Trip video series for Campaign 2012, Yahoo News headed to Florida in search of the exotic, perhaps mythical, undecided voter. Here are three of our conversations.

'I have been registered to vote for seven years, and I have never voted.'

In a state filled with colorful characters, Eve Banks, 25, entertains many of them at the Mons Venus club in Tampa. She also travels extensively for her work as an exotic dancer. Eve Banks is a stage name: "I don't want girls from my sorority looking me up online," she says.

"I'm living a version of the American dream," she told Yahoo News. "It's not like the white picket fence, but I do have the dogs and I do have the husband. And I have everything I want. It's just kind of a different way of achieving it."

In the 2012 presidential election, Banks will be voting for the first time, casting a ballot for Barack Obama, she says, because of his support for women. "I generally don't care about politics because I feel like little old me does not make a difference," she said. "But this year I think is a lot different than previous years because of what's at stake right now.

"There was a lot of discrimination against women, believe it or not, not even that long ago really if you think about it. And that'll all change if we don't put the right person in the position," Banks said. "No woman wants a government to control her body or her choices."

'It has gotten pretty ugly between the two. I'm not sure I would want to be a part of it.'

Lloyd Parker, 33, hasn't decided how he is going to vote. He was working for a land development company in Lake Tahoe in Nevada until business started to slow down. His best friend lured him to Florida to become an entrepreneur by starting the Savage Race, an obstacle race in the mud. We hung out with him during their third race in Dade City.

"The Savage Race is a four- to six-mile mud obstacle course," Parker said. "It's timed. Twenty to 25 military-style obstacles that challenge you in many different ways. And afterward it's a fun gathering with live music and a party atmosphere."

Parker called Florida a Savage Race of sorts for Obama and Mitt Romney: "It is everywhere. It seems to be all over Facebook, everything. Maybe that has turned me off a little bit. That it's just been too much of back and forth and negativity, and it probably pushed me away a little bit.

"I have not been following it very much lately," he told Yahoo News. "In the last month I have been extremely busy with this course. I'm out on a ranch with no cable."

'I think somebody that's been in the farming business as long as we have—I don't think we should have to pay any inheritance tax.'

When Dave Black, 73, started in the citrus-farming and ranching business 42 years ago in Clermont, he stood on his 22 acres and saw fruit trees everywhere. Now his property is down to 14 acres, and it is hemmed in by new housing developments on three sides.

"We've got enough houses," Black told Yahoo News. "I mean we should leave a little open space."

Black is voting for Romney because of his opposition to the inheritance tax, in the hope that he can pass his property to his children undivided and tax-free.

"The Electoral College, I don't care for," he said. "I want the people to decide, not this state or that state. You know, Bush, the first election, he won on electoral votes. He didn't win on popular votes. Gore beat him on popular votes. So, that's wrong. That's just my opinion."

Bob Sacha is a multimedia producer, a documentary filmmaker, a photojournalist and a teacher. Maisie Crow is a documentary photographer, a filmmaker and a visual storytelling teacher. Earlier this year, Bob Sacha and Zach Wise traveled to Nevada to talk to Hispanics about the presidential election. In October, they talked to small-business owners along Colorado's Colfax Avenue. In July, Bob Sacha and Miki Meek traveled to Northern Virginia to talk to Mormons about what a President Romney would mean to them. In March, they drove Ohio's I-71 and talked to Republicans before Super Tuesday.

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