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Thursday, October 14, 2010 – Daily News – 5B WORLD BRIEFING Chile hoists 26 of 33 miners to freedom SAN JOSE MINE, Chile (AP) — With remarkable speed — and flawless execution — miner after miner climbed into a cramped cage deep beneath the Chilean earth, was hoisted through 2,000 feet of rock and saw precious sunlight Wednes- day after the longest under- ground entrapment in human history. By midafternoon, 26 of the 33 miners, including the weak- est and sickest, had been pulled to freedom, and officials said they might even be able to bring everyone out by midnight. After 69 days underground, including two weeks during which they were feared dead, the men emerged to the cheers of exuberant Chileans and before the eyes of a transfixed globe. The operation picked up speed as the day went on, but each miner was greeted with the same boisterous applause from rescuers. ‘‘Welcome to life,’’ President Sebastian Pinera told Victor Segvia, the 15th miner out. On a day of superlatives, it seemed no overstatement. They rejoined a world intensely curious about their ordeal, and certain to offer fame and jobs. Previously unimagin- able riches awaited men who had risked their lives going into the unstable gold and copper mine for about $1,600 a month. White House weighs appeal of ruling on gays in military WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House weighed a quick appeal of a judge’s order abruptly allowing gays to serve openly in the military as Penta- gon chief Robert Gates warned on Wednesday of ‘‘enormous consequences’’ for men and women in uniform if the ruling stands. A day after the federal judge in California ordered the Penta- gon to cease enforcement of the ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ law, Gates told reporters traveling with him in Europe that repeal- ing the law should be a question for Congress — and only after the Pentagon completes its study of the issue. Allowing gays to serve open- ly ‘‘is an action that requires careful preparation and a lot of training,’’ Gates said. ‘‘It has enormous consequences for our troops.’’ In Tuesday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ordered the military ‘‘immedi- ately to suspend and discontin- ue any investigation’’ or other proceeding to dismiss gay ser- vice members. The 1993 law says gays may serve in the mil- itary but only if they keep secret their sexual orientation. Phillips wrote that the law ‘‘infringes the fundamental rights’’ of current and prospec- tive service members. US prosecutors charge dozens with Medicare fraud scheme NEW YORK (AP) — A vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates used phan- tom health care clinics and other means to try to cheat Medicare out of $163 million, the largest fraud by one crimi- nal enterprise in the program’s history, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. Federal prosecutors in New York and elsewhere charged 73 people. Most of the defendants were captured during raids Wednesday morning in New York City and Los Angeles, but there also were arrests in New Mexico, Georgia and Ohio. The scheme’s scope and sophistication ‘‘puts the tradi- tional Mafia to shame,’’ U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a Manhattan news conference. ‘‘They ran a veritable fraud franchise.’’ Unlike other cases involving crooked medical clinics bribing people to sign up for unneeded treatments, the operation was ‘‘completely notional,’’ Janice Fedarcyk, head of the FBI’s New York office, said in a state- ment. ‘‘The whole doctor- patient interaction was a mirage.’’ The operation was under the protection of an Armenian crime boss, known in the for- mer Soviet Union as a ‘‘vor,’’ prosecutors said. The reputed boss, Armen Kazarian, was in custody in Los Angeles. 2-year freeze in Social Security follows biggest boost in 27 years WASHINGTON (AP) — Seniors will remain ahead of the inflation curve despite a second straight year without an increase in their Social Securi- ty benefits. Some seniors and their advocacy groups have raised the specter of millions of the elderly struggling to pay for food, utilities and health care under a benefit freeze. Strug- gle, many do, particularly those who rely on Social Secu- rity for most if not all of their income. But beneficiaries received a whopping 5.8 percent cost-of- living increase in January 2009, when the actual cost of living had risen only a tiny fraction of 1 percent. In effect, they got a double boost. This year marked the first time recipients have gone with- out a benefit increase since 1975, when Congress adopted a system of automatic increas- es based on the Consumer Price Index. The Social Securi- ty Administration is set to announce on Friday that there For banks, ‘‘the most efficient will again be no increase in 2011. So is the government turn- ing its back on the elderly — only a few weeks from an elec- tion, no less? Poll: College student fervor for Obama cools WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obamamania that gripped college campuses two years ago is gone. An Associated Press-mtvU poll found college students cooling in their support for President Barack Obama, a fresh sign of trouble for Democrats struggling to rekindle enthusiasm among many of these newest voters for the crucial midterm elec- tions in three weeks. Forty-four percent of stu- dents approve of the job Obama is doing as president, while 27 percent are unhappy with his stewardship, accord- ing to the survey conducted late last month. That’s a sig- nificant drop from the 60 per- cent who gave the president high marks in a May 2009 poll. Only 15 percent had a negative opinion back then. It’s not just students. Obama’s support from many groups has ebbed since his early months in office because of persistently high unemployment and opposi- tion to his plans to revive the economy and overhaul the health care system. But his diminished backing from col- lege students raises further questions about whether the Democrats’ efforts to rally them — and other loyal sup- porters such as blacks and union members — will be enough to prevent Republi- cans from winning control of Congress in the Nov. 2 elec- tions. Obama’s weaker perfor- mance on campus also under- scores his party’s struggles to turn the 15 million first-time voters of 2008 — nearly one in eight of that year’s total — into a solid political army. Exit polls from 2008 show 55 percent of new voters were age 18 to 24, and those young first-timers strongly backed Obama and Democratic House candidates — a potent bloc if Democrats could lure them back to the voting booth. US Hispanics can expect to outlive whites, blacks by years ATLANTA (AP) — U.S. His- panics can expect to outlive whites by more than two years and blacks by more than seven, government researchers say in a startling report that is the first to calculate Hispan- ic life expectancy in this country. The report released Wednesday is the strongest evidence yet of what some experts call the ‘‘His- panic paradox’’ — longevity for a population with a large share of poor, undereducated members. A leading theory is that Hispanics who manage to immigrate to the U.S. are among the healthiest from their countries. A Hispanic born in 2006 could expect to live about 80 years and seven months, the government estimates. Life expectancy for a white is about 78, and for a black, just shy of 73 years. Researchers have seen signs of Hispanic longevity for years. But until recently, the government did- n’t calculate life expectancy for Hispanics as a separate group; they were included among the black and white populations. The new report projecting future life spans is based on death certificates from 2006. By breaking out the longer-liv- ing Hispanics, the life expectan- cies for non-Hispanic whites and blacks both declined slightly, said the report’s author, Elizabeth Arias of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Attorneys general in 50 states launch foreclosure probe WASHINGTON (AP) — A joint investigation by every state and the District of Columbia could force mortgage companies to set- tle allegations that they used flawed documents to foreclose on hundreds of thousands of home- owners. It could take months, at least, for any settlement to be reached. But legal experts say lenders could be forced to accept an independent monitor to ensure they follow state foreclosure laws. The banks could also be subject to financial penal- ties and be forced to pay some people whose foreclosures were improperly handled. way for them to get out from under this to settle across the board,’’ said Kathleen Engel, a law professor at Suffolk Universi- ty in Boston. Employees of several major lenders have acknowledged in depositions that they signed thou- sands of foreclosure documents without reading them as required by state laws. ‘‘This is not simply about a glitch in paperwork,’’ Iowa Attor- ney General Tom Miller, who’s leading the probe announced Wednesday, said in a statement. ‘‘It’s also about some companies violating the law and many people losing their homes.’’ Humpback makes longest single mammal migration ever LONDON (AP) — It wasn’t love. It could have been adventure. Or maybe she just got lost. It remains a mystery why a female humpback whale swam thousands of miles from the reefs of Brazil to the African island of Madagascar, which researchers believe is the longest single trip ever undertaken by a mammal — humans exclud- ed. While humpbacks normally migrate along a north-to-south axis to feed and mate, this one — affectionately called AHWC No. 1363 — made the unusual deci- sion to check out a new continent thousands of miles to the east. Marine ecologist Peter Stevick says it probably wasn’t love that motivated her — whales meet their partners at breeding sites, so it’s unlikely that this one was fol- lowing a potential mate. ‘‘It may be that this is an extreme example of exploration,’’ he said. ‘‘Or it could be that the animal got very lost.’’ Stevick laid out the details of the whale’s trip on Wednesday in the Royal Society’s Biology Let- ters, calculating that, at a mini- mum, the whale must have trav- eled about 6,200 miles. Millions watch Chilean mine rescue on TV They were inspired by the miners’ fortitude and cama- raderie. They were amazed by the engineering feat that saved the men’s lives. And they were grate- ful for some good news for a change. From Australia to the coal fields of Appalachia, people in seemingly every corner of the world followed the Chilean min- ers’ rescue Wednesday on TV and the Internet, and many were uplifted by the experience. ‘‘It’s a heartwarming story. It’s family values. It’s leadership. It’s everything that we should have here,’’ Mark Vannucci said as he watched on a TV at a restaurant in New York’s Times Square. His wife, Susan, said: ‘‘Instead of those guys in the mine turning on each other, they worked together, they bonded.’’ Tehama County’s Personal/Professional Service Directory Bankruptcy Attorney Local Bankruptcy Attorney Jocelyn C. 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