Laura Bush to speak at fundraiser for Flight 93 memorial in Pa., attend Sept. 11 service

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. Former first lady Laura Bush will speak at a National Park Service fundraiser in Pittsburgh on Friday, a day before joining Michelle Obama in rural Pennsylvania to remember the victims of Flight 93, which crashed there in the Sept. 11 attacks.Bush’s appearance is part of a wider effort to raise money for the memorial to the 40 passengers and crew who died after they fought back against their hijackers.Just $40 million of the $58 million needed for the memorial has been raised, and the first phase of the project is scheduled to be dedicated in time for the 10th anniversary of the attacks next year.

A memorial plaza is under construction in these rolling hills, part of a long-awaited 2,200-acre national park that will eventually honor the victims. The finished memorial will include a 93-foot tower at the entrance with wind chimes for each of the victims and a grove of trees.The project’s planners say they hope Bush’s and Obama’s efforts help bring attention and much-needed cash to the project.

“In a world where there’s so much politics, one thing we have always found is that our story and our efforts resonate across the board. And this is just one more indication of that,” said Gordon Felt, the president of the Families of Flight 93, whose brother died aboard the flight.Patrick White, whose cousin, Louis “Joey” Nacke II, died in the crash, called donating to the memorial “a patriotic thing to do.”

“This is America’s memorial, certainly primarily to the 40 heroes of Flight 93, but indirectly to the events of the day as well,” he said.More than 1.2 million people have visited the temporary memorial since the crash. Planners predict that about 250,000 people will visit the permanent memorial each year.

The park foundation has recently stepped up its efforts to raise money, including a new public service campaign encouraging people to make a $10 donation by texting the word MEMORIAL to 90999, or to contribute online at http://www.honorflight93.org .Flight 93 was en route from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco when hijackers seized control and diverted it toward Washington, D.C. But the passengers fought back and the hijackers responded by crashing the plane about 60 miles southwest of Pittsburgh.

It’s imperative to honor the victims, said David Beamer, whose son Todd was believed to have led the revolt with the words “Let’s roll.” He said some textbooks only casually reference Flight 93 as the fourth plane to crash on Sept. 11, with no details.”That’s not sufficient,” Beamer said.(AP)

U.S. natural gas industry officials on Thursday defended a controversial drilling technique

U.S. natural gas industry officials on Thursday defended a controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing as the industry braces for possible new government regulations.Hydraulic fracturing injects millions of gallons of water, sand and a proprietary mix of chemicals up to two miles underground where it breaks open fissures in the gas-bearing shale to allow the gas to be extracted.Some environmental groups claim the technique, which is often referred to as “fracking”, is unsafe and threatens supplies of drinking water, but the industry claims its practice is safe.

“There is no known instance where fracking has contaminated someone’s drinking water,” said Will Brackett, the managing editor of the Powell Barnett Shale Newsletter, speaking on an industry panel sponsored by the George W. Bush Institute and Southern Methodist University’s Cox Maguire Energy Institute.Bush, the former U.S. president and Texas oil man, said more natural gas drilling would create more U.S. jobs. Bush did not touch on the hydraulic fracturing debate.

“When you explore for natural gas, when you develop natural gas, when you lay pipelines for natural gas, Americans are working,” Bush said in opening remarks to the conference.Earlier this month, the top U.S. environmental regulator said she was “very concerned” about the practice. The Environmental Protection Agency last week said it will conduct a study of drinking water impacts, which could mean new regulations on a booming area of the energy sector.

An industry scramble to develop vast shale deposits that are estimated to contain enough natural gas to meet U.S. needs for up to a century has brought drilling rigs within the limits of cities like Dallas and Fort Worth.

A bill in Congress would require gas companies to disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing and give the EPA oversight of the industry, which is now regulated by the states.

Industry officials dismissed any suggestion that their drilling practices were dangerous.”We have had some issues in less than half a dozen cases and they have been mostly mistakes and it is not clear that the issue is directly related to the fracking process itself,” said Randy Foutch, chairman and CEO of privately-held Laredo Petroleum.

Some residents who live near gas rigs in states from Pennsylvania to Wyoming say their water has become undrinkable since drilling companies fractured the wells and they complain of sickness and skin rashes after using the water.

Removing gas from shale rock accounts for 15 to 20 percent of U.S. natural gas production and provides a relatively clean energy source for the United States, which is trying to reduce its dependence on foreign oil.(Reuters)

New York The abrupt transformation of Colleen R. LaRose from bored middle-aged matron to "JihadJane," her Internet alias

New York The abrupt transformation of Colleen R. LaRose from bored middle-aged matron to “JihadJane,” her Internet alias, was unique in many ways, but a common thread ties the alleged Islamic militant to other recent cases of homegrown terrorism: the Internet.

From charismatic clerics who spout hate online, to thousands of extremist websites, chat rooms and social networking pages that raise money and spread radical propaganda, the Internet has become a crucial front in the ever-shifting war on terrorism.”LaRose showed that you can become a terrorist in the comfort of your own bedroom,” said Bruce Hoffman, professor of security studies at Georgetown University. “You couldn’t do that 10 years ago.”

“The new militancy is driven by the Web,” agreed Fawaz A. Gerges, a terrorism expert at the London School of Economics. “The terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being replaced by virtual camps on the Web.”

From their side, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are scrambling to monitor the Internet and penetrate radical websites to track suspects, set up sting operations or unravel plots before they are carried out.

The FBI arrested LaRose in October after she had spent months using e-mail, YouTube, MySpace and electronic message boards to recruit radicals in Europe and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to a federal indictment unsealed this week.That put the strawberry-haired Pennsylvania resident in league with many of the 12 domestic terrorism cases involving Muslims that the FBI disclosed last year, the most in any year since 2001. The Internet was cited as a recruiting or radicalizing tool in nearly every case.

“Basically, Al Qaeda isn’t coming to them,” Gerges said. “They are using the Web to go to Al Qaeda.”

In December, for example, five young men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of seeking to join anti-American militants in Afghanistan.A Taliban recruiter made contact with the group after one of the five, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, posted comments on YouTube praising videos of attacks on U.S. troops, officials said. To avoid detection, they communicated by leaving draft e-mail messages at a shared Yahoo e-mail address.

Hosam Smadi, a Jordanian, was arrested in September and accused of trying to use a weapon of mass destruction after he allegedly tried to blow up a 60-story office tower in downtown Dallas. The FBI began surveillance of Smadi after seeing his anti-American postings on an extremist website.And Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed, two middle-class kids barely out of high school near Atlanta, secretly took up violent jihad after meeting at a mosque.

“They started spending hours online — chatting with each other, watching terrorist recruitment videos, and meeting like-minded extremists,” the FBI said in a statement after the pair were convicted of terrorism charges in December.

Prosecutors alleged that the pair traveled to Washington and made more than 60 short surveillance videos of the Capitol, the Pentagon and other sensitive facilities, and e-mailed them to an Al Qaeda webmaster and propagandist.

U.S. authorities also closely monitor several fiery Internet imans who use English to preach jihad and, in some cases, to help funnel recruits to Al Qaeda and other radical causes.The best known is Anwar al Awlaki, an American-born imam who is believed to be living in Yemen. U.S. officials say more than 10% of visitors to his website are in the U.S.

Among those who traded e-mails with Awlaki were Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with shooting and killing 13 people in November at Ft. Hood, Texas, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day.

Mahdi Bray, executive director of the MAS Freedom Foundation, part of the Muslim American Society, noted that many extremist websites featured fiery images, loud music and fast-moving videos of violence and death.”They use video games and hip-hop to bring young people in, sometimes in very benign ways,” he said. “Then they make this transition by showing all the horrific things” and by then, some would-be recruits are hooked.

Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said his group had struggled to compete with the instant attention that grisly videos of beheadings, roadside bombs or masked men with weapons draw on the Internet.”They get the backdrop of the Afghani mountains or the battlefields of Somalia,” he said. “We’re speaking from conference centers and quiet halls. Somehow, we have to figure out a way to make our message more newsworthy. We’ve issued YouTube videos, and it barely gets a couple of hundred hits.”

strong winter storm slammed New York City and much of the U.S. Northeast on Friday

NEW YORK  A strong winter storm slammed New York City and much of the U.S. Northeast on Friday, forcing businesses, schools and transportation systems to shut down.Commuters struggled in the absence of suburban train and bus services into New York City, where several inches (cm) of snow accumulation and drifts of several feet snarled morning rush hour travel.On Wall Street, workers pitched in electronically or braved the storm to get to their jobs, so trading was unlikely to take a heavy hit, observers said.”I don’t think it will affect the volume, and volumes have been light anyway,” said Alan Valdes, director of floor trading at Kabrik Trading. “I would guess volumes would be light whether it was sunny and in the 70s or not.”

The wintry blast, which began on Thursday and was predicted to last through Saturday, was the third heavy storm to hit the region in a month.Bond trading was light due to the inclement weather, said William Larkin, fixed income portfolio manager at Cabot Money Management in Salem, Massachusetts.”New York is probably out of the picture,” he said.Parts of Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey, upstate New York and Massachusetts could expect snow accumulations of as much as two feet, the National Weather Service said.The storm was moving very slowly and was expected to hover over the Northeast through Saturday, the NWS said.The impact of the bad winter weather could be felt throughout a U.S. economy still struggling to emerge from recession.

HIGH WINDS

“The issue … has been the unusual weather this quarter, said Subodh Kumar, chief investment strategist at Subodh Kumar & Associates, in Toronto,In New York City, subway service was slowed and buses struggled to navigate snow-covered streets.Strong winds, gusting up to 60 miles per hour in eastern Long Island, posed danger to those venturing outside, the NWS said.Among the storm’s casualties, a man was struck and killed by a snow-laden tree limb that fell in Central Park on Thursday, authorities said. The roof of a home in suburban New Jersey collapsed under the heavy snow, and a snowplow and an automobile collided in suburban New York, causing an undermined number of injuries, authorities said.

Some 28,000 people were without power in suburban New York, and more than 2,000 customers suffered outages in the city, Con Edison said. More than 2,000 customers were without power in New Jersey, local power authorities said.Schools were closed in New York City, Philadelphia and elsewhere in the Northeastern states.Hundreds of flights were canceled at Newark Liberty International Airport, while delays were reported at John F. Kennedy International Airport and flights canceled at Philadelphia’s airport, authorities said.Winds gusted up to 50 miles per hour in Philadelphia, which declared a snow emergency, its fourth of the winter.Amtrak canceled regional trains in upstate New York, and commuter bus service was suspended in northern New Jersey.(Reuters)

blizzard warnings were expected to expire early Thursday. Some areas in New York, Maryland and Washington

Blizzard warnings in some areas, such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, expired late Wednesday. And other blizzard warnings were expected to expire early Thursday. Some areas in New York, Maryland and Washington, already buried under layers of snow, might still see light snow Thursday, the National Weather Service said.

Officials were still deciding early Thursday whether to open Dulles International Airport and Reagan Washington National airports, after they were shut down Wednesday.Amtrak was still providing limited service for Washington, New York and Boston, Massachusetts, on Thursday, but most passenger rail service south of Washington was canceled.

The New York subway system was expected to run normally Thursday, compared with the limited service at the height of the blizzard, transit officials said.This winter is already the snowiest on record for Washington and its suburbs, as well as Baltimore, Maryland, and Wilmington, Delaware, the National Weather Service said. And it’s on track to set records in other cities, including Philadelphia and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The 55 inches of snow that have accumulated in the nation’s capital during the past two storms proved too much for some buildings. Snow was blamed for the collapse of at least 22 roofs in Washington.In central Pennsylvania, Interstate 80 near Clearfield was shutdown after two pileups — one involving 17 cars and the other involving seven cars, said Rich Kirkpatrick of the state’s Department of Transportation.One person died and another person was seriously injured, police said.

The number of miners killed on the job in the United States fell for a second straight year to 34

mining machine breaks through a wall of coal

FRANKFORT, Ky. The number of miners killed on the job in the United States fell for a second straight year to 34, the fewest since officials began keeping records nearly a century ago.That was down from the previous low of 52 in 2008.U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration documents show 18 of the deaths occurred in coal mines, down from 29 in 2008; and 16 were in gold, copper and other types of mines, down from 22 in 2008. Most involved aboveground truck accidents on mine property, though some of the deaths resulted from rock falls and being struck by machinery.Obama administration mine safety czar Joe Main said the numbers are encouraging, but he won’t be satisfied until no miners are killed on the job.”I think that’s accomplishable, if you look at where we came from, and where we’ve come to,” Main said.The latest statistics are vastly improved, he said, from a century ago when hundreds, sometimes thousands of miners were killed each year.The deadliest year in recorded U.S. coal mining history was 1907, when 3,242 deaths were reported. That year, the nation’s most deadly mine explosion killed 358 people near Monongah, W.Va.Main credits the decrease in deaths over the past year to beefed-up enforcement and stricter regulations in the wake of a series of mining disasters over the past four years in Kentucky, Utah and West Virginia.

In 2006, 73 miners were killed, including 12 who died in a methane explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia and five who died in a similar explosion at the Darby Mine in Kentucky. In 2007, 67 miners died, including six who were killed in the collapse of the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah.Coal states reacted by revamping their mine safety laws, and Congress toughened federal rules that that brought a variety of advances. Among the improvements are caches of oxygen stashed in underground mines in case miners are trapped, refuge chambers to provide shelter in emergencies, and a communications system to allow underground miners to talk with colleagues on the surface.

Steve Earle, United Mine Workers of America international vice president for the Midwest, said while those were important improvements, getting inspectors into the field is the key.”I can say without reservation that the safest day coal miners have is when inspectors are in the mines,” he said. “The more we can put our inspectors in the mines, the safer those mines will become and the closer we will come to zero fatalities.”

Mine safety advocate Tony Oppegard, who has successfully lobbied to triple the number mine inspections conducted in Kentucky, said mining remains a dangerous occupation.”Everyone who’s involved in mine safety has to be extremely vigilant,” he said. “There’s very small margin for error in coal mining. The smallest mistake can cost a miner his life.”Kentucky led the nation in mining deaths last year with six in coal mines and one in a limestone quarry. That was followed by West Virginia and Alabama, each of which had three coal miners killed.

Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas each had two miners killed in coal, salt, alumina, zinc or sand and gravel operations. Arizona, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia and Puerto Rico had one miner killed in either clay, copper, gold, lime or sand and gravel operations.

“It’s never positive when you have numbers like that, but it could have been worse,” said David Moss, spokesman for the Kentucky Coal Association. “We’re always striving for that goal of zero. That’s what we work toward every single day.”Main credited cooperation between regulatory agencies, coal companies and miners with making mines safer, which led the decrease in workplace deaths.”It is historic,” he said. “And it does tell us we can achieve a point in time when we have no fatalities.”(AP)