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Show Friday, Oct. 30, 2009 Page 2 World&Nation Utah State University • Logan, Utah • www.aggietownsquare.com ClarifyCorrect The policy of The Utah Statesman is to correct any error made as soon as possible. If you find something you would like clarified or find unfair, please contact the editor at statesmaneditor@aggiemail.usu.edu Police seek shooter who wounded 2 in synagogue LOS ANGELES (AP) — A gunman shot and wounded two men in the parking garage of a North Hollywood synagogue Thursday, frightening worshippers who heard gunshots and screams before the bleeding victims stumbled in during morning services. Authorities initially put Jewish schools and temples on alert before saying the attack appeared to be isolated. NEW YORK (AP) — Sting Police detained a 17-year-old high isn’t a religious man, but he says President Barack Obama might school student near the temple because be a divine answer to the world’s he matched a “very loose” description of the attacker, who was described as problems. a black man wearing a hoodie, Deputy “In many Police Chief Michel Moore said. They ways, he’s sent later released the youth and said he is no from God,” longer a suspect. he joked in Mori Ben-Nissan, 38, and Allen an interview, Lasry, 53, were shot in the legs in the “because parking garage underneath the Adat the world’s a Yeshurun Valley Sephardic Orthodox mess.” STING synagogue in the San Fernando Valley, But Sting is serious in his belief that Obama said police Detective Steve Castro. The is the best leader to navigate the men, both synagogue members, arrived in separate cars for the morning service world’s problems. shortly before 6:30 a.m. and were in a “I can’t think of anyone better qualified because of his back- stairwell leading up to the synagogue ground, his education, particu- sanctuary when the gunman shot them larly in regard to Islam,” he said. several times, police said. The victims, who were hospitalized in good condition, told police the attacker Celebs&People NewsBriefs Utah teens cited for McDonald’s rap AMERICAN FORK (AP) — A rap by four teenagers at a McDonald’s has gotten them a bad rap in one Utah city. The teens were cited by American Fork police earlier this week for disorderly conduct after they rapped their order at a McDonald’s drive-through. The teens said they were imitating a popular video on YouTube. They rapped their order, which begins with, “I need a double cheeseburger and hold the lettuce ...” once quickly before repeating it more slowly. LateNiteHumor David Letterman, Oct. 28, 2009 – Top 10 Questions On The Northwest Airlines Pilot Job Application. 10. How many sleep hours have you logged while flying? 9. Do you have any flight experience because if not, that’s totally cool. 8. How many times have you safely landed a plane in a river? 7. Are you at the controls of an airplane right now? 6. Are you a cop? 5. Do you have a good attorney? 4. Name the jet engine that makes this sound: Pssshhhhhheeewwwwwww! 3. Are you available for both take-offs and landings? 2. Besides “using my laptop” and “having a heated conversation” what other lame excuses can you come up with for falling asleep in the cockpit and missing an airport by 150 miles? 1. Are you drunk right now? SYNAGOGUE PARISHONERS huddle at the scene in Los Angeles where a gunman shot and wounded two men in the parking garage of a North Hollywood synagogue early Thursday. AP photo did not speak, Moore said. One worshipper, Yehuda Oz, said he and about 14 others were praying in the temple when they heard four gunshots and screams from the parking area. Two men stumbled into the temple, Oz said, and people rushed to stop their bleeding. No one saw the attacker, he said. “Maybe it was crazy person,” Yehuda told the Los Angeles Times. “Maybe he was drugged up. Maybe it was a Jew. We don’t know.” Even as investigators tried to find a motive, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials moved to calm fears that the attack was part of any organized anti-Semitic violence. “We certainly recognize the location and we’re sensitive to that,” Moore said. “But we do not know that this was a hate crime at all.” Police searched the area for several hours but found no one. An alert that sent extra police patrols to local Jewish schools and synagogues was called off. Initial security camera footage from the synagogue shows the suspect but not the shooting, and the quality is too poor for investigators to identify the man, Cmdr. Jorge Villegas said. But Castro said detectives later found more security cameras at the synagogue and were reviewing those tapes for possible clues. Castro said information showed different scenarios for a possible motive, including a personal business dispute. The attack occurred 10 miles from a Jewish community center where white supremacist Buford Furrow wounded three children, a teenager and an adult, in 1999. Furrow later killed a Filipino letter carrier on another street, and is serving a life sentence without chance of parole. Stimulus report overstated jobs by thousands WASHINGTON (AP) — A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. The real number: fewer than 1,000. A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees. Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times. The government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under the president’s $787 billion recovery program, according to an Associated Press review of data released in the program’s first progress report. The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is released. It is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls. The White House seized on an initial report from a government oversight board weeks ago that claimed federal contracts awarded to businesses under the recovery plan already had helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The administration said the number was evidence that the stimulus program had exceeded early expectations toward reaching the president’s promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year. But the 30,000 figure is overstated by thousands – at the very least by nearly 5,000, or one in six, based on AP’s limited review of some of the contracts – because some federal agencies and recipients of the money provided incorrect job counts. The review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs were credited to stimulus spending when, in fact, none were produced. The White House says it is aware there are problems. In an interview, Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said. “If there’s an error that was made, let’s get it fixed,” DeSeve said. Within minutes of the publication of AP’s story, the White House released a statement that it said was the “real facts” about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago. It said that had been a test run of a small subset of data that had been subjected only to three days of reviews, that it had already corrected “virtually all” the mistakes identified by the AP and that the discovery of mistakes “does not provide a statistically significant indication of the quality of the full reporting that will come on Friday.” The data partially reviewed by the AP for errors included all the data presently available, representing all known federal contracts awarded to businesses under the stimulus program. The figures being released Friday include different categories of stimulus spending by state governments, housing authorities, nonprofit groups and other organizations. As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected. There’s no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report, but the administration embraced the flawed figures the moment they were released. The figures released earlier this month claimed jobs linked to roughly $16 billion in federal contracts, an initial report on a small fraction of the total stimulus program. DeSeve said federal officials had only a few days to go through the data for errors before they were made public. While the thousands of overstated jobs represent a tiny sliver of the overall economy, they represent a significant percentage of the initial employment count credited to the stimulus program. of how the jobs should be counted. Clinton scolds Pakistan over inaction on al-Qaida ISLAMABAD (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chided Pakistani officials Thursday for failing to press the hunt for al-Qaida inside their borders, suggesting they know where the terror leaders are hiding. American officials have long said that al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden and senior lieutenants of the network accused in the Sept. 11 attacks operate out of the rugged terrain along the border with Afghanistan. But Clinton’s unusually blunt comments went further in asserting that Pakistan’s government has done too little about it. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani journalists in Lahore. “Maybe that’s the case. Maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.” There was no immediate reaction from Pakistani officials, but the thrust of Clinton’s comments were startling, coming after months of lavish public comments from her and other American officials portraying Pakistan’s leaders as finally receptive to the war against militants inside their own country. As a political spouse, career public official and recently as a diplomat, Clinton has long showed a tendency toward bluntness, sometimes followed by a softening of her comments. But her remarks about Pakistan’s lack of action against al-Qaida comes at a particularly sensitive moment – amid a major Pakistani offensive against militants and a deadly spate of insurgent violence. With Pakistan reeling from Wednesday’s devastating bombing that killed more than 100 people in Peshawar, Clinton also engaged in an intense give-and-take with students at the Government College of Lahore. She insisted that inaction by the government would have ceded ground to terrorists. “If you want to see your territory shrink, that’s your choice,” she said, adding that she believed it would be a bad choice. Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters that Clinton planned to meet late Thursday with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to get an update on the offensive that began Oct. 17 against Taliban forces in a portion of the tribal areas near the Afghan border. “We want to encourage them,” Holbrooke said of the Pakistanis. “She wants to get a firsthand account of the military situation.” During her hourlong appearance at the college, Clinton stressed that a key purpose of her trip was to reach out to ordinary Pakistanis and urge a better effort to bridge differences and improve mutual understanding. |