Conn. warns of end to unemployment benefits

Conn. warns of end to unemployment benefits

WETHERSFIELD, Conn. (AP) -- State labor officials say about 43,000 Connecticut residents could lose emergency unemployment benefits at the end of December unless Congress continues the program.

An additional 50,000 people obtain benefits as part of the state benefits program and would not be able to collect beyond the 26 weeks provided by the program.

And those who are recently unemployed will be eligible to only collect 26 weeks of state unemployment insurance benefits if federal funding ends.

During the worst of the recession Connecticut provided up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.

A 20-week federal extended benefits program ended and the number of weeks available under the federal program was eliminated during the year.

The state Labor Department said Wednesday that Connecticut's unemployed who are collecting benefits should continue to put in claims.

Russia Passes US Adoption Ban

Russia Passes US Adoption Ban

MOSCOW - The upper house of the Russian parliament unanimously approved a ban on adoptions to the United States on Wednesday. All eyes are now on the Kremlin as the bill goes to President Putin for his signature.

The ban was added last week to a broader bill retaliating for human rights sanctions signed by President Obama earlier this month. Putin has expressed support for the broader bill, which reciprocates the sanctions, but dodged questions last week about the adoption ban.

At stake are the cases of 46 Russian children whose adoptions would be frozen if the bill becomes law, according to Russia's children's ombudsman Pavel Astakhav. He said those children would receive priority to be adopted by Russian families.

The proposed ban has split Russian society. Outside the parliament at least seven people were detained while protesting the bill, according to RIA Novosti. Human rights advocates have urged Russian authorities not to move forward with the ban, saying it denies Russian orphans a home with a family.

It has also caused a rare division among the Russian government.

Several top officials, including Russia's foreign minister and education minister have come out against the ban. A leaked memo from another top official suggested its passage would cause Russia to breach several international treaties, including a recently enacted adoption agreement between the United States and Russia.

Others, like Astakhav, have supported the measure, saying that Russian children should remain in Russia.

A recent poll by the Public Opinion Foundation found a majority of Russians supported the ban, while a quarter opposed it and another quarter expressed no opinion.

Russia is the third most popular place for Americans to adopt children. According to the State Department, over 45,000 Russian children have been adopted by American families since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Russian officials, however, have pointed to the cases of 19 Russian adopted children who have been killed in the United States as evidence of broader mistreatment of Russian children by their adopted parents. The adoption ban bill was named after Dima Yakovlev, who died in 2008 after his adoptive father left him in a car in a Washington, D.C., suburb. The bill also slaps sanctions on Americans accused of abusing Russian children and judges deemed to have provided them with lenient sentences.

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Storm that struck nation's midsection, killing 6, knocking out power

Storm that struck nation's midsection, killing 6, knocking out power,

A powerful winter storm system that pounded the nation's midsection, wrecking holiday travel plans and dumping a record snowfall in Arkansas, began lashing the Northeast on Wednesday with high winds, snow and sleet.

The storm, which knocked out power to thousands of homes, mainly in Arkansas, was blamed in at least six deaths.

Hundreds of flights were cancelled or delayed, scores of motorists got stuck on icy roads or slid into drifts and blizzard warnings were issued amid snowy gusts of 30 mph that blanketed roads and windshields, at times causing whiteout conditions.

"The way I've been describing it is as a low-end blizzard, but that's sort of like saying a small Tyrannosaurus rex," said John Kwiatkowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis.

The system, which spawned Gulf Coast region tornadoes on Christmas Day, pushed through the Upper Ohio Valley and headed into the Northeast Wednesday night. High winds, snow and sleet slickened roads in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Forecasts called for 12 to 18 inches of snow inland from western New York to Maine into Thursday.

The National Weather Service said Wednesday night that spotters had reported up to a foot of snow in some Pennsylvania counties. Forecasters predicted 10 to 12 inches of snow in western and central Massachusetts.

The system was expected to taper off into a mix of rain and snow closer to the coast, where little or no accumulation was expected in such cities as Philadelphia, Boston and New York.

The storm left freezing temperatures in its aftermath, and forecasters also said parts of the Southeast from Virginia to Florida would see severe thunderstorms.

Schools on break and workers taking holiday vacations meant that many people could avoid messy commutes, but those who had to travel were implored to avoid it. Snow was blamed for scores of vehicle accidents as far east as Maryland, and about two dozen counties in Indiana and Ohio issued snow emergency travel alerts, urging people to go out on the roads only if necessary.

About 40 vehicles got bogged down trying to make it up a slick hill in central Indiana, and four state snowplows slid off roads as snow fell at the rate of 3 inches an hour in some places.

Two passengers in a car on a sleet-slickened Arkansas highway were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision, and two people, including a 76-year-old Milwaukee woman, were killed Tuesday on Oklahoma highways. Deaths from wind-toppled trees were reported in Texas and Louisiana.

The day after Christmas wasn't expected to be particularly busy for AAA, but its Cincinnati-area branch had its busiest Wednesday of the year. By mid-afternoon, nearly 400 members had been helped with tows, jump starts and other aid, with calls still coming in, spokesman Mike Mills said.

Jennifer Miller was taking a bus Wednesday from Cincinnati to visit family in Columbus.

"I wish this had come yesterday and was gone today," she said, struggling with a rolling suitcase and three smaller bags on a slushy sidewalk near the station. "I'm glad I don't have to drive in this."

Traffic crawled at 25 mph on Interstate 81 in Maryland, where authorities reported scores of accidents.

"We're going to try to go down south and get below" the storm, said Richard Power, travelling from home in Levittown, N.Y., to Kentucky with his wife, two children and their beagle, Lucky.

He said they were well on their way until they hit snow in Pennsylvania, then 15-mph traffic on I-81 at Hagerstown, Md.

"We're going to go as far as we can go. ... If it doesn't get better, we're going to just get a hotel," he said.

More than 1,600 flights were cancelled, according to the aviation tracking website FlightAware.com, and some airlines said they would waive change fees. Lengthy delays were reported Wednesday at the three major New York City-area airports, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

In Arkansas, some of the nearly 200,000 people who lost power could be without it for as long as a week because of snapped poles and wires after ice and 10 inches of snow coated power lines, said the state's largest utility, Entergy Arkansas. Gov. Mike Beebe sent out National Guard teams, and Humvees transported medical workers and patients. Snow hadn't fallen in Little Rock on Christmas since 1926, but the capital ended Tuesday with 10.3 inches of it.

Other states also had scattered outages. Duke Energy said it had nearly 300 outages in Indiana, with few left in Ohio by early afternoon after scores were reported in the morning.

As the storm moved east, New England state highway departments were treating roads and getting ready to mobilize with snowfall forecasts of a foot or more.

"People are picking up salt and a lot of shovels today," said Andy Greenwood, an assistant manager at Aubuchon Hardware in Keene, N.H.

As usual, winter-sports enthusiasts welcomed the snow. At Smiling Hill Farm in Maine, Warren Knight was hoping for enough snow to allow the opening of trails.

"We watch the weather more carefully for cross-country skiing than we do for farming. And we're pretty diligent about farming. We're glued to the weather radio," said Knight, who described the weather at the 500-acre farm in Westbrook as being akin to the prizes in "Cracker Jacks — we don't know what we're going to get."

Behind the storm, Mississippi's governor declared states of emergency in eight counties with more than 25 people reported injured and 70 homes left damaged.

Cindy Williams stood near a home in McNeill, Miss., where its front had collapsed into a pile of wood and brick, a balcony and the porch ripped apart. Large oak trees were uprooted and winds sheared off treetops in a nearby grove. But she focused instead on the fact that all her family members had escaped harm.

"We are so thankful," she said. "God took care of us."

___

Associated Press writers Rick Callahan and Charles Wilson in Indianapolis, Kelly P. Kissel in Little Rock, Ark.; Jim Van Anglen in Mobile, Ala.; Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Miss.; Julie Carr Smyth and Mitch Stacy in Columbus, Ohio; Amanda Lee Myers in Cincinnati; David Dishneau in Hagerstown, Md.; Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H.; and David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.

___

Contact Dan Sewell at http://www.twitter.com/dansewell

Oil prices rise as 'fiscal cliff' talks to resume_0

Oil prices rise as 'fiscal cliff' talks to resume

BANGKOK (AP) -- The price of oil rose Wednesday after President Barack Obama indicated he would cut his Christmas holiday short and head to Washington to try to work out a deal to keep the U.S. from heading over the "fiscal cliff."

Benchmark oil for February delivery rose 49 cents at late afternoon Bangkok time to $89.10 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

On Monday, concerns over the stalemate in Washington drove benchmark oil prices lower, with the contract closing down 5 cents at $88.61 a barrel on the Nymex.

Obama was expected to arrive in Washington early Thursday, the White House said, after a brief vacation in Hawaii. Congress was also expected to return to the U.S. capital Thursday and begin budget negotiations.

Hopes that U.S. leaders might reach a budget deal helped buoy oil prices. Failure to agree on a plan before Jan. 1 would lead to spending cuts and tax hikes that economists predict will push the economy back into recession. Otherwise, the economy is expected to show slight improvement in 2013, a positive for energy consumption and prices.

In other energy futures trading:

— Brent crude, used to price international varieties of oil, rose 45 cents to $109.25 a barrel.

— Natural gas fell 3.5 cents to $3.311 per 1,000 cubic feet.

— Heating oil rose 1.5 cents to $3.0034 a gallon.

— Wholesale gasoline rose 0.8 cents to $2.7588 a gallon.

Oklahoma City house fire kills mother, 4 children

Oklahoma City house fire kills mother, 4 children

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A fire that ripped through a home in Oklahoma City before dawn Wednesday killed a woman and her four children and left one man in critical condition with serious burns, authorities said.

Firefighters who arrived about 6:30 a.m. found the bodies of Jeanine Bonnet, 28, and her children inside the two-story, wood-frame home, Fire Department Maj. Tammy McKinney said. They found Brian Poletto, 39, outside the burning house while a man who rented a room at the home, David Ruppert, managed to escape the flames.

Polletto was in critical condition at a local hospital later Wednesday with second- and third-degree burns to his back and arms, McKinney said.

"When we got on scene, we had reports that there were children inside," McKinney said. "The fire was so intense that we could not make entry and had to knock the fire down before we could make entry. That's when we found the bodies."

Police Sgt. Gary Knight identified the children as Kara Leon, 3; Matthew Zackary Leon, 5; Samantha Leon, 7; and Natalie Leon, 8.

Knight said there didn't appear to be anything suspicious about the fire, which he called a tragedy, although investigators were still trying to determine a cause.

"It's never a good time, but the day after Christmas, it's horrible" Knight said.

Ruppert, while picking through the remains of the burned home Wednesday afternoon, said he was awake when he was startled by two popping noises that he heard coming from outside the first-floor room he was renting, causing him to open the door to the inner area of the home.

"All I was saw was smoke. My eyes were immediately burning," Ruppert told The Associated Press.

"The kids didn't have a chance," Ruppert said. "If I hadn't been up (awake) already, I'd have been dead too."

Ruppert said the children typically stayed with their father, but were visiting their mother Tuesday for Christmas.

The bodies were sent to the medical examiner's office in Oklahoma City for autopsies, according to McKinney.

McKinney said the home didn't have working smoke detectors and was completely destroyed on the inside.

Three dogs were also killed in the blaze.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Miller in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.

Fit for Flight- Space Tourism Lacks Medical Standards_1

Fit for Flight? Space Tourism Lacks Medical Standards Related Content

Enlarge Photo

U.S. spaceflight participant Charles…

The rise of space tourism is going to bring a new headache to doctors' doors: whether or not to approve their patients for spaceflight. Worse, a new paper cautions, there is no established protocol in place to judge a person fit for making the trip.

The new study stops short of suggesting rigid regulation, saying that too much of it would hurt the space tourism industry before it even gets off the ground. Rather, the researchers encourage doctors to "consider developing a resource file for future reference."

Lead author Marlene Grenon said her team's recent paper in the British Medical Journal was designed to make doctors aware of potential health issues related to spaceflight. How to set medical standards, and the implications for insurance, are matters for further research, she said.

"The question is, should there be standards set or not?" said Grenon, an assistant professor of vascular surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. "If you start [restricting] the number of people who are going to fly to the healthiest people, you're not going to encourage the market to develop." [Photos: The First Space Tourists]

More data needed

Aerospace is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world. In the United States, pilots and crewmembers must pass strict medical exams authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The military has its own set of exams for Navy aviators and Air Force pilots.

Standards are even more stringent for NASA astronauts. Laser eye surgery is permitted when an astronaut is selected, but only if it was performed more than a year ago. The ability to cope in small spaces, under high stress, is extensively tested. Nutrition, exercise and mental health are constantly evaluated and recorded in the years of training before an astronaut launches.

Physicians have plenty of data about these super-healthy space travellers. But there's little advice available for more ordinary specimens — people with health issues such as osteoporosis, for example. Only a handful of space tourists, politicians and other non-specialized astronauts have journeyed into orbit.

Doctors aren't fumbling completely in the dark, though, as they already know many of the effects of weightlessness on the human body. Microgravity hardens arteries, affects eyeballs and weakens bones. Astronauts also can get motion sickness, accumulate large doses of potentially dangerous radiation and experience kidney stones.

Kidney stones are never pleasant, but they can be particularly problematic on orbit. In 1982, the Soviet Union planned to evacuate an astronaut with a severe case from its Salyut 7 space station but ultimately decided against it.

Setting a standard

If a potential space tourist were to pop in Grenon's office today and ask for medical approval, Grenon said her primary tool would be standards set by the company flying the astronaut.

This leaves medical procedures in the hands of Virgin Galactic and other private companies, meaning that physical exams are not necessarily subject to government regulation.

Doctors are working to fill the gap. In June, an FAA-sponsored medical group suggested guidelines for flight crew and spaceflight participants.

The 23-page document suggests pre-flight measures such as medical questionnaires, screening for certain mental health conditions, and chest X-rays and electrocardiograms.

The guidelines are not binding, and the FAA's center of excellence for commercial space transportation cautioned that it does not necessarily endorse the recommendations. But Grenon said this effort is the best one put forth so far.

Medical tests will matter even more during lengthier space missions, Grenon added. On the first flights, tourists will "only be in microgravity for a few minutes. But as we step more into space and we go into a space hotel, those [conditions] are all things that will need to be better understood."

Grenon's co-authors have affiliations with the Canadian Space Agency, Virgin Galactic and several Canadian and U.S. medical schools. One has even been to space — Millie Hughes-Fulford flew on the space shuttle's STS-40 mission in 1991. 

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

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Erratic Environment May Be Key to Human Evolution

Erratic Environment May Be Key to Human Evolution Related Content

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The first specimen of Paranthropus…

At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added.

Olduvai Gorge is a ravine cut into the eastern margin of the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania that holds fossils of hominins — members of the human lineage. Excavations at Olduvai Gorge by Louis and Mary Leakey in the mid-1950s helped to establish the African origin of humanity.

The Great Drying?

To learn more about the roots of humanity, scientists analyzed samples of leaf waxes preserved in lake sediments at Olduvai Gorge, identifying which plants dominated the local environment around 2 million years ago. This was about when Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of modern humans who used relatively advanced stone tools, appeared.

"We looked at leaf waxes, because they're tough, they survive well in the sediment," researcher Katherine Freeman, a biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement.

After four years of work, the researchers focused on carbon isotopes — atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons — in the samples, which can reveal what plants reigned over an area. The grasses that dominate savannasengage in a kind of photosynthesis that involves both normal carbon-12 and heavier carbon-13, while trees and shrubs rely on a kind of photosynthesis that prefers carbon-12. (Atoms of carbon-12 each possess six neutrons, while atoms of carbon-13 have seven.)

Scientists had long thought Africa went through a period of gradually increasing dryness — called the Great Drying — over 3 million years, or perhaps one big change in climate that favored the expansion of grasslands across the continent, influencing human evolution. However, the new research instead revealed "strong evidence for dramatic ecosystem changes across the African savanna, in which open grassland landscapes transitioned to closed forests over just hundreds to several thousands of years," researcher Clayton Magill, a biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, told LiveScience. [Know Your Roots? Take Our Human Evolution Quiz]

The researchers discovered that Olduvai Gorge abruptly and routinely fluctuated between dry grasslands and damp forests about five or six times during a period of 200,000 years.

"I was surprised by the magnitude of changes and the rapid pace of the changes we found," Freeman told LiveScience. "There was a complete restructuring of the ecosystem from grassland to forest and back again, at least based on how we interpret the data. I've worked on carbon isotopes my whole career, and I've never seen anything like this before."

Losing water

The investigators also constructed a highly detailed record of water history in Olduvai Gorge by analyzing hydrogen isotope ratios in plant waxes and other compounds in nearby lake sediments. These findings support the carbon isotope data, suggesting the region experienced fluctuations in aridity, with dry periods dominated by grasslands and wet periods characterized by expanses of woody cover.

"The research points to the importance of water in an arid landscape like Africa," Magill said in a statement. "The plants are so intimately tied to the water that if you have water shortages, they usually lead to food insecurity."

The research team's statistical and mathematical models link the changes they see with other events at the time, such as alterations in the planet's movement. [50 Amazing Facts About Earth]

"The orbit of the Earth around the sun slowly changes with time," Freeman said in statement. "These changes were tied to the local climate at Olduvai Gorge through changes in the monsoon system in Africa."

Earth's orbit around the sun can vary over time in a number of ways — for instance, Earth's orbit around the sun can grow more or less circular over time, and Earth's axis of spin relative to the sun's equatorial plane can also tilt back and forth. This alters the amount of sunlight Earth receives, energy that drives Earth's atmosphere. "Slight changes in the amount of sunshine changed the intensity of atmospheric circulation and the supply of water. The rain patterns that drive the plant patterns follow this monsoon circulation. We found a correlation between changes in the environment and planetary movement."

The team also found links between changes at Olduvai Gorge and sea-surface temperatures in the tropics.

"We find complementary forcing mechanisms — one is the way Earth orbits, and the other is variation in ocean temperatures surrounding Africa," Freeman said.

These findings now shed light on the environmental shifts the ancestors of modern humans might have had to adapt to in order to survive and thrive.

"Early humans went from having trees available to having only grasses available in just 10 to 100 generations, and their diets would have had to change in response," Magill said in a statement. "Changes in food availability, food type, or the way you get food can trigger evolutionary mechanisms to deal with those changes. The result can be increased brain size and cognition, changes in locomotion and even social changes — how you interact with others in a group."

This variability in the environment coincided with a key period in human evolution, "when the genus Homo was first established and when there was first evidence of tool use," Magill said.

The researchers now hope to examine changes at Olduvai Gorge not just across time but space, which could help shed light on aspects of early human evolution such as foraging patterns.

Magill, Freeman and their colleague Gail Ashley detailed their findings online Dec. 24 in two papers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

In Photos: Uncovering a New Human Species Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans Image Gallery: One-of-a-Kind Places on Earth Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.