Gunman 'Tentatively' Identified in Oregon Shooting













A masked gunman who opened fire in the crowded Clackamas Town Center mall in suburban Portland, Ore., killing two individuals before killing himself, has been "tentatively" identified by police, though they have not yet released his name.


The shooter, wearing a white hockey mask, black clothing, and a bullet proof vest, tore through the mall around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, entering through a Macy's store and proceeding to the food court and public areas spraying bullets, according to witness reports.


Police have not released the names of the deceased. Clackamas County Sheriff's Department Lt. James Rhodes said authorities are in the process of notifying victims' families.


The injured victim has been transported to a local hospital, where she is "fighting for her life," according to Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts.


PHOTOS: Oregon Mall Shooting


Nadia Telguz, who said she was a friend of the injured victim, told ABC News affiliate KATU-TV in Portland that the woman was expected to recover.


"My friend's sister got shot," Teleguz told KATU. "She's on her way to (Oregon Health and Science University hospital). They're saying she got shot in her side and so it's not life-threatening, so she'll be OK."






Christopher Onstott/Pamplen Media Group/Portland Tribune













911 Calls From New Jersey Supermarket Shooting Watch Video







Witnesses from the shooting rampage said that a young man who appeared to be a teenager ran through the upper level of Macy's to the mall food court, firing multiple shots, one right after the other, with what is believed to be a black, semi-automatic rifle.


More than 10,000 shoppers were at the mall during the day, police said. Roberts said that officers responded to the scene of the shooting within minutes, and four SWAT teams swept the 1.4 million-square-foot building searching for the shooter. He was eventually found dead, an apparent suicide.


"I can confirm the shooter is dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," Rhodes said. "By all accounts there were no rounds fired by law enforcement today in the mall."


Roberts said more than 100 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting, and at least four local agencies were working on the investigation, including the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is working to trace the shooter's weapon.


READ: Guns in America: A Statistical Look


Roberts also said that shoppers, including two emergency room nurses and one physician who happened to be at the mall, provided medical assistance to victims who had been shot. Other shoppers helped escort individuals out of the mall and out of harm's way, he said.


"There were a huge amount of people running in different directions, and it was chaos for a lot of citizens, but true heroes were stepping up in this time of high stress," Roberts said. "E.R. nurses on the scene were providing medical care to those injured, a physician on the scene was helping provide care to the wounded."


Mall shopper Daniel Martinez told KATU that he had just sat down at a Jamba Juice inside the mall when he heard rapid gunfire. He turned and saw the masked gunman, dressed in all black, about 10 feet away from him.


"I just saw him (the gunman) and thought, 'I need to go somewhere,'" Martinez said. "It was so fast, and at that time, everyone was moving around."


Martinez said he ran to the nearest clothing store. As he ran, he motioned for another woman to follow; several others ran to the store as well, hiding in a fitting room. They stayed there for an hour and a half until SWAT teams told them it was safe to leave the mall.






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Family & friends key to resilient marriages: survey






SINGAPORE: Family, friends and religious advisors are often the primary informal sources of help for couples facing marital issues, according to a study commissioned by Marriage Central which aims to identify resilience factors that can mitigate marriage crises.

Children are an important reason for couples to continue their relationship.

Those who have prior positive interactions with counsellors, such as in marriage preparation programmes, also stand a better chance at overcoming crisis.

The study conducted from February to May involved over 500 married individuals.

Marriage Central said all of those surveyed had remained in their marriages, even though nearly half of the respondents had at some point considered divorce.

The study revealed that some of the common stresses to a marriage in Singapore include infidelity and interference by in-laws.

Principal investigator Dr Mathew Mathews, a research fellow from the Institute of Policy Studies, said: "It shows that there are different agents which are acting in that process - family, the community, broader messages around and notions of commitment are all there, and I think these things help to keep couples wanting to walk through their relationship rather than giving up."

Marriage Central - a workgroup under the National Family Council - said the findings indicate that there is hope for troubled marriages in Singapore.

The workgroup intends to share the findings with voluntary welfare organisations and other stakeholders so that they may develop more resources and programmes for building resilient marriages in Singapore.

- CNA/ck



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Wal-Mart row in Parliament: Opposition stalls both Houses

NEW DELHI: The Wal-Mart lobbying row resonated once again in the Parliament on Tuesday leading to adjournment of both the Houses.

The opposition, led by the BJP, insisted on suspension of Question Hour to discuss the lobbying issue.

In the Rajya Sabha, BJP members were up on their feet soon after Chairman Hamid Ansari made an obituary reference to former member G Swaminathan.

Within minutes, BJP members raised the issue of reported lobbying by Wal-Mart and SP members were objecting to the proposed move to provide reservations to SC/ST in promotion in government jobs.

When repeated efforts failed, Ansari said a situation has arisen where "the chair has to watch helplessly" frequent disruption of Question Hour.

He said he proposed to call meeting of the rules committee and suggest shifting the Question Hour or dispense with it all together.

Ansari then adjourned the House for 30 minutes.

When the Rajya Sabha reconvened, BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu insisted on immediate discussion.

In the Lok Sabha, as soon as Speaker Meira Kumar took up the Question Hour, members of BSP, Left parties and Trinamool Congress trooped into the Well raising slogans demanding inquiry into reports of lobbying by Wal-Mart and status of probe in the coal block allocation.

BJP members were on their feet demanding that the Speaker suspend Question Hour and ask the government to reply on the lobbying issue.

BSP members were in the Well raising slogans claiming that the government was trying to brush under the carpet the alleged scam in allocation of coal block.

The uproar continued even as the Speaker made repeated appeals for allowing the Question Hour to continue. Her assurances of allowing members to raise the issues during Question Hour also failed to cut any ice with the agitating members.

As the din continued, the Speaker adjourned the House till noon.

The BJP said that it had given a notice for the suspension of Question Hour given the seriousness of the issue. Stepping up the attack, the party has demanded an independent probe into the lobbying issue.

We have decided to raise the issue with greater seriousness. It is important to know who got the money, BJP leader Ravishankar Prasad said.

He said the government's response that lobbying was done in the US does not hold ground as the money was used in India.

The government, meanwhile, rejected the opposition charges.

Information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari slammed the BJP for stalling the Parliament.

(With inputs from PTI)

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U.K. Dash for Shale Gas a Test for Global Fracking

Thomas K. Grose in London


The starting gun has sounded for the United Kingdom's "dash for gas," as the media here have dubbed it.

As early as this week, a moratorium on shale gas production is expected to be lifted. And plans to streamline and speed the regulatory process through a new Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil were unveiled last week in the annual autumn budget statement by the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne.

In the U.K., where all underground mineral rights concerning fossil fuels belong to the crown, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could unlock a new stream of government revenue as well as fuel. But it also means that there is no natural constituency of fracking supporters as there is in the United States, birthplace of the technology. In the U.S., concerns over land and water impact have held back fracking in some places, like New York, but production has advanced rapidly in shale basins from Texas to Pennsylvania, with support of private landowners who earn royalties from leasing to gas companies. (Related: "Natural Gas Stirs Hope and Fear in Pennsylvania")

A taste of the fight ahead in the U.K. came ahead of Osborne's speech last weekend, when several hundred protesters gathered outside of Parliament with a mock 23-foot (7-meter) drilling rig. In a letter they delivered to Prime Minister David Cameron, they called fracking "an unpredictable, unregulatable process" that was potentially toxic to the environment.

Giving shale gas a green light "would be a costly mistake," said Andy Atkins, executive director of the U.K.'s Friends of the Earth, in a statement. "People up and down the U.K. will be rightly alarmed about being guinea pigs in Osborne's fracking experiment. It's unnecessary, unwanted and unsafe."

The government has countered that natural gas-fired power plants would produce half the carbon dioxide emissions of the coal plants that still provide about 30 percent of the U.K.'s electricity. London Mayor Boris Johnson, viewed as a potential future prime minister, weighed in Monday with a blistering cry for Britain to "get fracking" to boost cleaner, cheaper energy and jobs. "In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news," he wrote in the Daily Telegraph. (Related Quiz: "What You Don't Know About Natural Gas")

Energy Secretary Edward Davey, who is expected this week to lift the U.K.'s year-and-a-half-old moratorium on shale gas exploration, said gas "will ensure we can keep the lights on as increasing amounts of wind and nuclear come online through the 2020s."

A Big Role for Gas

If the fracking plan advances, it will not be the first "dash for gas" in the U.K. In the 1980s, while Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher battled with mining unions, she undercut their clout by moving the nation toward generating a greater share of its electricity from natural gas and less from coal. So natural gas already is the largest electricity fuel in Britain, providing 40 percent of electricity. (Related Interactive: "World Electricity Mix")

The United Kingdom gets about 10 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, and has plans to expand its role. But Davey has stressed the usefulness of gas-fired plants long-term as a flexible backup source to the intermittent electricity generated from wind and solar power. Johnson, on the other hand, offered an acerbic critique of renewables, including the "satanic white mills" he said were popping up on Britain's landscape. "Wave power, solar power, biomass—their collective oomph wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding," he wrote.

As recently as 2000, Great Britain was self-sufficient in natural gas because of conventional gas production in the North Sea. But that source is quickly drying up. North Sea production peaked in 2000 at 1,260 terawatt-hours (TWH); last year it totaled just 526 TWh.

Because of the North Sea, the U.K. is still one of the world's top 20 producers of gas, accounting for 1.5 percent of total global production. But Britain has been a net importer of gas since 2004. Last year, gas imports—mainly from Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands—accounted for more than 40 percent of domestic demand.

The government hopes to revive domestic natural gas production with the technology that has transformed the energy picture in the United States—horizontal drilling into deep underground shale, and high-pressure injection of water, sand, and chemicals to create fissures in the rock to release the gas. (Related Interactive: "Breaking Fuel From the Rock")

A Tougher Road

But for a number of reasons, the political landscape is far different in the United Kingdom. Britain made a foray into shale gas early last year, with a will drilled near Blackpool in northwest England. The operator, Cuadrilla, said that that area alone could contain 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, which is more than the known reserves of Iraq. But the project was halted after drilling, by the company's own admission, caused two small earthquakes. (Related: "Tracing Links Between Fracking and Earthquakes" and "Report Links Energy Activities To Higher Quake Risk") The April 2011 incident triggered the moratorium that government now appears to be ready to lift. Cuadrilla has argued that modifications to its procedures would mitigate the seismic risk, including lower injection rates and lesser fluid and sand volumes. The company said it will abandon the U.K. unless the moratorium is soon lifted.

A few days ahead of Osborne's speech, the Independent newspaper reported that maps created for Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) showed that 32,000 square miles, or 64 percent of the U.K. countryside, could hold shale gas reserves and thus be open for exploration. But a DECC spokeswoman said "things are not quite what it [the Independent story] suggests." Theoretically, she said, those gas deposits do exist, but "it is too soon to predict the scale of exploration here." She said many other issues, ranging from local planning permission to environmental impact, would mean that some tracts would be off limits, no matter how much reserve they held. DECC has commissioned the British Geological Survey to map the extent of Britain's reserves.

Professor Paul Stevens, a fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said the U.K. is clearly interested in trying to replicate America's shale gas revolution. "That's an important part of the story," he said, but trying to use the American playbook won't be easy. "It's a totally different ballgame." In addition to the fact that mineral rights belong to the crown, large expanses of private land that are commonplace in America don't exist in England. Just as important, there is no oil- and gas-service industry in place in Britain to quickly begin shale gas operations here. "We don't have the infrastructure set up," said Richard Davies, director of the Durham Energy Institute at Durham University, adding that it would take years to build it.

Shale gas production would also likely ignite bigger and louder protests in the U.K. and Europe. "It's much more of a big deal in Europe," Stevens said. "There are more green [nongovernmental organizations] opposed to it, and a lot more local opposition."

In any case, the U.K. government plans to move ahead. Osborne said he'll soon begin consultations on possible tax breaks for the shale gas industry. He also announced that Britain would build up to 30 new natural gas-fired power plants with 26 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. The new gas plants would largely replace decommissioned coal and nuclear power plants, though they would ultimately add 5GW of additional power to the U.K. grid. The coalition government's plan, however, leaves open the possibility of increasing the amount of gas-generated electricity to 37GW, or around half of total U.K. demand.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that Europe may have as much as 600 trillion cubic feet of shale gas that could be recovered. But Stevens said no European country is ready to emulate the United States in producing massive amounts of unconventional gas. They all lack the necessary service industry, he said, and geological differences will require different technologies. And governments aren't funding the research and development needed to develop them.

Globally, the track record for efforts to produce shale gas is mixed:

  • In France, the EIA's estimate is that shale gas reserves total 5 trillion cubic meters, or enough to fuel the country for 90 years. But in September, President Francois Hollande pledged to continue a ban on fracking imposed last year by his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
  • Poland was also thought to have rich shale gas resources, but initial explorations have determined that original estimates of the country's reserves were overstated by 80 percent to 90 percent. After drilling two exploratory wells there, Exxon Mobil stopped operations. But because of its dependence on Russian gas, Poland is still keen to begin shale gas production.
  • South Africa removed a ban on fracking earlier this year. Developers are eyeing large shale gas reserves believed to underlie the semidesert Karoo between Johannesburg and Cape Town.
  • Canada's Quebec Province has had a moratorium on shale gas exploration and production, but a U.S. drilling company last month filed a notice of intent to sue to overturn the ban as a violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
  • Germany's Environment Ministry has backed a call to ban fracking near drinking water reservoirs.
  • China drilled its initial shale gas wells this year; by 2020, the nation's goal is for shale gas to provide 6 percent of its massive energy needs. The U.S. government's preliminary assessment is that China has the world's largest "technically recoverable" shale resources, about 50 percent larger than stores in the United States. (Related: "China Drills Into Shale Gas, Targeting Huge Reserves")

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.


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Woman Gets Life for Lottery Winner's Murder













DeeDee Moore, the Tampa woman accused of swindling and then killing lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare, was found guilty today of first degree murder and other charges, after she declined to take the stand and the defense rested without calling a single witness.


In addition to the murder charge, Moore was also found guilty of possessing and discharging a firearm resulting in death. Prosecutors did not pursue the death penalty in the case, and Moore was sentenced to life in prison without parole.


"After trial and listening to all of this over two weeks, words that were said cool, calculated, manipulated. Abraham Shakespeare was your prey and victim. Money was the route of evil you brought to Abraham. You are sentenced to life in prison you shall not be elegible for parole," Judge Emmet Battles said.


Jurors deliberated for more than three hours Monday before delivering their verdict.


Prosecutors argued that Moore, 40, befriended Shakespeare before he vanished in April 2009 after he'd won $30 million in the Florida lottery. After Shakespeare had given away most of his money to people who simply asked for it, Moore agreed to manage the little he had left, but instead, prosecutors said, stole his winnings and killed him.


During a dramatic trial Moore has broken down in tears several times, and at one point said that she went into anaphylactic shock while in custody after taking the drug Bactrim when she was having problems with cuts on her ankles from being cuffed every day.


Early today the defense announced it would rest its case without calling any witnesses. Moore did not testify during her trial.






Jay Conner/The Tampa Tribune/AP Photo











Florida Lotto Murder Trial: Bizarre Moments Watch Video









Florida Lottery Murder Trial: Letters to Victim's Family Watch Video









Dee Dee Moore Trial: Woman Accused of Murdering Lottery Winner Watch Video





"There is no witness that can say she ever admitted to doing the killing or participating as a principle in helping anyone else do the killing," Moore's defense attorney Byron Hileman said today.


In the courtroom this morning, Moore's friend, former inmate Rose Condora was accused of threatening witnesses by Tampa Judge Emmett Battles, and was thrown out of the courtroom.


Authorities say Shakespeare, 47, was shot twice in the chest by a .38-caliber pistol sometime in April 2009. He wasn't reported missing until November 2009. His body was found under a slab of cement in a backyard in January 2010.


Polk County authorities claim Moore offered someone a $200,000 house in exchange for reporting a false sighting of Shakespeare. She also allegedly sent the victim's son $5,000 in cash for his birthday, and used the victim's cellphone to send text messages purportedly from him.


Shakespeare's mother, Elizabeth Walker, also testified that Moore tried to hide that her son was missing, and said that he had AIDS.


Sentorria Butler, Shakespeare's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child, also testified. Butler told the court last week that Moore is a divisive and manipulative woman who told her Shakespeare "ran off with the lady from the bank."


During the trial, jurors also watched a Walmart surveillance video that the prosecution said links Moore to Shakespeare's killing. The footage shows Moore making a $104 cash purchase of gloves, duct tape, plastic sheeting and other items detectives later found close to where Shakespeare's body was buried.


Jurors hearing the case also heard a rambling two-page letter that witness Greg Smith, a police informant who was a former friend of Shakespeare and supposed friend of Moore, says Moore allegedly forged while at a Comfort Inn & Suites in Lakeland, Fla.


The letter was meant to appear to be from Shakespeare, prosecutors said. They say the letter was a ruse to convince Shakespeare's mother that he was still alive. Moore attempted to cover her tracks while it was written, according to prosecutors.


During the trial, jurors had to be accompanied by a security escort into the courtroom after they told the judge Smith and Shakespeare's family and friends were making them feel uncomfortable outside the courthouse. None of the jurors had to be excused by the judge.


The Associated Press contributed to this report.



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The right to petition the White House prompts grievances, gags online



Several thousand Americans, for example, are calling on President Obama to nationalize the troubled Twinkies industry to prevent the loss of the snack cake’s “sweet creamy center.”

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Xi's Shenzhen visit a sign of reform: Chinese media






BEIJING: China's new Communist Party chief Xi Jinping has signalled his commitment to push for economic reforms by visiting the city of Shenzhen, the historic hub of modernisation, state media said Monday.

Xi's trip, his first official one as ruling party leader, echoed a visit by then-leader Deng Xiaoping to the southern boomtown in 1992 to revive reforms.

Deng had launched China's economic modernisation more than three decades ago under the slogan "Reform and Opening".

According to analysts the pace of restructuring has slowed in the last decade under outgoing leader Hu Jintao, but Xi's choice of destination sent a clear signal.

"The party Central Committee's decision to undertake Reform and Opening was correct," Xi said, according to the Nanjing Daily.

"We will continue down this path, unswervingly continue down the path of enriching the country and the people, and will break new ground."

Authorities stressed their commitment to reform during the once-a-decade party leadership handover last month that put Xi in the top spot.

They face growing calls to realign the economy to ensure long-term growth, by reducing reliance on investment and exports and boosting domestic consumption.

Growth slowed to a three-year low of 7.4 per cent in the third quarter of this year, hit by the global economic slowdown. Leaders have warned that the past years of dramatic double-digit growth are unlikely to return.

"It is high time the Party stepped up reform and opening up," the Global Times quoted Huang Weiping, director of the Contemporary Chinese Politics Research Institute at Shenzhen University, as saying.

"And Xi chose to visit Shenzhen now because he is aware that China has just experienced a major crisis, and crisis always drives further reforms."

Xi is due to take over as national president in March.

Shenzhen served as an early "special economic zone" in the 1980s, a laboratory of sorts as the communist country began to seek foreign investment.

The experiment transformed it from a small village bordering Hong Kong to a bustling modern city and helped initiate years of roaring growth for the country.

During his trip late last week Xi visited a fishing village and an industrial park which is home to the IT giant Tencent Technology, the China Daily reported. He also laid flowers at a statue of Deng in a park.

- AFP/ck



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India misguided, paranoid over China: Guha

Shreya Roy Chowdhury, TNN Dec 8, 2012, 06.12AM IST

MUMBAI: A good half-hour into the discussion on 'India, China and the World', historian Ramachandra Guha issued a disclaimer—all the three members on the panel had been to China only once. "We should learn their language, promote quality research, and have a panel on China driven by Chinese scholars," he said. And that was the general tenor of the debate—that the Indian attitude to China was influenced by a mix of ignorance, cautious optimism about partnerships and a whole lot of misguided paranoia. "Don't demonise the Chinese, please," Guha finally said in response to a question.

"China has existed in our imaginations," observed Sunil Khilnani, professor of politics and author of The Idea Of India. "There's been very little sustained engagement with the reality of China and very little of our own produced knowledge about China." It was after the events of 1962 ('war' in the popular imagination, 'skirmish' to the scholars participating in the discussion), explained Khilnani, that a miffed India "withdrew". It's the 50th anniversary of that exchange this year, and "what we haven't been able to do is learn from the defeat", observed Khilnani. Both could have benefited from greater engagement. "China has had a very clear focus on primary education and achieved high levels of literacy before its economic rise. It has also addressed the issue of land reform," said Khilnani. Guha added that China could learn from the "religious, cultural and linguistic pluralism" in India.

But China and India weren't always so out of sync with each other. Srinath Raghavan, a scholar of military history, got both Guha and Khilnani to talk about pre-1962 relations between the two when the picture was rosier. Tagore was interested in China and so was Gandhi. Both were very large countries with large populations and shared what Guha calls a "lack of cultural inferiority". "They were both," he continued, "also heavily dependent on peasant communities." Nehru was appreciative of China's will to modernize and industrialize and its adoption of technology to achieve those ends. In turn, Chinese politicians argued for Indian independence.

Things soured more, feel both Khilnani and Guha, after the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959. "He was welcomed here as a spiritual leader but the intensification of the conflict dates to the Dalai Lama's flight," said Guha. Both Guha and Khilnani argued that Nehru's decision to not react aggressively to China's occupation of Tibet was, in the long run, the right one and prevented further "militarization" of the region. An audience member wondered if that didn't make India "China's puppet". Guha disagreed. "If there's a Tibetan culture alive today," he said, "it's not because of Richard Gere. Don't believe in the hypocrisy of the Western countries. Will they give them land, employment, dignified refuge? The Tibetans is one of the few cases in which our record is honorable."

But the difference in levels of development and the lopsided trade relations between the two countries have only fuelled the suspicions many Indians seem to harbour about China. People were worried, said Guha, even about cricket balls made in China. Audience questions reflected those worries. A member asked about China's "strategy to conquer the world" and its likely impact on India. Guha cautioned against stereotypes; Khilnani explained, "History is littered with the debris of states that have tried to dominate the world. What we're doing may be more long-lasting."

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Plants Grow Fine Without Gravity


When researchers sent plants to the International Space Station in 2010, the flora wasn't meant to be decorative. Instead, the seeds of these small, white flowers—called Arabidopsis thaliana—were the subject of an experiment to study how plant roots developed in a weightless environment.

Gravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn't need it to flourish. The research team from the University of Florida in Gainesville thinks this ability is related to a plant's inherent ability to orient itself as it grows. Seeds germinated on the International Space Station sprouted roots that behaved like they would on Earth—growing away from the seed to seek nutrients and water in exactly the same pattern observed with gravity. (Related: "Beyond Gravity.")

Since the flowers were orbiting some 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the Earth at the time, the NASA-funded experiment suggests that plants still retain an earthy instinct when they don't have gravity as a guide.

"The role of gravity in plant growth and development in terrestrial environments is well understood," said plant geneticist and study co-author Anna-Lisa Paul, with the University of Florida in Gainesville. "What is less well understood is how plants respond when you remove gravity." (See a video about plant growth.)

The new study revealed that "features of plant growth we thought were a result of gravity acting on plant cells and organs do not actually require gravity," she added.

Paul and her collaborator Robert Ferl, a plant biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, monitored their plants from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using images sent from the space station every six hours.

Root Growth

Grown on a nutrient-rich gel in clear petri plates, the space flowers showed familiar root growth patterns such as "skewing," where roots slant progressively as they branch out.

"When we saw the first pictures come back from orbit and saw that we had most of the skewing phenomenon we were quite surprised," Paul said.

Researchers have always thought that skewing was the result of gravity's effects on how the root tip interacts with the surfaces it encounters as it grows, she added. But Paul and Ferl suspect that in the absence of gravity, other cues take over that enable the plant to direct its roots away from the seed and light-seeking shoot. Those cues could include moisture, nutrients, and light avoidance.

"Bottom line is that although plants 'know' that they are in a novel environment, they ultimately do just fine," Paul said.

The finding further boosts the prospect of cultivating food plants in space and, eventually, on other planets.

"There's really no impediment to growing plants in microgravity, such as on a long-term mission to Mars, or in reduced-gravity environments such as in specialized greenhouses on Mars or the moon," Paul said. (Related: "Alien Trees Would Bloom Black on Worlds With Double Stars.")

The study findings appear in the latest issue of the journal BMC Plant Biology.


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Fiscal Cliff Talks: Boehner, Obama Meet Face-to-Face













For the first time in more than three weeks, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner met face-to-face today at the White House to talk about avoiding the fiscal cliff.


White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest would offer no details saying only, "The lines of communication remain open."


Erskine Bowles, the co-creator of a debt reducing plan, who was pessimistic a couple weeks ago, said he likes what he's hearing.


"Any time you have two guys in there tangoing, you have a chance to get it done," Bowles said on CBS's "Face the Nation."


The White House afternoon talks, conducted without cameras or any announcement until they were over, came as some Republicans were showing more flexibility about approving higher tax rates for the wealthy, one of the president's demands to keep the country from the so-called fiscal cliff -- a mixture of across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts that many economists say would send the country back into recession.






Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo; Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo















Fiscal Cliff Battle: President Obama vs. Speaker John Boehner Watch Video





"Let's face it. He does have the upper hand on taxes. You have to pass something to keep it from happening," Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said on "FOX News Sunday."


This comes after the White House moderated one of its demands about tax rate increases for the wealthy.


The administration was demanding the rate return to its former level of 39.6 percent on income above $250,000. The so-called Bush tax cut set that rate at 35 percent. But Friday, Vice President Joe Biden signaled that rate could be negotiable, somewhere between the two.


"So will I accept a tax increase as a part of a deal to actually solve our problems? Yes," said Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn on ABC's "This Week."


The problems the senator was referring to are the country's entitlement programs. And there was some progress on that front, too.


A leading Democrat said means testing for Medicare recipients could be a way to cut costs to the government health insurance program. Those who make more money would be required to pay more for Medicare.


"I do believe there should be means testing, and those of us with higher income and retirement should pay more. That could be part of the solution," Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said on NBC's "Meet the Press."


But Durbin said he would not favor raising the eligibility age from 65 years old to 67 years old, as many Republicans have suggested.


The White House and the speaker's office released the exact same statement about the negotiating session. Some will see that as a sign of progress, that neither side is talking about what was said behind closed doors.



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