Lance Armstrong Under Criminal Investigation

Federal investigators are in the midst of an active criminal investigation of disgraced former Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, ABC News has learned.

The revelation comes in stark contrast to statements made by the U.S. Attorney for Southern California, Andre Birotte, who addressed his own criminal inquiry of Armstrong for the first time publicly on Tuesday. Birotte's office spent nearly two years investigating Armstrong for crimes reportedly including drug distribution, fraud and conspiracy -- only to suddenly drop the case on the Friday before the Super Bowl last year.

Sources at the time said that agents had recommended an indictment and could not understand why the case was suddenly dropped.

Today, a high level source told ABC News, "Birotte does not speak for the federal government as a whole."

According to the source, who agreed to speak on the condition that his name and position were not used because of the sensitivity of the matter, "Agents are actively investigating Armstrong for obstruction, witness tampering and intimidation."

An email to an attorney for Armstrong was not immediately returned.

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AP Photo/Bas Czerwinski, File

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Earlier Tuesday, during a Department of Justice news conference on another matter, Birotte was confronted with the Armstrong question unexpectedly. The following is a transcript of that exchange:

Q: Mr. Birotte, given the confession of Lance Armstrong to all the things --

Birotte: (Off mic.)

Q: -- to all thethings that you, in the end, decided you couldn't bring a case about, can you give us your thoughts on that case now and whether you might take another look at it?

Birotte: We made a decision on that case, I believe, a little over a year ago. Obviously we've been well-aware of the statements that have been made by Mr. Armstrong and other media reports. That has not changed my view at this time. Obviously, we'll consider, we'll continue to look at the situation, but that hasn't changed our view as I stand here today.

The source said that Birotte is not in the loop on the current criminal inquiry, which is being run out of another office.

Armstrong confessed to lying and using performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career in an interview with Oprah Winfrey.

READ MORE: Armstrong Admits to Doping

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Investigators are not concerned with the drug use, but Armstrong's behavior in trying to maintain his secret by allegedly threatening and interfering with potential witnesses.

Armstrong is currently serving a lifetime ban in sport handed down by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. He has been given a Feb. 6 deadline to tell all under oath to investigators or lose his last chance at a possible break on the lifetime ban.

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Strengthening security at the nation’s airports

Most people think of airport security as their walk through the metal detector and the eyeballing by transportation security officers (TSOs). Dan Liddell, whose job it is to protect the flying public at seven airports in central New York, instead sees 17 zones of worker responsibility and hundreds of different tasks.

In pursuit of safeguarding the public, Liddell, a federal security director based in Syracuse, has written a book that is now used to train TSOs. It’s called the “National Standardization Guide to Improving Security Effectiveness.” Tasks at each duty area have been inventoried and cataloged, and the “knowledge, values and skills” associated with the airport security jobs have been identified under what Liddell describes as a systems approach to training.

As important as it is to use X-ray machines and explosive trace-detection equipment and to have the correct rules and procedures in place, Liddell said transportation security relies on the skills of the people responsible for it.

“People performance is the cornerstone,” he said. “When I set out to improve things, I look at the people. I look at their proficiency, their skill in doing something and how well they’re doing that job.”

Even when people have the skills to do their jobs, they don’t necessarily do them well each time, especially when conditions can vary with each day and every passenger. To keep performance high, TSOs are tested covertly at unexpected times. A banned item will be sent through a checkpoint and the reaction and activities that take place are monitored.

Whether or not TSOs spot contraband, everyone at that checkpoint during the test participates in an “after-action” review. “It’s the learning experience that’s relevant,” Liddell said. “We’re doing a review of actual performance and you can always improve.”

Liddell is sensitive to the pressure that airport security personnel face. TSOs have the tough of performing multiple tasks under constant camera surveillance and public scrutiny, often interacting with tired or irritated travelers. The testing and training helps them continually up their game.

Thirty airports around the country that helped test the training system and now use a version of it. Paul Armes, federal security director at Nashville International Airport, was interested in creating such a system with a colleague when they both worked in Arizona, but it “never got traction.”

When he learned about what Liddell was doing, he was eager to participate. “Typical of Dan, he built it himself and practiced it so he had hard metric results, and then he started reaching out to some of us, working with his counterparts around the country to get a good representative sample,” Armes said. “He sees things others don’t see sometimes and he has the capability to drill down into the details.”

Liddell began the “pretty long process” of analyzing how people were performing at checkpoints in 2009. He sat down with subject-matter experts to produce the task inventory he now uses. In 2010, he improved the review and reporting process that occurs after covert tests events and instituted the security practices he refined at the other New York airports he oversees, including Greater Binghamton, Ithaca and four others. “I love breaking it down,” he said. “I’ve got a quest for improvement.”

In a less sneaky version of the television show, “Undercover Boss,” Liddell went through the new-hire training program for his employees to understand as much as he could about the jobs and the training provided for them, he said.

If pursuing knowledge is in Liddell’s genes, it may be because his parents were both in education. His father was a high school principal and his mother was a fifth-grade teacher. His teaching manifested itself instead in the training realm, where he strives to educate security employees as effectively as possible, inside the classroom and out.

“It’s always a challenge to meet that right balance of really great effectiveness and really great efficiency,” he said. “There are always challenges. It’s what gets me up in the morning, trying to improve.”

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference.

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N. Korea video shows US city under attack

SEOUL: North Korea, poised to conduct a nuclear test any day now, has posted a video on YouTube depicting a US city resembling New York engulfed in flames after an apparent missile attack.

The footage was uploaded Saturday by the North's official website, Uriminzokkiri, which distributes news and propaganda from the state media.

The video is shot as a dream sequence, with a young man seeing himself on board a North Korean space shuttle launched into orbit by the same type of rocket Pyongyang successfully tested in December.

As the shuttle circles the globe -- to the tune of "We Are the World" -- the video zooms in on countries below, including a joyfully re-unified Korea.

In contrast, the focus then switches to a city -- shrouded in the US flag -- under apparent missile attack with its skyscrapers, including what appears to be the Empire State Building, either on fire or in ruins.

"Somewhere in the United States, black clouds of smoke are billowing," runs the caption across the screen.

"It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze with the fire started by itself," it added.

The video ends with the young man concluding that his dream will "surely come true".

"Despite all kinds of attempts by imperialists to isolate and crush us... never will anyone be able to stop the people marching toward a final victory," it said.

The North is expected to conduct its nuclear test as a defiant response to UN sanctions imposed after its December rocket launch.

-AFP/gn

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Dalai Lama's visit called off despite security clearance

ALLAHABAD: The much-anticipated visit of Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama to the ongoing Mahakumbh has been finally called off despite security clearance given by the Uttar Pradesh government for his two-day visit.

Senior Superintendent of Police Mohit Agrawal said, "We have received information that the Dalai Lama is pre-occupied till February 15 and, if at all, he chooses to visit the Maha Kumbh it would be only after that".

February 15 happens to be the date on which Basant Panchmi festival is falling this year when the last "shahi snan" of "naga" ascetics takes place.

Although officially the Kumbh will end on March 10, as per tradition most of the "akharas" of "sadhus" start packing up after Basant Panchmi itself with only some "kalpavasi" pilgrims staying back till Magh Poornima which falls on February 25.

Earlier, the Dalai Lama was scheduled to arrive at a "Lama Nagar" that has been built inside the camp of Vishwa Hindu Parishad at the Kumbh on February 4.But the visit was put off for want of security clearance in time.

However, the state government provided the clearance on February 3 and the Inspector General of Police, Allahabad zone, Alok Sharma, said the police would be able to make necessary security arrangements for his visit.

The organisers of his visit, the Mahabodhi Society of India, made a last-ditch effort to ensure his arrival at the Kumbh today but this could not materialise.

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Space Pictures This Week: A Space Monkey, Printing a Moon Base

Illustration courtesy Foster and Partners/ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced January 31 that it is looking into building a moon base (pictured in an artist's conception) using a technique called 3-D printing.

It probably won't be as easy as whipping out a printer, hooking it to a computer, and pressing "print," but using lunar soils as the basis for actual building blocks could be a possibility.

"Terrestrial 3-D printing technology has produced entire structures," said Laurent Pambaguian, head of the project for ESA, in a statement.

On Earth, 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, produces a three-dimensional object from a digital file. The computer takes cross-sectional slices of the structure to be printed and sends it to the 3-D printer. The printer bonds liquid or powder materials in the shape of each slice, gradually building up the structure. (Watch how future astronauts could print tools in space.)

The ESA and its industrial partners have already manufactured a 1.7 ton (1.5 tonne) honeycombed building block to demonstrate what future construction materials would look like.

—Jane J. Lee

Published February 4, 2013

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Sarai Sierra's 2 Young Boys Don't Know Mom's Dead

The two young sons of slain New York mom Sarai Sierra are under the impression that their father has gone to Turkey to bring their mother home - alive.

Sierra, whose battered body was found near a highway in Istanbul over the weekend, was the mother of two boys aged 9 and 11.

Steven Sierra, who went to Istanbul in search of his wife after she disappeared nearly two weeks ago, told his children that he was going to Turkey to bring their mom home.

"The father will be speaking to them and it's something that's going to be hard and he's going to be talking to them when he comes back," Betsy Jimenez, the mother of Sarai Sierra, said today during a family news conference.

State Representative Michael Grimm said Steven Sierra's biggest concern is telling his children that mom's not coming home.

"It's going to be the hardest thing he's ever going to have to do in his life," said Grimm, who added that the Staten Island family isn't sure when Steven Sierra will be able to bring home his wife's body.

An autopsy was completed Sunday on Sarai Sierra, 33, but results aren't expected for three months. Turkish officials however said she was killed by at least one fatal blow to her head.

A casket holding the Staten Island mother was carried through alleyways lined with spice and food stalls to a church, where the casket remained on Monday.

Turkish police hope DNA samples from 21 people being questioned in the case will be key to finding the perpetrators, the Associated Press reported, according to state run media.

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Earlier this week, it was also reported that Turkish police are speaking to a local man who was supposed to meet Sierra the day she disappeared, but he said she never showed.

After an intense search for Sierra that lasted nearly two weeks, her body was found Saturday near the ruins of some ancient city walls and a highway. Sierra was wearing the same outfit she was seen wearing on surveillance footage taken at a food court and on a street the day she vanished, Istanbul Police Chief Huseyin Capkin said.

Sierra's body was taken to a morgue, Capkin said, and was identified by her husband.

It did not appear she had been raped or was involved in any espionage or trafficking, Capkin said.

Betsy Jimenez said Monday that her family has many unanswered questions such as what happened to her daughter after she left her hotel room to go and take photographs of a famous bridge.

"They're still investigating so they might think it might be a robbery, but they're not sure," said Jimenez.

Sierra, who had traveled to Istanbul on Jan. 7 to practice her photography hobby, was last heard from on Jan. 21, the day she was due to board a flight home to New York City.

Dennis Jimenez, Sierra's father, told reporters Monday that he didn't want her to go on the trip.

"I didn't want her to go. But, she wanted to go because this was an opportunity for her to sightsee and pursue her photography hobby because Turkey was a land rich with culture and ancient history and she was fascinated with that," said Jimenez.

While in Istanbul, Sierra would Skype with her family and friends daily, telling them about how amazing the culture was.

Sierra's best friend Maggie Rodriguez told ABC News that she was forced to pull out of the trip at the last minute because she couldn't afford it. That's why Sierra traveled alone.

Her husband, Steven Sierra, and brother, David Jimenez, traveled to Istanbul last Sunday to meet with American and Turkish officials and push the search forward.

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Why immigration reform in 1986 fell short

When Ronald Reagan signed a comprehensive immigration overhaul in 1986, he confidently predicted: “Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people — American citizenship.”

More than a quarter-century later, however, that law has not turned out to be the triumph that Reagan envisioned. Instead, those on both sides of the immigration debate see it as a cautionary lesson.

As President Obama and lawmakers from both parties begin to take their first tentative steps toward again rewriting the nation’s immigration laws, opponents warn that they are repeating the mistakes of the 1986 act, which failed to solve the problems that it set out to address. Critics contend that the law actually contributed to making the situation worse.

An estimated 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants were living in the United States when the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed. Now there are upwards of 11 million. And the question of who gets to be an American, far from being settled, has been inflamed.

The latest proposals contain the same three components as the 1986 law: a legalization program — and a possible path to citizenship — for those who are in the country illegally, stepped-up enforcement along the border, and measures to discourage employers from hiring workers who lack proof of legal residency.

“This is the same old formula we’ve dealt with before, including when it passed in 1986, and that is a promise of enforcement and immediate amnesty,” Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) said last week
on the Laura Ingraham radio show. “And of course, the promises of enforcement never materialize. The amnesty happens immediately, the millisecond the bill is signed into law.”

But immigration experts note that the country has undergone big changes since then. And the experience of what went wrong after 1986 might help policymakers get it right this time.

“There’s just an entirely different mentality,” said Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Bill Clinton administration and who now directs immigration policy studies at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Technology affords new means of enforcing sanctions against hiring illegal immigrants, for instance, and Americans in the post-9/11 world may have lost some of their squeamishness about carrying tamper-proof government identification or submitting personal information to a national database. Meanwhile, businesses are eager to come up with a legal system of immigration that can more quickly adapt to their constantly changing labor needs.

Still, “the problem is always in the details, and that was certainly true in 1986. Once the debate got into the details, the compromises proved to be counterproductive,” said Susan F. Martin, director of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, who in the 1990s served as executive director of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.

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Sentimentality scoops Super Bowl ads

WASHINGTON: Unabashed sentimentality took the unofficial Super Bowl trophy for advertising brilliance on Sunday, with draft horses and pickup trucks both putting a lump in America's collective throat.

Budweiser's touching pocket narrative of an equine farmer reunited on the streets of Chicago with the Clydesdale he nurtured from birth for the beer's signature draft horse team was a run-away hit with viewers and critics alike.

New York ad agency Anomaly married the heartwarming imagery with singer Fleetwood Mac's sorrowful "Landslide" for the 60-second spot that went to invite a real-life newborn Budweiser foal via the brewer's Twitter account.

USA Today said the Budweiser ad took first place in its online reader-voted Ad Meter survey of Super Bowl commercials.

"Weepy, sentimental, nostalgic," wrote Kim Wheaton of Advertising Age in an instant analysis of the night's 50-plus commercials on the industry journal's website (www.adage.com).

"I don't care. This is everything I want from a Budweiser Super Bowl spot."

Viewers were still going onto Twitter to admit to shedding tears when Ram, the pickup division of Chrysler, weighed in a few minutes after Budweiser with a solemn ode to rural America created by Texas ad agency Richards Group.

It married spectacular photography of the Great Plains with late conservative broadcaster Paul Harvey's 1978 essay "So God Made a Farmer" -- and never revealed until the final few seconds that it was selling a truck.

"From the second it started to the last frame, I sat silent and mesmerised," tweeted Rick Liebling, an expert on the relationship between culture and creative advertising at New York ad agency Y&R.

Patriotism figured in another Chrysler spot, this time for Jeep, which celebrated the homecoming of American soldiers from Afghanistan.

The Super Bowl is the single most watched event on US television, easily pulling in more than 100 million viewers, and this year CBS was selling 30 seconds of ad time for as much as US$3.8 million.

But big-budget advertisers' best-laid plans to generate and sustain social media buzz got waylaid by the 34-minute partial blackout that hit the Superdome in New Orleans in the third quarter of the game.

That freak incident got people tweeting about the blackout instead of the ads, although Oreo made the most of the moment with an Instagram of its iconic cookie and the slogan: "You can still dunk in the dark."

While Pepsi indulged in the luxury of its spokeswoman Beyonce performing the half-time show, Coca-Cola invited viewers to go online and select the ending of its commercial, a Technicolor race through the desert for a bottle of Coke.

The winner climax -- the bus-driving showgirls in pink won out over the cowboys and the bikers -- was aired just minutes after the Baltimore Ravens' victory over the San Francisco 49s.

Many of Sunday's ads were released in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, including one from Volkswagen that some thought "racist" for depicting a cheerful Beetle-driving white office worker speaking in a Jamaican accent.

With Apple sitting out this year's game, the field was clear for Samsung, its arch rival in the smartphone market, to declare itself "the next big thing" with wise-cracking Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd plus a LeBron James cameo.

Fellow comedienne Amy Poehler managed to fit herself into a front-loading washing machine for electronics retailer Best Buy, while Israeli swimsuit model Bar Refaeli made out with a ruddy-faced geek named Walter for GoDaddy.com.

"That was disgusting," was one typical reaction on Twitter to the latter, but the website hosting service had nothing to complain about -- the backlash only helped get its #thekiss hashtag trending for a good part of the first quarter.

-AFP/fl

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Rain lashes Punjab, Haryana; minimum temperature goes up

CHANDIGARH: Light to moderate rains lashed most parts of Punjab and Haryana though minimum temperature rose sharply by up to eight notches above normal in both the states.

UT Chandigarh recorded a minimum of 13.7 degrees Celsius, up by seven notches above normal. The city also witnessed rainfall of 3.8 mm, the MeT office said here on Monday.

In Haryana, Ambala, Karnal and Narnaul settled at 14.2 degrees Celsius, 14 degrees Celsius and 8.8 degrees Celsius respectively, while Hisar had a low of 14.6 deg, up by 8 degrees above normal.

With rainfall of 4.6 mm, Bhiwani had a minimum of 10.4 degrees Celsius.

In Punjab, Amritsar recorded a minimum of 8 degrees Celsius with rainfall of 11.4 mm. Ludhiana and Patiala had a low of 13 degrees Celsius and 14.2 degrees Celsius, up by six and seven notches above normal respectively.

Among other places, rains also lashed Madhopur at 20.4 mm, Ranjit Sagar dam at 9.6 mm, Nangal at 11.2 mm and Shahpur Kandi area at 18.2 mm.

The MeT in its forecast said light to moderate rain may continue in next 48 hours, while hailstorm or thunderstorm may occur at isolated places in Punjab and Haryana.

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Pictures We Love: Best of January

Photograph by Dieu Nalio Chery, AP

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck near Port au Prince, Haiti, in January 2010 so devastated the country that recovery efforts are still ongoing.

Professional dancer Georges Exantus, one of the many casualties of that day, was trapped in his flattened apartment for three days, according to news reports. After friends dug him out, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. With the help of a prosthetic leg, Exantus is able to dance again. (Read about his comeback.)

Why We Love It

"This is an intimate photo, taken in the subject's most personal space as he lies asleep and vulnerable, perhaps unaware of the photographer. The dancer's prosthetic leg lies in the foreground as an unavoidable reminder of the hardships he faced in the 2010 earthquake. This image makes me want to hear more of Georges' story."—Ben Fitch, associate photo editor

"This image uses aesthetics and the beauty of suggestion to tell a story. We are not given all the details in the image, but it is enough to make us question and wonder."—Janna Dotschkal, associate photo editor

Published February 1, 2013

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