NAJIBAN, Afghanistan

More violence erupts at site of U.S. soldier’s shooting spree

A crowd of Afghan dignitaries – including two brothers of President Hamid Karzai – came under fire from suspected Taliban insurgents Tuesday as they visited the site of Sunday’s massacre of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier. One Afghan soldier was killed and two others wounded.

The attack by insurgents firing from long range showed that they can disrupt even the most well-guarded affairs.

Pentagon officials continued to remain tight-lipped about the suspect being held in Afghanistan in connection with the massacre – a 38-year-old Army staff sergeant who had served three tours in Iraq before being deployed to Afghanistan late last year. The identity of the sergeant – who reportedly walked off the base in the predawn hours and methodically shot the civilians, including nine children – was being withheld pending military charges that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said could carry the death penalty.

In Washington, President Barack Obama issued his strongest condemnation yet of the shooting spree and vowed that the Pentagon would conduct a thorough investigation. But he said the incident it wouldn’t force an acceleration of his administration’s plan to halt U.S. combat operations by the end of 2014 and transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

CHICAGO

Across much of U.S., warmth makes March feels like May

Unseasonably warm weather pushed throngs of people outside to play Tuesday from the Plains to New England, where March is feeling more like May. Temperatures ranged from the high 60s to low 80s, smashing dozens of record highs.

Boaters were cruising along the river in downtown Chicago amid one of Illinois’ warmest winters on record. Golfers were smacking balls at a central Minnesota course that opened weeks earlier than last year.

And an ice-breaking mission on Maine’s Kennebec River on Tuesday was the shortest in recent memory – because the Coast Guard found no ice.

Gino Izzi, a senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Chicago office, said the weather pattern is a random but normal fluctuation. A jet stream moving north to south on the West Coast is pushing an opposite, seesaw effect in the rest of the nation. Atmospheric patterns, including the Pacific phenomenon known as La Nina, have kept cold air bottled up over Canada and contributed to the unusually warm winter in parts of the lower 48 states accustomed to more snow.

 

Encyclopaedia Britannica closing book on print edition

Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said Tuesday that it will stop publishing print editions of its flagship encyclopedia for the first time since the sets were originally published more than 200 years ago.

The book-form of Encyclopaedia Britannica has been in print since it was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768. It will stop being available when the current stock runs out, the company said. The company will continue to offer digital versions of the encyclopedia.

Officials said the end of the printed, 32-volume set has been foreseen for some time.

“This has nothing to do with Wikipedia or Google,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. President Jorge Cauz said. “This has to do with the fact that now Britannica sells its digital products to a large number of people.”

The top year for the printed encyclopedia was 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold, Cauz said. That number fell to 40,000 just six years later in 1996, he said. The company started exploring digital publishing the 1970s. The first CD-ROM version was published in 1989 and a version went online in 1994.

The final hardcover encyclopedia set is available for sale at Britannica’s website for $1,395.

 

NEW ORLEANS

Implanted housecat gives birth to endangered species

Several endangered black-footed cats have been born recently in the U.S. and researchers say Crystal’s birth is the rarest – the first born from an embryo fertilized in a lab dish, frozen, and later implanted in a housecat’s womb.

The black-footed cat is Africa’s smallest wildcat and one of the world’s smallest felines – smaller even than a domestic cat.

Earle Pope, interim director of the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species, says Crystal was born Feb. 6 at the New Orleans complex. He says Crystal is proof that embryos of this dwindling species can be successfully implanted into domestic cats.

Only an estimated 10,000 of these cats, which get their name from their distinctive black foot pads, still live in the wild in southern Africa.

 

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