Putin mocks West but ratchets down tensions over Ukraine; Kerry in Kiev
MOSCOW (AP) — Stepping back from the brink of war, Vladimir Putin talked tough but cooled tensions in the Ukraine crisis Tuesday, saying Russia has no intention "to fight the Ukrainian people" but reserves the right to use force.
As the Russian president held court in his personal residence, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Kiev's fledgling government and urged Putin to stand down.
"It is not appropriate to invade a country, and at the end of a barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve," Kerry said. "That is not 21st-century, G-8, major nation behavior."
Although nerves remained on edge in the Crimean Peninsula, with Russian troops firing warning shots to ward off Ukrainian soldiers, global markets jumped higher on tentative signals that the Kremlin was not seeking to escalate the conflict. Kerry brought moral support and a $1 billion aid package to a Ukraine fighting to fend off bankruptcy.
Lounging in an arm-chair before Russian tricolor flags, Putin made his first public comments since the Ukrainian president fled a week and a half ago. It was a signature Putin performance, filled with earthy language, macho swagger and sarcastic jibes, accusing the West of promoting an "unconstitutional coup" in Ukraine. At one point he compared the U.S. role to an experiment with "lab rats."
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Analysts: Russian forces unlikely to pull back forces in Crimea despite US, European threats
WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia is unlikely to pull back its military forces in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, analysts and former Obama administration officials say, forcing the United States and Europe into a more limited strategy of trying to prevent President Vladimir Putin from making advances elsewhere in the former Soviet republic.
It's an unsettling scenario for President Barack Obama, who is under pressure to show he has leverage over Putin in a deepening conflict between East and West. The threat of economic sanctions, along with a series of modest measures that include canceling trade talks with Moscow and suspending plans to attend an international summit in Russia, have so far done little to persuade the Russian leader to pull his forces back from Crimea.
"I'm not optimistic they're going to leave," said Michael McFaul, who served as Obama's ambassador to Russia until just last week.
McFaul, in an interview on MSNBC, said he was expressing his personal view, not speaking on behalf of the administration. White House officials have condemned Russia's military maneuvers in Crimea as a violation of international law and insist they would oppose any long-term occupation of the region.
"We would not find that to be acceptable," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday.
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Grasping for diplomatic exit, players in Ukraine crisis converge on Paris
PARIS (AP) — Top diplomats from the West and Russia trying to find an end to the crisis in Ukraine are gathering in Paris on Wednesday as tensions simmered over the Russian military takeover of the strategic Crimean Peninsula.
A team of international observers headed to Crimea, Europe debated the size of its aid package to the nearly bankrupt Ukraine, and NATO prepared to take up the issue directly with Russia in an extraordinary meeting of the military alliance originally created as a counter to the Soviet Union.
The envoys from Russia, Ukraine, the U.S., Britain and France are not necessarily all at the same table, but French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said everyone has been working non-stop for a diplomatic solution.
"We have a principle of firmness but at the same time of searching for dialogue," Fabius said as he stood alongside his Ukrainian counterpart, making his first trip abroad in the new post.
Ukraine has accused Russia of military invasion after pro-Russian troops took over Crimea on Saturday, placing forces around its ferry, military bases and border posts. Moscow does not recognize the new Ukrainian leadership in Kiev that ousted the pro-Russian president.
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Obama's $3.9 trillion budget for 2015 attacked by Republicans, panned by anti-deficit groups
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans are dismissing President Barack Obama's new $3.9 trillion budget as nothing more than a Democratic manifesto for this fall's congressional campaigns, but the fiscal plan is taking hits from another quarter too — anti-deficit groups.
Obama on Tuesday sent lawmakers a 2015 budget top-heavy with provisions that have little chance of becoming law. They included $1 trillion in tax increases — mostly on the rich and corporations — and a collection of populist but mostly modest spending boosts for consumer protection, climate change research and improved technology in schools.
It even trumpeted $2.2 trillion in 10-year deficit reduction, though most of the proposed savings, including fresh tax boosts plus cuts in government payments to Medicare providers, seemed long shots to make it through Congress. Almost one-third came from claiming savings from the end of U.S. fighting in Iraq and troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.
That meant the budget's clearest impact was political: feeding Democrats' election-year narrative that they are trying to help narrow the income gap between rich and poor while creating jobs. Republicans, who see tax cuts as the surest way to help the economy, pounced.
"The president has once again opted for the political stunt for a budget that's more about firing up the president's base in an election year than about solving the nation's biggest and most persistent long-term challenges," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
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With Texas undergoing political shakeup, primary night leaves tea party influence unsettled
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The first primary in what Republicans hope is a triumphant election year sent a message that U.S. Sen Ted Cruz and the tea party still wield considerable influence in one of the nation's most conservative states.
But to find out exactly how much, Texans will have to wait.
In a primary where an extraordinary number of statewide positions were up for grabs following Gov. Rick Perry's decision not to seek another term, some incumbent candidates successfully fought to beat back tea party challengers Tuesday. But several candidates who forced runoffs in May were either praised by the outspoken freshman senator, Cruz, or who ran with his no-compromising swagger.
"In Texas, we will show the rest of the country what it means to be conservative," said GOP state Sen. Dan Patrick, who forced longtime Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst into a runoff, less than two years after Cruz beat Dewhurst in the Senate primary.
The primary was the first since Cruz barreled into the U.S. Senate in 2012 and yanked Republicans nationwide further right, and many watched results within Texas to see how strong his influence would be on the state's next generation of Republican leaders. Amid the Republican contests, however, is Wendy Davis, a rising Democratic star who has energized the state's Democratic base and making a run for the governor's seat in November.
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Oscar Pistorius defense tries to undermine testimony of couple that heard screams, shots
PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — The chief defense lawyer in Oscar Pistorius' murder trial sought on Wednesday to undermine the prosecution testimony of a couple who say they heard a woman's screams and gunfire the night the athlete fatally shot his girlfriend.
Lawyer Barry Roux said telephone records will show that the banging sounds the neighbors heard were instead a distressed Pistorius hitting a toilet door with a cricket bat to get to fatally wounded girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
Charl Johnson and his wife Michelle Burger have testified to hearing a sequence of events in the pre-dawn hours of Valentine's Day last year that involved a woman screaming, a man shouting for help and then the sound of gunshots. Cross-examining Johnson on the third day of the blockbuster trial, Roux says call records will show Pistorius called an estate manager at around 3:19 a.m. and soon after he bashed in the door with the bat.
In Johnson and Burger's testimony, they say they heard what they described as shots straight after making a call to security at 3.16 a.m. The similar times show the sounds were the bat on the door, Roux argued.
"There is only one thing you could have heard, because it coincides precisely," Roux said to Johnson. "That was the time that he (Pistorius) broke down the door (with the bat)."
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Israeli prime minister's Silicon Valley visit to include pro-business pact with Gov. Brown
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is planning a swing through the Silicon Valley to meet with high-tech leaders and sign a pro-business agreement with Gov. Jerry Brown.
Wednesday's visit follows Netanyahu's meetings with President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C., on Monday and his appearance Tuesday at the Los Angeles premiere of a television documentary that features him.
This is the first California visit from an Israeli prime minister since 2006, and Netanyahu is planning a stop at Apple Inc. in Cupertino, as well as a meeting with WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant who sold his company to Facebook Inc. for $19 billion last month.
Brown and Netanyahu plan to sign an agreement that follows on several decades of commitments from California and Israel leaders to promote trade, research and economic development. There's also promise that arid Israel might have some water conservation advice for California, which is in the midst of a severe drought.
The governor and prime minister's offices released statements that the agreement enables Israeli companies to access the California Innovation Network, a system of 16 iHub business incubators located around the state. IHub directors, who receive no state funding, said Tuesday that companies from Israel and anywhere else already have access to their resources.
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How deep can a fish go? Scientists say strange fish caught near New Zealand may provide answer
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — They may look like guts stuffed in cellophane, but five fish hauled up from near-record depths off the coast of New Zealand are providing scientists with new insights into how deep fish can survive.
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the U.S., Britain and New Zealand describe catching translucent hadal snailfish at a depth of 7 kilometers (4.3 miles).
By measuring levels of a compound in the fish that helps offset the effects of pressure, the scientists say they've concluded that fish likely can't survive below about 8,200 meters (5.1 miles). That would mean no fish at all live in the deepest one-quarter of the world's oceans.
The snailfish have little pigmentation due to the lack of light in their environment, hence their translucent appearance.
New Zealand marine ecologist Ashley Rowden, a co-author of the paper, said nobody had caught a snailfish in nearly 60 years and so he wasn't overly hopeful when they sent down a box-like trap into the Kermadec Trench near New Zealand in late 2011.
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2 years after overhauling flood insurance, Congress set to roll back law amid premium hikes
WASHINGTON (AP) — Less than two years after Congress approved a landmark bill to overhaul the federal flood insurance program, lawmakers are poised to undo many of the changes after homeowners in flood-prone areas complained about sharp increases in premiums.
The House overwhelmingly passed a bill Tuesday night that would allow sellers to give their subsidized, below-market insurance rates to new buyers and lower the cap on how much flood insurance premiums can rise each year.
Rep. Michael Grimm, a New York Republican who co-sponsored the bill, said it would ensure that families across the country, including those still struggling to recover from Superstorm Sandy, can avoid "a wave of devastating premium hikes and foreclosures."
The Senate could soon follow. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., says he supports the House measure, which mirrors a bill he sponsored and the Senate approved in January.
The House bill "will end the most egregious problems with the flood insurance program and bring some real relief to thousands of homeowners who desperately need our help," Menendez said in a statement Tuesday night. "I'm encouraged by this progress and hope we can bring the bill over the finish line very, very soon."
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NYC artists live on 25-foot-tall 'human hamster wheel' to demonstrate cooperation and trust
NEW YORK (AP) — Ever feel like you're on a big hamster wheel and you can't get off?
Ward Shelley and Alex Schweder know that feeling all too well. The two performance artists are spending 10 days living, eating and sleeping on a giant hamster wheel to make a larger point: We all have to work together to get through the daily grind.
"I wasn't prepared for this ... perhaps I should have been," Shelley said from atop the wheel, his feet dangling off the side of the 25-foot-tall wood and metal structure.
One wrong move by him or his fellow human hamster and they risk being thrown off. They are perched on opposite ends of the wheel, 180 degrees from each other, and must carefully coordinate their movements. When one walks, the other must walk in the opposite direction. When one stops, the other must stop.
"It's really an exploration of what it means to collaborate," Schweder said from the relative safety at the bottom, inside of the wheel. "It's an exploration of trust between two people."
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