Suspect in Craigslist case takes stand to deny murders

AKRON, Ohio (Reuters) - Richard Beasley, a street preacher accused of murdering down-on-their luck men who answered a Craigslist ad for a nonexistent job in Ohio, denied the charges at his trial on Wednesday and said witnesses against him were lying.

Beasley, 53, who is charged with the murder of three men in 2011, two of whom were lured by the Craigslist ad, told jurors he is the victim of a conspiracy by members of a motorcycle gang who wanted to kill him because he was a "snitch."

If convicted, Beasley faces the death penalty in the murders of David Pauley, 51, of Norfolk, Virginia; Ralph Geiger, 56, of Akron; and Timothy Kern, 47, of Massillon, Ohio.

He is also charged with the attempted murder of Scott Davis, who answered the Craigslist ad and was shot in the arm while escaping after meeting Beasley and his teenage accomplice, Brogan Rafferty.

Rafferty, 18, was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison without parole in November for his role in the deadly scheme. He was 16 years old at the time of the crimes and not subject to the death penalty.

In the Akron trial on Wednesday, Beasley denied the prosecution's assertion that he shot and killed Geiger to use the man's identity and avoid being arrested on numerous warrants for drugs and prostitution.

Geiger voluntarily gave Beasley his identity, Beasley said, so that Beasley could start a new life. Prosecutors contend that Beasley lured Geiger with the offer of a nonexistent caretaker job on a 680-acre ranch in rural Ohio, killed him, stole his identity and dyed his own hair and beard to look like Geiger's.

The Craigslist attacks were among a series of incidents in which people advertising goods for sale or responding to ads on social media have been killed. In 2009, a former medical student was accused of killing a masseuse he met through Craigslist.

Beasley also said Wednesday that Davis, who testified last week, had pointed a gun at him and said, "Brother, you are a weak link," shot at him three times and then another three times as they struggled for the gun.

Beasley said "weak link" is motorcycle slang for a snitch. He said Rafferty and Davis must have discovered that he had been a criminal informant for Akron police on the illegal activities of local motorcycle gangs and planned to kill him.

Under cross-examination, Beasley called witnesses who had testified for the prosecution "liars" and claimed that some were in on the conspiracy to kill him. He also called Summit County assistant prosecutor Jonathan Baumoel a liar when he accused Beasley of shooting and killing Pauley. "I did not do that and you didn't see it, nobody saw it," he shouted.

Prosecutors listed Rafferty as a potential witness but did not call him to testify before wrapping up their case on Tuesday. Rafferty could be called if a deal were negotiated with his defense attorneys, who have said they plan to appeal his conviction.

(Reporting by Kim Palmer in Akron; Editing by Mary Wisniewski and Prudence Crowther)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suspect-craigslist-case-takes-stand-deny-murders-204539735.html

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Jobless claims slide, hinting at labor market pickup

Reuters ? ? ? 13 hrs.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week, suggesting a pick-up in the labor market recovery.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 7,000 to a seasonally adjusted 340,000, declining for a second straight week, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

The prior week's claims figure was revised to show 3,000 more applications received than previously reported.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected first-time applications to rise to 355,000.

The four-week moving average for new claims, a better measure of labor market trends, also fell 7,000 to 348,750 - the lowest level since March 2008 - pointing to some firming in underlying labor market conditions.

A Labor Department analyst said no states had been estimated and there were no special factors influencing the report.

The data has no bearing on February's employment report, due on Friday, as it falls outside the survey period.

According to a Reuters survey of economists, employers probably added 160,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, a small pick-up up from January's 157,000 count. That would just be enough to hold the jobless rate steady at 7.9 percent.

Economists say job gains of at least 250,000 per month over a sustained period are needed to significantly dent the ranks of the unemployed. Job growth averaged 200,000 in the last three months.

While layoffs have subsided, companies are not in a hurry to step up hiring as domestic demand remains lackluster.

Claims remain tucked in the low end of a 330,000 to 375,000 range for this year.

High unemployment prompted the Federal Reserve last year to launch an open-ended bond buying program. The U.S. central bank said it would keep up the program until there was a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market.

In testimony to Congress last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke signaled the central bank would press forward with plans to buy $85 billion in bonds per month.

The number of people still receiving benefits under regular state programs after an initial week of aid rose 3,000 to 3.1 million in the week ended February 23. The four-week moving average of so-called continuing claims was the lowest since July 2008.

Meanwhile, nonfarm productivity fell at its fastest pace in four years in the fourth quarter, but the decline was likely to be temporary as economic growth is expected to pick up after stalling in late 2012.

Productivity fell at a 1.9 percent annual rate, the weakest pace since the fourth quarter of 2008, the Labor Department said on Thursday. A month ago it estimated that productivity, which measures hourly output per worker, fell at a 2 percent pace.

It had increased at a 3.1 percent rate in the third quarter. Economists polled by Reuters had expected the decline productivity to be revised to a 1.6 percent rate.

The drop largely reflects a surge in hiring while output continued to expand at a slower pace. The economy added about 600,000 jobs the fourth quarter, but gross domestic product only grew at a 0.1 percent rate.

Growth is expected to accelerate in the first quarter, although the pace is not expected to be above 2 percent as the economy adjusts to tighter fiscal policy.

Unit labor costs - a gauge of the labor-related cost for any given unit of output - rose at a 4.6 percent rate in the fourth quarter rather than 4.5 percent, the report showed.

Labor costs were up only 2.1 percent from a year-ago, underscoring the lack of wage-related inflation pressures in the economy and helping to keep the door open to further monetary easing by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economywatch/jobless-claims-slide-hinting-labor-market-pickup-1C8736227

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'True grit' erodes assumptions about evolution

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Dining on field grasses would be ruinous to human teeth, but mammals such as horses, rhinos and gazelles evolved long, strong teeth that are up to the task.

New research led by the University of Washington challenges the 140-year-old assumption that finding fossilized remains of prehistoric animals with such teeth meant the animals were living in grasslands and savannas. Instead it appears certain South American mammals evolved the teeth in response to the gritty dust and volcanic ash they encountered while feeding in an ancient tropical forest.

The new work was conducted in Argentina where scientists had thought Earth's first grasslands emerged 38 million years ago, an assumption based on fossils of these specialized teeth. But the grasslands didn't exist. Instead there were tropical forests rich with palms, bamboos and gingers, according to Caroline Str?mberg, UW assistant professor of biology and lead author of an article in Nature Communications.

"The assumption about grasslands and the evolution of these teeth was based on animal fossils," Str?mberg said. "No one had looked in detail at evidence from the plant record before. Our findings show that you shouldn't assume adaptations always came about in the same way, that the trigger is the same environment every time."

To handle a lifetime of rough abrasion, the specialized teeth ? called high-crowned cheek teeth ? are especially long and mostly up in the animals' gums when they are young. As chewing surfaces of the teeth wear away, more of the tooth emerges from the gums until the crowns are used up. In each tooth, bone-like dentin and tough enamel are complexly folded and layered to create strong ridged surfaces for chewing. Human teeth have short crowns and enamel only on the outside of each tooth.

In Argentina, mammals apparently developed specialized teeth 20 million years or more before grasslands appeared, Str?mberg said. This was different from her previous work in North America and western Eurasia where she found the emergence of grasslands coincided with the early ancestors of horses and other animals evolving specialized teeth. The cause and effect, however, took 4 million years, considerably more lag time than previously thought.

The idea that specialized teeth could have evolved in response to eating dust and grit on plants and the ground is not new. In the case of Argentine mammals, Str?mberg and her co-authors hypothesize that the teeth adapted to handle volcanic ash because so much is present at the study site. For example, some layers of volcanic ash are as thick as 20 feet (six meters). In other layers, soils and roots were just starting to develop when they were smothered with more ash.

Chewing grasses is abrasive because grasses take up more silica from soils than most other plants. Silica forms minute particles inside many plants called phytoliths that, among other things, help some plants stand upright and form part of the protective coating on seeds.

Phytoliths vary in appearance under a microscope depending on the kind of plant. When plants die and decay, the phytoliths remain as part of the soil layer. In work funded by the National Science Foundation, Str?mberg and her colleagues collected samples from Argentina's Gran Barranca, literally "Great Cliff," that offers access to layers of soil, ash and sand going back millions of years.

The phytoliths they found in 38-million-year-old layers ? when ancient mammals in that part of the world developed specialized teeth ? were overwhelmingly from tropical forests, Str?mberg said.

"In modern grasslands and savannas you'd expect at least 35 to 40 percent ? more likely well over 50 percent ? of grass phytoliths. The fact we have so little evidence of grasses is very diagnostic of a forested habitat," she said.

The emergence of grasslands and the evolution of specialized teeth in mammals are regarded as a classic example of co-evolution, one that has occurred in various places around the world. However, as the new work shows, "caution is required when using this functional trait for habitat reconstruction," the co-authors write.

###

University of Washington: http://www.uwnews.org

Thanks to University of Washington for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127133/_True_grit__erodes_assumptions_about_evolution

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Iditarod kicks off with festive ceremony

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Dogs barked and spectators cheered as 66 mushers and their teams in the 1,000-mile Iditarod race set out from downtown Anchorage on Saturday after religious blessings, singing and glad-handing with fans.

The 11-mile (17-kilometer) first leg ends at a wooded park in the southeast part of the city, in the ceremonial launch of the 41st annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Timed racing will not start until Sunday when the mushers reach Willow, a small community about 80 miles north of Anchorage. The competition will eventually see them glide into Nome, a city on the coast of the Bering Sea.

On Saturday mushers mingled with fans in Alaska's largest city and reflected on the long road ahead.

Fans serenaded Jamaican musher Newton Marshall, who turned 30 on Saturday, with "Happy Birthday." A Russian television crew asked him about his decision to leave the sunny Caribbean climate for the snowy Iditarod trail.

"Well, you can't do it in Jamaica," Marshall said.

A Catholic priest, a Russian Orthodox priest and a minister from a Korean church blessed the dogs in racer Scott Janssen's team. Janssen, an Anchorage funeral director, calls himself "The Mushin' Mortician."

Four-time champion Martin Buser, the first competitor out of the chute, reminisced about the days when the race clock started in Anchorage and mushers sprinted out of town.

"It used to be wild," he said. "This is a bit more relaxed, a bit more at ease."

The Iditarod began with timed competition in Anchorage until the mid-1990s. Back then, the racers rushed to the suburb of Eagle River, where they had to load their dogs into trucks, speed 30 miles up the highway and restart the competition in Wasilla.

Sleds crashed into cars, snowmobiles, people and even trains, Buser recalled. Buser himself once hit a police cruiser with one of his sleds.

STILL SOMETHING AT STAKE

Concerns about safety as development spread to the edges of Anchorage caused race organizers to change the format to the current two-day start.

Even though Saturday's trot through Anchorage does not count in the race rankings, there was something at stake. The winner will receive $50,400, part of a total race purse of $600,000, and a new truck.

"I suppose, if everything goes right for them, anybody can win," said 2011 champion John Baker, who holds the race speed record of eight days, 18:46 hours. "I would hope my chances are better than everybody else's."

Baker and Buser are in a crowded field of contenders this year. Also in that group is defending champion Dallas Seavey, who at 25 was the youngest Iditarod winner. Last year's runner-up, New England transplant Aliy Zirkle, could become the first female champion in more than two decades.

Many of this year's racers have no ambitions for victory.

"My biggest goal is just to finish it. I'm not looking to compete whatsoever," said Charley Bejna, a race rookie from Addison, Illinois.

Bejna said he hopes someday to move permanently to Alaska, where he has built a cabin. For now, he said, he is maintaining a reverse-snowbird lifestyle, spending winters in Alaska to train with his dogs and summers in Illinois, where he runs a landscaping business that provides the money for him to pursue his dog-mushing dreams.

"Everybody says, ?Why would you do that?'" Bejna said.

His reply?

"I can't run dogs in the summertime."

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Xavier Briand)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iditarod-race-starts-songs-blessings-hopes-victory-021713770--spt.html

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Video: On trial for murder, Jodi Arias breaks down

>>> we want to begin this half hour with a phoenix, arizona, murder trial that has been grabbing a lot of national headlines. the defendant is a woman named jodi arias. she is accused of murdering her lover. arias says it's self-defense. the state says it's murder. here's our report.

>>> did you kill travis alexander on june 4th , 2008 ?

>> yes, i did.

>> why?

>> the simple answer is that he attacked me.

>> reporter: but there are not many simple answers here. jo jodi arias said she feared for her life so she killed him. the prosecution says it was a love story that ended in murder.

>> she rewarded that love by sticking a knife in his chest.

>> reporter: for two months a phoenix jury has heard the steamy details of their relationship. seen naked pictures and listened to the one time lovers have phone sex .

>> you're bad. you make me feel so dirty.

>> you are, too.

>> reporter: travis ' friends say jodi became obsessed.

>> travis confided in us she snoops through my e-mails. she snoops through my house. she checks up on me constantly. i'm going out on a date with a different girl and she's following me.

>> reporter: when travis was found stabbed and shot to death, his friends told police look for jodi . she denied everything.

>> it was you that wanted to cover it up because --

>> no.

>> that's you.

>> it looks like me.

>> reporter: police showed her explicit photos they found at the crime scene taken on the day travis died proving she was at his house having sex . jodi changed her story, blaming intruders. then changed it again saying travis attacked her.

>> you say you have memory problems but it depends on the circumstance, right?

>> that's right.

>> what factors influence your having a memory problem?

>> usually when men like you are screaming at me or grilling me or someone like travis doing the same.

>> reporter: two months into the trial, after a week of scorching cross-examination, jodi arias finally lost it.

>> ma'am, were you crying when you were shooting him?

>> i don't remember.

>> were you crying when you were stabbing him?

>> i don't remember.

>> how about when you cut his throat? were you crying then?

>> i don't know.

>> reporter: soon, expert witnesses for both sides will offer their interpretations of her actions and the jury will decide whether jodi is a murderer or a victim. for "today," nbc news, phoenix.

>>> beth karas is a correspondent on trutv. great to see you.

>> good morning.

>> this woman has been talking almost nonstop. she told the police she wasn't there. then she says i was there but intruders came in. then she says she was there and she was attacked. and she does jailhouse interviews. how does the defense thread this needle in front of a jury?

>> you know, that is still to come, lester, when the experts take thestand. she admitted all the lies. she had to. she said i did it in self-defense. i did all the horrible acts but i was justified. he was abusing me. so she says at this point that the lies, all these lies were because she was still protecting his reputation. she had dirty little secrets on him and she still was protecting him in death. i don't know what the psychologist and domestic violence experts still to come for the defense will say about that. maybe they'll have some interpretation that this is consistent with victim of abuse. however, the state says this is not a woman who was abused at all. there is no evidence of abuse except coming from her mouth.

>> and, beth, you and i talked about other cases before and whether the defendant should take the stand on their owe bee half. not only is she taking the stand, she's been up there 13 days now.

>> yes. 13 days .

>> did she have any choice? did the defense have any other evidence to present other than her story?

>> she needed to testify. this was self-defense. she needed to explain what he was doing to her just before she slaughtered him that would justify killing him. she had to be in fear of her life and what she told the jury is that he was coming at her in a linebacker stance, no weapons on him, and that he said he was going to kill her. and then she slashed and stabbed him. 29 knife wounds and she shot him. one of the stab wounds was to the heart. she gcut his throat, all the way to the spinal cord . i don't know if they will say that is justified for lunging at her.

>> the jury gets to ask questions, at least submit questions. will that tip the hand as to where they may be?

>> well, you know, maybe so. that has happened with a few witnesses already. and there are a number of notes in a basket in front of the jury. so we'll see if the jury allows those questions to be asked. but depending on what they ask, if allowed, it may give us an idea of where at least one juror is going.

>> it's an absolutely fascinating case. beth karas , thank you for joining us.

Source: http://www.today.com/video/today/51016969/

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PFT: Free-agent Keller hasn't heard from Jets

Getty Images

So why did March 4 become the real deadline for the Ravens to get a deal done with quarterback Joe Flacco?

Because the Ravens didn?t want to have to choose between the non-exclusive and exclusive level of the franchise tag.

The latter, in light of the recent restructurings by Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger, would have put Flacco on track to make more than $74 million over three years, if Flacco opted to take it year to year under the franchise tag.? (That?s more than $24 million per year.)? The former would have opened the door for a front-loaded monster offer from another team that the Ravens couldn?t have matched without dumping plenty of players.

That was enough to persuade the Ravens to get it done before encountering a fork in the road with a pair of paths that led nowhere good.

Unless the Falcons and quarterback Matt Ryan work out a new deal within the next 12 months, Atlanta G.M. Thomas Dimitroff will face a similar dilemma.

Per a source with knowledge of Ryan?s contract, his cap number in 2013, the final year of his rookie contract, will be $12 million.? Which means that his non-exclusive tender would be no higher than the base quarterback amount for 2014, since a 20-percent raise over $12 million will be only $14.4 million.

The exclusive number will be several million higher, setting the stage for a much higher three-year haul under a formula that would give Ryan a 20-percent raise for the second year of the tag and a 44-percent raise in the third.

The difference in this case is that Ryan is represented by CAA, which handles an ever-growing stream of franchise and highly-paid quarterbacks (Eli and Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Matthew Stafford, Tony Romo, Sam Bradford, Philip Rivers, Robert Griffin III) and which consistently emerges from these talks with top-of-market deals, team cap situation be damned.? Now that the contract CAA negotiated in 2012 for Drew Brees has been eclipsed by the non-CAA Flacco deal, the goal will be to get back on top.

It?ll likely happen with Ryan, whether now or later or on the brink of the franchise-tag dilemma.? Or at some point after that.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/03/03/dustin-keller-hasnt-heard-from-jets-about-new-deal/related/

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Sergey Brin Thinks Your Smartphone Is for Girls

Hey, sweetheart, nice iPhone. Nice Android, too. It matches your Hello Kitty mug and bra. In fact, it's downright "emasculating," according to Google co-founder and Professional Computer Face Sergey Brin. So, stop throwing your manliness away. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/9B-0ZWP0Igw/sergey-brin-thinks-your-smartphone-is-for-girls

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