Colorado communities facing
more heavy rains overnight


Forecasters in Colorado are warning residents near Denver to brace for torrential overnight rains, as raging flood waters roar through the region and cloud cover hampers helicopter rescue efforts.

Days of heavy rains and flooding have turned the state's Rocky Mountain foothills into high risk zones, with dozens of washed out roads and bridges turning entire communities into disaster areas short on supplies and services. At least four people were known dead by late Sunday, with two others officially missing and presumed dead.

Authorities say about 500 people were unaccounted for Sunday, while cautioning that some may be unable to communicate with loved ones while stranded and awaiting rescue.

Rocky Mountain rescue management officials say as many as 1,000 people were awaiting rescue north of Denver, in an area that includes the hard-hit mountain community of Estes Park. But all airlifts were grounded Sunday because of new rains and poor visibility.

Local news outlets say 50 bridges linking rural communities have been destroyed or damaged, and warn of a growing threat from mudslides and rockslides as roads crumble. Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle, speaking to reporters Saturday, said authorities were only beginning to understand the scope of the crisis.

President Barack Obama has declared Colorado a major disaster zone and ordered federal help to boost state and local recovery efforts.

Helicopters have plucked hundreds of people from inundated homes. One helicopter carrying Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on a tour of the region made two stops to pick up residents waving to be rescued on Saturday.


Obama will outline advances
he made with U.S. economy


President Barack Obama will speak Monday about the progress made in the five years since the meltdown of the U.S. financial markets.  The president will make his case in anticipation of some tough battles with Congress.

Obama will go to the White House Rose Garden to highlight the recovery of the U.S. economy in the five years since the Lehman Brothers global financial firm declared bankruptcy, accelerating the onset of a financial crisis.

After taking office in January 2009, President Obama moved to stabilize the financial industry, committing government money to bail out some failing banks, as well as the three major U.S. automakers.

A slow, steady, partial recovery followed.

Gene Sperling, the director of the president's National Economic Council, says a new White House report shows the president's policies were largely responsible for turning around the failing economy. "The president undertook a series of bold, unprecedented and politically difficult measures in 2009 that have performed better than virtually anyone at the time predicted," he said.

Opposition Republicans in Congress, however, say Obama focused too much time and energy on pushing through his health care proposal, often called Obamacare and too little on creating jobs.

The president and Republican lawmakers are expected to wage legislative battles in the coming weeks over a federal budget, which is needed to keep the government running, and a debt ceiling, needed to allow the government to continue borrowing money.

Sperling says the inability of Congress, especially the Republican-led House of Representatives, to compromise and pass legislation is the biggest obstacle to continued economic recovery. "The largest concern has been really over the ability of the House of Representatives to be able to work out a reasonable budget outcome without using the threat of a default as a tool or tactic in budget negotiations," he said.

Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner, are threatening to vote down a debt ceiling increase unless it is accompanied by more cuts in the federal deficit.

“For the sake of our economy, we will continue to do everything we can to repeal, dismantle and defund Obamacare. Another important part of our plan for jobs is reining in the massive deficits and debt that is hurting our economy and jeopardizing the American dream for our kids and grandkids," he said.

The president, on ABC-TV's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," again said he will not negotiate on the debt ceiling. “The deficit has been cut in half since I came into office. It is continuing on a trend line of further reductions," he said. "If we want to do more deficit reduction, I have already put out a budget that says ‘let us do it.’”

In addition to Monday's Rose Garden speech, Obama will visit an auto manufacturing plant in the midwestern city of Kansas City, Missouri Friday to highlight the auto industry's recovery.

Without a funding extension, the U.S. government’s spending authority expires at the end of this month. The federal government will reach its borrowing limit weeks later.


Japan launches a satellite
on the cheap with small staff


Japan has launched a new rocket that it hopes will be a less expensive and more efficient way of sending satellites into space.

The three-stage, solid fuel Epsilon lifted off successfully Saturday from a space center in southern Japan.

The Epsilon was carrying the SPRINT A, the first space telescope designed for remote observation of other planets.

Japan hopes the rocket, launched with conventional laptop computers in a pared-down command center, will become competitive in the global space business.

The French news agency, AFP, reports only eight workers were assigned to the blastoff operation.

Lift-off had originally been scheduled for two weeks ago, but the attempt was suspended with just 19 seconds to go due to a computer glitch.


America's Cup challenge
is keeping up with billionaires


Software titan Larry Ellison's decision to race the 34th America's Cup on high-speed 72-foot catamarans, which are harder to build and sail than keelboats, has been criticized for pushing the competition too far beyond traditional sailing and pricing out non-billionaires.
 
But this is the America's Cup, Silicon Valley's style — it's all about technology, ideas and information — and advances made in preparation for the races are already being felt in television, aerospace and sporting gear.
 
“The America's Cup has a long history of innovation on all kinds of levels,” said Gary Jobson, the tactician on Ted Turner's 12-meter yacht "Courageous" when it won the Cup in 1977. “The boats have always had the leading edge of technology, whatever the technology has been.”
 
Sailing shares with aeronautics the physics of lift and drag and high- and low-pressure airflow. Picture a plane turned on its side in the water with one wing a dagger board protruding below the hull and the other a vertical mainsail.
 
This is even more true of Ellison's huge dream cats, known as AC72s. Instead of a traditional mainsail, they are powered by 135-foot-tall fixed “wings.” Forward, they usually carry just a small sailcloth jib to help turn their twin bows through the wind when coming about.
 
With horizontal fins at the tip of each rudder and dagger board blade below the water's surface, the radical yachts commissioned by Oracle Corp's Ellison — who could define the parameters of this year's Cup boats because he won the 2010 America's Cup in Valencia, Spain — can hydrofoil atop the waves at speeds of more than 50 miles per hour.
 
The AC72 may represent the America's Cup's greatest innovation yet — a mostly carbon-fiber sailboat that borrows heavily from aviation technology.
 
Industries increasingly share techniques for using space age materials adopted early on by yacht builders. Carbon fiber and titanium are the favorites to reduce weight and cost, and add strength to hulls, airframes and components.
 
Boeing Co. has been sharing information with America's Cup boat designers and builders for years, according to America's Cup sources. A Boeing spokesman said the company could not confirm or deny an America's Cup connection.
 
Design innovations have trickled down in boating since Alan Bond — an Australian real estate and mining entrepreneur who declared bankruptcy in 1992 and was later imprisoned for fraud — revealed a winged keel that gave his "Australia II" syndicate the edge over Dennis Conner's "Liberty" in the 1983 Cup.
 
Today, many cruising sailboats have similar horizontal surfaces on the bottom of their keels to help them steer straighter and faster. Experts expect hydrofoiling designs to likewise end up on recreational sailboats very soon.
 

Investors eye meeting this week
of U.S. Federal Reserve Board


Investors are watching nervously as the U.S. central bank considers when to reduce its efforts to stimulate the economy.  Many economists predict that the cuts will come sometime next year, while others say it might be as soon as Wednesday.

Stock prices plunged earlier this year when the U.S. central bank said it might gradually reduce stimulus efforts.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke said a strengthening economy would, eventually, no longer need the boost it got from a huge program of bond purchases.

"If the incoming data support the view that the economy can sustain a reasonable cruising speed, we will ease the pressure on the accelerator by gradually reducing the pace of purchases," he said.

The National Association for Business Economics said its economists saw growth improving this year, rising to a 3 percent annual rate next year.

The group's survey of its members said stronger growth meant less need for stimulus this year, and made cuts nearly certain next year.

National Defense University's Nayantara Hensel designed the survey. “The bulk of our panelists think there is an 80 percent probability that the Fed is going to taper off in 2014,” she said.

The Fed has been trying to boost economic growth since the recession sharply increased unemployment.

First, it cut short-term interest rates to nearly zero and pledged to keep them ultra-low until unemployment falls to 6.5 percent or lower.

Then it created a second program to cut long-term interest rates, making it easier for families to borrow money for new homes and easier for businesses to raise capital for new equipment.

Under the program, the Fed is buying $85 billion in securities each month. So cutting that stimulus would reduce those purchases.
  
Hensel said not all the data supported a cutback. “We are seeing sort of some economic growth, but not as sudden and as significant as one might expect,” she said.

And a survey of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants showed some members were worried that renewed wrangling over taxes and government spending in Congress could discourage investments needed for growth.
 
Gary Lubin, CEO of Centerphase Solutions, helped organize the survey.

“The debt ceiling, sequestration, issues around patent protection and some international business practices - all really create a certain level of uncertainty which leads to some apprehension or some holding back of items, for example capital spending,” he said.

Top officials of the U.S. Federal Reserve are scheduled to meet Tuesday and Wednesday for debate on economic policy.  On Wednesday, Bernanke is scheduled to meet with journalists to explain the changes - if any - in the bank’s strategy.


México facing twin storms,
one in Pacific and one in Gulf


Twin storms are battering the east and west coasts of Mexico, killing at least 17 people so far and forcing thousands to flee their homes.

Hurricane Ingrid is forecast to strike Mexico's Gulf coast early today with winds as high as 120 kph (about 75 mph).

The Category One storm could dump as much as 63 centimeters of rain on parts of the east coast. Ingrid has already soaked several coastal towns and sent thousands running for safety. That's nearly 25 inches.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Manuel has brought heavy rains and high winds to Mexico's Pacific Coast. At least 17 people have been killed by landslides, flash floods and collapsed buildings in the southwestern state of Guerrero.

Forecasters predict more heavy rain and life-threatening weather before Manuel is expected to break apart over land Monday.


Brazil's president attempting
to improve public approvals


When a Brazilian newspaper reported last month that President Dilma Rousseff had gone for a nighttime spin incognito around the capital on the back of an aide's Harley-Davidson, her favorable mentions soared on social media.
 
It was just what Rousseff needed after a bad couple of months: She had been booed at an international soccer match and at a gathering of mayors from around the country. Worse still, her popularity tanked following massive street protests against corruption, poor public services and the high cost of living.
 
The unexpected outburst of anger was aimed at politicians of all stripes and targeted Congress. But it also shook Ms. Rousseff's administration to the core and clouded the prospects for next year's election, when she is widely expected to run for a second four-year term.
 
A technocrat with a distaste for the gladhanding of politics, Ms. Rousseff quickly gathered her closest advisers, led by her 2010 campaign adviser and pollster JoIao Santana, and drew up a plan to connect more with the public through travel and the Internet, an aide said.
 
The president responded to the demonstrators' main demands with a five-point plan to improve public transportation, health and education services, maintain fiscal discipline and reform Brazil's political system to make it more accountable.
 
The president has increased the frequency of her trips around Brazil to two or three a week to inaugurate new schools, low-cost housing and infrastructure projects aimed at upgrading and expanding the overcrowded urban transit systems that sparked the first protests in June.
 
“A government cannot be deaf,” Ms. Rousseff, 65, told a crowd on Wednesday in a working-class suburb of Rio de Janeiro where she announced plans to build a new metro line.
 
Donning a hardhat and orange overalls, she visited a shipyard that is building a production and storage platform to tap Brazil's huge offshore oil reserves, praising a law she proposed — and Congress quickly passed after the protests — to use royalties to fund education and health programs.
 
At each stop, Ms. Rousseff starts by speaking to local radio stations, a trick borrowed from her charismatic predecessor and political mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who remains hugely popular almost three years after leaving office.
 
The results are beginning to show. Rousseff's approval rating sank from 73.7 percent before the protests to 49.3 percent in July. By last week it had climbed back to 58 percent.
 


Alabama church is marking
50th anniversary of bombing


Hundreds of worshippers packed an Alabama church Sunday to honor four young girls killed 50 years ago in a bombing by the Ku Klux Klan that became a defining moment in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Bells tolled at the precise moment the blast ripped through Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, killing 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, along with 11-year-old Denise McNair.

Later, the Rev. Arthur Price taught the same Sunday school lesson on forgiveness that was heard the morning of the bombing.

President Barack Obama, in a written statement, called Sept.15, 1963. a horrific day for the city and the country that ultimately galvanized national support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That federal legislation outlawed discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion and gender. It also brought an end to so-called Jim Crow laws that enforced rigid segregation in much of the American South.

One of the Klansmen convicted years later in the bombing remains imprisoned. Two others died in prison.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Birmingham native who attended school with victim Denise McNair, headed a list of speakers set to participate in a Birmingham commemoration later in the day. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also was on hand.

The U.S. Congress last week posthumously awarded the victims the Congressional Gold Medal -- the highest honor bestowed on American civilians.