Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images(MESA, Ariz.) -- See live coverage and commentary from ABC News and Yahoo of the Republican presidential debate in Mesa, Ariz.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- A collection of House Democrats are protesting silently against Proposition 8 Wednesday, participating in a photo shoot to draw attention to California’s state law banning same-sex marriage.
Wednesday the NOH8 campaign released images of 10 members of the House of Representatives from its “NOH8 on the Hill” photo shoot; the campaign opposes California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, and supports the LGBT community with its stand against bullying and discrimination.
Four Democratic lawmakers from California -- Reps. Judy Chu, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee and Jackie Speier -- joined Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), William Keating (Mass.), Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), Niki Tsongas (Mass.), Jared Polis (Colo.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) in the cause.
“Equality before the law is an American value articulated in our Constitution and it’s at the heart of the NOH8 Campaign,” Polis, one of a handful of openly homosexual members of Congress, said. “With a focus on our nation’s value of freedom and an unflagging insistence on equality for all, we can look forward to a time when equal rights for all is a given.”
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling that California’s ban on same-sex marriage violates both the due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitution. That ruling, however, is pending further appeal.
The photo shoot, which occurred on Capitol Hill on Feb. 15, was open to any members of Congress willing to take a stand against the controversial law, although no Congressional Republicans participated.
Each member issued a statement explaining why they had the NOH8 logo applied to their face, along with a piece of silver duct tape covering up their mouths.
“Gay and lesbian Americans are part of the fabric that makes this country strong,” Blumenauer said. “The notion that we could ask these men and women to do everything from paying taxes to serving our country in uniform while denying them the right to marry is offensive to everything I believe in as a public servant. I won’t stop working for equal rights in Congress until they have been extended to every American.”
“These pictures speak volumes about the will of the American people to be treated the same, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation,” Chu stated.
Proposition 8 is the ballot initiative passed in 2008 to amend the California constitution and ban same-sex marriage. About 18,000 same-sex couples had already obtained marriage licenses in the state before voters approved the law.
Jay LaPrete/Getty Images(TUCSON, Ariz.) -- Campaigning at a Tea Party rally Wednesday, Rick Santorum zeroed in on immigration in this southern Arizona city as he promised to “secure the southern border” and make illegal immigration a focal point of his presidency.
“You have my pledge that we will secure this border. We will deal with the issue of the drug violence and the cartels, we will work with the Mexican government to make sure that we … have relationships there that can help strengthen their economy, deal with the national security threats to our country at the border and secure the border so that people in Arizona can live in peace and prosperity just like every other state in the county,” said Santorum.
Unlike his campaign stops Tuesday in Phoenix, where he mentioned immigration only once at one event, Santorum focused on the issue here in Tucson, which is 70 miles from the Mexican border, eliciting cheers from the crowd as he told the story of how his grandfather left his family in Italy to come to the United States legally.
“I share that, that concern that many people have. Well, what are we going to do with all these people in America?” Santorum said to a crowd of about 200 at a Shriner’s Hall. “Well, I look at it from the standpoint of my grandfather. My grandfather came to this country, he came in 1925. He came by himself. He left his family behind, his young children, his wife, he left them after having served in World War I. But came to America, sacrificed five years of his life … until he was able to refill the requirements and bring the rest of the family over.”
Santorum said securing the border wasn’t “hostile, this is just who we are.”
There was increased security at the Tucson rally with bag checks and organizers telling an overflow crowd of about 50 people that the candidate would not be shaking hands outside due to security reasons. At the end of the rally, Santorum urged the candidates who spoke before him to “take this district back,” but he did not mention former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in Tucson last year.
Neither did he mention the foreclosure crisis rocking this state, and he kept most of his hits on President Obama rather than his rivals, telling an enthusiastic and responsive audience who repeatedly shouted out disparaging comments about Obama, “We see a president who is systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian principles in this country.”
Santorum again defended the controversial Satan comments that popped up on the campaign trail Tuesday when audio was released of the former Pennsylvania senator saying Satan was attacking U.S. government and religious institutions. He said Obama was “making the world a much more dangerous place,” and there were “forces of evil” at work in this country and around the world.
“You hear a lot of talk from me, as I mentioned this earlier, about the threats that we have around this world, and we do have serious threats that this president is uniformly making worse,” Santorum said. “He’s making the world a much more dangerous place as he continues to pull America back and allow those who seek to do harm to freedom, those who seek to oppress, yes, evil forces around the world. As Ronald Reagan was courageous enough to go out and speak about the forces of evil, not just around the world by the way but in this country, go read the speech. He went out and identified clearly why, because America stands for something, we stand for goodness we stand for freedom we stand for the dignity of every human person, that is who we are, that is why we’re that shining city on the hill that the rest of the world looks to. … And yet our president refuses to call evil evil, refuses to even name it, refuses to confront it, tries to appease and cajole it in an effort to reduce America’s commitments around the world.”
Santorum called his rivals “Johnny-come-latelys to the conservative cause” and urged the audience to vote for him on Tuesday.
“That’s the decision you have to make here in Arizona,” Santorum said. “Who do you trust? Who’s authentic? Who’s believable? Is it the guy reading from the teleprompter or the guy out here on a high-wire line telling you what’s in his heart, and what’s in his gut?”
“Getting to that peace and prosperity, we need to do two things to turn this country around economically,” Santorum said. “First, we have to get the government off the backs of the American people and American businesses. I’ve put forward a plan that does both, grow this economy by changing the tax code. I just saw today that Gov. Romney announced that he was going to be lowering the tax rates to well, the tax rate I proposed. Welcome to the party, governor. Great to have you along.”
STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images(ROME) -- Teams searching the crippled Costa Concordia cruise liner have found another eight bodies, more than a month after the ship capsized off the coast of Italy.
Italian officials had previously put the number of those killed at 32, though only 17 bodies had been recovered, according to the BBC.
The ship struck a patch of rocks on the night of Jan. 13, causing a large gash in the ship’s exterior. The vessel took on water as the ship’s passengers and crew raced to escape, some of them jumping in the water in hopes of swimming to shore.
The ship’s captain and a number of other crew members are currently being investigated for their respective roles in the disaster.
JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images(LONDON) -- For almost three weeks, Syria’s central city of Homs has been pounded by shelling from the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, leaving hundreds dead, according to opposition activists. Judging from a video clip posted online, one weapons analyst says Assad’s forces are using the biggest mortars in the world.
The video was first flagged in the Christian Science Monitor, which was told by a Human Rights Watch official that the regime forces are using the Russian-made 240mm “Tulip.” In the clip, two men are standing in rubble holding up the fanned tails of the exploded ordnance.
Peter Falstead of Jane’s Defence Weekly says the tail fins look, “very much like the tail fins from SM-240,” also known as the “Tulip Tree” developed by the Soviets in the 1970s. Today it is the largest mortar system used by any military in the world, and the Syrian army is believed to have up to 10 in service.
“If you wanted to strike at rebel-held positions in a built-up area to which you had no line of sight, and you had no regard whatsoever for the killing of innocent civilians, then I guess the SM-240 would be a weapon of choice,” Falstead told ABC News.
Few of the self-propelled SM-240s -- also known as the M-1975 -- remain in service, Jane’s says, due to its short range and slow firing (around one shell per minute). All-told, the system weighs 60,000 pounds, its range is between 2,600 and 5,900 feet, and it can fire shells weighing between 300 and 500 pounds.
By comparison, Falstead says the largest mortars used by the U.S. Army are 120mm, noting that they do have howitzers of a larger caliber.
JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images(BUENOS AIRES, Argentina) -- At least 49 people were killed and another 600 injured when a packed commuter train crashed into a retaining wall at the terminal in Argentina’s capital city at the height of rush hour Wednesday morning.
The crash at the Once train station in Buenos Aires happened around 8:30 a.m. local time when the train, carrying approximately 1,200 passengers, reportedly had braking problems and crashed into a barrier. The train is said to have been traveling from anywhere between 12 to 20 miles per hour at the time of the accident.
"There are people still trapped, people alive," Argentina’s transportation secretary J.P. Schiavi told reporters Wednesday, according to the BBC.
The first two cars -- and the passengers in them -- took the brunt of the crash. Traditionally, commuters pack the first few cars and move up as the train approaches its final stop, so as to get a head start in exiting the approaching station.
Tony Avelar/Bloomberg via Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Smartphones are becoming smarter by the day, and by 2016, there’ll be more of them on planet Earth than humans. Tech giant Cisco Systems estimates there will be 10 billion smartphones and tablets being used on Earth by 2016. The world population by that same year, according to the United Nations, will be 7.3 billion.
Some additional numbers from Cisco:
490 million -- Number of smartphones sold in 2011. 1.4 -- Number of mobile gadgets for every person on Earth in 2016. 50 -- The factor by which data traffic from smartphones will increase by 2016. 62 -- Factor by which data traffic from tablets will increase by 2016. 71 -- Percent of mobile traffic dedicated to watching videos on portable devices by 2016, a 25-fold increase from today. 130 -- Exabytes of worldwide data traffic in 2016. That's roughly the equivalent of 33 billion DVDs, 4.3 quadrillion mp3 files, or 813 quadrillion text messages.
KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Arguing that the current corporate tax system hinders economic growth and job creation, President Obama Wednesday called for slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent by eliminating loopholes and subsidies.
“Our current corporate tax system is outdated, unfair, and inefficient. It provides tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas and hits companies that choose to stay in America with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It is unnecessarily complicated and forces America’s small businesses to spend countless hours and dollars filing their taxes. It’s not right, and it needs to change,” the president said in a written statement.
Obama’s proposed overhaul, announced by the Treasury Department, instead aims to simplify the corporate tax code and broaden the base. To pay for the cuts, the administration would do away with subsidies and loopholes that save companies billions of dollars each year, including those for oil and gas companies.
To encourage domestic investment, the White House plan would reduce the tax rate for manufacturers that create new products and produce goods in the U.S. to 25 percent and establish a minimum tax on foreign earnings.
“We want to restore a system in which American businesses succeed or fail based on the products they make and the services they provide, not on the creativity of their tax engineers or the lobbyists they hire,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told reporters Wednesday.
The administration’s framework is “fully paid for, and it won’t add a dime to the deficit,” Obama said.
While the election-year proposal puts the president at odds with Republicans vying for his position who would like to see lower corporate tax rates, both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill have shown previous support for reducing corporate tax rates while eliminating special-interest loopholes.
Geithner said Wednesday that he has already been in contact with Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “We plan to meet, hopefully next week, to begin the process of building consensus, deciding how to move forward,” Geithner said.
Scott Eells/Bloomberg via Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- An encouraging housing report couldn't keep the markets in positive territory Wednesday. Investor concerns about the unstable financial situation in Europe pushed stocks down.
Stocks backtracked over concern about the outlook for Greece and the possible risk to the global economy. On Wednesday the Dow lost 27 points. The Nasdaq and S&P gave up 15 and 5 points, respectively.
The declines come a day after the Dow touched the 13,000 level for the first time since May of 2008.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(MONTGOMERY, Ohio) -- Daniel von Bargen, perhaps best known as Mr. Kruger on Seinfeld, was hospitalized this week after shooting himself in the head in a botched suicide attempt.
The Montgomery, Ohio, resident shot himself in the temple with a Colt .38 gun on Monday. He called Hamilton County 911 after his attempt failed.
According to the call, Von Bargen shot himself to avoid going to the hospital. After the dispatcher asked if the shooting was accidental, von Bargen responded, "No, I was supposed to go to the hospital today, didn’t want to … well, I shot myself.” Von Bargen is a diabetic and was supposed to have two of his toes amputated that day.
The harrowing call was caught on tape. Entertainment site TMZ has the call.
One can hear Von Bargen painfully describing what happened to the dispatcher.
“Yes, I shot myself in the head and, uhh, I need help,” he said.
Unable to open his eyes or move to open his door, he was able to stay on the phone until police and fire officials arrived at his home five minutes after he called 911. Apparently worried that Von Bargen may have other weapons around, police can be heard yelling at Von Bargen to stay still and keep his hands where they could see them.
According to Montgomery Police Srgt. Greg Vondenbenken, Von Bargen was “seriously injured.” They took him to Bethesda North Hospital, where Vondenbenken says that his condition is improving.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images(LOS ANGELES) -- Lindsay Lohan's future is looking brighter. A day after news broke she'd be playing Elizabeth Taylor in a Lifetime movie, a Los Angeles judge said the actress is sailing through probation with flying colors.
"You're in the home stretch," Judge Stephanie Sautner told a beaming Lohan in court Wednesday morning. "You seem to be getting your life back on track and that's what we all hoped for."
Sautner explained as long as Lohan keeps her nose clean, and completes 14 more days of community service and five therapy sessions by the next progress hearing March 29, her formal probation on DUI charges will be considered successfully completed. Her probation on a theft case will require her only to "obey all laws," Sautner said.
Ingram Publishing/Thinkstock(KAMPALA, Uganda) -- American television producer Jeff Rice was found dead in a hotel in Uganda and police told ABC News he died of an apparent cocaine overdose.
Rice’s body was discovered in a luxury hotel in the capital city of Kampala on Friday. His assistant Katheryne Fuller was found unconscious and is now recovering at a hospital.
Police say hotel staff noticed a man hanging on a balcony. When they went to the room, they found Rice’s body on the balcony and Fuller lying in the room. Staff called police and rushed the victims to a hospital where Rice was declared dead, police said.
“Ms. Fuller is slowly recovering, and when she is recovered enough we will be able to talk to her and find out more about what happened,” said Uganda Police Force spokesman AsumanMugenyi.
Police initially believed Rice and Fuller may have been sickened by some type of food poisoning. Mugenyi denied reports that Rice was poisoned after he rebuffed a shakedown attempt from local thugs.
Rice was a veteran producer who worked on the latest season of the hit reality series The Amazing Race and the Emmy-nominated Animal Planet series Whale Wars. In addition to raising two young kids, he and his wife Sally Blackman operated a television and film production company called SB Productions in Durban, South Africa. Fuller was an employee of their company.
Rice and Fuller were not working on Amazing Race in Uganda. Fuller’s father Stuart Fuller said they were shooting a documentary and other crew members who were with them should know more about what sickened them.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- When Richard Kaminski had an unusual mole removed from his cheek in 1998, he thought it was the end of his experience with melanoma.
But more than 10 years later, Kaminski developed a cough that didn't go away. Medical tests confirmed the diagnosis: metastatic melanoma that had spread to his lungs.
Melanoma is a form of skin cancer that kills 85 percent of its victims within five years if it has spread. It is responsible for about 9,000 deaths in the United States a year, according to the American Cancer Society.
Kaminski was floored. "I had this awful thing working in my lungs," he said.
Doctors treated Kaminski with a drug typically used against this form of cancer, but without success. It was only when his oncologist put him in touch with Dr. Anna Pavlick at New York University, who enrolled him in a clinical trial of a medication called vemurafenib, that he began to turn the corner on the deadly illness.
Before treatment, Kaminski recalled, "I had great difficulty breathing. I couldn't put sentences together because I couldn't get a deep breath. I had pain in my chest." Three weeks after beginning the drug, "A lot of that was greatly diminished," he said.
Within three months, Kaminski's symptoms disappeared. Scans showed his tumors starting to regress. By the end of 2010, the tumors were gone.
Kaminski, now 65, is understandably thankful.
"In two weeks, I will be two years on this drug," he said. "It was a lifeline."
On Wednesday, the results of the clinical trial in which Kaminski was enrolled appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the study conducted at 13 centers in the U.S. and Australia, researchers followed 132 patients with Kaminski's type of melanoma who had failed to respond to standard treatment. In about half of them, vemurafenib shrunk their tumors. For another third of the patients, the tumors showed no progression once the drug regimen had kicked in. Dr. Lynn Schuchter at the University of Pennsylvania, another of the study's authors, called these numbers "unprecedented."
"I've treated patients [with melanoma] for almost 25 years and never seen a drug with this kind of activity," Schuchter said. "It's so much better than the therapies that have been available to us before."
Also impressive was the improvement in survival; patients on the drug lived, on average, for an additional 15.9 months after treatment began, compared with the six to 10 months typically seen with the disease. A larger trial, also published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the drug brought about improved survival at six months. But the authors of the new study were able to follow some of their patients much longer -- for more than a year after they'd started treatment.
For patients like Kaminski who fail standard treatment, the new drug offers hope. Unlike many other cancer drugs, vemurafenib was just as effective in patients who had failed a previous treatment as it was in patients who had received the drug right off the bat -- a rare finding when it comes to cancer treatments.
The drug is not without its limits. In targeted therapy, cancer cells can mutate slightly and stop being a target, a process called resistance. In this study, cancer tended to recur in patients after about seven months of treatment. Dr. Kelly McMasters, chairwoman of surgery at the University of Louisville who treats melanoma patients, points out, "It can cause the tumors to shrink, but they will recur on average in about six months."
That being said, McMasters said, "In some patients...vemurafenib offers the hope to shrink the tumors enough to allow [surgical removal]."
So far, resistance hasn't been an issue for Richard Kaminski. Two years into treatment, he continues to enjoy a relatively normal life. He loves to garden, although he does have to take precautions out in the sun since one of the side effects of the medication is sun sensitivity.
FDA/iStockphoto/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- A U.S. Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committee Wednesday recommended approval of the weight loss drug Qnexa, a treatment many hope will help millions of Americans who struggle with obesity.
In voting 20-2 for approval, the committee said Wednesday that Qnexa’s weight-loss benefits for the chronically obese outweighed the risks of birth defects and cardiovascular problems that have been associated with the drug. An FDA advisory panel recommended against approval in 2010 over concerns about the drug’s side effects, and the FDA rejected it shortly after that. Vivus, the drug’s manufacturer, recently submitted additional research.
The committee Wednesday recommended that the manufacturer take a number of steps to prevent the drug from causing birth defects like cleft palate, including a possible warning label targeted toward women of childbearing years.
The FDA has considered numerous anti-obesity drugs in the past 20 years, but most have failed to meet the agency’s standards for safety and effectiveness. But so far, data on Qnexa suggests that the drug is the most effective in helping patients shed up to 10 percent of their body weight. Those changes, along with diet and exercise modifications, could go a long way toward alleviating some of the health problems associated with obesity, such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
Critics say the risk of potentially dangerous side effects of Qnexa, which include increased heart rate, heart attacks and arrhythmias, are too great to make the drug available to millions of people, especially because long-term effects of the drug are still largely unknown.
“Public health cannot tolerate another diet drug approved that has not been accepted for cardiovascular risk especially in light of the suggested findings of Qnexa,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the health research group at Public Citizen, an advocacy group.
Obesity currently plagues one-third of Americans and has been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes and a range of other chronic, expensive health problems. Doctors and dietitians routinely recommend changes in diet and exercise as the safest and most effective way to shed pounds. But some acknowledge that these strategies just don’t work for a large number of obese patients. Bariatric surgery, though largely successful in producing weight loss, is not a viable option for many people.
Dr. Melina Jampolis, an obesity specialist in San Francisco, said the current options for treating obesity are “frustratingly limited,” and said it would be helpful if patients had additional tools to aid their weight loss.
“I think that combination therapy is essential as there are numerous individual and overlapping mechanisms that make weight loss difficult,” she said. “So the more of them that you can address with medication therapy when necessary, the more effective a regimen will be.”
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.) -- A California plastic surgeon is keeping it in the family by performing multiple cosmetic procedures on his own young daughters.
Dr. Michael Niccole, founder of the CosmetiCare Plastic Surgery Center in Newport Beach, Calif., gave his daughter Brittani, now 22, breast implants when she was 18. Brittani also had a rhinoplasty. Niccole performed surgery on his daughter Charm, now also 22, when she was 10 to turn her “outtie” belly button into an “innie.”
Dr. Niccole said he has performed surgery on other family members as well and felt comfortable operating on his daughters, both of whom are adopted.
“Who would give them the time -- that extra little look during surgery more than I would?” the surgeon said.
Brittani told 20/20 she wanted breast augmentation surgery to “build my self-esteem.”
“I didn’t have large breasts when I was younger, and all my friends did…I felt very self-conscious about it,” she said.
Both Brittani and Charm also receive regular injections of Botox to prevent wrinkles and undergo other cosmetic procedures.
Though critics say women Brittani and Charm's age have no business undergoing cosmetic procedures, Dr. Niccole defends his work on his daughters as “maintenance.”
“I’m not changing their looks in any means. They want maintenance,” he said. "They don’t want to get old. They want to stay young.”
