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INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Santorum on the defensive as Romney attacks
BY ALAN COWELL AND STEVEN LEE MYERS
Washington Post Service
New York Times Service
MESA, Ariz. — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is on the defensive here as rival Mitt Romney has attacked the former senator over spending and earmarks and accused him of compiling an inconsistent and contradictory record. Wednesday night, in the first GOP debate since he won a trio of states two weeks ago, Santorum fired back, accusing Romney of his own inconsistencies, but he struggled under repeated criticism to explain his record. The squabbling became so intense at times that the two talked past each other, with voices raised, each trying to gain the upper hand. SANTORUM When Santorum came under fire for supporting earmarks as a senator from Pennsylvania, he countered by noting that Romney had sought federal money when ROMNEY he was governor of Massachusetts and when he was in charge of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Romney didn’t apologize for the money he received from Washington for the latter, telling his rival, “Our Games were successful. But while I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’ ” Santorum began to respond, only to be interrupted by Romney, which brought a sharp response from the former senator. “You’re misrepresenting the facts,” Santorum said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” The high-stakes debate came six days before crucial primaries in Arizona and Michigan and less than two weeks before Super Tuesday, the biggest round of contests this year. Santorum’s surge, the latest twist in what has been an unpredictable nomination contest, has put Romney in jeopardy of losing in Michigan, where he was born and
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Barney Rosset, Grove Press publisher, dies at 89 BY DOUGLAS MARTIN
New York Times Service
Barney Rosset, the flamboyant, provocative publisher who helped change the course of publishing in the United States, bringing masters like Samuel Beckett to U.S. citizens’ attention under his Grove Press imprint and winning celebrated First Amendment slugfests against censorship, has died in New York. He was 89. His son Peter said he died
the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., have reconstructed the Y chromosome’s past and find that its gene-shedding days seem to be over. Men are not living on borrowed time after all, they reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. In people, sex is determined by a single gene that resides on the Y chromosome. Chromosomes come in pairs, with one set bequeathed by each parent, and the Y is paired with X such that men have an X-Y pair and
COLONOSCOPY CUTS RISK OF COLORECTAL CANCER DEATH IN HALF, STUDY SHOWS, 3A
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JIM COOPER/AP FILE
Tuesday after a double-heartvalve replacement. Over a long career Rosset championed beat poets, French surrealists, German expressionists and dramatists of the absurd, helping to bring them all to prominence. Besides publishing Beckett, he brought early exposure to European writers like Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet and gave intellectual ammunition to the New Left by publishing Che Gue-
Diminished Y chromosome holding its ground Men, or at least male biologists, have long been alarmed that their tiny Y chromosome, once the same size as its buxom partner, the X, will continue to wither away until it simply vanishes. The male sex would then become extinct, they fear, leaving women to invent some virgin-birth method of reproduction and propagate a sexless species. The fear is not without serious basis: The Y and X chromosomes once shared some 800 genes in common, but now, after shedding genes furiously, the Y carries just 19 of its ancestral genes, as well as the male-determining gene that is its raison d’etre. So much DNA has been lost that the chromosome is a fraction of its original size. But there are grounds for hope that the Y chromosome has reached a plateau of miniaturized perfection and will shrivel no more. Researchers led by Jennifer Hughes and David Page of
vara, Ho Chi Minh and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Most of all, beginning in high school when he published a mimeographed journal titled “The Anti-Everything,” Rosset, slightly built and sometimes irascible, savored a fight. He defied censors in the 1960s by publishing D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer,
LONDON — A United Nations panel concluded on Thursday that “gross human rights violations” had been ordered by the Syrian authorities as state policy at “the highest levels of the armed forces and the government,” amounting to crimes against humanity. The panel of three investigators, led by Paulo Pinheiro of Brazil, did not release the names of the officials it had identified as bearing responsibility. Instead, they delivered the names in a sealed envelope to the United Nations’ top human rights official. The 72-page report published by the panel said that the insurgent Free Syrian Army, made up of defectors from forces loyal to President Bashar al Assad, had also committed abuses, but those were “not comparable in scale and organization to those carried out by the state.” The investigators said the report was based on 369 interviews with victims, witnesses, defectors and other people with “inside knowledge” of the situation in Syria. They also examined photographs, video recordings and satellite imagery to corroborate some witness accounts. The investigators said they were not allowed to enter Syria to conduct inquiries at first hand. The report, delivered to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was published as security forces continued to bombard areas of Homs, a city in central Syria, for a 20th successive day on Thursday, despite a growing outcry and international calls for the creation of humanitarian corridors to reach the sick, the wounded and the frail. The newest shelling, reported by activists, came on the eve of a major international gathering in Tunisia to seek a way out of the crisis. Some reports from Homs said that tanks had pressed into contested areas of the city where opponents of the government say hundreds of trapped civilians have died. The Homs campaign has become one of the deadliest in nearly a year of violent repression by the government of Assad. The foreign ministers of several
Over a long publishing career, Barney Rosset championed beat poets, French surrealists, German expressionists and dramatists of the absurd, helping to bring them all to prominence.
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New York Times Service
109TH YEAR I ©2012 THE MIAMI HERALD
U.N. panel accuses Syria of crimes against humanity
BY DAN BALZ AND SANDHYA SOMASHEKHAR
BY NICHOLAS WADE
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012
women an X-X. When the maledetermining gene first arose, • TURN TO GENES, 2A
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WIDESPREAD ATTACKS IN IRAQ KILL AT LEAST 50, 6A
SEC DEFENDS ‘NO WRONGDOING’ SETTLEMENTS, BUSINESS FRONT
U.S. justices appear open to affirming Stolen Valor Act BY ADAM LIPTAK
New York Times Service
That was all false, and Alvarez was prosecuted under a 2005 law, the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to say falsely that one has “been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the armed forces of the United States.” Alvarez argued that his remarks were protected by the First Amendment. His case ran into trouble at the Supreme Court as it emerged that many justices accepted two fundamental propositions. First, most of the justices seemed to accept that the First Amendment does not protect calculated falsehoods that cause at least some kinds of harm. Second, there seemed to be something like a consensus that the government has a substantial interest in protecting the integrity of its system for honoring military distinction. To arrive at those two propositions, the justices worked
WASHINGTON — Over the course of an hourlong argument, the Supreme Court seemed gradually to accept that it might be able to uphold a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about military honors, notwithstanding the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees. The justices were aided by suggestions from the government about how to limit the scope of a possible ruling in its favor and by significant concessions from a lawyer for the defendant. The case arose from a lie told in 2007 at a public meeting by Xavier Alvarez, an elected member of the board of directors of a water district in Southern California. “I’m a retired Marine of 25 years,” he said. “I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy.” • TURN TO STOLEN VALOR, 2A
U.K. LEADER WANTS SOCCER RACISM ACTION PLAN, SPORTS FRONT
INDEX THE AMERICAS............4A U.S. NEWS ...................5A OPINION........................7A COMICS & PUZZLES ..6B
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