Latest News

Now, federal investigators are trying to determine why a lithium-ion battery caught fire in Boeing's long-awaited 787 Dreamliner last week, and they have grounded the planes until they figure it out.

While Boeing officials insist that the failure never endangered passengers or the plane's integrity, the prospect that batteries would leak flammable fluids and smoke on flights packed with passengers has opened perhaps the most unnerving chapter in the technology's relatively short life.

For Boeing, the development of the 787 represented a push into new technology and energy efficiency, and the company staked much of its future on the plane. It turned to the new batteries for many of the same reasons that Silicon Valley and Detroit have: they pack a lot of energy in a small package and, unlike older batteries, can be charged rapidly and frequently without loss of power.

Even though the safety standards are higher in aviation than most other industries, federal regulators decided in 2007 to approve Boeing's use of lithium-ion batteries for the first time in one of its passenger jets. But the agency also required the company to take a series of steps, among them to keep pressure from building in the batteries and toxic gases from escaping.

Just as in the early days of aviation, "you cannot do pioneering work without assuming some risk," said Hans Weber, president of Tecop, an aviation consulting firm. "In today's world, we don't have to pay the price of pioneering with death anymore, but we have to accept the fact we will have some incidents."

Still, safeguards for lithium-ion batteries have progressed to the point that a fire on an airplane should never have happened, said Sanjeev Mukerjee, a chemistry professor at Northeastern University and an expert on batteries.

"If a battery of that size catches fire, then a whole bunch of mechanisms didn't work," Mr. Mukerjee said. "Whoever is making that battery is doing a really bad job."

It is still not clear what caused the battery fire last week in Boston, about 30 minutes after a Japan Airlines 787 landed from Tokyo and passengers had gotten off the plane. The cleaning crew noticed smoke seeping into the cabin, and it took firefighters 40 minutes to put out the battery fire in the electrical bay in the back of the plane.

On Wednesday, a 787 had to make an emergency landing in Japan after pilots received a smoke alarm. Officials found that a battery in the front of the plane was charred and swollen. Chemicals appeared to have leaked, and black discolorations on the plane suggested that there had been smoke inside.

Investigators are considering a variety of causes, though it might be months before they pinpoint what went wrong and how to solve it. The problem could be in the basic design of the batteries, the units that charge them or in an undetected manufacturing flaw, experts said.

"It might not be the underlying technology; it might be the design of this particular unit," said Robert A. McKenzie, an electrical engineer and an aviation lawyer.

Other industries have found out the hard way that minor imperfections in lithium-ion batteries can cause big problems. In 2006, Lenovo, IBM, Dell and Apple all recalled laptops because of concerns about the hazards of lithium-ion batteries manufactured by Sony.

General Motors last year announced a series of enhancements to its electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, after two lithium-ion batteries caught fire days after a crash test.

While those fires were started under extraordinary conditions — and did not involve Volt owners — General Motors nonetheless reacted swiftly to the negative publicity and bolstered the structure and cooling system to protect the battery further in the event of a serious accident.

And about four years ago, Toyota considered switching to lithium-ion batteries for its popular Prius hybrid but decided to stick with an older chemistry, nickel-metal hydride. The reason was cost, said John Hanson, a spokesman for the company.

Others call him "Laaouar," or the One-Eyed, after he lost an eye to shrapnel; some call him "Mr. Marlboro" for the cigarette-smuggling monopoly he created across the Sahel region to finance his jihad. And French intelligence officials called him "the Uncatchable" because he escaped unharmed after apparently being involved in a series of kidnappings in 2003 that captured 32 European tourists, an undertaking which is thought to have earned him millions of dollars in ransoms.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, 40, born in the Algerian desert city of Ghardaïa, 350 miles south of Algiers, is now being called the mastermind of the hostage crisis at an internationally run natural-gas facility in eastern Algeria. Algerian officials say he mounted the assault on the facility and the mass abduction of foreigners; his spokesmen say the raid is in reprisal for the French military intervention in Mali and for Algeria's quiet support for the French war against Islamist militants in the Sahel.

Mr. Belmokhtar has been active in politics, moneymaking and fighting for decades in the Sahel, which includes Mali, Mauritania and Niger and is one of the poorest regions in the world. But through this single action, one of the most brazen kidnappings in years, he has suddenly become one of the best-known figures associated with the Islamist militancy sweeping the region and agitating capitals around the world.

The 1989 killing in Pakistan of Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian considered the "father of global jihad" and a mentor of Osama bin Laden's, prompted Mr. Belmokhtar to seek to avenge Mr. Azzam's death, he has said in interviews. At 19 he traveled to Afghanistan for training with Al Qaeda, and has claimed in interviews to have made contact with other jihadi luminaries like Abu Qatada and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, according to a 2009 Jamestown Foundation study. Bin Laden made contact with him, through emissaries, in the early 2000s, according to Djallil Lounnas, who teaches at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco.

Mr. Belmokhtar later named a son Osama, after Bin Laden, and inserted himself into local populations in the southern Algerian and northern Malian desert by marrying the daughter of a prominent Arab leader from Timbuktu, Mali. He is also said to have shared the riches of his lucrative activities with the impoverished local population, Mr. Lounnas has written.

Mr. Belmokhtar, described as taciturn, watchful and wary by a Malian journalist, Malick Aliou Maïga, who met him last summer, was one of the most experienced of the leaders of what became Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb until he broke with the group last year to form his own organization, the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, sometimes translated as the Signatories for Blood. Occasionally using the alias Khaled Abu Abass, he is thought to have based himself in Gao, Mali, which has seen heavy bombing by French warplanes.

It was not clear whether Mr. Belmokhtar was at the scene or commanding the operation from afar.

There are stories that he lost his eye fighting in Afghanistan, but others say he lost it fighting Algerian government troops after he returned to Algeria in 1993. The country was being ripped apart by civil war at the time, after the government annulled 1992 elections that were about to be won by an Islamist party. Mr. Belmokhtar has been a wanted man in Algeria since that time and condemned to death several times by Algerian courts.

Mr. Belmokhtar was falsely reported to have been killed in 1999. Nearly a decade later, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which he joined, adopted the jihadist ideology of Bin Laden and renamed itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Mr. Belmokhtar is considered to have been a key intermediary with Al Qaeda and a well-known supplier of weapons and matériel in the Sahara.

But he clearly does not share authority easily, and left or was removed from his post as commander of a battalion in Mali last October, reportedly for "straying from the right path," according to a Malian official, quoting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdel.

The dispute was about Mr. Belmokhtar's return to smuggling and trafficking. Dominique Thomas, a specialist in radical Islam, told Le Monde that Mr. Belmokhtar's activities ran counter to the group's official line, which presents itself as entirely virtuous.

Mr. Belmokhtar then founded his new group, which he allied with the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, another Islamist group that had broken off from Al Qaeda.

Te'o, a Notre Dame official said this week, was badly shaken by the call.

Nonetheless, two days later, on Dec. 8 at the Heisman Trophy ceremony, Te'o was asked about his most unforgettable moment of the season. Te'o, clearly aware of questions surrounding his girlfriend's death, responded with little hesitation: the memory he would never forget from the 2012 season was the moment he learned his girlfriend was dead.

That sequence of events in December was one of many being pored over Thursday — by journalists and bloggers, students at Notre Dame and an American public trying to figure out the truth at the heart of one of the most bizarre of sports stories.

Was Te'o a sympathetic victim of a cruel fraud, or a calculating participant in a phony story that had been milked to aid his bid for the Heisman Trophy?

The series of events in early December, though, like so much else that has emerged about Te'o and his girlfriend in the last 48 hours, is hardly conclusive. Te'o, in giving the interview on Dec. 8, quite possibly was nothing more than a frightened and confused young man, unsure himself of what was going on or what to say.

On Thursday, a day of little clarity and deepening mystery, Notre Dame stuck by its official version: Te'o was the target of a meanspirited and vicious hoax, and the university's hired investigators had determined that it involved a vast cast of characters, all engaged in an effort to humiliate a humble, private and perhaps somewhat naïve young man in the public spotlight.

Te'o, for his part, did not speak. His agent did not offer a statement, and a rumored interview on national television never occurred. His agent told The Associated Press that he had been in Bradenton, Fla., training at the IMG Academy in preparation for the N.F.L. draft.

One thing in the odd, evolving drama did seem to become clearer: as far back as early December, there were some people in the Twitter world who were beginning to sound alarms about the authenticity of Te'o's inspirational story.

Those people online maintained openly that they believed Te'o had been duped, with some pointing to a California man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo as the architect of the scheme. They even joked about the embarrassment and absurdity of the fake story line as Notre Dame prepared to play in the Bowl Championship Series title game against Alabama.

On Dec. 5, one Twitter message was sent to The New ND Nation, with 7,000 followers, saying it needed "to know the truth" about Te'o's girlfriend.

A blogger, Justin Megahan, collected some of the Twitter messages in one blog post and titled it "Catfished," referring to "Catfish," a 2010 film in which a woman created a fake online persona to strike up a relationship.

The alarms online, such as they were, never seemed to gain wider attention. Perhaps because, at the time, a hoax seemed an unlikely possibility.

Even a month and a half later — and after the Web site Deadspin first reported on the hoax on Wednesday — figuring out the exact truth continued to be challenging.

As of Thursday evening, the people identified by Deadspin to be behind the hoax, including Tuiasosopo, had not emerged to tell their side of the story. Telephone calls to Tuiasosopo were not successful. Some people who appeared close to him shunned journalists on their Twitter accounts.

As President Obama tries to persuade a reluctant Congress to pass new gun laws, the poll found that a majority of Americans — 54 percent — think gun control laws should be tightened, up markedly from a CBS News poll last April that found that only 39 percent backed stricter laws.

The rise in support for stricter gun laws stretched across political lines, including an 18-point increase among Republicans. A majority of independents now back stricter gun laws.

Whether the Newtown shooting — in which 20 first graders and 6 adults were killed — will have a long-term effect on public opinion of gun laws is hard to assess just a month after the rampage. But unlike the smaller increases in support for gun control immediately after other mass shootings, including after the 2011 shooting in Tucson that severely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the latest polling results suggest a deeper, and possibly more resonating, shift.

In terms of specific gun proposals being considered, the poll found even wider support, including among gun owners.

The idea of requiring background checks on all gun purchases, which would eliminate a provision that allows about 40 percent of guns to be sold by unlicensed sellers without checks, was overwhelmingly popular. Nine in 10 Americans would favor such a law, the poll found — including 9 in 10 of the respondents who said that there was a gun in their household, and 85 percent whose households include members of the National Rifle Association.

A ban on high-capacity magazines, like the 15-round and 30-round magazines that have been used in several recent mass shootings, was supported by more than 6 in 10, and by a majority of those who live in households with guns. And just over half of all respondents, 53 percent, said they would support a ban on some semiautomatic weapons.

After the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Tucson in 2011, polls found that 47 percent of Americans favored stricter gun laws.

"I'm from a rural area in the South, I grew up in a gun culture, my father hunted," Leslie Hodges, a 64-year-old graphic artist who lives in Atlanta and has a gun, said in a follow-up interview. "However, I don't believe being able to have a gun keeps you from thinking reasonably about changes that would keep someone from walking into a school and being able to kill 20 children in 20 seconds. I think that we can say, O.K., we want the freedom to have guns in this country, but there are rules we can all agree to that will make us all safer."

The poll also gave an indication of the state of play in Washington at the outset of what is expected to be a fierce debate over the nation's gun laws, as the National Rifle Association and several members of Congress, particularly Republicans in the House, have criticized the gun control measures that Mr. Obama proposed Wednesday and have vowed to block them.

Americans said that they trusted the president over Republicans in Congress to make the right decisions about gun laws by a margin of 47 percent to 39 percent, the poll found.

The National Rifle Association, the powerful gun lobby, is viewed favorably by nearly 4 in 10 Americans, the poll found. All told, 38 percent said that they had a favorable opinion of the group, while 29 percent had a negative view and the rest had no opinion. The N.R.A. was viewed positively by 54 percent of those with guns in their homes.

But the group is deeply unpopular with people in households without guns, who were twice as likely to have a negative view of the N.R.A. as a positive one: 41 percent of them expressed a negative view of it, while only 20 percent expressed a positive one.

The survey underscored how common guns in America are: 47 percent of those surveyed said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, and 31 percent had close friends or relatives who did. The top reasons cited for owning guns were protection and hunting.

The national telephone poll was conducted by land lines and cellphones from Jan. 11 to Jan. 15, before the president announced his proposals to curb gun violence. It surveyed 1,110 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Some gun owners, like Sally Brady, a 69-year-old retired teacher who lives in Amissville, Va., explained in follow-up interviews why they would support some restrictions on ammunition or more thorough background checks of all gun buyers.

"I see no reason for high-capacity magazines if you want to go hunting," said Mrs. Brady, an independent who owns a hunting rifle. "The purpose of hunting is sport, and you don't need a whole big bunch of bullets to shoot a deer or a squirrel. If you're that poor of a shot, stay out of the woods."

Despite the higher support for stricter gun laws, many Americans do not think the changes would be very effective at deterring violence. While most Americans, 53 percent, said stricter gun laws would help prevent gun violence, about a quarter said they would help a lot.

Other steps were seen as being potentially more effective. About three-quarters of those surveyed said that having more police officers or armed security guards would help prevent mass shootings in public places. And more than 8 in 10 said better mental health screening and treatment would help prevent gun violence.

Violence in popular culture is seen by a large majority of Americans, 75 percent, as contributing to gun violence in the United States, including about 4 in 10 who say it contributes a lot.  

In every episode of the show, a docudrama, the hosts try to unite couples who have interacted online or via telephone but have never met in person. Participants find out whether the objects of their affection are telling the truth about who they really are.

In one episode, a man suspects that a pageant contestant who messaged him on Facebook may not be real. She turns out to be a friend who used pictures online to create the persona.

In another episode, a woman wants to find out the truth about Mike, a man with whom she developed an online relationship. But it is revealed that Mike is actually the creation of a woman who wanted to divert attention from an ex-boyfriend. Some lies on the show are bigger than others, but typically the reveal at the end results in surprise or, often, embarrassment at having been duped.

A so-called catfish is the engineer of the false online identity, a reference to the bottom-feeding, whiskered water dwellers. Getting catfished is when someone falls for a person online who is not necessarily real. It can involve pictures, phone calls, social media profiles, text messages, e-mails and even phony friends or family members.

Many were introduced to this strange universe of digital dupers for the first time Wednesday when Deadspin reported that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o's girlfriend, whose death provided an inspirational story line for the Fighting Irish's triumphant season, did not exist. While the details of what Te'o knew and when are still emerging, the term "catfished" exploded online with Twitter hash tags created and Google searches soaring.

Notre Dame has said that Te'o was the victim of a hoax, with Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick even mentioning the show "Catfish" during a news conference Wednesday. In a statement, Te'o called the situation "painful and humiliating." It is unclear whether Te'o had a role in the hoax or lied about aspects of the relationship.

The term "catfishing" became popular with the release of the 2010 documentary film "Catfish," which follows a man's relationship with a woman on Facebook and his quest to find out whether she is real. The TV show of the same name followed on MTV.

For those who have immersed themselves in that world, the Te'o story was not surprising.

Andrew Jarecki, a producer of the film and an executive producer of the television show, said Te'o's experience sounded typical.

"We've been living this experience for years," Jarecki said.

He said part of what inspired the idea for the television show was the number of inquiries those involved with the film received about being potential victims and even perpetrators after the documentary's release.

"It's a new category of charades," Jarecki said. "It was only a matter of time before it happened to someone famous."

He said that while many of the tools used in catfish schemes — Facebook, Twitter and cellphones — were modern, the genesis of the trend was age-old: loneliness. Even though most computers are equipped with tools to video chat, he pointed out, many of those who become duped by online personalities stick to the phone and pictures. Te'o has said that he spoke at length with a woman he thought was named Lennay Kekua on the phone and received text messages from her brother.

"It's about finding someone who feels real to you," Jarecki said. "In the Internet, the person is satisfying that need. That's why he says he's embarrassed. You have people who are drawn into a situation."

For the most part, catfishing is not against the law, said Bradley Shear, a Washington-based lawyer who has examined legal issues related to social media. Some states have laws that criminalize impersonating someone, but not necessarily creating a fictitious person.

Real people in a picture that was used by a catfish to create a fake identity could have a claim because their likeness was used without permission, Shear said. Legal details may vary by state, and most laws are focused on identity theft, in which someone steals an identity in order to financially gain rather than for matters of cyberheartbreak.

Should Te'o pursue damages and claim that he lost an endorsement opportunity or that his N.F.L. draft position suffered as a result of the girlfriend hoax, he could face an uphill battle in court, Shear said.

"It's very difficult to win," he said. "You have to prove that direct, causal connection."

Deception online is far from something new. Some 81 percent of people misrepresented their weight, height or age in their online dating profiles, according to research from Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"People lie frequently online, but the amount by which they lied was small," Toma said. "Technologically, it's effortless to lie. Theoretically, deception is easy."

Becoming a catfish or falling prey to one is understandable and perhaps more common in an era of heavy texting, e-mailing and online chatting, she said.

Andrea Baker, a sociologist at Ohio University who has studied online relationships and communities, said: "I totally understand how these emotions develop. These are people who are lonesome who turn out to be romantics rather than realists. They buy into some deep bond."

Even highly intelligent people may find themselves susceptible to such a hoax, Baker said, part of the public's fascination with the catfish phenomenon and the Te'o story.

"I think people really identify with this thought — 'There's someone out there for me; it's just a matter of finding that person,' " Baker said. "It's a fantasy for a lot of people that the online person could be it, but knowing underneath it could be too good to be true. And there's the idea that we're trying to learn something from these experiences because we could also be caught up in it ourselves."

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth of United States District Court, imposed the fines on Wednesday, saying the Russian government had done nothing to comply with a judgment that he issued in 2010 ordering it to return the texts, more than 12,000 books and 50,000 religious papers known as the Schneerson Collection.

It was not immediately clear what form the Kremlin's threatened retaliation would take. In an earlier reaction to the dispute over the collection, which has now lasted decades, it forbade its state-run museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, to lend works to American museums. That highly unusual ban, instituted in February 2011, has left gaps in some major exhibitions.

The Kremlin said it feared that those works would be seized and held as ransom in the dispute, even though American officials have insisted that such seizures are prohibited by law.

The levying of the fines, potentially totaling more than $18 million a year but unlikely to be paid, added tension to Russian-American relations, which have become strained over the past year. Most recently, the countries have been at bitter odds over a Russian law banning adoptions of Russian children by American families, which itself was retaliation for an American law punishing Russians accused of violating human rights.

"The Russian Foreign Ministry regards as absolutely unlawful and provocative the decision of the federal court in Washington," the government said in a statement on Thursday. "We have repeatedly stated that this verdict is extraterritorial in character, contradicts international law and is legally void."

The government called the Schneerson Collection, which is held partly in the Russian State Library and partly in the Russian Military Archives, a "national treasure of the Russian people." It added, "U.S. officials are hopefully aware that if Russian state property, not protected by diplomatic immunity, is seized in the United States, as Chabad is demanding as an injunctive measure, we will have to take a tough response."

At a hearing this month, the Obama administration urged Judge Lamberth not to impose the fines, saying that they would further sour relations with Russia and imperil diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute. But in his decision, Judge Lamberth rejected those arguments and said he saw no reason to expect diplomacy to succeed.

In 1991, a court in Moscow ordered that the collection be turned over to the Chabad organization, but the Soviet Union soon collapsed, and the judgment was set aside by the Russian authorities. The Chabad group filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2004, but in 2009, after Russia failed in an effort to have the case thrown out, the Kremlin withdrew its lawyers and declared that the court had no authority to adjudicate the matter.

"Defendants have steadily resisted all legal and diplomatic efforts to compel them to return the collection for at least two decades," Judge Lamberth wrote in his ruling. He added, "The United States' claim that sanctions would 'risk damage to significant foreign policy interests' is similarly unconvincing."

In other respects, damage from the dispute, at least from a cultural perspective, has already been severe. The world's most prestigious museums rely heavily on international loans to put together large and lucrative shows, and such lending was common between the United States and Russia until Russia imposed its moratorium.

Although Chabad now has a large presence in Russia, particularly in Moscow, where it helped build a huge Jewish history museum that opened late last year, Lubavitch officials here said they had no official role in the dispute.

The police declined to say why the child, a second grader, was carrying a .22-caliber handgun or how it had been discovered. It was not fired at the school, Wave Preparatory Elementary School in Far Rockaway, they said.

Students there described a nervous few hours that began when the principal went on the intercom to say that the school was being locked down and that they were to remain in their classrooms.

"I thought we were going to get killed," said Javier Ferrufino, an 11-year-old in fifth grade. "We went to the back of the classroom. I hid with my friend behind some computers."

Officials at the school declined to comment.

The city's Education Department released a statement confirming that a gun had been found in the backpack of a second-grader and that the school had been locked down, but it did not provide further details.

When parents arrived in the afternoon to pick up their children, more than a dozen police officers were still at the school.

A notice given to parents said: "Due to an incident today there was need to secure all students in their classrooms. This procedure is called a lockdown. Our school-based support team is prepared to assist you with any emotional needs as a result of today's lockdown."

Giovanni Dennis, an 8-year-old third grader, said he hid under his teacher's desk after the principal announced the lockdown.

His mother, Cecelia Dennis, said she was upset that she did not know about the lockdown until she arrived to get Giovanni.

"I think they did a good job of locking down the school," she said. "But they could have notified the parents earlier. I am very upset."