Tennessee women are more likely than men to approve of the job the 44th president is doing, a Vanderbilt University poll found. African-Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to give Obama two thumbs up.

The opposite trends favor Mitt Romney, Obama’s likely opponent when he stands for re-election in November. The expected Republican nominee gets more support from men than women and twice as much from whites as he gets from African-Americans.

Vanderbilt’s pollster, Princeton Survey Research Associates International, surveyed 1,002 Tennessee residents who are 18 and older between May 2 and May 9. Three out of four participants said they were registered to vote. The poll, sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Read the expanded version of this report at the Tennessean Web site.

The Rev. Alvaro Corcuera wrote a letter to all Legion members in which he admitted he knew before he became superior in 2005 that the Rev. Thomas Williams, a well-known American television personality, author and moral theologian, had fathered a child. He said he had heard rumors of the child even before then when he was rector but took Williams' word they weren't true.

Corcuera acknowledged that even after he confirmed Williams' paternity, he did nothing to prevent him from teaching morality to seminarians or preaching about ethics on television, in his many speaking engagements or his 14 books, including "Knowing Right from Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience."

Williams, for example, was the keynote speaker at a Legion-affiliated women's conference just last month in the U.S.

Williams admitted last week he had fathered the child after The Associated Press confronted the Legion with the allegation. In a new statement Tuesday, Williams said he had resisted his superiors' encouragement to keep a low profile after the allegations were known to them.

"I foolishly thought that I had left this sin in my past, and that I could make up for some of the wrong I had done by doing the greatest good possible with the gifts God has given me. This was an error in judgment, and yet another thing I must ask your forgiveness for," he wrote, according to the text obtained by the AP.

Williams has not identified the mother or said whether he was supporting the child or in any way involved in the child's life. The Legion has said the child is being cared for.

Revelations of Williams' child have further eroded the Legion's credibility and compounded the scandal at the order, which in 2009 admitted that its late founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel had sexually abused his seminarians and fathered three children with two women. Maciel, who founded the Legion in 1941 in Mexico, died in 2008.

The scandal is particularly grave given that Maciel was held up as a model for the faithful by Pope John Paul II, who was impressed by the orthodox order's ability to attract money and young men to the priesthood. Maciel's double life, and the well-known problems of the cult-like order, have cast a shadow over John Paul's legacy since the Vatican knew of Maciel's crimes as early as 1950 yet he enjoyed the highest Vatican praise and access until he was finally sanctioned by Rome in 2006.

In 2010, the Vatican took over the Legion after determining that the order itself had been contaminated by Maciel's influence and needed to be "purified." The Vatican cited problems of the Legion's culture, in which silence reigned and authority was abused, as being in need of reform, as well as the need for its constitutions to be rewritten and its charism, or essential spirit, to be defined.

Following an AP investigation, the Legion on May 11 admitted that seven priests were under Vatican investigation for allegedly sexually abusing minors, an indication that Maciel's crimes were not his alone. Corcuera provided an update Tuesday, saying two of those cases had been dismissed, leaving five abuse-related cases under investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Another two priests are being investigated for other sacramental violations, believed to involve using confession or spiritual direction to have inappropriate sexual relations with women.

In his letter Tuesday, Corcuera announced that the Legion was going to review all past cases of allegations of sexual abuse to ensure that they were handled properly. Victims of Legion priests and critics of the order have said there are many more cases of abusers which have been well-known to the leadership but covered up for decades.

"Are there other cases waiting to be discovered, more scandals ready to attack your faith and trust? I can never say for sure," Corcuera wrote. "I can, however, tell you that we are following the lead of Pope Benedict XVI in dealing with abuse and sexual misconduct in the Legion."

Corcuera's letter is unlikely to stem the outrage among the members of the Legion's lay branch Regnum Christi, for whom Williams was a major point of reference in the United States and a top public defender of Maciel when the allegations of his crimes were leveled years ago.

One month ago, Williams was the keynote speaker at Regnum Christi's April 18-21 annual national women's convention in Greenville, Rhode Island, where he spoke about his 2010 book on Jesus. He was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at another Regnum Christi women's conference in Michigan in October.

Corcuera said he actually knew of the allegations against Williams before he became superior in 2005, but took Williams' word that they weren't true. After becoming superior in 2005, he said he learned for sure of the child's existence and asked Williams to start withdrawing from his public work. But only in 2010 did he limit Williams' work as a priest.

Williams, however, continued to write books, speak at conventions, author articles and, most significantly, teach morality to seminarians at the Legion's university in Rome. He only stopped teaching in February, abruptly, after a Spanish association of victims of the Legion forwarded the allegations against Williams to the Vatican.

Knox County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded shortly before 3 p.m. to the apartment at 7310 Old Clinton Pike, where the three victims, all of whom had been shot, said KCSO spokeswoman Martha Dooley.

Shortly thereafter, a male suspect was taken into custody at a nearby residence inside the city limits on Hickory Street by Knoxville Police Department officers, Dooley said.

Read the full story on the Knoxville News Sentinel website.

Dharun Ravi, 20, could have gotten 10 years behind bars for his part in a case that burst onto front pages when Tyler Clementi threw himself to his death off the George Washington Bridge.

Instead, Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman gave Ravi a month in jail, placed him on three years’ probation and ordered him to get counseling and pay $10,000 toward a program to help victims of hate crimes.

“Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance,” the judge said.

Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said he will appeal the sentence, calling it insufficient.

The tear-filled sentencing touched on many of the issues that made the case heart-wrenching and legally complicated: anti-gay bullying, teen suicide, hate-crime laws in the fast-changing Internet age, and the uses and abuses of technology in the hands of young people.

Ravi did not speak in court but shed tears as his mother pleaded with the judge not to send him to prison. Afterward, Ravi, his family and his lawyers left court without comment. He is expected to appeal his conviction.

In handing down the sentence, the judge quoted an email from Clementi himself describing Ravi’s conduct as “wildly inappropriate.”

At the same time, Berman pointed out that Ravi was not charged in Clementi’s suicide. He said Ravi has spent 20 months in “exile” since his arrest. And he suggested “hate crime” is a misnomer for what Ravi was convicted of: “I do not believe he hated Tyler Clementi.”

He also said he has examined the bias intimidation laws in 39 states and found that New Jersey’s is among the broadest. Most, he said, are used only to increase the sentences of people convicted of violent crimes.

The judge said he would recommend Ravi not be deported to his native India. Deportation is still a possibility, but a sentence of a year or more would have been more likely to trigger it.

Prosecutors had asked that Ravi be sent to prison; they did not say how much time he should get other than that it did not have to be the maximum. If prosecutors appeal the sentence, Ravi may not have to report to jail on May 31 as ordered.

New Jersey gay rights organization Garden State Equality expressed disappointment with the punishment. In a statement, chairman Steven Goldstein suggested that while the maximum would have been an act of “vengeance,” 30 days was too light.

“This was not merely a childhood prank gone awry,” Goldstein said.

Bill Dobbs, a New York gay rights activist who has long argued that hate-crime laws can be dangerous, said he believes the judge gave a short sentence in part in response to a backlash against the prosecution that became visible in recent weeks, including at a rally last week at New Jersey’s Statehouse, where hundreds of people called for leniency.

“Law and order cannot solve social problems,” he said. “If you put too much pressure on one person, you can crush someone on the receiving end.”

Marc Poirier, a professor at Seton Hall Law School, said the judge skillfully found a middle ground. “Having no jail time would have been interpreted as being a slap on the wrist,” he said. And a sentence of five to 10 years would be “out of control.”

The case began in September 2010 when Ravi’s randomly assigned roommate asked Ravi for the dorm room alone so that he and a guest could have privacy. Ravi went to a friend’s room, and they used a computer to watch Clementi and another man kissing.

They told others about it through instant messages and tweets, with Ravi boasting: “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

When Clementi asked for privacy again two days later, Ravi agreed, then told friends how to access his webcam. But this time, the camera was not on when the guest came over. There was testimony both that Clementi unplugged it and that Ravi himself put it to sleep.

The next night, Clementi — who learned he had been spied on — committed suicide at age 18, leaving behind a final Facebook update: “jumping off the gw bridge, sorry.”

Gay-rights activists held up Clementi as an example of the consequences of bullying gays. President Barack Obama himself weighed in on the tragedy.

Ravi was convicted in March of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation on the basis of sexual orientation — an offense widely referred to as a hate crime — and trying to cover his tracks by destroying text messages and tweets and tampering with a witness.

As for Clementi’s suicide, his mother, Jane Clementi, told the judge she didn’t know exactly why her son killed himself. And Ravi’s lawyers argued that the trial was not fair because the judge did not give them details from Clementi’s computer that may have explained it.

Ravi is being “demonized by the gay community, and they’re associating whatever he did with the death of Tyler,” said lawyer Steven Altman.

Clementi’s father, Joe Clementi, told the judge that Ravi deserved to be punished, saying the young man saw his son as undeserving of basic human decency. The elder Clementi said Ravi “still does not get it” and has no remorse.

Ravi’s mother, Sabitha Ravi, said in court that her son “doesn’t have any hatred in his heart toward anybody.”

“Dharun’s dreams are shattered and he has been living in hell for the past 20 months,” she said through tears, recounting how he has lost more than 20 pounds from an already-thin frame and how he only finds comfort with his little brother and his dog.

Before the trial, prosecutors had offered Ravi a plea bargain that called for no prison time. He turned it down.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan’s staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

In describing Brennan’s arrangement to The Associated Press, the officials provided the first detailed description of the military’s previous review process that set a schedule for killing or capturing terror leaders around the Arab world and beyond. They spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials are not allowed to publicly describe the classified targeting program.

One senior administration official argues that Brennan’s move adds another layer of review that augments rather than detracts from the Pentagon’s role. The official says that in fact there will be more people at the table making the decisions, including representatives from every agency involved in counterterrorism, before they are reviewed by senior officials and ultimately the president.

The CIA’s process remains unchanged, but never included the large number of interagency players the Pentagon brought to the table for its debates.

And the move gives Brennan greater input earlier in the process, before senior officials make the final recommendation to President Barack Obama. Officials outside the White House expressed concern that drawing more of the decision-making process to Brennan’s office could turn it into a pseudo military headquarters, entrusting the fate of al-Qaida targets to a small number of senior officials.

Previously, targets were first discussed in meetings run by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen at the time, with Brennan being just one of the voices in the debate.

The new Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Martin Dempsey, has been more focused on shrinking the U.S. military as the Afghan war winds down and less on the covert wars overseas.

With Dempsey less involved, Brennan believed there was an even greater need to draw together different agencies’ viewpoints, showing the American public that al-Qaida targets are chosen only after painstaking and exhaustive debate, the senior administration official said.

But some of the officials carrying out the policy are equally leery of “how easy it has become to kill someone,” one said. The U.S. is targeting al-Qaida operatives for reasons such as being heard in an intercepted conversation plotting to attack a U.S. ambassador overseas, the official said. Stateside, that conversation could trigger an investigation by the Secret Service or FBI.

The CIA and the Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment.

Drone strikes are highly controversial in Pakistan, too. Obama met briefly on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Chicago on Monday with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Pakistan has closed key transit routes used by NATO to send supplies to troops in Afghanistan in response to a U.S. airstrike that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers.

An example of a recent Pentagon-led drone strike was the fatal attack in January on al-Qaida commander Bilal al-Berjawi in Somalia. U.S. intelligence and military forces had been watching him for days. When his car reached the outskirts of Mogadishu, the drones fired a volley of missiles, obliterating his vehicle and killing him instantly. The drones belonged to the elite U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. The British-Lebanese citizen al-Berjawi ended up on the JSOC list after a studied debate run by the Pentagon.

The Defense Department’s list of potential drone or raid targets is about two dozen names long, the officials said. The previous process for vetting them, now mostly defunct, was established by Mullen early in the Obama administration, with a major revamp in the spring of 2011, two officials said.

Drone attacks were split between JSOC and the CIA, which keeps a separate list of targets, though it overlaps with the Pentagon list. By law, the CIA can target only al-Qaida operatives or affiliates who directly threaten the U.S. JSOC has a little more leeway, allowed by statue to target members of the larger al-Qaida network.

Under the old Pentagon-run review, the first step was to gather evidence on a potential target. That person’s case would be discussed over an interagency secure video teleconference, involving the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department, among other agencies. Among the data taken into consideration: Is the target a member of al-Qaida or its affiliates; is he engaged in activities aimed at the U.S. overseas or at home?

If a target isn’t captured or killed within 30 days after he is chosen, his case must be reviewed to see if he’s still a threat.

The CIA’s process is more insular. Only a select number of high-ranking staff can preside over the debates run by the agency’s Covert Action Review Group, which then passes the list to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to carry out the drone strikes. The Director of National Intelligence, Jim Clapper, is briefed on those actions, one official said.

Al-Berjawi’s name was technically on both lists — the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s. In areas where both JSOC and the CIA operate, the military task force commander and CIA chief of station confer, together with representatives of U.S. law enforcement, on how best to hit the target. If it’s deemed possible to grab the target, for interrogation or simply to gather DNA to prove the identity of a deceased person, a special operations team is sent, as in the case of the 2009 Navy SEAL raid against al-Qaida commander Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. Nabhan’s convoy was attacked by helicopter gunships, after which the raiders landed and took his body for identification, before burying him at sea.

But if the al-Qaida operative is in transit from Somalia to Yemen by boat, for instance, U.S. security officials might opt to use the Navy to intercept and the FBI to arrest him, officials said.

Obama, presiding over a 50-nation war coalition summit in his hometown, summed up the mood of all the nations by saying the Afghanistan that will be left behind will be stable enough for them to depart — good enough after a decade of war— but still loaded with troubles.

The war that began in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will finish at the end of 2014.

“I don’t think there’s ever going to be an optimal point where we say, ‘This is all done. This is perfect. This is just the way we wanted it,’” Obama said as the NATO summit closed. “This is a process, and it’s sometimes a messy process.”

Obama never spoke of victory.

Afghan forces for the first time will take over the lead of the combat mission by the middle of 2013, a milestone moment in a long, costly transition of control. Even in a backup role, U.S. forces and all the rest will face surprise attacks and bombings until the war’s end.

Wary of creating a vacuum in a volatile region, the nations also promised a lasting partnership with Afghanistan, meaning many years of contributing tax dollars, personnel and political capital after the end of their soldiers’ combat. The United States has already cut its own deal with Afghanistan along those lines, including a provision that allows U.S. military trainers and special forces to remain in Afghanistan after the war closes.

In an escalating election-year environment, Obama was as at the center of the action in Chicago, beaming and boasting about the city’s performance in hosting the event. Noisy protesters loaded the city’s streets at times, which Obama called just the kind of free expression NATO defends.

Tensions with Pakistan undermined some of the choreographed unity. Pakistan has not yet agreed to end the closure of key transit routes into Afghanistan — retaliation for American airstrikes that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers months ago — and the issue hung over the summit.

Obama had no official talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, although the two chatted briefly. Obama spoke of progress on the standoff and with Zardari overall, but he added: “I don’t want to paper over real challenges there. There’s no doubt that there have been tensions.”

On Afghanistan, led by Obama, the partners are in essence staying the course. They stuck with a timeline long established and underscored that there will be no second-guessing the decision about when to leave.

Since 2010, they have been planning to finish the war at the end of 2014, even as moves by nations such as France to pull combat troops out early have tested the strength of the coalition. The shift to have Afghan forces take the lead of the combat mission next year has also been expected. Leaders presented it as a significant turning point in the war.

It will be “the moment when throughout Afghanistan people can look out and see their own troops and police stepping up to the challenge,” said the NATO chief, Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

What the world is poised to leave behind is an Afghanistan still riddled with poverty, corruption and political instability.

Yet, out of money and patience, the U.S.-led partnership said it is confident Afghanistan will be stable and prepared enough to at least be able to protect itself — and, in turn, prevent its territory from becoming a launching pad for international terrorism.

It is time, Obama said, to “responsibly bring this war to an end.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron said the leaders were “making a decisive and enduring commitment to the long-term future of Afghanistan. The message to the Afghan people is that we will not desert them. And the message to the insurgency is equally clear: You cannot win on the battlefield. You should stop fighting and start talking.”

The political stakes are high for the U.S. president, who will go before voters in November with tens of thousands more troops in Afghanistan than when we took office. His emphasis will remain that he is methodically winding down the war after closing out the one in Iraq; U.S. voters desperate for better economic times have long stopped approving of the war mission.

NATO said it will keep providing “long-term political and practical support” to Afghanistan after 2014 but added: “This will not be a combat mission.”

Despite the size of the coalition, the war remains a United States-dominated effort.

The U.S. has 90,000 of the 130,000 foreign forces in the war. Obama has pledged to shrink that to 68,000 by the end of September but has offered no details on the withdrawal pace after that, other than to say it will be gradual.

The fighting alliance called negotiation the key to ending the insurgency in Afghanistan, but avoided mentioning the Taliban by name. The insurgents walked away from U.S.-led talks in March, and urged the NATO nations to follow the lead of France in pledging to remove combat forces ahead of schedule.

The alliance agreed on a fundraising goal to underwrite the Afghan armed forces after the international fighting forces depart. The force of about 230,000 would cost about $4.1 billion annually — the bulk of it paid by the United States and countries that have not been part of the fighting force. U.S. and British officials said during the summit that pledges total about $1 billion a year so far and that fundraising is on track to make up the rest.

Among the plaintiffs is the University of Notre Dame, which in February had praised President Barack Obama for pledging to accommodate religious groups and find a way to soften the rule. Notre Dame president, the Rev. John Jenkins, said the school had since decided to sue because “progress has not been encouraging” in talks with administration officials.

The lawsuits have been filed in eight states and the District of Columbia by the Archdioceses of Washington and New York, the Michigan Catholic Conference, Catholic Charities in Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Indiana, health care agencies in New York and two dioceses in Texas.

“We have tried negotiation with the administration and legislation with the Congress, and we’ll keep at it, but there’s still no fix,” said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now.”

Erin Shields, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department, said Monday the agency does not comment on pending litigation. The liberal advocacy group Catholics United accused the bishops of serving a “right-wing political agenda.”

Health and Human Services adopted the mandate to improve health care for women. Last year, an advisory panel from the Institute of Medicine, which advises the federal government, recommended including birth control on the list of covered services, partly because it promotes maternal and child health by allowing women to space their pregnancies.

However, many leaders across faith traditions and political ideology argued that the mandate’s exception for religious groups was too narrow. The original rule generally allowed churches and other houses of worship to opt out, but kept the requirement in place for religiously affiliated nonprofits, including hospitals, colleges and charities.

The political furor caught the administration by surprise. In response, Obama offered to soften the rule so that insurers would pay for birth control instead of religious groups. However, the bishops and others have said that the accommodation, which is still under discussion, doesn’t go far enough to protect religious freedom. An Obama administration official said the rule was still under discussion with religious leaders.

The lawsuits are the latest in the intensifying standoff between Roman Catholic bishops and the Obama administration during this election year.

The bishops plan a national campaign for religious freedom in the two weeks leading up to the July Fourth holiday. Last week, Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl lambasted Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, for inviting Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to make a graduation speech. Sebelius, who defended religious freedom in her talk, was named as a defendant in the lawsuits Monday, along with her agency and others.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm, had previously filed four other federal lawsuits challenging the mandate on behalf of religious schools and others. Still, observers had been closely watching for Notre Dame’s next step.

The university, dubbed the Catholic Harvard, in the past indicated willingness to work with Obama, despite his support for abortion rights. Notre Dame came under unprecedented criticism from U.S. bishops and others in 2009 for inviting Obama as commencement speaker and presenting him with an honorary law degree.

In February, when Obama responded to the complaints of religious leaders about the mandate, Jenkins said in a statement that, “we applaud the willingness of the administration to work with religious organizations to find a solution acceptable to all parties.”

On Monday, Jenkins said, “although I do not question the good intentions and sincerity of all involved in these discussions, progress has not been encouraging.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is not a plaintiff in the lawsuits. Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik, whose diocese is among those suing the government, said the law firm Jones Day was handling the lawsuits pro bono nationally.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled at two universities.

There is no official record-keeping system for exonerations of convicted criminals in the country, so academics set one up. The new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled.

The database compiled and analyzed by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they have less data.

They found that those 873 exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each. Nine out of 10 of them are men and half are African-American.

Nearly half of the 873 exonerations were homicide cases, including 101 death sentences. Over one-third of the cases were sexual assaults.

DNA evidence led to exoneration in nearly one-third of the 416 homicides and in nearly two-thirds of the 305 sexual assaults.

Researchers estimate the total number of felony convictions in the United States is nearly a million a year.

The overall registry/list begins at the start of 1989. It gives an unprecedented view of the scope of the problem of wrongful convictions in the United States and the figure of more than 2,000 exonerations "is a good start," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

"We know there are many more that we haven't found," added University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross, the editor of the newly opened National Registry of Exonerations.

Counties such as San Bernardino in California and Bexar County in Texas are heavily populated, yet seemingly have no exonerations, a circumstance that the academics say cannot possibly be correct.

The registry excludes at least 1,170 additional defendants. Their convictions were thrown out starting in 1995 amid the periodic exposures of 13 major police scandals around the country. In all the cases, police officers fabricated crimes, usually by planting drugs or guns on innocent defendants.

Regarding the 1,170 additional defendants who were left out of the registry, "we have only sketchy information about most of these cases," the report said. "Some of these group exonerations are well known; most are comparatively obscure. We began to notice them by accident, as a byproduct of searches for individual cases."

In half of the 873 exonerations studied in detail, the most common factor leading to false convictions was perjured testimony or false accusations. Forty-three percent of the cases involved mistaken eyewitness identification, and 24 percent of the cases involved false or misleading forensic evidence.

In two out of three homicides, perjury or false accusation was the most common factor leading to false conviction. In four out of five sexual assaults, mistaken eyewitness identification was the leading cause of false conviction.

Seven percent of the exonerations were drug, white-collar and other nonviolent crimes, 5 percent were robberies and 5 percent were other types of violent crimes.

"It used to be that almost all the exonerations we knew about were murder and rape cases. We're finally beginning to see beyond that. This is a sea change," said Gross.

Exonerations often take place with no public fanfare and the 106-page report that coincides with the opening of the registry explains why.

On TV, an exoneration looks like a singular victory for a criminal defense attorney, "but there's usually someone to blame for the underlying tragedy, often more than one person, and the common culprits include defense lawyers as well as police officers, prosecutors and judges. In many cases, everybody involved has egg on their face," according to the report.

Despite a claim of wrongful conviction that was widely publicized last week, a Texas convict executed two decades ago is not in the database because he has not been officially exonerated. Carlos deLuna was executed for the fatal stabbing of a Corpus Christi convenience store clerk. A team headed by a Columbia University law professor just published a 400-page report that contends DeLuna didn't kill the clerk, Wanda Jean Lopez.

___

Online:

Center on Wrongful Convictions: http://tinyurl.com/dd9s2o

Professor Samuel Gross: http://tinyurl.com/7rrauxh

The annular eclipse, in which the moon passes in front of the sun leaving only a golden ring around its edges, was visible to wide areas across Asia early Monday. It then moved across the Pacific and was also seen in parts of the western United States Sunday afternoon.

Viewing parties were held in Reno, Nev., Oakland, Calif., and elsewhere. In some parts of the U.S., special camera filters for taking photographs have been sold out for weeks in anticipation of the big event.

People from Colorado, Oklahoma and as far away as Canada traveled to Albuquerque to enjoy one of the best vantage points.

Members of the crowd smiled and cheered and children yelled with excitement as the moon crossed the sun and the blazing halo of light began to form. Eventually, the moon centered and covered 96 percent of the sun.

“That’s got to be the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Brent Veltri of Salida, Colo.

Albuquerque city officials had urged residents to go to organized events or watch one of the many live webcasts to avoid damaging their eyes.

The eclipse cannot be viewed with the naked eye or even sunglasses. And solar glasses, which make the sun look like a huge orange disc, are a rare commodity in communities along the eclipse’s path.

In Japan, “eclipse tours” were arranged at schools and parks, on pleasure boats and even private airplanes. Similar events were held in China and Taiwan as well, with skywatchers warned to protect their eyes.

The eclipse was broadcast live on TV in Tokyo, where such an eclipse hasn’t been visible since 1839. Japanese TV crews watched from the top of Mount Fuji and even staked out a zoo south of Tokyo to capture the reaction of the chimpanzees — who didn’t seem to notice.

A light rain fell on Tokyo as the eclipse began, but the clouds thinned as it reached its peak, providing near perfect conditions.

“It was a very mysterious sight,” said Kaori Sasaki, who joined a crowd in downtown Tokyo to watch event. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

At the Taipei Astronomical Museum in Taiwan, the spectacle emerged from dark clouds for only about 30 seconds. But the view was nearly perfect against Manila’s orange skies.

“It’s amazing. We do this for the awe (and) it has not disappointed. I am awed, literally floored,” said astronomical hobbyist Garry Andreassen, whose long camera lenses were lined up with those of about 10 other gazers in a downtown Manila park.

Hong Kong skywatchers weren’t so lucky.

Several hundred people gathered along the Kowloon waterfront on Hong Kong’s famed Victoria Harbor, most of them students or commuters on their way to work. The eclipse was already underway as the sun began to rise, but heavy clouds obstructed the view.

The eclipse followed a narrow 8,500-mile path for 3 1/2 hours. The ring phenomenon lasted about five minutes, depending on location. People outside the narrow band for prime viewing saw a partial eclipse.

“Ring of Fire” eclipses are not as dramatic as a total eclipse, when the disk of the sun is entirely blocked by the moon. The moon is too far from Earth and appears too small in the sky to blot out the sun completely.

Doctors and education officials have warned of eye injuries from improper viewing. Before the event started, Japan’s Education Minister Hirofumi Hirano demonstrated how to use eclipse glasses in a televised news conference.

Police also cautioned against traffic accidents — warning drivers to keep their eyes on the road.

The comments, made as Israel marked the 45th anniversary of capturing east Jerusalem, were nearly unprecedented for a mainstream Israeli leader and put Olmert at odds with his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu. Celebrating Israel’s control of the city on the Jewish state’s “Jerusalem Day,” Netanyahu declared his government was committed to keeping it the country’s undivided capital.

“No Israeli government since 1967 has done even a smidgen of what was needed in order to unify the city in practical terms. That is a tragedy that is going to lead us, for want of another choice, to making inevitable political concessions,” Olmert told the Maariv daily.

Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and immediately annexed the area, home to sensitive Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites as well as a large Arab population. The Palestinians hope to make east Jerusalem the capital of an independent state including the neighboring West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Speaking Sunday evening from the site of a Jerusalem battle from that war, Netanyahu said the city will not be partitioned.

“Israel without Jerusalem is like a body without a heart. And our heart will never be divided again,” he said.

The future of Jerusalem is one of the thorniest issues at the core of the conflict. Jerusalem’s old city is home a compound sacred to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. Jews revere it as the site of their two biblical Temples and Muslims regard it as Islam’s third-holiest site.

“There are those who believe that if we only divide Jerusalem, and that means giving up the Temple Mount, they believe we will have peace,” Netanyahu said. “I am doubtful, to say the least, that if we deposit that square of the Temple Mount with other forces, that we won’t quickly deteriorate to a religious sectarian war.”

“I know that only under Israeli control is accessibility and religious freedom is ensured, and will continue to be ensured to all the religions. Only under Israel will the quiet be preserved, only under Israel will the peace between the religions be ensured,” Netanyahu said.

Olmert said the notion of a united Holy City is unrealistic. He pointed to a number of Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, saying they have not been integrated into the rest of the city.

“We can’t unite them and connect them to the real fabric of life in Jerusalem, and except for grief, we haven’t gotten anything from them,” he said.

Olmert went through a dramatic political transformation late in his career.

As mayor from 1993 to 2003, he was an outspoken hard-liner opposed to concessions to the Palestinians. Then, while prime minister from 2006 to 2009, he pursued a peace agreement envisioning broad territorial concessions to the Palestinians before a corruption case forced him to step down.

In those talks, Olmert offered to turn over parts of east Jerusalem to the Palestinians, and have Jerusalem’s Old City, home to the most sensitive religious sites, be administered by an international consortium including Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, Jordanians and Saudis.

Olmert claimed his talks with the Palestinians came tantalizingly close to an agreement. The Palestinians have said Olmert did not go far enough.

Since taking power three years ago, Netanyahu has repudiated Olmert’s willingness to partition the city. With a newly expanded coalition, Netanyahu has cemented a formidable majority for his hardline policies.

The Palestinians have refused to conduct peace talks with Netanyahu unless he halts settlement construction in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. About 200,000 Israelis live in east Jerusalem, approaching the Arab population of about 280,000. Netanyahu says talks should resume without any preconditions.

Israel marked Sunday’s anniversary with a series of marches and speeches throughout the city. The Palestinians’ chief peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said the Israeli celebrations were “clear proof” that Israel is not interested in peace. “Clearly, this behavior reflects the mentality of a colonizer, rather than a supposed peace partner.”

Also Sunday, Israel’s Shin Bet security service said it had arrested nine Palestinians who tried to kidnap Israelis in the West Bank. The agency said in a statement that the ring made three unsuccessful kidnapping attempts in March, hoping to ransom the Israelis for Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

Last year, Israel released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a captive Israeli soldier.

The quake struck at 4:04 a.m., with its epicenter about 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Bologna at a relatively shallow depth of 5 kilometers (3.2 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said. Civil protection agency official Adriano Gumina described it as the worst quake to hit the region since the 1300s.

The four people killed were factory workers on the overnight shift when their buildings, in three separate locations, collapsed, agency chief Franco Gabrielli said, In addition, he said, two women died — apparently of heart attacks that may have been sparked by fear. Sky TG24 TV reported one of them was about 100 years old.

Gabrielli said dozens of people were injured.

Two of the dead were workers at a ceramics factory in the town of Sant’Agostino di Ferrara. Their cavernous building turned into a pile of rubble, leaving twisted metal supports jutting out at odd angles and the roof mangled.

“This is immense damage, but the worst part is we lost two people,” fellow worker Stefano Zeni said. News reports said one of the dead had worked the shift of an ill colleague. Elsewhere in the town, another worker was found dead under factory rubble.

In the town of Ponte Rodoni di Bondeno, a worker also died as his factory collapsed, emergency workers told Italian news agencies.

Premier Mario Monti, in Chicago for the NATO summit, told reporters he was returning to Italy before the meeting ends because of the quake.

The quake struck in the farm region known for production of Parmigiano and Grana cheeses. Italy’s farm lobby Coldiretti said that some 200,000 huge, round cheeses were damaged, causing a loss to producers of €50 million ($65 milion).

It also said in a statement that at least three barn roofs collapsed, trapping an unspecified number of pigs and milk cows inside.

Emilio Bianco, receptionist at Modena’s Canalgrande hotel — housed in an ornate 18th-century palazzo — said the quake “was a strong one, and it lasted quite a long time.” The hotel suffered no damage and the Modena province itself was spared, but guests spilled into the streets as soon as the quake hit, he said.

In Sant’Agostino. resident Alberto Fiorini said there was “pandemonium” during the night. “I took shelter under the bed and I prayed,” he said.

Mohamed Atzerc, also from Sant’Agostino, said he had feared for the safety of his three small children.

“They were crying. A wardrobe collapsed in front of the door. The light went out and I thought that everything was collapsing on my children,” who were unharmed, he said.

Many people were still awake at 4 a.m. and milling about town since stores and restaurants were open all night.

The epicenter was between the towns of Finale Emilia, San Felice sul Panaro and Sermide, but the quake was felt as far away as Tuscany and northern Alto Adige.

One woman on the outskirts of Finale Emilia told Sky her 5-year-old daughter was trapped on her bed by the bricks of a 14th-century tower that toppled onto their home.

Firefighters and other rescuers freed the child without a scratch after two hours. A supporting beam had protected her from falling rubble, rescuers and the mother said.

Nearly 12 hours after the quake, a sharp aftershock alarmed the residents of Sant’Agostino di Ferrara and knocked off part of a wall of city hall. The building already had been pummeled by the pre-dawn quake, which left a gaping hole on one side of it.

The same aftershock knocked down most of the clock tower in the town of Finale Emilia, injuring a firefighter and leaving only half the clock affixed. Sky TG24 showed the firefighter lying in the street near the rubble. The national geophysics institute assigned an initial magnitude of 5.1 to the aftershock.

The quake Sunday came as Italy was still reeling from Saturday’s bombing that killed a 16-year-old girl at a school in the country’s south.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his traditional Sunday appearance from his studio window overlooking St. Peter’s Square, said he was “spiritually close” to those affected by the quake, and asked people to join him in prayers for the dead and injured.

The initial quake was followed around an hour later by a 5.1-magnitude temblor, USGS said. It was preceded by a magnitude-4.1 temblor.

In 2009, a temblor killed more than 300 people in the central city of L’Aquila, where the historic center is still largely uninhabited and in ruins.

“Most people who know me know that all last year, I really had to think about that myself,” he said in a telephone interview from his Washington office.” If you have led a productive life, you have to wonder it it’s worth your time being here.

“But, for what it’s worth, I have become more optimistic than I have been in a long time that we will rise up and deal with our nation’s problems ... just because frustrations are so high, on both sides of the aisle.”

Read the full story on the Knoxville News Sentinel website.

With fewer restrictions and more abortion providers than elsewhere in the South, more women have made the decision to travel to Tennessee to end their pregnancies.

Out-of-state women now account for one in four abortions in Tennessee, a proportion that’s grown sharply since 2000, even as the overall number of abortions in this state has dropped.

Read the full story on The Tennessean website.

With a global economic crisis and waning public support for the war as a backdrop, world leaders opened a NATO summit confronted by questions about Afghanistan’s post-conflict future: money for security forces, coming elections and more. German officials cautioned against following France’s example, but NATO’s secretary general and the U.S. commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan played down stresses in the fighting alliance.

“We still have a lot of work to do and there will be great challenges ahead,” Obama said. “The loss of life continues in Afghanistan and there will be hard days ahead.”

The NATO summit opened Sunday afternoon, with leaders holding a moment of silence to pay tribute to force killed or injured while serving the alliance.

“Just as we’ve sacrificed together for our common security, we will stand united in our determination to complete this mission,” Obama said.

The end of the war is in sight, Obama said following a lengthy discussion with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the sidelines of the NATO summit. The military alliance is pledged to remain in Afghanistan into 2014, but will seal plans Sunday and Monday to shift foreign forces off the front lines a year faster than once planned.

Afghan forces will take the lead throughout the nation next year, instead of in 2014, despite uneven performance under U.S. and other outside tutelage so far. The shift is in large part a response to plummeting public support for the war in Europe and the United States, contributors of most of the 130,000 foreign troops now fighting the Taliban-led insurgency. A majority of Americans now say the war is unwinnable or not worth continuing.

Karzai said his nation is looking forward to the end of war, “so that Afghanistan is no longer a burden on the shoulder of our friends in the international community, on the shoulders of the United States and our other allies.”

Obama said NATO partners would discuss “a vision for post-2014 in which we have ended our combat role, the Afghan war as we understand it is over, but our commitment to friendship and partnership to Afghanistan continues.”

Newly elected French President Francois Hollande has said he will withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by year’s end — a full two years before the timeline agreed to by nations in the U.S.-led NATO coalition.

Hollande’s stance was facing some resistance.

German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle cautioned Sunday in Chicago that “withdrawal competition” among countries with troops in Afghanistan could strengthen the terrorist threat. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany stood “very firmly” behind the principle of “in together, out together.”

Hollande, speaking briefly to French reporters outside a Chicago hotel, insisted he was being “pragmatic” in his new leadership. “I am pragmatic in my effort to let the alliance continue to work for our defense and security, and at the same time make sure that our soldiers can come home from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.”

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen denied there were fresh cracks in the alliance. He suggested a deal will emerge for France to move into a noncombat role but continue to support the international mission.

“There will be no rush for the exits,” Rasmussen said. “Our goal, our strategy, our timetable remain unchanged.”

Pressed about the impact of the French withdrawal, Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, offered no public concern about a spillover effect. “The mantra of this particular mission has been in together, out together,” he told reporters. “And I’m not seeing, frankly, many voices being raised that would oppose that.”

Before the one-hour meeting with Karzai, a senior U.S. official said the prime topic was planning for Afghanistan’s 2014 elections, as well as the prospect of a political settlement with the Taliban.

Karzai has said repeatedly he will step down from power when his term ends in 2014, opening the way for new elections. NATO’s scheduled end of the war was built around those plans, with foreign forces staying until the 2014 election but exiting the country by 2015.

The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said before the meeting that Obama and Karzai also were to discuss prospects for a political settlement or peace pact between Karzai’s government and the Taliban-led insurgency. The Taliban pulled out of U.S.-led talks in March, but separate talks among Afghan and other contacts continue, the U.S. official said.

The Taliban is urging nations fighting in Afghanistan to follow France’s lead and pull their international forces from the war this year.

“We call upon all the other NATO member countries to avoid working for the political interests of American officials and answer the call of your own people by immediately removing all your troops from Afghanistan,” the group said in a statement before the meeting.

The national security-focused NATO summit caps an extraordinary weekend of international summitry. Obama and the leaders of the world’s leading industrial nations convened at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, for two days of talks focused in large part on Europe’s economic crisis.

Joining Obama and many of the G-8 leaders in Chicago are the heads of NATO alliance nations and other countries with a stake in the Afghan war.

Prominent among those nations is Pakistan. Tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan have been running high following several incidents, including the U.S. raid in Pakistan that led to the death of Osama bin Laden and a U.S. airstrike that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers.

Both countries have been seeking to restore normal relations. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s acceptance of an invitation to attend the NATO summit was seen as an indication that his country would reopen major roads used to supply NATO fighting forces in Afghanistan, a key U.S. demand.

White House officials said that while they believe an agreement on reopening the supply routes will be reached, they do not expect that to happen during the NATO meetings. The two nations are haggling over how much Pakistan will be paid to allow the heavy transport truck to pass through. A senior U.S. official said the two sides are far apart. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Officials have indicated that Obama and Zardari will not meet one on one until the matter is resolved. Although miffed, Zardari did meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Chicago.

“I do hope that we will see a reopening of the transit routes in the very near future,” Rasmussen said. “These negotiations will continue, but I am hopeful that they will be concluded in a positive manner.”

Haslam has signed measures to make confidential the names of all but the three finalists for leadership positions in state colleges and universities, and to prevent parents from finding out the evaluation scores of teachers.

Haslam in an interview with The Associated Press last week also continued to defend his failed effort to close off information about companies — including the identities of their owners — that receive cash grants from the state.

“Ultimately, it’s a balancing act between what’s doing best for the state and protecting the public’s right to know,” Haslam said. “And that’s not easy.”

Haslam’s view on government openness appears to have become more nuanced since he put his signature on an executive order on his first day in office that stated “it is the unwavering policy of the Executive Branch to facilitate the right of Tennesseans to know and have access to information with which they may hold state government accountable.”

The new governor said in a statement at the time that, “The rule should be the more you can be in the open, the better.”

Tennessee lawmakers passed what is known as the Public Records Act ensuring that records are open for inspection in 1957 and the Open Meetings Act in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in 1974. Commonly referred to as sunshine laws, they mark the high point of efforts to keep state and local governments open and transparent to their citizens.

Asked in the AP interview what steps he’s taken to promote more openness through his first two legislative sessions as governor, Haslam said more information is now made available on government websites.

“Is there more openness now than there has been in the past? I would say yes,” he said. “Ultimately it’s about measuring what’s public now, and what was public 20 years ago — and I think there’s much more public now.”

Frank Gibson, the public policy director of the Tennessee Press Association, noted that lawmakers have approved more than 350 exemptions to the open records law since it was enacted, and that they keep adding exemptions at a pace of about four or five each year.

“Some of them are reasonable, but every time one passes it just makes it easier to pass the next one,” he said. “They get started and they can’t stop.”

Gibson was the founding director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, of which The Associated Press is a member.

“The thing that gets overlooked by folks in government a lot is the fact that the Sunshine Law is there to benefit the customer, and the customer in this case is the taxpayer and the public,” Gibson said. “I have known few situations where secrecy in government turned out to be a good thing.”

Haslam endorsed transparency this year when he was a prominent and early voice against an effort that would eroded the Open Meetings Act.

The Tennessee County Commissioners Association had been promoting a change in the law to allow closed-door talks among local government officials as long as a quorum was not present. Haslam in December told reporters that he rejected efforts to water down the law, and House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville, soon followed suit.

Republican Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey of Blountville has said he’s against weakening open government laws, but also said he considers some elements of the current open meetings rules too onerous.

Lawmakers did approve one change to open meetings laws by allowing school board members to participate in meetings electronically up to twice a year if they were out of the country for work, on military service or attending to a family emergency.

Opponents of the measure said they worried that other elected bodies like county commissions, the city councils and even the Legislature could one day try to follow suit, and several argued that a physical presence is a fundamental requirement for casting a vote.

“If we allow them to attend and vote electronically, they’re not facing the public,” Rep. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, said during the floor debate in the House. “People run for office and they know what the job entails.”

Haslam signed the bill into law last month.

Chen Guangcheng had been hurriedly taken from a hospital hours earlier and put on a plane for the U.S. after Chinese authorities suddenly told him to pack and prepare to leave. He arrived Saturday evening at Newark Liberty International Airport and was whisked to New York City, where he will be staying.

Dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants and using crutches, his right leg in a cast, Chen was greeted with cheers when he arrived at the apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village where he will live with his family. The complex houses faculty and graduate students of New York University, where Chen is expected to attend law school.

“For the past seven years, I have never had a day’s rest,” he said through a translator, “so I have come here for a bit of recuperation for body and in spirit.”

Chen urged the crowd to fight against injustice, and thanked the U.S. and Chinese governments, along with the embassies of Switzerland, Canada and France.

“After much turbulence, I have come out of Shandong,” he said, referring to the Chinese province where he was under house arrest. The U.S. has granted him partial citizenship rights, he said.

Chen gave a short statement, which was greeted by cheers in Mandarin and English, but did not take questions from reporters.

The departure of Chen, his wife and two children to the United States marked the conclusion of nearly a month of uncertainty and years of mistreatment by local authorities for the self-taught activist.

After seven years of prison and house arrest, Chen made a daring escape from his rural village in April and was given sanctuary inside the U.S. Embassy, triggering a diplomatic standoff over his fate. With Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Beijing for annual high-level discussions, officials struck a deal that let Chen walk free, only to see him have second thoughts. That forced new negotiations that led to an agreement to send him to the U.S. to study law, a goal of his, at New York University.

“Thousands of thoughts are surging to my mind,” Chen said before he left China. His concerns, he said, included whether authorities would retaliate for his negotiated departure by punishing his relatives left behind. It also was unclear whether the government will allow him to return.

In New York, he said China had promised him protection of his rights as a citizen there.

“I am very gratified to see that the Chinese government has been dealing with the situation with restraint and calm, and I hope to see that they continue to open discourse and earn the respect and trust of the people.”

Chen’s expected attendance at New York University comes from his association with Jerome Cohen, a law professor there who advised Chen while he was in the U.S. Embassy. The two met when Chen came to the United States on a State Department program in 2003, and Cohen has been staunch advocate for him since.

“I’m very happy at the news that he’s on his way and I look forward to welcoming him and his family tonight and to working with him on his course of study,” Cohen said.

Before he left China, Chen asked his supporters and others in the activist community for their understanding of his desire to leave the front lines of the rights struggle in China.

“I am requesting a leave of absence, and I hope that they will understand,” he said.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland praised the quiet negotiations that freed him.

“We also express our appreciation for the manner in which we were able to resolve this matter and to support Mr. Chen’s desire to study in the U.S. and pursue his goals,” Nuland said in a statement.

The White House also said it was pleased with the outcome of negotiations.

China’s Foreign Ministry said it had no comment. The government’s news agency, Xinhua, issued a brief report saying that Chen “has applied for study in the United States via normal channels in line with the law.”

Chen’s supporters welcomed his departure. “This is great progress,” said U.S.-based rights activist Bob Fu. “It’s a victory for freedom fighters.”

The 40-year-old Chen is emblematic of a new breed of activists that the Communist Party finds threatening. Often from rural and working-class families, these “rights defenders,” as they are called, are unlike the students and intellectuals from the elite academies and major cities of previous democracy movements and thus could potentially appeal to ordinary Chinese.

Chen gained recognition for crusading for the disabled and for farmers’ rights and fighting against forced abortions in his rural community. That angered local officials, who seemed to wage a personal vendetta against him, convicting him in 2006 on what his supporters say were fabricated charges and then holding him for the past 20 months in illegal house arrest.

Even with the backstage negotiations, Chen’s departure came hastily. Chen spent the last 2 1/2 weeks in a hospital for the foot he broke escaping house arrest. Only on Wednesday did Chinese authorities help him complete the paperwork needed for his passport.

Chen said by telephone Saturday that he was informed at the hospital just before noon to pack his bags to leave. Officials did not give him and his family passports or inform them of their flight details until after they got to the airport.

Seeming ambivalent, Chen said that he was “not happy” about leaving and that he had a lot on his mind, including worries about retaliation against his extended family back home. His nephew, Chen Kegui, is accused of attempted murder after he allegedly used a kitchen knife to attack officials who stormed his house after discovering Chen Guangcheng was missing.

“I hope that the government will fulfill the promises it made to me, all of its promises,” Chen said. Such promises included launching an investigation into abuses against him and his family in Shandong province, he said before the phone call was cut off.

Much as Chen has said he wants return to China, it remains uncertain whether the Chinese government would bar him, as they have done with many exiled activists.

“Chen’s departure for the U.S. does not and should not in any way mark a ‘mission accomplished’ moment for the U.S. government,” said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The harder, longer-term part is ensuring his right under international law to return to China when he sees fit.”

Information from: The Knoxville News Sentinel, http://www.knoxnews.com

The tornado that tore through Joplin a year ago already ranks as the deadliest twister in six decades. Now it carries another distinction — the costliest since at least 1950.

Insurance policies are expected to cover most of the $2.8 billion in damage. But taxpayers could supply about $500 million in the form of federal and state disaster aid, low-interest loans and local bonds backed by higher taxes, according to records obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with federal, state and local officials.

Almost one-fifth of that money was paid to contractors who hauled off debris. Tens of millions more dollars went to individuals for temporary housing and other living expenses in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Additional money could help subsidize construction of a new hospital to replace one that was irreparably damaged.

All told, about two dozen school districts, emergency agencies, public housing authorities, religious groups and other nonprofits could receive taxpayer money through a program run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The outpouring of assistance is nowhere near the scale of Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans and damaged property along a wide swath of the Gulf Coast in 2005. Yet the Joplin tornado raises questions anew about the government’s role in disasters.

For Joplin families still on the long road to recovery, the taxpayer aid generally is appreciated.

The twister killed Danielle Robertson’s mother and destroyed the duplex she shared with her teenage daughter and two dogs. After several months of temporary living arrangements, Robertson eventually got one of the FEMA trailers for tornado survivors. No rent or utility payments were required.

“There are just thousands of people who would not have recovered at all had that aid not been there. I mean there’s no way,” said Robertson, who finally moved into a rebuilt rental home about three weeks ago. “I like to consider myself a survivalist, but there was nothing to survive with.”

The Joplin tornado, which killed 161 people, was one of 99 major disasters declared by President Barack Obama in 2011. Other included blizzards, wildfires and hurricanes. Congress responded in December by authorizing an extra $8.6 billion in disaster aid.

Missouri has a rainy day fund with about $500 million that was created for costly emergencies. But the fund hasn’t been tapped for Joplin because Gov. Jay Nixon and some lawmakers are reluctant to trigger a constitutional mandate that the borrowed money be replenished within three years.

Some critics of federal disaster aid point to Missouri’s rainy day fund as a prime example of how states pass the buck to the federal government for local tragedies.

“It seems to me this indicates the bad incentive problem that comes with federal involvement — that states would rather tap federal taxpayers before they have to tap their own taxpayers,” said Chris Edwards, an economist and editor of downsizinggovernment.org, a website run by the Washington-based Cato Institute, a group that promotes free markets.

FEMA Director Craig Fugate said it takes an especially destructive tornado to trigger federal aid. What made the Joplin tornado so unusual was the intensity of the devastation in such a concentrated area, he said.

“We’re talking thousands of families impacted, hundreds of deaths, the trauma to the community alone was overwhelming,” Fugate said. “The likelihood of Joplin being able to recover successfully without federal assistance ... warranted the president declaring it” a disaster zone.

Some of the taxpayer-subsidized projects, such as rebuilding St. John’s Regional Medical Center, will benefit people well beyond Joplin. The hospital served patients from a wide region extending into southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma.

Hospital administrators estimate their total cost from the tornado at $950 million, including demolishing the old building, creating temporary facilities and constructing a permanent replacement.

The hospital expects to get more than $345 million from insurance. It’s submitted more than $88 million of expenses to FEMA, of which the federal government could pay for 75 percent. The rest will be covered by private donations and the resources of the Sisters of Mercy Health System, which runs the hospital.

“We do hope to get some money from FEMA, but we’re not counting on that,” said Shelly Hunter, the chief financial officer for Mercy Health of Joplin.

The cost of replacing damaged school buildings will be covered largely by insurance, too. But voters recently approved the largest bond issue in Joplin history — $62 million — to help rebuild or repair 10 school buildings. The resulting property tax increase is estimated at $65 a year for the owner of a $100,000 home — roughly a 10 percent hike.

The Joplin school district has sought disaster aid for dozens of costs not covered by insurance, such as a truck and trailer used to shuttle band equipment between makeshift school buildings, as well as the concession stand, bleachers, flagpoles, fences, outdoor basketball hoops and new mulch for playgrounds. The cost to remove and replace the mulch at just three sites: $7,100.

The city has its own share of tornado costs, like the manhole covers. The tornado also destroyed two sirens that warn people of dangerous storms. Taxpayers paid more than $41,000 for temporary and permanent replacements, according to disaster-aid records.

During the cleanup, 14 fire hydrants and curbs and gutters at 111 locations were damaged by heavy equipment. And tires were punctured on about 125 vehicles, costing almost $57,300.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said it spent $1.2 million providing shelter and veterinary care for 1,300 homeless pets after the tornado. The city of Joplin agreed to cover $351,000 of those costs and now is seeking reimbursement from FEMA. It’s seeking an additional $21,000 for costs incurred by Joplin Human Society.

Federal disaster aid rules also reward local entities for the charitable work and donations of others. Joplin expects to receive $1 million through FEMA as a partial credit for an estimated $17.7 million worth of volunteer labor and donated supplies and services. That money can be used to offset the city’s own expenses for debris cleanup and emergency response.

“The fact that we can basically break even from a tornado of this magnitude is astonishing, and it’s in large part due to the donated resources,” city Finance Director Leslie Jones said. “Not only did it help us financially, they helped us clean up our community. I don’t even have words to describe it.”