Former Chilean spy chief commits suicide on leave from prison

head of the secret police under Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet killed himself while on weekend leave from prison, officials say.
Odlanier Mena, 87, allegedly shot himself in the head hours before he was to be transferred to a prison he believed was not equipped to handle his health issues, The Santiago Times reported Monday.
His daughter found his body Saturday in the service stairway of his apartment building in Santiago.
Mena was due to be transferred Monday from the Penal Cordillera, where he had been granted many privileges, to the Penal Punta Peuco, a facility designed to hold those convicted of human rights violations.
"He was terribly affected by the transfer situation, and the fact that in Punta Peuco he would not receive the medical attention he needed," said Mena's attorney, Jorge Balmaceda.
On his weekend leaves from prison, Mena was allowed to move freely around the city, the only inmate at the prison given such a privilege. Despite the fact he was a convicted felon, he was allowed to keep four guns that were registered in his name, said Eastern Santiago District Attorney Roberto Contreras.
Mena had been sentenced to six years in prison in 2008 for his role in the death of three men in Arica during the so-called "Caravan of Death" in which a military death squad killed 96 people.

Senate rejects House offer to negotiate over budget as shutdown hits

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- Democrats in the U.S. Senate rejected negotiating with the Republican-ruled House on government funding, leaving the federal government shutdown for now.
The Senate voted 54-46 to table a House request for a conference committee on a funding resolution, the third time Democrats have voted down legislation from the lower chamber since Monday, The Hill reported.
"The government is closed," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. "All over America, federal employees are getting furloughs this morning ... because of the irrationality that is going on in the other side [the House] of the Capitol."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Democrats of rooting for a shutdown all along.
"Democratic leaders in Congress finally have their prize -- a government shutdown that no one seems to want but them," McConnell said. "With just hours left to go Democrats voted again and again to reject reasonable legislation."
"They don't even want to talk about it."
House Republican leaders tried several tactics to defund or change implementation of the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare, in the government funding bill. Each attempt was rejected in the Senate.
Also Tuesday, the health insurance marketplaces, where individuals and small businesses can compare policies and buy insurance, went into effect despite the government shutdown.
Early Tuesday, the House passed a resolution asking for a formal conference between the House and Senate on the continuing resolution that would fund the federal government, The Hill said. Senate Democrats pledge to kill the motion because they did not want to negotiate with a "gun to our head," saying the House must first pass a "clean" short-term funding bill before there could be negotiations on a longer-term measure.
Moments after the shutdown deadline passed on Tuesday morning, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the House could send "100 other doodads and gizmos" but they would be rejected by the Senate until the House passed a clean continuing resolution.
Both sides dug in for the first government shutdown in 17 years. Now looming is the deadline for a debt-ceiling increase in mid-October.
House Republicans initially wanted to delay the entire healthcare law for a year, then voted to delay only the individual mandate and scrap subsidies in the law for members of Congress, their staff and political appointees.
The shutdown means 800,000 of the government's 2.9 million federal workers are furloughed and more than a million others have been asked to work without pay.
The Office of Management and Budget issued orders just before the midnight deadline for agencies to "execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations" from Congress.
As part of the orderly shutdown, many federal workers will report to their agencies for a half day of shutdown preparations before being sent home.
Essential functions such as law enforcement and air-traffic control continue, although tens of thousands of controllers, prison guards and Border Patrol agents are required to serve without pay.
National parks, monuments and museums, as well as most federal offices, are closed. Many federal activities, including Internal Revenue Service audits and flu-outbreak surveillance, have been suspended.
Numerous congressional hearings -- including one scheduled for Tuesday on last month's Washington Navy Yard shootings -- are postponed.
"Unfortunately, Congress has not fulfilled its responsibility. It has failed to pass a budget and, as a result, much of our government must now shut down until Congress funds it again," Obama told military and defense employees around the world in a video message.
Uniformed personnel remain on duty and will be paid, Obama said. "The threats to our national security have not changed, and we need you to be ready for any contingency."

Bikers attack SUV driver in New York

A gang of bikers attacked a man driving a Range Rover and broke his leg Sunday after he accidentally hit one of them on Manhattan's West Side Highway.
"It was an accident," Lt. Karen Anderson said.
The man was in the car with his wife and daughter when the incident took place. After he pulled over to check on the man he hit, the bikers surrounded the SUV and began hitting it and spiking the tires, police said.
The driver then attempted to escape, hitting three more bikers in the process and unraveling a 5-minute-long chase that ended with the driver having to pull over due to tire damage. At this point, the gang -- known as "Hollywood Stuntz" according to police -- cornered the man and beat him.
He was treated at a local hospital for injuries including slashes to his face and released. His wife and child were not injured.
One of the bikers struck by the car, 28-year-old Christopher Cruz, was arrested and faces several charges, including reckless endangerment, reckless driving and endangering the welfare of a child, police said.
Fifteen bikers were arrested after Sunday's incident. Police also seized 55 bikes and wrote 68 summons in relation to the episode.
Authorities have not yet unveiled the identity of the man driving the SUV. They're currently trying to determine if any more charges should be filed based on a video of the incident that was recorded in a helmet camera one of the bikers was wearing.

U.K. Couple Welcomes Rare Identical Triplets

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  U.K. Couple Welcomes Rare Identical Triplets 

A U.K. woman has given birth to identical triplets - the ultra-rare result of a single fertilized egg dividing into three separate embryos.
Karen Gilbert, 32, delivered the girls by C-section two months early on Aug. 2. But after six weeks in intensive care, all three babies, Ffion, Maddison and Paige are home and healthy.
"It's been crazy," Gilbert said. "Their personalities are already starting to shine through and I can't wait to get to know them better."
"At first they didn't look real and you could pick them up with one hand. It was a bit of a shock," said dad Ian Gilbert of his girls, who weighed less than 11 pounds combined at birth. "Now we've got them home we are coming to terms with it. They are starting to feel like our own."
Texas Mom Delivers Quadruplets: Two Sets of Identical Twins
The Gilberts, from Pontypool, U.K., already had a 3-year-old daughter, Faye. They became pregnant with the triplets while honeymooning in New York.
"At first we thought it was one, but at eight weeks I got some really bad pains," said Karen Gilbert. "We thought it was a miscarriage but it turns out it was three babies fighting for space."
"It has really taken its toll on Karen," said Ian Gilbert. "Because they are identical, they all share the same placenta and the same fluid. They all grew and fought so quickly it was practically ripping Karen's muscles apart."
Quintuplets Celebrate First Birthday
Being pregnant with multiples raises the risk of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a condition in which blood from fetus transfers to another. Despite the risk, the Gilberts refused to consider selective reduction - a procedure that aborts one or more fetuses in a multifetal pregnancy.
"We were scanned every week to make sure they were growing fine," Ian Gilbert said.
Karen Gilbert felt pain during her last scan and went into early labor. But the triplets, while still tiny at less than 6 pounds each, are doing well.
"The pregnancy has taken its toll, but now I'm taking my time to recover and get to know my three beautiful girls," Karen Gilbert said.

Positive outlook in heart disease tied to fewer deaths

NEW YORK: People with heart disease who are more upbeat and excited tend to live longer than those who don't have such a positive outlook, a new study suggests, possibly because they are often more active.

Researchers surveyed people with ischemic heart disease - when the heart doesn't get enough blood due to narrowed arteries - and found earning a high score on measures of "positive affect" was tied to a greater chance of being a regular exerciser and a lower risk of dying over the next five years.

"It adds to the body of literature suggesting that there may be relationships between positive affect … and all-cause mortality," Richard Sloan, who studies psychological risk factors and heart disease at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, said.

But, "It's going to take more than this to be confident that there's a link in the way we're confident there's a link between depression and (a higher risk of) heart disease," Sloan, who didn't participate in the new research, told Reuters Health.

The new study included 607 heart patients who were seen at one Danish hospital.

Susanne S. Pedersen from Tilburg University in The Netherlands and her colleagues asked the patients about their quality of life, mood and lifestyle habits including physical activity in 2005. Then they used death and hospital records to track participants through 2010.

On a mood scale ranging from 0 to 40, where higher scores indicate feeling more relaxed, self-confident and excited, half of participants scored a 24 or above. (Negative affect was measured separately - so a person could score high or low on measures of both positive attitude and insecurity or helplessness.)

During the follow-up period, 30 of the high positive affect patients died of any cause, compared to 50 people with a lower positive attitude score.

Some of that association appeared to be driven by exercise habits, the researchers found. People with high mood scores were more likely than other participants to say they exercised at least once a week, and exercisers were half as likely to die as non-exercisers.

There was not a clear difference, however, in how often people were hospitalized for heart-related conditions, based on their positivity. During the study period, about half of all participants were hospitalized for a heart attack, heart failure or chest pain, for example, according to findings published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

The researchers said past studies also found a link between having a positive outlook and better heart health, but it was unclear what explained the association.

"There is some evidence to suggest that even among people who are already ill, who already have heart disease or diabetes or related conditions, that those people who are happier also have better outcomes," Julia Boehm from Chapman University in Orange, California, who has studied psychological wellbeing and heart health, said.

Health behaviors such as exercise are one possible explanation for that link, she told Reuters Health. Some researchers have also proposed another mechanism, suggesting optimism may affect physiologic processes in the body that would ultimately influence heart health, such as inflammation levels.

Pedersen and her colleagues noted that they did not have information on participants' type or intensity of exercise. The researcher also said the study can't say how exercise and positive affect may be linked.

"We do not know what comes first (also known as the ‘chicken and egg' problem) and thus cannot make any conclusions about the direction of causality - is it exercise that increases positive affect or positive affect that leads to more exercise with an effect on mortality or both?" Pedersen told Reuters Health in an email.

"Irrespectively, it cements what we already know - namely that exercise is good for the heart."

Boehm, who wasn't involved in the new research, said there isn't enough evidence to tell people with heart disease to be happier or more optimistic in order to improve their outcomes. But she agreed with Pedersen that there are data to support recommending exercise to those people for heart health.