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From The Associated Press

Bleeding cash, Ford looks to Europe for help

DEARBORN, Mich.—Bleeding cash and with its very survival uncertain, Ford Motor Co., an icon of American automaking, will try to import some of its success from across the Atlantic.

Ford reported its worst-ever quarterly loss Thursday and announced plans to bring over six small, fuel-efficient cars it makes in Europe and start selling them in North America, where Ford is losing billions on its truck-heavy lineup.

The company burned through nearly $11 billion of its cash stockpile in the past year and reported a second-quarter loss of $8.7 billion.

Ford is trying to save itself by quickly morphing from a truck company into a car company. But the help from Europe won’t arrive until 2010: It takes time to retool U.S. plants, and importing the cars directly is too costly.

Ford has successfully sold cars in Europe for years, and it made billions of dollars selling trucks to Americans. But U.S. drivers have recoiled this year from high gas prices and bolted for smaller cars.

Most of the European models will be built in North America. The Fiesta subcompact will be built in Mexico, the European Focus will be built in Kentucky and Michigan, and the Transit Connect small van will be imported from Turkey. Ford won’t identify the other three. But analysts are betting on the Kuga, a small crossover vehicle, and the C-Max small van, both of built on the same underpinnings as the European Focus.

GOP kills effort to release oil

WASHINGTON D.C.—House Republicans have killed a Democratic effort to release 70 million barrels of oil from the government’s emergency stockpile. Democrats hoped the extra oil would have helped lower pump prices right away.

Their bill would have forced the Energy Department to release the oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That stockpile now holds 700 million barrels of oil in reserve.

The 70 million barrels is about a three-day supply for the United States. Democrats said it would have meant immediate relief at the pump, just as releases did in 1991, 2000 and 2005.

The bill won a clear 268-157 majority Thursday. But it still lost because Democratic leaders brought up the bill under terms requiring a two-thirds vote to pass.

Feds say Utah mine operator courted danger

PRICE, Utah—The operator of a collapsed Utah mine violated safety protocols by cutting coal pillars that should have been left standing to prevent cave-ins, federal regulators said Thursday.

The officials said a subsidiary of Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp. undermined other pillars by excavating coal from tunnel floors. They also faulted the company’s engineering firm, Agapito Associates Inc. of Grand Junction, Colo., for conducting a flawed evaluation of mining dangers.

The agency is fining Murray Energy $1.6 million and Agapito $220,000 for the disaster.

The Aug. 6 collapse trapped six miners whose bodies haven’t been recovered. Three others were killed during a rescue attempt.

Scientists expose mystery behind northern lights

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—Scientists have exposed some of the mystery behind the northern lights.

On Thursday, NASA released findings that indicate magnetic explosions about one-third of the way to the moon cause the northern lights, or aurora borealis, to burst in spectacular shapes and colors, and dance across the sky.

The findings should help scientists better understand the more powerful but less common geomagnetic storms that can knock out satellites, harm astronauts in orbit and disrupt power and communications on Earth, scientists said.

A fleet of five small satellites, called Themis, observed the beginning of a geomagnetic storm in February, while ground observatories in Canada and Alaska recorded the brightening of the northern lights. The southern lights — aurora australis — also brightened and darted across the sky at the same time. These auroral flare-ups occur every two or three days, on average.

A team led by University of California, Los Angeles, scientist Vassilis Angelopoulos confirmed that the observed storm about 80,000 miles from Earth was triggered by a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection. Every so often, the Earth’s magnetic field lines are stretched like rubber bands by solar energy, snap, are thrown back to Earth and reconnect, in effect creating a short circuit.

It’s this stored-up energy that powers the northern and southern lights or, in other words, causes them to dance, according to Angelopoulos.

An opposing theory has these geomagnetic events occurring much closer to Earth, about one-sixth of the way to the moon. More Themis observations are needed to resolve the debate, said David Sibeck, NASA’s project scientist.

3 people shot at Phoenix community college

PHOENIX—Officials say three people suffered gunshot wounds Thursday at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix.

A 25-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman were in critical condition, while a 17-year-old boy was in stable condition. No other information on their injuries was available.

Mark Faulkner, a division chief for the Phoenix Fire Department, says the three were taken by firefighters to a county hospital.

There was no information on the person responsible for the shooting, which happened around 4 p.m. MST.

South Mountain is a two-year college with a student enrollment of about 8,000.

It’s Web site says: “As part of the Maricopa Community College District, SMCC is a designated Minority and Hispanic Serving Institution.”

Obama addresses huge crowd in Berlin

BERLIN—Cheered by an enormous international crowd, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Thursday summoned Europeans and Americans together to “defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it” as surely as they conquered communism a generation ago.

Obama said he was speaking as a citizen, not as a president. Nonetheless, his remarks before a crowd estimated at more than 200,000 inevitably invited comparison to historic speeches in the same city by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. Obama borrowed rhetoric from his own appeals to campaign audiences this year in the likes of Berlin, N.H., as he spoke in one of the great cities of Europe.

“People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time,” he declared. “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand,” Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city.

“The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot stand,” he said.

Republicans chafed at the media attention Obama’s campaign-season trip has drawn. Presidential rival John McCain went to a German restaurant in swing-state Ohio, and said he’d like to deliver a speech in Germany, but as president not candidate.