The Vatican asked Catholics to join him between 5-6 p.m. Rome time (11.00 a.m.-12.00 p.m. ET) in what is known as a Eucharistic adoration - praying before a consecrated communion host.

They were asked to gather in cathedrals, neighborhood parishes and monasteries to pray for two general intentions penned by the pope, who prayed in St. Peter's Basilica.

One was for those "who still suffer slavery and who are victims of war, human trafficking, drug running and slave labor" as well as for the "unemployed, the elderly, migrants, the homeless, prisoners and those who experience marginalization".

The other was for the 1.2 billion member Church itself and that it be "without stain or blemish", an apparent allusion to scandals that have undermined its credibility, such as the sexual abuse of children by clergy.

A Vatican official said it was "the first time in the history of the Church" that such an event was taking place. The Vatican said it was impossible to estimate immediately how many people took part.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; editing by David Stamp)

The meeting at Panmunjom, where the truce ending the 1950-53 Korean War was signed, is the first of its kind on the Korean Peninsula in more than two years. Success will be judged on whether the delegates can pave the way for a summit between the ministers of each country's department for cross border affairs, which South Korea has proposed for Wednesday in Seoul. Such ministerial talks haven't happened since 2007.

The intense media interest in what's essentially a meeting of bureaucrats to iron out technical details is an indication of how bad ties between the Koreas have been.

Any dialogue is an improvement on the belligerence that has marked the relationship over recent years, which have seen North Korean nuclear tests and long-range rocket launches, attacks in 2010 blamed on the North that killed 50 South Koreans, and a steady stream in recent months of invective and threats from Pyongyang and counter-vows from Seoul.

"Today's working-level talks will be a chance to take care of administrative and technical issues in order to successfully host the ministers' talks," one of the South Korean delegates, Unification Policy Officer Chun Hae-sung, said in Seoul before the group's departure for Panmunjom.

The southern delegation will keep in mind, he said, "that the development of South and North Korean relations starts from little things and gradual trust-building."

Analysts express wariness about North Korea's intentions, with some seeing the interest in dialogue as part of a pattern where Pyongyang follows aggressive rhetoric and provocations with diplomatic efforts to trade an easing of tension for outside concessions.

March and April saw North Korean threats of nuclear war, Pyongyang's claim that the Korean War armistice was void, the closing of a jointly run factory park and a North Korean vow to ramp up production of nuclear bomb fuel.

If the Koreas can arrive at an agreement for ministerial talks, that meeting will likely focus on reopening the factory park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong that was the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean cooperation, and on other scrapped rapprochement projects and reunions of families separated by the Korean War.

Pyongyang pulled its 53,000 workers from the Kaesong factories in April, and Seoul withdrew its last personnel in May.

Success will also mark a victory for South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who took office in February and has maintained through the heightened tensions a policy that combines vows of strong counter-action to any North Korea provocation with efforts to build trust and re-establish dialogue.

It wasn't immediately clear how long Sunday's meetings would last; reporters weren't being allowed access to the venue.

The Koreas have been communicating on a recently restored Red Cross line that Pyongyang shut down during earlier tensions this spring. The site of Sunday's meeting holds added significance because the armistice ending the Korean War was signed there 60 years ago next month. The Panmunjom truce, however, has never been replaced with a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula technically at war.

Representatives of the rival Koreas met on the peninsula in February 2011 and their nuclear envoys met in Beijing later that year, but government officials from both sides have not met since.

The meeting follows a summit by U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in California. White House national security adviser Tom Donilon said Obama and Xi found "quite a bit of alignment" on North Korea and agreed that Pyongyang has to abandon its nuclear weapons aspirations.

China provides a lifeline for a North Korea struggling with energy and other economic needs, and views stability in Pyongyang as crucial for its own economy and border security. But after Pyongyang conducted its third nuclear test in February, China tightened its cross-border trade inspections and banned its state banks from dealing with North Korea's Foreign Trade Bank.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un late last month sent to China his special envoy, who reportedly told Xi that Pyongyang was willing to return to dialogue. President Park will travel to Beijing to meet Xi later this month.

The talks between the Koreas on Sunday could represent a change in North Korea's approach, analysts said, or could simply be an effort to ease international demands that it end its development of nuclear weapons, a topic crucial to Washington but initially not a part of the envisioned inter-Korean meetings.

Pyongyang, which is estimated to have a handful of crude nuclear devices, has committed a drumbeat of acts that Washington, Seoul and others deem provocative since Kim Jong Un took over in December 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.

___(equals)

AP writer Sam Kim contributed to this report from Seoul.

Rocky River Police Chief Kelly Stillman said city officers, a regional narcotics unit and postal inspectors were involved in Tuesday's operation to investigate a delivery to the Perez home in the lakeside Cleveland suburb.

No charges have been filed and the matter remains under investigation. A message seeking comment was left for Perez's attorney.

At a news conference Wednesday, the chief said the operation likely originated with a package that appeared suspicious to postal employees. "They took it from there," he said.

Officers with a search warrant took evidence from the Perez house, according to the chief, but the seized items weren't specified.

Whatever was contained in the "controlled delivery of narcotics" must be analyzed at the state crime laboratory, according to the chief, who stopped short of speculating what it was.

"Depending on what it was and how much it was, charges will be filed accordingly," Stillman said.

Indians general manager Chris Antonetti said in a statement that the team had talked with Perez and was "gathering additional information."

Manager Terry Francona, addressing the situation before the Indians' Wednesday afternoon game against the Yankees in New York, said he had reached out to Perez to check on him.

"I spoke to him this morning, called him, just wanted to make sure he was OK," he said. "Out of respect to everybody involved, that's really all I can say."

The Indians' often-polarizing closer has six saves this season, but is on the disabled list with an injured right shoulder. He and Cleveland fans have gotten on each other's nerves over the last couple years, and he recently deactivated his Twitter account after hearing it from fans following a couple of bad outings.

In previous seasons, Perez has criticized fans for not coming to games, and ownership for not spending money on free agents.

The right-hander was supposed to start throwing again this week. Francona said he wasn't sure if the investigation would affect Perez' injury rehabilitation.

"I don't know. I honestly don't know," he said. "Let's not only go one day at a time, let's go one hour at a time here."

___

AP Sports Writer Rick Freeman in New York contributed to this report.

Brooks, appearing in a packed Southwark Crown Court, denied the charges of conspiracy to hack phones and two counts of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office. She also pleaded not guilty to two counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World and the Sun who went on to run the whole British newspaper arm of Murdoch's News Corp, was arrested at the height of a scandal into illegal reporting practices in mid 2011.

The scandal, which prompted the closure of the mass-selling News of the World Sunday tabloid and a year-long public inquiry, sent shockwaves through the British establishment as it revealed the close ties between the country's media, police and politicians.

(Reporting by Michael Holden and Kate Holton, editing by Stephen Addison)

"We are absolutely delighted that Radamel Falco has accepted the challenge of coming to play for AS Monaco FC," Monaco said in a statement on their website (www.asm-fc.com).

"We are proud to have secured one of the best players in the world and confident that he will help ASMFC regain its rightful status."

Falcao, 27, has scored 28 goals in La Liga this season with one game left.

Monaco were promoted from Ligue 2 at the end of the season. (Reporting by Julien Pretot; Editing by Ken Ferris)

However it's not always clear if our new labors to save species are herculean or Sisyphean. The only hope for sustaining America's whooping cranes might be men dressed in white costumes flying ultralight aircraft. Rescuing a single humpback whale may inadvertently leave a unique butterfly habitat destroyed. To save endangered salmon, humans might find themselves hazing sea lions with firecrackers. The future oflooks more and more complicated as humans become entangled in the lives of animals, and people can't always tell if their efforts will ultimately be futile, or worse, do more harm than good.

In his new book "Wild Ones" (Penguin), which hit shelves today (May 16), Jon Mooallem tackles this maddening uncertainty through the eyes of people working with animals that have fallen victim to human whims among them, birds dependent on people to survive,feeling the pressures of climate change, and butterflies boxed into a broken habitat. Mooallem, who is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, talked to LiveScience this week about his book and how to decide which species to save and why. The following is an interview, edited for length and clarity. []

LiveScience: An underlying theme in your book seems to be that humans are uncomfortable with admitting how much power we have over other living things on the planet. Why do you think this is especially the case with animals?

Jon Mooallem: In just a very basic way, animals are the creatures we share the planet with. They're not like trees and rocks. They're not part of the scenery. They seem to have lives of their own going on, and that makes us really curious about them. And for a long time in human history, a lot of animals were also our competitors. We had to deal with predators. We were afraid of them, or we were trying to catch the same fish. Now we've evolved to a point where we really have so much of the planet on lockdown that even these rivals or these animals we've looked up to are under our control, and it's an incredibly uncomfortable thought. We shouldn't have that kind of purchase over these other beings.

LS: Some , like the Lange's metalmark butterfly featured in your book, are already living outside of their original context in the wild and, at this point, their extinction wouldn't seem to tear a big hole in the ecosystem. Is there an ultimate argument for saving a species even when their importance in the ecosystem is not so obvious?

JM: That gets at a core confusion in how we think about a lot of endangered species. Some of the arguments that we use to justify working to save these animals really aren't applicable and they really aren't the most powerful arguments either. Sometimes we try to make scientific arguments for species where it really comes down to a matter of emotion or even nostalgia. We'd like to preserve some of these things maybe because they're beautiful, maybe because we don't want to feel guilty about having exterminated them. I think those can be two really valid reasons for working very hard to save an . There's something gorgeous about trying to preserve something that we care about in an aesthetic sense or an emotional sense. Conservation, I find, doesn't really know how to talk through those arguments that well yet, and oftentimes people are wary of making them.

LS: Do you think revising our definition of wildness would change the way we look at animals and conservation?

JM: That's one of the real challenges right now, to figure out what it is we want to preserve when we say we want to preserve wilderness or wildness. The fact is that preserving a lot of species involves a kind of hands-on management that is completely at odds with our more romantic ideas of what wildness is. That doesn't necessarily mean that those projects aren't worth undertaking. I think it means we need to recalibrate our idea of what wildness is.

LS: You touch on how our emotional attachment to certain animals, like polar bears, colors the way we interact with them. Did you find yourself feeling sympathetic to any of your animal subjects?

JM: Amazingly, no. I was surprised by that. Doing reporting about wild animals actually involves very little exposure to actual animals. You always have to see the animal through the filter of the people who have access to it. I didn't write a book where I just wandered around the woods hoping to encounter a mountain lion. I went to the polar bear capital of the world in Manitoba to look at polar bears in a place where 10,000 tourists come every year to look at them. And in that context, I felt like the animals did become obscured somehow like they were part of the scenery individual animals, in any case. When I went to the place where they were breeding endangered butterflies it was basically a ramshacklefarm where the butterflies were in plastic deli containers on plants, so it was hard to form a one-on-one, gushy bond with the animals. []

LS: Did any of your human subjects emerge as personal heroes for you?

JM: I found something heroic in almost everyone in the book. Maybe not a storybook form of heroism, where you see an obstacle and you work very hard and you surmount it. It's more like a Zen heroism, where you see an obstacle and you try to surmount it, and you realize that it's going to be much more complicated and perhaps never-ending, and you still try to surmount it anyway. I think that there's a real nobility in that. I think the people at Operation Migration the nonprofit that flies ultralight aircraft in front of whooping cranes to teach them to migrate I think that they're a really exaggerated example of that in the sense that they're spending all fall on the road and trying to get these birds to Florida amid tons of very idiosyncratic frustrations, but somehow they're still able to wake up in the morning at dawn and check the wind and see if it's a good day to fly. I think, not just in terms of being a conservationist but in terms of being a human being, there's some really valuable lessons to be learned there. []

LS: Did you have a different idea about how this book was going to turn out when you started writing it?

JM: I don't know that I had expectations that were upended or anything like that. I will say I was pretty amazed at how much chance played into the stories of these people and the stories of these animals. When you scratch the surface of a lot of these recoveries and try to figure out, 'How do we get to this point where there's only 40 some-odd butterflies on a piece of land?' or 'How did this project get so elaborate that we have men in costumes flyingin front of birds?' when you try to trace back those histories and bring them up to the present you realize there isn't any grand design. The endangered species are so reliant on humankind right now that simple things like when a committed lepidopterist who's working to save the butterflies suddenly gets a rash and he has to give up his work little accidents like this, little freak occurrences, have humungous repercussions for the animals themselves.

LS: After immersing yourself in this world for a while, do you have any recommendations for conservationists or do you see any problems that they are going to need to confront in the near future?

JM: Conservation is a national project. Under the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws, it's a project that our government has taken on and thinks there's going to have to be some really substantive policy talks about how that work is going to move forward. Just from a sheer funding standpoint, there's going to be some difficult decisions to make as a lot of the threats against these species continue to ramp up, and the work gets even more involved and in some cases more futile. I don't know at this point that I have policy talking points because I think the problem right now is that we're just not asking the right questions in a lot of cases. It's not a matter of having the right answers but basic questions like, Why are we saving this particular creature? Are we saving it because we want it to be part of this ecosystem, or are we saving it more for aesthetic reasons? What happens when the needs of an endangered species conflict with the needs of a person on the same land? I think we just need a clearer sense of what our priorities actually are and why we're doing what we're doing before we can go about trying to do it better.

Follow Megan Gannon onandFollow us ,& . Original article on .

NEW YORK (Reuters) - After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own DNA had been removed.

The result is a harvest of human embryonic stem cells, the seemingly magic cells capable of morphing into any of the 200-plus kinds that make up a person.

The feat, reported on Wednesday in the journal Cell, could re-ignite the field of stem-cell medicine, which has been hobbled by technical challenges as well as ethical issues.

Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The technique announced on Wednesday, by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, uses unfertilized human eggs.

Eliminating the need for human embryos could boost attempts to use stem cells and their progeny to replace cells damaged or destroyed in heart disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and other devastating conditions.

But the achievement could also revive fears of reproductive cloning, or producing genetic copies of living (or dead) individuals.

Even before the study was published, a British watchdog group called Human Genetics Alert protested the research.

"Scientists have finally delivered the baby that would-be human cloners have been waiting for: a method for reliably creating cloned human embryos," said Dr. David King, the group's director. "This makes it imperative that we create an international legal ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this research."

Among scientists, however, the accomplishment is being hailed as "a tour de force," as stem cell biologist George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute put it. "This represents an unparalleled achievement. They succeeded where many other groups failed, including mine."

The highest-profile failure was that of biologist Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University in South Korea. In 2005 he and his team made headlines across the globe when they claimed, in the journal Science, that they had created human embryonic stem cells via nuclear transfer, the same technique the Oregon scientists used. Hwang's claim turned out to be a lie, making it one of the most infamous cases of scientific fraud in the last decade.

DOLLY THE SHEEP

If the Oregon achievement holds up and can be replicated by scientists in other labs, it would offer a third, and potentially superior, way of producing embryonic stem cells.

The field of stem cells took off in 1998, when scientists led by Jamie Thomson at the University of Wisconsin announced that they had harvested the cells from days-old human embryos, called blastocysts, obtained from fertility clinics.

The fact that the blastocysts are destroyed when their stem cells are removed ignited a furor from groups that believe life begins at conception. In 2001, President George W. Bush banned federal funding for research that would create more blastocysts, but stem cells already produced from them were fair game.

Those cell lines turned out to be fewer and of poorer quality than scientists had hoped. The next breakthrough came in 2007, when Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University produced human embryonic stem cells in a way that did not require eggs or embryos. He added four genes to adult cells, and the result was like turning back the calendar: The adult cells, which he called induced pluripotent (iPS) cells, showed all the properties of embryonic stem cells, an achievement for which Yamanaka shared last year's Nobel prize in medicine.

"The whole scientific community jumped on the iPS bandwagon," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology .

That turned attention away from a third technique for producing embryonic stem cells: the method that created Dolly the sheep in 1996. Scientists in Scotland had started with a sheep oocyte (egg), removed its DNA and replaced it with DNA from a sheep mammary gland cell. They zapped the egg with electricity to make it grow and divide like a fertilized embryo. No sperm were necessary.

This technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). If the embryo is implanted inside a surrogate mother, as the Dolly team did, the result is reproductive cloning, which has also been done for mice, cows and other animals. But if embryonic development is halted after five days or so, the result is stem cells genetically identical to the donor's - and thus custom-made for therapies to treat degenerative diseases without fear of rejection by the patient's immune system.

The Oregon scientists, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, used a variation of the Dolly technique. They carefully inserted an adult skin cell into a donated human egg whose DNA had been removed. The unfertilized eggs, stimulated by electric pulses to start dividing, developed to about the 150-cell stage.

The cells were all true embryonic stem cells; they have the "ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells," said Mitalipov. "While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine."

ODD EGGS

In succeeding with humans, the Oregon team toppled the dogma that there is something odd about human eggs or embryos, said stem cell expert Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Published data said there was a difference in principle between humans and the mice and other animals that had been cloned, a difference that presented an insurmountable barrier to human cloning" for either reproduction or stem cells.

The Oregon team figured out how to get the egg to act as if it had been fertilized. The secret was to keep the eggs in the phase of their growth cycle called "metaphase," which is when DNA aligns in the middle of the cell before the cell divides. The scientists got the best results when they grew the eggs in a little of a substance that tends to be abundant in labs: caffeine.

When conducting the same experiment with monkeys, the Oregon scientists stopped at the production of stem cells and never implanted the ball of cells into a surrogate mother. Mitalipov said reproductive cloning is "not our focus, nor do we believe our findings might be used by others" to do it with humans.

"Reproductive cloning hasn't been advanced by this new paper," agreed MIT's Jaenisch. "If you implanted these embryos, which would be illegal, I think you would get the same results as in mice: Most of them die at birth, and the others encounter big troubles as they age."

STEM CELL FACE-OFF

Now the question is whether embryonic stem cells produced with the Dolly method would be superior to those created with the turn-back-the-calendar iPS method.

Scientists have already found that iPS cells tend to age prematurely and die. They are also created with cancer-causing genes, which could make them dangerous to use therapeutically.

Another possible advantage of the embryonic stem cells produced by the Dolly method: It takes just days, compared with weeks for iPS cells.

"If you have a patient who needs , that can be an important difference," said Natalie DeWitt of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

On the other hand, the human eggs needed for the Dolly technique are in short supply and hard to obtain, notes MIT's Jaenisch. (The Oregon team paid the women who donated eggs for their time and "discomfort.") Although the Oregon team coaxed stem cells out of every egg they collected from one of the women, other labs might not be so efficient.

If the Dolly technique becomes a reliable source of embryonic stem cells, it might accelerate clinical trials of the cells, which have been slow to get going and disappointing.

In 2011, for instance, biotechnology firm Geronhalted a clinical trial that used embryonic stem cells to repair spinal cord injuries and said it was leaving the field.

The most promising human study is ACT's. It is two years into clinical trials using stem cells derived from human embryos to treat two forms of blindness, including macular degeneration, with encouraging results. One patient's vision went from 20/400 to 20/40, said Lanza. (Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Douglas Royalty)

A person familiar with the decision tells The Associated Press the new four-team playoff starting after the 2014 regular season will be called the College Football Playoff, and the conference commissioners will make it official with an announcement later Tuesday.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the name was not to be released before then.

The major college football conference commissioners are holding three days of meetings in the Rose Bowl's backyard. They also will choose the remaining three sites for the six-bowl semifinal rotation in the new system, along with the site of the first championship game to be held Jan. 12, 2015.

ESPN.com first reported the new name.

BCS executive director Bill Hancock, who will hold the same position in the playoff system, had said the goal was to have a simple and descriptive name.

Premiere Sports Management in Overland Park, Kan., was hired to help come up with a name and brand the new system.

Before the news was reported, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said he'd be happy with whatever was selected.

"I'm am not good with names obviously," Delany said during a break in the meetings, referring to the Big Ten's division names, Legends and Leaders, that produced so much negative feedback the conference has already decided to change them.

The new postseason format will create two national semifinals to be played New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, with the winners advancing. The six bowls in the playoff rotation will host marquee, BCS-type games on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day during the seasons they do not host a semifinal.

Three semifinal spots have already been decided: the Rose, Orange and Sugar bowls.

Four other bowls have bid for the final three spots. The clear front-runners are the Cotton, Chick-fil-A and Fiesta. The Holiday Bowl in San Diego also put in a bid, but even its organizers have acknowledged they are a long shot at best to land the game.

Those decisions will be announced Wednesday.

The coaches on the Big 12's spring teleconference were already talking about the Cotton Bowl having a spot in the rotation as if it was a done deal.

"I think it's really exciting for this region, for everybody, and I think all of the schools in this region, to have Dallas as one of those sites is great for everybody in this region, and exciting for everybody," Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops said. "Obviously everybody knows what a great and quality, what an awesome stadium it is, then the location for us is an advantage, or should be."

The first semifinals will be played at the Rose and Sugar bowls.

The site of the first national championship game in the new system will also be determined at these meetings and the finalists are Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the billion dollar home of the NFL team and the Cotton Bowl, and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., home of the Buccaneers.

Arlington is the favorite to land that first championship game, but the competition from Tampa has been serious.

"I'm glad it has," Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said on Tuesday. "I think it will give us a better outcome."

Also on the agenda this week for the commissioners will be the composition of the selection committee that will set the field for the playoff. They have said they would like the committee to be similar to the one that picks the teams for the NCAA basketball tournament, made up of conference commissioners and athletic directors.

Bowlsby said he expected both current and former administrators to have a spot on the committee.

"The hardest thing is making sure we're arming whoever is on the committee with the tools that it takes to differentiate among closely proximal teams," Bowlsby said. "You have to have some metrics available to differentiate between three, four, five, six and seven."

"You can't just say we like blue uniforms and not gold uniforms. You've got to arm the committee with the tools that it takes to do their job."

"We've learned from previous disasters in Oklahoma," said Commissioner Doak. "We've sent a very strong message that we take insurance fraud very seriously. We're active with our vehicles coming through the area. Our folks are in uniform and plain clothes, in marked and unmarked vehicles. NICB has helped train local law enforcement on insurance fraud and we're all working together to make it known that we don't tolerate this in our state."

Doak said 23,000 insurance claims had been filed in the first eight days after the tornado. Many of those involved vehicles.

"We have potential for fraudulent impounders coming in and taking these vehicles and the owners and insurance companies don't know where they are," said NICB Special Agent Mark Wenthold. "If the Vehicle Identification Numbers aren't recorded, the cars can end up being crushed and the VINs used on stolen vehicles in the weeks and months ahead."

Towing companies need to have background investigations and be registered with local law enforcement according to Doak and he's satisfied that the laws in place are helping protect Oklahomans.

To see a video on the efforts underway in Oklahoma, click .

NICB suggests you consider these tips before hiring a contractor:

Anyone with information concerning insurance fraud or vehicle theft can report it anonymously by calling toll-free 800-TEL-NICB (800-835-6422), texting keyword "fraud" to TIP411 (847411) or submitting aon our website. Or, download theon your iPhone or Android device.

About the National Insurance Crime Bureau: headquartered in Des Plaines, Ill., the NICB is the nation's leading not-for-profit organization exclusively dedicated to preventing, detecting and defeating insurance fraud and vehicle theft through data analytics, investigations, training, legislative advocacy and public awareness. The NICB is supported by more than 1,100 property and casualty insurance companies and self-insured organizations. NICB member companies wrote $350 billion in insurance premiums in 2012, or more than 78 percent of the nation's property/casualty insurance. That includes more than 93 percent ($160 billion) of the nation's personal auto insurance. To learn more visit .

SOURCE National Insurance Crime Bureau

(Reuters) - US Airways Groupand American Airlines , seeking approval for a merger that would create the world's largest airline, are warning lawmakers that a requirement to divest certain airport slots would lead to less service for small and medium-sized cities, sources close to the effort told Reuters.

The airlines may be required to shed slots Washington's Reagan National Airport to prevent market domination. There is concern that those slots could go to rivals, such as JetBlue Airways , which would likely use them for flights to major cities.

That could have the trickledown effect of leaving smaller markets such as Tallahassee, Florida; Augusta, Georgia; and Charleston, West Virginia, without a daily flight to the nation's capital.

A letter signed by at least 100 members of Congress is expected to be sent to the U.S. departments of Transportation and Justice next week, requesting that the merged carrier not be required to shed slots at Reagan National, according to two people familiar with the effort. The airport is used regularly by members of Congress to fly in and out of the nation's capital.

One of the people, who asked not to be named, said Representative Mike Michaud of Maine was planning to send the letter, signed by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, to the Transportation Department.

Representatives from Michaud's Washington, D.C., office did not return phone calls requesting comment on Friday.

"What we're trying to do is encourage as many people to join in that communication to DOT (Transportation Department) and DOJ (U.S. Justice Department) as possible," said Bob Coffman, government affairs chairman of Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots at American Airlines.

FEROCIOUS LOBBYING

Antitrust experts have said the Justice Department, which must approve the merger, could ask for divestitures in US Airways' hubs at Reagan National and Charlotte, North Carolina, and American's hub in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Outside these areas, the carriers fly different routes for the most part.

Airport officials in cities such as Tallahassee, Florida; Augusta, Georgia; and Charleston, West Virginia, said on Friday that they had also written to Congress and the Department of Transportation requesting that the merged carrier be allowed to keep the current gate access it has at Reagan National.

Sunil Harman, director of aviation at Tallahassee Regional Airport in Florida, said there is currently one daily flight provided by US Airways on a 50-seat jet into Reagan National.

"Our concern is that if those slots get reduced, then US Air and American as they merge and evaluate the routes will have no option but to shift service to a larger city," Harman said.

Among other U.S. carriers, JetBlue has said publicly that the combined American-US Airways should have to shed Reagan National slots for competitive reasons. This week, Delta Air Linestold Reuters in an interview that it also saw potential opportunities to benefit should divestitures be required of the new American.

Smaller communities expressed concern that should the new American be forced to give up Reagan National slots, the access will go to carriers that won't provide flights to their airports.

"The reality is if someone like a JetBlue gets the slot, they're not going to service our airport," said Diane Johnston, director of marketing and business at Augusta (Georgia) Regional Airport. "Theyre going to service New York City or one of those really large cities that already have service to Washington."

(Reporting by Karen Jacobs in Atlanta, additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)