The English-language station, beamed to 630 million viewers worldwide, said it would launch "Politics with Larry King" in June.

The show will be produced by Ora TV, an online broadcaster founded by King and Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim last year, and recorded in RT America's Washington, DC, studio and Ora TV's Los Angeles studio.

RT said it also signed a deal to air the online talk show "Larry King Now", which has been hosted by web broadcasters Hulu.com and Ora.tv since last July. The U.S. branch will be the exclusive broadcaster for both programmes, it said.

"Whether a president or an activist or a rock star was sitting across from him, Larry King never shied away from asking the tough questions, which makes him a terrific fit for our network," said RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.

RT and Ora TV declined to comment on King's salary in the deal.

Russia Today - considered a Kremlin exercise in image enhancement by critics - received 11 billion roubles ($349 million) from the state this year. It signed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange last year to host his own talk show.

King, 79, ended a 25-year run as the host of "Larry King Live" on CNN in 2010. He had interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin several times over his 13-year rule.

RT also made headlines in 2011 when U.S. airports refused to put up one of its controversial advertisements.

The billboards comparing U.S. President Barack Obama and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a tagline asking, "Who poses the greater nuclear threat?" did appear at airports across Europe.

(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel; editing by Mike Collett-White)

"I chose my opponent for September 14th and it's Canelo Alvarez," Mayweather said Wednesday night on Twitter. "I'm giving the fans what they want. It will be at the MGM Grand."

Alvarez sent a tweet in Spanish announcing the fight.

The 36-year-old Mayweather is unbeaten in 44 fights, the last a unanimous 12-round decision over Robert Guerrero on May 4 at the MGM Grand in defense of his WBC welterweight title.

Alvarez is 42-0-1. The 22-year-old fighter unified the WBC and WBA super welterweight titles April 20 in San Antonio with a unanimous victory over Austin Trout.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the fight will be contested at a catch weight of 152 pounds for Mayweather's junior middleweight and welterweight titles and Alvarez's belts.

"Canelo can come in at 200 pounds if he wants to, he'll still get his butt whipped," Mayweather's co-manager, Leonard Ellerbe, told the Review-Journal. "''Floyd is the best athlete in sports. He won't have any problems with 152 pounds. ... From Day 1, Floyd made it very clear he wanted to fight Canelo Alvarez. This is what the fans want. It's the biggest and best fight out there, and now it's going to happen."

The bout will be the second in Mayweather's six-fight, 30-month contract with Showtime that could pay him more than $200 million.

He meant an article. Or what, in the newspaper business, they used to call an article, where such things were filed, rather than submitted. Simultaneously, in the magazine business, the very same fistful of prose might be called a piece; there, youd be asked to turn in the piece, as you would have turned in an essay in college. Indeed, as a humanities major, you turned in essays on things like Anita Hill or The Real World, in semi-conscious preparation for the happy day youd be paid to do precisely this for Newsweek or Mirabella.

That is the media world as I choose to recall it, anyway, when Michael Musto ruled the Village and The Village Voice; Janet Malcolm published psycho tone-poem masterpieces in The New Yorker; and Tom Junod wrote creepily grand profiles for GQ and Esquire.

Now, working for all-digital media, I was being asked to submit a text asset. As a weird-girl poetry reader, optimistic English major, unstable English graduate student and lifelong writer, I would say Ive spent sickening amounts of time contemplating the production and consumption of words. So I couldnt help but pause, mid-career, over my re-classificiation from writer to text-asset submitter.

I was not hurt. I was closer to delighted.

Text asset hearkened back to a decent vein of jokes from ten years ago. That was the moment that aspiring laureates across the land were demoted en masse to content providers, during the first dotcom interlude. What we gave posterity was in an instant transformed to an inchoate mass noun, contentsomething to fill, stuff and take up space, like packing peanuts or gravel.

Content provider. There were jokes among fellow scribes that the romance of garrets and Keats and and 1947 Underwoodsthe blurry, boozy romance of being a writerhad grounded out just in time for our own debuts as faceless providers of content (listicles, charticles, deep captions). The idea with content provider was that it seemed people wanted to point their faces at screens featuring the World Wide Web; enterprising types wanted to get something, anything, in front of those faces that theyd really stare at, and that would lead those facesmaybe now, maybe neverto pay for.

Early Web opportunists were like the original Warner brothers, ns Wonskolaser, with their brand-new projector in 1900. They had acquired this eccentric chunk of engineering, holy as a taxi medallion, that beamed a generously proportioned square of colored, dancing light, and hauled it from Canada to New Castle, Penn., where they opened the Cascade Theater in 1903. A theater with chairs for gazers and a screen where they could beam their light. Shucks! Now they needed some meaningful shapessome contentto ride the photons. Enter movie-making.

But how will we shade and make symbols of these abundant pixels, asked the editors of webzines Feed and Salon and Slate and, my favorite, Stim, in the 1990s? Just as the Warners bent their light beams to look like stage plays, the early Web editors shaped their beams to look like indie zines and The New Republic.

As we all know, in both cases, the beams, the pixelsthe mediumtook on poltergeist lives of their own. They seemed to want different things, make different demands, have different capabilities, than stageplays and print magazines and newspapers. Thats what the old Marshall McLuhan rune, the medium is the message still means. That a movie is, above all, a movienot a play that happens to exist in light and shadow on a scrim. And a Website is, above all, a Websitenot a daily broadsheet with all the news thats fit to print that happens to appear on desktop screens.

But that all happenedthe move from writing to content-providingin the days when information wanted to be free. So the packing peanuts we were spinning out was just to stuff the pixel-waves and see what kept the eyes glued to it. The absurd end of that project of content-providing was content-farmingthe hideous practice of working writers like non-unionized factory-workers and tasking them with churning out nonsense prose, studded with search bait (Tina Feys scar, Obamas birthplace), on 25-minute deadlines. Fortunately, the search engines changed their algorithms so as not to feature farmed prose so high in their returns; most of the farms have changed their ways and now publish more useful and meaningful and valuable stuff.

Thats rightvaluable. And not just valuable because the output of writers might trick a Web user into looking at it for a quarter second, or even monopolize that attention for an hour but do nothing with it. But because writers, with massive assists from technologists and producers and marketers, could enchant readers from the open Web and keep them focused one place long enough to take in an ad. And maybe get inspired to try a Neuro drink or call Charles Schwab.

So thats what Internet prose is for! The same thing it really was for at the birth of newspapers and magazines. Something to put an ad near, or in, or on. Its a thing that can be sold. Its not art, OK. Its not literature. But its also not stuffing. Its not content. Its...an asset.

When is the text asset arriving? my boss asked again. Soon, soon, I said, like every deadline writer, ever. I labored for a minute longer over the text, as Ive done nearly every day of my life, forever. For this package we were making at Yahoo News, the visual assets and graphic assets and video assets were already in. And suddenly mine was too. Something in the phrase text asset had quickened my pace, and brought more joy to the project. At least its an asset, I thought with pride. And until its a liability, we writers should keep making it.

In one of the most electric moments since the IRS controversy erupted nearly two weeks ago, Lois Lerner defended herself during a brief appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The committee is investigating the agency's improper targeting of tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status from 2010 to 2012, and Lerner oversees the IRS office that processes applications for that designation.

"I have done nothing wrong," said a stern-looking Lerner, sitting next to three other witnesses and reading from a written statement. "I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee."

Members of Congress have angrily complained that Lerner and other high-ranking IRS officials did not inform lawmakers that conservative groups were targeted, even though legislators asked the IRS multiple times about it after local tea party groups told lawmakers they were being treated unfairly.

Lerner then said she would invoke her constitutional right to avoid incriminating herself.

"One of the basic functions of the Fifth Amendment is to protect innocent individuals, and that is the protection I am invoking today," she said.

After Oversight committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked her to reconsider, she said, "I will not answer any questions or testify about the subject matter of this committee's meeting."

Nine minutes after she began speaking, Issa excused Lerner but said she might be recalled, saying he might explore whether she would testify later if granted some immunity.

Lerner left the hearing room through a rear door, escorted by her lawyer and several other men. The men quickly whisked Lerner into an elevator, where several of the men physically pushed back television camera operators who were trying to film them.

Lerner's refusal to answer questions was not a surprise. Her attorney, William W. Taylor III, wrote a letter to the committee this week saying she would do so.

Issa and other members of the committee were not pleased with Lerner's decision to not testify. Even before she spoke, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., warned the witnesses that their refusal to cooperate would result in the eventual appointment of a special prosecutor to examine the case.

"There will be hell to pay if that's the route we choose to go down," Lynch said.

Lerner revealed the agency's targeting two weeks ago and apologized for the actions. Since then, Washington has been awash in questions about why the nonpartisan IRS focused on conservative groups, who instigated it and whether it was politically motivated which many Republicans suspect but participants have rejected.

J. Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general who focuses on taxes, released a report last week that detailed the targeting and called it inappropriate. He has said there is no evidence that the screening was politically motivated or that IRS officials were influenced by others, and blamed poor management by IRS officials for allowing the screening system to be instituted.

Lerner, 62, is an attorney who joined the IRS in 2001. She expressed pride in her 34-year career in federal government, which has included work at the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission, and said she currently oversees 900 workers and a budget approaching $100 million.

She has come under fire from members of both parties, including Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, who has said she should lose her job and criticized top IRS officials for not being more forthcoming.

"We're talking about truth and trust," Cummings said.

At Wednesday's hearing Congress' third since the controversy began the No. 2 Treasury Department official said his agency played no role in the episode.

"There is no indication that Treasury was involved in the inexcusable behavior at the IRS," said Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin.

Wolin told the committee that it was "absolutely unacceptable and inexcusable" that the IRS subjected tea party and other conservative groups seeking non-profit status to extra scrutiny from 2010 to 2012.

He said George told him last year "that he had undertaken an audit of the IRS's review of tax-exempt applications."

"I told him that he should follow the facts wherever they lead. I told him that our job is to stay out of the way and let him do his work," Wolin said.

Issa and other members of the committee complained repeatedly Wednesday that IRS officials had ample opportunity to tell Congress earlier about the targeting but didn't do so. Issa said his committee has privately interviewed another IRS official, Holly Paz, who said the IRS conducted an internal investigation that reached similar conclusions to George's report, but a year earlier.

"Think about it. For more than a year, the IRS knew it had inappropriately targeted groups of Americans based on their political beliefs, without mentioning it" to Congress, Issa said.

While the targeting began in early 2010, Lerner learned of it in June 2011 and ordered that the criteria be changed, according to George's report.

In early May 2012, Steven Miller, who was deputy commissioner, was told by staff that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted, George's report said.Miller later became acting commissioner but has been ousted by President Barack Obama in the wake of the disclosures.

Staff of the Oversight Committee questioned Lerner and other IRS officials last year after receiving complaints from Ohio tea party groups that they were being mistreated by the IRS. In responses to the committee, Lerner didn't mention that tea party groups had ever been targeted, according to documents. Her responses included 45-page letters in May 2012 to Issa and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

Lerner also met twice in early 2012 with staff from the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee to discuss the issue, according to a timeline constructed by committee staff. The timeline said she didn't mention at either meeting that conservative groups had been targeted.

Also coming under fire Wednesday for not telling Congress about the targeting was Douglas Shulman, who was IRS commissioner from 2008 until last November, while the screening was occurring. Shulman was appointed by President George W. Bush.

On Tuesday, Shulman told the Senate Finance Committee that he learned in the spring of 2012 about his agency's targeting of conservatives and George's probe. He said he didn't tell lawmakers or officials at Treasury of which the IRS is part because he only had sketchy information about the situation, was told it was being handled and believed it proper to let George's office conduct its investigation.

"When you learned that there was a list, you did nothing," said Lynch, the Massachusetts congressman.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nasdaq OMX on Wednesday agreed to pay $10 million, the largest penalty ever levied against a stock exchange, to settle civil charges stemming from mistakes made during Facebook's initial public offering last year, U.S. securities regulators said on Wednesday.

In its administrative proceeding against the stock exchange operator, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Nasdaq's "ill-fated decisions" on the day of the IPO led to a series of regulatory violations.

The SEC said Nasdaq's senior executives were aware of technical problems but decided to open up Facebook stock for secondary trading without first getting to the root cause of the troubles.

After trading had opened to the wider marketplace, the problems persisted. The exchange's chief economist spotted discrepancies in trading volume, and complaints from market makers started to mount. Still, exchange management decided not to halt trading, the SEC said.

As a result of those poor decisions, more than 30,000 Facebook orders remained stuck in Nasdaq's system for more than two hours when they should have been either executed or canceled. Investors were left in the lurch and market makers lost an estimated $500 million.

"This action against Nasdaq tells the tale of how poorly designed systems and hasty decision-making not only disrupted one of the largest IPOs in history, but produced serious and pervasive violations of fundamental rules governing our markets," said George Canellos, co-director of the SEC's enforcement division.

The exchange operator agreed to settle the charges without admitting or denying the allegations.

Separately, the exchange has agreed to pay as much as $62 million to compensate market makers for losses, an agreement approved by the SEC earlier this year.

Wednesday's settlement marks a major step for Nasdaq as it seeks to put the fallout from the Facebook debacle behind it. The exchange is still facing lingering battles with market markers who lost money in the May 18, 2012, IPO.

UBS, which lost $300 million - by far the most of any market player - is in arbitration with Nasdaq in an effort to recoup more money. A representative of UBS declined to comment on the status of the arbitration.

The SEC's case is the latest in a continuing crackdown on stock exchanges. Regulators are using enforcement as a tool to get exchanges to beef up their compliance with regulations and make sure they are properly self-policing.

Last year, the New York Stock Exchange became the first exchange in SEC history to face a financial penalty after it was accused of giving certain customers an "improper head start" on trading information.

In 2011 the SEC sanctioned Direct Edge for weak controls, and earlier this month the Chicago Board Options Exchange said it expects to be fined as much as $10 million to resolve an SEC probe into its duties as a self-policing organization.

In an open letter issued on Wednesday, Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld said the challenges that the exchange faced when the Facebook stock debuted were unprecedented.

"In the last year, we have carefully reviewed these events," Greifeld wrote. "As market leaders, we view our experiences as opportunities to learn and improve."

Facebook's IPO, the largest ever in terms of volume, was a much anticipated event. But the hype soon turned into panic after a software error at Nasdaq led to a 30-minute delay in the IPO.

The SEC said Nasdaq's senior management thought they had fixed the systems problem after removing a few lines of computer code and decided not to delay the start of secondary market trading.

But the technical problems persisted, with many brokers waiting for more than two hours to hear about the status of their orders.

In addition to charges stemming from poor decision-making, the SEC also said it was charging Nasdaq with a series of technical rule violations.

Nasdaq assumed a short position of more than 3 million shares of Facebook in an unauthorized account and covered that short position for a $10.8 million profit, two violations of exchange rules, the SEC said.

The agency also said it had found other problems unrelated to Facebook involving additional technology glitches. In those cases, in October 2011 and August 2012, the glitches led the exchange to violate rules that require investors to get the best bids and prices, the SEC said.

The settlement requires the exchange to make certain technical fixes related to its matching system for buy and sell orders for IPOs.

It also must expand the scope of its regulatory group's coverage of the rules governing its trading platforms and get the group more involved in decisions about software changes.

In his open letter, Greifeld said Nasdaq has already put new safeguards in place.

He said many of the SEC's demands have already been met, but he expects all of the requirements to be completed by the end of the year.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Additional reporting by John McCrank in New York; Editing by Kenneth Barry and John Wallace)

Meanwhile, the father of a Chechen immigrant killed in Florida while being interrogated by the FBI about his ties to the slain brother maintained that the U.S. agents killed his son "execution-style."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, walked without a wheelchair to speak to his mother last week for the first and only phone conversation they have had since he has been in custody, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the AP.

In a rare glimpse at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's state of mind, he told her he was getting better and that he had a very good doctor, but was struggling to understand what happened, she said.

"He didn't hold back his emotions either, as if he were screaming to the whole world: What is this? What's happening?," she said.

The April 15 bombings killed three people and wounded more than 260. Elder brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a shootout with police, and Dzhokhar remains in a prison hospital after being badly wounded.

"I could just feel that he was being driven crazy by the unfairness that happened to us, that they killed our innocent Tamerlan," their mother said, standing by the family's insistent belief that their children are innocent.

The Tsarnaevs met the AP in their new apartment in a 14-story building in a well-to-do area of Makhachkala, the capital of the restive Caucasus province of Dagestan. The apartment had no furniture apart from a TV, a few rugs, and wallpaper materials lying on the floor.

Anzor Tsarnaev, the suspects' father, said they had bought it for Tamerlan, his wife, and their young daughter in the expectation that they would move to Makhachkala later this year. He added that they planned to turn their old home in a dingy district on the outskirts of town into a dentist's office, so that Dzhokhar, a dental hygiene student, could work out of it after completing his studies.

"All I can do is pray to God and hope that one day fairness will win out, our children will be cleared, and we will at least get Dzhokhar back, crippled, but at least alive," Tsarnaev said.

Separately, at a news conference in Moscow, the father of a 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighter who was killed during FBI questioning accused agents of being "bandits" who executed his son.

Abdul-Baki Todashev showed journalists 16 photographs that he said were of his son, Ibragim, in a Florida morgue. He said his son had six gunshot wounds to his torso and one to the back of his head and the pictures were taken by his son's friend, Khusen Taramov.

It was not immediately possible to authenticate the photographs.

The FBI says Todashev was being questioned by an FBI agent and two Massachusetts state troopers about his ties to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as well as about a 2011 triple slaying in Massachusetts.

Three law enforcement officials said initially that Ibragim Todashev had lunged at the FBI agent with a knife, although two of them later said it was no longer clear what had happened.

The father said his son was "100 percent unarmed."

Taramov confirmed Thursday that he had taken some pictures of Ibragim Todashev's body at an Orlando funeral home and sent them to the father. He said Ibragim Todashev had a decorative sword with a broken handle, but that it was not a weapon.

"The sword wouldn't cut nothing," Tamarov said. "I played with it many times. It wasn't sharp from any angle. It would do the same harm as a piece of wood."

A spokesman for the Boston FBI declined to comment Thursday on the claim that Todashev was unarmed.

The father said Taramov told him that U.S. agents interrogated him on the street while five officials interrogated Todashev in his Florida house for eight hours on May 22, the night he was shot.

Todashev's father said that his son moved to the U.S. in 2008 on a study exchange program and met Tsarnaev at a boxing gym in Boston in 2011, about a year before he moved to Orlando. He said the two were "not particularly close friends."

Prior to last month's bombings, Todashev underwent an operation for a sports injury and was on crutches, making it physically impossible for him to have been involved in the bombings, his father said. He added that Todashev had recently received a green card and was planning to return to Chechnya for the summer last Friday, two days after he was killed.

The father said he and his brother were interviewed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Thursday as they sought a visa to take his son's body back to Chechnya.

FBI agents interrogated the younger Todashev twice before the night he was shot, his father said. He said his son told him that he thought Tsarnaev had been set up to take the blame for the bombings.

"I'd only seen and heard things like that in the movies they shoot somebody and then a shot in the head to make sure," Todashev said.

"These just aren't FBI agents, they're bandits," he added.

The Tsarnaevs' parents have held fast to their belief that their sons were framed. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, dressed all in black and still visibly distressed, showed AP several YouTube videos on an iPad she claimed cleared her sons. They could not be authenticated by the AP.

"I remember when our cat was sick, Tamerlan was sick himself for two days afterward, because he was so worried about her," Tsarnaeva said.

She said Tamerlan told her about Todashev, and that she and her husband had invited him to visit them in Russia, though he never came. Tamerlan later told them that he and Todashev were unlikely to continue training together since they practiced different sports, and he appeared to have lost track of him after Todashev moved to Florida, Tsarnaeva added.

_____

Seddon reported from Moscow. Associated Press writer Denise Lavoie in Boston and Kyle Hightower in Orlando contributed to the story.

_____

Follow Max Seddon on Twitter: http://twitter.com/maxseddon

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A day after a Southern California woman was fatally mauled by a pack of pit bulls, police were trying to determine on Friday whether any of the eight dogs they seized from a nearby home were involved in the attack, law enforcement officials said.

Homicide detectives serving a search warrant at a home in the unincorporated community of Littlerock, in the high desert about 65 miles east of Los Angeles, took eight dogs from the property, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Captain Mike Parker said.

Six of the canines were pit bulls and the other two were mixed breeds, Parker said.

Police who conducted an exhaustive daylong search for the dogs using helicopters and assisted by Los Angeles Animal Care and Control officers, were led to the house by tips from local residents, Parker said.

A "marijuana grow" operation was found on the property and a 29-year-old man was arrested there on suspicion of pot cultivation. He was not immediately identified by authorities and has not been charged in connection with the dog attack.

Authorities said a driver called police on Thursday morning to report that four pit bulls were mauling a woman by the side of a road in Littlerock.

When a sheriff's deputy arrived on the scene minutes later he found the woman being attacked by a single pit bull, who moved aggressively toward him. The deputy fired twice at the dog, who ran off into the desert apparently unharmed.

The 63-year-old woman died while being rushed to a nearby hospital. An autopsy will be conducted as early as Friday to establish a cause of death in the case, Los Angeles County Coroner's spokesman Ed Winter said.

Winter said the woman's name was being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

Sheriff's deputies warned residents in the area not to approach the dogs, which were described as tan in color, and said that people walking alone should carry a cell phone or whistle in case they were approached by aggressive animals.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Andrew Hay)

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Indiana will likely stop defending a law that stripped Medicaid funds from Planned Parenthood after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case Tuesday, an attorney who represents the nation's largest abortion provider said.

Indiana is among more than a dozen states that have enacted or considered laws to prevent taxpayers' money from funding organizations that provide abortion. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Oct. 23 that the 2011 law targeting Planned Parenthood went too far because it denied women the right to choose their own medical providers.

"I assume at this point the state will give up in its claim that that portion of the statue is valid under the Social Security Act," said Ken Falk, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. The case now returns to U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, who granted the initial preliminary injunction to temporarily block the law, precipitating the state's appeals.

The Family and Social Services Administration the agency tasked with enforcing the law declined comment.

"My office always contended this is ultimately a dispute between the state and federal government, not between a private medical provider and the state," Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller said in a statement. Zoeller's office handled the state's appeal.

Gov. Mike Pence, a fierce opponent of Planned Parenthood during his time in Congress, said he will decide what to do after viewing his legal options.

"We're disappointed in the court's decision, we obviously strongly supported the efforts of 2011," Pence said Tuesday. "I continue to believe and feel strongly that taxpayers should not be required to support the largest abortion provider in America."

The justices who rejected the state's appeal of the appeals' court ruling also did not comment.

The law aimed to deny Planned Parenthood funds from the joint federal-state Medicaid health program for the poor that are used for general health services including cancer screening.

Planned Parenthood warned that the law would deny more than 9,000 women access to other important health care services such as breast cancer screenings, birth control and prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. The organization was forced to stop seeing Medicaid patients for little more than a month, between the time the law was signed and the district court ruling saying it couldn't be enforced.

"While the state has been trying to score political points and wasting taxpayer dollars, we've been standing up for the Hoosiers who count on us every day. We look forward to the day the preliminary injunction in this case becomes permanent," Betty Cockrum, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Indiana, said in a statement.

Pratt's June 2011 decision blocked parts of the abortion law and granted Planned Parenthood of Indiana's request for a preliminary injunction on the state's move to defund the organization. Her decision sided with federal officials who said states cannot restrict Medicaid recipients' freedom to choose their health care provider or disqualify Medicaid providers merely because they also offer abortions.

Sen. Scott Schneider, R-Indianapolis, who sponsored the original bill, said he was disappointed the justices declined to hear the case because he believed the rulings left open a loophole in federal law barring public funding for abortion.

He said anti-abortion legislators would have to study the ruling and determine if there might be another approach.

Falk said the court rulings leave intact the state's power to block Planned Parenthood from receiving federal grants through the U.S. Department of Health, but those funds were a far smaller amount than the money the organization received from Medicaid.

The case now goes back to Pratt, who will decide whether to make the preliminary injunction permanent. Pratt was appointed in 2010 by President Barack Obama.

___

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.

Follow Charles Wilson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CharlesDWilson

sports a well-defined tail of dust and gas even though it remains far from the sun, the new images from Hawaii's Gemini North Observatory reveal. But it's still too early to tell if ISON will live up to the "comet of the century" hype, researchers stress.

Comet ISON was discovered in September 2012 by Russian amateur astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok. Researchers believe the comet, which is likely 3 to 4 miles (4.8 to 6.5 kilometers) wide, is making its first trip to the inner solar system from the distant, icy Oort Cloud. []

A prominent expert called the work a landmark, but noted that a different, simpler technique now under development may prove more useful.

Stem cells can turn into any cell of the body, so scientists are interested in using them to create tissue for treating disease. Transplanting brain tissue might treat Parkinson's disorder, for example, and pancreatic tissue might be used for diabetes.

But transplants run the risk of rejection, so more than a decade ago, researchers proposed a way around that: Create tissue from stem cells that bear the patient's own DNA, obtained with a process called therapeutic cloning.

If DNA from a patient is put into a human egg, which is then grown into an early embryo, the stem cells from that embryo would provide a virtual genetic match. So in theory, tissues created from them would not be rejected by the patient.

That idea was met with some ethical objections because harvesting the stem cells involved destroying human embryos.

Scientists have tried to get stem cells from cloned human embryos for about a decade, but they've failed. Generally, that's because the embryos stopped developing before producing the cells. In 2004, a South Korean scientist claimed to have gotten stem cells from cloned human embryos, but that turned out to be a fraud.

In Wednesday's edition of the journal Cell, however, scientists in Oregon report harvesting stem cells from six embryos created from donated eggs. Two embryos had been given DNA from skin cells of a child with a genetic disorder, and the others had DNA from fetal skin cells.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University, who led the research, said the success came not from a single technical innovation, but from revising a series of steps in the process. He noted it had taken six years to reach the goal after doing it with monkey embryos.

Mitalipov also said that based on monkey work, he believes human embryos made with the technique could not develop into cloned babies, and he has no interest in trying to do that.Scientists have cloned more than a dozen kinds of mammals, starting with Dolly the sheep.

The new work was financed by the university and the Leducq Foundation in Paris.

Dr. George Daley, a stem cell expert at Children's Hospital Boston who didn't participate in the work, called the new results "one landmark step in a very long journey" toward creating DNA-matched transplant tissue.

Now, Daley said, scientists must compare the embryo-cloning approach with another technology that reprograms blood or skin cells directly into substitutes for embryonic stem cells. This reprogramming approach is technically simpler and doesn't involve embryos or require the donation of human eggs, and it was widely acclaimed when it was reported in 2007. Its Japanese developer shared a Nobel Prize last year.

But these substitute cells show some molecular differences compared to embryonic ones, which has led to questions about whether they can safely be used for treating patients. So it's essential to compare the cells from the two methods, Daley said.

The new results mean "we have another tool," he said. "We have to learn more about this tool."

Daley said he believed scientists will prefer using the reprogramming approach unless it can be proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that embryo cloning produces better cells for treating patients.

Mitalipov said he believed his technique would present a particular advantage for treating patients with a certain type of rare diseases. These are caused by mutations in genes of the mitochondria, the power plants of cells. He noted his technique, unlike the cell-reprogramming approach, would supply tissue with new mitochondrial genes that could replace defective ones. Those new genes would come from the egg.

The Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for National Catholic Bioethics Center, an independent think tank in Philadelphia, reiterated his opposition to embryo cloning, calling the approach unethical.

"It involves the decision to utilize early human beings as repositories for obtaining desired cells," he said. "You're creating them only to destroy them."

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, Calif., said she was glad that Mitalipov doubted the embryos could be used to clone babies. She said the report still provides a good opportunity for the federal government to ban the use of cloning for reproduction.

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Journal Cell: http://www.cell.com/

___ Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/malcolmritter