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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit challenging billions of dollars in sales tax exemptions, without weighing in on the exemptions' legality.

Legislators have been awaiting a decision for nearly 18 months. The ruling lifts a cloud of uncertainty from the budget process, said House Ways and Means Chairman Brian White, R-Anderson.

House Speaker Bobby Harrell characterized the case, which sought to strike all exemptions, as seeking a $3 billion back-door increase.

"South Carolinians were staring down the barrel of a $3 billion tax increase. The court came down on the side of South Carolinians," said Harrell, R-Charleston. "These groups were trying to use the court to force a tax increase because they couldn't get it through the Legislature."

He said the state's high court agreed that levying taxes are the Legislature's responsibility.

But the opinion actually left the door wide open for another challenge.

The high court ruled that Richland County resident Matthew Bodman, a father of two young children not yet in school, didn't prove the state's tax scheme personally harmed him so he didn't have a right to sue. The court also said he failed to make his case anyway.

The justices said his lawyers' arguments wrongly focused on the sheer number of tax exemptions and limits passed over decades, rather than their worthiness.

Chief Justice Jean Toal seemed to invite lawyers to try again. Toal stressed the ruling does not preclude a future challenge on the constitutionality of specific exemptions.

"Many of these exemptions and caps could not withstand even a minimal level of scrutiny under an equal protection analysis," she wrote in a separate, concurring opinion.

She even outlined an argument against what she called the most glaring example the state's $300 sales tax cap on vehicles, boats, and airplanes. Democrats have unsuccessfully fought that exemption during budget debates for years.

While the cap had a legitimate purpose in 1984, when the Legislature put it in place to compete with North Carolina, it's outlived its usefulness, Toal said. She called it a clearly regressive tax that results in people who buy old, dilapidated vehicles paying the same tax as those buying luxury cars and airplanes.

It "represents an arbitrary and capricious exception to the sales tax," she wrote. "It is likely that the same can be said for many of the other exemptions or caps when viewed on an individual basis. However, the nature of Bodman's argument prevents this court from exercising such a review."

Attorney Dick Harpootlian said his firm is considering its options. The former chairman of the state Democratic Party said the lawsuit at least brought attention to the exemptions and caps that undermine the state's ability to fund education and other necessary services. It makes no sense, for example, to exempt fishing rods but not fishing tackle from sales taxes, he said.

The court noted that South Carolina exempts more sales taxes than it collects. The seven caps and 78 exemptions exist on a broad range of items, including school textbooks, sweetgrass baskets, prescriptions and portable toilets.

"The hole is bigger than the doughnut," said Harpootlian, whose law firm took on the case without charge. "It's ludicrous that the Legislature has not dealt with this issue."

Harrell contends the Legislature did so last year.

The case spurred a review by House Republicans, who proposed a bill eliminating more than $220 million worth of exemptions. Its main sponsor, Rep. Tommy Stringer, said at the time that his study committee chose early on not to eliminate the high-dollar exemptions that benefit families, such as on food, electricity, water and medicine.

But after special interests weighed in, the bill that eventually passed the House eliminated less than $11 million worth of exemptions and reduced a tiny fraction of a single penny-on-the-dollar in sales taxes. The watered-down bill went nowhere in the Senate.

In the dedication of her latest book, "A Cooked Seed," best-selling Chinese author Anchee Min thanks her daughter for "making (her) write this book." One cannot help but wonder why with such a powerful story to tell Min waited until now to share it. And then, as her rollicking tale takes off and we've forgiven her for the delay, we eagerly join her in a second round of heartfelt thanks to Lauryann.

Min, whose first memoir, "Red Azalea," told the story of her youth in China growing up under the leadership of Chairman Mao and introduced many to the true horrors of that regime, picks up here where she left off. It's 1984, she's 27 and on a plane bound for Chicago with a $500 loan in her pocket, no understanding of English and only a vague plan to study art.

After Mao died and his wife was overthrown, Min was quickly discarded by society, considered "a cooked seed," one that would never sprout. Like generations of immigrants before her, Min bore her family's burden of heading to America to save herself and rescue them all from a life of poverty.

With that heavy weight on her shoulders, Min faces unbelievable hardship, financial challenges and just plain rotten luck.

Min's writing is as beautiful and compelling as always here, and as we learn how she taught herself English how else, but by watching TV and later how she finds her literary voice, her talent is even more astounding.

The only time the narrative peters out is when Min goes into too much detail about her American, Vietnam vet husband. I found myself wanting to know less about him and more about her and her feelings for and her relationship with him.

But, overall, "A Cooked Seed" will hook you and stay with you for a long time.

___

Online:

http://ancheemin.com/

Smith, the NBA's top sixth man, entered the game late in the first quarter and missed his first two shots -- both came up short.

Coach Mike Woodson said during his pregame availability that Smith would warm up before a decision would be made. Smith missed the Knicks morning shootaround after spiking a 102-degree fever, but Woodson said the temperature came down throughout the day.

If Smith is effective, he could have a big impact in a series that is tied at 1.

Smith averaged 18.1 points and 5.3 rebounds during the regular season and won the NBA's Sixth Man Award. But his playoff numbers are down to 14.4 points and 4.7 rebounds, and he's just 7 of 30 from the field in the first two games against Indiana.

Amare Stoudemire also was active for the game and entered in the second quarter. He has not played in more than two months after having surgery on his right knee.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring. We see it anecdotally in the soaring fees for private schools, private lessons and private tutors, many of them targeted at the preschool set. And recent academic research has confirmed what many of us overhear at the school gates or read on mommy blogs.

This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually and rightly cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality. Whatever your views about income inequality among the parents, inherited privilege is inimical to the promise of equal opportunity, which is central to the social compact in Western democracies.

But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren't the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.

First, the data on parental spending on education. There is a lively debate among politicians and professors both about whether the economy is becoming more polarized and about the importance of education. Dismissing the value of a college education is one of the more popular clever-sounding contrarian ideas of the moment. And there are still a few die-hards who play down the social significance of rising income inequality.

When you translate these abstract arguments into the practical choices we make in our personal lives, however, the intellectual disagreements melt away. We are all spending a lot more money to educate our kids, and the richest have stepped up their spending more than everyone else.

In "Investing in Children: Changes in Parental Spending on Children, 1972-2007," a study published this year in the journal Demography, the researchers Sabino Kornrich and Frank F. Furstenberg found that spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal.

"Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew."

Kornrich and Furstenberg warn that social mobility is in jeopardy. "In the race to the top, higher-income children are at an ever greater advantage because their parents can and do spend more on child care, preschool, and the growing costs of postsecondary education," they write. "Thus, contemporary increases in inequality may lead to even greater increases in inequality in the future as advantage and disadvantage are passed across the generations through investment."

They are right to worry. But it turns out that the children being primed for that race to the top from preschool onward aren't in such great shape, either.

That is the conclusion of research by Suniya S. Luthar, professor of psychology and education at Columbia University's Teachers College. Luthar stumbled upon the subject of troubled rich kids.

"I was looking for a comparison group for the inner-city kids," Luthar told me. "And we happened to find that substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls, were much higher than among inner-city kids."

That accidental discovery set Luthar on a research path that has prompted her to conclude that the children of privilege are an "at-risk" group. "What we are finding again and again, in upper-middle-class school districts, is the proportion who are struggling are significantly higher than in normative samples," she said. "Upper- middle-class kids are an at-risk group."

Luthar's findings are directly connected to the stepped-up spending on children's education at the top that Kornrich and Furstenberg document. The title of the paper she is finishing now, due to be published in the autumn, is "I Can, Therefore I Must: Fragility in the Upper Middle Class," and it describes a world in which the opportunities, and therefore the demands, for upper-middle-class children are infinite.

"It is an endless cycle, starting from kindergarten," Luthar said. "The difficulty is that you have these enrichment activities. It is almost as if, if you have the opportunity, you must avail yourself of it. The pressure is enormous."

It can be tempting, particularly if you don't happen to be raising children yourself in one of the hothouse communities Luthar studies, to dismiss this hyper-education as a frivolous, albeit painful, form of conspicuous consumption, like cosmetic surgery or flashy cars. But the truth is that these parents and children are responding rationally to a hyper-competitive world economy.

"These are kids whose parents value upward mobility," Luthar said. "When we talk to youngsters now, when they set goals for themselves, they want to match up to at least what their parents have achieved, and that is harder to do."

It turns out that our children are feeling the same paradoxical strains of the 21st century that we all are. Increasingly, we live in individualistic democracies whose credo is that anyone can be a winner if he or she tries. But we are also subject to increasingly fierce winner-take-all forces, which means the winners' circle is ever smaller, and the value of winning is ever higher.

Luthar says the children she studies fear the price of losing would be psychic as well as economic: "What happens to me if I fall behind? I'll be worth nothing." In an age when more and more of the middle class is falling behind, no wonder they and their parents are at risk.

(Chrystia Freeland is a Reuters columnist. Any opinions expressed are her own.)

(Chrystia Freeland is the managing director and editor, Consumer News at Thomson Reuters. Prior, she was U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times. Before that, Freeland was deputy editor of the Financial Times, in London, editor of the FT's Weekend edition, editor of FT.com, UK News editor, Moscow bureau chief and Eastern Europe correspondent. From 1999 to 2001, Freeland served as deputy editor of The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. Freeland began her career working as a stringer in Ukraine, writing for the FT, The Washington Post and The Economist.

She is the author of two books: "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else," published by Penguin in 2012 and "Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution," published by Crown Publishing books in 2000.)

(Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

LONDON (Reuters) - A musical based on the meteoric rise of British pop band The Spice Girls that was mauled by the critics is closing six months after its premiere in London, the show's producer said on Thursday.

The brainchild of "Mamma Mia!" creator Judy Craymer, "Viva Forever" was loosely based on the story of The Spice Girls, with a wannabe girl band making the finals of a TV singing contest resembling "The X Factor".

But the show, written by British comedienne Jennifer Saunders, struggled after receiving appalling reviews. Critics said it lacked the "va-voom" of The Spice Girls and labored under an "insultingly banal" script, poor performances and a gloomy set.

The Spice Girls, who backed the show and all attended the red-carpet opening in London's West End theatre district last December, thanked the cast and fans for their support.

"Although 'Viva Forever' won't continue in the West End, we are thrilled that the thousands of people who came to the show had as much fun as we did," they said in a statement.

Craymer said it was "with a heavy heart" that the decision was made to close the show, which opened with strong advance tickets sales but struggled to fill seats despite discounted tickets. The last show will be on June 29.

"The show has evolved since we first opened and is now brighter, lighter and funnier, but despite the wonderful audiences and extremely positive feedback we just can't make it work," she said in the statement.

Craymer's "Mamma Mia!", based on ABBA hits, has earned nearly $2 billion worldwide and was made into a hit film.

The crash of "Viva Forever!" belies the enduring popularity of The Spice Girls who stormed the charts in the 1990s with a string of hits including "Viva Forever", "Spice Up Your Life", and "Wannabe".

They sold more 80 million records worldwide and notched up nine British No. 1 singles during their six years together before splitting up in 2000.

Now mothers in their late 30s and early 40s, The Spice Girls remain popular with Britain's celebrity-obsessed tabloids and performed at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics.

"Viva Forever!" joins a list of musicals that have failed in London. DJ Mike Read's musical about Oscar Wilde closed one night into its run in 2004 and Cameron Mackintosh's "Betty Blue Eyes" closed after six months in 2011.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Britain's most successful composer of musicals, has condemned so-called jukebox musicals based on previously recorded songs as purely money-making schemes.

"They are cynical exercises. You must have your heart in the subject you choose to turn into a musical," Lloyd Webber said in a recent interview.

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Florida, May 8 (Reuters) - Tiger Woods may get the red carpet treatment wherever he goes but that will be of little help to the world number one at TPC Sawgrass, site of this week's Players Championship.

Woods won his only Players title in 15 starts in 2001 and in addition to a field that includes the world's top 30 golfers, and 38 of the top 40, there is the diabolical Pete Dye layout that has frustrated contenders for four decades.

The 14-times major winner measures success by only the biggest championships, but he grudgingly admits that next in line after the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championship would be the Players Championship.

"I think we have our four major championships, and that's that," Woods said when asked if the Players could be considered the fifth major. "But if there was going to be another one, this would be it. This is the best field that we have."

Woods could be primed to become only the fifth golfer to win the tournament more than once since he is currently the hottest player in the world with three wins this season that helped him regain the world number one ranking from Rory McIlroy.

He was also in the lead at Augusta National before his third shot at the par-five 15th in the second round of last month's Masters hit the flagstick and ricocheted into the water.

The next morning he was hit with a controversial two-shot penalty - some called for his disqualification - for taking an improper drop following a review that was prompted by a phone call from a TV viewer.

Woods, who carded a triple-bogey on the hole, eventually finished tied for fourth, four shots out of a playoff won by Australian Adam Scott.

He said the Masters disappointment stayed with him for about a week.

"When I was away from it, I was reflecting on ... the things that I did right but also the things that I did wrong that week," Woods, who got the red carpet treatment at a New York fashion awards show this week with girlfriend and Olympic champion skier Lindsey Vonn, said on Tuesday.

"Unfortunately I hit a good shot and got a bad break. But I still had an opportunity over the next 36 holes to get it back, and I sort of had my opportunities to do it and I just didn't do it."

Winning at TPC Sawgrass is also no easy matter.

"It's one of those courses where they've got some tough lines, and if you're not playing well, you're going to get exposed," said Woods, who has just one top-10 finish here since his 2001 triumph. "You miss these greens at all, you've got some of the weirdest, funky little shots that you'll ever face."

Defending champion Matt Kuchar will tee it up with Woods and reigning end-of-season FedExCup winner Brandt Snedeker in Thursday's opening round as he embarks on a campaign to become the first repeat winner of the Players Championship.

"I think this is a great opportunity," said Kuchar, who won this year's WGC-Accenture Match Play, tied for eighth at the Masters and has had two other top 10s in 2013.

"They tell me nobody's defended the title. I don't think that this is necessarily a curse that nobody's defended the title here. It's just kind of one of those stats you pull out, and I'd like to be the first guy that is able to repeat." (Editing by Frank Pingue)

The newly released study shows that about two out of three Americans say weather in the country has worsened over the past several years, with only one in 10 saying the weather has been improving.

Americans also have strong views about the link between .

Nearly 50 percent of the population believes global warming made thethat plagued the Midwestand the Great Plains last year more severe. Similarly, 46 percent of Americans believe climate change exacerbated the effects of Superstorm Sandy, which battered the Northeast in October 2012. []

"Americans are continuing to connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather in the United States," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. "They're associating climate change with some of the major events that we experienced last year, like the ongoing drought."

Half of Americans also believe global warming was to blame for last year's record-breaking temperatures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration named 2012 the , with every contiguous U.S. state registering above-average annual temperatures for the year.

Furthermore, 85 percent of Americans said they personally experienced one or more types of extreme weather in the past year, ranging from extreme heat (51 percent) to extreme high winds (60 percent).

The number of Americans who were significantly harmed by extreme weather events in the past year increased to about 37 percent up 4 to 5 percentage points since 2012, Leiserowitz told LiveScience.

"That's quite a significant number," he said. "It shows just how dramatic these extreme weather events have been."

And concern about the potentialdoes not appear to be dissipating. More than half of Americans (54 percent) believe extreme weather is "very" or "somewhat likely" to cause a natural disaster in their local area in the coming year.

The new report, titled "Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind," is based on a nationally representative survey jointly conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication in New Haven, Conn., and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication in Fairfax, Va.

For the study, 1,045 participants over age 18 were interviewed between April 8 and April 15. The researchers report a 95 percent confidence level, with a total average margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. This means that if the survey were conducted 100 times, the results would fall within 3 percentage points above or below the data collected in 95 of the 100 surveys.

The study was funded by the Surdna Foundation, the 11th Hour Project, the Grantham Foundation and the V.K. Rasmussen Foundation.

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter . Follow LiveScience , & . Original article on.

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Here's what you can do to be smarter than the editors at The Onion, even if they're still funnier than you:

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1. Quadruple-check the sender's email address.

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The first rule of not getting spear-phished — after you understand— is to check the full email address of a shady email. If the user name or URL look strange, don't click the link therein. If, say, a U.N. refugee agency isn't usually sending you Washington Post stories about your day job, maybe think twice about it, too. But it only takes one person to fall for the link and transform what seems like a simple email attack into a far more sophisticated one — and "at least one Onion employee fell for this phase of the phishing attack," The Onion's tech team explains in their post from last night. (Employees at several other online news organizations, apparently, .)

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2. Check the links or attachments closely.

Even if step one seems easy, avoiding a hack takes a little more sleuthing. With that one compromised email account, the SEA hackers sent the same malicious link using a trusted address, which is where things started to fall apart:

Once the attackers had access to one Onion employee’s account, they used that account to send the same email to more Onion staff at about 2:30 AM on Monday, May 6. Coming from a trusted address, many staff members clicked the link, but most refrained from entering their login credentials.

As the Onion post explains, that supposed Washington Post link (DO NOT CLICK THIS) went to "http://hackedwordpresssite.com/theonion.php," which redirected to the less evil looking URL "http://googlecom.comeze.com/a/theonion.com/Service.Login?&passive=1209600&cpbps=1&continue=https://mail.google.com/mail/." Again, don't click them, but suffice it to say they don't have anything to do with a serious Washington Post article. If you right-click a link to copy the URL into your browser bar — rather than just clicking straight through  — you can see where you'll end up. It's a good workaround to save yourself the redirect hell.

3. Never, ever enter your username and password

This is easier said than done. But even after getting you to click a link, the likes of the SEA hackers can only get access to, say, you're Twitter account if you're like the two Onion staffers who clicked the link and then also entered their email addresses and passwords into what looked like a Google Accounts login box. Turns out one of the two had access to all The Onion's social media accounts. And the hack perpetuated from there. (Which also might be a reason not to save your important company-wide passwords in your Gmail account.)

The Onion's tell-all also suggests that other Syrian Electronic Army hacks — , BBC Weather, 60 Minutes, and more — went down by way of similar, simple means. In fact, many of the media hacking attacks over the last six months, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, were traced back to spear-phishing. It's pretty amateur stuff, but also pretty easy to fall for — so a little paranoia goes a long way. So does a.

The latest disclosures Friday raised new questions about whether the Obama administration tried to play down any terrorist factor in the attack on a diplomatic compound just weeks before the November presidential election. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed when insurgents struck the U.S. mission in two nighttime attacks.

The White House has insisted that it made only a "stylistic" change to the intelligence agency talking points from which Rice suggested on five Sunday talk shows that demonstrations over an anti-Islamic video devolved into the Benghazi attack.

Numerous agencies had engaged in an email discussion about the talking points that would be provided to members of Congress and to Rice for their public comments. In one email, then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland worried about the effect of openly discussing earlier warnings about the dangers of Islamic extremists in Benghazi.

Nuland's email said such revelations "could be abused by members of Congress to beat the State Department for not paying attention to (central intelligence) agency warnings," according to a congressional official who reviewed the 100 pages of emails.

The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the emails that still have not been released.

The final talking points that weekend reflected the work of several government agencies CIA, FBI, State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence apparently determined to cast themselves in the best light as the investigation was just getting underway.

A scathing independent report in December found that "systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels" of the State Department meant that security was "inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place."

Eight months after the attack, the long-running and bitter dispute between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans on the subject shows no sign of abating. The GOP argues that the administration deliberately tried to mislead Congress and the American people. The White House insists that Republicans are trying to politicize the issue.

"There's an ongoing effort to make something political out of this," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday of the disclosure of the emails, which the administration had provided to lawmakers. "The problem with that effort is that it's never been clear what it is they think they're accusing the administration of doing."

Republicans have complained that the administration was trying to conceal that the attack was the work of terrorists and not a protest over an anti-Islamic film that got out of hand. Such revelations just before the election perhaps could have undercut President Barack Obama's record on fighting terrorism, including the killing of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, one of his re-election strengths.

The State Department emails and other internal administration deliberations were summarized last month in an interim investigative report by Republicans on five House committees. New details about political concerns and the names of the administration officials who wrote the emails concerning the talking points emerged on Friday.

Following Capitol Hill briefings in the days after the attack, members of Congress asked the CIA for talking points to explain the assault, and the CIA under the direction of David Petraeus put together an assessment.

It said Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaida took part in the attack, cited reports linking the attack to the group Ansar al-Sharia, mentioned the experience of Libyan fighters and referred to previous warnings of threats in Benghazi.

The reference to al-Sharia was deleted, but Nuland wrote later that night that changes she had seen "don't resolve all my issues and those of my building leadership, they are consulting with NSS," a reference to the National Security staff within the White House.

She also wrote that she had serious concerns about giving information to members of Congress "to start making assertions to the media that we ourselves are not making because we don't want to prejudice the investigation."

Senior administration officials, including Jake Sullivan, deputy chief of staff at the State Department, and Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser, met that Saturday morning to discuss the talking points.

Following the meeting, Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell produced a final set of talking points that deleted mentions of al-Qaida, the experience of fighters in Libya and Islamic extremists.

The next day, Sunday, Sept. 16, Rice appeared on the talk shows and said evidence gathered so far showed no indication of a premeditated or coordinated strike. She said the attack in Benghazi, powered by mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, appeared to be a copycat of demonstrations that had erupted hours earlier outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, spurred by accounts of a YouTube film attributed to a California man mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

"In fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video," she said. "People gathered outside the embassy, and then it grew very violent. Those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya, and that then spun out of control."

Administration officials said Friday they deleted the references to terror groups because it was then unclear and still is who was responsible for the attack.

Rice's depiction of the chain of events contrasted with one offered by Libya's Interim President Mohammed el-Megarif, who said at the time there was no doubt the perpetrators had predetermined the date of the attack.

"It was planned, definitely. It was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago," el-Megarif said. "And they were planning this criminal act since their arrival."

At a House hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., read from an email he said was written by Beth Jones, the State Department official responsible for Near Eastern affairs, the day after the Benghazi attack that suggested the State Department had at least some belief that the attack was the work of terrorists.

According to Gowdy's reading, the Sept. 12, 2012, email by Jones said: "I spoke to the Libyan ambassador and emphasized importance of Libyan leaders continuing to make strong statements. ... When he said his government suspected that former Gadhafi regime elements carried out the attacks, I told him that the group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists."

The Republican lawmaker said the email by Jones was sent to a number of State Department officials, including Nuland.

Yet Rice still went on the Sunday talk shows several days later to "perpetuate a demonstrably false narrative," Gowdy said.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Friday that the department reviewed the talking points on Friday, Sept. 14, and raised two primary concerns.

"First, that the points went further in assigning responsibility than preliminary assessments suggested and there was concern about preserving the integrity of the investigation. Second, that the points were inconsistent with the public language the administration had used to date meaning members of Congress would be providing more guidance to the public than the administration."

An official familiar with the emails said former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was unaware of Nuland's concerns about the talking points. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The White House has long maintained that it played a minimal role in crafting the talking points, pinning that process on intelligence agencies. The White House also said it made just one "stylistic" change to the talking points, which was to change the reference to the Benghazi compound from a "consulate" to a "diplomatic mission."

___

Associated Press writers Richard Lardner and Tom Raum contributed.