Nation & World Glance
NEW YORK — The U.S. military remains released by North Korea on Friday will be sent to a military lab in Hawaii, where they’ll enter a system that routinely identifies service members from decades-old conflicts.
Identifications depend on combining multiple lines of evidence, and they can take time: Even after decades, some cases remain unresolved.
Dog tags found with the remains can help, and even scraps of clothing can be traced to the material used in uniforms. Teeth can be matched with dental records. Bones can be used to estimate height. And the distinctive shape of a clavicle bone can be matched to records of Xrays taken decades ago to look for tuberculosis, said Charles Prichard, a spokesman for the Defense POW/MIA Agency.
If a DNA analysis is called for, samples are sent to a military DNA lab at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Tiny samples of bone or teeth, no bigger than the amount of bone in the last joint of the pinkie finger, are enough to yield usable DNA, said Timothy McMahon, who oversees the Dover lab as director of Defense Department DNA Operations. Accounting
CBS looks into misconduct claims amid report on CEO Moonves
NEW YORK — CBS said Friday it is investigating personal misconduct claims after the company’s chief executive, Les Moonves, was the subject of a New Yorker story detailing sexual misconduct allegations.
The media company said independent members of its board of directors are “investigating claims that violate the company’s clear policies” regarding personal misconduct.
CBS Corp.’s stock fell 6 percent — its worst oneday loss in nearly seven years — as the reports of the misconduct allegations began to circulate around noon Friday, triggering investor concerns Moonves might be forced to step down. The CBS chief has been a towering figure in television for decades, credited with turning around a network that had been mired for years at the bottom ratings.
The New York-based company did not mention Moonves by name but said it issued a statement in response to the New Yorker article, which was published on the magazine’s website late Friday. The article was written by Ronan Farrow, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story last year for the same magazine uncovering many of the allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein
The article says six women who had professional dealings with Moonves say he sexually harassed them between the 1980s and late 2000s.
Four of the women described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, it says, while two said that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers.
Bad week in social media gets worse; Twitter hammered
NEW YORK — Cracking down on hate, abuse and online trolls is also hurting Twitter’s standing with investors.
The company’s stock plunged Friday after it reported a decline in its monthly users and warned that the number could fall further in the coming months. The 20.5 percent plunge comes one day after Facebook lost 19 percent of its value in a single day.
Twitter says it’s putting the long-term stability of its platform above user growth. That leaves investors seemingly unable to value what the biggest companies in the sector, which rely on their potential user reach, are worth.
Twitter had 335 million monthly users in the quarter, below the 339 million Wall Street was expecting, and down slightly from 336 million in the first quarter. That overshadowed a strong monthly user growth of 3 percent compared with the previous year.
The company said its monthly user number could continue to fall in the “mid-single-digit millions” in the third quarter.
Bear caught in storm drain freed when manhole cover lifted
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Authorities have freed a bear that got caught in a storm drain for about an hour.
Colorado Springs Utilities workers and Colorado Parks and Wildlife Southeast Region workers arrived to the residential neighborhood Thursday to work out a strategy to get the bruin out. They didn’t want to handle it because they would have to tag it and it would be euthanized if tagged again.
Wildlife officials harassed the bear by firing a nonlethal rubber slug while utility workers opened a manhole . The bear, estimated to be about 250 pounds, climbed out and was chased away.