Astronaut Andrew Feustel on Thursday successfully wrenched out a stubborn bolt that, if it had broken off, could have blocked installation of a $132 million camera on Hubble. The camera is one of astronomers’ highest priorities for this mission, the fifth and final visit to fix and modernize the Hubble.

There will be no weekend off for Feustel and the other six crewmembers of space shuttle Atlantis, which pulled up to the Hubble on Wednesday. In the next few days, they’ll undertake work so difficult that NASA is downplaying their chance of success.

“Today was a speed bump,” Hubble senior scientist David Leckrone said. “Two days from now is going to be the hold-your-breath day.”

What’s planned:

• On Saturday, Feustel and astronaut John Grunsfeld will attempt the first repair on a Hubble scientific instrument while in orbit. Fixing the Advanced Camera for Surveys requires them to remove tiny screws that they won’t be able to see – while wearing bulky space gloves.

“This will be a nail-biter all the way,” Grunsfeld said before Atlantis’ May 11 launch.

• On Sunday, astronauts Michael Massimino and Michael Good will try to mend another broken scientific instrument. To bring the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph back to life, they’ll have to undo more than 110 screws not much bigger than watch screws.

The telescope could be crippled if a single stray screw floats into it.

“I don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out,” Massimino said before launch. “A lot of miracles have to occur.”

The scientific instruments on Hubble – unlike its standard components, such as the observatory’s batteries – were not designed to be fixed in orbit. So it’s extraordinarily difficult to access them. Hubble’s managers decided the two instruments are so scientifically valuable that it’s worth the risk to try to repair them.

If the astronauts pull off the repairs, Hubble will have five functional scientific instruments for the first time since 1993, but Hubble’s overseers are trying to tamp down expectations.

“On this mission, the final mission, we’re going for broke,” Leckrone said.

Thursday’s spacewalk was not expected to be challenging, but the astronauts encountered an unexpected obstacle as they tried to remove a scientific instrument known as Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

The camera has been a scientific workhorse, but it’s 15 years old, and its replacement will be 15 to 35 times more powerful. Astronomers are eager to start using the new camera.

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration on Thursday outlined an expansion of its housing rescue plan that will help homeowners who face foreclosure because they are ineligible for current assistance programs.

Officials also provided a report card of sorts on how the home-loan modification and refinancing efforts are going since the housing rescue plan was announced in February.

The expanded program includes:

• Foreclosure alternatives. Homeowners unable to qualify for a modification will see a more streamlined process for pursuing short sales and deeds-in-lieu of foreclosures, which transfer a home back to the lender. The goal is to help homeowners avoid a foreclosure that could lead to a severe hit on their credit scores.

A short sale occurs when a home is sold for less than the remaining mortgage, but lenders agree to consider the debt paid.

• Protections for homeowners whose home value has fallen. Under a $10 billion program, new incentives will be provided to lenders to help them make modifications in regions where home prices have had steep drops.

The Obama administration has said it expects up to 9 million homeowners to get help through mortgage refinancing and loan modifications.

But the complexity of the program has made for a slow start and done little to dampen foreclosures, which have risen as banks ended temporary moratoriums on foreclosures.

“It’s been slow. The foreclosure problem is not going away,” said Mark Zandi, with Moody’s Economy.com.

WASHINGTON – After weeks of discussing ways to provide health care to the uninsured, Congress is beginning the difficult task of finding a way to pay for it.

Lawmakers are considering a broad range of ideas – including a new federal tax on soda – but a key Senate committee focused Tuesday on a proposal to tax health insurance that millions of Americans receive through their employers.

“I don’t think you can avoid taking that on,” Gail Wilensky, senior fellow at the health education foundation Project HOPE, told the Senate Finance Committee, which is helping to craft an overhaul of the health care system.

Nearly 164 million people, or 62 percent of the nation’s non-elderly population, receive health insurance through work, according to a joint congressional committee on taxation. Money spent on insurance provided by employers is excluded from an employee’s taxable income. If the exemption was lifted entirely, it could have raised about $226 billion in 2008, the joint committee reports.

During the campaign last year, President Obama opposed taxing employer-based health care benefits, and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs reiterated that opposition Tuesday.

Even so, Senate Democrats are taking a closer look at the idea of at least limiting the tax break. Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the exemption helps the well-off more than the poor, who are less likely to receive health care through work.

Baucus said the idea of repealing the break entirely is “just not going to happen,” but said Congress could cap the amount of benefit made available tax-free. He also said lawmakers may set an income limit so the exemption would not apply to high-paid employees.

Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, also supports the idea of repealing the exemption.

Gerald Shea of the AFL-CIO said limiting the tax break is “a step in the wrong direction” because it could punish employees who negotiated for better health care coverage rather than higher wages. Also, some employees pay more for health care insurance because of factors outside of their control, including the size of their company, he said.

The cockpit recording released Tuesday by the National Transportation Safety Board offers some of the first clues that could help explain why the pilots allowed the plane to get too slow and then apparently tugged the plane into a sudden, fatal climb.

It shows that the pilots were perhaps inattentive during a critical phase of the Feb. 12 flight as they prepared to land. Other evidence released by the safety board suggests they may also have suffered from lack of sleep and poor training.

Capt. Marvin Renslow, 47, urged co-pilot Rebecca Shaw, 24, who had complained that she was not feeling well, to pop her ears seven minutes before the crash. Federal aviation regulations forbid any non-work related conversation during an approach to landing.

Neither pilot realized that they had reduced the power to a dangerously low setting, according to the recording and other data released by the safety board.

What happened next doomed the flight. The plane’s “stick shaker” – a device that warns pilots when a plane gets too slow – activated, violently vibrating the control column.

Instead of adding power and lowering the plane’s nose as pilots are taught, Renslow pulled the plane into a climb that slowed it further.

As Renslow struggled with the controls, Shaw tried to help by resetting flaps on the plane’s wings and retracting the landing gear.

By this time, the plane’s wings were no longer keeping the plane aloft and it was rolling violently and plunging toward the ground.

“We’re down,” Renslow said in the final seconds before the recording ended. “We’re . . .”

The final sound on the recording was a scream by Shaw, the board reported.

Employers shed 539,000 jobs in April, pushing the nation’s unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, but the pace of job losses slowed, leading some analysts to predict the recession will end in a few months.

A record 13.7 million Americans were out of work last month and 5.7 million jobs have been lost since the downturn began in December 2007, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The jobless rate was up from 8.5 percent in March and the highest since fall 1983. A year ago, unemployment was 5 percent.

Still, the smallest number of jobs losses in six months provided the latest in a series of signs the recession’s ferocity is easing.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go,” said Maury Harris, chief U.S. economist for UBS.

Recent reports have shown manufacturing and services industries shrinking more slowly. Also, consumer spending and confidence have ticked up and the housing market has shown signs of bottoming.

Analyst Richard Yamarone of Argus Research said he expects the recession to end by late summer but, like many economists, predicts unemployment will remain high through 2010.

Harris said enthusiasm over April’s decline in job losses was restrained by the fact that it was partly due to the addition of about 60,000 government workers for the 2010 census.

“We have to appreciate that they’re temporary (workers),” he said.

Still, the 539,000 job cuts were far less than March’s 699,000 and January’s peak of 741,000.

President Obama said Friday “the gears of our economic engine do seem to be slowly turning once again.”

He asked states and colleges to help jobless people pursue education and training without losing their unemployment benefits. States generally require people who collect unemployment to be actively looking for work, which can make it difficult to sign up for school or job training. Under Obama’s plan, going to school would satisfy the requirement that they were seeking new employment.

“We’re still in the midst of a recession that was years in the making and will be months or even years in the unmaking,” Obama said. But he added: “Step by step, we are making progress.”

<h4>Unmanly comment </h4>

Boston Red Sox fans hold up a sign referring to former Sox left fielder Manny Ramirez during Boston's game against the Cleveland Indians at Fenway Park in Boston on Thursday. Ramirez was suspended for 50 games for using a banned substance, reportedly a female fertility drug sometimes used to mitigate side effects when ending a cycle of steroid use.

Concern about the swine flu has caused a Golden Baseball League team from Mexico to cancel its season, forcing the new Tucson Toros to try to fill six home dates and six road games.

The Tijuana Potros, also an expansion team in the independent league, were scheduled to visit Hi Corbett Field on June 23-25 and July 7-9. The Toros were set to visit Tijuana on May 26-28 and June 5-7.

Toros owner Jay Zucker said he would look for other opportunities to fill the lost dates, such as exhibitions or fantasy camps.

Mexican soccer teams have banned fans from attending recent games because of the flu epidemic, which has killed 44 people in the country and two in the United States.

As a result, the Tijuana team couldn’t risk launching its season with uncertainty about sponsors, ticket sales and stadium availability.

“We weren’t worried about our players being infected,” Zucker said. “The league just felt it couldn’t wait any longer” for the concerns to subside with the season only two weeks away.

The Toros, who now have 38 home games set, begin their season May 21 against the Chico Outlaws at Hi Corbett.

With Tijuana out, the league is down to nine teams.

Tucson will be in the South Division with Yuma, St. George (Utah) and Orange County (Calif.).

The North Division will feature Edmonton, Calgary and Victoria from Canada and Chico and Long Beach from California.

Tijuana plans to return to the league next season, team president Jose Manuel Peña said in a statement.

“We know this will pass and the Potros will be ready for next year,” he said, “but realize the timing of this natural disaster has left us with no other choice.”

Ex-Sun Devil suing NCAA

Former Arizona State and Nebraska quarterback Sam Keller is suing the NCAA and its video-game partner, EA Sports, claiming they’ve gone too far in using the likenesses of college players who are prohibited from sharing in the games’ profits.

The class-action suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in California, claims the games make illegal use of football and basketball players’ names – through the download of team rosters – and unidentified but scarcely hidden likenesses and that the NCAA condones the practice in violation of its own rules.

EA Sports, the NCAA and Collegiate Licensing Co., the Georgia-based marketing firm that represents the NCAA, “deliberately and systematically misappropriate players’ likenesses to increase revenues and royalties at the expense of student athletes,” says the suit, filed on behalf of every football and basketball player on an opening-game roster whose jersey number appeared in an EA game.

It asks for a jury trial. No damages are specified.

BoSox titles tainted?

BOSTON – Manny Ramirez hit cleanup on the Red Sox’s two championship teams this decade. Some of his teammates on those clubs say his suspension for using a banned substance won’t tarnish those titles.

“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but I don’t feel like our ’07 season was tainted,” Mike Lowell said Thursday night. “This is still a 25-man team.”

Ramirez was MVP of Boston’s World Series sweep of St. Louis that gave the Red Sox their first championship in 86 years in 2004. He also had one of his best seasons that year, hitting .308 with 43 homers and 130 RBIs.

“It’s not like we wouldn’t be the world champions if, whatever this is that’s going on,” 2008 AL MVP Dustin Pedroia said. “I don’t think it tarnishes any of that stuff.”

Thursday, Ramirez was suspended for 50 games for violating baseball’s performance-enhancing drug policy.

Several Red Sox players said they didn’t know if he used such substances when he played for Boston from 2001 until he was sent to the Los Angeles Dodgers at the trading deadline last July.

“I have no idea,” said Lowell, the MVP of the 2007 World Series against Colorado.

“He’s a phenomenal hitter and I never saw anything, so I defer to asking Manny that question.”

The Associated Press

Dophins renaming stadium

MIAMI – The Miami Dolphins are renaming their home Landshark Stadium as part of a partnership with singer Jimmy Buffett.

The name change from Dolphin Stadium is the fifth since the stadium opened in 1987. Buffett’s Margaritaville enterprise includes Landshark Lager, brewed by Anheuser-Busch.

Buffett and new Dolphins owner Stephen Ross are friends. They plan to unveil a new logo for the stadium at a private event Friday, where Buffett will perform a song inspired by the Dolphins.

The Associated Press

Bike race coming to Colo.?

DENVER – Lance Armstrong wants to bring bicycle racing back to Colorado, Gov. Bill Ritter said Thursday.

Ritter said Armstrong, who has a home in Aspen and has trained in the area, called him to discuss the proposal.

“He has this idea and he’s working on it from his end. There is some possibility we could bring it back,” Ritter said.

Armstrong is in Italy for the Giro d’Italia race.

A posting on his Twitter page on Wednesday said, “Had a great conversation with Governor Ritter from Colorado. Working on something. Stay tuned . . .”

Colorado had a stage race in the 1970s and ’80s known first as the Red Zinger Classic and later the Coors Classic, which grew to include two weeks of racing in California, Nevada and Colorado – with stages some years in Hawaii and Wyoming – and was considered one of the biggest stage races in the world.

It last ran in 1988.

The Associated Press

NUMBER OF THE DAY

105

Runs scored by the Diamondbacks, the No. 31 mark of 32 teams this year. How Arizona ranks in other offensive categories.

Batting average .222 (32)

Hits .207 (32)

RBIs 97 (31)

Doubles 54 (11)

Home runs 30 (12)

On base percentage .297 (32)

Slugging percentage .385 (27)

QUOTABLE

'You can't have arguably the greatest pitcher of our era, arguably the two greatest players of our era and now another very, very good player be under this cloud of suspicion and not feel like it has ruined it for everybody.'

CHIPPER JONES,

Atlanta Braves third baseman, referring to pitcher Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez being linked to steroids or drugs

———

TOROS OPENER

> Chico (Calif.) at Tucson, 7 p.m. May 21, Hi Corbett Field

> Tickets: 325-1010

———

ON THIS DATE

1968: Jim “Catfish” Hunter of the Oakland A’s pitches a perfect game, beating the Minnesota Twins 4-0. It is the first perfect game in the American League regular season in 46 seasons.

1970: Walt Frazier scores 36 points to lead the New York Knicks to a 113-99 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers and the NBA championship in seven games.

1984: On the day the Olympic torch relay begins, the Soviet Union announces it will not take part in the 1984 Summer Olympics.

The Associated Press

———

SPORTS SOUND-OFF

Ramirez couldn’t dodge drug test

Re: Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez suspended

• Major League Baseball was once a great sport. In recent years it has become a sad shadow of the past. OCOTILLOSUNSET

• Whatever happened to sports for the sake of the game? This is why people are not into sports anymore. The players are spoiled doper brats that play for the paycheck and not for the fans and just the pureness of having fun playing a game. JETMECH

• It’s high time, these “pretty boys” and pseudo “hip-hoppers” step up and really pay attention to any substance they take or are given, and play the game as it is a true sport of ability and ethics. Cheating sucks and those who engage in it are suckers! POPS

• As a Dodger fan this is not good, but . . . Manny is not the smartest person out there but he should have checked it out with a team doctor. DJQ32

By USA Today, Mike Chesnick

GM, which has borrowed $15.4 billion from the U.S. government in the past six months, shipped in 150 cars and trucks to the event this week at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa, and paid for airfare and hotel lodging for 90 percent of the guests.

The affair is scaled back from previous years, says GM spokesman Terry Rhadigan. Guests have to pay for their own golf outings, he says, and most of the days are packed with informational sessions on GM’s 2010 product line. The guests are GM’s fleet and corporate customers, which accounted for 27.6 percent of GM’s business in 2008. Fleet customers can buy dozens of vehicles at a time.

“Our approach this year has been noticeably austere,” he says. “We obviously had the option to cancel the event or move it … but … do we want to just let our competitors move in and take this important business from us?” Business with fleet customers is “highly profitable,” he says. They often order next year’s models in June.

GM is operating on a taxpayer-funded lifeline, having taken $15.4 billion in government loans. It has said it needs up to $30 billion. It faces a June 1 deadline to slash debt and sign new contracts with its labor union, or the government has said it won’t provide any more money.

A small number of the customers attending the event were government employees who paid their own way, Rhadigan says.

Helio Fred Garcia, a professor of crisis communications at New York University, says GM’s fleet meeting isn’t the same as events by other companies that have been criticized for sponsoring lavish entertainment while taking taxpayers’ dollars.

“If GM is going to survive … it has to maintain sales in a competitive marketplace,” Garcia says.

President Obama has called for “shared sacrifice” among all of GM’s stakeholders.

“I would hope that GM management would spend our financial dollars wisely, and in a manner that would be certainly appropriate in the taxpayer’s minds,” says Jack Dickinson, president of GM retiree group OverTheHillCarPeople.com. White-collar retirees lost health care benefits at the start of 2009. “I would hope that our management has the foresight to stay away from things that would project a negative image with the public.”

GM, Chrysler and Ford executives were harshly criticized last fall for flying on private jets to Washington to ask for government aid. Leslie Paige of Citizens Against Government Waste says it’s clear GM didn’t learn from that.

“GM has a tin ear to these things,” she says. “There shouldn’t be any wining and dining right now. They took taxpayer money. If you’re going to do that, you need to make some very public displays that you get that the taxpayers are part owners of the company now.”

Tom Donaldson, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says GM and other companies accepting government aid should be working hard to stay under the radar.

“Even legitimate functions that help sales, that create partnerships, that are not over the top and luxury, they are almost out of bounds from the public standpoint,” Donaldson says.

GM says the Treasury wasn’t consulted on the event, nor would it ask for permission. The Treasury has said it doesn’t want to interfere with GM’s day-to-day operations.

The shift shows how deeply the recession is cutting. Federal stimulus money aimed at reviving the economy and a sharp drop in tax collections have altered, at least temporarily, the traditional balance of how states, cities, counties and schools pay for their operations.

The sales tax had been the No. 1 source of state and local revenue since the mid-1970s, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Before that, property taxes were the primary source. That changed in the first three months of 2009.

Federal grants – early stimulus money plus conventional federal aid – soared 15 percent in the first quarter to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $437 billion, eclipsing sales taxes, which fell 2 percent.

The dominance of federal money is set to expand dramatically this year because tax collections are sinking while the bulk of federal stimulus aid is just starting to arrive. “This money isn’t manna from heaven. It comes with a price,” says Indiana state Sen. Jim Buck, a Republican. He worries that the federal money will leave states under greater federal control and burden future generations with more debt.

Nick Johnson, a state finance expert at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says the federal aid is well-timed. “This has more to say about the severity of the recession than anything else,” he says. “Congress stepped in on a temporary basis to help states.”

The federal government plans to provide about $300 billion in extra aid to state and local governments during the next two years, mostly for health care, education and transportation projects. State and local governments spend about $2 trillion a year, and the federal government is now paying about 23 percent of those costs.

States are counting on tax collections rebounding by 2012, when stimulus money starts to run out.

The early flow of stimulus money helped lift total state and local revenue by 1.6 percent in the first quarter of 2009 compared with a year earlier despite a 2.9 percent drop in total tax collections. Spending rose 1.5 percent.

Workers wearing bio-hazard protection suits as a precaution against swine flu clean a hallway at National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City on Monday. Mexican officials lowered their flu alert level in the capital on Monday, and plan to allow schools, businesses, museums and libraries to reopen this week.

The H1N1 virus, better known as swine flu, continues to infect people across the globe, but there is a growing sense among public health officials that the newly evolved influenza strain is mild, at least for now.

Though there is still much to be learned about the strain, Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says he sees encouraging signs that it is a mild form.

In the U.S., the hospitalization rate is only 0.7 percent, says Jon Andrus of the Pan American Health Organization: “That’s comparable to most seasonal influenza.”

That appears to be the case in New York, which, with 73, has the highest number of confirmed cases in the nation.

“We have looked daily at every hospital and every intensive care unit in the city,” says Thomas Frieden, New York City Health Department commissioner, “and we have yet to find a single patient with severe illness from H1N1.”

But that could change quickly at any moment, Andrus warns. “Influenza viruses are predictable in their unpredictability.”

Officials worldwide are watching carefully to see how the virus evolves during the winter flu season in the Southern Hemisphere, which begins in June.

“That will tell us a lot about whether the virus is changing, whether it’s becoming more severe and what measures we might want to take in the fall,” Besser says.

The World Health Organization’s figures for Monday were 1,025 cases with 26 deaths in 20 countries, says WHO flu director Keiji Fukuda. The majority of cases continue to be reported in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, Fukuda says, and most cases in the other 17 countries are related to travel from those three countries.

That means that raising the world pandemic phase to 6 is unlikely anytime soon, he says. WHO raised the alert level to Phase 4 on April 27 and to Phase 5 on April 29. Phase 6 would indicate “a global pandemic is under way,” according to WHO.

Besser suspects that the level probably will be raised to Phase 6 at some point “given that flu viruses spread easily from person to person,” but he says that wouldn’t change the work CDC already is doing.

In the U.S., the CDC’s report for Monday was 279 cases in 36 states and one death: a toddler visiting Texas from Mexico.

As of Monday, more than 330,000 children were out of school in the U.S. because of closures as the result of actual or suspected cases of H1N1. Taken together, the students would make up the nation’s sixth-largest school district, the U.S. Education Department says.

The CDC is considering revising its original advice that schools with active cases of H1N1 close for up to two weeks, Besser says. That’s because most schools have clusters of the flu, he says, and that means the virus is “already pretty well-established in those communities,” so closing schools won’t stop its spread.

The world’s two largest PC makers have rolled out dueling initiatives to deliver a plethora of services – many of them free – to help small and midsize businesses, so-called SMBs, prosper. Smaller companies “will be the catalyst for the economy recovering,” predicts Paul-Henri Ferrand, Dell’s vice president of global strategy for SMBs.

Dell and HP ultimately hope to broker lucrative management services along with their hardware, much as IBM does with big corporations. “This is all about being more efficient and finding access to new pockets of money,” IDC analyst Ray Boggs says.

IDC defines small businesses as those with one to 100 employees; midsize ones have 101 to 999 workers. SMBs last year spent $513 billion on hardware, software and tech services, and by 2013 should spend $674 billion, IDC says.

And that gets Dell and HP excited. Sales growth of computers, monitors and printers has been slowing for several years.

So now each has made catering to SMBs the linchpin to a revamped growth strategy. “It’s a shift from a transactions model to a relationship model,” says Stephen DeWitt, HP’s senior vice president of its personal systems group.

In recent months, each has begun offering special lines of PCs, backed by zero-percent financing, for SMBs. And each has launched websites and blogs with guidance on everything from how to get started to how to connect with clients.

Dell dedicates 10,000 of its 80,000 employees to SMBs. For a subscription fee, Dell technicians will use the Internet to take over day-to-day management of a firm’s internal network. “We want to become the No. 1 IT vendor to SMBs worldwide, period,” Ferrand says.

HP has authorized independent tech resellers to bundle HP hardware in package deals with e-mail services from USA.Net, software from Microsoft, and accounting and sales management programs from NetSuite.

“If we can help deliver a sustained set of capabilities to drive growth into their businesses, then this is a good thing for our business,” DeWitt says.

The big challenge: how to meet SMBs’ diverse needs. “You just can’t put a smorgasbord out there and hope they choose something,” says Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, which has catered to SMBs for a decade. “It’s the “Fortune” 5 million, not the “Fortune” 500. You have to really understand what they need.”