A falling apple proves the law of gravity. The price of Apple stock is proving otherwise — soaring past $500 a share for the first time on Monday.

Powered by the popularity of its mobile devices, such as the iPhone, Apple’s stock continues its breathtaking rise that knocks down any thresholds that stand in its way. The latest was the $500-a-share barrier, a new record, as the stock stormed $9.18 higher to $502.60.

Last month, Apple trounced ExxonMobil as the most valuable company in the world. Now, Apple’s market value is worth 16% more than Exxon’s. Shares of Apple have enjoyed 40% rise since last February and a nearly 500% gain from five years ago.

“It’s a once-in-a-generation company that reinvents markets and does no wrong,” says Michael Walkley, analyst at Canaccord Genuity.

Apple’s astounding rise and dominance of almost any market it taps is allowing investors to thumb their noses at all the conventional wisdom about stocks, including:

•The crowd is always wrong. The masses, which are bullish on Apple stock, have been dead right. The crowd of money managers, investors and analysts piling into the stock have enjoyed one of the greatest rides by a big stock in recent memory. Of the 40 Wall Street analysts who follow the stock, 38 rate it a “buy” or “strong buy.”

•Big companies, eventually, have difficulty maintaining their growth rates. As companies go from tiny upstarts to big-cap publicly traded companies, eventually their growth rates moderate. That’s been the case at Microsoft, Intel and even Google. But Apple continues to post growth like a corporate whippersnapper. Apple’s revenue grew 68% last year, its fastest rate of growth in the past five years, S&P Capital IQ says. Profit, too, jumped 98%, also the fastest clip of growth in the past five years.

•Investors need to diversify. With Apple’s stock rising so quickly and consistently, some investors might wonder if it’s the only stock they need. Most analysts have price targets on the stock of $560 or much more. “With this leg up (in the stock), it’s been an almost unimpeded move from $350 a share to almost $500,” says Scott Kessler of Standard & Poor’s, who has a $650 price target. Apple stock rose 26% last year and was the 55th-best stock in the S&P 500. This year, it’s already up 24%, making it the 46th best, a respectable return, given its sheer size.

While Apple has elbowed aside most competitors, there are long-term risks, says Michael Holt of Morningstar. Some wonder if lower-price smartphones could be more popular in emerging nations.

But for now, there’s more “upside,” he says. “Everyone agrees the near-term momentum is unstoppable.”

Copyright © 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Two Columbine High School students were injured today in a hammer attack by a 14-year-old girl, according to news reports.

Update at 4:45 p.m. ET: The teen suspect warned a school employee ahead of the attack, AP says.

The head of security for the Jefferson County School District, John McDonald, says that the girl attacked a 15-year-old girl in a bathroom and that a male student was hurt when he intervened.

Still no word on the conditions of the injured or on the identities of those involved.

Original post: A 14-year-old Columbine High student has been arrested for attacking two other students with a hammer at the infamous Denver-area school, the Associated Press reports.

A Jefferson County sheriff’s spokeswoman said that the attack happened this morning but that the conditions of the injured students were not known. The suspect is facing assault charges.

The school was the scene of the April 1999 massacre by two students who killed themselves after murdering 12 students and teacher and wounding 26 others.

Copyright 2012 USATODAY.com

With an end-of-February deadline approaching, House Republican leaders said today they may push a vote this week on extending the payroll tax cut — but not unemployment benefits or a delay of cuts in fees to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

In a written statement, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and other Republicans said they have developed a payroll tax cut-only option because negotiators can’t agree on spending cuts for a full package.

“Democrats have refused virtually every spending cut proposed — insisting instead on job-threatening tax hikes on small business job creators — and with respect to the need for an extension of the payroll tax cut, time is running short,” said the GOP statement.

The White House took a cautious approach to the Republican announcement on the payroll tax cut, but officials said they continue to support a bill that also extends unemployment insurance and includes a Medicare “doc fix.”

“There is time to negotiate a solution,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney.

Congress and the White House agreed to a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut late last year, and it expires at the end of February. The temporary deal included unemployment insurance and the Medicare doctors’ fees issue, and authorized continuing talks on offsetting budget cuts so that the package would not add much to the federal debt.,

Many congressional Democrats say budget offsets should include higher taxes on wealthy Americans, as well as budget cuts.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., one of the negotiators, said that while he supports extending the payroll tax cut without offsets in principle, he would prefer to keep the focus on an overall package.

“It’s preferable to keep these three together,” he said.

Here’s the full statement from Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and House GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Cal.:

“We support the work of our conference negotiators and continue to support a responsible resolution that extends current payroll tax relief, reforms and extends unemployment insurance, and includes a Medicare ‘doc fix.’ Republicans have attempted to reach an agreement and negotiated in good faith for months, and we will continue to do so. Unfortunately, to date, Democrats have refused virtually every spending cut proposed — insisting instead on job-threatening tax hikes on small business job creators — and with respect to the need for an extension of the payroll tax cut, time is running short.

Because the president and Senate Democratic leaders have not allowed their conferees to support a responsible bipartisan agreement, today House Republicans will introduce a backup plan that would simply extend the payroll tax holiday for the remainder of the year while the conference negotiations continue regarding offsets, unemployment insurance, and the ‘doc fix.’ If Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith, Republicans may schedule this measure for House consideration later this week pending a conversation with our members. Democrats’ refusal to agree to any spending cuts in the conference committee has made it necessary for us to prepare this fallback option to protect small business job creators and ensure taxes don’t go up on middle class workers.

This is not our first choice. Our goal is to reach a responsible agreement in conference. But in the face of the Democrats’ stonewalling and obstructionism, we are prepared to act to protect small businesses and our economy from the consequences of Washington Democrats’ political games.”

Copyright 2012 USATODAY.com

An autopsy was performed on Whitney Houston’s body Sunday, but it will be weeks before investigators know the cause of her death. Until the Los Angeles County coroner’s office has toxicology results, nothing can be known for certain, and those tests will take weeks.

Why does it take 30 days to perform simple lab tests? In part, because they’re not so simple, says Michael Fishbein, chief of the autopsy service at UCLA and a deputy medical examiner who consults for Los Angeles County on some cases, though not homicides or suicides. It’s not like on TV, he says. “When you watch Law and Order, in 20 minutes, they already have the toxicology results. That’s not realistic.”

An autopsy is an examination of a body to determine the cause of death. In addition to looking for obvious signs of foul play, the person performing the autopsy will take fluid and tissue samples to test for drugs and other chemicals that might explain the person’s death, says James Klaunig, a professor of toxicology and environmental health at Indiana University in Bloomington.

That generally includes blood and urine, and many times a piece of the liver and samples of the vitreous humor, the fluid in the eyeball. Kidney and brain tissue samples are also possible, Klaunig says. Tissue samples can be especially important if the person was dead a long time and the blood is coagulated, making testing on it difficult or impossible. If the bladder emptied at death, urine can be difficult to retrieve as well.

The first task is to screen the blood and urine to determine whether specific groups of chemicals are present. Most screens check for alcohol, barbiturates, amphetamines, opiates and common prescription drugs, Klaunig says. The most commonly used test is called “enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay,” or ELISA. The samples are given a numerical code, so they can’t be traced back to an individual, which generally takes a day. Then it takes an additional day or two to run the test and perhaps a final day to interpret the results, Klaunig says.

The ELISA screen says only whether a chemical compound is present, not how much of it there was. “It doesn’t find the needle for you, it just tells you which haystack to look under,” he says.

With those results in hand, investigators do a more precise test called “gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.” That typically takes two to three days and shows concentrations of the chemicals.

Then investigators know whether there was enough of a given drug, or combination of drugs, to be deadly.

“If you take alcohol and a barbiturate, when you put the two together, they may depress your respiratory system so much that you stop breathing,” Klaunig says.

The month-to-six-weeks timeline for results often given by police builds in time for retests and analysis. “It’s also more a workload issue than the actual time it takes to do the tests,” Fishbein says.

A busy lab isn’t going to stop everything to run samples on one case, no matter how high-profile, Klaunig says. “They will be put in the queue like everyone else to wait their turn.”

Copyright © 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Rain forced searchers today to postpone more digging at an old well in Northern California where a death row inmate says there are remains of 10 or more victims from a 15-year murder spree by the “Speed Freak Killers.”

After two days of searching the site, investigators, public works employees and volunteers have found more than 300 human bones, San Joaquin County sheriff’s spokesman Deputy Les Garcia said in a statement, the Associated Press reports.

On Sunday, authorities said the search near Linden, Calif., found a pair of sandals, tennis shoes, engraved jewelry and a woman’s purse.

Searchers are going by a map drawn by death-row inmate Wesley Shermantine, who claims that the well holds remains of victims killed in the 1980s and 1990s by him and a childhood friend, Lorenz Herzog.

The pair were arrested in 1999, but the killings may have spanned more than 15 years, the AP reports.

In letters and interviews, Shermantine has said there could be 10 to 20 bodies in the wells. But, the Los Angeles Times reports, he also is said to have bragged about killings as far away as Utah.

“They basically hunted people,” Rob Dick, a private investigator who for more than a decade has been compiling a list of possible victims, tells the newspaper.

Herzog was convicted of three murders and sentenced to 77 years to life in prison, though that was later reduced to 14 years. An appeals court threw out his first-degree murder convictions after ruling that his confession had been illegally obtained.

He was paroled in 2010, but committed suicide last month after a bounty hunter told him Shermantine was disclosing the location of the well along with two other sites.

The killings were spread over such a large area and years that it wasn’t until the pair were arrested 13 years ago that authorities realized there was a connection between the victims.

Copyright 2012 USATODAY.com

FERNDALE, Mich. — As a Catholic TV station becomes increasingly popular around the world, church officials are trying to tell the public that the media outlet is not the voice of Catholicism.

In two public statements, the Archdiocese of Detroit has taken the unusual step of publicly criticizing Real Catholic TV, saying “that it does not have the authorization required under church law to identify or promote itself as Catholic.”

The dispute comes as the TV station, which operates mainly over the Internet, has exploded in popularity since it started in 2008. Its videos attract 10 million views on YouTube and its public face, Michael Voris, has become a well-known, aggressive global advocate for conservative Catholics.

Voris returned Feb. 6 from Nigeria, where he visited the church that terrorists attacked on Christmas Day. And on Friday, he left for the Philippines to help make the case against contraception use.

But as Real Catholic TV’s popularity rises, the station is facing its share of detractors concerned about how its traditional views are sometimes expressed in a blunt manner.

“The only way to prevent a democracy from committing suicide is to limit the vote to faithful Catholics,” Voris said on a show that stoked controversy.

On a mission to save the Catholic church from itself, Voris isn’t afraid to offend. For much of his life, Voris was a lukewarm Catholic, someone who usually just went through the motions at church.

But after the sudden death of his brother in 2003 from a heart attack and the death of his mother from stomach cancer the following year, the former TV reporter became a changed man.

“Her dying really kind of started to wake me up,” Voris said. “You have to face mortality. And then the questions came pouring in: What is the meaning of life? Who are we as human beings? Is there life after death? Those are fundamental questions everyone has to look for.”

Voris found those answers in the Catholic church. In 2006, he formed St. Michael’s Media, a Catholic TV production company and studio here. And in 2008, he helped launch Real Catholic TV.

Today, the never-married 50-year-old is consumed by his passion to promote what he considers the one true faith. Working up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, Voris is on a burning mission to save Catholicism and America by trying to warn the public about what he sees as a decline of morality in society.

But it’s a vision that has rubbed some the wrong way. His critics said his remarks, at times, promote division and extremism.

Catholic officials from Pennsylvania to Spain to Detroit have warned people that he doesn’t speak for the Catholic church. The Archdiocese of Detroit released two public statements on Voris, saying in December that the TV station was not permitted to have the word “Catholic” in its title. After receiving complaints from Voris’ supporters, it sent out a second release last month reiterating its stance.

But Voris and his supporters said it’s their critics who violate the core teachings of the church. They’re not surprised about the attacks because they see them as part of an effort to water down the faith.

“Chaos has run through the church for the last 40 to 50 years,” Voris said. “For people who are faithful Catholics, it’s a source of great sorrow. It’s definitely broken.”

The tension between the two sides reflects an intense debate among Catholics over how to stem the number of people leaving the faith. Liberals argue that people are leaving because the church is too strict and outdated, but conservatives such as Voris say the opposite is true.

Voris said the church’s liberal tilt in the years after the 1960s reforms of Vatican II led to declining Mass attendance and the decline of morality in the West. In his videos — which on YouTube have drawn more than 10 million views — Voris criticizes everything from abortion, comparing it to a holocaust, to contraception to liberal Catholics who promote feminism and homosexuality.

In one of his more controversial videos, Voris said:

“The only way to run a country is by benevolent dictatorship, a Catholic monarch who protects his people from themselves and bestows on them what they need, not necessarily what they want.”

After an uproar, Voris apologized, saying that he misspoke but he stands by his larger point, which is that a society needs strong morals to survive.

Last April, the diocese in Scranton, Pa., banned him from speaking in its facilities after it received complaints about his comments on other faiths.

In response to the criticism, Voris told the Free Press:

“Current culture doesn’t let things be said plainspokenly. It’s … political correctness. Anything somebody takes offense at, whether it’s true or not, seems to be out of bounds.”

Despite the controversy, Voris travels the world to promote the Catholic faith. He has done shows in Nigeria, the Philippines, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany and has upcoming trips to New Zealand and Australia.

Voris’ efforts are financed by Marc Brammer, a business developer for Moody’s who lives in South Bend, Ind., and is a member of Opus Dei, a somewhat controversial group known for its traditional views.

Voris started and owns a media company, St. Michael’s Media, which Brammer contracts to produce Real Catholic TV.

Like Voris, Brammer is concerned about what he feels is the liberal shift of the Catholic church. They both criticize what they call “Americanism,” a term they use to describe a post-1960s culture that they say has influenced Catholics negatively.

“Our Catholic church is infected with Americanism that has gone wrong,” Brammer said. “Not that America is wrong. But America’s best days are not today; it was in the past, just like the Catholic church.”

While in Madrid, Voris bemoaned the American Catholics who attended, saying they were dressed immodestly.

“It made you downright cringe to see so many Americanized Catholics standing there at Mass half-naked,” he said in a video.

Voris and his backers are committed to forging ahead on a mission to save the Catholic church and the United States.

Many current church leaders are “namby-pamby,” Voris said. “It’s all about ‘love your neighbor.’ “

What’s needed instead, he said, is a muscular Catholicism that isn’t afraid to encourage battle and sacrifice.

“Sometimes, you have to provocative,” Brammer said.

Copyright © 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Once-unknown Jeremy Lin, who capitalized on the absence of star teammates Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony to establish himself as the New York Knicks point guard, joins them in expecting the good times to continue to roll as they prepare to return.

“When we get out there, hopefully we’ll hit the ground running,” said Lin, whose improbable 26.8-point average created “Linsanity” and coincided with a five-game winning streak that lifted New York’s record to 13-15 ahead of Tuesday night’s game at the Toronto Raptors.

The undrafted Harvard graduate, previously cut by the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets, also averaged 8 assists and 4.2 rebounds and shot 51.5% in the last five games.

Carmelo Anthony, who has not played in a week because of a strained groin, compared Lin to Rudy Ruettiger, who spent most of his Notre Dame career as a member of the scout team before getting in on two plays as a reward for his hard work. His inspirational story became a Hollywood film.

“He’s Rudy. That’s our Rudy, man,” Anthony said of Lin, 23. “People love an underdog.”

Lin started the last four games, all without Anthony and Stoudemire, who was with family in Florida after the death of older brother Hazell. .

“I feel I have a long way to go, a lot more to do,” Lin said. “If I can inspire people along the way, I’d love to do that.”

Stoudemire, who averages 18.2 points, rejoined the team for Monday’s practice that Lin sat out. Coach Mike D’Antoni said he was giving the first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent a “recovery day” to rest a “tweaked” ankle.

D’Antoni could not be more delighted with the emergence of a point guard.

“We’ve talked about it all year, if we have a point guard who can set people up we’ll be better,” D’Antoni said. “And this happened.”

Anthony, too, said he sees only an upside. “I know there are questions about whether I’ll fit in,” Anthony said, “but this is a dream come true for me. … At the end of the day, I’m here for one thing, and that’s winning basketball games.”

Lin played the entire second half of Saturday’s two-point win at the Minnesota Timberwolves, and he was visibly fatigued, especially with the pounding he took driving the lane against big men Kevin Love and Nikola Pekovic.

“My body has to adjust, for sure, to playing heavier minutes,” said Lin, 6-3, 200.

His coach at Palo Alto High School in California, Peter Diepenbrock, said Lin didn’t lift weights in high school and didn’t have a Division I body.

“It was not like we were sitting here wondering, ‘What are those Division I coaches thinking?’ He wasn’t that strong, he wasn’t that explosive,” Diepenbrock said.

Stoudemire and Lin are set to start together for the first time Tuesday, and D’Antoni suggested Anthony, who has improved considerably, could return later this week.

On adding Stoudemire and soon Anthony with Lin, D’Antoni said: “I know everybody’s worried about it, but it will only get better. It should.”

Anthony, who dominated the ball earlier this season as the Knicks desperately searched for a point guard and averages a team-leading 22.3 points, insisted Lin’s emergence can only help him because it will remove the need for him to work the ball up the floor.

“To say, ‘How is it going to work out? Can I fit in?’ It’s easy,” Anthony said. “Give him the ball and space out.”

Stoudemire thrived under D’Antoni’s system when they were together with the Phoenix Suns and Steve Nash was the point guard. Lin, with the way he probes defenses and his rapid ball movement, has drawn early comparisons to Nash.

“I see similarities in their games,” Stoudemire said. “He’s finding guys. He’s unselfish.”

Lin rejected such talk.

“I’m very careful not to compare myself to a two-time MVP and a Hall of Famer,” he said Monday.

In other Lin items of interest:

• Courtside tickets for Tuesday’s game at Toronto were selling for more than $1,600 on Ticketmaster.com on Monday. The same seats for Toronto’s next home game, against the San Antonio Spurs, peak at $896.

• With “Linsanity” sweeping the nation if not the world, the natural would be for someone to grab and go with a Linsanity URL.

It won’t happen — because Linsanity.com was registered by one of Lin’s high school basketball coaches in 2010 as the “official home for all your LINSANE apparel.”

Among the most popular of the LinSanitees right now? “Live from New York, it’s The Jeremy Lin Show.”

• According to social media aggregate topsy.com, over the past two weeks, what it terms “significant and valid” mentions of Lin on Twitter — a tweet retweeted or containing a link — have gone from zero on Feb. 3 to a peak of roughly 225,000 on Friday, when he scored 38 points to lead the Knicks past the Los Angeles Lakers.

By comparison, mentions of injured Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony have gone from just under 1,000 on Jan. 31 to a peak of 2,250 on Friday.

• Lin is Fathead’s No. 1 seller, overtaking Tom Brady, fastest product turnaround in company history.

•Endorsement offers have been pouring in and are being evaluated to see what Lin might take on.

• On hardly any fantasy rosters two weeks ago, Lin now “plays” in 97% of the leagues on cbssports.com, starts for 82% of his “owners” and is the most claimed off the waiver wire.

Copyright © 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Watch live video as President Obama awards the 2011 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal in the East Room of the White House.

Copyright 2012 USATODAY.com

Updated 5:09 p.m. ET

Rick Santorum is now neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney in two national polls, reflecting the former Pennsylvania senator’s surge in the past week as well as a slide for Romney among the most conservative voters.

Santorum leads Romney, 30% to 28%, of Republican and GOP-leaning voters in a Pew Research Center poll taken Wednesday through Sunday. In mid-January, Romney had a 17-point lead over Santorum in the Pew survey.

In Gallup’s daily tracking poll, Romney leads Santorum by two percentage points: 32% to 30% among registered GOP voters. Romney previously had a 19-point lead on Santorum during Gallup interviews taken Jan. 30-Feb. 3.

The Pew poll points out challenges for Romney, the prohibitive GOP front-runner who has had trouble exciting conservative voters.

Pew finds that Santorum does best among the GOP voters who identify themselves with the small-government Tea Party movement and white evangelical GOP voters.

Romney, by contrast, does best among non-Tea Party Republicans and moderate to liberal Republicans, according to Pew.

One telling point from the guts of the Pew poll: In November, before voting actually began in the GOP race, a majority (53%) of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they thought Romney was a “strong conservative.”

Today, 42% say they see Romney as a “strong conservative” while 50% say he is not.

The Gallup daily tracking poll is a five-day rolling average, reflecting public opinion Wednesday through Sunday. It includes interviews taken after Romney’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, in which he defended his record as Massachusetts governor and called himself “severely conservative.”

Copyright 2012 USATODAY.com

As Greek lawmakers approved a new round of austerity cuts to qualify for a second bailout, some say the rescue package isn’t going to help Greece but make things worse — piling on new debt for years to come while undermining its wobbly economy.

“The austerity (they are imposing) on top of what has happened in the past two years means it is almost mathematically certain that this (rescue) will fail,” said Costas Lapavitsas, professor of economics at the University of London.

Lapavitsas says the further cuts to wages and pensions could lead the Greek economy to contract by 6% this year. “If that were to materialize Greece is finished,” he said. “There’s no way that this debt would be sustainable.”

Early Monday, Greek lawmakers voted 199 to 74 in favor of the cuts as more than 100,000 protesters demonstrated nearby, some throwing gas bombs and setting buildings on fire. Firefighters doused smoldering buildings and cleanup crews swept rubble from the streets of central Athens.

Rioters destroyed or seriously damaged 93 buildings, the Athens municipality said, while police said at least 45 were burned. They included nine listed as national heritage buildings, mostly in the neoclassical style, while dozens of stores and cafes were smashed and looted.

“Criminals targeted all that was best in the city of Athens, its neoclassical monuments,” said Thanassis Davakis, the cultural policy chief for the Conservative party that led the fight for the austerity measures. “The damage must be swiftly redressed and the city’s memory restored.”

Protesters say the demonstrations were large even for Athens, where taking to the streets to register complaints occurs often.

“I’ve been to many demonstrations, but I’ve never seen so many people,” said Janine Louloudi, 29, a documentary producer in Athens who attended the protests late Sunday and early Monday. But she said police began hitting people, attacking cars to scare protestors and firing tear gas.

The main Greece parliamentary coalition parties, Pasok and New Democracy, expelled 43 deputies for failing to back the bailout package that some members said is being forced on them by outsiders to benefit European Union banks and not Greeks.

Greece is now in its sixth year of recession. Unemployment is now at more than 20%; youth unemployment is close to 50% and climbing.

“I see Greece’s future as very grim,” said Christos Kountis, 63, a retired businessman in the Greek city of Naousa. “And I am not referring to my future but that of our children —the new generation has no future.”

The vote came after weeks of wrangling that saw European leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel express deep frustration over Greek stalling on austerity measures after years of using the euro currency to finance heavy spending on public benefits and projects, and lying about the extent of its budget deficit to EU inspectors.

“The Germans have to be convinced that these guys down in the Mediterranean are suffering,” said Theodore Pelagidis, an economics professor at the University of Piraeus in Greece.

In return, Greece will be granted another $172 billion in bailout funds, an amount some analysts believe isn’t enough, and some creditors will forgive a portion of the Greece debt.

To prevent default on its next round of debt repayments ($19 billion on March 20), the bailout package must be approved Wednesday by the EU, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The three are demanding Greece cut pensions and minimum wages and hike certain taxes to qualify for the bailout.

Some analysts believe Greece has no choice. Others say that the measures will only deepen the misery of Greeks and provide no way out, raising the possibility that Greece should default on its debts and allow itself to be forced from the eurozone, the 17 countries that use the euro for currency.

“All they are doing at the moment is piling more debt on top of already unsustainable levels of debt and strangling the country,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform, a London-based think tank.

Tilford says default looks increasingly likely and the only economic reason for keeping Greece in the eurozone is to prevent its credit crisis from affecting faltering economies like Spain and Portugal, which are also in debt.

Meanwhile, Greece already owes almost $462 billion or 160% of GDP without the new bailout loan. About $264 billion of that is owed to private creditors and is likely to be reduced by 50-70%. But because at least 40% of that debt is owed to Greeks themselves, such as Greek banks, insurers and social security funds, economists say much of the resulting losses could force Greece to borrow more.

Pensioners are already feeling the pinch.

“Since my pension has been already been reduced by a third, of course this has had a major impact on my life,” Kountis said. “I had planned my life based on this pension I was going to take, by being very responsible and paying the money that I should as an employee, to the state.”

Even so, Prime Minister Lucas Papademos warned that that the social cost of the program was preferable to the “economic and social catastrophe” of not reaching an austerity deal. But forcing the Greek government into siding with the EU over its people, who are increasingly feeling the cutbacks to generous government benefits, could cause serious unrest, some say.

“The Greeks don’t win any prizes for the way they have handled the economy,” Lapavitsas said. “But the way their so-called partners and allies in Europe have forced them to deal with it is atrocious.”

Copyright © 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.