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By MICHAEL BIESECKER, AP
Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl says he was tortured repeatedly in the five years he was held captive by the Taliban: beaten with a copper cable, chained, held in a cage and threatened with execution after trying to escape.
Bergdahl described his captivity in a note his lawyer made public Thursday after sharing it with the Army in an attempt to avert a court martial.
The Army charged Bergdahl nevertheless on Wednesday, accusing him of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy for leaving his post in Afghanistan in June 2009.
Freed last year in exchange for five Taliban commanders held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the 28-year-old soldier from Hailey, Idaho faces up to life in prison if convicted.
Bergdahl says he tried about a dozen times to escape, and that his captors' response was brutal.
"In the beginning of my captivity, after my first two escape attempts, for about three months I was chained to a bed spread-eagle and blindfolded," Bergdahl wrote.
"Around my ankles where the chains were, I developed open wounds. ... During these months some of the things they did was beat the bottoms of my feet and parts of my body with a copper cable."
He also says he was beaten with a rubber hose, fists and the butt of an AK-47, so hard the rifle's stock broke off. He was repeatedly threatened with execution, and "kept in constant isolation during the entire 5 years."
Bergdahl next faces an Article 32 hearing before a high-ranking officer known as a "convening authority," who will decide if the evidence merits a court martial.
By GREG KELLER and LORI HINNANT
Associated Press
French investigators cracked open a mangled black box and extracted audio from its cockpit voice recorder Wednesday, but gleaned no explanation for why a German plane dropped unexpectedly and smashed into a rugged Alpine mountain, killing all 150 on board.
The orange cockpit voice recorder - dented, twisted and scarred by the impact - is considered key to knowing why the pilots of Germanwings Flight 9525 lost radio contact with air traffic controllers over the French Alps and then crashed Tuesday during a routine flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf.
French officials said terrorism appeared unlikely, and Germany's top security official said Wednesday there was no evidence of foul play.
Remi Jouty, director of the French aviation investigative agency, said an audio file was recovered by Wednesday afternoon, including sounds and voices. But he said it was too early to draw any conclusions from the recorder, which takes audio feeds from four microphones in the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots, air traffic controllers as well as any noises.
Jouty said the plane was flying "until the end" and was at 6,000 feet (1,820 meters) just before it smashed into the mountainside, well below its previous cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. He said the final communication from the plane was a routine message about permission to continue on its route.
He would not speculate on possible causes of the crash or rule anything out.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, said Wednesday that "we still cannot understand what happened yesterday." He said his airline "never in its history has lost an aircraft in cruise flight."
French President Francois Hollande, meanwhile, said the case for the plane's second black box had been found but not its contents. Jouty refused to confirm that about the flight data recorder, which captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
JOAN LOWY, Associated Press
Distractions — especially talking with passengers and using cellphones — play a far greater role in car crashes involving teen drivers than has been previously understood, according to compelling new evidence cited by safety researchers.
The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety analyzed nearly 1,700 videos that capture the actions of teen drivers in the moments before a crash. It found that distractions were a factor in nearly 6 of 10 moderate to severe crashes. That's four times the rate in many previous official estimates that were based on police reports.
The study is unusual because researchers rarely have access to crash videos that clearly show what drivers were doing in the seconds before impact as well as what was happening on the road. AAA was able to examine more than 6,842 videos from cameras mounted in vehicles, The foundation got the videos from Lytx Inc., which offers programs that use video to coach drivers in improving their behavior and reducing collisions. Crashes or hard-braking events were captured in 1,691 of the videos.
They show driver distraction was a factor in 58 percent of crashes, especially accidents in which vehicles ran off the road or had rear-end collisions. The most common forms of distraction were talking or otherwise engaging with passengers and using a cellphone, including talking, texting and reviewing messages.
Other forms of distraction observed in the videos included drivers looking away from the road at something inside the vehicle, 10 percent; looking at something outside the vehicle other than the road ahead, 9 percent; singing or moving to music, 8 percent; grooming, 6 percent; and reaching for an object, 6 percent.