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CARACAS, Venezuela—Venezuela’s defense minister says a military helicopter has crashed during a training flight, killing four servicemen.

Minister Gen. Henry Rangel Silva says one of the five on board the helicopter was injured but survived.

Rangel says the Russian-made MI-17 helicopter crashed during a training flight at an airport in the western town of San Felipe.

He said among those killed in Friday’s crash was Col. Oscar Martinez Mora, a flight instructor and commander of a helicopter battalion in the town.

Rangel says the helicopter had been about 10 meters (11 yards) off the ground when it suddenly dropped and crashed. He says officials are investigating what might have caused the accident.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is using weekend gatherings of world leaders — dominated by discussion of European economic woes and Afghanistan — to solidify world resolve against development of an Iranian nuclear bomb and to encourage a more forceful response to worsening violence in Syria.

Obama will have the ear of key players on both issues during back-to-back G-8 and NATO summits that begin Friday evening at the secluded presidential retreat in Camp David, Md. Discussion will be aimed directly and indirectly at Russia, a sometime protector of both Iran and Syria and the chief blockade to such U.S. goals as an arms embargo on Syria.

The gatherings come in the shadow of the eurozone debt crisis and plummeting public support for the war in Afghanistan.

NEW YORK—A prominent retired psychiatrist is apologizing to the gay community for a decade-old study that concluded some gay people can go straight through what’s called reparative therapy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, formerly of Columbia University, now says he no longer believes his work showed that.

For the study, Spitzer had interviewed 200 people who’d claimed some degree of change. The “fatal flaw” is that there is no way to judge the credibility of their accounts, Spitzer says in a letter he submitted last month to a journal that published his work in 2003.

The work made headlines when he presented it at a 2001 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. One reason for the attention was that Spitzer had played a leading role 30 years before in removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in the association’s diagnostic manual.

Spitzer’s study was attacked by critics who questioned the reliability of the accounts from the people he interviewed. At the time, Spitzer acknowledged that he had no proof their stories were accurate, but said several aspects of their accounts suggested their statements could not be dismissed out of hand.

Now he says his reasoning was wrong, and that “there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Spitzer, who lives in Princeton, N.J., sent a copy to The Associated Press after a reporter interviewed him about his change of heart.

“I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy,” Spitzer wrote. “I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some `highly motivated’ individuals.”

FRESNO, Calif.—Quarantines were lifted on two Central California dairies associated with a case of mad cow disease after investigators found no link between the illness and food the diseased bovine might have consumed, federal officials said Friday.

Tests performed by the World Organization for Animal Health also confirmed what U.S. labs had found: The cow had a random mutation of the illness that was unlikely to affect other cows in the herd.

The tests were part of an investigation begun in April when an examination of a carcass of a nearly 11-year-old cow taken to a Hanford rendering plant tested positive for mad cow disease, the nation’s fourth case and the third “atypical” strain to be discovered.

Mad cow disease is a deadly affliction of the central nervous system that can be transmitted to humans who eat meat from infected cows.

The rash of cases that occurred in Great Britain in the 1990s were caused by cattle being fed protein supplements made from the spinal columns and brains of diseased cows, a practice that has since been banned.

The California cow had what is known as atypical L-type bovine spongiform that scientists know happens occasionally.

In the disorder, a protein the body normally harbors folds into an abnormal shape called a prion, setting off a chain reaction that eventually kills brain cells.

Scientists say they do not yet know what causes this strain of the disease. The incubation period is two to eight years.

The USDA tests 40,000 of the 35 million cattle slaughtered annually for BSE, but some public health experts have called for more aggressive testing, especially in light of Friday’s announcement.

“If that’s true, then it’s even more important to increase surveillance since the feed ban could not be expected to prevent future cases,” said Dr. Michael Greger, director of public health and animal agriculture with the Humane Society of the United States.

He said adopting the European model of testing all older cattle, or the Japanese model of testing every cow slaughtered for human consumption would add mere pennies per pound of beef sold and lower the risk of human cases of the fatal disease.

As part of its investigation, the FDA and the California Department of Food and Agriculture examined feed records at the affected dairy and identified at least 10 suppliers. They said Friday that all were in compliance with regulations.

The California cow, which came from a still-unnamed Tulare County dairy, had been unable to stand when she was euthanized and hauled away to a plant that renders carcasses into animal food protein and other products.

Dairy operators are not required to report if their cattle contract neurological diseases.

Investigators with the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service were still working to track down at least a dozen other living cows that were raised on a calf ranch with the sick cow. Calves taken from their mothers after birth are fed a protein supplement made from slaughtered cattle blood, and some question whether that blood might carry BSE.

Already investigators have tracked down two offspring of the diseased cow. One that was euthanized for testing turned out to be healthy. Another calf was stillborn within the last two years, but officials have not yet said what happened to the carcass.

Baker Commodities, the rendering plant where the diseased cow was discovered, is a voluntary participant in the USDA testing program.

BOSTON—Massachusetts lawmakers are reviving the debate over whether to require car manufacturers to provide software needed to diagnose car trouble to independent repair shops and vehicle owners, but supporters of the measure also want voters to decide this fall if it doesn’t pass.

The state Senate passed the measure late Thursday night. It now heads to the House of Representatives.

The bill previously passed the Senate in 2010, but failed to come up in the House. It calls for auto manufacturers that sell cars in Massachusetts to provide access to their diagnostic and repair information system through a universal software system that can be accessed by dealers and independent repairs shops, starting in 2016.

Security-related information would not be made available to owners and independent repair shops.

Supporters say the bill would bring savings and convenience to consumers, repair shops and even dealerships when it comes to repairing trade-in vehicles.

Art Kinsman, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Right to Repair Coalition, which represents more than 1,000 Massachusetts mechanics supporting the legislation, said it would provide mechanics and car owners the ability to purchase all repair information. As a result, he said, consumers will have more options for service, including do-it-yourself repairs.

“If they can’t get all of the information, do they ever really own their car?” he said.

But opponents argue that the information is already available to owners and mechanics, and it’s up to the person or shop to invest in the tools and training.

Daniel Gage, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said individuals have always had the “right to repair,” and many independent repair shops have the tools and software codes to fix a wide array of vehicles.

He said manufacturers must require dealerships to have updated tools and software to be “service ready,” but that they have no control over small, independent shops.

Additionally, there is no guarantee that cars made before the 2016 start date would be repaired at independent shops, Gage said, as they would not be included in the universal system as proposed under the bill.

“It all sounds great, it sounds like a magic wand,” he said, noting that if passed, the legislation could lead manufacturers to redesign cars across the board in an effort to comply with the Massachusetts law, resulting in higher sticker prices.

Gage also questioned whether the measure would result in lower repair costs, saying the bill has no provision to ensure that any savings are actually passed on to consumers.

Kinsman said the bill has a wide range of support from state residents and that his organization is working to gather enough signatures to ensure the measure will be on the November ballot if the Legislature doesn’t pass it.

“We want to make sure that one way or another, consumers have their say,” he said.

MIAMI—Richard Knabb, the tropical weather expert at The Weather Channel, will be the next chief of the U.S. government’s hurricane forecasting hub in Florida, federal officials said Friday.

The promotion to director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami fulfills a childhood dream for Knabb, who grew up in Coral Springs and Katy, Texas, and later was a forecaster at the center.

Knabb remembers watching the hurricane center’s director on local television news as Hurricane David aimed at Miami in 1979. The storm eventually swerved and made landfall farther north in Palm Beach County, but Knabb was hooked on the tropical storm forecasts.

“Largely that came out of personal, childhood fear. I wanted to be able to figure out how to forecast those things myself because they posed such a danger to folks in hurricane-prone areas,” said Knabb, 43. “From that point forward I think I knew that that was what I was going to end up doing as a career.”

Knabb started working at the hurricane center in 2001. He was a senior hurricane specialist at the center from 2005 to 2008, experiencing what other longtime forecasters called “decades of hurricane activity in just a few years,” thanks to the overactive and devastating 2004 and 2005 seasons.

“I was living the hurricane problem while I was helping others prepare for the hurricane problem,” Knabb said.

Knabb is already cautioning coastal residents to be prepared.

“One of these days another major hurricane is going to come to the U.S., and we need to be prepared. And that starts with me and my family,” Knabb said. “We’re going to be living in South Florida again, and we have to have a hurricane preparedness plan for our home and our family. And that will be just one of the examples I’ll try to set for personal preparedness.”

The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season was the sixth consecutive year without the U.S. landfall of a major hurricane. Those are storms classified as Category 3 or higher, with top winds of at least 111 mph. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is set to release its hurricane season outlook next week.

“At the helm, (the center’s) director must be the cool and calm voice that conveys this array of information that prompts life-saving actions from an individual to across all levels of emergency management and even internationally, and I firmly believe that our next director embodies this reputation,” said NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco.

After leaving the hurricane center, Knabb served as the deputy director of the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu. He joined The Weather Channel in 2010.

Knabb will replace Bill Read, who steps down as director June 1, the official start of the six-month Atlantic hurricane season.

Read’s retirement after four years as director is much calmer than his entrance in 2008. He replaced Bill Proenza, who only held the job for six months after replacing the popular Max Mayfield. Most of the center’s staff called for Proenza’s dismissal after they said he exaggerated problems with an aging weather satellite and undermined forecasters.

Earlier this week, Read said his successor would face the same challenge that has perplexed forecasters since Hurricane Andrew’s catastrophic Florida landfall in 1992: how to see how big a storm will be well in advance or whether a storm will rapidly strengthen into a major threat.

Knabb said NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project is showing signs of solving that and other forecasting problems. He also praised Read’s leadership and said he was eager to reunite with the hurricane center staff.

“I think they’re in a really good place right now,” he said.

Other hurricane specialists who work outside the National Hurricane Center applauded the selection of Knabb for one of the toughest jobs in weather forecasting.

Knabb is well qualified for the job, said Kerry Emanuel, an MIT meteorology professor who specializes in hurricanes.

“That job requires a terrific amount of energy and enthusiasm. It tends to burn people out. It’s good to choose a young person who has a lot of energy and experience,” Emanuel said.

Knabb not only has the scientific credentials to lead the hurricane center, he also understands the importance of the job’s communications aspect, said Heidi Cullen, a climatologist at the nonprofit Climate Central in New Jersey and a former climate expert for The Weather Channel.

“This is someone who is incredibly experienced and knows how to handle the really, really intense situation of broadcasting during hurricane landfall,” said Cullen, adding “you want someone who is not going to overhype a situation and really can communicate the risks and uncertainties.”

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AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.

MEXICO CITY—The tortured body of a Mexican police reporter was found on the side of a road in the northern state of Sonora on Friday, a day after he was kidnapped by gunmen while waiting at a car wash, authorities said.

Marco Antonio Avila Garcia’s body was found inside a black plastic bag near the city of Empalme, about 68 miles (110 kilometers) south of Ciudad Obregon, where he was abducted, said Sonora state prosecutors’ spokesman Jose Larrinaga.

Larrianga said police also found a message signed by a cartel, but he wouldn’t reveal the message’s content.

The 39-year-old reporter often wrote about organized crime for the sister newspapers Diario Sonora de la Tarde and El Regional of Ciudad Obregon, said Larrinaga.

Avila was snatched and forced into a pickup truck Thursday by three masked gunmen as he waited for a company car to be washed in Ciudad Obregon.

Eduardo Flores, director of the newspapers, told The Associated Press that Avila wrote about drug trafficking but never mentioned cartels by name nor did investigative pieces.

“He wrote about drug trafficking, but nothing involved” about it, Flores said. “He wasn’t allowed to cover anything that would be considered aggressive by criminal groups.”

Flores said Avila was among the most experienced police reporters on his staff. The journalist never mentioned receiving threats or being afraid of covering the police beat. No threats had been received by the newspapers, he added.

The reporter was married and had three small children. He worked at night and during the day was going to university. He recently graduated with a degree in chemistry, Flores said.

Mexico has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists in recent years, with media workers disproportionately targeted as a government offensive against drug cartels and rivalry among crime gangs have resulted in tens of thousands of killings, kidnappings and extortion cases.

Last week, gunmen opened fire on the offices of the El Manana newspaper in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. The week before, police found the mutilated bodies of three photojournalists inside plastic bags dumped in a canal in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.

Prosecutions in journalist killings are rarely carried out, which is generally the case with most homicides and other serious crimes in Mexico.

Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights says 79 journalists were killed between 2000 and 2011. In addition, it said 14 of them have disappeared. Other press freedom groups differ with that number.

The commission said Friday it has opened an investigation into the death of Rene Orta Salgado, a journalist who had quit working for El Sol de Cuernavaca newspaper in the resort city of Cuernavaca in January. Police found Orta’s body inside his car’s trunk. A cause of death has not been made public.

PROVIDENCE, R.I.—A Massachusetts man who has been charged alongside a Rhode Island inmate who may face a death-penalty prosecution is asking for a new lawyer.

The request from Jose Alibal Santiago was forwarded to a judge on Friday in U.S. District Court in Providence.

Santiago says his relationship with lawyer Judith Crowell isn’t working and that he hasn’t been able “to find that level of trust and comfort.”

Santiago is accused of participating in a plot to rob a gas station manager in 2010. He has pleaded not guilty.

Jason Pleau (PLEW) is accused of fatally shooting the gas station manager outside a bank during the robbery. Pleau does not want to be tried federally where he may face the death penalty if convicted.

Crowell did not return a message for comment Friday.

NEW YORK—President Barack Obama’s May 9 announcement that he favors same sex marriage led to a huge spike on YouTube, according to data assembled by the popular video sharing site.

Obama’s endorsement of same-sex nuptials resulted in a record number of searches and a rush of users uploading videos on the subject. Gay marriage was also the most popular topic on YouTube’s news and politics category this week.

YouTube is owned by the online search giant Google, which saw a 458 percent increase in national searches for “Obama” and “gay marriage” between 10 am and 6pm the day Obama disclosed his views in an interview with ABC News.

Gay rights issues have a history of sparking online viral videos. University of Iowa student Zach Wahls’ plea for Iowa lawmakers to allow marriage rights for his lesbian parents was YouTube’s most-watched political video of 2011. It was followed closely by “Strong,” an ad from Rick Perry’s now abandoned campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, in which the Texas governor laments that “gays can serve openly in the military.” The commercial sparked numerous parodies and drew more than 760,000 “dislikes” on YouTube.

Matthew Nisbit, a professor of communications at American University who studies the intersection of politics and social media, said online videos and an interest in gay rights were a natural pairing.

“The heaviest users of video are people under the age of 25, and gay rights is one of the few political issues young people feel passionate about,” Nisbit said. “And the gay community was an early adopter of social networking — the technology was a good fit for people of minority status looking for like-minded others.”

Following Obama’s announcement, more videos with the key words “gay marriage” were uploaded on YouTube than ever before, drawing more than 3 million views and 100,000 comments.

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Follow Beth Fouhy on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/bfouhy

CAMP DAVID, Md.—President Barack Obama and leaders of other major industrial powers stepped outside discussions of European economic woes and Afghanistan that will dominate a long weekend of summitry for a look Friday at options to solidify world resolve against development of an Iranian nuclear bomb and encourage a more forceful response to worsening violence in Syria.

Obama will have the ear of key players on both issues during back-to-back G-8 and NATO summits. Discussion will be aimed directly and indirectly at Russia, a sometime protector of both Iran and Syria and the chief blockade to such U.S. goals as an arms embargo on Syria.

The gatherings come in the shadow of the eurozone debt crisis and plummeting public support for the war in Afghanistan. Political and economic chaos in Greece and Spain underscored just how fragile Europe’s economy remains after an eviscerating austerity regime. Germany’s finance minister predicted Friday that the crisis could last up to another two years.

Most of the leaders are part of overlapping international coalitions formed to address the Iranian nuclear problem and the newer crisis in Syria, where an estimated 9,000 people have died in more than a year of violence that arose from the pro-democracy Arab uprisings.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will be part of a discussion focused on Syria and Iran on Friday evening among the G-8 industrial nations. Faced with implacable Russian opposition to significant new United Nations punishments on the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials are trying to get consensus among other allies about ways to promote Assad’s ouster.

A senior U.S. official said one goal of Friday’s closed-door discussion at the secluded presidential retreat in Camp David, Md., was to impress on Medvedev that other nations that share Russia’s usual role at the forefront of international diplomacy are seeking ways to address the Syria debacle without Russian help.

The United States wants to avoid escalating a confrontation with Moscow over Syria, the official said, but wants Medvedev to hear the depth of international outrage. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal diplomacy.

Russia is a partner with the United States and European nations in containing Iran’s nuclear program, although with China it has blocked the most severe penalties the United Nations Security Council might impose. A U.N.-affiliated negotiating group including Russia will meet with Iranian officials next week in Baghdad, Iraq.

White House national security adviser Tom Donilon predicted ready consensus among the leaders that tough economic sanctions must continue even while a once-dormant diplomatic process shows new life. U.S. officials say the economic pressure of sanctions is key to drawing Iran back to the bargaining table this spring after a long hiatus.

“Each member of the G-8 is a core member of this sanctions effort,” Donilon said Thursday. “Each member has been absolutely essential to really putting in place what has been an extraordinarily effective and, I think most people would say, surprisingly effective sanctions effort.”

The G-8 gathering is expected to produce a statement by the leaders on Iran, which would reinforce the diplomatic effort to prevent Iran’s nuclear work from progressing to the point of a bomb. Iran denies it is seeking a bomb. A possible deal could allow Iran to enrich uranium at a lower level than needed to build weapons, with sanctions easing as Iran shows it is scaling back more troublesome work.

Iran says it is enriching only to create nuclear fuel. Its refusal to halt enrichment has provoked U.N. and other sanctions, including U.S. and European Union penalties meant to cripple its oil exports — its main revenue source — that are to fully take effect in a few weeks.

“The message will be that the Iranians should seize this opportunity” for talks, Donilon said. “And while this goes on, in parallel, the sanctions and pressure effort will continue, led by the United States and the others who will be at the table on Friday evening.”

Syria is a much harder case, in part because Russia and China oppose U.N. action that could set a precedent for outside interference in internal ethnic or human rights matters, and partly because there is no international appetite for a military confrontation with Assad.

Syrian forces on Friday fired on protesters holding the largest opposition marches yet in Aleppo, a sign of rising anti-regime sentiment in the country’s biggest city, which has largely remained supportive of President Bashar Assad throughout the 15-month uprising.

The head of the U.N. observer mission in Syria warned that neither his team nor armed action could solve the country’s crisis, and called on all sides to discuss a solution. But the regime kept up its assaults on opposition areas and protests, while the head of Syria’s largest exile opposition group dismissed the U.N.’s plan as unrealistic.

The White House abruptly moved the G-8 session to Camp David earlier this spring, after months of planning for a Chicago venue. A desire for seclusion and intimacy was one reason and a gesture to Russia was another.

Russia is opposed to a NATO plan for a missile defense shield in Europe that will be detailed at the NATO summit Sunday in Chicago, causing Russian President Vladimir Putin to let NATO know he did not want to be invited to the alliance meeting.

Separating the two sessions was supposed to make it easier for Putin to attend one and not the other. But Putin made his own abrupt change, telling Obama last week that he would skip the gathering and send Medvedev in his place.

The administration denied speculation that the sessions were moved for security reasons. Past G-8 meetings have seen large and sometimes violent protests by activists opposed to the increasing globalization of world economies. Street violence overshadowed the 2001 summit in Genoa, Italy. Critics have accused the G-8 of representing the interests of an elite group of industrialized nations to the detriment of the needs of the wider world. Since Genoa, the meetings have been held in increasingly isolated locations to shield leaders from protests, playing into criticism of the G-8′s closed-door image.

Obama, an infrequent visitor to Camp David, is putting the presidential hideaway on full display for the G-8, the largest gathering of foreign leaders ever to assemble there. The leaders will stroll leafy paths to rustic meetings halls and bed down in the 11 residential cabins. Four African leaders will join them for lunch Saturday.

The G-8 is made up of the leaders of the United States, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. The meetings began in 1975 at a forum instigated by France, where leaders of the six largest economic powers agreed to annual meetings. Canada joined a year later, making it the G-7. Russia was brought into the organization in 1997, six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The European Union is represented but is not granted the power to act as host of the annual sessions or to serve as the rotating leader.

Obama holds the chairmanship this year.