Why Mass Shooters Often Wear Masks

The Oregon mall shooter was dressed all in black and his face was covered by a white hockey mask.

The mask, the black clothes, the age of the gunman and a weapon are becoming a familiar and deadly pattern.

The gunman, 22-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts of Portland, is one of a string of killers before him, including Aurora shooter James Holmes, who chose to wear black and cover their faces with masks.

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For these cold-hearted killers, the costume bolsters their confidence and power as they carry out their depraved fantasies, said Dr. Mary Ellen O'Toole, a retired FBI profiler.

"They're doing it because it's a role. It's almost like a big game and like they're the puppet master. They've got the control, the power, the weapons," she told ABCNews.com.

"The biggest thing for a mass shooter is the control and empowerment for the shooting," said former FBI agent and ABC News consultant Brad Garrett. "It isn't uncommon for a shooter to wear a costume, or sometimes simply to dress in black.... He went there being someone other than who he is in reality because it gives him power."

From the costume to his age and ethnicity, Roberts fit the mold of who FBI profilers expected the shooter to be.

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"Its clear the majority [of shooters] are white males, but we can't say anything statistical about that," O'Toole said, pointing to the Virginia Tech shooting, which was perpetrated by a Korean, and the Red Lake shooting, where the gunman was Native American.

Nevertheless, she acknowledged the preponderance of whites among the list of mass killers.

"I think it's a question that needs to be put out there," O'Toole said

There is one thing that can be predicted, however -- age. Most mass shooters are between the ages of 15 and 25, O'Toole said.

"This is where we see young men acting out in a different way," she said, citing increased levels of testosterone. "It has to do with their biological make-up and development."

Garrett said that the age period between 15 to 25 years can also be a time when young men might feel the world is passing them by, stifling what they could have been. The desire to be remembered, he said, can be a factor that can cause unstable young men to kill.

They may have thoughts of, "I can be more than I am if you didn't stop me," Garrett said, adding that the "you" didn't necessarily refer to a specific individual.

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Psychiatric issues are another commonality with mass killers, said Garrett.

"The idea that you can walk into a mall or any other location and shoot people is very intoxicating for these people. They typically do not feel empowered during the day," he said. "Depression, manic depression play into feelings of inadequacy."

As Roberts walked through the Clackamas Town Center, intent on killing as many people as possible, witnesses said he was looking straight ahead, shooting along the way.

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Two people were killed and one wounded before Roberts took his own life.

While investigators try to piece together what made Roberts snap, O'Toole warned the cycle of gun violence will continue.

"Somewhere, there is a male in this age range thinking of outdoing the shooter in Aurora and outdoing the shooter in Oregon and they are watching this and saying, 'I am going to do it.'"

ABC News' Colleen Curry and Jared Weiner contributed to this report

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US blacklists Al-Qaeda-linked rebels in Syria

WASHINGTON: Washington blacklisted an Al-Qaeda-linked rebel group in Syria Tuesday, warning extremists could play no role in building the nation's future as the US readies to recognize the new Syrian alliance.

The move against the Al-Nusra Front came ahead of talks in Morocco on Wednesday, when the United States is expected to give full recognition to the Syrian National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

Though a minority, Al-Nusra has been one of the most effective rebel groups fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, raising concerns that hardline extremists are hijacking the 21-month-old revolt.

"What is important is to understand that extremists fighting the Assad regime are still extremists and they have no place in the political transition that will come," a senior State Department official said.

"Extremists should not dictate that political transition," he insisted on a conference call with journalists, asking to remain anonymous.

The State Department designated the group linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) a foreign terrorist organization, while the Treasury also slapped sanctions on two of its leaders, Maysar Ali Musa Abdallah al-Juburi and Anas Hasan Khattab.

"Exposing the operation and the identities of Al-Nusra's leaders is a key objective here," another top US official said.

Topping the agenda at the Friends of Syria meeting in Marrakech will be two key issues -- the political transition after Assad's fall and mobilizing humanitarian aid as winter sets in amid a growing refugee crisis.

Declaring Al-Nusra a terrorist group freezes its assets and bans Americans from any transactions with it, but US officials said it would also help ensure that vital aid is falling into the right hands.

Countries wanting to support the opposition need to ensure they are helping "those opposition groups who truly have the best interest of Syria and Syrians in mind," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

They should not back "groups coming from the outside who want to hijack what the Syrian people have started for their own means, and have a very different future in mind, a future that is based in Al-Qaeda-based values and principles, not democratic-based principles and values."

The group has claimed responsibility for recent suicide bombings that killed scores of people, and has said it hopes to replace the Assad family's four-decade hold on power with a strict Islamic state.

Wednesday's talks could mark a step forward for the Syrian opposition, which had struggled for months to unite until a new coalition arose from November meetings in Qatar.

"Now that there is a new opposition formed, we are going to be doing what we can to support that opposition," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Brussels last week.

Clinton had planned to attend the Marrakesh meeting but canceled her trip on Monday due to illness. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns is traveling in her place.

She also met on her Europe trip with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to see if there were ways to increase the pressure on Assad to step down and end the bloodshed.

Since the last Friends of Syria meeting in Paris in July, the number of people killed has risen from 16,000 to more than 42,000, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has carried out scores of massive bombings aimed at Shiite civilians and regularly targeted US forces before their withdrawal a year ago.

The Treasury Department also sanctioned two armed militia groups supporting the Assad regime -- Jaysh al-Sha'bi and Shabiha -- as well as two Shabiha commanders.

The United States "will target the pro-Assad militias just as we will the terrorists who falsely cloak themselves in the flag of the legitimate opposition," said David Cohen, under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

The Treasury Department said the militias have been "instrumental in the Asad regime's campaign of terror and violence against the citizens of Syria."

Nuland warned the US may target other groups. "There's a lot of morphing and changing within these militia groups," she said. "What we are saying is this is a false flag that we can identify and beware."

-AFP/ac

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Disclose Swamy's letter to Kalam after consulting him: CIC

NEW DELHI: The Central Information Commission (CIC) has directed the President's Secretariat to make Janata Party chief Subramanian Swamy's letter to former President Dr A P J Abdul Kalam public after consulting him. Swamy had written to Kalam after the 2004 election which UPA had won.

In the letter Swamy had raised doubts on if Congress president Sonia Gandhi's candidature would be accepted by the courts as it was unclear whether she had renounced her Italian citizenship as stipulated under the Citizenship Act.

Activist Subhash Agrawal had sought a copy of the letter from the President's office, which had turned down his application earlier this year, saying the disclosure would be a breach of confidentiality and fiduciary relationship and therefore attracts Sec 8(1)(e) of RTI Act.

After hearing the matter, Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) Satyananda Mishra ordered to disclose, "the information... relating to the letter written by Subramanian Swamy to the then President on the formation of the Council of Ministers after following the procedure laid down in Section 11 of the Right to Information Act, if the CPIO considers such consultation necessary."

"No records are available in this regard," the Secretariat had said to a question on whether it was true that certain individuals, political parties or anyone else had objected against some particular person being invited to form the government in 2004.

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APNewsBreak: DA investigating Texas cancer agency

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas prosecutor responsible for investigating public corruption among state officials said Tuesday that he has opened an investigation into the state's troubled $3 billion cancer-fighting agency.

Gregg Cox, director of the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit, told The Associated Press that an investigation has begun into the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. The agency also is under investigation by the Texas attorney general's office after an $11 million grant to a private company did not receive the proper review.

Cox said his unit, which prosecutes crimes related to the operation of state government, is beginning its investigation not knowing "what, if any, crime occurred" at CPRIT.

His announcement came on the same day that CPRIT said its executive director had submitted his resignation letter and amid escalating scrutiny over the management of the nation's second-biggest pot of cancer research dollars.

CPRIT has not been able to focus on fighting the disease due to "wasted efforts expended in low value activities" during the past tumultuous eight months, Executive Director Bill Gimson wrote in a resignation letter dated Monday. Gimson offered to stay on until January, and the agency's board must still approve his request to step down.

Gimson has led the state agency since it launched in 2009. But he fell under mounting criticism over the recent disclosure that an $11 million award to a private company was never reviewed. It was the second time this year that a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant instigated backlash and raised questions about oversight.

"Unfortunately, I have also been placed in a situation where I feel I can no longer be effective," Gimson wrote.

The Texas attorney general's office has said it is looking into CPRIT's $11 million grant to Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics. An internal audit performed by the agency revealed that Peloton's proposal was approved for funding in 2010 without being reviewed by an outside panel.

Gimson said last week that Peloton's funding was the result of an honest mistake that happened when the agency was still young and in the process of installing checks and balances. Agency emails surrounding the Peloton grant are no longer available, Gimson said, and state investigators said they will work to find them.

Only the National Institutes of Health doles out more cancer research dollars than CPRIT, which has awarded more than $700 million so far. The agency's former chief science officer, Nobel laureate Alfred Gilman, resigned earlier this year over a separate $20 million award that Gilman claimed received a thin review. That led some of the nation's top scientists to accuse the agency of charting a politically-driven path.

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Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber

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Serial Killer 'Broke Own Rule,' Lost Control

Serial killer Israel Keyes' capture was his own undoing. It was the meticulous murderer's loss of control and violation of his own careful rules of murder that ended years of traveling to kill for fun.

When Keyes, 34, approached an Anchorage coffee stand Feb. 1, he told himself that if the person working inside did not have her own car, he would only rob the place and leave.

But when he approached and found teenage barista Samantha Koenig by herself, he couldn't help himself, Keyes told police. He dragged her out, into his own car, raped her, strangled her and was eventually arrested for her murder.

"In prior cases, he had enough self-control to walk away from it, to not commit the kidnapping, to not commit the abduction and with Samantha he didn't," Anchorage homicide Det. Monique Doll said Monday. "He broke his own rule. He had drawn his line in the sand and he couldn't help himself, he said. He took her anyway."

The arrest of Keyes on March 12 ended more than a decade of traveling around the country to find victims to kill or to prepare for future crimes by burying murder kits of weapons, cash and tools to dispose of bodies. Since March he had been slowly telling police about his hidden life and how he operated. But the tale abruptly ended when Keyes committed suicide in his jail cell on Dec. 1.

Police are now left trying to fill in the details of his vicious life. Police believe he killed between 8 and 12 people, including Koenig, but only three victims have been definitively tied to Keyes so far.

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Before his jail cell suicide, Keyes gave authorities some clues on how he managed to remain undetected for so long.

"He basically had this rule, this unwritten rule, that he would travel outside and go to great lengths to distance himself from any of his victims," Doll said. "He told us he was losing control. He was losing the massive amount of self-control that he had."

Koenig's abduction broke Keyes' rules on two levels. First, she was in Anchorage, which was also Keyes' home. Second, she did not have her own vehicle.

"Mr. Keyes told us that he was deciding as he walked up the coffee kiosk that if the person working inside did not have a vehicle he was only going to rob the [place] and walk away because he did not want to transport his victim in his vehicle," Doll said.

Keyes quickly discovered that Koenig did not have a car, but when he saw her, his desire to kill overpowered his discipline.

This admission was among many startling revelations Keyes made over about 40 hours of interviews with police in which he discussed topics ranging from torturing animals as a child to the way he fantasized his own death.

"He didn't plan on being taken alive," Anchorage Police Officer Jeff Bell said at the news conference.

Keyes envisioned himself being caught robbing a bank and dying in a police shootout, Bell said. For this reason, he would bring two guns with him to bank robberies--the gun used to rob the bank and a second gun hidden in his coat with 100 rounds for a shootout.

Keyes also talked about his interest in serial killers, though he was adamant about not being called a serial killer.

"He had researched and read other serial killers. He knew a lot about Ted Bundy," Doll said. "He was very careful to say that he had not patterned himself after any other serial killers, that his ideas were his own. He was very clear about that distinction. That mattered a lot to him."

"He never identified himself as a serial killer," she said. "That was one of the things that he wanted very much, as this investigation progressed, to keep from being identified as."

Doll said Keyes was interested in suspense and crime movies and books, which he said he enjoyed because he recognized himself in the characters in a way that he could never talk about.

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Egypt army seeks national unity as crisis mounts

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's army chief called for talks on national unity to end the country's deepening political crisis after a vital loan from the IMF was delayed and thousands of pro- and anti-government demonstrators took to the streets.

The meeting, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, was called in response to a destabilizing series of protests since President Mohamed Mursi awarded himself sweeping powers on November 22 to push through a new constitution shaped by his Islamist allies in a referendum on Saturday.

"We will not speak about politics nor about the referendum. Tomorrow we will sit together as Egyptians," armed forces chief and Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said at a joint gathering of army and police officials.

An aide said Mursi had supported the call for talks. The Muslim Brotherhood announced it would be there, while the main opposition coalition said it would decide on Wednesday morning whether to attend.

Earlier, the finance minister disclosed that a $4.8 billion International Monetary Fund loan, a cornerstone of Egypt's economic recovery hopes, would be delayed until next month.

Mumtaz al-Said said the delay was intended to allow time to explain a widely criticized package of economic austerity measures to the Egyptian people.

On Monday Muris backed down on planned tax rises, seen as essential for the loan to go ahead, but which the opposition had fiercely criticized.

"Of course the delay will have some economic impact, but we are discussing necessary measures (to address that) during the coming period," Said told Reuters, adding: "I am optimistic ... everything will be well, God willing."

Prime Minister Hisham Kandil said the measures would not hurt the poor. Bread, sugar and rice would not be touched, but prices of cigarettes and cooking oil would go up and fines would be imposed for public littering. In a bid to rebuild consensus, he said there would be a public consultation about the program next week.

In Washington, the IMF said Egypt had asked for the loan to be postponed "in light of the unfolding developments on the ground". The Fund stood ready to consult with Egypt on resuming discussions on the stand-by loan, a spokeswoman said.

GUNMEN OPEN FIRE

On the streets of Cairo, tensions ran high after nine people were hurt when gunmen fired at protesters camping in Tahrir Square, according to witnesses and Egyptian media.

The opposition has called for major protests it hopes will force Mursi to postpone the referendum. Thousands gathered outside the presidential palace, whose walls are scrawled with anti-Mursi graffiti.

A bigger crowd of flag-waving Islamist Mursi backers, who want the vote to go ahead as planned on Saturday, assembled at a nearby mosque, setting the stage for further street confrontations in a crisis that has divided the nation of 83 million.

In Egypt's second city of Alexandria, thousands of rival demonstrators gathered at separate venues. Mursi's backers chanted: "The people want implementation of Islamic law", while his opponents shouted: "The people want to bring down the regime". Others cities also witnessed protests.

The upheaval following the fall of Hosni Mubarak last year is causing concern in the United States, which has given Cairo billions of dollars in military and other aid since Egypt, the Arab world's most populous nation, made peace with Israel in 1979.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland emphasized "deep concerns" over the situation in Egypt and repeated calls on protesters to demonstrate peacefully and on security forces to act with restraint.

"Key stakeholders in Egypt are raising real and legitimate questions, both about the substance and about the process for moving to a constitutional referendum this weekend," Nuland told a news briefing. She declined to be drawn on whether Washington believed the referendum itself should be postponed.

The turmoil has also put a big strain on the Egyptian economy, sending foreign currency reserves down to about $15 billion, less than half what they were before the revolt two years ago as the government has sought to defend the pound.

"Given the current policy environment, it's hardly a surprise that there's been a delay, but it is imperative that the delay is brief," said Simon Williams, HSBC economist in Dubai. "Egypt urgently needs that IMF accord, both for the funding it brings and the policy anchor it affords."

The IMF deal had been seen as giving a seal of approval to the government's economic plans, vital for drawing more cash into the economy to ease a crushing budget deficit and stave off a balance of payments crisis.

MASKED ATTACKERS

In central Cairo police cars surrounded Tahrir Square, the first time they had appeared in the area since shortly after Mursi awarded himself the sweeping temporary powers in a move that touched off widespread protests.

The attackers, some masked, also threw petrol bombs that started a small fire, witnesses said.

"The masked men came suddenly and attacked the protesters in Tahrir. The attack was meant to deter us and prevent us from protesting today," said John Gerges, a Christian Egyptian who described himself as a socialist.

The latest bout of unrest has so far claimed seven lives in clashes between the Muslim Brotherhood and opponents who gathered outside Mursi's presidential palace.

But the Republican Guard, which protects the palace, has yet to use force to keep protesters away from the building, now ringed with tanks, barbed wire and concrete barricades.

The army has told all sides to resolve their differences through dialogue. For the period of the referendum, the army has been granted powers by Mursi allowing it to arrest civilians.

In statement issued after rights groups criticized the army's new police powers, the presidency said anyone arrested by the military during the referendum would face civil rather than military courts. It said the army's new role would only last until results are declared after Saturday's referendum.

Leftists, liberals and other opposition groups say the hastily arranged constitutional referendum is polarizing the country and could put it in a religious straitjacket.

Islamists have urged their followers to show support for Mursi and for a referendum they feel sure of winning.

(Additional reporting by Tamim Elyan and Edmund Blair in Cairo, and Andrew Quinn in Washington; Writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Will Waterman and David Stamp)

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Facebook vote ends experiment with democracy

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook closed the polls Monday on letting democracy rule when it comes to policy changes.

A referendum to strip Facebook users of the power to endorse or reject policy changes through popular vote was opposed by a majority of voters, but not enough people cast ballots to make the results binding.

The referendum was opposed by 87 percent of the 668,125 members who cast ballots, according to a posting on the Facebook governance site.

But Facebook had indicated that if fewer than 30 percent of Facebook's one billion users voted, the California-based firm would be free to go forward with a plan to eliminate the voting structure and integrate Instagram data for ad purposes.

Facebook bought smartphone-picture sharing service Instagram early this year in a cash and stock deal valued at a billion dollars at the time.

A week ago, Facebook asked its members to vote on an overhaul of privacy and other policies in what on Monday became the last binding referendum of its kind at the huge social network.

The social media giant, which has drawn fresh fire from privacy activists for the proposed changes on how it manages users' data, said the poll would be binding only if it gets responses from 30 percent of members -- or 300 million people.

The changes end the voting process, and also would permit sharing of information with its newly acquired photo-sharing service, Instagram.

Additionally, the changes would make it easier for advertisers and others to send messages on Facebook, limiting users' control, according to privacy rights groups.

Activists have raised a ruckus, saying the new policies, if implemented, could violate some laws or Facebook's agreement with US regulators earlier this year after complaints from privacy groups.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center urged Facebook users to vote no, saying the changes "would end user voting, remove spam blocking, and combine personal information from Facebook with data from photo-blogging site Instagram."

Facebook said in a message to users last month that the vote system -- implemented in 2009 -- "resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality."

Facebook's stock price tumbled after its hotly anticipated market debut in May at $38 a share, in part due to concerns over ad and revenue growth.

However, Facebook shares have rallied in recent weeks and were up slightly to $27.92 on Monday.

-AFP/ac

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Protocol leg-up to MPs in deep freeze?

NEW DELHI: After their plans for beacon lights on vehicles went awry, parliamentarians are unlikely to get an upgrade in the protocol anytime soon.

The Centre has constituted a sub-committee to look into the recommendation that MPs be put at par with 'chief justices of high courts (outside their jurisdiction)' and chairpersons of four statutory commissions/tribunals in the warrant of precedence. The government has, in fact, clubbed various demands for change in protocol for a holistic examination.

According to the home ministry, the recommendation of the parliamentary panel on privileges to put MPs at par with chief justices would require consultation with the Chief Justice of India, as laid out in a key Supreme Court judgment.

The tricky nature of the case, with obvious sensitivities for the judiciary, has resulted in the ministry handing over the issue to a sub-panel headed by the home secretary.

Calling it a "delicate balance" between various dignitaries, sources said the alteration of protocol requires thorough examination and the sub-panel's recommendation will be considered by the 'committee on table of precedence' that is in place in the home ministry to decide on the issue. The order of precedence is followed for official courtesies like seating arrangement in official functions.

The decision for minute study of the issue is being interpreted as government putting the matter in cold storage. After the refusal to give beacons on cars, this is the second blow to Parliament members anxious for an elevation in protocol.

The MPs are placed 21st in the protocol list, below ambassadors, certain officials and chairpersons of statutory bodies. The privileges panel said the members be put at par with 'chief justices of high courts outside their jurisdiction', arguing the list does not reflect the correct standing of responsibilities.

The pause in promotion in protocol follows Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's decision to nix the plan to allow parliamentarians to use beacon lights on cars. The diktat from the UPA chief scuppered the informally sewn agreement between representatives of MPs and the home ministry.

The home ministry had agreed to permit MPs to use beacons with the exception of VIP area of Delhi (New Delhi region), as first reported by TOI.

However, Sonia told a Congress parliamentary party meeting that the move would be unpopular with people. "As Congress president, I cannot accept this," she told the MPs.

With beacons gone, the MPs have been banking on a leg-up in protocol.

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Surprise: New insurance fee in health overhaul law

WASHINGTON (AP) — Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too. It's a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers.

Employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks calls it a "sleeper issue" with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers.

"Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty, (companies will) be hit with a multi-million dollar assessment without getting anything back for it," said Sheaks, a principal at Buck Consultants, a Xerox subsidiary.

Based on figures provided in the regulation, employer and individual health plans covering an estimated 190 million Americans could owe the per-person fee.

The Obama administration says it is a temporary assessment levied for three years starting in 2014, designed to raise $25 billion. It starts at $63 and then declines.

Most of the money will go into a fund administered by the Health and Human Services Department. It will be used to cushion health insurance companies from the initial hard-to-predict costs of covering uninsured people with medical problems. Under the law, insurers will be forbidden from turning away the sick as of Jan. 1, 2014.

The program "is intended to help millions of Americans purchase affordable health insurance, reduce unreimbursed usage of hospital and other medical facilities by the uninsured and thereby lower medical expenses and premiums for all," the Obama administration says in the regulation. An accompanying media fact sheet issued Nov. 30 referred to "contributions" without detailing the total cost and scope of the program.

Of the total pot, $5 billion will go directly to the U.S. Treasury, apparently to offset the cost of shoring up employer-sponsored coverage for early retirees.

The $25 billion fee is part of a bigger package of taxes and fees to finance Obama's expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It all comes to about $700 billion over 10 years, and includes higher Medicare taxes effective this Jan. 1 on individuals making more than $200,000 per year or couples making more than $250,000. People above those threshold amounts also face an additional 3.8 percent tax on their investment income.

But the insurance fee had been overlooked as employers focused on other costs in the law, including fines for medium and large firms that don't provide coverage.

"This kind of came out of the blue and was a surprisingly large amount," said Gretchen Young, senior vice president for health policy at the ERISA Industry Committee, a group that represents large employers on benefits issues.

Word started getting out in the spring, said Young, but hard cost estimates surfaced only recently with the new regulation. It set the per capita rate at $5.25 per month, which works out to $63 a year.

America's Health Insurance Plans, the major industry trade group for health insurers, says the fund is an important program that will help stabilize the market and mitigate cost increases for consumers as the changes in Obama's law take effect.

But employers already offering coverage to their workers don't see why they have to pony up for the stabilization fund, which mainly helps the individual insurance market. The redistribution puts the biggest companies on the hook for tens of millions of dollars.

"It just adds on to everything else that is expected to increase health care costs," said economist Paul Fronstin of the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute.

The fee will be assessed on all "major medical" insurance plans, including those provided by employers and those purchased individually by consumers. Large employers will owe the fee directly. That's because major companies usually pay upfront for most of the health care costs of their employees. It may not be apparent to workers, but the insurance company they deal with is basically an agent administering the plan for their employer.

The fee will total $12 billion in 2014, $8 billion in 2015 and $5 billion in 2016. That means the per-head assessment would be smaller each year, around $40 in 2015 instead of $63.

It will phase out completely in 2017 — unless Congress, with lawmakers searching everywhere for revenue to reduce federal deficits — decides to extend it.

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New Evidence Suggests Biblical Flood Happened

The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.

In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News, Robert Ballard, one of the world's best-known underwater archaeologists, talked about his findings. His team is probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah.

Tune in to Christiane Amanpour's two-part ABC News special, "Back to the Beginning," which explores the history of the Bible from Genesis to Jesus. Part one airs on Friday, Dec. 21 and part two on Friday, Dec. 28, both starting at 9 p.m. ET on ABC. See photos from her journey HERE

Ballard's track record for finding the impossible is well known. In 1985, using a robotic submersible equipped with remote-controlled cameras, Ballard and his crew hunted down the world's most famous shipwreck, the Titanic.

Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah. He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.

"Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube," he said. "But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history."

The water from the melting glaciers began to rush toward the world's oceans, Ballard said, causing floods all around the world.

"The questions is, was there a mother of all floods," Ballard said.

According to a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was one in the Black Sea region. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path.

Fascinated by the idea, Ballard and his team decided to investigate.

"We went in there to look for the flood," he said. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed... The land that went under stayed under."

Four hundred feet below the surface, they unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred.

"It probably was a bad day," Ballard said. "At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under."

The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah.

Noah is described in the Bible as a family man, a father of three, who is about to celebrate his 600th birthday.

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