(Continued from page 35)

U.S. or Israel.
• The suspension of U.S. contributions, which account for $80 million a year -- 22 percent of UNESCO's overall budget -- brought the agency to the brink of a financial crisis and forced it to cut or scale back American-led initiatives such as Holocaust education and tsunami research over the past two years.
• It has worried many in Washington that the U.S. is on track to becoming a toothless UNESCO member with a weakened voice in international programs fighting extremism through education, and promoting gender equality and press freedoms.
• ___

• NEW YORK (AP) -- Twitter's stock took to its wings in its public debut, closing up more than 70 percent. The day flew by with nary a hitch and gave birth to a new batch of Silicon Valley millionaires -- even a few billionaires.
• Now comes the hard part. With Twitter's value skyrocketing in just a day, the 7-year-old company that's never turned a profit and has just a fraction of Facebook's user base must prove to investors that it's worth the money. Twitter stock ended Thursday's trading at $44.90, giving the company a market value of $31 billion. That's $13 billion more than on Wednesday night, when the company set its IPO price at $26.
• "Ultimately what you want is a nice pop," said Roger Entner of Recon Analytics. "Everyone walks away with smiles from ear to ear."
• Twitter, he added, "now just has to deliver on all this."
• By the closing bell, the social network that reinvented global communication in 140-character bursts was worth nearly as much as Yahoo Inc., an Internet icon from another era, and only slightly less than Kraft Foods, the grocery conglomerate founded more than a century ago.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bowing to intense criticism, President Barack Obama apologized to Americans who are losing health insurance plans he repeatedly said they could keep and pledged to find fixes that might allow people to keep their coverage.

(Continued on page 37)