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COLORADO SHOOTING MATCH CANCELED OVER NEW GUN LAWS: MONTROSE, Colo. (AP) — A regional shooting competition that would have brought hundreds of people to Colorado has become the latest casualty of the state's new gun laws set to kick in just a few days before the competition.

Members of the International Defensive Pistol Association had planned a regional championship beginning July 4 at the San Juan Shooting Range in Montrose. Organizers said about 300 were planning to attend.

Pistol association event coordinator Walt Proulx told the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel that impending limitations on magazine capacity would be the biggest problem. A new state law bans ownership of any magazine with more than 15 rounds manufactured or purchased after July 1.

"If somebody were planning to come to the event, and for some reason needed to get new magazines for their (guns) and they bought them on July 2 and hopped on an airplane and came here, they would technically be in violation as soon as they touched the ground," Proulx said.

The association's regional competition was the second event to be publicly canceled due to Colorado's new gun laws. Firearms maker Ruger recently announced they would move the planned 2013 Ruger Rimfire Challenge World Championships out of the state.

GOLDMAN TAKES APPLE STOCK OFF 'PREFERRED' LIST: NEW YORK (AP) — Goldman Sachs dropped Apple off its list of most highly recommended stocks Tuesday as it joined other analysts in reducing expectations for a company that hasn't had a revolutionary new product since the iPad in 2010.

Goldman analyst Bill Shope said the iPhone 5, introduced last fall, hasn't sold as well as he expected. He said the company now needs some real hits among the products it rolls out during the second half of the year in order to boost the stock price.

Apple's stock fell $1.01, or 0.2 percent, to $427.90 in afternoon trading Tuesday, while the Nasdaq was up 0.2 percent. Apple's stock price is close to its one-year low of $419, hit a month ago. It's well off its all-time peak of $705.07, reached in September on the day the iPhone 5 went on sale.

Besides taking the company off Goldman's "Americas Conviction List," which it had been on since December 2010, Shope lowered Apple's price target on the shares to $575, from $660. But he kept a "Buy" rating for the company.

After a heady decade, Apple's sales growth is slowing down. In recent years, Apple has tinkered with existing products rather than come out with groundbreaking new ones. Even so, the company warned this fall that a wave of improvements meant higher production costs, at least initially. For the quarter that just ended, analysts polled by FactSet expect an 18 percent decrease in earnings compared with the previous year. It would be the first time in many years that Apple sees an earnings decline of that magnitude.

ALL 18 TAXIS IN NH'S LARGEST CITY PULLED OFF ROAD: MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — Odds are you won't get a cab in New Hampshire's largest city after police sidelined all 18 licensed taxis for inspection failures or failing to show up for inspection.

Seventeen cabs in Manchester were cited for mechanical violations. The 18th was sidelined for failing to show up.

Police Lt. Maureen Tessier said Tuesday six of the 18 cabs had such severe defects including conditions that could compromise their brakes inspectors pulled their registrations and they had to be towed.

Queen City Taxi has surrendered its operating permits to the city clerk's office. The taxi that wasn't inspected belongs to Manchester Taxi Dispatch. The companies haven't commented.

Tessier says officials appreciate the inconvenience to those among the city's 110,000 residents who rely on taxis and will work with the companies to get the taxis back on the road.


ARIZONA CITY NEARS VOTE ON CIVIL UNIONS: BISBEE, Ariz. (AP) — The City Council in a former mining community-turned-artist's haven in rural southeastern Arizona is scheduled to vote Tuesday night on an ordinance to recognize civil unions for same-sex couples.

The proposed Bisbee ordinance said the city wants to end "discriminatory practices against members of the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender community" so that couples could have lasting and meaningful relationships regardless of sexual orientation.

The ordinance would make Bisbee the first Arizona city to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples, giving them rights now enjoyed by married couples.

However, Bisbee City Attorney John MacKinnon said that the ordinance's impact would only apply to things within the city's control. He says those would include city personnel policies and the city cemetery.

FEDS: MAN STOLE US CANCER DATA TO STUDY IN CHINA : MILWAUKEE (AP) — When three vials of a possible cancer-fighting compound disappeared recently from a professor's desk at the Medical College of Wisconsin, suspicion quickly fell on a research assistant who had been working in the scientist's lab.

Security video showed Hua Jun Zhao, who studied in China and whose wife lives there, was the only person who entered the professor's office that day. Investigators later found research results from another fellow professor on Zhao's computer.

Zhao has been charged in a federal complaint with economic espionage, accused by prosecutors stealing academic research to pass off as his own in China. Prosecutors said he hoped to study the compound and other materials at Zhejiang University, one of several Chinese schools that have been troubled by plagiarism, fraud and academic misconduct.

Zhao, 42, worked on a team led by professor Marshall Anderson, who is researching whether the compound can help kill cancer cells without damaging healthy ones, school spokeswoman Maureen Mack said. The compound is still being studied in a lab and has not yet advanced to clinical testing, she said.

The stolen vials of the C-25 powder are worth $8,000, the complaint said. Leonard Peace, an FBI spokesman in Milwaukee, said he couldn't comment beyond what was in the complaint, except to confirm the vials had not been