The Hard Road Back: Chaplain with Traumatic Brain Injuries, Finds Tables Turned




A Counselor in Need:
Sent home from Iraq, Lt. Col. Richard Brunk, an Army chaplain, returned to Houston, where he is learning to cope with a serious brain injury.







It was Lt. Col. Richard Brunk’s second Sunday in Baghdad, and so, of course, there was church. Only 16 soldiers showed up, but that was good for that busy day, election day across Iraq. The presiding chaplain asked everyone to take seats up front. It was a providential move.




A 122-millimeter rocket exploded outside, virtually collapsing the rear of the chapel. Colonel Brunk was pitched forward, an outstretched arm failing to stop his head from hitting the marble floor. Gathering himself amid the chaos, he noticed some foil-wrapped chocolates scattered like pebbles before him and offered one to the chaplain, sprawled on the ground nearby.


“If I’m going to die, it’s going to be with chocolate on my breath,” the colonel said jokingly. The chaplain moved his lips in reply. “And I realized: ‘Uh oh, I’ve got a problem,’ ” Colonel Brunk recalled. “Because I couldn’t hear him.”


The explosion broke Colonel Brunk’s wrist, shattered both his eardrums and rattled his skull, medical records show. It would be the first of two major blasts in 2005 that traumatically injured his brain.


Seven years later, the symptoms have not gone away. Colonel Brunk, who retired from the Army this summer, regained his hearing, but he still has daily headaches, ringing in his ears, double vision and dizziness, all typical of traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I. Occasionally he struggles to remember once-familiar words, faces and names.


The military says it has diagnosed more than 260,000 cases of T.B.I. since 2000, about 42,000 of them involving deployed troops. That is less than 2 percent of the service members sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and many experts believe that the actual number is higher. Though three in four of those cases were labeled “mild,” many veterans like Colonel Brunk have struggled with powerful aftereffects for years.


In his case, age has been a factor. A chaplain himself, Colonel Brunk was 54 when he was injured, a rarity in these wars, where 99 percent of the 2.3 million troops who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan were under 50. Now 62, he faces a much steeper path to recovery than a younger person, doctors say.


But emerging research shows that traumatic brain injuries may have long-term effects on troops of all ages. A study by the University of Oklahoma this year, for instance, found that a majority of veterans treated at a traumatic brain injury clinic continued having headaches, dizziness and poor coordination eight years after their injuries.


Data from the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University suggests that multiple traumatic brain injuries during one’s youth may be linked to degenerative brain disease later in life.


Colonel Brunk’s story underscores another important issue: how poorly the military understood brain injuries early in the wars.


Since 2009, the Pentagon has required troops suspected of having head injuries to rest immediately after blast exposure, a crucial period when brains can often heal themselves, doctors say.


But in 2005, Colonel Brunk was allowed to return to work within hours of his first exposure. When doctors eventually recognized that he had neurological damage, he was sent home for about three months but was treated mainly for hearing problems. He was then permitted to return to Iraq, at his own request, where he had a second, potentially devastating head injury.


He had gone to war not expecting to experience warfare quite so intimately. But once he was hurt, he was determined to rejoin his battalion and finish the tour with his flock. And like many of those soldiers, he did his level best to ignore injury, pain and, eventually, a collapsing marriage.


“I went to Iraq a chaplain,” Colonel Brunk says. “But I came home a soldier.”


But to those close to him, his dogged good cheer was a mask that did not always serve him well. “People look at him and say, ‘That’s Chaplain Brunk, he can’t be having problems,’ ” said Kathy Curry, a close friend. “But he’s got problems at home. He’s got T.B.I. He’s got pain.”


And so, not long after meeting him, Ms. Curry felt compelled to ask: Who counsels you? Who counsels the counselor?


The answer, for a time at least, was nobody.


He had wanted to be a doctor, but college microbiology killed that notion. So he followed his father, an Army chaplain, into the ministry, leading Texas parishes of the Evangelical Lutheran Church while volunteering as chaplain for fire departments and hospitals. But the military, a family tradition, called.


In the fall of 1989, Colonel Brunk found himself chatting with an Army chaplain recruiter at a church convention in New Orleans. By the end of their stroll down Bourbon Street, the minister had signed on for the Texas National Guard. He was 39.


Read More..

Ten Commandments join Isaac Newton’s notes online






LONDON (Reuters) – A copy of The Ten Commandments dating back two millennia and the earliest written Gaelic are just two of a number of incredibly rare manuscripts now freely available online to the world as part of a Cambridge University digital project.


The Nash Papyrus — one of the oldest known manuscripts containing text from the Hebrew Bible — has become one of the latest treasures of humanity to join Isaac Newton‘s notebooks, the Nuremberg Chronicle and other rare texts as part of the Cambridge Digital Library, the university said on Wednesday.






Cambridge University Library preserves works of great importance to faith traditions and communities around the world,” University Librarian Anne Jarvis said in a statement.


“Because of their age and delicacy these manuscripts are seldom able to be viewed – and when they are displayed, we can only show one or two pages.”


Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nash Papyrus, was by far the oldest manuscript containing text from the Hebrew Bible and like most fragile historical documents, only available to select academics for scrutiny.


The university’s digital library is making 25,000 new images, including an ancient copy of the New Testament, available on its website (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/), which has already attracted tens of millions of hits since the project was launched in December 2011.


The latest release also includes important texts from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.


In addition to religious texts, internet users can also view the 10th century Book of Deer, which is widely believed to be the oldest surviving Scottish manuscript and contains the earliest known examples of written Gaelic.


“Now… anyone with a connection to the Internet can select a work of interest, turn to any page of the manuscript, and explore it in extraordinary detail,” Jarvis said.


The technical infrastructure required to get these texts to web was in part funded by a 1.5 million pound ($ 2.4 million) gift from the Polonsky Foundation in June 2010.


($ 1 = 0.6210 British pounds)


(Reporting by Dasha Afanasieva, editing by Paul Casciato)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News


Read More..

Donald Faison Marries Cacee Cobb















12/15/2012 at 08:25 PM EST







Cacee Cobb and Donald Faison


Dr. Billy Ingram/WireImage


It's official!

After six years together, Donald Faison and Cacee Cobb were married Saturday night at the Los Angeles home of his Scrubs costar Zach Braff.

Cobb's friend Jessica Simpson was a bridesmaid. Sister Ashlee Simpson also attended.

"What a happy day," Tweeted groomsman Joshua Radin, a singer, who posted a photo of himself with Faison and Braff in their tuxedos.

The couple got engaged in August 2011. At the time, Faison Tweeted, "If you like it then you better put a Ring on it," and Cobb replied, "If she likes it then she better say YES!!"

Since then, the couple had been hard at work planning their wedding. On Nov. 12, Faison, who currently stars on The Exes, Tweeted that they were tasting cocktails to be served on the big day.

"Alcohol tasting for the wedding!" he wrote, adding a photo of the drinks. "The [sic] Ain't Say It Was Going To Be Like This!!!"

This is the first marriage for Cobb. Faison was previously married to Lisa Askey, with whom he has three children. (He also has a son from a previous relationship.)

Read More..

Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants


ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.


The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.


To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.


But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.


When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.


And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.


In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."


The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.


Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.


Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.


A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.


California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.


The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.


And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.


If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.


Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.


The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.


"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."


Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.


There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.


Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.


For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.


"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."


___


Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .


Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .


Read More..

Wall Street Week Ahead: Holiday "on standby" as clock ticks on cliff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last two weeks of December are traditionally quiet for stocks, but traders accustomed to a bit of time off are staying close to their mobile devices, thanks to the "fiscal cliff."


Last-minute negotiations in Washington on the so-called fiscal cliff - nearly $600 billion of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in January that could cause a sharp slowdown in growth or even a recession - are keeping some traders and analysts from taking Christmas holidays because any deal could have a big impact on markets.


"A lot of firms are saying to their trading desks, 'You can take days off for Christmas, but you are on standby to come in if anything happens.' This is certainly different from previous years, especially around this time of the year when things are supposed to be slowing down," said J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.


"Next week is going to be a Capitol Hill-driven market."


With talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at an apparent standstill, it was increasingly likely that Washington will not come up with a deal before January 1.


Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York, will also be on standby for the holiday season.


"It's a 'Look guys, let's just rotate and be sensible" type of situation going on," Charlop said.


"We are hopeful there is some resolution down there, but it seems to me they continue to walk that political tightrope... rather than coming up with something."


Despite concerns that the deadline will pass without a deal, the S&P 500 has held its ground with a 12.4 percent gain for the year. For this week, though, the S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent.


BEWARE OF THE WITCH


This coming Friday will mark the last so-called "quadruple witching" day of the year, when contracts for stock options, single stock futures, stock index options and stock index futures all expire. This could make trading more volatile.


"We could see some heavy selling as there is going to be a lot of re-establishing of positions, reallocation of assets before the year-end," Kinahan said.


RETHINKING APPLE


Higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends are part of the automatic tax increases that will go into effect next year, if Congress and the White House don't come up with a solution to avert the fiscal cliff. That possibility could give investors an incentive to unload certain stocks in some tax-related selling by December 31.


Some market participants said tax-related selling may be behind the weaker trend in the stock price of market leader Apple . Apple's stock has lost a quarter of its value since it hit a lifetime high of $705.07 on September 21.


On Friday, the stock fell 3.8 percent to $509.79 after the iPhone 5 got a chilly reception at its debut in China and two analysts cut shipment forecasts. But the stock is still up nearly 26 percent for the year.


"If you owned Apple for a long time, you should be thinking about reallocation as there will be changes in taxes and other regulations next year, although we don't really know which rules to play by yet," Kinahan said.


But one indicator of the market's reduced concern about the fiscal cliff compared with a few weeks ago, is the defense sector, which will be hit hard if the spending cuts take effect. The PHLX Defense Sector Index <.dfx> is up nearly 13 percent for the year, and sits just a few points from its 2012 high.


(Reporting by Angela Moon; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)



Read More..

Changing of the Guard: Chinese Opposition to Labor Camps Widens





BEIJING — It is hard to say exactly which “subversive” sentiments drew the police to Ren Jianyu, who posted them on his microblog last year, although “down with dictatorship” and “long live democracy” stand out.




In the end, Mr. Ren, 25, a college graduate from Chongqing, the southwestern metropolis, was sent without trial to a work camp based on the T-shirt that investigators found in his closet: “Freedom or death,” it said.


Last year Mr. Ren was among tens of thousands of Chinese who were dumped into the nation’s vast “re-education through labor” system, a Stalinist-inspired constellation of penal colonies where pickpockets, petitioners, underground Christian church members and other perceived social irritants toil in dismal conditions for up to four years, all without trial. With as many as 190,000 inmates at any one time, it is one of the world’s largest systems of forced labor.


But now the labor system, known by its shorthand, “laojiao,” is facing a groundswell of opposition from both inside and outside the Communist Party. Critics say the once-in-a-decade leadership transition last month, which included the demotion of the chief of the nation’s vast internal security apparatus, has created a potential opening for judicial and legal reform.


“It’s high time we demolish this unconstitutional and abusive system that violates basic human rights, fuels instability and smears the government’s image,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology who frequently rails against the system that Mao Zedong created in the 1950s to take down suspected class enemies and counterrevolutionaries.


The calls for change go beyond longstanding advocates of political reform like Professor Hu. China’s national bar association is circulating an online petition that has been signed by thousands. Legal experts have convened seminars to denounce the system. And almost every day, it seems, the state-run news media, with the top leadership’s tacit support, report on hapless citizens ensnared by the arbitrary justice that the local police impose with the wave of a hand.


Mr. Ren’s case would probably have gone unnoticed if not for China’s increasingly emboldened human-rights defenders, who showcased his plight on the Internet. Evidently prodded by the torrent of media coverage, Chongqing officials cut short his two-year sentence and freed him.


“It was a depressing, dreadful experience,” Mr. Ren said in a telephone interview this month, describing long days spent in the camp’s wire-coiling workshop.


Other examples abound. A migrant worker from Inner Mongolia was sent away for quarreling with an official at a restaurant. A mother from Hunan Province was given an 18-month sentence after she publicly protested that the men who had raped and forced her 11-year-old daughter into prostitution had been treated too leniently.


This month an 80-year-old Korean War veteran with Parkinson’s disease sobbed on national television as he described spending 18 months in a labor camp as punishment for filing local corruption complaints.


People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, took aim at the system last month, saying it had become “a tool of retaliation” for local officials. In October the head of a government judicial reform committee noted a broad consensus in favor of addressing the system’s worst abuses.


And in a widely circulated recent essay, the vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, Jiang Bixin, argued that the government must act within the law if it is to survive. “Only with constraints on public power can the rights and freedoms of citizens be securely realized,” he wrote.


China’s incoming president, Xi Jinping, has not yet weighed in on the issue, but reform advocates are encouraged by a speech he gave this month talking up the widely ignored protections afforded by China’s Constitution, which include freedom from unlawful detention and the right to an open trial. “We must establish mechanisms to restrain and supervise power,” Mr. Xi said.


Until now, China’s powerful security establishment has staved off any erosion of its authority, warning of calamity if the police lose their ability to detain perceived troublemakers without the interference of judges or defense lawyers.


The Ministry of Public Security has other reasons to preserve the status quo. The system, which employs tens of thousands of people, is a gold mine for local authorities, who earn money from the goods produced by detainees. Officials also covet bribes offered to reduce sentences, critics say, and the payments families make to ensure a loved one is properly fed while in custody.


Patrick Zuo contributed research.



Read More..

Pope needs help sending out blessing in first tweet






VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – After weeks of anticipation bordering on media frenzy, Pope Benedict solemnly put his finger to a computer tablet device on Wednesday and tried to send his first tweet – but something went wrong.


Images on Vatican television appeared to show the first try didn’t work. The pope, who still writes his speeches by hand, seems to have pressed too hard and the tweet was not sent right away. So, he needed a little help from his friends.






Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli of the Vatican‘s communications department showed the pontiff how to do it, but the pope hesitated. Celli touched the screen lightly himself and off went the papal tweet.


“Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart,” he said in his introduction to the brave new world of Twitter.


The tweet was sent at the end of weekly general audience in the Vatican before thousands of people.


The pope actually has eight linked Twitter accounts. @Pontifex, the main account, is in English. The other seven have a suffix at the end for the different language versions. For example, the German version is @Pontifex_de, and the Arabic version is @Pontifex_ar.


The tweets will be going out in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Arabic and French. Other languages will be added in the future.


The pope already had just over a million followers in all of the languages combined minutes before he sent his first tweet and the number was growing.


PAPAL Q AND A


Later on Wednesday after the audience was over and the television cameras turned off, the pontiff answered the first of three questions sent to him at #askpontifex.


The first question answered by the pope was: “How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?”


His answer: “By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the Gospel and looking for him in those in need.”


The pope, who, as leader of the Roman Catholic Church already has 1.2 billion followers in the standard sense of the word, won’t be following anyone else, the Vatican has said.


After his first splash into the brave new world of Twitter on Wednesday, the contents of future tweets will come primarily from the contents of his weekly general audience, Sunday blessings and homilies on major Church holidays.


They are also expected to include reaction to major world events, such as natural disasters.


The Vatican says papal tweets will be little “pearls of wisdom”, which is understandable since his thoughts will have to be condensed to 140 characters, while papal documents often top 140 pages.


The Vatican said precautions had been taken to make sure the pope’s certified account is not hacked. Only one computer in the Vatican’s secretariat of state will be used for the tweets.


After Wednesday, Benedict won’t be pushing the button on his tweets himself. They will be sent by aides but he will sign off on them.


The pope’s Twitter page is designed in yellow and white – the colors of the Vatican, with a backdrop of the Vatican and his picture. It may change during different liturgical seasons of the year and when the pope is away from the Vatican on trips.


The pope has given a qualified welcome to social media.


In a document issued last year, he said the possibilities of new media and social networks offered “a great opportunity”, but warned of the risks of depersonalization, alienation, self-indulgence, and the dangers of having more virtual friends than real ones.


In 2009, a new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, went live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook”, and another allowing the faithful to see the pontiff’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.


The Vatican famously got egg on its face in 2009 when it was forced to admit that, if it had surfed the web more, it might have known that a traditionalist bishop whose excommunication was lifted had for years been a Holocaust denier.


(Reporting By Philip Pullella, editing by Paul Casciato)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News


Read More..

Gunman's Father and Brother Are 'in Shock,' Says a Source









12/14/2012 at 08:50 PM EST







State police personnel lead children to safety away from the Sandy Hook Elementary School


Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee/Reuters/Landov


The father and older brother of the gunman who was blamed for the Connecticut school shooting are being questioned by authorities but are not suspects, a law enforcement source tells PEOPLE.

The Associated Press reports that the gunman has been identified as 20-year-old Adam Lanza.

His unidentified father, who lives in New York City, and his older brother, Ryan, 24, of Hoboken, N.J., are "in shock," the law enforcement source tells PEOPLE.

They were being questioned by the FBI in the Hoboken police station but "are not suspects, they have no involvement," the source says.

"Imagine the 24 year old – he's lost his mother. Imagine the father, his son killed 20 kids," the source says."   

As for Adam, "It looks like there's mental history there," the law enforcement source says.

Adam Lanza died at the scene of the shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

His mother, Nancy Lanza, was found dead at her home, according to CNN.

The source describes the weapons used by Lanza as "legitimate." According to CNN, Lanza used two hand guns that were registered to his mother and a rifle.

Adam's parents were no longer together, the source says.   

Read More..

Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants


ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.


The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.


To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.


But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.


When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.


And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.


In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."


The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.


Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.


Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.


A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.


California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.


The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.


And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.


If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.


Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.


The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.


"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."


Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.


There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.


Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.


For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.


"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."


___


Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .


Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .


Read More..

Wall St Week Ahead: Holiday "on standby" as clock ticks on cliff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last two weeks of December are traditionally quiet for stocks, but traders accustomed to a bit of time off are staying close to their mobile devices, thanks to the "fiscal cliff."


Last-minute negotiations in Washington on the so-called fiscal cliff - nearly $600 billion of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in January that could cause a sharp slowdown in growth or even a recession - are keeping some traders and analysts from taking Christmas holidays because any deal could have a big impact on markets.


"A lot of firms are saying to their trading desks, 'You can take days off for Christmas, but you are on standby to come in if anything happens.' This is certainly different from previous years, especially around this time of the year when things are supposed to be slowing down," said J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.


"Next week is going to be a Capitol Hill-driven market."


With talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at an apparent standstill, it was increasingly likely that Washington will not come up with a deal before January 1.


Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York, will also be on standby for the holiday season.


"It's a 'Look guys, let's just rotate and be sensible" type of situation going on," Charlop said.


"We are hopeful there is some resolution down there, but it seems to me they continue to walk that political tightrope... rather than coming up with something."


Despite concerns that the deadline will pass without a deal, the S&P 500 has held its ground with a 12.4 percent gain for the year. For this week, though, the S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent.


BEWARE OF THE WITCH


This coming Friday will mark the last so-called "quadruple witching" day of the year, when contracts for stock options, single stock futures, stock index options and stock index futures all expire. This could make trading more volatile.


"We could see some heavy selling as there is going to be a lot of re-establishing of positions, reallocation of assets before the year-end," Kinahan said.


RETHINKING APPLE


Higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends are part of the automatic tax increases that will go into effect next year, if Congress and the White House don't come up with a solution to avert the fiscal cliff. That possibility could give investors an incentive to unload certain stocks in some tax-related selling by December 31.


Some market participants said tax-related selling may be behind the weaker trend in the stock price of market leader Apple . Apple's stock has lost a quarter of its value since it hit a lifetime high of $705.07 on September 21.


On Friday, the stock fell 3.8 percent to $509.79 after the iPhone 5 got a chilly reception at its debut in China and two analysts cut shipment forecasts. But the stock is still up nearly 26 percent for the year.


"If you owned Apple for a long time, you should be thinking about reallocation as there will be changes in taxes and other regulations next year, although we don't really know which rules to play by yet," Kinahan said.


But one indicator of the market's reduced concern about the fiscal cliff compared with a few weeks ago, is the defense sector, which will be hit hard if the spending cuts take effect. The PHLX Defense Sector Index <.dfx> is up nearly 13 percent for the year, and sits just a few points from its 2012 high.


(Reporting by Angela Moon; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)



Read More..

Prosecutor Says Morsi Aides Interfered


Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times


A demonstrator in Cairo on Thursday tried to remove part of a wall near the palace where President Mohamed Morsi resides.







CAIRO — A prosecutor in Cairo is accusing aides to President Mohamed Morsi of applying political pressure to an investigation into the bloody clashes here last week, in order to corroborate Islamists’ claims about a conspiracy against the president involving paid thugs to foment violence.




The complaints by the prosecutor, Mustafa Khater, have raised some of the most serious questions to date about the Morsi government’s commitment to the impartial rule of law, as well as about its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group whose political arm the president once led.


Since the clashes outside the presidential palace last week, accounts have appeared of Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters detaining and abusing dozens of opponents, whom they accused of being paid to attack them and kept tied up overnight by the gates of the palace. A spokesman for Mr. Morsi said the president was not responsible for those events and had ordered an investigation.


If Mr. Khater’s accusations, detailed in a memorandum to senior judicial authorities that circulated widely on Thursday, are borne out, they would suggest that the president’s chief of staff was directly involved in what happened to the captives.


The events resonate against the backdrop of the political battle raging over a draft constitution and the referendum on it that is scheduled for Saturday.


Mr. Morsi’s allies argue that the new charter will usher in a government of institutions and laws, but critics say it will provide too little protection for individual freedom. They see ominous hints of authoritarianism in Mr. Morsi’s attempt three weeks ago to claim unchecked powers until the referendum. He said he was putting himself above the law for a short time to keep his political opponents from using the courts to block the referendum.


Mr. Morsi’s first use of those broadened powers was to replace the country’s chief prosecutor, arguing that he had protected corrupt former officials and cronies from the overthrown government of Hosni Mubarak.


The local Cairo prosecutor’s accusations on Thursday suggest that Mr. Morsi may have merely replaced one politicized national chief prosecutor with another.


A spokesman for Mr. Morsi denied on Thursday that the president had meddled in the investigation of the events outside the palace.


“The presidency does not interfere or comment on the judiciary,” the spokesman, Khaled al-Qazzaz, said in an e-mail.


Defense lawyers confirmed elements of Mr. Khater’s account. During last Wednesday’s fighting, thousands of Islamist supporters of the president battled similar numbers of his opponents for hours with thrown rocks and occasional gunshots, and Islamists captured and detained dozens of their opponents. It is unclear how many of the captors belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood or more hard-line groups. But videos, corroborated by the accounts of victims, indicated that the vigilante jailers tried to bully their prisoners into confessing that they were paid to use violence as part of a conspiracy against the president.


Mr. Khater wrote that around dawn the next day, he received a phone call from Mr. Morsi’s newly appointed public prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, who said that “49 thugs” had been arrested and detained outside a gate to the palace. Mr. Khater said that when he arrived at the scene, the president’s chief of staff, Refaa al-Tahtawi, displayed guns, knives and other implements along with a document stating that the Islamists had confiscated the weapons from the captives.


All 49 captives had been beaten, Mr. Khater wrote, and they said members of the Muslim Brotherhood had tried to coerce them into confessing that they had taken money to commit violence. But prosecutors found no evidence that they had done so.


Even so, Mr. Morsi declared in a televised speech later that night that prosecutors had obtained confessions.


Still, officials from the chief prosecutor’s office requested a “firm” response in the case, Mr. Khater wrote, and the officials later pressed Mr. Khater to at least order the detention of a group of poor and unemployed prisoners.


When Mr. Khater nonetheless released them all, Mr. Abdullah “reprimanded him,” according to the memorandum, and the following day ordered him transferred to the obscure town of Beni Suef in Upper Egypt.


“The transfer was in fact a punishment for a violation that I haven’t committed, and constitutes an explicit threat to the entire team working on the case,” Mr. Khater wrote.


On Thursday, the transfer was canceled and Mr. Khater was restored to his position in Cairo without explanation.


Mr. Khater, Mr. Tahtawi and Mr. Abdullah could not be reached for comment.


Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.



Read More..

The X Factor Reveals Season 2 Finalists






The X Factor










12/13/2012 at 09:10 PM EST







Carly Rose Sonenclar, Emblem3, Tate Stevens and Fifth Harmony


Ray Mickshaw/FOX (4)


Sparks will fly at the finale!

On Thursday, The X Factor revealed its top three acts, who will perform next week in the final night of competition – in hopes of taking home the $5 million recording contract.

Simon Cowell said it would take a miracle to get his girl group, Fifth Harmony, to the finale after they performed Shontelle's "Impossible" and Ellie Goulding's "Anything Could Happen" on Wednesday. Keep reading to find out if their dream came true ...

Apparently, miracles do happen! Fifth Harmony was the first act to be sent through to the finale.

They will compete against departing judge L.A. Reid's country singer, Tate Stevens, and Britney Spears's only remaining contestant, Carly Rose Sonenclar.

That means Simon's promising boy band, Emblem3, are out of the running for the big prize.

"This is the way it goes on competitions," Simon said. "I'm gutted really for them ... But it happens."

Read More..

Study: People worldwide living longer, but sicker


LONDON (AP) — Nearly everywhere around the world, people are living longer and fewer children are dying. But increasingly, people are grappling with the diseases and disabilities of modern life, according to the most expansive global look so far at life expectancy and the biggest health threats.


The last comprehensive study was in 1990 and the top health problem then was the death of children under 5 — more than 10 million each year. Since then, campaigns to vaccinate kids against diseases like polio and measles have reduced the number of children dying to about 7 million.


Malnutrition was once the main health threat for children. Now, everywhere except Africa, they are much more likely to overeat than to starve.


With more children surviving, chronic illnesses and disabilities that strike later in life are taking a bigger toll, the research said. High blood pressure has become the leading health risk worldwide, followed by smoking and alcohol.


"The biggest contributor to the global health burden isn't premature (deaths), but chronic diseases, injuries, mental health conditions and all the bone and joint diseases," said one of the study leaders, Christopher Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.


In developed countries, such conditions now account for more than half of the health problems, fueled by an aging population. While life expectancy is climbing nearly everywhere, so too are the number of years people will live with things like vision or hearing loss and mental health issues like depression.


The research appears in seven papers published online Thursday by the journal Lancet. More than 480 researchers in 50 countries gathered data up to 2010 from surveys, censuses and past studies. They used statistical modeling to fill in the gaps for countries with little information. The series was mainly paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.


As in 1990, Japan topped the life expectancy list in 2010, with 79 for men and 86 for women. In the U.S. that year, life expectancy for men was 76 and for women, 81.


The research found wide variations in what's killing people around the world. Some of the most striking findings highlighted by the researchers: — Homicide is the No. 3 killer of men in Latin America; it ranks 20th worldwide. In the U.S., it is the 21st cause of death in men, and in Western Europe, 57th.


— While suicide ranks globally as the 21st leading killer, it is as high as the ninth top cause of death in women across Asia's "suicide belt," from India to China. Suicide ranks 14th in North America and 15th in Western Europe.


— In people aged 15-49, diabetes is a bigger killer in Africa than in Western Europe (8.8 deaths versus 1 death per 100,000).


— Central and Southeast Asia have the highest rates of fatal stroke in young adults at about 15 cases per 100,000 deaths. In North America, the rate is about 3 per 100,000.


Globally, heart disease and stroke remain the top killers. Reflecting an older population, lung cancer moved to the 5th cause of death globally, while other cancers including those of the liver, stomach and colon are also in the top 20. AIDS jumped from the 35th cause of death in 1990 to the sixth leading cause two decades later.


While chronic diseases are killing more people nearly everywhere, the overall trend is the opposite in Africa, where illnesses like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are still major threats. And experts warn again shifting too much of the focus away from those ailments.


"It's the nature of infectious disease epidemics that if you turn away from them, they will crop right back up," said Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders.


Still, she acknowledged the need to address the surge of other health problems across Africa. Cohn said the agency was considering ways to treat things like heart disease and diabetes. "The way we treat HIV could be a good model for chronic care," she said.


Others said more concrete information is needed before making any big changes to public health policies.


"We have to take this data with some grains of salt," said Sandy Cairncross, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.


He said the information in some of the Lancet research was too thin and didn't fully consider all the relevant health risk factors.


"We're getting a better picture, but it's still incomplete," he said.


___


Online:


www.lancet.com


http://healthmetricsandevaluation.org


Read More..

S&P 500 ends six-day winning streak on "cliff" anxiety

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 ended its six-day winning streak on Thursday, retreating as worries intensified that Washington's "fiscal cliff" negotiations were dragging on with little progress.


Anxiety about the drawn-out talks between Democrats and Republicans was enough to offset encouraging data on retail sales and jobless claims on Thursday.


There is concern that tax hikes and spending cuts, set to begin in 2013 if a deal is not reached in Washington, will hurt growth. The stock market has taken the heated rhetoric in stride of late, but downbeat remarks from Republican House Speaker John Boehner prompted some selling on Thursday.


Boehner accused President Barack Obama of "slow walking" the economy off the fiscal cliff. He is scheduled to meet with Obama later on Thursday.


"There is no conviction here and Boehner's comments - as harsh as they were - were realistic," said Jason Weisberg, managing director at Seaport Securities Corp., in New York.


"The fiscal cliff is already built in. That being said, people don't like to be told the apocalypse is coming over and over and over again. The real players in this market have already closed their books."


After coming close to a 1 percent decline for the day, the S&P 500 pared losses late in the session. The index had posted six straight sessions of gains through Wednesday's close, and at one point on Wednesday, the S&P touched its highest intraday level since October 22.


While the Federal Reserve's announcement on Wednesday of a new round of economic stimulus bolstered stocks, Chairman Ben Bernanke's comments that monetary policy would not be sufficient to offset the impact of the fiscal cliff weighed on sentiment.


Apple's stock , down 1.7 percent at $529.69, was among the biggest drags on the Nasdaq in Thursday's session, while International Business Machines , down 0.5 percent at $191.99, was among the biggest weights on the Dow. A U.S. jury found that Apple's iPhone infringed three patents owned by MobileMedia Ideas.


Among the day's biggest gainers, Best Buy Co shares shot up 15.9 percent to $14.12 after a report that the company's founder is expected to offer to buy the consumer electronics retailer by the end of the week.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> tumbled 74.73 points, or 0.56 percent, to 13,170.72 at the close. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 9.03 points, or 0.63 percent, to 1,419.45. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> slid 21.65 points, or 0.72 percent, to end at 2,992.16.


Energy and information technology sectors were the S&P 500's weakest performers, with the S&P energy index <.gspe> down 0.9 percent.


In the energy sector, shares of Nabors Industries Ltd dropped 4.7 percent to $13.85 after Jefferies cut the drilling company's rating. Shares of U.S. refining company Phillips 66 lost 1.6 percent to $52.21.


The day's economic data sent some positive signals on the economy, with weekly claims for jobless benefits dropping to nearly the lowest level since February 2008, and retail sales rising in November after an October decline, improving the picture for consumer spending.


In Europe, European Union finance ministers reached agreement to make the European Central Bank the bloc's top banking supervisor, which could boost confidence in EU leaders' ability to confront the euro zone's sovereign debt crisis.


After the bell, shares of Adobe Systems Inc rose 5.8 percent to $37.60 after the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat software posted a better-than-expected fourth-quarter profit. The stock ended the regular session at $35.53, down 1.2 percent.


Volume was roughly 6.16 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the year-to-date average daily closing volume of 6.52 billion.


Decliners outnumbered advancers on the NYSE by a ratio of about 7 to 3, and on the Nasdaq, more than five stocks fell for every three that rose.


(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Jan Paschal)



Read More..

Assad Fires Scuds at Rebels, U.S. Says, Escalating War in Syria


Narciso Contreras/Associated Press


Free Syrian Army fighters with two bodies they found in the rubble during clashes with government forces in Aleppo on Monday.







WASHINGTON — President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have resorted to firing ballistic missiles at rebel fighters inside Syria, Obama administration officials said Wednesday, escalating a nearly two-year-old civil war as the government struggles to slow the momentum of a gaining insurgency.




Administration officials said that over the last week, Assad forces for the first time had fired at least six Soviet-designed Scud missiles in the latest bid to push back rebels who have consistently chipped away at the government’s military superiority.


In a conflict that has already killed more than 40,000 Syrians, the government has been forced to augment its reliance on troops with artillery, then airpower and now missiles as the rebels have taken over military bases and closed in on the capital, Damascus. The escalation has not changed Washington’s decision to avoid military intervention in Syria — as long as chemical weapons are not used — but it did prompt a rebuke.


“As the regime becomes more and more desperate, we see it resorting to increased lethality and more vicious weapons moving forward, and we have in recent days seen missiles deployed,” said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman.


President Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” implying that it might lead to an American military response.


Mr. Assad’s decision to fire Scuds — not known for their precision — inside his own country appears directly related to the rebel ability to take command of military bases and seize antiaircraft weapons. The Scuds have been fired since Monday from the An Nasiriyah Air Base, north of Damascus, according to American officials familiar with the classified intelligence reports about the attacks. The target was the Sheikh Suleiman base north of Aleppo that rebel forces had occupied.


The development may also represent a calculation by the Syrian leadership that it can resort to such lethal weapons without the fear of international intervention, partly because Washington had set its tolerance threshold at the use of chemical weapons. Mr. Obama has never suggested that the United States would take action to stop attacks against Syrian rebels and civilians with conventional weapons, no matter how severe.


“This may be another example of the unintended consequence of the red line the administration has drawn with regard to chemical weapons,” said Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer and a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a nongovernmental research group. “Assad views every weapon short of chemicals as fair game.”


The disclosure about the Scuds came as representatives of more than 100 nations gathered in Marrakesh, Morocco, for a conference intended to give a political lift to the Syrian opposition, which is formally known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. And it came amid an increase in violence in Syria, including reports of a new massacre of about 100 Alawites, Mr. Assad’s sect, and a large bombing in the capital.


Mr. Obama, in an interview on Tuesday with ABC News, formally recognized the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.


William Burns, the deputy secretary of state who led the American team to the Morocco gathering, said Wednesday that he had invited opposition leaders to Washington, including Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, the coalition leader.


Mr. Khatib, however, took issue with a decision by the Obama administration to classify Al Nusra Front — one of several armed groups fighting Mr. Assad — as a foreign terrorist organization.


“The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against the Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must reconsider,” Mr. Khatib said. “We can differ with parties that adopt political ideas and visions different from ours. But we ensure that the goal of all rebels is the fall of the regime.”


Obama administration officials have said that the Nusra Front is an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that has sought to foment sectarian violence there and topple the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.


Reporting was contributed by Mark Landler from Washington; Aida Alami from Marrakesh, Morocco; Alan Cowell from London; Anne Barnard, Hwaida Saad and Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon; and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.



Read More..

‘Dishonored’ tops a diverse year in video games






The video game universe in 2012 is a study in extremes.


At one end, you have the old guard striving to produce mass-appeal blockbusters. At the other end, you have a thriving community of independent game developers scrambling to find an audience for their idiosyncratic visions. Can’t we all just get along?






Turns out, we can. For while some industry leaders are worried (and not without cause) about “disruptive” trends — social-media games, free-to-play models, the switch from disc-based media to digital delivery — video games are blossoming creatively. This fall, during the height of the pre-holiday game release calendar, I found myself bouncing among games as diverse as the bombastic “Halo 4,” the artsy “The Unfinished Swan” and the quick-hit trivia game “SongPop.”


Some of my favorite games this year have benefited from both sides working together. The smaller studios get exposure on huge platforms like Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. The big publishers seem more willing to invite a little quirkiness into their big-budget behemoths. Gamers win.


1. “Dishonored” (Bethesda Softworks, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): Arkane Studios’ revenge drama combined a witty plot, crisp gameplay and an uncommonly distinctive milieu, setting a supernaturally gifted assassin loose in a gloriously decadent, steampunk-influenced city.


2. “Mass Effect 3″ (Electronic Arts, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC): No 2012 game was more ambitious than BioWare’s sweeping space opera. Yes, the ending was a little bumpy, but the fearless Commander Shepard’s last journey across the cosmos provided dozens of thrilling moments.


3. “The Walking Dead” (Telltale Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, iOS): This moving adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comics dodged the predictable zombie bloodbath in favor of a finely tuned character study of two survivors: Lee, an escaped convict, and Clementine, the 8-year-old girl he’s committed to protect.


4. “Journey” (Thatgamecompany, for the PlayStation 3): A nameless figure trudges across a desert toward a glowing light. Simple enough, but gorgeous visuals, haunting music and the need to communicate, wordlessly, with companions you meet along the way translate into something that’s almost profound.


5. “Borderlands 2″ (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): Gearbox Software’s gleeful mash-up of first-person shooting, role-playing and loot-collecting conventions gets bigger and badder, but what stuck with me most were the often hilarious encounters with the damaged citizens of the godforsaken planet Pandora.


6. “XCOM: Enemy Unknown” (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): A strategy classic returns, as the forces of Earth fight back against an extraterrestrial invasion. It’s a battle of wits rather than reflexes, a stimulating change of pace from the typical alien gorefest.


7. “Fez” (Polytron, for the Xbox 360): A two-dimensional dude named Gomez finds his world has suddenly burst into a third dimension in this gem from indie developer Phil Fish. As Gomez explores, the world of “Fez” continually deepens, opening up mysteries that only the most dedicated players will be able to solve.


8. “Spec Ops: The Line” (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): This harrowing tale from German studio Yager Development transplants “Apocalypse Now” to a war-torn Dubai. It’s a bracing critique, not just of war but of the rah-rah jingoism of contemporary military shooters.


9. “Assassin’s Creed III” (Ubisoft, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC): A centuries-old conspiracy takes root in Colonial America in this beautifully realized, refreshingly irreverent installment of Ubisoft’s alternate history franchise.


10. “ZombiU” (Ubisoft, for the Wii U): The best launch game for Nintendo’s new console turns the Wii U’s GamePad into an effective tool for finding and hunting down the undead.


Runners-up: “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” ”Darksiders II,” ”Dust: An Elysian Tail,” ”Far Cry 3,” ”Halo 4,” ”Mark of the Ninja,” ”Need for Speed: Most Wanted,” ”Paper Mario: Sticker Star,” ”Papo & Yo,” ”The Unfinished Swan.”


Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News


Read More..

Tevin Hunte Is 'So Happy' After His Voice Elimination






The Voice










12/12/2012 at 07:45 PM EST



Team Cee Lo's Trevin Hunte was eliminated on Tuesday's episode of The Voice, but the soulful singer isn't letting the end of this journey hold him back.

"I feel like the best person on the planet Earth. I am so happy and excited to be honest," Hunte told PEOPLE after the show. I feel like a weight has been lifted. Being away from family and friends and what you're used to was definitely a hard thing for me."

Hunte is looking forward to his mom's cooking and seeing his friends back home, and he won't waste a second wondering what if he'd made it further.

"I have no regrets. I am glad that I took a leap of faith and auditioned," he said. "I auditioned for American Idol and told my family I didn't have the strength to do it again. But I am definitely happy and excited that I made it this far."

And he still has a long way to go. "I'm only 18," he said. "I'm just really excited."

Read More..

Congress examines science behind HGH test for NFL


WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressional committee has opened a hearing to examine the science behind a human growth hormone test the NFL wants to start using on its players.


Nearly two full seasons have passed since the league and the players' union signed a labor deal that set the stage for HGH testing.


The NFL Players Association won't concede the validity of a test that's used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball, and the sides haven't been able to agree on a scientist to help resolve that impasse.


Among the witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday is Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dick Butkus. In his prepared statement, Butkus writes: "Now, let's get on with it. The HGH testing process is proven to be reliable."


Read More..

Wall Street ends almost flat as Bernanke warns on "cliff"

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks ended nearly flat on Wednesday, giving up most of the day's gains after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke reiterated that monetary policy won't be enough to offset damage from the "fiscal cliff."


His comments followed the Federal Reserve's announcement of a new stimulus plan, which briefly pushed the S&P 500 to a seven-week high.


The plan, the latest attempt to boost the country's struggling economy, will replace a more modest program set to expire with a fresh round of Treasury purchases that will increase its balance sheet. The program is known as "quantitative easing" or QE.


In comments after the announcement, Bernanke said he hopes that markets won't have to tank to get a fiscal cliff deal.


"Initially the addition of QE was certainly favorable. I think, though, in the press conference, what came out is that there still seems to be a level of uncertainty with regard to the exit strategy (and) the efficacy of the current policy," said Bucky Hellwig, senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management in Birmingham, Alabama.


Bernanke "reiterated the fact that monetary policy has its hands tied as far as addressing the seriousness of going over the fiscal cliff," Hellwig added.


The S&P financial sector index <.gspf>, which had been up more than 1 percent after the Fed's announcement, ended up just 0.5 percent.


Wal-Mart Stores Inc's stock was the biggest drag on the Dow, falling 2.8 percent to $68.94 following the Indian government's announcement of an inquiry into the company's lobbying practices.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> slipped 2.99 points, or 0.02 percent, to 13,245.45 at the close. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> inched up just 0.64 of a point, or 0.04 percent, to 1,428.48. But the Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> shed 8.49 points, or 0.28 percent, to end at 3,013.81.


Though the S&P 500 ended up just slightly, it was the sixth day of gains for the index - its longest winning streak since August.


The central bank committed to monthly purchases of $45 billion in Treasuries on top of the $40 billion per month in mortgage-backed bonds it started buying in September. It also said it will keep its near-zero interest-rate program in place until the U.S. unemployment rate falls to 6.5 percent from its current 7.7 percent.


"The actions by the Fed were more aggressive than investors anticipated," said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at RDM Financial in Westport, Connecticut.


"The asset-purchasing program is probably larger and more comprehensive than some might have thought."


Negotiations over plans to avoid the fiscal cliff intensified in Washington, but U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Wednesday that "serious differences" remain with President Barack Obama in their talks. If no agreement is reached, steep tax hikes and budget cuts will fall into place early next year.


Shares of Aetna , the third-largest U.S. health insurer, gained 3.2 percent to $45.91, a day after the company gave a higher forecast for profit and revenue growth in 2013.


Volume was roughly 6.58 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the year-to-date average daily closing volume of 6.52 billion.


Decliners slightly outnumbered advancers on the NYSE by about 16 to 15, and on the Nasdaq, by about 3 to 2.


(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Leah Schnurr Editing by Jan Paschal)



Read More..

Herat Journal: Afghan Museum Recalls a Previous War


Bryan Denton for The New York Times


A groundskeeper at the Jihad Museum in Herat, Afghanistan, and a helicopter that was left behind from the Soviet Union’s occupation of the country.







HERAT, Afghanistan — For a country disfigured by decades of conflict, it seems fitting that Afghanistan should have a place set aside for reflecting on war.




The Jihad Museum on a forested hillside in the western provincial capital of Herat is many things: a temple to the mujahedeen heroes who battled the Soviets in the 1970s and ’80s, and a memorial for the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were slaughtered or fled the fighting.


It is also, for many Afghans, a not-so-veiled portrayal of a likely future: they review the museum’s dioramas of historical violence with clenching knots in their stomachs, fearing that the scenes may play out again soon, after the end of the NATO combat mission here in 2014.


“I think the worst days are yet to come,” said Obaidullah Esar, 51, a former fighter, who was touring the museum one recent afternoon.


The museum is a blue, green and white rotunda covered on the outside with the names of hundreds of victims from the war, all set in a watered garden of flower beds and fountains.


It boasts captured Soviet weaponry like tanks, a MIG fighter jet and helicopters. It has a portrait hall of fame of mujahedeen commanders.


The star attraction is a graphic diorama showing models of Afghan villagers rising up in a hellish wartime landscape to cudgel the heads of Soviet oppressors, in a triumphant if rather rosy narrative arc: Soviets commit heinous acts against poor villagers, farmers besiege Soviet tanks with sticks, Soviet soldiers are throttled, Soviet soldiers are shot. At the end, the army of the mujahedeen marches home victorious.


Still, if its view is more triumphal than strictly historical, it is one of the few accounts of the era that is easily accessible here.


“Since most Afghans are uneducated and we don’t have good historians to write our histories, our children don’t know who the Russians were, why the Afghans fought against them and what was the result of their resistance,” said Sayed Wahid Qattali, a prosperous 28-year-old politician and businessman who is the son of a former jihadi commander. Mr. Qattali’s father established the museum with the help of Ismail Khan, a mujahedeen warlord and former governor of Herat.


Mr. Qattali says one of the motivations for building the museum is the reluctance of the country’s official history books to address the painful events of the past four decades. In an attempt to depoliticize the history of a country pulled in so many different ways by ethnic tensions, school textbooks tell Afghanistan’s history in depth only up until about the 1970s, skipping over major events since then like the Soviet invasion, civil war, the Taliban’s reign and the American-led invasion and military presence.


Mr. Qattali wants the museum to fill that void, in particular telling his version of the mujahedeen’s exploits — before time moves on and the next chapter of history is inevitably written.


His family has profited during the relative calm of the past 10 years, with interests from chicken farms to a security firm that guards NATO fuel convoys, and he runs his own television station.


Recently, he toured the garden of the museum, showing off the mujahedeen’s trophies, like the MIG jet.


“Afghans have very bad memories of this,” he said, shaking his head, before strolling past an 82-millimeter light-rocket launcher perched in the grass. Near a Soviet helicopter, behind some bushes, Mr. Qattali hunched his shoulders and grew even more morose. “A lot of people were killed by this kind of helicopter,” he said. “We lost a lot of relatives and loved ones. Of course, we fought to the end.”


Inside the hushed museum, shoeless feet — visitors are required to remove their shoes — shuffled past glass cabinets of centuries-old rifles seized from British soldiers in earlier conflicts. The British were repelled, too, and the guns were used against the Soviets, showing an Afghan knack for taking whatever weapons invaders bring and turning them to their advantage.


A museum visitor might reflect that the arsenal of weaponry currently being supplied to Afghanistan by the American-led coalition could one day be piled here, too.


After the guns, a long corridor is lined with more than 60 iconic portraits of mujahedeen commanders who made their names during the fighting against the Soviets and, later, the Taliban: men like Ahmed Shah Massoud and Abdul Haq.


Though they share a hallway, the warlords hardly were united.


Read More..

Hugh Hefner's Engagement Ring to Crystal Harris Revealed















12/11/2012 at 07:00 PM EST



The wedding's back on – though it may be a good idea to save that gift receipt.

Hugh Hefner, 86, officially confirms that he is once again engaged to Crystal Harris, 26, telling his Twitter followers, "I've given Crystal Harris a ring. I love the girl."

And to prove it, Harris posted photos of the big diamond sparkler, calling it "my beautiful ring."

Neither announced a wedding date, though sources tell PEOPLE they're planning to tie the knot at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve.

Whether that still happens remains to be seen.

This is the plan they had in 2011 – a wedding at the mansion – except that Harris called it off just days before the nuptials were scheduled to happen in front of 300 invited guests.

Hugh Hefner's Engagement Ring to Crystal Harris Revealed| Engagements, Crystal Harris, Hugh Hefner

Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris

David Livingston / Getty

The onetime Playmate of the Month then ripped Hef's bedroom skills, calling him a two-second man, to which Hefner replied, "I missed a bullet" by not marrying her.

A year later, Hefner's "runaway bunny" bounded back to him.

Reporting by JENNIFER GARCIA

Read More..

DA investigating Texas' troubled $3B cancer agency


AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Turmoil surrounding an unprecedented $3 billion cancer-fighting effort in Texas worsened Tuesday when its executive director offered his resignation and the state's chief public corruption prosecutor announced an investigation into the beleaguered agency.


No specific criminal allegations are driving the latest probe into the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, said Gregg Cox, director of the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit. But his influential office opened a case only weeks after the embattled agency disclosed that an $11 million grant to a private company bypassed review.


That award is the latest trouble in a tumultuous year for CPRIT, which controls the nation's second-largest pot of cancer research dollars. Amid the mounting problems, the agency announced Tuesday that Executive Director Bill Gimson had submitted his letter of resignation.


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


Gimson said the troubles have resulted in "wasted efforts expended in low value activities" at the agency, instead of a focused fight against cancer. Gimson offered to stay on until January, and the agency's board must still approve his request to step down.


His departure would complete a remarkable house-cleaning at CPRIT in a span of just eight months. It began in May, when Dr. Alfred Gilman resigned as chief science officer in protest over a different grant that the Nobel laureate wanted approved by a panel of scientists. He warned it would be "the bomb that destroys CPRIT."


Gilman was followed by Chief Commercialization Officer Jerry Cobbs, whose resignation in November came after an internal audit showed Cobbs included an $11 million proposal in a funding slate without a required outside review of the project's merits. The lucrative grant was given to Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics, a biomedical startup.


Gimson chalked up Peloton's award to an honest mistake and has said that, to his knowledge, no one associated with CPRIT stood to benefit financially from the company receiving the taxpayer funds. That hasn't satisfied some members of the agency's governing board, who called last week for more assurances that no one personally profited.


Cox said he has been following the agency's problems and his office received a number of concerned phone calls. His department in Austin is charged with prosecuting crimes related to government officials; his most famous cases include winning a conviction against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2010 on money laundering charges.


"We have to gather the facts and figure what, if any, crime occurred so that (the investigation) can be focused more," Cox said.


Gimson's resignation letter was dated the same day the Texas attorney general's office also announced its investigation of the agency. Cox said his department would work cooperatively with state investigators, but he made clear the probes would be separate.


Peloton's award marks the second time this year that a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant authorized by CPRIT instigated backlash and raised questions about oversight. The first involved the $20 million grant to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston that Gilman described as a thin proposal that should have first been scrutinized by an outside panel of scientific peer-reviewers, even though none was required under the agency's rules.


Dozens of the nation's top scientists agreed. They resigned en masse from the agency's peer-review panels along with Gilman. Some accused the agency of "hucksterism" and charting a politically-driven path that was putting commercial product-development above science.


The latest shake-up at CPRIT caught Gilman's successor off-guard. Dr. Margaret Kripke, who was introduced to reporters Tuesday, acknowledged that she wasn't even sure who she would be answering to now that Gimson was stepping down. She said that although she wasn't with the agency when her predecessor announced his resignation, she was aware of the concerns and allegations.


"I don't think people would resign frivolously, so there must be some substance to those concerns," Kripke said.


Kripke also acknowledged the challenge of restocking the peer-review panels after the agency's credibility was so publicly smeared by some of the country's top scientists. She said she took the job because she felt the agency's mission and potential was too important to lose.


Only the National Institutes of Health doles out more cancer research dollars than CPRIT, which has awarded more than $700 million so far.


Gov. Rick Perry told reporters in Houston on Tuesday that he wasn't previously aware of the resignation but said Gimson's decision to step down was his own.


Joining the mounting criticism of CPRIT is the woman credited with brainstorming the idea for the agency in the first place. Cathy Bonner, who served under former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, teamed with cancer survivor Lance Armstrong in selling Texas voters in 2007 on a constitutional amendment to create an unprecedented state-run effort to finance a war on disease.


Now Bonner says politics have sullied an agency that she said was built to fund research, not subsidize private companies.


"There appears to be a cover-up going on," Bonner said.


Peloton has declined comment about its award and has referred questions to CPRIT. The agency has said the company wasn't aware that its application was never scrutinized by an outside panel, as required under agency rules.


___


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


Read More..