Congress to miss midnight cliff deadline


America is going over the “fiscal cliff” – for a few minutes, or hours, at the very least. Don't panic. There's no need to move the family into the Doomsday bunker in the backyard. Yet.


While President Barack Obama and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have said they are close to a broad agreement that would prevent across-the-board income-tax hikes, lawmakers are unlikely to approve actual legislation before a midnight deadline.


That’s not expected to pose any major logistical problem in the next few days, provided that Democrats and Republicans actually have a deal. Unlike a college student who writes an end-of-semester paper overnight before a morning deadline, then drops the assignment off hours after it was due, Congress can write its own rules to minimize the damage – and Americans whose taxes are staying the same won’t see a change in their bottom line.


“It’s basically a matter of saying it’s effective January 1,” one senior Republican aide shrugged.


The deal – if a final deal is reached – will originate in the Democratic-led Senate (but on a House bill, since legislation affecting revenues technically has to start in the lower chamber). Republican House Speaker John Boehner has said that the House will only act after the Senate does. Obama and McConnell have both said that they expected work to continue on avoiding the first installment in $1.2 trillion in cuts to domestic and defense programs, the other part of the "fiscal cliff." McConnell called earlier in the day for lawmakers to vote on the tax component now, but Democrats demurred.


As of 5 p.m. on Monday, it was not clear whether the Senate would vote before midnight.



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Pope marks end of difficult year, notes God’s good






VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI marked the end of a difficult year Monday by saying that despite all the death and injustice in the world, goodness prevails.


Benedict celebrated New Year’s Eve with a vespers service in St. Peter’s Basilica to give thanks for 2012 and look ahead to 2013. He appeared tired during the service and used a cane afterward — an indication that the busy Christmas season may be taking a toll on the 85-year-old Benedict.






In his homily, Benedict said it’s tough to remember that goodness prevails when bad news — death, violence and injustice — “makes more noise than good.” He said taking time to meditate in prolonged reflection and prayer can help “find healing from the inevitable wounds of daily life.”


This past year was full of highs and lows for the pope, including a successful trip to Mexico and Cuba but also the betrayal of his butler, convicted in October of stealing Benedict’s personal papers and leaking them to a journalist.


After the service, Benedict was brought out in a covered car to pray before the Vatican’s main nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square. Walking with a cane in the chilly piazza, Benedict chatted animatedly with the artist who crafted the scene, which recreated an entire village from the poor, southern Italian region of Basilicata which donated this year’s crèche.


The Vatican gladly accepted Basilicata’s donation after the €550,000 price tag the Vatican paid for the 2009 nativity scene was revealed in the documentation leaked by Benedict’s ex-butler Paolo Gabriele.


Gabriele was convicted of aggravated theft by a Vatican tribunal and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He received a pre-Christmas papal pardon and is expected to soon leave his Vatican City apartment for a new home and job elsewhere.


On Tuesday morning, Benedict celebrates a New Year’s Day Mass, which the Catholic Church celebrates as its world day of peace.


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Green Day to get back on road in March






NEW YORK (Reuters) – The members of Green Day said on Monday they will return to the road in March after the punk rock band canceled its fall club tour and postponed later dates as frontman Billie Joe Armstrong underwent treatment for substance abuse.


“We want to thank everyone for hanging in with us for the last few months,” the band members said in a statement on their website. “We are very excited to hit the road and see all of you again, though we regret having to cancel more shows.”






Armstrong, lead singer and guitarist for the Grammy-winning rock band, sought substance abuse treatment in September following an angry, guitar-smashing on-stage outburst in Las Vegas. The details of his addiction were never specified.


Armstrong, 40, added to the website posting with a note on Instagram, saying:


“Dear friends … I just want to thank you all for the love and support you’ve shown for the past few months. Believe me, it hasn’t gone unnoticed and I’m eternally grateful to have such an amazing set of friends and family.


“I’m getting better every day,” he said. “So now, without further ado, the show must go on. We can’t wait to get on the road and live out loud! Our passion has only grown stronger.”


The tour will begin in Chicago on March 28, with dates in Pittsburgh, New York, Toronto and other cities up through April 12 in Quebec City.


The band said it would announce additional West Coast dates in early 2013.


Tickets for the postponed shows will be honored at the new dates, Green Day said. Tickets for canceled shows will be refunded at the point of purchase.


In November the band moved up the release date of “iTré!,” part of an ambitious trilogy of albums that marks their first collection of new music since 2009, to December 11 from its original date of January 15, in part to make up for the canceled and postponed dates.


The California-based punk rock band, formed in the late 1980s, has sold more than 65 million records worldwide and won five Grammys, including best alternative album for its 1994 major-label debut, “Dookie,” and best rock album for “American Idiot” and “21st Century Breakdown.”


(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Bill Trott)


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Naloxone reverses overdoses without hefty price tag






NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Distributing a drug that reverses drug overdoses in heroin users would save lives and be cost-effective, according to a new analysis.


U.S. researchers, who published their findings in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, calculated that one death may be prevented for every 164 naloxone injection kits they distribute to heroin users.






That, the researchers say, works out to be a few hundred dollars for every year of healthy life gained.


“The great news here is these overdose deaths can be prevented, it’s cost effective to do so, and may even be cost saving,” said Dr. Phillip Coffin, the study’s lead author from the San Francisco Department of Public Health.


Naloxone is a drug that stops opioids such as heroin from reaching receptors in the brain, which may reverse an overdose. The drug is currently only approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be injected into a person, but there are promising trials for an inhaled version of it.


The general idea, according to Coffin, is that giving heroin or opioid users naloxone injection kits gives them the chance to reverse another person’s overdose.


“Typically when someone has an overdose, they’re unconscious and they fall asleep quite quickly… So the idea that you would reverse your own overdose is not practical,” said Dr. Wilson Compton from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Bethesda, Maryland.


Currently, an estimated 213,000 people in the U.S. use heroin each year. Over that population’s lifetime, more than one in 10 users may die of an overdose.


Compton, who co-authored an editorial accompanying the study, said naloxone has few side effects, except that high doses may send someone into withdrawal.


For the new study, Coffin and a colleague created a computer simulation that predicted what would happen if they distributed naloxone injection kits to 20 percent of U.S. heroin users, and compared the resulting deaths and costs to a simulation of users without kits.


In that scenario, the model found that in a population of 200,000 heroin users 6.5 percent of deaths that would have occurred could be prevented with distribution of the kits.


The simulation also found that almost 2 percent of heroin users eventually quit when the kits were distributed. That, however, also led to about a 1 percent increase in overdoses, because high-risk users were living longer.


The researchers calculated that the kits would cost about $ 400 for every year of healthy life gained.


That’s well below the $ 50,000 per healthy year of life gained threshold that policymakers typically think is worth paying for, the authors note.


Coffin told Reuters Health that distributing the kits may end up saving money because it might prevent aggressive attempts to revive a person who overdoses, which can be costly.


“This study helps us understand that providing naloxone is not only effective, but can also be a very cost effective approach to preventing overdose deaths in heroin addicts,” Compton said.


Coffin added that there may be additional benefits from distributing the kits based on real-world experiences in places such as New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Scotland, where overdose deaths fell between 37 percent and 90 percent with naloxone distribution programs.


“It may be influencing behavior,” said Coffin. “That rides on the assumption that talking to people about overdoes and providing them with a tool to prevent overdoses makes them a little bit more careful.”


But Compton said these kits may only be part of an approach to curb the growing epidemic of opioid overdose deaths.


“Providing this intervention to address the overdose epidemic is one piece of it, but we think it must be part of a larger approach to prevent the abuse and misuse of prescription drugs,” he said.


According to Compton and his editorial co-authors, which include NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow and representatives from the FDA, total U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2010 reached almost 40,000 and outpaced deaths from motor vehicle accidents.


Overall, Coffin told Reuters Health he thinks the results are “fantastic,” because it shows “it’s a really excellent benefit for a modest amount of dollars.”


SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Ms1ZbQ Annals of Internal Medicine, online December 31, 2012.


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GOP Senate leader urges Biden to break ‘fiscal cliff’ impasse


Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is shown in this C-Span video footage as he addresses the Senate …Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday to jump into “fiscal cliff” talks in hopes of breaking an impasse that threatens Americans with sharply higher income taxes come January 1.


In a brief speech on the Senate floor, McConnell complained that Democrats had not yet placed a counter-offer to a new Republican proposal, delivered at 7 pm on Saturday, “despite the obvious time crunch.”


“I’m concerned about the lack of urgency here,” the Kentucky lawmaker said. “I think we all know we’re running out of time.”


Besides conferring with his Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, McConnell said he had reached out to Biden "to see if he could help jump-start the negotiations on his side.”


McConnell added, “The vice president and I have worked together on solutions before, and I believe we can again."


Absent a breakthrough by tomorrow, income tax rates will rise across the board while government spending on domestic and defense programs will be slashed – a combination that some experts warn could plunge the economy into a new recession.


President Barack Obama has pressed for extending Bush-era tax rates on income up to $250,000 but letting them expire above that threshold. Republicans have resisted raising taxes on income at all levels. The two sides have also been at odds on issues like the estate tax and whether to extend unemployment benefits that stand to expire for some two million Americans.


Republican aides said that McConnell and Biden had spoken several times. A Biden aide said the vice president went to the White House after spending Christmas with his family in Delaware.


“We’re willing to work with whoever, whoever can help,” McConnell said. “There’s no single issue that remains an impossible sticking point. The sticking point appears to be a willingness, an interest, or frankly the courage to close the deal.”


“I’m willing to get this done, but I need a dance partner,” he said.


Reid said he had spoken several times on Sunday with Obama but acknowledged that his side had been “unable” to present a counter-offer to the latest Republican proposal.


“He and the vice president, I wish them well. In the meantime I will continue to try to come up something but at this stage I don’t have a counter-offer to make,” Reid said. “We are apart on some pretty big issues.”


Reid said he remained "hopeful but realistic" about the prospects for a breakthrough.


But he also seemed to confirm that one key sticking point was a Republican demand for reducing Social Security payments but adopting a less generous cost-of-living calculation known as “chained CPI” (the CPI being “consumer price index,” a measure of inflation).


“We’re not going to have any Social Security cuts,” Reid declared, saying it would not be “appropriate” in a short-term deal. Democratic leaders have cautiously signaled support for that approach – but only as part of a larger-scale deal that would see the U.S. debt limit raised for a significant stretch of time. Republicans want to use the debt ceiling fight to wrangle deeper government spending cuts.


“We're willing to make difficult concessions as part of a balanced, comprehensive agreement,” Reid said, “but we'll not agree to cut Social Security benefits as part of a small or short-term agreement, especially if that agreement gives more handouts to the rich.”


Republican aides bristled at Reid's characterization, noting that Democrats had not yet returned with a counter-offer. "If they don't like the CPI thing, they can strike it out," one told Yahoo News.


Republican senators, meanwhile, emerged from a closed door party meeting saying that chained CPI was off the table for now. The proposal was "not a winning hand" in the current standoff, John McCain told reporters drily.


Republican House Speaker John Boehner has said that it's up to the Senate to craft a compromise that can clear both chambers of Congress. Boehner suffered an embarrassing setback 10 days ago when conservative opposition forced him to withdraw legislation that would have let taxes rise on income of above $1 million. But a senior Republican aide noted that the exercise allowed the speaker to gauge how many of his rank-and-file would accept any increase in tax rates.



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Pakistan militants kill 41 in mass execution, attack on Shi’ites






PESHWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – Pakistani militants, who have escalated attacks in recent weeks, killed at least 41 people in two separate incidents, officials said on Sunday, challenging assertions that military offensives have broken the back of hardline Islamist groups.


The United States has long pressured nuclear-armed ally Pakistan to crack down harder on both homegrown militants groups such as the Taliban and others which are based on its soil and attack Western forces in Afghanistan.






In the north, 21 men working for a government-backed paramilitary force were executed overnight after they were kidnapped last week, a provincial official said.


Twenty Shi’ite pilgrims died and 24 were wounded, meanwhile, when a car bomb targeted their bus convoy as it headed toward the Iranian border in the southwest, a doctor said.


New York-based Human Rights Watch has noted more than 320 Shias killed this year in Pakistan and said attacks were on the rise. It said the government’s failure to catch or prosecute attackers suggested it was “indifferent” to the killings.


Pakistan, seen as critical to U.S. efforts to stabilize the region before NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, denies allegations that it supports militant groups like the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network.


Afghan officials say Pakistan seems more genuine than ever about promoting peace in Afghanistan.


At home, it faces a variety of highly lethal militant groups that carry out suicide bombings, attack police and military facilities and launch sectarian attacks like the one on the bus in the southwest.


Witnesses said a blast targeted their three buses as they were overtaking a car about 60 km (35 miles) west of Quetta, capital of sparsely populated Baluchistan province.


“The bus next to us caught on fire immediately,” said pilgrim Hussein Ali, 60. “We tried to save our companions, but were driven back by the intensity of the heat.”


Twenty people had been killed and 24 wounded, said an official at Mastung district hospital.


CONCERN OVER EXTREMIST SUNNI GROUPS


International attention has focused on al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.


But Pakistani intelligence officials say extremist Sunni groups, lead by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) are emerging as a major destabilizing force in a campaign designed to topple the government.


Their strategy now, the officials say, is to carry out attacks on Shi’ites to create the kind of sectarian tensions that pushed countries like Iraq to the brink of civil war.


As elections scheduled for next year approach, Pakistanis will be asking what sort of progress their leaders have made in the fight against militancy and a host of other issues, such as poverty, official corruption and chronic power cuts.


Pakistan’s Taliban have carried out a series of recent bold attacks, as military officials point to what they say is a power struggle in the group’s leadership revolving around whether it should ease attacks on the Pakistani state and join groups fighting U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.


The Taliban denies a rift exists among its leaders.


In the attack in the northwest, officials said they had found the bodies of 21 men kidnapped from their checkpoints outside the provincial capital of Peshawar on Thursday. The men were executed one by one.


“They were tied up and blindfolded,” Naveed Anwar, a senior administration official, said by telephone.


“They were lined up and shot in the head,” said Habibullah Arif, another local official, also by telephone.


One man was shot and seriously wounded but survived, the officials said. He was in critical condition and being treated at a local hospital. Another had escaped before the shootings.


Taliban spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan claimed responsibility for the attacks.


“We killed all the kidnapped men after a council of senior clerics gave a verdict for their execution. We didn’t make any demand for their release because we don’t spare any prisoners who are caught during fighting,” he said.


The powerful military has clawed back territory from the Taliban, but the kidnap and executions underline the insurgents’ ability to mount high-profile, deadly attacks in major cities.


This month, suicide bombers attacked Peshawar’s airport on December 15 and a bomb killed a senior Pashtun nationalist politician and eight other people at a rally on December 22.


(Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud in DERA ISMAIL KHAN and Gul Yousufzai in QUETTA; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Michael Georgy and Ron Popeski)


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‘The Hobbit’ stays atop box office for third week






LOS ANGELES (AP) — “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” continues to rule them all at the box office, staying on top for a third-straight week with nearly $ 33 million.


The Warner Bros. fantasy epic from director Peter Jackson, based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novel, has made $ 222.7 million domestically alone.






Two big holiday movies — and potential awards contenders — also had strong openings. Quentin Tarantino‘s spaghetti Western-blaxploitation mash-up “Django Unchained” came in second place for the weekend with $ 30.7 million. The Weinstein Co. revenge epic, starring Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, has earned $ 64 million since its Christmas Day opening.


And in third place with $ 28 million was the sweeping, all-singing “Les Miserables.” The Universal Pictures musical starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway has made $ 67.5 million since debuting on Christmas.


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Democrats, Republicans apart on key “fiscal cliff” issues: Reid






WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Sunday that Democrats and Republicans still had key differences in talks to avert a looming year-end “fiscal cliff,” and he had not been able to make a counteroffer to the latest Republican proposal.


“I’ve had a number of conversations with the president and at this stage we’re not able to make a counteroffer,” Reid said on the Senate floor.






He said that as the day wears on, Democrats may be able to make such an offer.


“I think that the Republican leader has shown absolutely good faith. It’s just that we’re apart on some pretty big issues,” Reid added. (Reporting By David Lawder; Editing by David Brunnstrom)


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Senate leaders aim to craft fiscal bill by Sunday


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate leaders are working to craft legislation by Sunday that averts the year-end "fiscal cliff" of tax hikes and spending cuts, but many details needed to be worked out after a crucial meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday.


U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart Mitch McConnell, termed the meeting "constructive" and "positive" and said they would keep working on trying to find a solution over the weekend.


After adjourning on Friday, Reid he would probably not call the Senate back into session until about 1 p.m. EST/ 1800 GMT on Sunday to give leaders time to hash out a deal.


"We are engaged in discussions, the majority leader and myself and the White House, in the hopes that we can come forward as early as Sunday and have a recommendation that I can make to my conference and the majority leader can make to his conference," McConnell said on the Senate floor.


"So we'll be working hard to try to see if we can get there in the next 24 hours. So I'm hopeful and optimistic," he added.


An aide to House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said it was agreed at the White House meeting that the Senate should act first.


"The speaker told the president that if the Senate amends the House-passed legislation and sends back a plan, the House will consider it - either by accepting or amending," the aide said.


However, Reid said it would be difficult to craft a solution that can win passage in both the House and Senate, adding that it involves "big numbers."


"Whatever we come up with is going to be imperfect," Reid said. "Some people aren't going to like it. Some people will like it less. But that's where we are and I feel confident that we have an obligation to do the best we can."


(Reporting By David Lawder, Rachelle Younglai; editing by Christopher Wilson)



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2 arrested after Guinea treasury chief killed






CONAKRY, Guinea (AP) — Officials in the West African nation of Guinea say they’ve arrested two suspects in the case of the killing of the country’s treasury chief, who was shot to death nearly two months ago.


Authorities paraded the pair in front of journalists Friday. Aissatou Boiro was killed as she was driving home. She had launched an investigation into the loss of 13 million francs ($ 1.8 million) which went missing from the state coffers.






The government says the suspects were found with Boiro‘s computer memory stick and mobile telephone.


The men denied any involvement in her slaying and said a friend had given them the items.


Boiro’s colleagues say she had zero tolerance for corruption and was intent on putting an end to the mismanagement of state funds.


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NORAD Santa trackers draw record number of phone calls, social media followers






PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo.NORAD says it drew a record number of phone calls and social media followers during its NORAD Tracks Santa operation on Christmas Eve.


The North American Aerospace Defence Command said Friday volunteers answered more than 114,000 calls, up 12,000 from 2011.






NORAD’s Santa Facebook page had more than 1.2 million followers, up from about 1 million last year. More than 129,000 people followed on Twitter, up from 101,000 last year.


NORAD got 11,000 emails, up from 7,700 in 2011.


More than 1,250 volunteers answered phone calls, including first lady Michelle Obama.


NORAD Tracks Santa began in 1955 when a newspaper listed the wrong number for children to call Santa. They wound up calling the Continental Air Defence Command, NORAD’s predecessor.


The operation is based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.


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Matt Damon tackles “fracking” issue in the “Promised Land”






LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The hot-button topic of “fracking” has finally made its way to Hollywood in the new movie “Promised Land,” out in U.S. theaters on Friday, with actors Matt Damon and John Krasinski teaming up to further the debate on the energy drilling technique.


The film explores the social impact of hydraulic fracturing drilling technique, or “fracking,” which has sparked nation-wide environmental and political battles over its impact on drinking water, U.S. energy use, seismic activity and other areas.






“Promised Land” will see Damon, 42, reunite with director Gus Van Sant for the third time, following their success with 1997 film “Good Will Hunting and 2002′s “Gerry.”


In their latest film, Damon plays a corporate salesman who goes to a rural U.S. town to buy or lease land on behalf of a gas company looking to drill for oil. He soon faces opposition from a slick environmentalist, played by Krasinski.


In real life, Damon hasn’t shied away from getting involved in political and social issues, working with charities and organizations to eradicate AIDS in developing countries, bringing attention to atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region, providing safe drinking water and stopping trees from being chopped and used for junk mail.


Yet “Promised Land,” which Damon also co-wrote and produced, doesn’t take a noticeable stance on “fracking.” The actor would not publicly state his own views, telling Reuters that he didn’t think his opinion had “any bearing” on the film.


“The point is that the movie should start a conversation. It’s certainly not a pro-fracking movie, but we didn’t want to tell people what to think,” Damon said.


The actor said he and Krasinski never set out to make a socially conscious film, and “fracking” was added in later, as a backdrop to the story.


“It wasn’t that we said we wanted to make a movie about ‘fracking’ as much as we wanted to make a movie about American identity, about real people. We wanted to make a movie about the country today, where we came from, where we are and where we are headed,” Damon said.


“‘Fracking’ was perfect because the stakes are so incredibly high and people are so divided. It asks all the questions about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking.”


Hydraulic fracturing entails pumping water laced with chemicals and sand at high pressure into shale rock formations to break them up and unleash hydrocarbons. Critics worry that “fracking” fluids or hydrocarbons can still leak into water tables from wells, or above ground.


FROM ‘ADJUSTMENT BUREAU’ TO ‘PROMISED LAND’


At first glance, the pairing of Damon with Krasinski may not come across as the perfect fit, as Damon has primarily been associated with longtime friend and collaborator Ben Affleck, both of whom won Oscars for writing “Good Will Hunting.”


Damon later become a colleague and friend to a number of key Hollywood players, including George Clooney and Brad Pitt, with whom he co-starred in the “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise.


Krasinski, 33, is best known for playing sardonic Jim Halpert on NBC’s long-running television series, “The Office,” and has had occasional supporting roles in films such as 2008′s “Leatherheads.”


Damon and Krasinski came together after meeting through Krasinski’s wife, Emily Blunt, who co-starred with Damon in the 2011 film “The Adjustment Bureau.” Damon said he and his wife started double-dating with Krasinski and Blunt, through which their collaboration on “Promised Land” came about.


The duo’s busy work schedules forced them to moonlight on weekends to make “Promised Land.”


“John showed up at my house every Saturday at breakfast and we would write all day until dinner,” Damon said. “Then we’d do it again on Sunday. I have four kids so he would come to me.”


But Damon’s determination to make the film his feature directorial debut fell through when his acting schedule changed, making it impossible to direct “Promised Land,” so he turned to Van Sant.


“My first inclination was to send the script to somebody I’d worked with before,” he said. “Gus seemed like the most obvious choice and I realized later that I’d never written anything that anyone else had directed, except Gus. I have a real comfort level with him.”


Damon said he has not given up on his dream of directing movies and has his eye on a project at movie studio Warner Bros., which has a deal with Damon and Affleck’s joint production company, Pearl Street Films.


With Affleck’s third directorial effort “Argo” becoming an awards contender, Damon joked that the film’s success can only be a good thing for his own budding directing career.


“I now happen to be partnered with the hottest director in Hollywood!” he said, laughing.


(Reporting By Zorianna Kit, Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Paul Simao)


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Hospitals, red tape may be limiting tubal ligations






NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women in California and Texas have varying access to “getting their tubes tied” immediately after giving birth, according to a new study, but the reasons are still unclear researchers say.


Analyzing the records of nearly 890,000 mothers across 499 hospitals in both states, they found that more women in Texas got the voluntary sterilization procedure after delivery in 2009 than did women in California.






But the differences were not clearly linked to obvious factors – such as cost or religiously affiliated hospitals that refuse to do the surgery. Further, sterilization rates ranged from zero to 15 percent in California hospitals and between zero and 30 percent in Texas hospitals.


“This huge variation we’re seeing both between the two states and within facilities raises a red flag,” said study author Dr. Daniel Grossman, senior associate at Ibis Reproductive Health. “Our paper raises more questions than it answers,” he told Reuters Health.


Differences in federal funding could explain some of the discrepancies. Federal funds through Title X and Medicaid programs reach more women in California than Texas, Grossman said.


In his team’s report, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, the researchers suggest that Texas women have fewer low-cost family planning options, which may act as an incentive to get their tubes tied for contraceptive purposes.


Conversely, the more generous family planning funding in California might mean that women have access to low-cost options beyond sterilization after delivery.


Nonetheless, surgical sterilization remains very popular in the U.S. and nearly a third of women with children use it for family planning purposes, according to some estimates.


A 2011 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, found that tubal sterilization was performed following every one in 13 births in the U.S. between 2001 and 2008, while insertion of a contraceptive IUD was done after one in every 37,000 births. (See Reuters Health story of August 26, 2011.)


In the new study, Grossman and his colleagues found that in California, one in every 15 women had her tubes tied after delivery, compared with Texas where one in 10 women was sterilized after delivery.


They looked at several factors that might explain the variation in rates, but none stood out as a clear cause. Variation was similar among private versus publicly insured patients and among mothers who delivered by cesarean section – a procedure that might make it easier to have elective sterilization right after delivery.


The age of the mothers also did not explain the disparities. The data did not include the number of previous children the women had.


Differences in accessibility might arise from several other sources, the researchers suggested. Catholic hospitals ban sterilization, but non-Catholic hospitals could also have policies that limit tube tying.


“It doesn’t matter if it’s at an institutional level or a state level, it’s always the least mobile, the poorest (women) who don’t have the choice,” said Dr. Cori Baill, a physician at The Menopause Center in Orlando, who has counseled mothers in family planning issues.


Baill, who was not involved in the current study, said poor women who lack prenatal care will not have sterilization as an option since Medicaid requires expectant mothers to sign consent forms 30 days before delivery. “It’s ridiculous that Medicaid rule still exists,” Baill told Reuters Health.


Night and weekend staffing could also affect the variation in tube tying since doctors may not be around to perform the elective surgery, Baill added.


Though the current study did not examine how many mothers requested their tubes tied after delivery, Grossman and colleagues are examining the demand for sterilization in an ongoing pilot study in El Paso, Texas.


“Women across the country should be able to access the form of contraception that they want,” Grossman said. “We need more information to determine what accounts for this variability.”


SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Uqx8hQ Obstetrics & Gynecology, online December 20, 2012.


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House back Sunday night, will have 29.5 hours to strike deal on fiscal cliff


President Barack Obama salutes as he returns via Marine One from a Christmas visit with his family in Hawaii, to …Will parachutes be provided? Republican House leaders informed their rank-and-file on a conference call Thursday that they have to be back at work at 6:30 p.m. Sunday – giving them, oh, 29.5 hours to forestall the “fiscal cliff.”


Absent a last-minute compromise, Americans will see across-the-board income-tax hikes and painful federal spending cuts come into force January 1. Some economists fear that, taken together, the measures could plunge the economy into a new recession.


Technically, however, the Congress could vote the cliff into oblivion at any time – either before OR after the income-tax increases and spending cuts are slated to take effect. Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor noted on Twitter that lawmakers “may be in session through Wednesday, January 2.”


House Speaker John Boehner told his troops on the conference call that the Senate would have to act first, either by passing, or by amending, legislation the House has already passed to avert the cliff.


“If the Senate will not approve these bills and send them to the president to be signed into law in their current form, they must be amended and returned to the House,” he said, according to a source on the call.

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China tightening controls on Internet






BEIJING (AP) — China‘s new communist leaders are increasing already tight controls on Internet use and electronic publishing following a spate of embarrassing online reports about official abuses.


The measures suggest China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, and others who took power in November share their predecessors’ anxiety about the Internet’s potential to spread opposition to one-party rule and their insistence on controlling information despite promises of more economic reforms.






“They are still very paranoid about the potentially destabilizing effect of the Internet,” said Willy Lam, a politics specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They are on the point of losing a monopoly on information, but they still are very eager to control the dissemination of views.”


This week, China’s legislature took up a measure to require Internet users to register their real names, a move that would curtail the Web’s status as a freewheeling forum to complain, often anonymously, about corruption and official abuses. The legislature scheduled a news conference Friday to discuss the measure, suggesting it was expected to be approved.


That comes amid reports Beijing might be disrupting use of software that allows Web surfers to see sites abroad that are blocked by its extensive Internet filters. At the same time, regulators have proposed rules that would bar foreign companies from distributing books, news, music and other material online in China.


Beijing promotes Internet use for business and education but bans material deemed subversive or obscene and blocks access to foreign websites run by human rights and Tibet activists and some news outlets. Controls were tightened after social media played a role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia.


In a reminder of the Web’s role as a political forum, a group of 70 prominent Chinese scholars and lawyers circulated an online petition this week appealing for free speech, independent courts and for the ruling party to encourage private enterprise.


Xi and others on the party’s ruling seven-member Standing Committee have tried to promote an image of themselves as men of the people who care about China’s poor majority. They have promised to press ahead with market-oriented reforms and to support entrepreneurs but have given no sign of support for political reform.


Communist leaders who see the Internet as a source of economic growth and better-paid jobs were slow to enforce the same level of control they impose on movies, books and other media, apparently for fear of hurting fledgling entertainment, shopping and other online businesses.


Until recently, Web surfers could post comments online or on microblog services without leaving their names.


That gave ordinary Chinese a unique opportunity to express themselves to a public audience in a society where newspapers, television and other media are state-controlled. The most popular microblog services say they have more than 300 million users and some users have millions of followers reading their comments.


The Internet also has given the public an unusual opportunity to publicize accusations of official misconduct.


A local party official in China’s southwest was fired in November after scenes from a videotape of him having sex with a young woman spread quickly on the Internet. Screenshots were uploaded by a former journalist in Beijing, Zhu Ruifeng, to his Hong Kong website, an online clearing house for corruption allegations.


Some industry analysts suggest allowing Web surfers in a controlled setting to vent helps communist leaders stay abreast of public sentiment in their fast-changing society. Still, microblog services and online bulletin boards are required to employ censors to enforce content restrictions. Researchers say they delete millions of postings a day.


The government says the latest Internet regulation before the National People’s Congress is aimed at protecting Web surfers’ personal information and cracking down on abuses such as junk e-mail. It would require users to report their real names to Internet service and telecom providers.


The main ruling party newspaper, People’s Daily, has called in recent weeks for tighter Internet controls, saying rumors spread online have harmed the public. In one case, it said stories about a chemical plant explosion resulted in the deaths of four people in a car accident as they fled the area.


Proposed rules released this month by the General Administration of Press and Publications would bar Chinese-foreign joint ventures from publishing books, music, movies and other material online in China. Publishers would be required to locate their servers in China and have a Chinese citizen as their local legal representative.


That is in line with rules that already bar most foreign access to China’s media market, but the decision to group the restrictions together and publicize them might indicate official attitudes are hardening.


That comes after the party was rattled by foreign news reports about official wealth and misconduct.


In June, Bloomberg News reported that Xi’s extended family has amassed assets totaling $ 376 million, though it said none was traced to Xi. The government has blocked access to Bloomberg’s website since then.


In October, The New York Times reported that Premier Wen Jiabao’s relatives had amassed $ 2.7 billion since he rose to national office in 2002. Access to the Times’ Chinese-language site has been blocked since then.


Previous efforts to tighten controls have struggled with technical challenges in a country with more than 500 million Internet users.


Microblog operators such as Sina Corp. and Tencent Ltd. were ordered in late 2011 to confirm users’ names but have yet to finish the daunting task.


Web surfers can circumvent government filters by using virtual private networks — software that encrypts Web traffic and is used by companies to transfer financial data and other sensitive information. But VPN users say disruptions that began in 2011 are increasing, suggesting Chinese regulators are trying to block encrypted traffic.


Curbs on access to foreign sites have prompted complaints by companies and Chinese scientists and other researchers.


In July, the American Chamber of Commerce in China said 74 percent of companies that responded to a survey said unstable Internet access “impedes their ability to do business.”


Chinese leaders “realize there are detrimental impacts on business, especially foreign business, but they have counted the cost and think it is still worthwhile,” said Lam. “There is no compromise about the political imperative of controlling the Internet.”


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iOS apps see Christmas sales spike shrink in 2012






Distimo just released its statistics on Christmas Day app downloads and revenue growth… and the download spike is far smaller than it was last year. Back in 2011, Christmas Day iOS app download volume spiked 230% above the December average. This year, the increase was just 87% — far below industry expectations. The revenue spike came in at 70%.


[More from BGR: Google names 12 best Android apps of 2012]






Interestingly, iPad downloads increased by 140% this Christmas, implying that the iPhone download bounce was really modest.


[More from BGR: New purported BlackBerry Z10 specs emerge: 1.5GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 8MP camera]


A few weeks ago, AppAnnie released statistics showing that iOS app revenue growth had stalled over the summer of 2012, whereas Android app revenue growth was relatively strong at 48% over a five month period. Both Distimo and Appannie are respected companies and their analytics are closely followed by app industry professionals. Could it be that the pace of iPhone app revenue growth has slowed down sharply from 2011 levels, even if Distimo and AppAnnie numbers aren’t entirely accurate?


This article was originally published by BGR


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“Rescue Me” singer Fontella Bass dies aged 72






(Reuters) – American soul singer Fontella Bass, who topped the R&B chart in 1965 with the song “Rescue Me,” died in St. Louis. She was 72.


Bass died in hospice care on Wednesday night from complications of a heart attack she suffered three weeks ago, her daughter, Neuka Mitchell, told Reuters. Bass had also suffered from strokes in recent years.






“She’s going to be missed,” Mitchell said. “Her big personality. Her love for family. Her big, giving heart and her cooking.”


She was known as the “queen of soul food” to her family, Mitchell said.


Bass was born into a singing family in St. Louis. Her mother, Martha Bass, was a singer in the Clara Ward Singers gospel group. Her brother, the late R&B singer David Peaston, scored a handful of hits in the 1980s and 1990s.


Bass first achieved success dueting with Bobby McClure in 1965 on songs such as “Don’t Mess Up A Good Thing” and “You’ll Miss Me (When I’m Gone),” both of which were hits on the pop and R&B charts.


Bass’ biggest hit came with “Rescue Me,” which shot up the Billboard pop charts in the fall of 1965, becoming one of the most popular soul hits of all time.


“It held a special place in her heart,” Mitchell said of the song. “She sang it every time she performed.”


The song has been covered and sampled numerous times over the years, including by pop stars Linda Ronstadt and Cher, and more recently in 2000 by UK group Nu Generation, who remixed the song into a dance track.


Nu Generation’s remix, “In Your Arms (Rescue Me)” hit the top 10 of the UK singles chart.


Bass had moderate success in later years with a gospel album in the 1990s, but was unable to emulate the popularity set by “Rescue Me.”


She was married to jazz trumpeter and composer Lester Bowie. The two spent time living in Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s before moving back to the United States.


Funeral arrangements for Bass have not been finalized. The singer is survived by her four children.


(Reporting by Eric Kelsey and Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Doina Chiacu)


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Senator McConnell says still time to avert “fiscal cliff”






WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top Republican in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, on Thursday said that there is still time to avert the “fiscal cliff” and a “wholly preventable economic crisis.”


In a speech on the Senate floor McConnell warned, however, that Senate Republicans “aren’t about to write a blank check for anything Senate Democrats put forward just because we find ourselves at the edge of the cliff.”






Lawmakers and President Barack Obama are up against a December 31 deadline for finding a way to stop $ 600 billion in potentially harmful tax hikes and spending cuts from taking effect with an alternative deficit-reduction formula.


(Reporting By Richard Cowan and David Lawder; Editing by Sandra Maler)


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George H.W. Bush in intensive care


HOUSTON (AP) — A spokesman says former President George H.W. Bush is in the intensive care unit at a Houston hospital.


Bush's spokesman, Jim McGrath, said late Wednesday that the former president was admitted to the ICU on Sunday at Methodist Hospital, "following a series of setbacks including a persistent fever."


McGrath says Bush is alert and conversing with medical staff, and that doctors are cautiously optimistic about his treatment.


No other details about his medical condition were provided, but McGrath says Bush is surrounded by family.


Earlier Wednesday, McGrath said a fever that kept Bush in the hospital over Christmas had gotten worse and that doctors had put him on a liquids-only diet.


A bronchitis-like cough initially brought Bush to the hospital in late November. McGrath says the cough has improved.


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Afghan bomber attacks near major US base






KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A vehicle driven by a suicide bomber exploded at the gate of a major U.S. military base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing the attacker and three Afghans, Afghan police said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.


Police Gen. Abdul Qayum Baqizai said a local guard who questioned the vehicle driver at the gate of Camp Chapman was killed along with two civilians and the assailant. The camp is located adjacent to the airport of the capital of Khost province, which borders Pakistan. Chapman and nearby Camp Salerno had been frequently targeted by militants in the past, but violent incidents have decreased considerably in recent months.






Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in an email that the bomber targeted Afghan police manning the gate and Afghans working for the Americans entering the base. He claimed high casualties were inflicted.


NATO operates with more than 100,000 troops in the country, including some 66,000 American forces. It is handing most combat operations over to the Afghans in preparation for a pullout from Afghanistan in 2014. Militant groups, including the Taliban, rarely face NATO troops head-on and rely mainly on roadside bombs and suicide attacks.


NATO forces and foreign civilians have also been increasingly attacked by rogue Afghan military and police, eroding trust between the allies.


On Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said a policewoman who killed an American contractor in Kabul a day earlier was a native Iranian who came to Afghanistan and displayed “unstable behavior” but had no known links to militants.


The policewoman, identified as Sgt. Nargas, shot 49-year-old Joseph Griffin, of Mansfield, Georgia, on Monday, in the first such shooting by a woman in the spate of insider attacks. Nargas walked into a heavily-guarded compound in the heart of Kabul, confronted Griffin and shot him once with her pistol.


The U.S-based security firm DynCorp International said on its website that Griffin was a U.S. military veteran who earlier worked with law enforcement agencies in the United States. In Kabul, he was under contract to the NATO military command to advise the Afghan police force.


The ministry spokesman, Sediq Sediqi, told a news conference that Nargas, who uses one name like many in the country, was born in Tehran, where she married an Afghan. She moved to the country 10 years ago, after her husband obtained fake documents enabling her to live and work there.


A mother of four in her early 30s, she joined the police five years ago, held various positions and had a clean record, he said. Sediqi produced an Iranian passport that he said was found at her home.


No militant group has claimed responsibility for the killing.


The chief investigator of the case, Police Gen. Mohammad Zahir, said that during interrogation, the policewoman said she had plans to kill either the Kabul governor, city police chief or Zahir himself, but when she realized that penetrating the last security cordons to reach them would be too difficult, she saw “a foreigner” and turned her weapon on him.


There have been 60 insider attacks this year against foreign military and civilian personnel, compared to 21 in 2011. This surge presents another looming security issue as NATO prepares to pull out almost all of its forces by 2014, putting the war against the Taliban and other militant groups largely in the hands of the Afghans.


More than 50 Afghan members of the government’s security forces also have died this year in attacks by their own colleagues. The Taliban claims such incidents reflect a growing popular opposition to the foreign military presence and the Kabul government.


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Samsung expects to ship more than half a billion phones in 2013









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Web-based info may not increase cancer screening






NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Offering women information on colon cancer screening via the web does not get them to take up screening any more effectively than printed materials, according to a new study.


“It’s disappointing that the web didn’t have more effect,” said Dr. David Weinberg of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, the report’s lead author.






Although the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that adults between ages 50 and 75 get screened regularly for colorectal cancer, about 40 percent of people don’t follow those guidelines.


To raise awareness of the recommendations and encourage people to go get screened, researchers have developed a variety of approaches, Weinberg said, including videos and printed materials. But none of these “have been tremendously successful,” he added.


Dr. Hamant Roy, director of gastroenterology research at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Illinois, said one method that has been shown to be effective is simply having doctors spend time with their patients to talk about the cancer tests.


“But one of the issues is they have to see more and more people with less and less time, so it gets really hard to have these discussions with patients,” said Roy, who was not involved in the new study.


To see whether the web might provide an easily accessible and inexpensive alternative for getting people to comply with screening recommendations, Weinberg and his colleagues asked 865 women who were coming in for routine gynecology appointments to participate in the study.


Of those, 171 saw their doctor as normal, 349 also received printed materials about colon cancer screening at the time of their visit and 345 were offered access to a web site that contained the same information as the printed matter.


Included in the materials was information about the benefits of screening and harms of going unscreened, as well as background on the various types of colon cancer screen available: a stool test once a year, a sigmoidoscopy every five years or a colonoscopy every 10 years.


All the women were eligible to get screened for colon cancer based on their age and health status.


Four months after the doctor visit, however, roughly 12 percent of the women – regardless of whether they received the extra information or not – had gotten a colon cancer screen.


Roy called the numbers “dismal.”


“At the end of the day, something is better than nothing,” he said, but compared to screening rates for breast cancer, the uptake for colorectal cancer screening was quite low.


Among the women in the study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 73 percent had received a mammogram in the past year.


On the other hand, Weinberg said, “you might argue their participation in the study did manage to raise their interest level enough” to get screened.


Not enough, however, to get most of the women to even access the website Weinberg’s group had developed.


Only 24 percent had logged on, according to the researchers’ records, and just 16 percent of the women remembered going to the website.


Weinberg still thinks there might be ways that the web could be helpful.


“I think that the web has great promise…the question is, how do you get people to look at it in the first place?” he said.


Perhaps following up with people to ask them about their experience on the website might improve their participation, he suggested.


Roy agreed that it would be premature to toss out the web as a potential tool for increasing screening rates.


“It seems like the energy to get people over the hump to get colorectal screening is higher than simply passively going to a website. I think the website is maybe helpful, but there needs to be more help to get them over the edge,” he said.


SOURCE: http://bit.ly/VizaRR Archives of Internal Medicine, online December 17, 2012.


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Newtown celebrates Christmas amid signs of mourning


NEWTOWN, Conn. - Newtown celebrated Christmas amid piles of snow-covered teddy bears and heaps of flowers as volunteers manned a 24-hour candlelight vigil in memory of the 20 children and six adults shot to death in the second-largest school shooting in U.S. history.


Well-wishers from around the country showed up Tuesday morning to hang ornaments on memorial Christmas trees, while police officers from around Connecticut took extra shifts to give local police a day off.


"It's a nice thing that they can use us this way," Ted Latiak, a police detective from Greenwich, Connecticut, said as he and a fellow detective came out of a store with bagels and coffee for other officers.


A steady stream of residents, some in pyjamas, relit candles that had been extinguished in an overnight snowstorm. Others dropped off toys and fought back tears at a huge sidewalk memorial filled with stuffed animals, poems, flowers, posters and cards.


In the morning, resident Joanne Brunetti watched over 26 candles that had been lit at midnight in honour of those slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She and her husband, Bill, signed up for a three-hour shift and erected a tent to ensure that the flames never went out throughout the day.


"You have to do something and you don't know what to do, you know? You really feel very helpless in this situation," she said. "My thought is if we were all this nice to each other all the time maybe things like this wouldn't happen."


Julian Revie played "Silent Night" on a piano on the sidewalk at the downtown memorial. Revie, from Ottawa, Canada, was visiting the area at the time of the shootings. He found a piano online and chose to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day playing for the people of Newtown.


"It was such a mood of respectful silence," said Revie. "But yesterday being Christmas Eve and today being Christmas Day, I thought now it's time for some Christmas carols for the children."


At a town hall memorial, Faith Leonard waved to people driving by and handed out Christmas cookies and children's gifts. She had driven from Arizona, at almost the other end of the country, to volunteer on Christmas morning alone.


"I guess my thought was if I could be here helping out, maybe one person would be able to spend more time with their family or grieve in the way they needed to," Leonard said.


Many residents attended Christmas Eve services and spent Tuesday morning at home with their families. Others attended church services in search of a new beginning.


At St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, which eight of the child victims of the massacre attended, the pastor told parishioners that "today is the day we begin everything all over again."


Recalling the events of Dec. 14, the Rev. Robert Weiss said: "The moment the first responder broke through the doors, we knew good always overcomes evil."


"We know Christmas in a way we never ever thought we would know it," Weiss said. "We need a little Christmas and we've been given it."


Police have yet to offer a theory about a possible motive for gunman Adam Lanza's rampage. The 20-year-old resident killed his mother in her bed before carrying out the massacre and killing himself.


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Netflix suffers Christmas Eve outage, points to Amazon






NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon‘s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.’s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.


The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles such as Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray players.






Evers said that the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing center in Virginia, and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users late on Monday.


“We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented,” Evers said.


“We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night,” he added.


An outage at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare in April of last year.


Amazon Web Services was not immediately available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company’s contracts with Amazon.


(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)


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Queen delivers 1st Christmas message in 3D






LONDON (AP) — Queen Elizabeth II has hailed the holidays in a new dimension, delivering her Christmas message for the first time in 3D.


In the annual, prerecorded broadcast, the monarch paid tribute to the armed forces, “whose sense of duty takes them away from family and friends” over the holidays, and expressed gratitude for the outpouring of enthusiasm for her Diamond Jubilee celebrations.






The queen said she was struck by the “strength of fellowship and friendship” shown by well-wishers to mark her 60 years on the throne.


“It was humbling that so many chose to mark the anniversary of a duty which passed to me 60 years ago,” she said as footage showed crowds lining the Thames River in the rain earlier this year for a boat pageant. “People of all ages took the trouble to take part in various ways and in many nations.”


The queen also reflected on Britain’s hosting of the Olympic games in 2012, praising the “skill, dedication, training and teamwork of our athletes” and singling out the volunteers who devoted themselves “to keeping others safe, supported and comforted.”


Elizabeth’s message aired shortly after she attended a traditional church service at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk.


Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, the monarch rode to church in a Bentley, accompanied by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie. Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other members of the royal family.


Three familiar faces were missing from the family outing. Prince William is spending the holiday with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury. Prince Harry is serving with British troops in Afghanistan.


After the church service, the royals usually gather to watch the queen’s prerecorded television broadcast, a tradition that began with a radio address by King George V in 1932.


The queen has made a prerecorded Christmas broadcast on radio since 1952 and on television since 1957. She writes the speeches herself and the broadcasts mark the rare occasion on which the queen voices her own opinion without government consultation.


Her switch to 3D was not the only technological leap for prominent British figures this Christmas.


The Archbishops of Canterbury and York chose to tweet their sermons for the first time, in order to bring Christmas to a new digital audience.


In his speech, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he has been inspired by meeting victims of suffering over the past decade while leading the world’s 80 million-strong Anglican Communion.


Delivering his final Christmas Day sermon from Canterbury Cathedral, Williams also acknowledged how a vote against allowing women to become bishops has damaged the credibility of the church.


Still, he said, it was “startling” to see after the vote how many people “turned out to have a sort of investment in the church, a desire to see the church looking credible and a real sense of loss when — as they saw it — the church failed to sort its business out.”


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One in 12 in military has clogged heart arteries






NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Just over one in 12 U.S. service members who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had plaque buildup in the arteries around their hearts – an early sign of heart disease, according to a new study.


None of them had been diagnosed with heart disease before deployment, researchers said.






“This is a young, healthy, fit group,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Bryant Webber, from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.


“These are people who are asymptomatic, they feel fine, they’re deployed into combat,” he told Reuters Health.


“It just proves again the point that we know that this is a clinically silent disease, meaning people can go years without being diagnosed, having no signs or symptoms of the disease.”


Webber said the findings also show that although the U.S. has made progress in lowering the nationwide prevalence of heart disease, there’s more work that can be done to encourage people to adopt a healthy lifestyle and reduce their risks.


Heart disease accounts for about one in four deaths – or about 600,000 Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


The new data come from autopsies done on U.S. service members who died in October 2001 through August 2011 during combat or from unintentional injuries. Those autopsies were originally performed to provide a full account to service members’ families of how they died.


The study mirrors autopsy research on Korean and Vietnam war veterans, which found signs of heart disease in as many as three-quarters of deceased service members at the time.


“Earlier autopsy studies… were critical pieces of information that alerted the medical community to the lurking burden of coronary disease in our young people,” said Dr. Daniel Levy, director of the Framingham Heart Study and a senior investigator with the National Institutes of Health.


The findings are not directly comparable, in part because there was a draft in place during the earlier wars but not for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom/New Dawn. When service is optional, healthier people might be more likely to sign up, researchers explained.


Still, Levy said the new study likely reflects declines in heart disease in the U.S. in general over that span.


Altogether the researchers had information on 3,832 service members who’d been killed at an average age of 26. Close to 9 percent had any buildup in their coronary arteries, according to the autopsies. And about a quarter of the soldiers with buildup in their arteries had severe blockage.


Service members who had been obese or had high cholesterol or high blood pressure when they entered the military were especially likely to have plaque buildup, Webber and his colleagues reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.


More than 98 percent of the service members included were men.


“This study bodes well for a lower burden of disease lurking in young people,” Levy, who wrote an editorial published with the report, told Reuters Health.


“Young, healthy people are likely to have a lower burden of disease today than their parents or grandparents had decades ago.”


That’s likely due, in part, to better control of blood pressure and cholesterol and lower rates of smoking in today’s service members – as well as the country in general, researchers said.


However, two risks for heart disease that haven’t declined are obesity and diabetes, which are closely linked.


“Obesity is the one that has not trended in the right direction,” Levy said.


“Those changes in obesity and diabetes threaten to reverse some of the dramatic improvements that we are seeing in heart disease death rates,” he added.


SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JjFzqx Journal of the American Medical Association, online December 25, 2012.


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Firefighters ambushed by gunman while responding to house fire



A man with a criminal history shot and killed two West Webster, N.Y. firefighters and seriously injured two others as they responded to a fire at his home, police say.


William H. Spengler, Jr., 62, apparently started a 5:35 a.m. fire at his home on Lake Road  and then waited with an armament of weapons for first responders to arrive, Webster N.Y. Police Chief Gerald Pickering said at an afternoon news conference.


“He was shooting from high ground or a berm," Pickering said. "He was barricaded with weapons to shoot first responders."


After a brief exchange of gunfire with police, Spengler then shot and killed himself at the scene, Pickering said.


Spengler was convicted in 1981 in the death of his 92-year-old grandmother a year earlier. He served time in prison and was released in 1998, Pickering said.


Spengler beat Rose Spengler to death with a hammer 1980, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported. Rose Spengler had lived in the home next to William Spengler on Lake Road at the time of her death.


Local police had not noted any criminal activity in his recent past, Pickering said.


Pickering said they are looking into the apparent disappearance of Spengler's sister who is unaccounted for at this time.


Police and fire officials are continuing to gather evidence and will inspect the seven homes that were destroyed in the fire that spread to nearby houses in the small lakeside town located 10 miles east of Rochester.


The victims in the shooting are Mike Chiapperini, also a lieutenant and public information officer with the local police department, and Tomasz Kaczowka, Pickering said.


"These people get up in the middle of the night to fight fires. They don't expect to be shot and killed," a tearful Pickering said at the press conference.


Chiapperini was described by Pickering as a lifelong firefighter who started with the department's explorer program and had about 20 years of experience. Kaczowka was a younger firefighter who was on the force for about two years and was also a 911 dispatcher, he said.


West Webster firefighters Joseph Hofsetter and Theodore Scardino were seriously injured and are at Strong Memorial Hospital with gunshot wounds, a hospital spokeswoman said.  Scardino  has  injuries to his chest and lungs. Hofsetter was injured in the pelvis, the spokeswoman said at a media briefing. Both are in guarded condition, she said.


An off-duty police officer from nearby Greece, N.Y., John Ritter was also injured by shrapnel during the shooting, Pickering said.


Pickering said that one of the firefighters who survived made his way across a bridge to safety. The other three did not make it across, Pickering said. Police arrived and rescued the other three firefighters, but two were fatally shot, Pickering said.


The morning scene was described as chaotic as police and firefighters dealt with an immense blaze as well as gunshots,  local news station WHAM-TV  reports.


“I’m not aware of anything like this happening in Webster, obviously not a firefighter being fired upon,” Webster Fire Marshal Rob Boutillier told the Democrat and Chronicle.  Pickering described Webster as resort lakeside community that is quiet and usually peaceful.


WHAM reported that an outpouring of support has come through the Webster community. Black flags reportedly have been draped at some homes and offices to honor those killed and injured.


N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted of the incident: We as the community of #NY mourn their loss as now 2 more families must spend the holidays without their loved ones #Webster



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