Economic Frustration Simmers Again in Tunisia

Moises Saman for The New York Times

People in Tunis and across the country are struggling with high unemployment and inflation.

TUNIS — Tahar Bayahi, who runs Tunisia’s largest grocery store chain, spent the days right after the revolution toting up his losses: one-quarter of his 60 stores nationwide incinerated and another quarter pillaged.

Yet his company, Magasins Général, turned right around to rebuild, pouring $40 million and nine months into the effort. “It’s true that we were badly affected, but it opened up a far larger horizon,” Mr. Bayahi said over lunch on a sunny lakeside terrace. “What was important was that the change would bring us to a new epoch much faster.”

Nearly two years after riots that began over economic frustration and unemployment toppled the Tunisian government and started the Arab Spring, the frustration that people here are not better off is starting to overflow again. The gross domestic product is down, unemployment is up, debt and inflation are growing and social unrest is simmering.

Last week, the government sent troops into Siliana, south of the capital, after four days of violent protests, mainly over demands for jobs and more government investment, turned violent. Thousands participated and hundreds were injured in clashes with the police.

President Moncef Marzouki, acknowledging Friday on television that the government had not “met the expectations of the people,” expressed concern that unrest could spread to other towns in the underdeveloped interior.

“Tunisia today is at a crossroads,” he said. “Tunisia today has an opportunity that it must not miss to be a model because the world is watching us, and we mustn’t disappoint.”

Unemployment remains the biggest economic problem and catalyst for unrest. A vicious circle imperils all the Arab nations with unfinished revolutions: political unrest scares off the investors needed to create jobs.

Since President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was ousted in January 2011, the unemployment rate has risen to 18 percent from 13 percent, meaning about 750,000 people are out of work.

More troubling, a third of the unemployed are college graduates, said Said Aidi, minister of the economy for much of 2011. By 2015, an estimated 100,000 new graduates will seek jobs annually, while even before the revolution at most 20,000 graduates a year found work matching their degrees.

“Ben Ali ignored the blinking red lights on the economy, and that is what got him thrown out,” said Karim Ben Smail, the owner of a modest publishing company. “The unemployed are an army in a country the size of Tunisia.”

The numbers are not all bad, however. The economy contracted by 1.8 percent in 2011, troubled by problems like a 30 percent drop in the number of tourists, according to the World Bank. It predicts 2.2 percent growth this year, and a close-to-normal 4.6 percent by 2014 should conditions stabilize.

But a new constitution has yet to be written, and elections have been postponed until at least next June. Periodic riots — especially the sacking of the United States Embassy in September in response to a video made in the United States mocking the Prophet Muhammad — have left investors sitting on their wallets and kept tourists at home. A State Department travel advisory warned Americans against visiting Tunisia.

Bracing for further unrest, Magasins Général rebuilt its stores with shatterproof glass, heavy metal shutters and 20-foot walls topped by barbed wire.

Before the revolution, the company felt disadvantaged because its closest competitors, franchises of the giant French retailers Carrefour and Monoprix, enjoyed closer ties to the ruling family, Mr. Bayahi said. Both opened superstores while his applications languished.

After the revolution, he expected permits to sail through, particularly since his two proposed superstores meant more than 1,400 jobs. Instead, officials tell him “it is being studied,” just like before the revolution, he said.

While Mr. Bayahi blamed a combination of government incompetence and foot dragging for the delay, economic experts cited an additional reason. Small neighborhood shops potentially hurt by big chains extend credit to poor customers, helping to maintain social peace.

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Ashley Hebert and J.P. Rosenbaum Are Married

People Exclusive

By Monica Rizzo

12/01/2012 at 06:15 PM EST

J.P. Rosenbaum and Ashley Hebert

Victor Chavez/Getty

It’s official: Bachelorette star Ashley Hebert and her fiancé J.P. Rosenbaum tied the knot Saturday afternoon in Pasadena, Calif.

Surrounded by family, friends and fellow Bachelor and Bachelorette alumni like Ali Fedotowsky, Emily Maynard, and Jason and Molly Mesnick, the couple said "I do" in an outdoor ceremony officiated by franchise host Chris Harrison.

"Today is all about our friends and family," Hebert, whose nuptials will air Dec. 16 on a two-hour special on ABC, tells PEOPLE. "It's about standing with J.P., looking around at all the people we love in the same room there to celebrate our love."

The 28-year-old dentist from Madawaska, Maine, met New York construction manager Rosenbaum, 35, on season 7 of The Bachelorette. The couple became engaged on the season finale.

Hebert and Rosenbaum are the second couple in the franchise's 24 seasons to make it from their show finale to the altar, following in the footsteps of Bachelorette Trista Rehn, who married Vail, Colo., firefighter Ryan Sutter in 2003.

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Asperger's dropped from revised diagnosis manual

CHICAGO (AP) — The now familiar term "Asperger's disorder" is being dropped. And abnormally bad and frequent temper tantrums will be given a scientific-sounding diagnosis called DMDD. But "dyslexia" and other learning disorders remain.

The revisions come in the first major rewrite in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic guide used by the nation's psychiatrists. Changes were approved Saturday.

Full details of all the revisions will come next May when the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic manual is published, but the impact will be huge, affecting millions of children and adults worldwide. The manual also is important for the insurance industry in deciding what treatment to pay for, and it helps schools decide how to allot special education.

This diagnostic guide "defines what constellations of symptoms" doctors recognize as mental disorders, said Dr. Mark Olfson, a Columbia University psychiatry professor. More important, he said, it "shapes who will receive what treatment. Even seemingly subtle changes to the criteria can have substantial effects on patterns of care."

Olfson was not involved in the revision process. The changes were approved Saturday in suburban Washington, D.C., by the psychiatric association's board of trustees.

The aim is not to expand the number of people diagnosed with mental illness, but to ensure that affected children and adults are more accurately diagnosed so they can get the most appropriate treatment, said Dr. David Kupfer. He chaired the task force in charge of revising the manual and is a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

One of the most hotly argued changes was how to define the various ranges of autism. Some advocates opposed the idea of dropping the specific diagnosis for Asperger's disorder. People with that disorder often have high intelligence and vast knowledge on narrow subjects but lack social skills. Some who have the condition embrace their quirkiness and vow to continue to use the label.

And some Asperger's families opposed any change, fearing their kids would lose a diagnosis and no longer be eligible for special services.

But the revision will not affect their education services, experts say.

The new manual adds the term "autism spectrum disorder," which already is used by many experts in the field. Asperger's disorder will be dropped and incorporated under that umbrella diagnosis. The new category will include kids with severe autism, who often don't talk or interact, as well as those with milder forms.

Kelli Gibson of Battle Creek, Mich., who has four sons with various forms of autism, said Saturday she welcomes the change. Her boys all had different labels in the old diagnostic manual, including a 14-year-old with Asperger's.

"To give it separate names never made sense to me," Gibson said. "To me, my children all had autism."

Three of her boys receive special education services in public school; the fourth is enrolled in a school for disabled children. The new autism diagnosis won't affect those services, Gibson said. She also has a 3-year-old daughter without autism.

People with dyslexia also were closely watching for the new updated doctors' guide. Many with the reading disorder did not want their diagnosis to be dropped. And it won't be. Instead, the new manual will have a broader learning disorder category to cover several conditions including dyslexia, which causes difficulty understanding letters and recognizing written words.

The trustees on Saturday made the final decision on what proposals made the cut; recommendations came from experts in several work groups assigned to evaluate different mental illnesses.

The revised guidebook "represents a significant step forward for the field. It will improve our ability to accurately diagnose psychiatric disorders," Dr. David Fassler, the group's treasurer and a University of Vermont psychiatry professor, said after the vote.

The shorthand name for the new edition, the organization's fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is DSM-5. Group leaders said specifics won't be disclosed until the manual is published but they confirmed some changes. A 2000 edition of the manual made minor changes but the last major edition was published in 1994.

Olfson said the manual "seeks to capture the current state of knowledge of psychiatric disorders. Since 2000 ... there have been important advances in our understanding of the nature of psychiatric disorders."

Catherine Lord, an autism expert at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York who was on the psychiatric group's autism task force, said anyone who met criteria for Asperger's in the old manual would be included in the new diagnosis.

One reason for the change is that some states and school systems don't provide services for children and adults with Asperger's, or provide fewer services than those given an autism diagnosis, she said.

Autism researcher Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said small studies have suggested the new criteria will be effective. But she said it will be crucial to monitor so that children don't lose services.

Other changes include:

—A new diagnosis for severe recurrent temper tantrums — disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. Critics say it will medicalize kids' who have normal tantrums. Supporters say it will address concerns about too many kids being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with powerful psychiatric drugs. Bipolar disorder involves sharp mood swings and affected children are sometimes very irritable or have explosive tantrums.

—Eliminating the term "gender identity disorder." It has been used for children or adults who strongly believe that they were born the wrong gender. But many activists believe the condition isn't a disorder and say calling it one is stigmatizing. The term would be replaced with "gender dysphoria," which means emotional distress over one's gender. Supporters equated the change with removing homosexuality as a mental illness in the diagnostic manual, which happened decades ago.

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner .

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Downtown L.A. residents voting on streetcar project

Voting will conclude Monday in a special election on a streetcar proposal in downtown Los Angeles.

The proposal before downtown residents calls for an assessment district to be created to help finance the $125-million project. If it receives the two-thirds majority required to pass, planning would move forward, with completion scheduled in 2015.

Supporters of the streetcar say it would bring a fresh wave of economic development to downtown. Its proposed route covers 10 blocks of Broadway — where the city is working to revive old movie palaces and vacant office buildings — before veering over toward L.A. Live and then up through the financial district.

"This is really going to be the cherry on top for all the revitalization and transformation we're seeing," said City Councilman Jose Huizar, a key supporter of the streetcar. He cited estimates that the fixed-rail streetcar would bring $1 billion in development to downtown, including 2,600 new housing units and 675,000 square feet of new office space.

A group of business leaders and developers has been actively campaigning in support of the project in recent months, with a series of town hall meetings and special events.

Jon Blanchard, a member of the Los Angeles Streetcar Inc. board and lead developer of the Ace Hotel project on Broadway, said the streetcar would cater specifically to tourists and young residents downtown who prefer a car-free urban experience.

"Just for everyday purposes, it really kind of connects the city and makes it one," he said. "It makes it a lot easier for people that come down here and live down here to get around."

Some have criticized the voting process used for the project, saying it's unfair that only residents can vote while property owners would pay the assessment. The Los Angeles Downtown News also took the campaign to task in an editorial, claiming that officials were not upfront about the portion of total funding that would come from the tax assessments, versus the federal grants the project is expected to receive.

Still, there is no organized opposition to the project, and several streetcar backers said they were confident it would pass.

Ballots were due to be submitted by mail last week, but residents can still turn in their votes in person at City Hall on Monday.

sam.allen@latimes.com

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After Moves on New Constitution, Protesters Gather in Cairo

CAIRO — In the second potent showing of opposition rage in less than a week, tens of thousands of people streamed into Tahrir Square on Friday, angrily denouncing Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, and the hasty passage earlier in the day of a draft constitution written by an Islamist assembly.

The gathering on Friday was smaller than one that packed the square on Tuesday, raising the question of whether Mr. Morsi’s opponents — liberals, leftists and fierce opponents of the Islamist group that the president once helped lead — could maintain their momentum. As they planned ways to escalate the protests with civil disobedience, Mr. Morsi had to face his critics personally at a mosque in Cairo, where, state news media reported, the president was heckled during Friday Prayer.

Egypt’s often fractured opposition banded together this week to protest a series of moves by Mr. Morsi that had led to accusations that he was reviving the country’s autocracy, presenting the president with the most severe crisis in the five months since he took office.

Mr. Morsi’s moves to issue an edict that places his decisions above judicial review and to press the constitutional assembly to pass a draft constitution hastily, despite a walkout by non-Islamists, have provided the opposition with a rallying cry. Despite the heady atmosphere on Friday, protesters and activists in Tahrir Square’s choked approaches, bus shelters and plazas predicted an increasingly bitter standoff, given the slim likelihood that the president planned to accede to their demands.

Slogans calling on Mr. Morsi to leave or for the fall of his government have energized crowds and drawn new faces to the opposition, including people staunchly opposed to Islamist rule and those who have supported figures from Hosni Mubarak’s government, like Ahmed Shafik, a former minister who ran against Mr. Morsi in the presidential race. Strikingly, some revolutionary activists now refuse to use the word “remnant,” as they had in the past, to describe their new allies, saying instead that they are glad for the support of people who decided to stay home during the uprising.

It was unclear whether the newcomers would remain as the opposition pressed more concrete demands and stepped up its confrontation with the government. Sitting on a curb in Tahrir Square on Friday night, Adel Abdullah, an unemployed Web designer, said he was happy to find like-minded people also bitterly opposed to Mr. Morsi. But, short of demanding that Mr. Morsi leave office, he said he was not sure, practically, what the president’s opponents should do.

“The people don’t want him,” he said of Mr. Morsi. “I’m so glad he made a mistake.”

Other opposition figures were trying to find ways to capitalize on the president’s mistakes. Leaders of the newly formed National Salvation Front, a coalition of parties, threatened to call for a national strike and possibly to march on the presidential palace to prevent the draft constitution’s going to referendum.

Mohamed Ahmed, a leader of the April 6th Revolutionary Youth Group, spoke of plans to escalate the protests in an effort to win concessions on key demands, including a rescinding of Mr. Morsi’s edict; a new, more representative constituent assembly; and an overhaul of the Interior ministry.

“We’re going to have demonstrations in places that affect the regime,” he said, also mentioning the possibility of strikes and civil disobedience. Nearby, a judge speaking to a crowd compared Mr. Morsi to Hitler and Caligula.

Mr. Ahmed said that the talk of toppling Mr. Morsi was unrealistic — but tactically important. “We have to raise our demands to get our demands,” he said.

Islamist parties have repeatedly prevailed at the polls since Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow, leaving the opposition to rely on obstructionist tactics to try to thwart them. Some activists say they hope for help from an Egyptian judiciary angered at Mr. Morsi’s bid to place his decisions out of their reach. They have argued that the president will be unable to hold a referendum on the constitution because the interim charter requires judicial supervision of the vote. Most of Egypt’s judges, though, have gone on strike to protest the decree.

“The judicial bodies don’t approve of the decree, and they don’t approve of the draft constitution, and under current constitutional articles, it is impossible to hold a referendum without judicial monitoring,” said Ahmed Kamel, a spokesman for Amr Moussa, a former diplomat under Mr. Mubarak who ran for president last year and has emerged as an opposition leader.

On Friday, with Mr. Morsi in attendance, worshipers at the Al-Sharbatly mosque heckled the imam as he called on the public to support the president and recited religious verse that called on people to “obey those in authority,” according to an account of the visit in the semiofficial newspaper Al-Ahram. After the imam stopped his sermon, some worshipers chanted, “Down with the rule of the supreme guide,” referring to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi’s Islamist party. The president asked the crowd to calm down and tried to explain recent decisions, as some supporters chanted his name, the paper said.

David D. Kirkpatrick, Joe Gabra and Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

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Is Facebook planning to develop its own games? Revised Zynga terms open the door

As Zynga (ZNGA) continues its free fall into irrelevancy with layoffs and its one-hit social games, the gaming company has revised its contract with Facebook (FB) to free it from being “forced to launch games exclusively on the Facebook platform” and “obligated to use Facebook Credits for Zynga game pages,” according to AllThingsD. The change of terms filed with the SEC also includes a clause that states “Facebook will no longer be prohibited from developing its own games” on March 31, 2013. Could Facebook start developing its own social games? Theoretically, yes. But would Facebook really jeopardize its relationships with game developers who already make games for its social network? Probably not.

“We’re not in the business of building games and we have no plans to do so,” a Facebook spokesman told AllThingsD. “We’re focused on being the platform where games and apps are built.”

AllThingsD’s report says the change in terms isn’t so much as a bid by Facebook to make its own games, but to shed its dependence on Zynga to supply it with hit games. The new revised terms give Facebook more leverage and other game developers such as Wooga and King.com greater incentive to create games.

At the end of the day, Facebook is a publicly traded company chasing profits, despite what CEO Mark Zuckerberg says. It might not be developing games today, but that doesn’t mean it won’t create them in the future. The new terms with Zynga now leaves that door open, should it want to make its own games one day.

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Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Jessica Biel: Married Life with Justin Timberlake 'Feels Incredible'

By Dahvi Shira

11/30/2012 at 06:30 PM EST

Jessica Biel and Ellen DeGeneres

Michael Rozman/Warner Bros

It's all about the little things for newlywed Jessica Biel.

The Hitchcock star, 30, who tied the knot last month, says a huge perk of being married to Justin Timberlake is getting to use a certain seven-letter word.

"It's weird because it feels like almost nothing has changed, yet something that you can't really describe, or something that isn't tangible has changed," Biel says on The Ellen DeGeneres Show airing on Monday. "The weirdest and kind of most wonderful thing is that word. That's my husband."

Changing up her voice, the actress adds, "That's the word, and every time I say it, I go really Southern with it. 'Oh, that's my husband. That's him over there.' I touch my hair and I completely go like I'm from the South or something. It's weird."

As for life as Timberlake's wife, Biel says with a smile, "It just feels incredible. It feels like you have this partner who is going to be with you and also change light bulbs and do dishes with you."

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Kenya village pairs AIDS orphans with grandparents

NYUMBANI, Kenya (AP) — There are no middle-aged people in Nyumbani. They all died years ago, before this village of hope in Kenya began. Only the young and old live here.

Nyumbani was born of the AIDS crisis. The 938 children here all saw their parents die. The 97 grandparents — eight grandfathers among them — saw their middle-aged children die. But put together, the bookend generations take care of one another.

Saturday is World AIDS Day, but the executive director of the aid group Nyumbani, which oversees the village of the same name, hates the name which is given to the day because for her the word AIDS is so freighted with doom and death. These days, it doesn't necessarily mean a death sentence. Millions live with the virus with the help of anti-retroviral drugs, or ARVs. And the village she runs is an example of that.

"AIDS is not a word that we should be using. At the beginning when we came up against HIV, it was a terminal disease and people were presenting at the last phase, which we call AIDS," said Sister Mary Owens. "There is no known limit to the lifespan now so that word AIDS should not be used. So I hate World AIDS Day, follow? Because we have moved beyond talking about AIDS, the terminal stage. None of our children are in the terminal stage."

In the village, each grandparent is charged with caring for about a dozen "grandchildren," one or two of whom will be biological family. That responsibility has been a life-changer for Janet Kitheka, who lost one daughter to AIDS in 2003. Another daughter died from cancer in 2004. A son died in a tree-cutting accident in 2006 and the 63-year-old lost two grandchildren in 2007, including one from AIDS.

"When I came here I was released from the grief because I am always busy instead of thinking about the dead," said Kitheka. "Now I am thinking about building a new house with 12 children. They are orphans. I said to myself, 'Think about the living ones now.' I'm very happy because of the children."

As she walks around Nyumbani, which is three hours' drive east of Nairobi, 73-year-old Sister Mary is greeted like a rock star by little girls in matching colorful school uniforms. Children run and play, and sleep in bunk beds inside mud-brick homes. High schoolers study carpentry or tailoring. But before 2006, this village did not exist, not until a Catholic charity petitioned the Kenyan government for land on which to house orphans.

Everyone here has been touched by HIV or AIDS. But only 80 children have HIV and thanks to anti-retroviral drugs, none of them has AIDS.

"They can dream their dreams and live a long life," Owens said.

Nyumbani relies heavily on U.S. funds but it is aiming to be self-sustaining.

The kids' bunk beds are made in the technical school's shop. A small aquaponics project is trying to grow edible fish. The mud bricks are made on site. Each grandparent has a plot of land for farming.

The biggest chunk of aid comes from the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has given the village $2.5 million since 2006. A British couple gives $50,000 a year. A tree-growing project in the village begun by an American, John Noel, now stands six years from its first harvest. Some 120,000 trees have already been planted and thousands more were being planted last week.

"My wife and I got married as teenagers and started out being very poor. Lived in a trailer. And we found out what it was like to be in a situation where you can't support yourself," he said. "As an entrepreneur I looked to my enterprise skills to see what we could do to sustain the village forever, because we are in our 60s and we wanted to make sure that the thousand babies and children, all the little ones, were taken care of."

He hopes that after a decade the timber profits from the trees will make the village totally self-sustaining.

But while the future is looking brighter, the losses the orphans' suffered can resurface, particularly when class lessons are about family or medicine, said Winnie Joseph, the deputy headmaster at the village's elementary school. Kitheka says she tries to teach the kids how to love one another and how to cook and clean. But older kids sometimes will threaten to hit her after accusing her of favoring her biological grandchildren, she said.

For the most part, though, the children in Nyumbani appear to know how lucky they are, having landed in a village where they are cared for. An estimated 23.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have HIV as of 2011, representing 69 percent of the global HIV population, according to UNAIDS. Eastern and southern Africa are the hardest-hit regions. Millions of people — many of them parents — have died.

Kitheka noted that children just outside the village frequently go to bed hungry. And ARVs are harder to come by outside the village. The World Health Organization says about 61 percent of Kenyans with HIV are covered by ARVs across the country.

Paul Lgina, 14, contrasted the difference between life in Nyumbani, which in Swahili means simply "home," and his earlier life.

"In the village I get support. At my mother's home I did not have enough food, and I had to go to the river to fetch water," said Lina, who, like all the children in the village, has neither a mother or a father.

When Sister Mary first began caring for AIDS orphans in the early 1990s, she said her group was often told not to bother.

"At the beginning nobody knew what to do with them. In 1992 we were told these children are going to die anyway," she said. "But that wasn't our spirit. Today, kids we were told would die have graduated from high school."

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On the Internet:

http://www.trees4children.org/

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Murder case against tennis umpire is dropped

From the beginning, the death of professional tennis umpire Lois Goodman's husband was beset by contradictions.

When Alan Goodman, 80, was found dead in April at the couple's Woodland Hills condominium, paramedics noticed a suspicious cut to the side of his head. But Los Angeles police initially agreed with Lois Goodman's account that her ailing husband had fallen down a flight of stairs.

Days later, a coroner's investigator found that the injuries were consistent with being struck by a sharp object. That ultimately led to Goodman's dramatic arrest at a luxury Manhattan hotel as she prepared for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, with authorities claiming she bludgeoned her husband with a coffee mug.

PHOTOS: Murder case against tennis umpire is dropped

On Friday, prosecutors abruptly dropped a murder charge against her. Officials would say only that prosecutors received "additional information," declining to elaborate.

But law enforcement sources told The Times that medical experts consulted by the Los Angeles County district attorney's office concluded that the death could be the result of an accident, contradicting the coroner's determination that it was a homicide.

The finding added to a long list of problems with the case, the sources said, that included a lack of a clear motive as well as other physical evidence that could help the defense. Moreover, genetic tests found none of Goodman's DNA on the piece of the coffee mug that prosecutors had alleged she used to kill her husband.

After she left the courtroom Friday a free woman, Goodman, 70, insisted she was innocent and said she wanted to get back on the professional tennis tour, where she has been a fixture for decades.

"I feel wonderful," she said, standing in the rain outside the Van Nuys courthouse, flanked by her attorneys. "I just feel I have been treated fairly now and it was just a tragic accident."

The dismissal raised questions about how the case was investigated and whether both detectives and prosecutors rushed to charge Goodman. Last year, the LAPD acknowledged detectives had wrongly arrested a man in the high-profile beating of a San Francisco Giants baseball fan outside Dodger Stadium.

One of Goodman's attorneys, Robert Sheahen, criticized the LAPD's investigation, saying crime scene evidence undercut the theory that Alan Goodman's death was a homicide.

A prominent medical expert, he said, told the defense team that Goodman was more likely to have died from heart failure, noting that his heart was four times the size of a normal heart. Blood evidence showed that an injured Goodman was downstairs at some point but was upstairs in bed by the time paramedics arrived, Sheahen said. Lois Goodman — who suffered from bad knees, a torn rotator cuff, rheumatoid arthritis and severe back pain — was in no physical condition to move her 160-pound husband, the attorney said.

"She would have needed a forklift to take the body up the stairs. It was ridiculous," Sheahen said.

The LAPD declined to comment on details of the case, but LAPD Chief Charlie Beck released a brief statement.

"I am aware that the district attorney today declared that they are not ready to proceed in the Alan Goodman homicide trial and asked the court to dismiss the case without prejudice," Beck said. "This is still considered an open case, and our Topanga-area homicide detectives will continue their investigation."

Sources told The Times that prosecutors would review any new compelling evidence in the case and determine whether to refile charges but believed that would be unlikely. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing, said there were obvious problems from the outset, noting that the coroner was never called to the crime scene. Some inside the district attorney's office, they said, had questioned the public way in which Goodman was arrested. New York police took Goodman into custody after she had finished breakfast at a Midtown Sheraton and then walked her past photographers.

Steve Meister, a defense attorney and former Los Angeles County prosecutor, said district attorney's officials deserve credit for dismissing the case when they realized they did not have enough evidence to proceed. Nevertheless, he said, the office should examine whether prosecutors could have anticipated the problems before they decided to file criminal charges.

"There needs to be a ... thoughtful, honest internal review process to figure out what went wrong here, because something clearly did," Meister said.

From the outset, Lois Goodman told police she came home and found her husband dead in bed. She said she believed he crawled there after falling down the stairs and onto a coffee cup he was carrying.

At a court hearing earlier this year, a prosecutor accused her of plotting to kill her husband by wielding the broken coffee mug like an "improvised knife." Shards from the mug were found embedded in his wounds. Prosecutors alleged that she left him to die and went off to "tennis and to get her nails done."

A search warrant executed four days after the death turned up blood throughout the home "inconsistent with accidental death," an LAPD detective wrote in the warrant affidavit. Stains on carpets, the refrigerator door, inside a linen closet and on the wall leading to the garage suggested "a mobile victim" who, police theorized, would have called for help.

They also found that Lois Goodman, married to her husband for nearly 50 years, was communicating on the Internet with another man, according to the warrant. One email described in the warrant included cryptic remarks about her "terminating a relationship" and having "alternative sleeping arrangements," though exactly what she meant remains unclear.

But Lois Goodman's supporters described her as a loving wife who cared for her aging husband. And her lawyers said she passed a lie-detector test administered by a former FBI examiner in which she denied killing her husband.

Hours after the court hearing, a bail bonds official cut off the electronic ankle bracelet that Lois Goodman was required to wear while she was out on bail.

"I didn't do anything. I would never hurt my husband," Goodman said, her eyes filling with tears. "I loved him and I was his caretaker, and he came first and I came second."

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

jack.leonard@latimes.com

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General Assembly Grants Palestine Upgraded Status in U.N.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority spoke at the United Nations before the General Assembly voted on Palestine's status as a “nonmember observer state” on Thursday.

UNITED NATIONS — More than 130 countries voted on Thursday to upgrade Palestine to a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, a triumph for Palestinian diplomacy and a sharp rebuke to the United States and Israel.

But the vote, at least for now, did little to bring either the Palestinians or the Israelis closer to the goal they claim to seek: two states living side by side, or increased Palestinian unity. Israel and the militant group Hamas both responded critically to the day’s events, though for different reasons.

The new status will give the Palestinians more tools to challenge Israel in international legal forums for its occupation activities in the West Bank, including settlement-building, and it helped bolster the Palestinian Authority, weakened after eight days of battle between its rival Hamas and Israel.

But even as a small but determined crowd of 2,000 celebrated in central Ramallah in the West Bank, waving flags and dancing, there was an underlying sense of concerned resignation.

“I hope this is good,” said Munir Shafie, 36, an electrical engineer who was there. “But how are we going to benefit?”

Still, the General Assembly vote — 138 countries in favor, 9 opposed and 41 abstaining — showed impressive backing for the Palestinians at a difficult time. It was taken on the 65th anniversary of the vote to divide the former British mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, a vote Israel considers the international seal of approval for its birth.

The past two years of Arab uprisings have marginalized the Palestinian cause to some extent as nations that focused their political aspirations on the Palestinian struggle have turned inward. The vote on Thursday, coming so soon after the Gaza fighting, put the Palestinians again — if briefly, perhaps — at the center of international discussion.

“The question is, where do we go from here and what does it mean?” Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, who was in New York for the vote, said in an interview. “The sooner the tough rhetoric of this can subside and the more this is viewed as a logical consequence of many years of failure to move the process forward, the better.” He said nothing would change without deep American involvement.

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, speaking to the assembly’s member nations, said, “The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine,” and he condemned what he called Israeli racism and colonialism. His remarks seemed aimed in part at Israel and in part at Hamas. But both quickly attacked him for the parts they found offensive.

“The world watched a defamatory and venomous speech that was full of mendacious propaganda against the Israel Defense Forces and the citizens of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded. “Someone who wants peace does not talk in such a manner.”

While Hamas had officially backed the United Nations bid of Mr. Abbas, it quickly criticized his speech because the group does not recognize Israel.

“There are controversial issues in the points that Abbas raised, and Hamas has the right to preserve its position over them,” said Salah al-Bardaweel, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday.

“We do not recognize Israel, nor the partition of Palestine, and Israel has no right in Palestine,” he added. “Getting our membership in the U.N. bodies is our natural right, but without giving up any inch of Palestine’s soil.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, spoke after Mr. Abbas and said he was concerned that the Palestinian Authority failed to recognize Israel for what it is.

“Three months ago, Israel’s prime minister stood in this very hall and extended his hand in peace to President Abbas,” Mr. Prosor said. “He reiterated that his goal was to create a solution of two states for two peoples, where a demilitarized Palestinian state will recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“That’s right. Two states for two peoples. In fact, President Abbas, I did not hear you use the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ this afternoon. In fact, I have never heard you say the phrase ‘two states for two peoples’ because the Palestinian leadership has never recognized that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

The Israelis also say that the fact that Mr. Abbas is not welcome in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave run by Hamas, from which he was ejected five years ago, shows that there is no viable Palestinian leadership living up to its obligations now.

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, and Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank.

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Thousands touched by photograph of New York cop helping shoeless man

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A photograph of a New York City police officer crouching by a shoeless panhandler to give him a new pair of boots on a cold night in Times Square has drawn a deluge of praise after it was published on the police department‘s Facebook page this week.

By Thursday afternoon, nearly 394,000 people had clicked a button on the department’s Facebook page to indicate that they “liked” the photograph. Tens of thousands left comments, most praising Officer Lawrence DePrimo for his charitable deed.

The photograph was snapped by Jennifer Foster, an employee of the Pinal County Sheriff‘s Office in Florence, Arizona, during a trip to New York this month, according to police.

She took the picture shortly after she noticed the man asking passersby for money.

“Right when I was about to approach, one of your officers came up behind him,” Foster wrote in an email to the New York Police Department accompanying the snapshot, according to the picture caption on the department’s Facebook page. She said she was some distance away, and the officer did not know he was being photographed.

“The officer said, ‘I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let’s put them on and take care of you.’ The officer squatted down on the ground and proceeded to put socks and the new boots on this man.”

DePrimo and Foster could not be reached for comment on Thursday, and the police department did not respond to queries about the photograph.

DePrimo, 25, joined the force in 2010 and lives with his parents on Long Island, according to The New York Times. He paid $ 75 for the boots from a nearby Skechers store after an employee there gave him a 25 percent discount upon learning they were to be donated to a man in need.

“I wish more cops were like this guy,” one person wrote on the department’s Facebook page. Others suggested there were plenty of good-hearted police officers about, even if their good deeds were not photographed or touted on Facebook.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Stacey Joyce)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry Reach Truce in Custody War

By Ken Lee

11/29/2012 at 07:40 PM EST

Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry

Jason Merritt/Getty; Chris Weeks/WireImage

After a long court battle and an ugly fistfight outside her house, Halle Berry and her ex Gabriel Aubry appear to have settled their key differences over custody of 4 ½-year-old daughter Nahla – for now.

"The parties have reached an amicable agreement," read a written statement held up by attorney Blair Berk, who represents Berry, after a hearing Thursday in Los Angeles. "There will be no further statements regarding this matter."

Aubry, wearing a black sport coat with dark sunglasses to mask his bruised
face, was present, but Berry and her fiancé Olivier Martinez did not
attend.

Just exactly what they agreed to – earlier issues ranged from residency to restraining orders – wasn't known.

But the deal was worked out on the same day an emergency protective order issued against Aubry was to expire. That order barred him from seeing his daughter or going anywhere near Berry and Martinez.

It's also unclear whether Aubry's restraining order against Martinez, filed Monday, remains in effect or if it had been, or will be, withdrawn.

Meanwhile, LAPD Commander Andrew Smith tells PEOPLE the Thanksgiving Day altercation between Aubry and Martinez is still under investigation. "Our officers have initially concluded that Aubry was the primary instigator," he says, but adds it's too early
to say whether the case will be referred to prosecutors.

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Clinton releases road map for AIDS-free generation

WASHINGTON (AP) — In an ambitious road map for slashing the global spread of AIDS, the Obama administration says treating people sooner and more rapid expansion of other proven tools could help even the hardest-hit countries begin turning the tide of the epidemic over the next three to five years.

"An AIDS-free generation is not just a rallying cry — it is a goal that is within our reach," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who ordered the blueprint, said in the report.

"Make no mistake about it, HIV may well be with us into the future but the disease that it causes need not be," she said at the State Department Thursday.

President Barack Obama echoed that promise.

"We stand at a tipping point in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and working together, we can realize our historic opportunity to bring that fight to an end," Obama said in a proclamation to mark World AIDS Day on Saturday.

Some 34 million people worldwide are living with HIV, and despite a decline in new infections over the last decade, 2.5 million people were infected last year.

Given those staggering figures, what does an AIDS-free generation mean? That virtually no babies are born infected, young people have a much lower risk than today of becoming infected, and that people who already have HIV would receive life-saving treatment.

That last step is key: Treating people early in their infection, before they get sick, not only helps them survive but also dramatically cuts the chances that they'll infect others. Yet only about 8 million HIV patients in developing countries are getting treatment. The United Nations aims to have 15 million treated by 2015.

Other important steps include: Treating more pregnant women, and keeping them on treatment after their babies are born; increasing male circumcision to lower men's risk of heterosexual infection; increasing access to both male and female condoms; and more HIV testing.

The world spent $16.8 billion fighting AIDS in poor countries last year. The U.S. government is the leading donor, spending about $5.6 billion.

Thursday's report from PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, outlines how progress could continue at current spending levels — something far from certain as Congress and Obama struggle to avert looming budget cuts at year's end — or how faster progress is possible with stepped-up commitments from hard-hit countries themselves.

Clinton warned Thursday that the U.S. must continue doing its share: "In the fight against HIV/AIDS, failure to live up to our commitments isn't just disappointing, it's deadly."

The report highlighted Zambia, which already is seeing some declines in new cases of HIV. It will have to treat only about 145,000 more patients over the next four years to meet its share of the U.N. goal, a move that could prevent more than 126,000 new infections in that same time period. But if Zambia could go further and treat nearly 198,000 more people, the benefit would be even greater — 179,000 new infections prevented, the report estimates.

In contrast, if Zambia had to stick with 2011 levels of HIV prevention, new infections could level off or even rise again over the next four years, the report found.

Advocacy groups said the blueprint offers a much-needed set of practical steps to achieve an AIDS-free generation — and makes clear that maintaining momentum is crucial despite economic difficulties here and abroad.

"The blueprint lays out the stark choices we have: To stick with the baseline and see an epidemic flatline or grow, or ramp up" to continue progress, said Chris Collins of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

His group has estimated that more than 276,000 people would miss out on HIV treatment if U.S. dollars for the global AIDS fight are part of across-the-board spending cuts set to begin in January.

Thursday's report also urges targeting the populations at highest risk, including gay men, injecting drug users and sex workers, especially in countries where stigma and discrimination has denied them access to HIV prevention services.

"We have to go where the virus is," Clinton said.

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The lure of fishing endures even when they're not biting

Jordan and Stephanie Martinez planned to celebrate their one-month wedding anniversary with a night out at their favorite Thai restaurant. But what's a date without fishing? So first, they drove in from Alhambra for a little pole time at Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier in Long Beach.

Carrying folding camp chairs and tackle boxes, the Martinezes joined a handful of lone fishermen and families staking out spots along the pier's metal railing and dropping their lines. From Vietnamese, Filipino, Mexican and African American backgrounds, they shared bait, admired each other's catches flopping around in plastic buckets of ice, and traded fish stories.

What they didn't do is complain about the fish not biting. They didn't care. They came out, even with rain in the forecast, to break away, enjoy the peace and camaraderie.

"We don't even need to fish," Jordan Martinez, 23, a FedEx driver, said. "We're just here for the fun."

Belmont is the homely stepsister to the Redondo Beach and Santa Monica piers, with their restaurants, honky-tonks and vintage arcade games like Zoltar the Fortune Teller. The T-shaped pier doesn't have much in the way of frills — just portable toilets and street lights with metal shades shaped like pith helmets. An American flag flaps over a bait shop at the end.

What the pier, a third of a mile long and as wide as a city street, does have is space. And, on a chilly autumn night this week, a bizarre but strangely enchanting view. Christmas lights hung from a metal frame form a Christmas tree in front of the bait shop. In the distance, the Queen Mary's stacks were also strung for the holidays. The moon rose, spilling ribbons of milky light across the waters.

Way offshore, a twinkling breakwater built by the Navy slashed through the bay. Closer in, several islands were alight. It took a minute to realize the islands weren't real: they were camouflage for oil and gas drilling equipment. With their pastel towers and unnaturally jaunty palms, they looked like where Gilligan pulled up after the S.S. Minnow shipwrecked, or the atoll where castaways slump in old New Yorker cartoons.

I was drawn to the pier by a half-baked desire to start fishing again. While the cool kids worked on their tans in Balboa, my family vacationed at the then-unfashionable Oxnard Beach, which seemed to be socked in solid in dense fog every day of the year. But at dawn, my father would take us fishing off the now-vanished Point Mugu Pier. He was a World War II veteran, but even so, it remains a mystery to me how he got us on the restricted naval base that once included the pier.

Although the ocean perch we caught and fried up remains my favorite breakfast, I had failed to interest my kids in fishing. And without equipment or somebody to tell me what to do, I hadn't fished for decades.

But the Belmont pier was my kind of place. Nobody seemed to know what they were doing. They paid no heed to the "do not eat" list of fish contaminated by DDT, PCBs and mercury posted on the pier in four languages — English, Spanish, Chinese and Khmer. If it's big enough to keep, it's big enough to eat.

"That's for kids," Benilda Badeo, a Long Beach caregiver for the elderly, said as she laughed off the do-not-eat warning and prepared to take home several forbidden smelt. "I'm already an adult."

Several fishermen and women admitted they didn't know one fish species from another. Icie Gibson, 29, of Compton, said she didn't "eat anything with eyes on the same side of the head."

"There was one here came up biting on the line of the pole," Gibson said. "That thing was vicious. I said, oh no, that's not an eater."

The fishing lore they passed around was contradictory. Martin Estrada blamed the near-full moon for his bad luck.

"The moon has to be gone to best catch fish," said the 42-year-old Long Beach gardener. "I just like to waste my time here."

John Colima, on the other hand, held that fish flee the darkness. He said he suspended a light bulb above the water line or threw in glow sticks to attract the little buggers.

Colima, his face obscured behind the light from his headlamp, arrived with a hoop net as well as his pole. The net was for catching lobsters, he said.

Lobstering in Southern California? Granted, they're spiny, strange and altogether different from Maine's finest. But Colima, 40, rhapsodized about their delectability, dipped in soy sauce or melted butter.

And, drawn by mussels bristling off the pier footings, lobsters were easy to catch, said Colima, 40, a phone installer. He assured me he'd caught lobsters a half-foot wide.

Unfolding his camp chair, he sat down and scored several little silver fish with his knife, slipped them into his net and dropped it over the side. Lobsters would be crawling into the net in 15 minutes, he predicted, half an hour tops.

An hour later, with the lobsters still stubbornly refusing to show, I asked another lobster fisherman, Tuan Lai of Anaheim, to report on the catch the next day.

Reached by phone, Lai, 19, a Golden West College student, said he plied his own net for two or three hours but came up with nothing but little blue crabs. And no one else did any better, he added.

"I don't know what happened," said Lai, who, Internet-trained in lobstering, insisted that earlier in the month he'd snagged a small one. Perhaps the gig was up with the lobsters, he theorized. "Maybe the lobsters are just kind of smart," he said.

gale.holland@latimes.com

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As Opposition Coalition Meets in Cairo, More Violence Kills Dozens in Syria

Francisco Leong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Rebels celebrated on top of a downed Syrian jet in Daret Azzeh, 20 miles west of Aleppo, on Wednesday.

In its first major effort to show that it can be a viable political force, the newly formed Syrian opposition coalition started talks in Egypt on Wednesday aimed at forming an alternative to the government of President Bashar al-Assad and paving the way for more international acceptance and aid.

The coalition, whose official name is the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, was formed at a meeting in Qatar this month and has been recognized by Britain, France, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council. To win further support from foreign capitals, it must tackle the broader problems of uniting the many opposition groups in exile and the rebels on the ground in Syria.

Delegates were expected to hold their second day of talks in a Cairo hotel on Thursday against the backdrop of a 20-month civil war in which about 40,000 people have been killed in clashes between armed rebels and jihadist fighters on one side and Mr. Assad’s forces on the other. The rebels appear to be gaining in their strategy to challenge the air supremacy of Mr. Assad’s military.

There were reports on Wednesday that for the second successive day, insurgents had shot down a government aircraft. Video posted on the Internet by rebels showed an airplane tail assembly jutting out of debris. Such videos are difficult to verify, but the episode on Wednesday seemed to be confirmed by other witnesses.

“We watched a Syrian plane being shot down as it was flying low to drop bombs” on the town of Daret Azzeh, 20 miles west of Aleppo and close to the Turkish border, said Ugur Cuneydioglu, who said he saw the aircraft being downed from a Turkish border village in southern Hatay Province. “It slowly went down in flames before it hit the ground. It was quite a scene,” Mr. Cuneydioglu said.

The video said the plane had been brought down by “the free men of Daret Azzeh soldiers of God brigade.”

On Tuesday, Syrian rebels said they shot down a military helicopter with a surface-to-air missile outside Aleppo.

The violence on Wednesday also included car bombs in a Damascus suburb that killed dozens of people.

In their first meeting since their umbrella organization was created in Doha, Qatar, on Nov. 11, coalition delegates confronted the realities of the political terrain. Disagreements emerged over the coalition’s composition when one member, the Syrian National Council, tried to increase the number of its representatives.

“Nothing will proceed until we work this out,” said one council member who spoke on condition of anonymity, according to Reuters.

The focus also seemed to be more on deciding how leadership candidates should be chosen rather than on who they might be. “I don’t think we’ll be discussing the election of a transitional government during the meeting today,” said Khaled Khoja, a coalition member. “We’re still discussing whether to have a government or to have committees instead.”

While the group, and the talks, are in their infancy, members appeared to recognize that world supporters were watching for results. Mr. Khoja said that while the group was discussing the coalition’s structure, it wanted to “see the outcome of the meeting in Morocco before deciding on the government.”

He was referring to a meeting planned for next month in Morocco of the so-called Friends of Syria group of nations, which includes the United States. At a meeting in New York City in September that included foreign ministers and Syrian opposition leaders, the group offered modest pledges of support for opponents of the Assad government. The opposition had unified under international pressure to give provinces better representation, and ideally, to oversee the disparate rebel factions while also providing a counterweight to the well-armed jihadist groups in the country.

The conflict has also flared along Syria’s borders with Lebanon, Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

In Turkey, which was once an ally of the Assad government, a team of NATO inspectors visited sites on Wednesday where the alliance might install batteries of Patriot antiaircraft missiles.

Another video on Wednesday showed a rebel fighter holding what appeared to be a complete SA-16 heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missile.

The man claimed to have shot down both the airplane and the helicopter, and said the missiles had been captured by rebels when they overran Base 46 outside Aleppo earlier this month.

High-profile tactical successes in the war have often been followed by videotaped claims of responsibility, and in part are seen as fund-raising opportunities for the fighters. Many claims, including those by the rebel fighters, are impossible to verify immediately.

But it was significant. The SA-16 is more modern and capable than the more commonly seen SA-7. It flies at a faster speed, can be used against aircraft at much wider range of attack angles, has a longer range and is promoted by its Russian exporters as being more resistant to an aircraft’s efforts to thwart it.

Its presence suggested that the rebels have been acquiring more weapons and could be mounting a more meaningful challenge to the Syrian Air Force.

State news media said on Wednesday that two car bombings struck Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus that is populated by members of the Christian and Druse minorities.

The SANA news agency said the death toll was at least 34. An activist group based in Britain, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said 47 people were killed.

Christine Hauser reported from New York, and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell from London; Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon; and C. J. Chivers from the United States.

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Angus T. Jones Is Not Leaving Two and a Half Men: Source

TV Watch

By Elizabeth Leonard

11/28/2012 at 07:50 PM EST

The Half wants back!

Ever since Angus T. Jones bashed Two and a Half Men in a now-viral video, it begged the question: Will the 19-year-old actor return to the hit show?

If he has it his way, he will.

"Angus expects to report to work after the holiday break in January," says a source close to the star. "He intends to honor his contract through the end of the season."

Jones, who called the show "filth" and urged viewers in a video interview on a religious website to stop watching, issued an apology Tuesday night, saying he has the "highest regard" for the "wonderful people" on the show.

Although Jones is not featured in an episode that tapes next week, he intends to show up on schedule after the break, the source says.

In the meantime, the source adds, "Angus is feeling positive and he is concentrating on spending some downtime with family and friends."

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Simple measures cut infections caught in hospitals

CHICAGO (AP) — Preventing surgery-linked infections is a major concern for hospitals and it turns out some simple measures can make a big difference.

A project at seven big hospitals reduced infections after colorectal surgeries by nearly one-third. It prevented an estimated 135 infections, saving almost $4 million, the Joint Commission hospital regulating group and the American College of Surgeons announced Wednesday. The two groups directed the 2 1/2-year project.

Solutions included having patients shower with special germ-fighting soap before surgery, and having surgery teams change gowns, gloves and instruments during operations to prevent spreading germs picked up during the procedures.

Some hospitals used special wound-protecting devices on surgery openings to keep intestine germs from reaching the skin.

The average rate of infections linked with colorectal operations at the seven hospitals dropped from about 16 percent of patients during a 10-month phase when hospitals started adopting changes to almost 11 percent once all the changes had been made.

Hospital stays for patients who got infections dropped from an average of 15 days to 13 days, which helped cut costs.

"The improvements translate into safer patient care," said Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the Joint Commission. "Now it's our job to spread these effective interventions to all hospitals."

Almost 2 million health care-related infections occur each year nationwide; more than 90,000 of these are fatal.

Besides wanting to keep patients healthy, hospitals have a monetary incentive to prevent these infections. Medicare cuts payments to hospitals that have lots of certain health care-related infections, and those cuts are expected to increase under the new health care law.

The project involved surgeries for cancer and other colorectal problems. Infections linked with colorectal surgery are particularly common because intestinal tract bacteria are so abundant.

To succeed at reducing infection rates requires hospitals to commit to changing habits, "to really look in the mirror and identify these things," said Dr. Clifford Ko of the American College of Surgeons.

The hospitals involved were Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; Cleveland Clinic in Ohio; Mayo Clinic-Rochester Methodist Hospital in Rochester, Minn.; North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Great Neck, NY; Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago; OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill.; and Stanford Hospital & Clinics in Palo Alto, Calif.

___

Online:

Joint Commission: http://www.jointcommission.org

American College of Surgeons: http://www.facs.org

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

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California school districts face huge debt on risky bonds

Two hundred school districts across California have borrowed billions of dollars using a costly and risky form of financing that has saddled them with staggering debt, according to a Times analysis.

Schools and community colleges have turned increasingly to so-called capital appreciation bonds in the economic downturn, which depressed property values and made it harder for districts to raise money for new classrooms, auditoriums and sports facilities.

Unlike conventional shorter-term bonds that require payments to begin immediately, this type of borrowing lets districts postpone the start of payments for decades. Some districts are gambling the economic picture will improve in the decades ahead, with local tax collections increasingly enough to repay the notes.

DATABASE: Bonds by district

CABs, as the bonds are known, allow schools to borrow large sums without violating state or locally imposed caps on property taxes, at least in the short term. But the lengthy delays in repayment increase interest expenses, in some cases to as much as 10 or 20 times the amount borrowed.

The practice is controversial and has been banned in at least one state. In California, prominent government officials charged with watching the public purse are warning school districts to avoid the transactions.

One sounding the alarm is California Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who compares CABs to the sort of creative Wall Street financing that contributed to the housing bubble, the subsequent debt crisis and the nation's lingering economic malaise.

"They are terrible deals," Lockyer said. "The school boards and staffs that approved of these bonds should be voted out of office and fired."

Most school bonds, like home mortgages, require roughly $2 to $3 to be paid back for every $1 borrowed. But CABs compound interest for much longer periods, meaning repayment costs are often many times that of traditional school bonds.

And property owners — not the school system — are likely to be on the hook for bigger tax bills if the agency's revenues can't cover future bond payments, Lockyer and other critics say.

Several financial consultants who advise school districts on CABs declined to comment, as did the chairman of their trade group. Education officials acknowledge some drawbacks with CABs, but argue that the bonds are funding vital educational projects.

The Newport Mesa Unified School District in Orange County issued $83 million in long-term notes in May 2011. Principal and interest will total about $548 million, but officials say they are confident they can pay off the debt.

The bonds "have allowed us to provide for facilities that are needed now," said the district's business manager, Paul Reed. "We could not afford to wait another 10 years."

Overall, 200 school systems, roughly a fifth of the districts statewide, have borrowed more than $2.8 billion since 2007 using CABs with maturities longer than 25 years. They will have to pay back about $16.3 billion in principal and interest, or an average of 5.8 times the amount they borrowed.

Nearly 70% of the money borrowed involves extended 30- to 40-year notes, which will cost district taxpayers $13.1 billion, or about 6.6 times the amount borrowed on average.

State and county treasurers say debt payments of no more than four times principal are considered reasonable, though some recommend a more conservative limit of three times.

"This is part of the 'new' Wall Street," Lockyer said. "It has done this kind of thing on the private investor side for years, then the housing market and now its public entities."

The Poway Unified School District, which serves middle-class communities in north San Diego County, is one of the school systems faced with massive CAB debt payments. In 2011, it issued $105 million in capital appreciation bonds to complete a school rebuilding program.

Because the recession had depressed property values and tax revenue, Poway district officials realized that using conventional bonds might jeopardize a promise to district voters to limit the tax rate.

So on the advice of an Irvine-based financial consulting firm, they turned to the long-term notes. Under the deal, the school board could keep construction moving, avoid reneging on its pledge to voters and stay within the legal limits. And it would not have to repay the bonds for decades.

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Protesters Gather Again in Cairo Streets to Denounce Morsi

CAIRO — Tens of thousands of people filled the central Tahrir Square on Tuesday afternoon in an outpouring of rage at President Mohamed Morsi’s attempt to claim expansive new powers and at the role in politics played by his party, the Muslim Brotherhood.

An attempt by Mr. Morsi on Monday to soften his edict, by reaffirming his deference to Egyptian courts, did little to constrain the crowd, which some estimates put at hundreds of thousands of people. In scenes that were reminiscent of the popular uprising against President Hosni Mubarak, and that signaled the country’s current widening divides, the protesters dusted off old taunts for Mr. Morsi, the country’s first freely elected leader.

“Leave,” they chanted. “The people want the fall of the regime.”

The president’s opponents turned out large numbers in several other cities, and clashed at times with his supporters, including in Mahalla el-Kubra in the Nile Delta, where more than a hundred people were reportedly injured. The Brotherhood also reported attacks on several of its political offices.

Most significant, though, was the turnout in Tahrir Square, where Egypt’s secular-minded opposition appeared to have momentarily overcome its divisions, bolstering its numbers with new allies among people implacably opposed to the Brotherhood, in an effort to muster a serious, visible challenge to Egypt’s Islamist groups.

It remained unclear whether Tuesday’s numbers signaled a new movement, or a moment. Islamists have repeatedly won at the polls since the fall of Mr. Mubarak, and the Brotherhood has shown its ability to turn out large crowds with little difficulty.

On Tuesday, the Brotherhood mocked the gathering in Tahrir Square, dismissing the protesters as “remnants” of the Mubarak government on a television channel associated with the group and playing down their numbers on Twitter.

The taunts were ignored in Tahrir Square, where the crowd chanted, “The square is full without the Brotherhood.”

The gathering was prompted by an edict released by Mr. Morsi last week that his decisions would be above judicial review, a move that essentially removed the last check on his power, since Egypt’s Parliament had earlier been dissolved by the courts.

Though Mr. Morsi framed the decree as an attempt to insulate Egypt’s constitutional assembly from being dissolved by Mubarak-era judges, it was quickly attacked as a power grab and a worrying return to autocracy. On Monday, through his spokesman, Mr. Morsi again tried to explain his intentions, saying he would work within judicial precedents to hold back efforts to dissolve the constituent assembly, rather than putting his power above judicial scrutiny.

Even as Mr. Morsi tried to placate the country’s judges, Egyptian television on Monday showed the growing polarization of the country in split-screen coverage of two funerals, each for a teenage boy killed in clashes set off by Mr. Morsi’s edict.

“Now blood has been spilled by political factions, so this is not going to go away,” said Rabab el-Mahdi, an activist and professor at the American University in Cairo, adding that these were the first deaths that rival factions had blamed on one another and not on the Mubarak government’s security forces since uprising began last year.

Despite Mr. Morsi’s attempts at clarification, opposition leaders went ahead with Tuesday’s protest. Some said that respect for the judiciary was now only a small part of their cause, and that their goal was to abort the current Islamist-dominated constituent assembly.

Many protesters treated the occasion as a referendum on Mr. Morsi’s rule, saying he and his prime minister had failed to make important changes, like reforming the Interior Ministry.

“I voted for Mr. Morsi,” said Emad Abdel Kawy, 35, a computer engineer. “It seems like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You expect a revolution to bring revolutionary actions. It didn’t happen.” And like many here, Mr. Abdel Kawy blamed the Brotherhood, which Mr. Morsi helped lead before becoming president.

“It’s clear he doesn’t make the decisions,” he said of Mr. Morsi. “The decisions come to him.”

The gathering brought together the revolution’s hardened activists with their former foes, including supporters of the Mubarak government. Some said that the strange new alliances were just a necessary result of Egypt’s confusing, emerging politics. Yosra Mostafa, a 28-year-old activist, said she realized that some of Mr. Mubarak’s supporters had turned out simply because they sought a return to power.

“I don’t mind being on their side to oust a dictator,” she said, speaking of Mr. Morsi.

The show of unity masked deep divisions between the opposition and other groups and even in them, Ms. Mahdi said.

“This is not a united front, and I am inside it,” she said. “Every single political group in the country is now divided over this. Is the decree revolutionary justice or building a new dictatorship? Should we align ourselves with felool” — the term for the remnants of the old government — “or should we be revolutionary purists?”

Yasser el-Shimy, an Egypt analyst at the International Crisis Group, argued that the persistence of protests against Mr. Morsi reflected in part the failure of the opposition to accept its own recent election defeats, including of the parliamentary and presidential elections.

“It has never come to terms with these defeats, so it tries to delegitimize the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.

Mayy El Sheikh and Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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Nintendo Unveils Wii Mini for the Canucks

Nintendo‘s pushing the new $ 299 Wii U console hard (and has already sold 400K units in the process), but in at least one region, the gaming company has a new back-up plan: The $ 99 Nintendo Wii Mini.

[More from Mashable: Wii U Sells 400,000 Units in First Week]

The new smaller, black box with red trim is a simpler game console. It offers no Internet access and cannot play older GameCube console games. What it does do is play virtually all Wii games (Nintendo says there are around 1,300 of them). The other major caveat is that the console is only available in Canada. According to a Nintendo press release on the new system, “Wii Mini is available exclusively in Canada during the holiday season. No information is available about its potential availability in other territories in the future.”

Nintendo also left out some details on the console itself. We do not know the exact size or weight of the box, though judging from the above image, it’s not much wider than a Wii Remote.

[More from Mashable: Meet the Super Fan Who Waited in Line for a Month for a Wii U [VIDEO]]

As Nintendo describes it, the Wii Mini is “all about games,” and without the Internet, it has to be. No Web browsing, cavorting with other Mii’s or multi-player gaming. It’s also worth noting that while the Wii Mini ships with a single Wii Remote Plus and Nunchuk (both red), a brand new Black Wii with Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort (including Remote and Nunchuk) is currently $ 119 at Best Buy.

What do you think of the Wii Mini? Would you game without the Internet? Is this the perfect gift for young, Canadian children? Let us know in the comments.

GamePad

The Wii U GamePad has a 6.2-inch touchscreen.

Click here to view this gallery.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The Voice Contestants Explain Their Song Choices

TV Watch

The Voice

By Julia Haskins

11/27/2012 at 07:00 PM EST

From left: Cassadee Pope, Terry McDermott, Dez Duron, host Carson Daly, Cody Belew, Nicholas David, Trevin Hunte, Melanie Martinez and Amanda Brown

Tyler Golden/NBC

Contestants on The Voice already have the talent, but to make it to the top, they need the perfect song. On Monday night's show, Coach Cee Lo Green anticipated that at this point in the competition, song choice would be the ultimate factor in determining the next star. Now, hear from the competitors themselves:

Team Blake

• Terry McDermott sang Blake Shelton's "Over"
"Me and Blake went back and forth and I'd said I wanted to do something different," he said of the song choice. "He suggested his song – and the second I heard it I was like, "That's it!" It worked out tremendously. It was really fun."

• Cassadee Pope sang Michelle Branch's "Are You Happy Now?"
"It was a big deal," she told PEOPLE of closing the show with that number. "There was pressure to close out with a bang and also top the last week. I tried to push it all aside and go out and have fun because I love Michelle Branch and that song. She is one of my songwriting idols."

Team Christina

• Dez Duron sang Justin Bieber's "U Smile"
"That song was totally my groove," he said of the performance. "Christina came up with the Justin Bieber idea. I wanted to do it my way. I love the song. It's a huge song, but I know Justin has a lot of avid fans. I knew we had to make it me. It ended up being a great risk."

Team Cee Lo

• Trevin Hunte sang Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All"
"It's definitely kind of scary because I feel like America will want something different," he says of the fact that the past two Voice winners have been soul singers. "I just want to leave a mark."

• Nicholas David sang Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On"
"I loved being able to switch it up and play a little piano and add a sax," he said of the performance. "I get nervous when I stand there waiting for the judges to talk because I have so much energy right after playing. But I'm just excited."

• Cody Belew sang Queen's "Somebody to Love"
"I never felt like I would out sing Freddie Mercury because you can't, but I wanted to put my own spin on things and embody his lyrics," he explained of performing with a choir behind him. "It was a big moment for me."

Team Adam

Melanie Martinez sang Alex Clare's "Too Close"
"It's always going to be hard when you're singing about your personal experiences," she says of the recent breakup that informed her performance. "I never expected to do it on TV. I hope that now on I can let my personal experiences be fuel for the fire."

Amanda Brown sang Adele's "Someone Like You"
"I feel like it was intense ... and I hope people were moved by it, by the rock soul," she said. "Hopefully that was enough."

• Reporting by JESSICA HERNDON

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CDC: HIV spread high in young gay males

NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials say 1 in 5 new HIV infections occur in a tiny segment of the population — young men who are gay or bisexual.

The government on Tuesday released new numbers that spotlight how the spread of the AIDS virus is heavily concentrated in young males who have sex with other males. Only about a quarter of new infections in the 13-to-24 age group are from injecting drugs or heterosexual sex.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said blacks represented more than half of new infections in youths. The estimates are based on 2010 figures.

Overall, new U.S. HIV infections have held steady at around 50,000 annually. About 12,000 are in teens and young adults, and most youth with HIV haven't been tested.

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Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns

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Inglewood educator returns to turn schools around

When he was a kid, Kent Taylor bounced from school to school in South Los Angeles until his family landed in Inglewood. In sixth grade, he started classes at an elementary school under the LAX flight path.

Thirty-six years later, he's back where he began.

"This very classroom set me on my course through life," he told students at Oak Street Elementary on a recent day. As some of them whispered, wondering if the slender African American man before them was President Obama, Taylor spoke of how he struggled to read and do math until one teacher singled him out.

"I understand what you are going through because I have been there, sitting right where you are sitting."

Named recently to turn around Inglewood's insolvent school system, Taylor is offering his life as a symbol for the change that can come to a district long mired in trouble.

But not everyone is cheering for Inglewood's would-be hometown hero, who is known for ruthlessly cutting bloated costs in another school district. One critic refers to his "quiet assassin style. You smile and grin a lot, but you are cutting people off at the knees."

Everyone agrees that Inglewood needs help. The district's standardized test scores are among the worst in California. At Inglewood High, for example, just 25% of students are at grade level in English, and 4% are proficient in math. Enrollment is in free fall, largely because students have been lured away by charter and private schools.

Because state funding is calculated largely based on attendance, the decline has left a gaping hole in the district budget. In September, Inglewood became the ninth school system to be taken over by the state. The district received a $55-million loan to shore up debts, and its leadership was stripped of power.

As state administrator, Taylor's mandate is to stabilize the district's finances — and offer some hope to its students.

In that classroom that had meant so much to him, he told the children he would be there for them. He said he'd keep coming back to their school, that he'd check on their progress. He'd even host a pizza party.

"I am you, many years from now," he said. "I want you to know that you can achieve your dreams — and I'm going to help you get there."

Taylor, the youngest of three, had a turbulent beginning. His father wasn't around much. His mother was an office clerk who at times survived on welfare. Nobody in his extended family had ever gone to college.

"Life was very hard on my son in his younger years, there's no way around that," said his mother, Ivory Wilborne, 70. "I tried my best to provide for them, but nothing was ever settled. It was hard just to pay for food. But life settled down once we got to Inglewood."

Taylor speaks mostly of his sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Fletcher, crediting her for seeing his promise. She spent extra time with the rambunctious boy who entered her classroom with poor academic skills.

"She didn't give up on me," Taylor said. "Her diligence pushed me to improve, literally gave me the foundation to succeed in later years.... Before that, honestly, I was headed for trouble."

By the time Taylor reached Inglewood High, he had become an "A" student, bookish and by-the-rules, able to read and do math better than most of his peers. He was named class president his freshman and sophomore years. Inglewood was beginning a hard struggle with gangs back then, but the gangs didn't bother kids like him — "the ones who spent our time lugging around heavy backpacks, proudly marching off to the library," he said. "That's the guy I became."

"There was something special inside him that made him stand out," said Mary Boykin, one of his English teachers. "I recall talking to him a great deal about his desire to go to college, his desire to be somebody. He was one of those you don't ever forget."

Taylor went on to UC Riverside, a big move for a kid who'd rarely ventured outside his working-class, mostly black neighborhood. He began to mix with other cultures and classes, even joining a predominantly white fraternity.

"This was another step, leaving Inglewood, expanding my view of the world," he said. "I wasn't sure if I would ever return."

Taylor's career in education took off in the 1990s. He worked as a special education teacher in San Bernardino, became a principal and then a district supervisor overseeing curriculum and intervention programs for struggling students.

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