French Capture Gao Airport in Move to Retake North Mali

KONNA, Mali — French special forces took control of the airport in the Islamic rebel stronghold of Gao, the French government said Saturday, meeting “serious resistance” from militants even as they pressed northward.

Gao is one of three main northern cities in Mali that has been under rebel control for months, and the capture of the main strategic points in Gao represents the biggest prize yet in the battle to retake the northern half of the country.

French airstrikes have been pounding the city since France joined the fight at Mali’s request on Jan. 11. French troops also took control of a bridge over the Niger River on Saturday, and the capture of the airport allowed a company of French soldiers to be airlifted in on Saturday afternoon, according to Col. Thierry Burkhard, the French military spokesman.

Another French company was on the road to Gao from Sévaré on Saturday night, and Malian and other African forces had begun to arrive, he said.

He stepped back from an earlier statement by the French Defense Ministry that declared the city freed by French forces, acknowledging that the statement was “a bit overdone.” Noting Gao’s 70,000 inhabitants, he added, “it’s not with a detachment of special forces that you take over a city.”

But with reinforcements streaming in, the battle for Gao appeared imminent.

Soldiers from Chad and Niger are expected to arrive soon, the French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said in a statement. They will be part of a contingent of 1,900 African troops who have already arrived in Mali, fighting alongside the 2,500 French soldiers deployed here.

Gao’s mayor, who had fled to Bamako, the capital, returned to his city on Saturday, Mr. Le Drian said.

In Washington, the Pentagon said Saturday that the United States would provide aerial refueling for French warplanes. The decision increases American involvement, which until now had consisted of transporting French troops and equipment and also providing intelligence, including satellite photographs.

Gao, 600 miles northeast of the capital, had been under the control of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, a splinter group of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Al Jazeera broadcast a statement from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in which the group said it had withdrawn temporarily from some cities it held, but would return with greater force.

Little information has come from the other two main cities under rebel control — Timbuktu, the fabled desert oasis, and Kidal, northeast of Gao — for the past 10 days because mobile phone networks have been down.

Konna was overrun by Islamic fighters on Jan. 10, prompting France to intervene, and a clearer picture has begun to emerge of the fighting. Residents and officials here said that at least 11 civilians had been killed in French airstrikes.

Charred husks of pickup trucks lined the road into the town, and broken tanks and guns littered the fish market, where the rebels appeared to have set up a temporary base.

France’s sudden entry into the fray has left the United Nations and Ecowas, the regional trade bloc, scrambling to put together an African-led intervention force that had been in the planning stages. The Mali Army, which has struggled to fight the Islamist groups, has been accused of serious human rights violations.

From Konna, it is easy to see why the Malian government pleaded for French help after the Islamist fighters took control of the town. Just 35 miles of asphalt separate Konna from the garrison town of Sévaré, home to the second-biggest airfield in Mali and a vital strategic point for any foreign intervention force.

Residents said their town fell to the rebels when 300 pickup trucks of fighters, bristling with machine guns, rolled in and pushed back the Malian Army troops who had been guarding the town after a fierce battle.

Lydia Polgreen reported from Konna, and Scott Sayare from Paris. Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington.

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Guy Fieri Says His Beef Sandwich Recipe Is 'the Bomb!'

By Maggie Coughlan

01/26/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Guy Fieri's Beef Sandwich

Andrew Purcell; Inset: Michael Tran/Getty

After crossing the nation on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Guy Fieri knows a thing or two about what makes a sandwich spectacular.

The co-host of Food Network's Rachael vs. Guy: Celebrity Cook-Off shares one of his all-time favorite recipes – his beef sandwich.

"The rye bread, the horseradish, the onions – it's the bomb!" he says.

Guy Fieri's Beef Sandwich

Ingredients
•1 ¾ tsp. fine sea salt, divided
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1 ½ tsp. onion powder
• 1 ½ tsp. garlic powder
• 1 tsp. dried oregano
• 1 ½ tsp. paprika
• ½ tsp. chili powder
• 1 ¼ lb. beef top round
• ¼ cup sour cream
• ¼ cup mayonnaise
• ½ tsp. lemon juice
• ¼ cup hot horseradish
• ½ tsp. minced garlic
• 8 slices rye bread, lightly toasted
• 1 white onion, sliced paper-thin

Instructions
1. Combine 1 ½ tsp. sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, 1 ½ tsp. onion powder, 1 ½ tsp. garlic powder, 1 tsp. dried oregano, 1 ½ tsp. paprika, and ½ tsp. chili powder in a resealable 1-gallon plastic bag. Add meat and shake it around in the bag. Marinate in the refrigerator for 24 to 48 hours.
2. In a medium bowl, combine sour cream, mayonnaise, lemon juice, horseradish, garlic, ¼ tsp. sea salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerate for at least four hours.
3. Remove meat from refrigerator 20 minutes before grilling. Pre-heat grill or large grill pan to high. Grill for 15 minutes (7½ minutes per side) for medium rare. Cover meat and let rest 10 minutes. Slice paper-thin. Divide meat among four bread slices. Top with sauce, onion slices and remaining bread.
    

 
 

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CDC: Flu seems to level off except in the West

New government figures show that flu cases seem to be leveling off nationwide. Flu activity is declining in most regions although still rising in the West.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hospitalizations and deaths spiked again last week, especially among the elderly. The CDC says quick treatment with antiviral medicines is important, in particular for the very young or old. The season's first flu case resistant to treatment with Tamiflu was reported Friday.

Eight more children have died from the flu, bringing this season's total pediatric deaths to 37. About 100 children die in an average flu season.

There is still vaccine available although it may be hard to find. The CDC has a website that can help.

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CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

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Nude woman hits nude fiance with car, CHP says

Authorities are investigating after a woman in San Bernardino County allegedly struck her fiance with a car. The California Highway Patrol said both were naked at the time of the Thursday incident.

CHP officials told KTLA News that the couple were in the parked car on Phelan Road in Phelan when Alberto Giovanni Bravo got out and walked in front of the vehicle. For reasons that are not clear, the woman, identified as 22-year-old Hesperia woman, got behind the wheel and ran into him.

Bravo was thrown onto the hood of the car and then tossed to the ground as the vehicle preceded to cross the road and run into a chain-link fence and some trees before coming to a stop.

The man was airlifted to a hospital and was said to be in serious condition. The woman, whose name was not released, was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. She was arrested on suspicion of felony DUI.

“Part of this investigation is of a sensitive nature and still under investigation,” a CHP officer told the Daily Press.

-- A Times staff writer

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Dolours Price, Defiant I.R.A. Bomber, Dies at 61

Press Association, via Associated Press

Dolours Price, left, and her younger sister, Marian, in 1972.

Dolours Price, an unrepentant former member of the Irish Republican Army who went to prison for a 1973 London bombing and who recently shook Northern Ireland’s fragile calm by claiming that her orders had come from Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein party leader and peace negotiator who denies having ever been in the I.R.A., died on Thursday at her home in a suburb of Dublin. She was 61.

The police in Dublin said the cause was not known. An autopsy was scheduled.

Ms. Price, the former wife of the Irish actor Stephen Rea, attracted more public attention than she might have expected in recent years. Since 2011, the police in Northern Ireland police have been fighting in the courts for access to audiotaped interviews that Ms. Price gave to an oral history project at Boston College in which she detailed her I.R.A. career. The United States Supreme Court has been asked to hear the case.

The police learned of the audiotapes from an interview Ms. Price gave to an Irish newspaper in 2010. She told the paper that her testimony for the college’s “Belfast Project” described kidnappings and executions that she said she helped carry out in 1972 on orders from Mr. Adams. She also asserted on the tapes, she said, that Mr. Adams had a role in conceiving the London car bombings and that he ordered her and nine other I.R.A. volunteers, including her sister Marian, to carry them out in 1973.

The explosions, at four landmark sites, including the Old Bailey Courthouse, injured 200 people and left one man dead from a heart attack. It was the I.R.A.’s first attack in London.

Mr. Adams, who has intermittently been a member of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly since a peace agreement was forged in 1998, has repeatedly denied her accusations. On Thursday he said he had “no concerns, because they are not true.”

The Northern Ireland police have said that Mr. Adams is not a target in their seeking the audiotapes. The family of one suspected I.R.A. informer described by Ms. Price as having been executed has called for Mr. Adams’s arrest.

Mr. Adams expressed sorrow this week at the news of Ms. Price’s death.

"She endured great hardship during her time in prison in the 1970s,” he said.

Ms. Price spoke often of the personal toll of her terrorist activities: years of depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Among the suspected informers she drove to their executions, she said, was a longtime family friend. In prison, she staged a 203-day hunger strike in which her jailers force-fed her every day through rubber tubing.

Suffering from tuberculosis and other ailments, Ms. Price was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in 1981 after serving seven years of a life sentence.

Ms. Price told interviewers that she might have spared herself and her victims had she known that the struggle would end with a peace that left Northern Ireland’s Catholic majority, in her view, where it had started: under British rule.

“When we starved together on hunger strike,” she wrote in a 2004 essay in Fortnight, an Irish journal, “it was not to ‘move the process forward,’ it was not for seats in a British government.” It was, she said, “to rid this land of any British interference.”

Ms. Price married Mr. Rea in 1983 and had two children with him. Mr. Rea, who portrayed an I.R.A. hit man in the 1992 film “The Crying Game,” spoke only obliquely about his wife’s past.

“You can’t be born in the north of Ireland and not be political,” he told the British newspaper The Evening Standard in 1992. “The situation there is a pollution of your thinking.”

Dolours Price was born in Belfast on June 21, 1951, into a family steeped in Irish republican politics. Her father, Albert, was an I.R.A. founding member. “My father never saw his firstborn child because she was born and died while he was interned,” she wrote.

An aunt, Bridie Price, lost both hands and her eyesight when a bomb she was assembling accidentally blew up. Her sister Marian, who was among the 10 I.R.A. members involved in the 1973 London bombings, was released from prison in the early ’80s but rearrested several years ago on charges of plotting an attack on the government.

Ms. Price was a recent college graduate and training to be a teacher when she enlisted in the I.R.A. in the early 197os. She was one of the first women assigned to carry out an armed attack and was selected for the London mission in part, she said in an interview, because she was a pretty young woman and had no arrest record.

Ms. Price’s marriage to Mr. Rea ended in divorce in 2003. She is survived by their children, Danny and Oscar; her sister Marian and another sister, Clare; and two brothers, Sean and Dino.

Ms. Price remained defiant to the end. She had no truck, she said, with those whose political views had changed over the years. “I am a republican, born and bred, as were my mother and father before me and theirs before them,” she wrote in a letter to an Irish newspaper last year. “I have no time for people who constantly change their position.”

“They are not republicans,” she wrote.

Douglas Dalby contributed reporting from Dublin.

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BlackRock to buy $80 million Twitter stake: source

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, has taken an $ 80 million stake in Twitter Inc, a person with knowledge of the deal said Friday.

The six-year old social media company will not raise new capital as part of the private deal that values the firm at more than $ 9 billion. BlackRock will buy shares directly from early Twitter employees seeking to liquidate their stock holdings and options.

Twitter’s new valuation represents a slight rise from late 2011, when the company facilitated a similar tender offer with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia that valued the company at a reported $ 8.4 billion.

Twitter sought investors for another tender offer last summer in the wake of Facebook Inc‘s botched initial public offering in May, but did not complete the deal until recently, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

In recent years other tech companies including Facebook, Groupon Inc and SurveyMonkey have used similar transactions to cash out existing employees and delay an initial public offering. Twitter itself is rumored to be a potential IPO prospect within two years.

Several hundred Twitter employees, including many who joined the company before 2009, will be eligible to sell their shares as part of the transaction.

(Reporting By Gerry Shih; editing by Andrew Hay)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Liberty Ross Files for Divorce from Rupert Sanders

By Dahvi Shira

01/25/2013 at 08:20 PM EST

Liberty Ross

Michael Buckner/Wireimage

It's over for Rupert Sanders and Liberty Ross.

The Snow White and the Huntsman actress, 34, filed for divorce Friday from her director-husband Sanders, 41, in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Friday, PEOPLE confirms.

News of the filing comes about six months after Sanders's highly publicized cheating scandal with Huntsman's star, Kristen Stewart.

Stewart has since patched things up with boyfriend Robert Pattinson, who she was dating during the fling.

In the court documents, Ross seeks joint custody of the couple's two kids, 5 and 7, TMZ reports. She also asks for spousal support and attorney's fees.

Sanders, who has filed his response to the divorce petition, also seeks joint custody of the kids, and wants to share legal fees with Ross, according to TMZ.

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CDC: Flu seems to level off except in the West

New government figures show that flu cases seem to be leveling off nationwide. Flu activity is declining in most regions although still rising in the West.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hospitalizations and deaths spiked again last week, especially among the elderly. The CDC says quick treatment with antiviral medicines is important, in particular for the very young or old. The season's first flu case resistant to treatment with Tamiflu was reported Friday.

Eight more children have died from the flu, bringing this season's total pediatric deaths to 37. About 100 children die in an average flu season.

There is still vaccine available although it may be hard to find. The CDC has a website that can help.

___

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

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St. John's in court fight over failed nurse recruitment effort

Short of hospital nurses in recent years, St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica hired a recruiter in England and flew one of its top executives to London to interview job candidates.

The recruiter's firm, Stateside Nursing, found 105 nurses and the hospital paid the company nearly $700,000 in recruiting fees and for providing "acculturation services" to help the foreigners adjust to life in Southern California.

Despite all those payments, none of the nurses ever arrived in Santa Monica.

Now the hospital is pursuing a court fight over this costly failure, saying it was the victim of fraud, bribery and unfair business practices. But the legal battle may also yield unflattering details about the inner workings of one of the area's best-known hospitals, which recently saw a high-profile management shake-up.

In the case headed to trial next month, St. John's accuses the recruiter, Lisa Taylor, of paying about $128,000 in bribes to Victor Melendez, the hospital's former vice president of human resources. The hospital is suing the pair in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Both Melendez, through his lawyer, and Taylor deny the allegations, and they say the payments to Melendez were not bribes. He was paid for previous recruiting work unrelated to the hospital contracts, they said. Taylor says changes in U.S. immigration rules prevented the nurses from coming to work.

There's no indication that this nurse-recruitment saga prompted the recent dismissals of St. John's former chief executive, Lou Lazatin, and her chief operating officer, Eleanor Ramirez, by the hospital's owner, the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health System in Denver. In November, the Catholic nonprofit escorted Lazatin and Ramirez off the hospital premises one morning and fired 15 of the hospital's 17 board members by email.

Taylor wants the two former executives to testify in this case and explain their departure. "We want to know why they aren't there anymore," she said. "It goes to their credibility." Neither Lazatin nor Ramirez could be reached for comment.

Michael Slubowski, chief executive of the Sisters of Charity, has declined to comment on the specific reasons for the St. John's dismissals, and he said the hospital "doesn't publicly discuss legal matters."

There have been discussions in recent months about selling the 266-bed hospital, which has tended to celebrities and politicians over the years. St. John's reported a loss of $13 million for 2011, the latest state data show, and patient revenue slipped 8% to $891 million.

The nursing shortage at St. John's was a common problem for many hospitals across California.

In 2006, Melendez, the hospital's newly hired human resources executive, set out to remedy that problem. He recommended three recruiting firms to the hospital, including Taylor's Stateside Nursing, according to his lawyer, Vincent S. Ammirato. In a contract that year, St. John's agreed to pay Stateside an $8,000 recruitment fee for each nurse it found.

The hospital sent Melendez to London, where he and Taylor interviewed dozens of nurses and 52 of them accepted job offers, according to the hospital's lawsuit. Stateside billed Saint John's for about $200,000 in initial fees.

Stateside then offered to provide "acculturation services" for the 52 nurses at $2,000 per nurse to help them acclimate to life in the U.S. because many were originally from the Philippines, India and other countries. In court filings, the hospital contends that Melendez didn't have the authority to approve those additional expenses because they weren't included in the contract. Rather, the hospital said, those payments were just a way for Taylor to pocket extra money for the alleged bribes.

By August 2007, even though no nurses had arrived, St. John's agreed to pay Stateside even more. The hospital boosted Stateside's recruitment fee to $13,000 per nurse from $8,000 earlier.

The hospital says Melendez wasn't authorized to sign the new contract. Ammirato, Melendez's lawyer, said that his client did not act alone and that Melendez's boss, the former chief operating officer, was involved in negotiating Stateside's agreements and approving its invoices.

In mid-2007, Melendez left St. John's for another job, so the hospital sent other human resource officials to London to interview nurses. Stateside found 53 more nurses and it billed for additional fees. Overall, according to court documents, the hospital paid Stateside $669,550 in upfront fees in 2007 and 2008.

St. John's said it became suspicious later in 2008 when Stateside's director of sales sent a letter to the hospital alleging that the recruitment firm was overcharging St. John's and paying bribes to Melendez. Based on this tip, St. John's sought to recoup its money and subpoenaed Melendez's bank records.

Stateside wired Melendez $51,843 in February 2007 and sent him an additional $51,943 the next month, according to the hospital's lawsuit. Those wire transfers took place shortly after Melendez authorized two payments of $52,000 apiece to Stateside. Later in 2007, Taylor wrote him another check, for $25,000. Taylor and Melendez don't dispute those payments.

In October 2010, an arbitrator found that Stateside engaged in "unlawful and fraudulent business practices" by paying Melendez to gain improper advantages in its contracts. The arbitrator awarded the hospital $1 million in damages, interest and legal fees.

Stateside went through liquidation in England, Taylor said, and she couldn't defend herself at the arbitration hearing. The hospital hasn't collected any portion of the arbitration award since her company shut down.

Taylor said she had satisfied her obligations by finding the nurses and getting them licensed to work at St. John's. The U.S. had adopted a policy in 2006 that made it more difficult for some foreign nurses to obtain work visas. St. John's said in its suit that Taylor misrepresented that she could handle those immigration issues.

"We got the nurses as far as we could get them when the U.S. government ran out of visa numbers," said Taylor, 47, who now lives in Colorado. "I'm looking forward to telling my story at trial."

chad.terhune@latimes.com

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St. Gallen Journal: Swiss City Fears for Cultural Legacy in Wake of a Bank’s Fall

Daniel Auf der Mauer for The New York Times

Bach concerts sponsored by the bank Wegelin were sometimes held at the St. Laurentius church in St. Gallen.

ST. GALLEN, Switzerland — Given the modest size of its offices, a trim neo-Classical building off the marketplace, it is easy to underestimate the imprint of the bank once called Wegelin on this compact Swiss city.

It is not just that it was the oldest bank in Switzerland, founded by local textile merchants in 1741. Its senior managing partner, Konrad Hummler, was the son of a former mayor, chairman of the board of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Zurich daily that is the country’s leading newspaper, and the prolific author of columns in which he often denounced the business practices of bigger Swiss banks, like UBS.

But most important, Wegelin, which closed its doors this month, was a significant sponsor of cultural institutions in the area. Among its projects, in 2006 Mr. Hummler, a passionate music lover and amateur violinist, established the Johann Sebastian Bach Foundation, with the goal of financing the performance and recording of the entire vocal works of the German composer, more than 200 cantatas, a task expected to last more than 20 years.

Moreover, the bank was dedicated to preserving the architectural substance of the town. In 2007, Wegelin paid almost $2 million for a significant part of the late Gothic convent of St. Catherine, a former nunnery with a soaring chapel and vaulted cloister that was in considerable disrepair. It then underwrote a painstaking restoration of the chapel with its 19th-century organ, and other portions of the buildings. The idea was to use them eventually for performances of Bach’s works and other music.

The bank and Mr. Hummler also had close ties to the local business school, and at any given time several dozen students might be employed in its training programs.

Now, all this is jeopardized. Last year, Wegelin was charged in the United States with illegally helping American citizens avoid taxes. Under the shock of these charges, Wegelin was split up and its valuable assets placed with another local bank, Raiffeisen. Its bad assets remained with Wegelin, though its name was changed to Notenstein Privatbank, for a medieval guild in St. Gallen.

Wegelin executives eventually pleaded guilty before a court in New York to helping Americans avoid taxes on $1.2 billion of assets between 2002 and 2010, and agreed to pay restitution and fines of almost $60 million. Entering the plea, one of Mr. Hummler’s closest associates, Otto Bruderer, told the court that Wegelin had always believed it was in compliance with Swiss law, adding that “such conduct was common in the Swiss banking industry.”

The news shook St. Gallen. “It was extremely surprising,” said Leonie Schwendimann, who runs a small bookshop across from St. Laurentius, the Protestant church where Bach concerts sponsored by the bank are occasionally held.

Ms. Schwendimann, who often attended the concerts and was a friend of Rudolf Lutz, the baroque specialist who directed the series, voiced concern for their future. “It would be a great loss,” she said. Of the bank’s disappearance, she added, “You have to take care of your business.”

It seemed only coincidental that posters around town advertised the latest piece at the town theater, a sharp critique of the financial world by the Swiss playwright Urs Widmer titled “The End of Money,” featuring a full-length photograph of a banker with donkey’s ears.

Madeleine Herzog, responsible for culture in the city government, called the bank’s restoration of St. Catherine’s convent “exemplary.” But she was concerned about the future without Wegelin. “It was planned for the buildings to be used for cultural events, but that lies now in the responsibility of the bank’s new owners,” she said. “What their concrete plans are, what the future of the Bach cycle is,” she said, “that is not known.”

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Baby Born with Heart Outside Her Chest Goes Home from Hospital

By Dahvi Shira

01/24/2013 at 06:40 PM EST

Ashley and Audrina Cardenas

Three-month-old Audrina Cardenas is a survivor.

The infant, delivered on Oct. 15 with a rare genetic deformity called "ectopia cordis," was born with part of her heart outside of her body. Following a successful surgery in November, Cardenas finally left the hospital on Wednesday.

At the time of her procedure, the Texas Children's Hospital in Houston released a statement explaining, "A multidisciplinary team of surgeons saved Audrina's life during a miraculous six-hour, open-heart surgery where they reconstructed her chest cavity to make space for the one-third of her heart that was outside of her body."

Cardenas's mother Ashley told ABCNews.com that she knew about her daughter's condition when she was 16 weeks pregnant.

"They gave me the option to terminate the pregnancy [or] continue with the pregnancy and do something called comfort care at the time of delivery, where instead of doing anything painful to her or do surgery, they let you spend as much time with her until she passes, or opt for a high-risk surgery to help repair the heart," Ashley Cardenas said.

Although she's been released from the hospital, Audrina will still be on oxygen and use a feeding tube, according to her mom, who spoke to HLN affiliate KTRK.

With Audrina wearing a pink chest shield made by doctors, Ashley said, "She doesn't have the sternum. She doesn't have anything over her heart besides the skin and a little muscle that they put over, so this is very important for her to wear. Especially for a car seat, the straps go right on her heart, and if she didn't have anything hard, it would damage her heart."

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Penalty could keep smokers out of health overhaul

WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama's health care law, according to experts who are just now teasing out the potential impact of a little-noted provision in the massive legislation.

The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" to its detractors — allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting next Jan. 1.

For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums.

Younger smokers could be charged lower penalties under rules proposed last fall by the Obama administration. But older smokers could face a heavy hit on their household budgets at a time in life when smoking-related illnesses tend to emerge.

Workers covered on the job would be able to avoid tobacco penalties by joining smoking cessation programs, because employer plans operate under different rules. But experts say that option is not guaranteed to smokers trying to purchase coverage individually.

Nearly one of every five U.S. adults smokes. That share is higher among lower-income people, who also are more likely to work in jobs that don't come with health insurance and would therefore depend on the new federal health care law. Smoking increases the risk of developing heart disease, lung problems and cancer, contributing to nearly 450,000 deaths a year.

Insurers won't be allowed to charge more under the overhaul for people who are overweight, or have a health condition like a bad back or a heart that skips beats — but they can charge more if a person smokes.

Starting next Jan. 1, the federal health care law will make it possible for people who can't get coverage now to buy private policies, providing tax credits to keep the premiums affordable. Although the law prohibits insurance companies from turning away the sick, the penalties for smokers could have the same effect in many cases, keeping out potentially costly patients.

"We don't want to create barriers for people to get health care coverage," said California state Assemblyman Richard Pan, who is working on a law in his state that would limit insurers' ability to charge smokers more. The federal law allows states to limit or change the smoking penalty.

"We want people who are smoking to get smoking cessation treatment," added Pan, a pediatrician who represents the Sacramento area.

Obama administration officials declined to be interviewed for this article, but a former consumer protection regulator for the government is raising questions.

"If you are an insurer and there is a group of smokers you don't want in your pool, the ones you really don't want are the ones who have been smoking for 20 or 30 years," said Karen Pollitz, an expert on individual health insurance markets with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. "You would have the flexibility to discourage them."

Several provisions in the federal health care law work together to leave older smokers with a bleak set of financial options, said Pollitz, formerly deputy director of the Office of Consumer Support in the federal Health and Human Services Department.

First, the law allows insurers to charge older adults up to three times as much as their youngest customers.

Second, the law allows insurers to levy the full 50 percent penalty on older smokers while charging less to younger ones.

And finally, government tax credits that will be available to help pay premiums cannot be used to offset the cost of penalties for smokers.

Here's how the math would work:

Take a hypothetical 60-year-old smoker making $35,000 a year. Estimated premiums for coverage in the new private health insurance markets under Obama's law would total $10,172. That person would be eligible for a tax credit that brings the cost down to $3,325.

But the smoking penalty could add $5,086 to the cost. And since federal tax credits can't be used to offset the penalty, the smoker's total cost for health insurance would be $8,411, or 24 percent of income. That's considered unaffordable under the federal law. The numbers were estimated using the online Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator.

"The effect of the smoking (penalty) allowed under the law would be that lower-income smokers could not afford health insurance," said Richard Curtis, president of the Institute for Health Policy Solutions, a nonpartisan research group that called attention to the issue with a study about the potential impact in California.

In today's world, insurers can simply turn down a smoker. Under Obama's overhaul, would they actually charge the full 50 percent? After all, workplace anti-smoking programs that use penalties usually charge far less, maybe $75 or $100 a month.

Robert Laszewski, a consultant who previously worked in the insurance industry, says there's a good reason to charge the maximum.

"If you don't charge the 50 percent, your competitor is going to do it, and you are going to get a disproportionate share of the less-healthy older smokers," said Laszewski. "They are going to have to play defense."

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Online:

Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator — http://healthreform.kff.org/subsidycalculator.aspx

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'California did the impossible,' Brown says in State of the State

SACRAMENTO — Seeking to reclaim the state's identity as an innovator and engine of growth, Gov. Jerry Brown declared in a sweeping State of the State address that "California did the impossible" in emerging from financial crisis poised to lead again.

Brown outlined a vision for the state Thursday in remarks that were equal parts history lesson, lecture and rhetorical flourish. It includes major investment in water and rail systems, more robust trade and an education structure free of regulations that crush creativity.

Invoking California's "spectacular history of bold pioneers meeting every failure with even greater success," he asked a joint session of the Legislature to overhaul the way schools are funded, build a controversial bullet train and aggressively expand healthcare to millions of needy residents.

Californians "have a rendezvous with our own destiny," he said, in an allusion to Franklin Roosevelt's famous Depression-era speech.

At the same time, he sounded the familiar theme that the state should not try to live beyond its means. Drawing on the Book of Genesis, he recounted Pharaoh's dreams of well-fed cows eaten by starving cows — a warning that famine can follow plenty.

"Fiscal discipline is not the enemy of our good intentions but the basis for realizing them," he told an Assembly chamber packed with legislators, state Supreme Court justices and other dignitaries who applauded throughout the 24-minute speech.

Brown plans to take his message to Washington, D.C., next month, when he will attend a meeting of the National Governors Assn., and to China in April, when he leads a state delegation to christen California's new trade office there.

The governor is at a high point in his long political career, presiding over a Capitol now entirely controlled by his Democratic Party and having convinced voters that higher taxes would restore the state's financial footing.

He will have more influence over lawmakers than any governor has had in years. He solved for them their most immediate problem: an out-of-whack budget that has constrained their ambitions and forced them to cut deeply into programs their constituents value.

But despite Brown's proclamations that California no longer has a deficit, the state faces long-term financial problems that could stymie his agenda.

"It was a springtime speech, but California is more likely to be in Indian summer," said John J. Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. "The good economic times are probably temporary."

The governor's budget does not address hundreds of billions of dollars in debt the state has accumulated. And in his speech, Brown acknowledged the cost of healthcare for more Californians, in line with the new federal law that expands coverage next year, is unclear.

"Ignoring such known unknowns would be folly," he said.

In addition, his general call for restraint may collide with plans by legislative leaders to restore sizable programs slashed or eliminated in recent years.

After the speech, state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) seemed eager to do just that.

"If the economy grows, and if there is opportunity, and if there is headroom to restore some of what's been lost, of course we are going to," Steinberg said.

It also remains to be seen whether Brown's alliance with the state's influential teachers unions and other school groups can withstand his proposals to shift resources from wealthier school districts to poorer ones and eliminate or ease some popular state mandates, such as restrictions on class size.

Brown vowed to do away with mandates that inhibit school flexibility and creativity and to shift more control from Sacramento to local districts. He said the system for funding education is "overly complex, bureaucratically driven and deeply inequitable" and called for a new formula that would give a financial boost to districts "based on the real-world problems they face."

He prodded leaders of public colleges and universities to work harder to control costs, graduate students in four years and make it easier for them to transfer from community colleges to universities.

"Tuition increases are not the answer," he said to a standing ovation. "I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities."

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The Making of Yair Lapid, Israel’s New Power Broker

Oliver Weiken/European Pressphoto Agency

Yair Lapid spoke to reporters in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, a day after his centrist party became the second-largest faction in Parliament.

TEL AVIV — They pitched tents along Rothschild Boulevard and took to the streets in unprecedented numbers, hundreds of thousands demonstrating against the rising costs of gas, apartments, even cottage cheese.

Back on the genteel boulevard on Wednesday, many of those middle-class protesters from 2011 said they had taken their grievances to the ballot box the day before, helping to catapult Yair Lapid, a suave, handsome journalist-turned-populist-politician, into Israel’s newest power broker.

“He spoke out the strongest about how everything in this country is upside down,” said Elad Shoshan, 28, who works with computers and rents an apartment on a cheaper street off the boulevard.

Echoing his candidate’s mantra, Roni Klein, 52, an accountant, said, “My wife and I work, and still it is very hard for us to finish the month.”

Mr. Lapid’s new, centrist Yesh Atid party shocked the political establishment by winning 19 of Parliament’s 120 seats, becoming Israel’s second-largest faction and a crucial partner for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose relatively poor showing left him scrambling to form a stable coalition.

While Mr. Netanyahu remains all but assured of serving a third term — Mr. Lapid said Wednesday that he would not unite with Arab lawmakers to stop him — Yesh Atid’s ascendance promises to shift the government’s focus to pocketbook concerns despite the pressing foreign policy issues Israel faces.

Mr. Lapid’s campaign hardly challenged Mr. Netanyahu’s policies on the Iranian nuclear threat, the tumult in the Arab world or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was the first election in memory in which such existential security issues were not emphasized, as a growing majority of Israelis see them as too tough to tackle. Even Mr. Netanyahu barely spoke about Iran, his raison d’être.

Instead, voters and analysts alike said Mr. Lapid had captured the hearts of Israel’s silent majority with his personal charm and a positive, inclusive message that harnessed the everyday frustrations that fueled the huge social justice protests in 2011.

One pollster found that about 40 percent of Mr. Lapid’s supporters defined themselves as right-leaning, and in Israel’s coalition system, many saw his success as a tactical move by voters not to oust Mr. Netanyahu but to nudge him to broaden the agenda.

On Wednesday, the prime minister embraced Mr. Lapid’s platform, promising a government “as broad as possible” that would bring change on three fronts: affordable housing, government reform and forcing ultra-Orthodox Jews to “share the burden” of military service and taxes.

Some saw the results as a victory for secular Jews at a time of conflict with the ultra-Orthodox over resources and religious pluralism. Mr. Lapid’s stronghold was here in coastal Tel Aviv and its bourgeois suburbs, where he won about 1 in 4 votes cast, and Modiin, a fast-growing bedroom community halfway between here and Jerusalem.

Tamar Hermann, a political scientist and vice president of Israel’s Open University, called Mr. Lapid “the epitome of the Israeli dream” and described his voters as “the mainstream of the mainstream.”

“This is the kind of voting you can take your kids to and teach them a lesson in civic fulfillment without taking any risks,” Professor Hermann said. “They are complaining, but this is a kind of the zeitgeist, not real agony, not real suffering, not real dissatisfaction with the basic cornerstone of the system. It’s just polishing here and there.”

The election results were widely seen as a rebuke to the status quo, but not necessarily a call for change in approach to contentious questions like what to do about the Palestinians. While Mr. Lapid has called for a return to negotiations, he shares Mr. Netanyahu’s skepticism about the lack of a partner, saying this week, “I don’t think the Arabs want peace.” He opposes division of Jerusalem and made his foreign policy speech in Ariel, a sprawling Jewish settlement 12 miles into the West Bank that the Palestinians see as problematic for the viability of their state.

“The majority of Israelis came to the conclusion that there will be no new Middle East,” Mr. Lapid said over cappuccino here last month. “What we want is not a happy marriage, but a decent divorce.”

Instead, the change voters were seeking was more about the nature of politics itself.

Irit Pazner Garshowitz contributed reporting.

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Women have caught up to men on lung cancer risk

Smoke like a man, die like a man.

U.S. women who smoke today have a much greater risk of dying from lung cancer than they did decades ago, partly because they are starting younger and smoking more — that is, they are lighting up like men, new research shows.

Women also have caught up with men in their risk of dying from smoking-related illnesses. Lung cancer risk leveled off in the 1980s for men but is still rising for women.

"It's a massive failure in prevention," said one study leader, Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. And it's likely to repeat itself in places like China and Indonesia where smoking is growing, he said. About 1.3 billion people worldwide smoke.

The research is in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. It is one of the most comprehensive looks ever at long-term trends in the effects of smoking and includes the first generation of U.S. women who started early in life and continued for decades, long enough for health effects to show up.

The U.S. has more than 35 million smokers — about 20 percent of men and 18 percent of women. The percentage of people who smoke is far lower than it used to be; rates peaked around 1960 in men and two decades later in women.

Researchers wanted to know if smoking is still as deadly as it was in the 1980s, given that cigarettes have changed (less tar), many smokers have quit, and treatments for many smoking-related diseases have improved.

They also wanted to know more about smoking and women. The famous surgeon general's report in 1964 said smoking could cause lung cancer in men, but evidence was lacking in women at the time since relatively few of them had smoked long enough.

One study, led by Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto, looked at about 217,000 Americans in federal health surveys between 1997 and 2004.

A second study, led by Thun, tracked smoking-related deaths through three periods — 1959-65, 1982-88 and 2000-10 — using seven large population health surveys covering more than 2.2 million people.

Among the findings:

— The risk of dying of lung cancer was more than 25 times higher for female smokers in recent years than for women who never smoked. In the 1960s, it was only three times higher. One reason: After World War II, women started taking up the habit at a younger age and began smoking more.

—A person who never smoked was about twice as likely as a current smoker to live to age 80. For women, the chances of surviving that long were 70 percent for those who never smoked and 38 percent for smokers. In men, the numbers were 61 percent and 26 percent.

—Smokers in the U.S. are three times more likely to die between ages 25 and 79 than non-smokers are. About 60 percent of those deaths are attributable to smoking.

—Women are far less likely to quit smoking than men are. Among people 65 to 69, the ratio of former to current smokers is 4-to-1 for men and 2-to-1 for women.

—Smoking shaves more than 10 years off the average life span, but quitting at any age buys time. Quitting by age 40 avoids nearly all the excess risk of death from smoking. Men and women who quit when they were 25 to 34 years old gained 10 years; stopping at ages 35 to 44 gained 9 years; at ages 45 to 54, six years; at ages 55 to 64, four years.

—The risk of dying from other lung diseases such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis is rising in men and women, and the rise in men is a surprise because their lung cancer risk leveled off in 1980s.

Changes in cigarettes since the 1960s are a "plausible explanation" for the rise in non-cancer lung deaths, researchers write. Most smokers switched to cigarettes that were lower in tar and nicotine as measured by tests with machines, "but smokers inhaled more deeply to get the nicotine they were used to," Thun said. Deeper inhalation is consistent with the kind of lung damage seen in the illnesses that are rising, he said.

Scientists have made scant progress against lung cancer compared with other forms of the disease, and it remains the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. More than 160,000 people die of it in the U.S. each year.

The federal government, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the cancer society and several universities paid for the new studies. Thun testified against tobacco companies in class-action lawsuits challenging the supposed benefits of cigarettes with reduced tar and nicotine, but he donated his payment to the cancer society.

Smoking needs more attention as a health hazard, Dr. Steven A. Schroeder of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a commentary in the journal.

"More women die of lung cancer than of breast cancer. But there is no 'race for the cure' for lung cancer, no brown ribbon" or high-profile advocacy groups for lung cancer, he wrote.

Kathy DeJoseph, 62, of suburban Atlanta, finally quit smoking after 40 years — to qualify for lung cancer surgery last year.

"I tried everything that came along, I just never could do it," even while having chemotherapy, she said.

It's a powerful addiction, she said: "I still every day have to resist wanting to go buy a pack."

___

Online:

American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org

National Cancer Institute: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/tobacco/smoking and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/lung

Medical journal: http://www.nejm.org

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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As Bell corruption trial nears, city faces uncertain future

When Doug Willmore became Bell's city manager last June, one of his first questions was about the padded black chair behind his desk. Had it been occupied by the man he was replacing, Robert Rizzo?

No. To his relief, that one had been chucked.

"I'd sit on a folding chair instead of his chair, or a stool," Willmore said.

In the seat of power for 17 years, Rizzo became the face of a salary scandal in 2010 that sent the city to the edge of insolvency. Bell, just 2½ square miles in southeast Los Angeles County, became the butt of jokes everywhere and a rallying cry for reformers.

Now, six former Bell council members are facing trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court on corruption charges related to their lavish compensation during Rizzo's reign as city administrator. The council members made $100,000, mostly for sitting on boards that rarely, if ever, met.

The trial is expected to bring new attention to a scandal that former Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley famously described as "corruption on steroids." But there has been significantly less focus on the small city's slow recovery from the scandal.

"Everybody suspected that the city of Bell would go under immediately, but we haven't two years later," said Ana Maria Quintana, a councilwoman who won office in the wake of the revelations.

The city's general fund has been slashed to $12 million from $16 million, largely because a handful of highly paid employees are now gone, and the budget is balanced. Council meetings are streamed online in a city where the workings of government were once opaque. The city has cut fees for trash pickup, building permits and business licenses that had ballooned under Rizzo.

But it is too soon to tell how well the city will ultimately emerge from the scandal. It faces a tangle of scandal-related lawsuits, with $1.5 million in legal fees a year, and the possibility of fiscal calamity.

"If all the litigation stuff were solved today, I'd tell you Bell has a bright future, and we can pay our bills," said Willmore, who estimates he spends a third of his time on lawsuits. "There are all these things that could happen that could bankrupt the city."

Among the worries, he said, is that Bell will be made to pay the legal fees of the former city leaders, who claim the city should foot the bill because their alleged misdeeds occurred as part of their official duties.

"That's probably $5 million easily," Willmore said.

Rizzo and the other officials have pleaded not guilty and deny any wrongdoing. James Spertus, Rizzo's attorney, described his client as "a good administrator who turned the city around," and attributed its financial woes to a bad economy. He said the city has refused to negotiate on Rizzo's legal fees.

"The public outrage creates a political environment where they can't compromise [on] anything, and that's economic disaster," Spertus said. "The city should be trying to conserve resources, heal and move forward."

Willmore said that when he arrived, the city hadn't reconciled a bank statement in two years. "Under Rizzo, the lack of accounting was just staggering," he said. "I've inherited scandals before, but certainly nothing like this." He said the city's handbook of ethics policies — which new employees are given — still bore Rizzo's name when he took office. He quickly changed that.

The city is also posting its audits online. The most recent, for the fiscal year that ended in June 2010, found widespread flaws in the city's financial bookkeeping under Rizzo, with shoddy documentation and a lack of clear policies regarding license fees and loans to employees.

Bell still has the second-highest property tax in Los Angeles County, after only Beverly Hills, and a 10% utility tax, about twice that of most cities.

In contrast to Rizzo, who made a salary of $800,000, Willmore earns $175,000 for the same job — now making him the city's highest-paid employee.

Drive the city's main streets — Gage, Florence and Atlantic avenues — and the sight of boarded-up storefronts is a common one. Willmore attributes that in part to the way Rizzo allegedly squeezed local businesses for fees. For years, the Chamber of Commerce was perceived as a bloc of Rizzo stooges and received $7,000-a-month payments from the city — a practice Willmore said he hasn't seen elsewhere. The new City Council has stopped the payments.

Jose Vazquez, a tire shop owner and head of the Bell Business Assn. — formed because the Chamber of Commerce was so distrusted — said the atmosphere for businesspeople is "100% better" than it was.

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Exit Polls in Israel Suggest Netanyahu’s Showing Is Weaker Than Expected

Pool photo by Uriel Sinai

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel touched the Western Wall on Tuesday in Jerusalem.

TEL AVIV — A weakened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged Wednesday from Israel’s national election likely to serve a third term, according to preliminary results and political analysts after voters on Tuesday gave a surprising second place to a new centrist party founded by a television celebrity who emphasized kitchen-table issues like class size and apartment prices.

Baz Ratner/Reuters

A polling station on Tuesday in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Elon Moreh, near Nablus.

For Mr. Netanyahu, who entered the race an overwhelming favorite with no obvious challenger, the outcome was a humbling rebuke as his ticket lost seats in the new Parliament. Overall, the prime minister’s conservative team came in first, but it was the center, led by the political novice Yair Lapid, 49, that emerged newly invigorated, suggesting that at the very least Israel’s rightward tilt may be stalled.

Mr. Lapid, a telegenic celebrity whose father made a splash with his own short-lived centrist party a decade ago, based his campaign on issues that resonated with the middle class, including the need to integrate the ultra-Orthodox into the army and the work force.

Perhaps as important, he also avoided antagonizing the right, having not emphasized traditional issues of the left, like the peace process. Like a large majority of the Israeli public, he supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but is skeptical of the Palestinian leadership’s willingness to negotiate seriously; he has called for a return to peace talks but has not made it a priority.

On Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu implored his supporters to turn out, reading signs that voters were not embracing his message of security and his party’s conservative agenda. The day ended with Mr. Netanyahu reaching out again —this time to Mr. Lapid, offering to work with Israel’s newest kingmaker as part of the “broadest coalition possible.”

Israel’s political hierarchy is only partly determined during an election. The next stage, when factions try to build a majority coalition, decides who will rule, how they will rule and for how long. While Mr. Lapid has signaled a willingness to work with Mr. Netanyahu, the ultimate coalition may bring together parties with such different ideologies and agendas that the result is neither a shift to the right nor the left, but paralysis.

Still, for the center, it was a time of celebration.

“The citizens of Israel today said no to politics of fear and hatred,” Mr. Lapid told an upscale crowd of supporters that had welcomed him with drums, dancing and popping Champagne corks. “They said no to the possibility that we might splinter off into sectors, and groups and tribes and narrow interest groups. They said no to extremists, and they said no to antidemocratic behavior.”

With three-quarters of the votes counted by 3 a.m. Wednesday, Israel Radio reported that Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud-Beiteinu ticket was poised to take 31 of Parliament’s 120 seats, with Mr. Lapid’s party, There Is a Future, coming in second with 19, far more than polls had predicted. The right wing and religious parties that make up Mr. Netanyahu’s current coalition garnered a thin majority of perhaps 62 seats, pushing him to try to join with Mr. Lapid instead and possibly embrace other center and left-leaning groups. Labor took 15 seats in early returns and Jewish Home, a new religious-nationalist party, 11

The prime minister called Mr. Lapid shortly after the polls closed at 10 p.m. Tuesday and, according to Israeli television reports, told him that they had great things to do together for the country. In his speech to a rowdy crowd of supporters here Wednesday morning, he said, “I see many partners.”

Mr. Lapid said he was open to working with Mr. Netanyahu, saying the only way to face Israel’s challenges was “together.” But he added: “What is good for Israel is not in the possession of the right, and nor is it in the possession of the left. It lies in the possibility of creating here a real and decent center.”

The results were a blow to the prime minister, whose aggressive push to expand Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank has led to international condemnation and strained relations with Washington. The support for Mr. Lapid and the left-leaning Labor Party showed voters responded strongly to an emphasis on domestic, socioeconomic issues that brought 500,000 people to the streets of Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011.

Jodi Rudoren reported from Tel Aviv, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

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Google’s fourth quarter results shine after ad rate decline slows

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Revenue from Google Inc’s core Internet business outpaced many analysts’ expectations during the crucial holiday quarter and advertising rates fell less than in previous periods, pushing its shares up more than 4 percent.

The world’s largest Internet search company introduced new product listings during the fourth quarter – typically its strongest – and also benefited from business growth in international markets, analysts said.

Excluding traffic-acquisition costs, the business generated net revenue of $ 9.83 billion, up from $ 8.13 billion a year earlier, Google reported on Tuesday. That surpassed a $ 9.6 billion average forecast from six analysts polled by Reuters.

“Business looked really strong, especially from a profitability perspective. They really grew their margins in the core business,” said Sameet Sinha, an analyst with B. Riley Caris. “Most of that strength seems to be coming from international markets which grew revenues quite substantially: up 23 percent year over year, versus the 15 percent growth in the third quarter.”

Average cost-per-click, a critical metric that denotes the price advertisers pay Google, declined 6 percent from a year ago, the fifth consecutive quarter of decline.

Google executives told analysts on a conference call that the company had focused on improving the metric – shoring up margins – while lowering the overall growth rate of paid clicks in the holiday quarter.

“Click prices are still declining, but it’s better than expected,” said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.

MOTOROLA MOBILITY “STILL LOSING MONEY”

Consolidated net income in the fourth quarter was $ 2.89 billion or $ 8.62 per share, compared with $ 2.71 billion, or $ 8.22 per share, in the year-ago period when Google had not yet acquired Motorola.

Excluding certain items, Google said it earned $ 10.65 per share in the fourth quarter.

“The core business is a great business and the fourth-quarter is always a time for Google to shine. However, Motorola is still losing money and click rates still declined. They only declined 6 percent, but go back four or five quarters and click prices were improving. So mobile is still pressuring click prices,” Gillis said.

The company posted consolidated revenue – which includes its Motorola Mobility mobile phone business but not the television set-top box business it recently agreed to sell – of $ 14.42 billion on Tuesday.

Motorola Mobility had an operating loss of $ 353 million during the quarter.

Shares of Google were up roughly 4.5 percent at $ 734.46 in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Bernard Orr)

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PEOPLE's Music Critic: Why We're Upset About Beyoncé's Lip-Synching Drama

By Chuck Arnold

01/22/2013 at 08:40 PM EST

Did she lip-synch or didn't she?

That's the question surrounding Beyoncé after reports surfaced that she didn't sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" live at yesterday's presidential inauguration.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marine Band, which backed the pop diva at the ceremony, said Tuesday that Mrs. Jay-Z decided to use a previously recorded vocal track before delivering the national anthem, but later on another spokesperson, this one for the Pentagon, said there was no way of knowing whether the 16-time Grammy winner was guilty of lip-synching or not.

Should it matter? Let's remember that Whitney Houston, in what is widely considered one of the best renditions of "The Star-Spangled Banner" of all time, didn't sing it live either at the 1991 Super Bowl.

There are all sorts of technical reasons why it can be challenging to perform a song as difficult as this on such a large scale, and there are many extenuating circumstances that could have played a role in any decision to lip-synch. Certainly no one is questioning whether Beyoncé – who, in removing her earpiece midway through, may have been experiencing audio problems – has the chops to sing it.

Lip-synching – or at least singing over pre-recorded vocal tracks – has long been acceptable for dance-driven artists like Madonna, Janet Jackson and Britney Spears, whose emphasis on intense, intricate choreography makes it hard to execute the moves fans have come to expect while also singing live. Huffing and puffing into the microphone or barely projecting for the sake of keeping it real just isn't gonna cut it. Of course, there have been other instances – such as Ashlee Simpson's 2004 Saturday Night Live debacle – where faking it crossed the line.

Surely there wouldn't be the same controversy about Beyoncé had she been hoofing across the stage performing "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" on one of her tour stops. But this was the presidential inauguration, the national anthem, and there was no choreography involved.

Some things have to remain sacred, and for "the land of the free and the home of the brave," this was one of them.

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Flu season fuels debate over paid sick time laws

NEW YORK (AP) — Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.

A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.

"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.

An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for a third of civilian workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.

Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.

Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.

The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.

Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.

But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.

Michael Sinensky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."

"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinensky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.

Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.

To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.

"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.

Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.

In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.

The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.

Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.

While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.

"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."

___

Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.

___

Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

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Years after bond's passage, no start on new Sierra Madre school

The summer before Kenna Castillo started sixth grade at Sierra Madre Middle School, education officials ordered demolition of the aging campus to make way for a brand-new school.

More than 2 1/2 years later, construction has yet to start, and Kenna is wrapping up eighth grade in a hodgepodge of trailers on a dirt lot.

On Tuesday, Pasadena Unified school board members ordered yet another delay for the rebirth of Sierra Madre Middle School after bids for the $22.5-million project came in nearly $9 million over budget.

That has Kenna's mom doubting that even her fifth-grade son will be able to enjoy the school her daughter was promised.

"I'm not holding my breath. For most of us working to get this school built, our kids aren't going to see it," said Melissa Castillo, an organizer and past president of Sierra Madre's PTA.

But school officials say construction will break ground later this year, after a new call for bids on a plan that incorporates cost-cutting design adjustments goes out to a wider pool of contractors in April. The initial request for proposals attracted just six bids from eight general contractors who were pre-qualified for major construction projects.

"We are totally committed to building this school," school board President Renatta Cooper said. "I'm sorry as can be that the middle school has taken so long to build, but we can't afford to spend more on it than it should cost. We have to be wise fiscal stewards."

Plans for the Sierra Madre campus include the construction of 22 classrooms, two science labs and a computer lab, as well as a new gym, library, cafeteria and parking area.

The renovation effort is one of 28 projects funded by the $350-million Measure TT school bond approved by voters in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre in 2008.

Troubles at Sierra Madre Middle School began in July 2010 with demolition of the old campus before California's Division of the State Architect had issued approvals for new buildings.

Cooper said former Pasadena Unified supervisors had sold school board members on an early demolition under the pretense that they could save money by using workers already engaged in other district construction projects.

A year later, Pasadena officials were accusing the Division of the State Architect, which must sign off on all public school construction plans, of dragging out the approval process.

The agency countered that state workers were waiting on Pasadena to submit design changes needed to meet regulations. Local officials denied that any design changes were needed at that time.

Plans for the campus weren't approved until fall 2012, school district Chief Finance Officer John Pappalardo said.

Pappalardo took charge of Measure TT projects last month after board members placed the district's chief facilities officer on leave and suspended a pact with a contractor overseeing some work pending an investigation into the use of bond funds.

Officials have declined to specify the nature of the investigation, which is ongoing.

Staff upheaval and budget reductions for most bond-funded projects, meanwhile, have some Sierra Madre parents accusing officials of delaying construction until they can cancel the project by claiming lack of funds.

That's what happened to Blair Middle School, which the school district demolished in 2005 and failed to rebuild before exhausting a $240-million bond approved in 1997. The new Blair campus was built later using Measure TT proceeds.

Pappalardo said about $111 million has been spent on or committed to school renovations under the current bond program, with some $274 million in Measure TT proceeds and other construction funding still left in the pipeline.

joe.piasecki@latimes.com

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Euro Official, in New Role, Aims to Mend Rift Over Austerity

BRUSSELS — Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the newly elected president of the group of ministers overseeing the euro, said on Monday he wanted to heal the rift over austerity policies that had bred mistrust between southern and northern nations using the currency.

Mr. Dijsselbloem, 46, the Dutch finance minister, also said he wanted to improve the stature of the group, and the image of the currency, after three years of near-constant crises and moments of deep division.

The only opposition during the vote to elect Mr. Dijsselbloem, held late Monday, came from Luis de Guindos, the Spanish economy minister. Mr. Dijsselbloem, whose term lasts two-and-a-half years, told a news conference that Mr. de Guindos offered no explanation for the decision but he said the Spanish move should not “lead to dramatic consequences.”

Spain is among the countries in southern Europe to have been hardest hit by the austerity policies that northern nations like Finland, Germany and the Netherlands have insisted on as an important solution to the euro crisis.

Spanish officials have been irritated by the preponderance of representatives from so-called Triple-A rated countries, which pay less to borrow than countries with weaker ratings, in top economy jobs in Europe. Spanish officials were particularly angered by a decision last year not to select a Spaniard for a seat on the executive board of the European Central Bank.

In a sign of his concern about fractures in the euro zone, Mr. Dijsselbloem pledged to do what he could to assuage those tensions in his new role coordinating meetings of finance ministers when they make decisions like giving political approval for bailouts and pressing governments to shore up their finances.

“If we are going to approach the euro zone and the euro area as a zone with a harsh line in the middle between Triple-A and non-Triple-A, between the north and the south, there’s no way we’re going to move forward and no way are we going to reach decisions that are so much needed,” Mr. Dijsselbloem said. “So that will definitely not be my approach,” he said.

The French also had concerns about putting a representative from the Netherlands in charge of the group and they insisted that Mr. Dijsselbloem explain to the other 16 finance ministers in the Eurogroup how he intended to carry out the job before the vote was held.

But the French finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, told a news conference that he was satisfied with the outcome because he expected Mr. Dijsselbloem to act fairly. “It’s a Dutchman who is president; it’s not a Dutch presidency,” Mr. Moscovici said.

Mr. Moscovici said he expected other top finance jobs, including the job of overseeing a new banking supervisor based at the European Central Bank, would be allocated to French candidates. But he insisted that was not a reason he voted in favor of Mr. Dijsselbloem’s appointment.

Allies of Mr. Dijsselbloem also have sought to ease fears that his presidency would be divisive, saying that his membership of a left-leaning social democratic party could help him mediate between nations like France with different views to many in the Netherlands on how to stabilize the euro.

“Jeroen should be able, within financial sound limits, to bridge the debate between those who criticize budget cuts and those who emphasize the need to enforce the treaties on budgetary controls,” Thijs Berman, the leader of the Dutch social democrats in the European Parliament, said Monday.

Another goal of Mr. Dijsselbloem is to reform the way the group operates to cut down on the need for emergency sessions and all-night meetings.

In a letter sent to ministers on the eve of the vote, Mr. Dijsselbloem suggested that the group hash out their views in “discussion papers” to make decision-making smoother. He also said he wanted a “clear mandate” to represent the Eurogroup “on an international stage,” including at Group of 20 meetings and in international financial institutions.

“Our focus needs to shift from crisis management to delivering and implementing sound medium-term policies,” Mr. Dijsselbloem said in his letter to ministers.

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Sony to sell new Xperia tablet in Japan: Nikkei

(Reuters) – Sony Corp’s Sony Mobile Communications Inc said it will sell the new version of its Xperia tablet in Japan this spring, the Nikkei reported, citing Kyodo News.

The Xperia Tablet Z, whose price has not been announced, has a 10.1-inch display, is 6.9 mm thin and weighs 495 grams, according to the company’s website.

Rival Google Inc’s Nexus 10 tablet is 8.9 mm thick, while Apple Inc’s iPad mini measures 7.9 mm.

Sony halted sales of Xperia in October, a month after launch, after discovering gaps between the screen and the case that made some of the machines susceptible to water damage.

The Nikkei reported on Sunday that Japanese smartphone makers seem to be regaining some market share they lost to companies like Apple and Samsung Electronics Co.

(Reporting by Krithika Krishnamurthy in Bangalore; Editing by Joyjeet Das)

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