North Korea plans long-range rocket launch

BEIJING -- North Korea announced Saturday that it will send a long-range rocket into space this month, trying to make up for a public-relations disaster in April when a much-hyped launch failed.

In the announcement attributed to a spokesman for the Korean Committee for Space Technology, North Korea said the rocket would carry a "polar-orbiting Earth observation satellite" for "peaceful scientific and technological" purposes.

Nonetheless, the launch is seen as a defiant move for an impoverished country that is already subject to a U.S. ban from developing nuclear and missile technology.

PHOTOS: North Korea's April launch preparations

The timing -- between Dec. 10 and 22, according to the announcement -- coincides with several sensitive dates on the Korean calendar.

On Dec. 19 there is a closely contested presidential election in archrival South Korea that could be swayed by the rocket launch. Perhaps more important on the North Korean calendar, Dec. 17 marks the one-year anniversary of the death of longtime leader Kim Jong Il, who is believed to have ordered the launch.

A successful launch is also seen as key to establishing the legitimacy of successor Kim Jong Un, the late dictator’s son who is still in his 20s.

North Korea had been in the midst of a propaganda campaign, claiming that it would become a "strong and prosperous nation" by 2012, which happens to be the centennial of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the dynasty’s founder.

PHOTOS: Rare glimpse of North Korea

"It seems like they are trying to keep up with their declaration that the year 2012 will be the first year of  'strong and prosperous nation,'" said Koh Yoo-hwan, North Korean studies professor at South Korea’s Dongguk University. "Because that had failed, they will try and finish the project within this year."

The earlier launch was an embarrassment for the regime, which had invited foreign television crews into North Korea to publicize the feat. But the rocket flew for less than two minutes before splashing into the Yellow Sea, close enough to South Korea that its intelligence services were able to recover pieces to analyze.

"The purpose of a rocket launch is for domestic politics," said another South Korean specialist, Baek Seung-joo at Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. "This is their chance to recover from embarrassment in April, and also to strengthen the Kim Jong Un-centered leadership."

In the announcement, North Korea said the satellite, known as Kwangmyongsong-3, meaning "bright star," had been "manufactured by its own efforts and with its own technology, true to the behests of leader Kim Jong Il."

"Scientists and technicians of the DPRK  [North Korea] analyzed the mistakes that were made during the previous April launch and deepened the work of improving the reliability and precision of the satellite and carrier rocket, thereby rounding off the preparations to launch," the statement read.

The April launch was the third attempt for North Korea, the last two having taken place in 1998 and 2009. This launch, like the attempt in April, is to take place from the Sohae military installation on the country’s west coast near the border with China, and is probably headed south toward the Philippines. The 1998 and 2009 launches, directed to the east, caused great consternation in Japan.

Technologically, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile or satellite is essentially the same, with the main difference being what the rocket is carrying. The fact that North Korea is simultaneously developing nuclear weapons has raised fears that eventually the United States could be within its range.

South Korea's first rocket from its own territory, Naro-1, was scheduled to launch Thursday, but was delayed until next year because of technical problems.

In a statement, the South Korean foreign ministry said Thursday that the North's planned launch is "a grave provocation and a head-on challenge to the international community."

The North Korean statement was not a surprise because satellite intelligence released in recent days showed a movement of trucks around the launch site, according to 38 North, a think tank affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.

"If Pyongyang follows past practice in preparing for a launch, it could be ready to fire a rocket as early as the end of the first week in December," 38 North said in the report released Wednesday.

Demick reported from Beijing and Choi from Seoul.

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Glen Campbell considering more live shows in 2013

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Glen Campbell may be wrapping up a goodbye tour but that doesn’t mean he’s done with the stage.

Campbell is considering scheduling more shows next year after playing more than 120 dates in 2012.

The 76-year-old singer has Alzheimer’s disease and has begun to lose his memory. He put out his final studio album, “Ghost on the Canvas,” in 2011 and embarked on the tour with family members and close friends serving in his band and staffing the tour.

Campbell’s longtime manager Stan Schneider said in a phone interview from Napa, Calif., where the tour wrapped for the year Friday night, that recent West Coast shows have been some of the singer’s strongest. Campbell will break for the holidays and if he still feels strong he’ll begin scheduling more shows.

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Online:

http://glencampbellmusic.com

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Small union is causing big problems for ports

The small band of strikers that has effectively shut down the nation's busiest shipping complex forced two huge cargo ships to head for other ports Thursday and kept at least three others away, hobbling an economic powerhouse in Southern California.

The disruption is costing an estimated $1 billion a day at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, on which some 600,000 truckers, dockworkers, trading companies and others depend for their livelihoods.

"The longer it goes, the more the impacts increase," said Paul Bingham, an economist with infrastructure consulting firm CDM Smith. "Retailers will have stock outages, lost sales for products not delivered. There will be shutdowns in factories, in manufacturing when they run out of parts."

Despite the union's size — about 800 members of a unit of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union — it has managed to flex big muscles. Unlike almost anywhere else in the nation, union loyalty is strong at the country's ports. Neither the longshoremen nor the truckers are crossing the tiny union's picket lines.

The strike started at the L.A. port's largest terminal Tuesday and spread Wednesday to 10 of the two ports' 14 cargo terminals. These resemble seaside parking lots where long metal containers are loaded and unloaded with the help of giant cranes.

The union contends that the dispute is over job security and the transfer of work from higher-paid union members to lower-paid employees in other countries. The 14-employer management group says that no jobs have been outsourced and that the union wants to continue a practice called "featherbedding," or bringing in temporary workers even when there is no work.

The two sides haven't met since negotiations broke down Monday, but they were scheduled to begin talking again Thursday night. The union has worked without a contract for 21/2 years.

The clerical workers are a vital link in the supply chain. They handle the immense flow of information that accompanies each cargo ship as well as every item in the freight. One shipload of shoes, toys and other products is enough to fill five warehouses.

Logistics clerk Trinie Thompson, 41, normally spends her days working with railroad lines and trucking companies to ensure that the right containers are sent along to their proper destinations. On Thursday, she was walking the picket lines at the docks.

"We will be setting up trains to Houston, trains to Dallas, to Chicago, to the Pacific Northwest," said Thompson, who has worked for 10 years for Eagle Marine Services terminal, which is affiliated with the giant APL shipping line.

"For a typical container ship, we will have to set up multiple trains. We might be sending 200 to 300 containers to Chicago alone, and there will be paperwork for all of them."

The strike comes at a time of simmering labor unrest at other U.S. ports, underscoring the unusual power labor holds in maritime trade.

On the East Coast and Gulf Coast, another group of shipping lines and terminal operators called the United States Maritime Alliance has repeatedly failed to reach agreement on a new labor contract with the International Longshoremen's Assn. A strike that might have involved dozens of ports was avoided only after both sides agreed to extend negotiations past the September end of their current contract.

A strike also was narrowly avoided at Portland, Ore., only a few days ago in a dispute between grain shippers and union workers.

Operations at Oakland International Airport and at the Port of Oakland, the third-largest port in the state behind Los Angeles and Long Beach, were affected by a brief strike this month.

Maritime unions "have successfully organized one of the most vital links in the supply chain, and it's a tradition they nurture with all of their younger workers," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a UC Santa Barbara history professor and workplace expert. "They have a very strong ideological sense of who they are, and for now they are strong."

In Los Angeles and Long Beach, the 800 clerical workers have been able to shut down most of the ports because the 10,000-member dockworkers union is honoring the picket lines. Work continues at only four cargo terminals, where the office clerical unit has no workers.

"Longshoremen stand up when other workers need our help," said Ray Ortiz Jr., a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's Coast Committee. "Sure, it's a sacrifice to give up a paycheck when you refuse to cross the picket line, but we believe it's in the long-term interest of the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor area to retain these good local jobs."

Stephen Berry, lead negotiator for the shipping lines and cargo terminals, said the clerical workers have been offered a deal that includes "absolute job security," a raise that would take average annual pay to $195,000 from $165,000, 11 weeks' paid vacation and a generous pension increase.

At a news conference Thursday, Berry denounced the tactics by the clerical workers, calling them "irresponsible."

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Producer sues Pythons over ‘Spamalot’ royalties

LONDON (AP) — It’s no joking matter.

A producer of the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is suing the British comedy troupe over royalties from the hit stage musical “Spamalot.”

Producer Mark Forstater wants a bigger share of proceeds from the show, which is based on the Pythons’ 1975 movie spoof of the legend of King Arthur.

Lawyers for Monty Python are contesting Forstater’s claim and will present their arguments later. Python members Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones will give evidence during a five-day hearing that began Friday at London’s High Court.

Forstater is suing the trio and the two other surviving Python members, John Cleese and Terry Gilliam. The sixth member of the troupe, Graham Chapman, died in 1989.

Forstater’s lawyer, Tom Weisselberg, said that under an agreement made when the film was produced, “for financial purposes Mr. Forstater was to be treated as the seventh Python” and entitled to the same share of “Holy Grail” merchandising and spin-off income as the other members.

But the lawyer said Forstater had not received his fair share of royalties from the stage show, which has been a hit around the world. It ran on Broadway for almost four years to 2009 and is still playing in London’s West End.

Weisselberg said Forstater, who was declared bankrupt earlier this year, had been forced to go to court because of his “difficult financial circumstances.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ranbaxy, a Generic Drug Maker, Stops Making Cholesterol Pill

Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals, the largest producer of the generic version of Lipitor, has halted production of the drug until it can figure out why glass particles may have ended up in pills that were distributed to the public, the Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday.

The agency said it had not received any reports of patients being harmed by the particles, which are about the size of a grain of sand. Earlier this month, Ranbaxy recalled more than 40 lots of the drug because of the glass contamination.

The company has declined to say where the drug was manufactured or why the problem occurred, but a spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said Thursday that the company would stop making the pill’s active ingredient, which is made in India, until the investigation is completed.

The contamination was the latest episode in a history of manufacturing lapses at Ranbaxy, which is a subsidiary of the Japanese pharmaceutical company Daiichi Sankyo. The company has been operating under a court-ordered consent decree since January, one that federal authorities have called “unprecedented in scope,” after they identified a host of manufacturing problems at the company’s plants in India and the United States, and concluded that Ranbaxy had submitted false data in drug applications to the F.D.A..

The decree prevents Ranbaxy from manufacturing drugs at its most troubled facilities until it can show it is meeting United States standards, although it was allowed to continue making products — including the generic version of Lipitor — at other plants.

The F.D.A. spokeswoman, Sarah Clark-Lynn, said the affected lots were not made at “the same facilities whose conduct gave rise to the consent decree.” Nonetheless, she said in an e-mail Monday, “the consent decree provides the F.D.A. with additional tools to address violations for other Ranbaxy facilities.”

A spokesman for Ranbaxy declined to comment beyond an informational statement on the company’s Web site.

Some drug manufacturing experts said Ranbaxy’s latest troubles highlight the disparities in oversight of plants in the United States versus those overseas. “I have pretty good faith in companies and plants that make drugs in this country because I know from my own experience that they try to do a good job,” said Prabir K. Basu, executive director of the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Technology and Education, who previously worked in manufacturing and global outsourcing for pharmaceutical companies, including Searle and Pharmacia. “But my confidence is not that high when we are getting products from outside the country.”

He pointed to studies that have shown the F.D.A. inspects foreign generic manufacturing plants about once every seven to 13 years, compared with once every two years for domestic manufacturers. A law passed over the summer will eventually require the F.D.A. to apply the same standards when inspecting all manufacturing plants, regardless of which country they’re in.

Allan Coukell, director of medical programs at the Pew Health Group and an expert on drug safety, said the new law would level what he described as an uneven playing field, but “it’s incumbent on F.D.A. to hire the staff and to make the shift to a risk-based inspection system.” Under the law, fees collected from generic manufacturers will help pay for more inspectors.

Mr. Basu said the law, called the Generic Drug User Fee Amendments of 2012 and known as Gdufa (Gah-doofuh) was a step in the right direction, but fixing the problem would require more than simply hiring more people. “This is a very difficult and complex system, and how do we ensure the integrity of this supply chain?” he said. “I don’t know how much Gdufa will help.”

Ranbaxy has held a significant share of the market for generic Lipitor, also known as atorvastatin, since it became one of the first companies to sell it after Pfizer lost patent protection for the top-selling drug last November; another company, Watson, sold a generic version that was authorized and manufactured by Pfizer. In October, Ranbaxy’s product accounted for 43 percent of prescriptions for atorvastatin, a widely used drug to lower cholesterol levels, according to an analysis by Michael Faerm, an analyst for Credit Suisse who used prescription data from the research firm IMS Health.

In its statement on Thursday, the F.D.A. said it did not expect a shortage of atorvastatin. Erin Fox, who tracks drug shortages as director of the Drug Information Service at the University of Utah, said drugs in pill form have long shelf lives and suppliers can keep large quantities in stock. Other generic manufacturers with approval to sell the drug include Apotex, Dr. Reddy’s Labs, Mylan, Sandoz, and Teva, according to the F.D.A. Web site.

Ranbaxy has posted a list of the recalled lots on its Web site, and has warned that patients should not stop taking the drug without guidance from their doctor. The lot numbers are found on the side of Ranbaxy pill bottles and the company advised patients to check with their pharmacist if customers received pills in a container dispensed by the pharmacy.

The agency said the potential for injury because of the contamination appeared to be low and “if any adverse events are experienced, they would be temporary.”

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Consumers Cut Spending in October

WASHINGTON — Americans cut back on spending last month and saw no growth in their income, the Commerce Department said Friday, reflecting disruptions from Hurricane Sandy that could hold back economic growth in the final months of the year.

Consumer spending dropped 0.2 percent in October, the government said. That was down from an increase of 0.8 percent in September and was the weakest showing since May.

Income was flat in the month, following a 0.4 percent rise in September.

The government said work interruptions caused by the late October storm reduced wages and salaries by about $18 billion at an annual rate. Hurricane Sandy affected 24 states, with the most severe damage in New York and New Jersey.

Consumers may also be worried about automatic tax increases and spending cuts that will take effect in January if lawmakers and the Obama administration fail to strike a deal before then.

The depressed spending figures suggest economic growth are likely to be weak in the October-December quarter. Consumer spending drives nearly 70 percent of economic activity in the United States.

Discounting the effects of the storm, income growth would have risen a still-weak 0.1 percent. After-tax income adjusted for inflation fell 0.1 percent, while spending adjusted for inflation dropped 0.3 percent.

The saving rate edged up slightly, to 3.4 percent of after-tax income in October, compared with 3.3 percent in September.

The government reported Thursday that the overall economy grew at an annual rate of 2.7 percent in the July-September quarter, an improvement from the 2 percent rate of growth initially estimated. However, economists believe the acceleration in activity will be short-lived.

Many of them predict growth is slowing in the current October-December quarter to less than 2 percent, a rate that is too weak to make a significant dent in unemployment. But they expect growth to rebound in the New Year when the rebuilding phase begins in the Northeast.

In October, spending at retail businesses fell 0.3 percent, the first drop after three months of gains. Auto sales dropped 1.5 percent, the biggest decline in a year.

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British judge urges new press regulator due to hacking scandal

LONDON – In a highly anticipated and lengthy report, a senior judge Thursday recommended that a new, independent regulatory authority be set up to monitor Britain’s raucous press and to crack down on media abuses such as phone hacking and other unethical newsgathering practices.

Justice Brian Leveson said such a regulator was necessary because the press had at times “wreaked havoc in the lives of innocent people” through its intrusions on privacy and relentless pursuit of scoops.

The new regulatory body should be backed by law, but it should not include any politicians, in order to avoid government control of the press, nor any editors, in order to maintain full independence, Leveson said.

The regulator would replace a previous press complaints commission that is widely recognized in Britain to have been a failure, particularly with regard to the phone-hacking scandal. Evidence has emerged that hundreds of high-profile figures may have had their cellphones tapped by the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

The scandal gave rise to a months-long, government-commissioned investigation into media culture and ethics by Leveson, who heard testimony from more than 300 witnesses.

The recommendations in his 2,000-page report are likely to please some hacking victims and satisfy demands of some lawmakers who say that Britain’s media, in particular its sensation-seeking and gossip-hungry tabloids, have been allowed to run amok.

But the news organizations themselves have expressed alarm over any form of regulation that has its roots in law and that, they fear, could be the first step toward government censorship. Although they recognize the need for oversight, many news outlets have pushed for a better system of self-regulation with no legal underpinning.

Leveson was eager to emphasize his respect for a free press and denied that his recommendations represented any threat to it.

“The press operating freely and in the public interest is one of the true safeguards of our democracy. As a result, it holds a privileged and powerful place in our society,” he told reporters. “But this power and influence carries with it responsibilities to the public interest in whose name it exercises these privileges. Unfortunately, as the evidence has shown beyond doubt, on too many occasions those responsibilities … have simply been ignored.”

The report has been eagerly awaited for months. As its release date neared, politicians and high-profile individuals dug in on either side, calling for laws to regulate the media or warning against them as an unacceptable infringement on a free press.

“As parliamentarians, we believe in free speech and are opposed to the imposition of any form of statutory control,” said a letter signed by 86 lawmakers. “The solution is not new laws but a profound restructuring of the self-regulatory system.”

A recent poll, however, found a majority of Britons in favor of some kind of regulation of the media backed by the force of the law.

The witnesses who appeared before Leveson included some of Britain’s best-known public figures, such as Prime Minister David Cameron. Actor Hugh Grant and "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling denounced media invasions of their privacy. Media baron Rupert Murdoch and other newspaper proprietors spoke about newsgathering practices.

The inquiry was launched last year after the hacking scandal exploded in the public consciousness with the revelation that the News of the World had tapped the voicemail messages of a missing 13-year-old girl, whose body was later found dumped in the woods by her killer.

Like a fast-spreading fire, the scandal quickly engulfed key pillars of British public life, putting the heat not just on tabloid newspapers but also the politicians who cozied up to them and the police who offered scoops in hopes of flattering coverage. Within days, the head of Scotland Yard resigned, as did one of Murdoch’s closest confidants, and the 168-year-old News of the World was shut down.

Three separate police investigations – into phone hacking, computer hacking and bribery of public officials – were spawned by the affair. Dozens of people, most of them journalists at Murdoch-owned publications, have been arrested.

Only a few hours before Leveson’s report was released, the former head of Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain and a onetime senior aide to Cameron appeared in court on charges of paying public officials for information.

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Lindsay Lohan arrested on assault charge in NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — Actress Lindsay Lohan was arrested Thursday after police said she hit a woman during an argument at a New York City nightclub.

The “Mean Girls” and “Freaky Friday” star was arrested at 4 a.m. and charged with third-degree assault.

She left a police precinct nearly four hours later with a black jacket pulled over her head. She was wearing leggings, a green mini skirt and high-heels, and drove off in a black SUV with a driver and another man who was seen going in and out of the precinct.

She allegedly got into the spat with another woman at Club Avenue, in Manhattan‘s Chelsea section. She struck the woman in face with her hand, police said. The woman did not require medical attention.

Lohan’s publicist did not immediately return a call for comment.

The arrest is Lohan’s latest brush with law enforcement in New York City.

She was involved in a NYPD investigation in September after alleging a man had assaulted her in a New York hotel, but charges against the man were later dropped.

Also in September, the actress was accused of clipping a man with her car outside another Manhattan nightclub, but prosecutors chose not to move ahead with charges.

In October, police were called to her childhood home on Long Island after a report of fight between her and her mother. An investigation revealed “no criminality.”

The actress was also involved in a car accident in California this summer that sent her and an assistant to a hospital, but didn’t result in serious injuries for anyone. The accident remains under investigation.

In May, she was cleared of allegations that she struck a Hollywood nightclub manager with her car.

Lohan remains on informal probation for taking a necklace from a jewelry store without permission last year. That means she doesn’t have to check in with a judge or probation officer but could face a jail term if arrested again.

Her latest film, “Liz & Dick,” in which she portrays screen icon Elizabeth Taylor, premiered on Lifetime on Sunday.

Lohan also recently filmed “The Canyons,” an indie film written by “Less Than Zero” and “American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Medicare Is Faulted in Electronic Medical Records Conversion

The conversion to electronic medical records — a critical piece of the Obama administration’s plan for health care reform — is “vulnerable” to fraud and abuse because of the failure of Medicare officials to develop appropriate safeguards, according to a sharply critical report to be issued Thursday by federal investigators.

Mike Spencer/Wilmington Star-News, via Associated Press

Celeste Stephens, a nurse, leads a session on electronic records at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator for Medicare.

The use of electronic medical records has been central to the aim of overhauling health care in America. Advocates contend that electronic records systems will improve patient care and lower costs through better coordination of medical services, and the Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to encourage doctors and hospitals to switch to electronic records to track patient care.

But the report says Medicare, which is charged with managing the incentive program that encourages the adoption of electronic records, has failed to put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that information being provided by hospitals and doctors about their electronic records systems is accurate. To qualify for the incentive payments, doctors and hospitals must demonstrate that the systems lead to better patient care, meeting a so-called meaningful use standard by, for example, checking for harmful drug interactions.

Medicare “faces obstacles” in overseeing the electronic records incentive program “that leave the program vulnerable to paying incentives to professionals and hospitals that do not fully meet the meaningful use requirements,” the investigators concluded. The report was prepared by the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare.

The investigators contrasted the looser management of the incentive program with the agency’s pledge to more closely monitor Medicare payments of medical claims. Medicare officials have indicated that the agency intends to move away from a “pay and chase” model, in which it tried to get back any money it has paid in error, to one in which it focuses on trying to avoid making unjustified payments in the first place.

Late Wednesday, a Medicare spokesman said in a statement: “Protecting taxpayer dollars is our top priority and we have implemented aggressive procedures to hold providers accountable. Making a false claim is a serious offense with serious consequences and we believe the overwhelming majority of doctors and hospitals take seriously their responsibility to honestly report their performance.”

The government’s investment in electronic records was authorized under the broader stimulus package passed in 2009. Medicare expects to spend nearly $7 billion over five years as a way of inducing doctors and hospitals to adopt and use electronic records. So far, the report said, the agency has paid 74, 317 health professionals and 1,333 hospitals. By attesting that they meet the criteria established under the program, a doctor can receive as much as $44,000 for adopting electronic records, while a hospital could be paid as much as $2 million in the first year of its adoption. The inspector general’s report follows earlier concerns among regulators and others over whether doctors and hospitals are using electronic records inappropriately to charge more for services, as reported by The New York Times last September, and is likely to fuel the debate over the government’s efforts to promote electronic records. Critics say the push for electronic records may be resulting in higher Medicare spending with little in the way of improvement in patients’ health. Thursday’s report did not address patient care.

Even those within the industry say the speed with which systems are being developed and adopted by hospitals and doctors has led to a lack of clarity over how the records should be used and concerns about their overall accuracy.

“We’ve gone from the horse and buggy to the Model T, and we don’t know the rules of the road. Now we’ve had a big car pileup,” said Lynne Thomas Gordon, the chief executive of the American Health Information Management Association, a trade group in Chicago. The association, which contends more study is needed to determine whether hospitals and doctors actually are abusing electronic records to increase their payments, says it supports more clarity.

Although there is little disagreement over the potential benefits of electronic records in reducing duplicative tests and avoiding medical errors, critics increasingly argue that the federal government has not devoted enough time or resources to making certain the money it is investing is being well spent.

House Republicans echoed these concerns in early October in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services. Citing the Times article, they called for suspending the incentive program until concerns about standardization had been resolved. “The top House policy makers on health care are concerned that H.H.S. is squandering taxpayer dollars by asking little of providers in return for incentive payments,” said a statement issued at the same time by the Republicans, who are likely to seize on the latest inspector general report as further evidence of lax oversight. Republicans have said they will continue to monitor the program.

In her letter in response, which has not been made public, Ms. Sebelius dismissed the idea of suspending the incentive program, arguing that it “would be profoundly unfair to the hospitals and eligible professionals that have invested billions of dollars and devoted countless hours of work to purchase and install systems and educate staff.” She said Medicare was trying to determine whether electronic records had been used in any fraudulent billing but she insisted that the current efforts to certify the systems and address the concerns raised by the Republicans and others were adequate.

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Media Decoder Blog: CNN Makes It Official: Zucker to Be New President

11:36 a.m. | Updated CNN made official Thursday morning its decision to install Jeff Zucker, the former chief executive of NBC, as the new president of CNN Worldwide.

The announcement culminated a monthslong search to find a replacement for Jim Walton, who had led CNN to record profits even as ratings for its American network, CNN/U.S., hit record lows. The network announced in July that Mr. Walton would step down at the end of the year.

What’s Next?

Many Paths for CNN

Jeff Zucker no doubt is getting much advice on how to revitalize the network: maybe add more celebrities or double-down on news or documentaries.

Mr. Zucker will be expected to revive the American network to competitive standing against its rivals, Fox News and MSNBC, even as it maintains its position as a nonpartisan news network opposing those speaking from the right (Fox) and left (MSNBC). CNN said that Mr. Zucker would start his new assignment in January.

He will arrive at CNN carrying the baggage of the collapse of NBC’s own broadcast network, which descended from dominance in prime time to last-place status under Mr. Zucker, even as the company’s cable networks, including MSNBC, thrived under him.

But Mr. Zucker also brings a reputation for leadership in news, which he forged in two tenures leading NBC’s “Today” show to dominance in morning ratings and profits.

Time Warner’s chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, and his deputy, Phil Kent, the head of Turner Broadcasting, were known to have sought candidates with the right combination of management skills, programming expertise and journalistic credibility to oversee CNN’s many channels and Web sites. There was a short list, and Mr. Zucker was on it from the beginning.

Walter Isaacson, who ran CNN from 2001 to 2003, preceding Mr. Walton, said Mr. Zucker was a smart choice because “CNN has great journalists, but what it has needed is an imaginative programmer who knows how to build good shows.”

Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said that if anyone could “bring CNN back,” Mr. Zucker could. On Thursday he sounded excited about the competition to come. Referring to Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman, Mr. Griffin said: “Ailes on one side, Zucker on the other: Game on.”

This year Mr. Zucker joined with his longtime friend Katie Couric to produce “Katie,” the syndicated talk show that started in September. There was no immediate word about who would take over the talk show. But Ms. Couric said in a statement on Thursday: “I’m very excited that Jeff has such a wonderful opportunity at CNN and equally excited for CNN. I’m also grateful that Jeff has been so instrumental in getting our show off to such a strong start and look forward to working with the fantastic staff we’ve assembled and building on the strong foundation we’ve created.”

At CNN Mr. Zucker will report to Mr. Kent, who said in a statement: “Jeff’s experience as a news executive is unmatched for its breadth and success. He built and sustained the No. 1 brand in morning news, and under his watch NBC’s signature news programming set a standard for quality and professionalism. As a programmer, a brand-builder and a leader, he will bring energy and new thinking to CNN. I couldn’t be happier to welcome him or more excited about what he’ll accomplish here.”

Mr. Zucker said in a news release that he was excited to return to work as a journalist, specifically “to daily news gathering and compelling storytelling in a place that values those above all else.”

Notably, Mr. Zucker will be based at CNN’s bureau in New York. Mr. Walton was based in Atlanta, where CNN has been headquartered since its inception in 1980. The change may signal a shift in power within the 4,000-employee organization.

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Obama, Romney to meet over lunch at the White House Thursday

WASHINGTON -- President Obama and former campaign rival Mitt Romney will meet for a private lunch Thursday at the White House, fulfilling an offer that Obama made after his reelection victory.

The White House announced Wednesday morning that Obama and the former Republican presidential nominee will dine at an undisclosed time in the Private Dining Room in the Executive Mansion. The event will be closed to reporters and photographers.

The duo’s meeting follows a statement from Obama on Election Night.

“In the weeks ahead, I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward,” Obama said.

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

Obama, in a press conference held Nov. 14, offered some hints as to what their conversation may be.

“There are certain aspects of Governor Romney’s record and his ideas that I think could be very helpful,” Obama said. “To give you one example, I do think he did a terrific job running the Olympics. And you know, that skill set of trying to figure out how do we make something work better applies to the federal government.”

“There may be ideas that he has with respect to jobs and growth that can help middle-class families that I want to hear,” Obama added. “I’m not either prejudging what he’s interested in doing, nor am I suggesting I’ve got some specific assignment.”

Romney, who lost the race by about 3.5 million votes, has avoided public appearances since shortly after the election, when he aggravated many in his own party by accusing Obama of winning through “gifts” to African-Americans, Latinos and young voters during his first term.

“The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls,” the former Massachusetts governor said on a conference call to supporters.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

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Rihanna’s “Unapologetic” tops Billboard album chart

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – R&B singer Rihanna shot straight to the top of the Billboard 200 album chart on Tuesday with her seventh record “Unapologetic,” scoring her first No. 1 album despite mixed reviews.

“Unapologetic,” which topped iTunes charts in 43 countries just hours after its release on November19, sold 238,000 copies according to Billboard, scoring the 24-year-old singer from Barbados her best opening sales week to date.

The album’s lead single “Diamonds” landed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart last week, giving Rihanna her 12th No. 1 single and tying her with Madonna and The Supremes for the fourth-most chart-topping singles in Billboard history.

“Unapologetic” left some critics unsettled by the singer’s harder sound and close-to-home lyrics. One track in particular that had everyone talking is “Nobody’s Business,” Rihanna’s collaboration with ex-boyfriend Chris Brown, who was charged with assaulting her three years ago.

The album has been promoted extensively by Rihanna, who embarked on a seven day tour across seven cities around the world, accompanied by a plane full of fans and journalists.

The full Billboard charts will be released on Wednesday.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Nurses Sue Douglas Kennedy for $200,000

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Two nurses have accused Douglas Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy, of assault and battery, negligence and causing them emotional and physical distress after an episode involving his newborn son.

Two nurses in Westchester County have filed a $200,000 lawsuit against Douglas Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy, accusing him of assault and battery, negligence and causing them emotional and physical distress after an episode involving his newborn son.

The Journal News of Westchester reported that the lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, a week after a court in Mount Kisco, N.Y., acquitted Mr. Kennedy of child-endangerment and harassment charges.

The charges stemmed from Mr. Kennedy’s attempt in January to take his newborn son from a maternity ward.

The two nurses said Mr. Kennedy hurt them as they tried to prevent him from leaving with the newborn. Mr. Kennedy said he was just taking the baby outside for some fresh air.

In a statement, Mr. Kennedy vowed to fight the lawsuit and said it was an attempt to extort money from his family.

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Ex-NASA Scientist’s Data Fears Come True

In 2007, Robert M. Nelson, an astronomer, and 27 other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued NASA arguing that the space agency’s background checks of employees of government contractors were unnecessarily invasive and violated their privacy rights.

Privacy advocates chimed in as well, contending that the space agency would not be able to protect the confidential details it was collecting.

The scientists took their case all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose last year.

This month, Dr. Nelson opened a letter from NASA telling him of a significant data breach that could potentially expose him to identity theft.

The very thing he and advocates worried about had occurred. A laptop used by an employee at NASA’s headquarters in Washington had been stolen from a car parked on the street on Halloween, the space agency said.

Although the laptop itself was password protected, unencrypted files on the laptop contained personal information on about 10,000 NASA employees — including details like their names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and in some cases, details related to background checks into employees’ personal lives.

Millions of Americans have received similar data breach notices from employers, government agencies, medical centers, banks and retailers. NASA in particular has been subject to “numerous cyberattacks” and computer thefts in recent years, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, an agency that conducts research for Congress.

Even so, Dr. Nelson, who recently retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a research facility operated by the California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA, stands out as a glaring example of security lapses involving personal data, privacy advocates say.

“To the extent that Robert Nelson looks like millions of other people working for firms employed by the federal government, this would seem to be a real problem,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group which filed a friend-of-the-court brief for Dr. Nelson in the Supreme Court case.

In a 2009 report titled “NASA Needs to Remedy Vulnerabilities in Key Networks,” the Government Accountability Office noted that the agency had reported 1,120 security incidents in fiscal 2007 and 2008 alone.

It also singled out an incident in 2009 in which a NASA center reported the theft of a laptop containing about 3,000 unencrypted files about arms traffic regulations and wind tunnel tests for a supersonic jet.

“NASA had not installed full-disk encryption on its laptops at all three centers,” the report said. “As a result, sensitive data transmitted through the unclassified network or stored on laptop computers were at an increased risk of being compromised.” Other federal agencies have had similar problems. In 2006, for example, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs reported the theft of an employee laptop and hard drive that contained personal details on about 26.5 million veterans. Last year, the G.A.O. cited the Internal Revenue Service for weaknesses in data control that could “jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of financial and sensitive taxpayer information.”

Also last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission warned its employees that their confidential financial information, like brokerage transactions, might have been compromised because an agency contractor had granted data access to a subcontractor without the S.E.C.’s authorization.

In a phone interview, Dr. Nelson, the astronomer, said he planned to hold a news conference on Wednesday morning in which he would ask members of Congress to investigate NASA’s data collection practices and the recent data breach.

Robert Jacobs, a NASA spokesman, said the agency’s data security policy already adequately protected employees and contractors because it required computers to be encrypted before employees took them off agency premises. “We are talking about a computer that should not have left the building in the first place,” Mr. Jacobs said. “The data would have been secure had the employee followed policy.”

The government argued in the case Dr. Nelson filed that a law called the Privacy Act, which governs data collection by federal agencies, provided the scientists with sufficient protection. The case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld government background checks for employees of contractors. The roots of Dr. Nelson’s case against NASA date back to 2004 when the Department of Homeland Security, under a directive signed by President George Bush, required federal agencies to adopt uniform identification credentials for all civil servants and contract employees. As part of the ID card standardization process, the department recommended agencies institute background checks.

Several years later, when NASA announced it intended to start doing background checks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Nelson and other scientists there objected.

Those security checks could have included inquiries into medical treatment, counseling for drug use, or any “adverse” information about employees such as sexual activity, or participation in protests, said Dan Stormer, a lawyer representing Dr. Nelson.

But Dr. Nelson and other long-term employees of the lab challenged the legality of those checks, arguing that they violated their privacy rights. NASA, they said, had not established a legitimate need for such extensive investigations about low-risk employees like themselves who did not have security clearances or handle confidential information. Dr. Nelson, for example, specializes in solar system science — concerning, for example, Jupiter’s moon Io and Titan, a moon of Saturn — and publishes his work in scientific journals

“It was an invitation to an open-ended fishing expedition,” Dr. Nelson said of the background checks.

In friend of the court briefs for Dr. Nelson, privacy groups cited many data security problems at federal agencies, arguing that there was a risk that NASA was not equipped to protect the confidential details it was collecting about employees and contractors.

In 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco temporarily halted the background checks, saying that the case had raised important questions about privacy rights. But last year, the Supreme Court upheld the background investigations of employees of government contractors.

Dr. Nelson said he retired from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory last June rather than submit to a background check. He now works as a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute of Tucson.

NASA has contracted with ID Experts, a data breach company, to help protect employees whose data was contained on the stolen laptop against identity theft. Mr. Jacobs, the NASA spokesman, said the agency has encrypted almost 80 percent of its laptops and plans to encrypt the rest by Dec. 21. He added that he too received a letter from NASA warning that his personal information might have been compromised by the laptop theft.

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Obama returns to campaign trail to promote middle-class tax cuts

Negotiations on the fiscal cliff continue Tuesday as neither Republicans nor Democrats have been able to broker a deal.

By Christi Parsons




This post has been updated, as indicated below.

November 27, 2012, 8:47 a.m.

WASHINGTON — President Obama is heading back out on the campaign trail this week — this time to pressure Congress to extend the expiring middle-class tax cuts.
 
On Friday, Obama plans to travel to Hatfield, Pa., for an event at a toy factory that according to the White House “depends on middle-class consumers during the holiday season.”
 
Lest anyone miss the holiday spin of this public campaign, the White House issued an analysis Monday predicting how the automatic tax increases could hurt the winter shopping season. Obama is expected to mention its findings, including its estimate that the hike would put a $200-billion crimp in consumer spending in 2013.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past 

Of course, Republicans are perfectly amenable to extending the Bush-era tax cuts as a complete package. But aides to Obama are reiterating that he won’t go along with a deal that extends the cuts for high earners.
 
Staffers on all sides are working now to come up with an agreement that will avert the expiration of the tax cuts as well as the federal government spending cuts set to take effect the end of the year.
 
Just how hard Obama plans to hit the “Grinch” message at this point in the talks isn’t clear. The politics of a deal call for a delicate balance of partisan interests — no easy task so soon after the acrimonious fall campaigns.
 
For much of this week, the campaign will take place behind closed doors. On Tuesday Obama is scheduled to meet with small retailers whose profits depend significantly on holiday sales.

QUIZ: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff?
 
On Wednesday, he has scheduled an event at the White House with middle-class Americans who responded to an email from senior advisor David Plouffe seeking accounts of how a tax increase would affect them. He’ll also meet that day with business leaders.
 
But on Friday, Obama is set to go to Pennsylvania to visit the 150 employees of the Rodon Group factory.
 
The facility makes toys for K’NEX Brands, whose products include popular items of Christmases past and present — Tinkertoys and Angry Bird Building Sets.

Republicans are planning their own public campaign on the tax fight. House members are planning events at small businesses to argue the merits of extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts.

"The target of the president’s rallies should be the congressional Democrats who want to raise tax rates on small businesses rather than cut spending," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. "To draw attention to the irresponsible position of Democrats in Congress, House Republicans will be taking our message to small businesses across America."

[For the Record, 8:44 a.m. PST Nov. 27: This post has been updated to include Republican plans for a public campaign on taxes.]

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christi.parsons@latimes.com

Twitter: @cparsons

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Nintendo says more than 400,000 Wii Us sold in US

NEW YORK (AP) — Nintendo has sold more than 400,000 of its new video game console, the Wii U, in its first week on sale in the U.S., the company said Monday.

The Wii U launched on Nov. 18 in the U.S. at a starting price of $ 300. Nintendo said the sales figure, based on internal estimates, is through Saturday, or seven days later.

The Wii U is the first major game console to launch in six years. It comes with a new touch-screen controller that promises to change how people play games by offering different people in the same room a different experience, depending on the controller used.

Six years ago, Nintendo Co. sold 475,000 of the original Wii in that console’s first seven days in stores, according to data from the NPD Group. The original Wii remains available, and Nintendo said it sold more than 300,000 of them last week, along with roughly 250,000 handheld Nintendo 3DS units and about 275,000 of the Nintendo DS.

At this early stage, demand isn’t the only factor dictating how many consoles are sold. Supply is, too. This means it’s likely that more people wanted to buy the Wii U in the first week than those who were able to. The original Wii was in short supply more than a year after it went on sale.

As of Monday afternoon, the website of Best Buy Co. was sold out of the Wii U. Video game retailer GameStop Corp. said there was at least a three day wait for a deluxe Wii U, which costs $ 350, has more memory and comes with a game called “Nintendo Land.” GameStop still had the basic, $ 300 version available.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter estimates that Nintendo will ship 1 million to 1.5 million Wii Us in the U.S. through the end of January.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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New Jersey’s Christie, more popular than ever, seeks re-election

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican star who has enjoying record-high popularity for his hands-on approach to Superstorm Sandy, on Monday filed papers announcing his intention to seek a second term next November.

Christie, a popular surrogate on Republican Mitt Romney‘s failed presidential campaign, delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention this summer and is considered a popular choice to run for president in 2016.

Despite his popularity on the national stage, Christie – known for his blunt, sometimes over-the-top style – has sometimes struggled to win over his constituents in liberal New Jersey, where Democrats control both houses of the legislature.

Since Sandy tore through the state on October 29, laying waste to large stretches of the Jersey Shore, Christie’s approval rating has jumped 19 percentage points.

Christie appeared to set politics aside, touring the damage with Democratic President Barack Obama days before November 6 Election Day, and showing a personal touch with residents who lost their homes or loved ones in the storm.

Christie has a 67 percent favorability rating among registered voters, up from 48 percent in October, according to the Rutgers-Eagleton poll.

Since taking office three years ago, Christie’s signature achievement has been a 2011 law that made sweeping changes to the state’s pensions and health benefits for state workers.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Jackie Frank)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Imaging Shows Progressive Damage by Parkinson’s

For the first time, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report, brain imaging has been able to show in living patients the progressive damage Parkinson’s disease causes to two small structures deep in the brain.

The new technique confirms some ideas about the overall progress of the disease in the brain. But the effects of Parkinson’s vary in patients, the researchers said, and in the future, the refinement in imaging may help doctors monitor how the disease is affecting different people and adjust treatment accordingly.

The outward symptoms and progress of Parkinson’s disease — tremors, stiffness, weakness — have been well known since James Parkinson first described them in 1817. But its progress in the brain has been harder to document.

Some of the structures affected by the disease have been buried too deep to see clearly even with advances in brain imaging. An important recent hypothesis about how the disease progresses was based on the examinations of brains of patients who had died.

Now, a group of scientists at M.I.T. and Massachusetts General Hospital report that they have worked out a way to combine four different sorts of M.R.I. to get clear pictures of damage to two brain structures in people living with Parkinson’s. In doing so, they have added support to one part of the recent hypothesis, which is that the disease first strikes an area involved in movement and later progresses to a higher part of the brain more involved in memory and attention.

Suzanne Corkin, a professor emerita of behavioral neuroscience at M.I.T. and the senior author on the paper published online Monday in The Archives of Neurology, said that this progression was part of the hypothesis put forward in 2003 by Heiko Braak, a German neuroscientist, based on autopsies.

But, she said, because of the limits of brain imaging, “nobody could test this in living patients.”

David A. Ziegler, who was at M.I.T. when the research was done, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, said that the study, of 29 patients with Parkinson’s and 27 healthy patients of roughly the same age, showed that the peanut-sized substantia nigra lost volume first, and another structure called the basal forebrain, involved in memory and attention, was struck later.

Glenda Halliday, a neuroscientist at Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said the paper confirmed “the progression of degeneration in two important affected brain regions in people with Parkinson’s.”

Dr. Corkin, Dr. Ziegler and their colleagues developed a way to use four different varieties of M.R.I. — each using different settings on the same machine — to come up with four different images that could be used to form one image that showed structures deep in the brain like the substantia nigra, long known to be important in Parkinson’s.

The disease kills brain cells, shrinking the parts of the brain that it affects, and the comparative study showed that the reduction in size of the substantia nigra showed up in early stage Parkinson’s patients, compared with a healthy group.

The reduction in size in the basal forebrain, compared with the healthy group, did not show up in the patients in the early stage, but was clear in patients in the later stage.

“This is a project we’ve been working on in our lab for years,” she said. A next step, already in progress, is to correlate damage to specific brain structures with symptoms.

Parkinson’s, she said, is a disease that shows the same broad outlines of development in most patients, but with considerable variation. Dementia may arrive early or may not appear. The M.R.I. technique described in the paper, she said, might help tease out what is going on in the brain in subgroups of Parkinson’s patients that show different symptoms and could influence treatment.

One important difference between the two brain structures is that damage to the substantia nigra decreases production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, while a smaller basal forebrain would reduce the production of a different chemical, acetylcholine.

The research is just one step, Dr. Ziegler said. One of the “big outstanding questions,” he said, is whether all patients will eventually get dementia.

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News Analysis: St. Jude Medical Suffers for Redacting a Product Name

Peter Muhly for The New York Times

Dr. Ernest Lau holds a Durata lead from a St. Jude Medical Fortify ICD, an implanted heart defibrillator.

IS covering a product’s name in a public document a sign that a company has something to hide? And how should doctors, patients and investors react if the product at issue is one on which peoples’ lives and a company’s fortunes depend?

Such questions now loom over St. Jude Medical after the disclosure last week that its executives had blacked out the name of a heart device component when they released a critical federal report involving the product. The value of St. Jude has since plummeted more than $1 billion, or 12 percent. But the company’s actions may have a more lasting impact on its reputation and the health of patients, some experts say.

Last week’s incident was the latest development in a controversy involving the component, an electrical wire that connects an implanted defibrillator to a patient’s heart. St. Jude officials say the wire, which is known as the Durata, is safe. But uncertainty about the company’s statements is growing, underscored by its handling of the report, which involved a Food and Drug Administration inspection of a plant that makes the Durata.

St. Jude released that report in October as part of a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The F.D.A. provides device makers with the reports in an unaltered form, and they may contain criticisms of a company’s procedures.

But the version of the report that St. Jude filed with the S.E.C. left some doctors and analysts uncertain about which company product or products were at issue for a simple reason — St. Jude had redacted, or blocked out, all 20 references to the Durata in it.

Company executives said they had done so based on their “good faith” interpretation of how the F.D.A. would act if it publicly released the report under the Freedom of Information Act. But both an F.D.A spokeswoman and a lawyer who specializes in medical devices took exception with that view, saying that names of approved products typically do not qualify as the type of confidential business information that the F.D.A. would redact.

Among other things, F.D.A. inspectors found significant flaws in the company’s testing and oversight of the Durata. It was those revelations and the implications that the problems could lead to further F.D.A. action against St. Jude that led to the sharp fall last week in its stock price.

In 2005, Guidant, a device maker that no longer exists, also found itself under scrutiny. Back then, its executives decided not to tell doctors that one of its defibrillators could short-circuit when a patient needed an electrical jolt to save a life. The expert who brought the Guidant problem to light, Dr. Robert Hauser, a heart specialist in Minnesota, has also raised concerns about the St. Jude wires, adding that he believes that its executives have been less than forthright.

“Patients and physicians would appreciate more information,” Dr. Hauser said.

In an earlier interview, St. Jude’s chief executive, Daniel J. Starks, said the company had hidden nothing about the Durata or another heart wire named the Riata, which it stopped selling in 2010.

“We’ve been more transparent than others,” said Mr. Starks, referring to company competitors like Medtronic.

Still, some Wall Street analysts share Dr. Hauser’s view. And if one St. Jude executive can claim credit for shaping their opinion, it would be Mr. Starks.

Earlier this year, he sought, among other things, to have a medical journal retract an article written by Dr. Hauser that was critical of the Riata. The publication refused.

Now, after St. Jude’s latest misfire, Wall Street analysts, who usually agree more than disagree, are placing wildly differing bets on St. Jude, with some valuing it at $48 a share and others at $30. On Monday, St. Jude closed at $31.86 on the New York Stock Exchange.

One of those bearish analysts, Matthew Dodds of Citigroup, said he thought the Food and Drug Administration might act soon on Durata. “I believe that a lot of their actions have made the situation worse, ” he said of the company’s executives.

A St. Jude spokeswoman, Amy Jo Meyer, reiterated the company’s stance that it had interpreted agency rules in “good faith” when releasing the redacted report about the Durata. An F.D.A. spokeswoman, Mary Long, said the agency did not consider the names of approved products to be confidential. And a lawyer, William Vodra, said that while device makers try to make a confidentiality argument for product data they consider embarrassing, like injury reports, they rarely succeed.

“In my experience, the F.D.A. consistently rejects” such arguments, Mr. Vodra wrote in an e-mail.

For patients, the dilemma may become more excruciating. The company’s earlier heart wire, the Riata, has begun failing prematurely in some of the 128,000 patients worldwide who received it. And those patients and their doctors face a difficult decision: whether to leave it in place or have it surgically removed, a procedure that carries significant risks.

St. Jude executives say that the Durata, which uses a different type of insulation than the Riata, is not prone to such problems.

And with the Durata already implanted in 278,000 people, many heart specialists certainly hope they are right.

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SEC chief Mary Schapiro to step down

WASHINGTON -- Mary Schapiro said Monday she will step down as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission next month.

Schapiro, who has headed the Wall Street watchdog since 2009, had been widely expected to depart the commission after the presidential election. She announced that her last day would be Dec. 14.

“It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to work with so many dedicated SEC staff who strive every day to protect investors and ensure our markets operate with integrity,” Schapiro said in a written statement.

 “Over the past four years we have brought a record number of enforcement actions, engaged in one of the busiest rulemaking periods, and gained greater authority from Congress to better fulfill our mission,” she said.

Her five-year term does not expire until January 2014, but it's rare for chairs to serve more than four years. The SEC noted that Schapiro has served longer than 24 of the previous 28 chairs.

Schapiro, the first woman to serve as a non-interim chair of the agency, has headed the SEC during a volatile period. The SEC has grappled with the fallout from the Bernard Madoff ponzi scheme.

And it has launched cases stemming from the financial crisis and has had to implement dozens of new rules from the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The SEC chairwoman also serves on the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of top regulators that monitors the financial system for threats to the broader economy.

Democratic Commissioner Elisse Walter has been mentioned as a possible successor. The New York Times reported that Mary J. Miller, assistant Treasury secretary for domestic finance, and Sallie L. Krawcheck, a former executive at Bank of America and Citigroup, also are under consideration.

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Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

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Yes, the Government Can Still Spy on Your Digital Life (for Now)

Ahead of a controversial Senate debate on digital privacy this week, the battle over warrantless cell-phone and Internet searches is beginning to take shape — even as law-enforcement agencies continue to carry out the searches anyway. Judges across the country have thrown out cases that used tracked digital American lives without warrants, but others haven’t, reports The New York Times‘s Somini Sengupta. A DC court, for example, compared text messages to voicemail messages, which because they can be overheard are not protected by state privacy laws, argued one judge. A Louisiana court is deciding if cell-phone records are like business records. Another court ruled that GPS cell phone tracking without a warrant was fine, too. Others, however, argue that cell phones are more than just a paper trail. One judge called cell phones “raw, unvarnished and immediate, revealing the most intimate of thoughts and emotions,” as in something that is subject to higher privacy standards. Meanwhile, we see the same inconsistencies with Internet protections, reports The Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Pallazolo. A federal court recently ruled that people who use their neighbors’ WiFi without permission forfeit privacy, opening up government officials to warrantless searches. The same ruling other courts have made for IP addresses. However, the law isn’t that clear-cut, either, argues George Washington University professor Oren Kerr. 

RELATED: Anonymous’s and LulzSec’s Overlapping, FBI-Thwarting Pasts

Without clear rules, government agencies have continued investigations with warrantless searches. As people have started using cell phones more often and for more than just calling, law enforcement agency requests for cell-phone information have increased, reported The New York Times‘s Eric Lichtblau earlier this year. AT&T gets more than 700 requests a day from various agencies, triple what it got in 2007, he notes. Last year, the total number of requests came in at at least 1.3 million. At the same time, the application for wiretapping warrants declined 14 percent last year to 2,732, according to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. A curious pattern considering the requests for information have gone up. Though these wireless carriers say they require a search warrant, a court order or a formal subpoena to release information, “in cases that law enforcement officials deem an emergency, a less formal request is often enough,” writes Lichtblau. Or, it’s possible that law enforcement has opted for other forms of tracking that don’t require warrants, at least not according to some judges. 

RELATED: Saints GM Denies Using Nixonian Dirty Tricks; Directing the NFL Draft

A Senate debate beginning Thursday to make changes on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act might bring some clarity to these issues. However, it’s unclear if the revised bill will give the government more or less power, and it doesn’t sound like the vote will apply to all cell phone or Internet data. An early draft of the bill reportedly allowed warrantless e-mail searches, reported CNET’s Declan McCullagh. Since, Senator Patrick Leahy, who is spearheading the bill, has denied that the updates to the regulation will do that, however. Instead, the revised bill will require search warrants to get into email no matter how old, says Sengupta. That should presumably apply to some of our smartphone and Internet data, too. But it doesn’t address text messages or location information, other concerns of consumers.

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Rolling Stones turn back clock with hit-filled comeback

LONDON (Reuters) – The Rolling Stones turned back the clock in style on Sunday with their first concert in five years, strutting and swaggering their way through hit after familiar hit to celebrate 50 years in business.

Before a packed crowd of 20,000 at London‘s O2 Arena, they banished doubts that age may have slowed down one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands, as lead singer Mick Jagger launched into “I Wanna Be Your Man”.

More than two hours of high-octane, blues-infused rock later, and they were still going strong with an impressive encore comprising “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.

In between there were guest appearances from American R&B singer-songwriter Mary J. Blige, who delivered a rousing duet with Jagger on “Gimme Shelter” and guitarist Jeff Beck who provided the power chords for “I’m Going Down”.

Former Rolling Stones Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor were also back in the fold, performing with the regular quartet of Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards on guitar and Charlie Watts on drums for the first time in 20 years.

“It took us 50 years to get from Dartford to Greenwich!” said Jagger, referring to their roots just a few miles from the venue in southeast London. “But you know, we made it. What’s even more amazing is that you’re still coming to see us…we can’t thank you enough.”

The Sunday night gig was the first of two at the O2 Arena before the band crosses the Atlantic to play three dates in the United States.

The mini-tour is the culmination of a busy few months of events, rehearsals and recordings to mark 50 years since the rockers first took to the stage at the Marquee Club on London‘s Oxford Street in July, 1962.

There has been a photo album, two new songs, a music video, a documentary film, a blitz of media appearances and a handful of warm-up gigs in Paris.

“STYLE AND PANACHE”

The reunion nearly did not happen. One factor behind the long break since their record-breaking “A Bigger Bang” tour in 2007 has been Wood’s struggle with alcohol addiction, while Jagger and Richards also fell out over comments the guitarist made about the singer in a 2010 autobiography.

But they eventually buried the hatchet, and Richards joked in a recent interview: “We can’t get divorced – we’re doing it for the kids!”

Critics were fulsome in their praise of the first comeback gig.

“Keith Richards has said that the beauty of rock and roll is that every night a different band might be the world’s greatest. Well, last night at the O2 Arena, it was the turn of the Rolling Stones themselves to lay claim to the title they invented,” wrote Neil McCormick of the Daily Telegraph.

“And they did it with some style and panache.”

The big question on every fan’s lips is whether the five concerts lead to a world tour and even new material. The Stones sang their two new tracks “Doom and Gloom” and “One More Shot”, which appeared on their latest greatest hits album “GRRR!”.

Richards has hinted that the five concerts ending at the Newark Prudential Center in the United States on December 15 would not be the last.

“Once the juggernaut starts rolling, it ain’t gonna stop,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “So without sort of saying definitely yes – yeah. We ain’t doing all this for four gigs!”

The band has come in for criticism from fans about the high price of tickets to the shows – they ranged from around 95 pounds ($ 150) to up to 950 pounds for a VIP seat.

The flamboyant veterans, whose average age is 68, have defended the costs, saying the shows were expensive to put on, although specialist music publication Billboard reported the band would earn $ 25 million from the four shows initially announced. A fifth was added later.

“Everybody all right there in the cheap seats,” Jagger asked pointedly as he looked high to his left at the arena. “They’re not really cheap though are they? That’s the trouble.”

Among the biggest cheers on the night were for classics including “Wild Horses”, “It’s Only Rock and Roll” and “Start Me Up”.

There was even time for the odd reference to their advancing years.

“Good to see you all,” said Richards with a mischievous grin. “Good to see anybody.”

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Agency Investigates Deaths and Injuries Associated With Bed Rails

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black’s mother died in her bed at a care facility.

In November 2006, when Clara Marshall began suffering from the effects of dementia, her family moved her into the Waterford at Fairway Village, an assisted living home in Vancouver, Wash. The facility offered round-the-clock care for Ms. Marshall, who had wandered away from home several times. Her husband Dan, 80 years old at the time, felt he could no longer care for her alone.

Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Gloria Black, visiting her mother’s grave in Portland, Ore. She has documented hundreds of deaths associated with bed rails and said families should be informed of their possible risks.

But just five months into her stay, Ms. Marshall, 81, was found dead in her room apparently strangled after getting her neck caught in side rails used to prevent her from rolling out of bed.

After Ms. Marshall’s death, her daughter Gloria Black, who lives in Portland, Ore., began writing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. What she discovered was that both agencies had known for more than a decade about deaths from bed rails but had done little to crack down on the companies that make them. Ms. Black conducted her own research and exchanged letters with local and state officials. Finally, a letter she wrote in 2010 to the federal consumer safety commission helped prompt a review of bed rail deaths.

Ms. Black applauds the decision to study the issue. “But I wish it was done years ago,” she said. “Maybe my mother would still be alive.” Now the government is studying a problem it has known about for years.

Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with bed rail injuries. Officials at the F.D.A. and the commission said the data probably understated the problem since bed rails are not always listed as a cause of death by nursing homes and coroners, or as a cause of injury by emergency room doctors.

Experts who have studied the deaths say they are avoidable. While the F.D.A. issued safety warnings about the devices in 1995, it shied away from requiring manufacturers to put safety labels on them because of industry resistance and because the mood in Congress then was for less regulation. Instead only “voluntary guidelines” were adopted in 2006.

More warnings are needed, experts say, but there is a technical question over which regulator is responsible for some bed rails. Are they medical devices under the purview of the F.D.A., or are they consumer products regulated by the commission?

“This is an entirely preventable problem,” said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who first alerted federal regulators to deaths involving bed rails in 1995. The government at the time declined to recall any bed rails and opted instead for a safety alert to nursing homes and home health care agencies.

Forcing the industry to improve designs and replace older models could have potentially cost bed rail makers and health care facilities hundreds of million of dollars, said Larry Kessler, a former F.D.A. official who headed its medical device office. “Quite frankly, none of the bed rails in use at that time would have passed the suggested design standards in the guidelines if we had made them mandatory,” he said. No analysis has been done to determine how much it would cost the manufacturers to reduce the hazards.

Bed rails are metal bars used on hospital beds and in home care to assist patients in pulling themselves up or helping them out of bed. They can also prevent people from rolling out of bed. But sometimes patients — particularly those suffering from Alzheimer’s — can get confused and trapped between a bed rail and a mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.

While the use of the devices by hospitals and nursing homes has declined as professional caregivers have grown aware of the dangers, experts say dozens of older adults continue to die each year as more rails are used in home care and many health care facilities continue to use older rail models.

Since those first warnings in 1995, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred, a review by The New York Times of F.D.A. data, lawsuits, state nursing home inspection reports and interviews, found. Last year alone, the F.D.A. data shows, 27 people died.

As deaths continued after the F.D.A. warning, a working group put together in 1999 and made up of medical device makers, researchers, patient advocates and F.D.A. officials considered requiring bed rail makers to add warning labels.

But the F.D.A. decided against it after manufacturers resisted, citing legal issues. The agency said added cost to small manufacturers and difficulties of getting regulations through layers of government approval, were factors against tougher standards, according to a meeting log of the group in 2000 and interviews.

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