Sympathy over US school shooting stretches globe


LONDON (AP) — Images of a tearful President Barack Obama speaking after a shooting rampage in Connecticut resonated around the world, with many outside the United States expressing hope Saturday that America's latest school massacre would prompt the country to strengthen gun control.


Shock and sympathy were the initial reactions to the rampage that left 28 people dead, including 20 children at an elementary school — though as dawn broke in the U.S., questions swirled overseas about the easy access to guns in America.


Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Union's executive Commission, said: "Young lives full of hope have been destroyed. On behalf of the European Commission and on my own behalf, I want to express my sincere condolences to the families of the victims of this terrible tragedy."


The gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, killed his mother at their home before beginning his deadly rampage inside the school in Newtown, Connecticut, then committed suicide, police said.


British Prime Minister David Cameron, said he was "deeply saddened" to learn of the "horrific shooting."


"My thoughts are with the injured and those who have lost loved ones," he said. "It is heartbreaking to think of those who have had their children robbed from them at such a young age, when they had so much life ahead of them."


Queen Elizabeth II sent a message to President Barack Obama, saying she was shocked to learn of the "dreadful loss of life" and that the thoughts and prayers of all in the U.K. are with those affected by the events.


Pope Benedict XVI asked the Holy See's secretary of state to "convey his heartfelt grief and the assurance of his closeness in prayer to the victims and their families, and to all those affected by the shocking event," the Vatican said Saturday. It also sent a condolence message to Monsignor Jerald A. Doyle at the diocese in Connecticut that includes Newton.


But amid the messages of condolences, much of the discussion after the Connecticut rampage centered on gun control — a baffling subject for many in Asia and Europe, where mass shootings also have occurred but where access to guns is much more heavily restricted.


Many Twitter users and media personalities in the U.K. immediately invoked Dunblane — a 1996 shooting in that small Scottish town which killed 16 children. That tragedy prompted a campaign that ultimately led to tighter gun controls effectively making it illegal to buy or possess a handgun in the U.K.


"This is America's Dunblane," British CNN host Piers Morgan wrote on Twitter late Friday. "We banned handguns in Britain after that appalling tragedy. What will the U.S. do? Inaction not an option."


French President Francois Hollande said in an open letter to Obama that he was "horrified" by the shooting, while Russian leader Vladimir Putin called the events "particularly tragic," given that the majority of the victims were children.


"Vladimir Putin asked Barack Obama to convey words of support and sympathy to the families and friends of the victims and expressed his empathy with the American people," the Kremlin said in a statement about Putin's message to the U.S. president.


Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described the attack as a "senseless and incomprehensible act of evil."


"Like President Obama and his fellow Americans, our hearts too are broken," Gillard said in a statement, referring to the U.S. leader's emotional expression of condolence.


Australia confronted a similar tragedy in 1996, when a man went on a shooting spree in the southern state of Tasmania, killing 35 people. The mass killing sparked outrage across the country and led the government to impose strict new gun laws, including a ban on semi-automatic rifles.


The attack quickly dominated public discussion in China, rocketing to the top of topic lists on social media and becoming the top story on state television's main noon newscast.


China has seen several rampage attacks at schools in recent years, though the attackers there usually use knives and not guns. The most recent attack happened Friday, when a knife-wielding man injured 22 children and one adult outside a primary school in central China.


With more than 100,000 Chinese studying in U.S. schools, a sense of shared grief came through.


"Parents with children studying in the U.S. must be tense. School shootings happen often in the U.S. Can't politicians put away politics and prohibit gun sales?" Zhang Xin, a wealthy property developer, wrote on her feed on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo service, where she has 4.9 million followers. "There will always be mental patients among us. They should not be given guns."


In India, Kiran Bedi, a retired pioneering policewoman who is now a major anti-corruption activist, tweeted in the shorthand style familiar to users of text services that: "Firearms in hands of unbalanced r security threat! Gun/even Driving license issue needs due diligence! They r responsibility before a right!"


Some in South Korea, whose government does not allow people to possess guns privately, blamed a lack of gun control in the United States for the high number of deaths in Connecticut. Most people on the Internet expressed utter shock at the scale of the tragedy, many of them calling it frightful and unimaginable and expressing condolences to the families of the victims.


Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's top daily, speculated in an online report that it appears "inevitable" that the shooting will prompt the U.S. government to consider tighter gun control.


In Thailand, which has one of Asia's highest rates of murder by firearms and has seen schools attacked by Islamist insurgents in its southern provinces, a columnist for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation blamed American culture for fostering a climate of violence.


"Repeated incidents of gunmen killing innocent people have shocked the Americans or us, but also made most people ignore it quickly," Thanong Khanthong wrote on Twitter. "Because each Hollywood movie, namely Batman and Spiderman, have hidden the message of violence and brutal killings."


"Intentionally or not, Hollywood and video games have prepared people's mind to see killings and violence as normal and acceptable," he wrote.


In Japan, where guns are severely restricted and there are extremely few gun-related crimes, public broadcaster NHK led the noon news Saturday with the shooting, putting it ahead of an update on the final day of campaigning before Sunday's nationwide parliamentary elections.


NHK, which had a reporter giving a live broadcast from the scene, said that five of the children at the school were Japanese, and that all five were safe. Its report could not immediately be independently confirmed.


Condolences poured in also from Baghdad.


"We feel sorry for the victims and their families. And this tragic incident shows there is no violence-free society in the world, even in Western and non-Muslim countries," said Hassan Sabah, 30, owner of stationary shop in eastern Baghdad.


Samir Abdul-Karim, a 40-year-old government employee from eastern Baghdad said, "This attack shows clearly that U.S. society is not perfect and the Americans do have people with criminal minds and who are ready to kill for the silliest reasons. "


He added, "If such an attack happened in Iraq or Afghanistan, I am sure the U.S. media would have seized the chance to depict the Arabs or Muslims as savage people who do not hesitate to kill children. "


Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda sent a condolence message to Obama. "We express our condolences to the families of the victims," he said. "The sympathy of the Japanese people is with the American people."


In the Philippines, a society often afflicted by gun violence, President Benigno Aquino III said he and the Filipino people stand beside the United States "with bowed heads, yet in deep admiration over the manner in which the American people have reached out to comfort the afflicted, and to search for answers that will give meaning and hope to this grim event.


"We pray for healing, and that this heartbreak will never be visited on any community ever again," Aquino said in a statement tweeted by deputy presidential spokesman Abigail Valte.


___


Peck reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Thanyarat Doksone in Bangkok, Kristen Gelineau in Sydney, Malcolm Foster and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Charles Hutzler in Beijing, Ravi Nessman in New Delhi, Sam Kim in Seoul, South Korea, Oliver Teves in Manila, Philippines, Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad, Don Melvin in Brussels, Jim Heintz in Moscow and Frances D'Emilio in Rome contributed to this report.


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School shooting postpones Cruise premiere in Pa.


NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. premiere of the Tom Cruise action movie "Jack Reacher" is being postponed following the deadly Connecticut school shooting.


Paramount Pictures says "out of honor and respect for the families of the victims" the premiere won't take place Saturday in Pittsburgh, where "Jack Reacher" was filmed.


The premiere would've been Cruise's first U.S. media appearance since his split from Katie Holmes over the summer. It was to be more contained with select outlets covering and a location away from Hollywood or New York.


A proclamation ceremony for Cruise had been planned with Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.


No new date for the premiere has been set. The movie opens Dec. 21.


Friday's massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school killed 20 children and several adults.


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Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


___


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


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


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Police, world wonder about Conn. shooting motive


NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — The massacre of 26 children and adults at a Connecticut elementary school elicited horror and soul-searching around the world even as it raised more basic questions about why the gunman, a 20-year-old described as brilliant but remote, would have been driven to such a crime and how he chose his victims.


Investigators were trying to learn more about the gunman, Adam Lanza, and questioned his older brother, who is not believed to have been involved in the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary. Police shed no light on the motive for the nation's second-deadliest school shooting.


In tight-knit Newtown on Friday night, hundreds of people packed St. Rose of Lima church and stood outside in a vigil for the 28 dead — 20 children and six adults at the school, the gunman's mother at home, and the gunman himself, who committed suicide. People held hands, lit candles and sang "Silent Night."


"These 20 children were just beautiful, beautiful children," Monsignor Robert Weiss said. "These 20 children lit up this community better than all these Christmas lights we have. ... There are a lot brighter stars up there tonight because of these kids."


Lanza is believed to have suffered from a personality disorder and lived with his mother, said a law enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation.


Lanza shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, drove to the school in her car with at least three guns, including a high-powered rifle that he apparently left in the back of the vehicle, and shot up two classrooms around 9:30 a.m. Friday, law enforcement officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.


A custodian ran through the halls, warning of a gunman, and someone switched on the intercom, perhaps saving many lives by letting them hear the chaos in the school office, a teacher said. Teachers locked their doors and ordered children to huddle in a corner or hide in closets as shots echoed through the building.


The well-liked principal, Dawn Hochsprung, was believed to be among the dead. A woman who worked at the school was wounded. An update on victims' identities was possible Saturday morning, state police Lt. Paul Vance said Friday evening.


A law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said investigators believe Lanza attended the school several years ago but appeared to have no recent connection to it.


At least one parent said Lanza's mother was a substitute teacher there. But her name did not appear on a staff list. And the official said investigators were unable to establish any connection so far between her and the school.


Lanza's older brother, 24-year-old Ryan Lanza, of Hoboken, N.J., was questioned, but a law enforcement official said he was not believed to have had a role in the rampage. Investigators were searching his computers and phone records, but he told law enforcement he had not been in touch with his brother since about 2010.


The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation.


At one point, a law enforcement official mistakenly identified the gunman as Ryan Lanza. Brett Wilshe, a friend of Ryan Lanza's, said Lanza told him the gunman may have had his identification. Ryan Lanza apparently posted Facebook page updates Friday afternoon that read, "It wasn't me" and "I was at work."


For about two hours late Friday and early Saturday, clergy members and emergency vehicles moved steadily to and from the school. The state medical examiner's office said bodies of the victims would be taken there eventually for autopsies.


At least three guns were found — a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols, inside the school, and a .223-caliber rifle in the back of a car, authorities said. A law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said some of the guns used in the attack may have belonged to Lanza's family. His mother had legally registered four weapons, his father two.


Authorities also recovered three other guns — a Henry repeating rifle, an Enfield rifle and a shotgun. It was not clear exactly where those weapons were found.


Adam Lanza and his mother lived in a well-to-do part of prosperous Newtown, about 60 miles northeast of New York City, where neighbors are doctors or hold white-collar positions at companies such as General Electric, Pepsi and IBM.


Lanza's parents filed for divorce in 2008, according to court records. His father, Peter Lanza, lives in Stamford, Conn., and works as a tax director for General Electric.


The gunman's aunt Marsha Lanza, of Crystal Lake, Ill., said her nephew was raised by kind, nurturing parents who would not have hesitated to seek mental help for him if he needed it.


"Nancy wasn't one to deny reality," Marsha Lanza said, adding her husband had seen Adam as recently as June and recalled nothing out of the ordinary.


Catherine Urso, of Newtown, said her college-age son knew the killer and remembered him for his alternative style. "He just said he was very thin, very remote and was one of the goths," she said.


Adam Lanza attended Newtown High School, and several news clippings from recent years mention his name among the honor roll students.


Joshua Milas, who graduated from Newtown High in 2009 and belonged to the school technology club with him, said Adam Lanza was generally a happy person but that he hadn't seen him in a few years.


"We would hang out, and he was a good kid. He was smart," Joshua Milas said. "He was probably one of the smartest kids I know. He was probably a genius."


An official who spoke on condition of anonymity said it was not clear that Adam Lanza had a job, and there was no indication of law enforcement interviews or search warrants at a place of business.


The mass shooting is one of the deadliest in U.S. history, and among school attacks is second in victims only to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, which left 33 people dead, including the gunman. Reaction was swift and emotional in Newtown, a picturesque New England community of 27,000 people, as well as across the country and around the world.


"It has to stop, these senseless deaths," said Frank DeAngelis, principal of Colorado's Columbine High School, where a massacre in 1999 killed 15 people.


In Washington, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence organized a vigil at the White House, with some protesters chanting, "Today IS the day" to take steps to curb gun violence. In New York's Times Square, a few dozen people held tea lights in plastic cups, with one woman holding a sign that read: "Take a moment and candle to remember the victims of the Newtown shooting."


President Barack Obama's comments on the tragedy amounted to one of the most outwardly emotional moments of his presidency.


"The majority of those who died were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old," Obama said at a White House news briefing. He paused for several seconds to keep his composure as he teared up and wiped an eye. Nearby, two aides cried and held hands.


Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described the attack as a "senseless and incomprehensible act of evil."


"Like President Obama and his fellow Americans, our hearts too are broken," Gillard said in a statement.


In Japan, where guns are severely restricted and there are extremely few gun-related crimes, the attack led the news two days before nationwide parliamentary elections. In China, which has seen several knife rampages at schools in recent years, the attack quickly consumed public discussion.


At the Newtown vigil, Anthony Bloss, whose three daughters survived, said they are doing better than he. "I'm numb. I'm completely numb," he said.


Panicked parents looking for their children had raced earlier in the day to Sandy Hook, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school where police told youngsters to close their eyes as they were led from the building so that they wouldn't see the blood and broken glass.


Schoolchildren — some crying, many looking frightened — were escorted through a parking lot in a line, hands on one another's shoulders.


Robert Licata said his 6-year-old son was in class when the gunman burst in and shot the teacher. "That's when my son grabbed a bunch of his friends and ran out the door," he said. "He was very brave. He waited for his friends."


He said the shooter didn't utter a word.


Kaitlin Roig, a teacher at the school, said she implored her students to be quiet.


"I told them we had to be absolutely quiet. Because I was just so afraid if he did come in, then he would hear us and just start shooting the door. I said we have to be absolutely quiet. And I said there are bad guys out there now and we need to wait for the good guys to come get us out," Roig told ABC News.


"If they started crying, I would take their face and say it's going to be OK. Show me your smile," she said. "They said, we want to go home for Christmas. Yes, yeah. I just want to hug my mom, things like that, that were just heartbreaking."


___


Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Pat Eaton-Robb and Matt Apuzzo and videographer Robert Ray in Newtown; Bridget Murphy in Boston; Samantha Henry in Newark, N.J.; Pete Yost in Washington; Michael Melia in Hartford; and the AP News Research Center in New York.


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Kazakhstan to introduce mayoral elections in 2013


ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) — The president of Kazakhstan said Friday he plans to introduce direct elections for town and village mayors in an effort to foster democratic standards in the authoritarian Central Asian nation.


In a wide-ranging address, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said more than 2,500 municipal heads — about 90 percent of local governor posts — would be elected starting from next year. No local governors are currently elected.


Nazarbayev said Kazakhstan would seek to pursue further democratization and strengthen the power of the parliament. He gave no indication that he plans to step aside.


Kazakhstan, a vast oil-rich nation of 17 million bordering China and Russia, has come under sustained criticism for limiting media freedoms and making slow progress in political reforms. The president insisted, however, that his country would not be rushed into reforms before the economic conditions were right.


"Every step of our political reforms is closely tied to our level of economic development," he said.


The bulk of Friday's speech was aimed at cataloging achievements in the ex-Soviet nation over the 72-year old leader's two decades in power and setting out the nation's strategy until 2050.


Nazarbayev said Kazakhstan has to date attracted $160 billion in foreign investment. Much of that has gone toward developing the country's abundant energy and mineral resources.


In what may prove a controversial announcement, Nazarbayev said the Latin alphabet would be adopted by 2025 in place of the Russian-style Cyrillic alphabet currently in use. By the same year, 95 percent of Kazakhstan's citizens should have learned to speak in Kazakh, he said.


Although Kazakh is the official state language, many people speak Russian instead.


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Sweet and Lowe: How a captivating Twitter feed sealed Rob Lowe’s comeback






By Virginia Heffernan


@RobLowe follows 135 people on Twitter. Among them is not @HilaryASwank, the Oscar-winning ex-wife of his brother, @ichadlowe.






@RobLowe does, however, follow @ikimlowe, the new wife of his brother, who helpfully identifies herself on the site as “wife of @ichadlowe.” Would @HilaryASwank, a formidable actor who does not use Twitter very often, have consented to live in her lesser-known husband’s Twitter shadow? Perhaps not. Perhaps that’s why they div—


But what am I doing? This is where Twitter can lead a person: to deranged, speculative pointless nosiness. To mindlessly customizing a version of Us Weekly magazine by reading between the Twitter lines of who follows whom, who tags whom, who seeks whose attention with tags and hashtags.


So forget that. I’m just going to keep following @RobLowe. His Twitter feed is one for the ages, and he’s on a tear, having just hit half a million followers. And I swear I follow Rob Lowe for the epigrams and jokes—why else?—though, yes, I once had a poster of the matinee idol from “St. Elmo’s Fire” on my wall. (But only because I learned that science had proven that he and Jaclyn Smith were the most perfectly symmetrical, beautiful humans ever to exist—and who ever would exist. It was a duty of citizenship in the human race to have a poster!)


Not long after “St. Elmo’s Fire,” @RobLowe, the record reflects, had a speedy fall after an early-adopter DIY sex tape (1988! Paris Hilton’s was not ’til 2003!). As Lowe’s first-rate autobiography reports, this was part of a bigger personal unraveling into promiscuity and dissipation on an NBA/Lohan scale. Eventually Lowe found deliverance in sobriety (which he names as one of his interests on Twitter) and the love of a good woman, @Sheryl_Lowe (business) or @Sheryllowe61 (personal).


Lowe also evidently found something in Twitter. As his career has done more than rebound—it has fully realized itself, with his comic-stilted-earnest-inimitable performances on “The West Wing,” “Brothers & Sisters” and, now, “Parks and Recreation”—he has built a sturdy and complementary Twitter feed.


Lowe’s Twitter presence seals his comeback. It is freewheeling, wide-ranging and among his best work. The onetime incorrigible gadfly, who might have died outside the Viper Room like River Phoenix or been left howling at the moon like Charlie Sheen, now knows who he is, has a gift for observational humor and lives his life with something that looks like joy.


Lowe recently retweeted this observation from the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson:


More:


Another Lowe tweet:


Which of us–especially those of us who were born in the 1960s–doesn’t feel like saying that aloud every year?


And speaking of Lowe’s vintage, it’s appealing that he’s not afraid to use our generation’s corny locutions on young-skewing Twitter. As he put it recently:


The merciless “pumped” kills me. Do people never leave the slang (or bands?) of their 20s? Lowe is big on “dude,” too.


At the same time, Lowe seems to enjoy aging:


He wrote this last month, referring to Chris Traeger, his character on “Parks and Recreation,” who exercises without cease, gunning for eternal life. In Traeger’s intense specificity—his needs in beverages, for example, are so idiosyncratic as to require paragraphs of instructions—he is a perfect new-sitcom archetype. One thing he is not is cool.


And neither is Lowe cool in his Twitter feed. Often he is sending out blessings to his followers or his family, or reveling in mere existence, with the hashtag #LoveLife. Lowe’s autobiography makes clear that the Handsome Man, a cultural slot in which he found himself early on, invites way too much resentment if he doesn’t start spoofing himself with gusto. It’s imperative he find the joke in life, and the dignity in himself, or he’ll yield to prettiness and silliness, as well as drugs and sex tapes.


Look on that @RobLowe Twitter feed, and learn from it, ye handsome millennials!


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News


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Tolkien class at Wis. university proves popular


MILWAUKEE (AP) — The vast collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts initially sold senior Joe Kirchoff on Marquette University, so when the school offered its first course devoted exclusively to the English author, Kirchoff wanted in. The only problem: It was full and he wasn't on the literature track.


Undaunted, the 22-year-old political science and history major lobbied the English department and others starting last spring and through the summer and "kind of just made myself a problem," he said. His persistence paid off.


"It's a fantastic course," said Kirchoff, a Chicago native. "It's a great way to look at something that's such a creative work of genius in such a way you really come to understand the man behind it."


He and the 31 other students can now boast of their authority about the author who influenced much of today's high fantasy writing. The course was taught for the first time this fall as part of the university's celebration of the 75th anniversary of "The Hobbit" being published. And class wrapped up just before the film, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," was released Friday.


The class, which filled up fast with mostly seniors who had first dibs, looked at Tolkien as a whole, not just the popular "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit." Students took their final exam this week, and the course was so well received, Marquette is considering more in the future.


"It's the best class I've had in 27 years here ... for student preparation, interest and enthusiasm," said English professor Tim Machan. "And I can throw out any topic and they will have read the material and they want to talk about the material."


Marquette is one of the main repositories of Tolkien's drafts, drawings and other writings — more than 11,000 pages. It has the manuscripts for "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit," as well as his lesser-known "Farmer Giles of Ham" and his children's book "Mr. Bliss." Marquette was the first institution to ask Tolkien for the manuscripts in 1956 and paid him about $5,000. He died in 1973.


Other significant collections are at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England and Wheaton College in Illinois.


Though Tolkien classes aren't unusual nationwide, Marquette students had the added bonus of being able to visit Tolkien's revisions, notes, detailed calendars, maps and watercolors on site at the school's archive. And they got a lesson from the school's archivist Bill Fliss.


"One of the things we wanted to impress upon the students was the fact that Tolkien was a fanatical reviser," said Fliss said. "He never really did anything once and was finished with it."


Chrissy Wabiszewski, a senior English major, described Tolkien's manuscripts as art.


"When you get down and look at just his script and his artwork in general, it all kind of flows together in this really beautiful, like, cumulative form," Wabiszewski said. "It's cool. It is just really cool to have it here."


The class also looked at Tolkien's poetry, academic articles and translations of medieval poems; talked about the importance of his writers' group, the Inklings; and explored what it meant to be a writer at that time.


"We've ... tried to think about continuities that ran through everything he did," Machan said. His students were also required to go to three lectures that were part of Marquette's commemoration.


"The Hobbit," a tale of homebody Bilbo Baggins' journey, is set in Tolkien's fictional realm of Middle-earth and takes place 60 years before "The Lord of the Rings." The movie released Friday is the first of the trilogy, with "The Hobbit: There and Back Again" set for release on Dec. 13, 2013, and a third film to come out in the summer of 2014.


Most of the students were just finishing elementary school when the first "Lord of the Rings" film was released 11 years ago.


Kirchoff said he started reading "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" when he was in fourth grade, before the movies came out. He said the movies have introduced others to Tolkien's ideas, making his love for Tolkien's fantasy worlds more socially acceptable.


"The movies were fantastic enough and engaging enough to coexist in my mind with the literature I really do love," he said.


Wabiszewski said it's clear her classmates weren't just taking the class as a filler.


"I definitely expected the enthusiasm from everybody but just the knowledge that everybody brought into the class, it's cool," she said. "We really have a smart group of people in that class who have a lot to offer."


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Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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U.S. to send missiles, troops to Turkey


INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signed an order on Friday to send two Patriot missile batteries to Turkey with 400 American personnel to operate them, in a move by NATO members to bolster Turkey's defenses against the threat of Syrian missiles.


The order was signed shortly before Panetta arrived on an unannounced visit to Turkey to meet American troops stationed at the Incirlik Air Base, the last stop on a week-long trip that took him to Afghanistan and Kuwait.


"The purpose of this deployment is to signal very strongly that the United States, working closely with our NATO allies, is going to support the defense of Turkey, especially with potential threats emanating from Syria," spokesman George Little said.


NATO-member Turkey has repeatedly scrambled jets along the countries' joint frontier and responded in kind when shells from the Syrian conflict came down inside its borders, fanning fears that the civil war could spread to destabilize the region.


The widely expected U.S. move follows similar steps by Germany and the Netherlands, which also said they will send two Patriot batteries. The three countries are the only NATO nations with the most modern type of Patriots.


Little declined to say where the U.S. batteries would be located and said the systems would be deployed to Turkey for an unspecified amount of time.


"We expect them to be deployed in the coming weeks," Little said.


NATO approved Turkey's request for air defense batteries on December 4, in a move meant to calm its fears of coming under missile attack, possibly with chemical weapons, from Syria.


The Patriot system is designed to intercept aircraft or missiles. NATO says the measure is purely defensive, but Russia, Syria and Iran have criticized the decision, saying it increases regional instability.


(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Janet Lawrence)



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Pakistan extends refugee status for Afghans


ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan has extended refugee status for over a million Afghans in the country by an additional six months, the government announced — a move likely to ease fears of Afghans living in Pakistan that they would soon have to return home.


Pakistan has been hosting hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees dating back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan three decades ago. But many Pakistanis have become increasingly frustrated with the length of time the Afghans have stayed and would like them to leave.


The Pakistani government said in a statement released late Wednesday that refugee status had been set to expire on Dec. 30 and that they would extend it for another six months. The statement said there are 1.6 million registered and 1 million unregistered Afghans in Pakistan.


The extension would not affect unregistered Afghans, who are considered illegal residents.


The Afghan population in Pakistan is a legacy of Afghanistan's repeated conflicts, starting with the Soviet Union's invasion in 1979.


Many refugees can't fathom returning to Afghanistan any time soon, saying their homeland is still too violent and desperately poor.


Ehsanullah Elaj, an Afghan refugee who is a dentist in the city of Rawalpindi next to Islamabad, questioned what would happen to the refugees after the six-month extension expires.


"It would be very difficult for us to return to Afghanistan," Elaj said. "The majority of people want to stay here."


The Islamabad government has said it will not forcibly evict Afghans, many of whom have children born and raised in Pakistan. However, revoking their refugee status would encourage people to return.


Refugee status allows Afghans to get a government ID card that they use for everyday activities like banking or registering for school.


In a statement, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees welcomed the extension but pointed out the uncertainty for Afghan refugees.


"While the six month extension is important, Afghan refugees will be left wondering what the future has in store in July 2013 and beyond. UNHCR will therefore continue to encourage the government to maintain asylum space in the challenging transitional period ahead," said Neill Wright, the U.N. agency's Pakistan representative.


The U.N. agency has said that 83,000 Afghans have gone back this year, a 40 percent increase in those returning to their homeland compared to 2011. The U.N. has been spearheading a program this year designed to help Afghan refugees return to their homeland.


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Online:


http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e487016.html


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Familiar names line up for Golden Globe noms


BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — A familiar lineup of Hollywood awards contenders are expected among Golden Globe nominations, whose prospects include past Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis, Helen Mirren, Robert De Niro and Sally Field.


Nominations come out Thursday morning for the 70th Globes ceremony, Hollywood's second-biggest film honors after the Academy Awards.


Among potential contenders are two-time Oscar winners Day-Lewis and Field for Steven Spielberg's Civil War saga "Lincoln," whose Globe possibilities also include past Oscar recipient Tommy Lee Jones.


Two-time Oscar winner De Niro is in the running for the lost-soul romance "Silver Linings Playbook," along with the film's lead performers, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.


The field of contenders is loaded with other Oscar recipients such as Mirren and Anthony Hopkins for "Hitchcock," Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Master," Helen Hunt for "The Sessions," Marion Cotillard for "Rust and Bone," Russell Crowe for "Les Miserables" and Alan Arkin for "Argo."


One of the year's big action hits, the James Bond adventure "Skyfall," could bring the latest Globe nomination for past Oscar winner Javier Bardem, who elevates his super-villain role into one of the year's most entertaining performances.


Presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a relatively small group of about 90 reporters covering Hollywood for overseas outlets, the Globes sometimes single out newcomers to Hollywood's awards scene. Hilary Swank's Globe win for 1999's "Boys Don't Cry" helped put her on the map on the way to winning her first Oscar.


The possibilities this time include veteran French performers Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, who star as an elderly couple in "Amour," and first-time actors Quvenzhane Wallis and Dwight Henry for the low-budget critical darling "Beasts of the Southern Wild."


Globe acting winners often go on to receive the same prizes at the Oscars. All four Oscar winners last season — lead performers Meryl Streep of "The Iron Lady" and Jean Dujardin of "The Artist" and supporting players Octavia Spencer of "The Help" and Christopher Plummer of "Beginners" — won Globes first.


The Globes have a spotty record predicting which films might go on to earn the best-picture prize at the Academy Awards, however.


The Globes feature two best-film categories, one for drama and one for musical or comedy. Last year's Oscar best-picture winner, "The Artist," preceded that honor with a Globe win for best musical or comedy.


But in the seven years before that, only one winner in the Globe best-picture categories — 2008's "Slumdog Millionaire" — followed up with an Oscar best-picture win.


Along with 14 film prizes, the Globes hand out awards in 11 television categories.


Jodie Foster, a two-time Oscar and Globe winner for "The Accused" and "The Silence of the Lambs," will receive the group's Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the Jan. 13 ceremony.


Tina Fey, a two-time Globe TV winner for "30 Rock," and Amy Poehler, a past nominee for "Parks and Recreation," will host the show, which airs live on NBC.


Fey and Poehler follow Ricky Gervais, who was host the last three years and rubbed some Hollywood egos the wrong way with sharp wisecracks about A-list stars and the foreign press association itself.


With stars sharing drinks and dinner, the Globes have a reputation as one of Hollywood's loose and unpredictable awards gatherings. Winners occasionally have been off in the restroom when their names were announced, and there have been moments of onstage spontaneity such as Jack Nicholson mooning the crowd or Ving Rhames handing over his trophy to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon.


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Online:


http://www.goldenglobes.org


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Dozens sue pharmacy, but compensation uncertain


NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Dennis O'Brien rubs his head as he details ailments triggered by the fungal meningitis he developed after a series of steroid shots in his neck: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, drowsiness, blurred vision, exhaustion and trouble with his speech and attention.


He estimates the disease has cost him and his wife thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses and her lost wages, including time spent on 6-hour round trip weekly visits to the hospital. They've filed a lawsuit seeking $4 million in damages from the Massachusetts pharmacy that supplied the steroid injections, but it could take years for them to get any money back and they may never get enough to cover their expenses. The same is true for dozens of others who have sued the New England Compounding Center.


"I don't have a life anymore. My life is a meningitis life," the 59-year-old former school teacher said, adding that he's grateful he survived.


His is one of at least 50 federal lawsuits in nine states that have been filed against NECC, and more are being filed in state courts every day. More than 500 people have gotten sick after receiving injections prepared by the pharmacy.


The lawsuits allege that NECC negligently produced a defective and dangerous product and seek millions to repay families for the death of spouses, physically painful recoveries, lost wages and mental and emotional suffering. Thirty-seven people have died in the outbreak.


"The truth is the chance of recovering damages from NECC is extremely low," said John Day, a Nashville attorney who represents several patients who have been sickened by fungal meningitis.


To streamline the process, attorneys on both sides are asking to have a single judge preside over the pretrial and discovery phases for all of the federal lawsuits.


This approach, called multidistrict litigation, would prevent inconsistent pretrial rulings and conserve resources of all parties. But unlike a class-action case, those lawsuits would eventually be returned to judges in their original district for trial, according to Brian Fitzpatrick, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville.


Even with this approach, Fitzpatrick noted that federal litigation is very slow, and gathering all the evidence, records and depositions during the discovery phase could take months or years.


"Most of the time what happens is once they are consolidated for pretrial proceedings, there is a settlement, a global settlement between all the lawyers and the defendants before anything is shipped back for trial," he said.


A lawyer representing NECC, Frederick H. Fern, described the consolidation process as an important step.


"A Boston venue is probably the best scenario," Fern said in an email. "That's where the parties, witnesses and documents are located, and where the acts subject to these complaints occurred."


Complicating efforts to recover damages, attorneys for the patients said, NECC is a small private company that has now recalled all its products and laid off its workers. The company's pharmacy licenses have been surrendered, and it's unclear whether NECC had adequate liability insurance.


Fern said NECC has insurance, but they were still determining what the policy covers.


But Day says, "It's clear to me that at the end of the day, NECC is not going to have sufficient assets to compensate any of these people, not even 1 percent."


As a result, many attorneys are seeking compensation from other parties. Among the additional defendants named in lawsuits are NECC pharmacist and co-founder Barry Cadden; co-founder Greg Conigliaro; sister company Ameridose and its marketing and support arm, Medical Sales Management.


Founded in 2006 by Cadden and Conigliaro, Ameridose would eventually report annual revenue of $100 million. An NECC spokesman didn't respond to a request for the pharmacy's revenue.


While Federal Drug Administration regulators have also found contamination issues at Westborough, Mass.-based Ameridose, the FDA has said it has not connected Ameridose drugs to infection or illness.


Under tort law, a lawsuit has to prove a defendant has a potential liability, which in this case could be anyone involved in the medical procedure. However, any such suit could take years and ultimately may not be successful.


"I would not be surprised if doctors, hospitals, people that actually injected the drugs, the people that bought the drugs from the compounding company, many of those people will also be sued," said Fitzpatrick.


Plaintiffs' attorneys said they're considering that option but want more information on the relationships between the compounding pharmacy and the hundreds of hospitals and clinics that received its products.


Day, the attorney in Tennessee, said the clinics and doctors that purchase their drugs from compounding pharmacies or manufacturers could be held liable for negligence because they are in a better position to determine the safety of the medicine than the patients.


"Did they use due care in determining from whom to buy these drugs?" Day said.


Terry Dawes, a Michigan attorney who has filed at least 10 federal lawsuits in the case, said in traditional product liability cases, a pharmaceutical distributor could be liable.


"We are looking at any conceivable sources of recovery for our clients including pharmaceutical supply places that may have dealt with this company in the past," he said.


Ten years ago, seven fungal meningitis illnesses and deaths were linked to injectable steroid from a South Carolina compounding pharmacy. That resulted in fewer than a dozen lawsuits, a scale much smaller than the litigations mounting up against NECC.


Two companies that insured the South Carolina pharmacy and its operators tried unsuccessfully to deny payouts. An appellate court ruled against their argument that the pharmacy willfully violated state regulations by making multiple vials of the drug without specific prescriptions, but the opinion was unpublished and doesn't set a precedent for the current litigation.


The lawsuits represent a way for patients and their families recover expenses, but also to hold the pharmacy and others accountable for the incalculable emotional and physical toll of the disease.


A binder of snapshots shows what life is like in the O'Briens' rural Fentress County, Tenn., home: Dennis hooked up to an IV, Dennis in an antibiotics stupor, bruises on his body from injections and blood tests. He's had three spinal taps. His 11-day stay in the hospital cost over $100,000, which was covered by health insurance.


His wife said she sometimes quietly checks at night to see whether her husband of 35 years is still breathing.


"In my mind, I thought we were going to fight this and get over it. But we are not ever going to get over it," said Kaye O'Brien.


Marjorie Norwood, a 59-year-old grandmother of three who lives in Ethridge, Tenn., has spent just shy of two months total in the hospital in Nashville battling fungal meningitis after receiving a steroid injection in her back. She was allowed to come home for almost a week around Thanksgiving, but was readmitted after her symptoms worsened.


Family members are still dealing with much uncertainty about her recovery, but they have not filed a lawsuit, said their attorney Mark Chalos. He said Norwood will likely be sent to a rehabilitation facility after her second stay in the hospital rather than return home again.


Marjorie Norwood's husband, an autoworker, has taken time off work to care for her and they depend on his income and insurance.


"It doesn't just change her life, it changes everyone else's life around her because we care about her and want her to be happy and well and have everything that she needs," said her daughter, Melanie Norwood.


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Why more didn't die in Ore. mall shooting


Citizens' coolheadedness and individual preparation for coping with gunfire in public settings may have curtailed the casualty count from Tuesday's shooting at a Portland, Ore., shopping mall, law officers suggested on the day after the tragedy.


Two people died and one was critically wounded before the shooter, 22-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts of Portland, killed himself a few minutes after running into the food court at the Clackamas Town Center mall. Officials say Mr. Roberts, wearing camouflage and a white hockey mask, had methodically fired "multiple" rounds from an assault-style rifle at random shoppers.


Most of the 10,000 Christmas shoppers at the mall appeared nearly as ready and able as police to deal with a gunman appearing suddenly in their midst, Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts said on Wednesday.


"Many people have asked me why there were so few victims during this incident," said Sheriff Roberts. He listed the fact that Mr. Roberts's AR-15 semiautomatic rifle intermittently jammed and noted a well-practiced mall lockdown procedure. But he also credited "10,000 people in the mall who at one time kept a level head, got themselves out of the mall, helped others get out, secured themselves in stores.… It was really about a whole group of people coming together to make a difference."


RECOMMENDED: A Second Amendment quiz


Law officers said during a Wednesday press conference that they did not know whether any member of the public carrying a concealed weapon had counterattacked Roberts. But they said they are certain that Roberts died by his own hand after fleeing down a stairwell from the mall's upper level.


The death rate from mass shootings has ticked up slightly in recent years, even as deaths in single-victim incidents have decreased, according to a recent analysis of FBI crime data by the Huffington Post. The worst recent mass shooting came in July in Aurora, Colo., where a gunman killed 12 people and injured 58 during a midnight screening of a new "Batman" movie.


Gun-control advocates seized on the mall shooting as a possible result of the expiration in 2004 of a national ban on assault weapons.


"Santa Claus could have been shot in the mall," said Penny Okamoto, executive director of Ceasefire Oregon, in an interview with the Portland Tribune. "If you're sick of this, you should call your legislators to tell them to fix the laws so that assault weapons don't end up in the hands of felons."


Many versions of the AR-15 were banned under the assault weapons law, but it's not known if the gun used in the Clackamas mall shooting was one of them.


Police said Roberts had no criminal record and had stolen the AR-15 from "someone he knew."


Does the collected response by shoppers at the Clackamas Town Center indicate that Americans are becoming less daunted by senseless violence and, perhaps, better ready to react? Those who back broad gun rights under the Constitution's Second Amendment suggest a shift may be under way in people's readiness to respond.


In blocking Illinois's ban on concealed weapons, the last such law in the nation, Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner on Tuesday implied that self-defense readiness in public is not only protected by the US Constitution, but may be good social policy. An awareness "that many law-abiding citizens are walking the streets armed may make criminals timid," he wrote in his ruling.


"As far as a social shift, I think people are getting more intelligent and appropriate in their reactions to shooters," says Dave Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank in Golden, Colo. "Police training has changed in significant ways since the Columbine [High School] shooting [in 1999], where they no longer wait for the SWAT team to arrive but go in immediately with … the army they have. There's also an awareness [among police and the public] that if you're trying to stop a gangster from robbing a liquor store, you may have a [heck] of a fight on your hands, but that these publicity-seeking guys with mental illness, they basically crumble at first opposition."


The upshot, says Mr. Kopel: "Lying down and cowering doesn't seem to work very well, so law enforcement has gotten smarter and civilians have gotten smarter."


In Clackamas County, Sheriff Roberts said local law-enforcement personnel had trained earlier this year for a shooting scenario at Clackamas Town Center, an exercise that involved both police and retailers. On Tuesday, arriving police, in keeping with evolving police tactics nationwide, formed small teams and quickly entered the mall to pursue the shooter. Police could not say Wednesday whether any officers saw the shooter before he killed himself.


Dennis Curtis, the mall's general manager, noted that police officers told him that they were amazed "how many stores were secured and people were locked in place" upon entering the mall to look for the shooter.


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Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar dies at 92


NEW DELHI (AP) — With an instrument perplexing to most Westerners, Ravi Shankar helped connect the world through music. The sitar virtuoso hobnobbed with the Beatles, became a hippie musical icon and spearheaded the first rock benefit concert as he introduced traditional Indian ragas to Western audiences over nearly a century.


From George Harrison to John Coltrane, from Yehudi Menuhin to David Crosby, his connections reflected music's universality, though a gap persisted between Shankar and many Western fans. Sometimes they mistook tuning for tunes, while he stood aghast at displays like Jimi Hendrix's burning guitar.


Shankar died Tuesday at age 92. A statement on his website said he died in San Diego, near his Southern California home with his wife and a daughter by his side. The musician's foundation issued a statement saying that he had suffered upper respiratory and heart problems and had undergone heart-valve replacement surgery last week.


Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also confirmed Shankar's death and called him a "national treasure."


Labeled "the godfather of world music" by Harrison, Shankar helped millions of classical, jazz and rock lovers discover the centuries-old traditions of Indian music.


"He was legend of legends," Shivkumar Sharma, a noted santoor player who performed with Shankar, told Indian media. "Indian classical was not at all known in the Western world. He was the musician who had that training ... the ability to communicate with the Western audience."


He also pioneered the concept of the rock benefit with the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh. To later generations, he was known as the estranged father of popular American singer Norah Jones.


His last musical performance was with his other daughter, sitarist Anoushka Shankar Wright, on Nov. 4 in Long Beach, California; his foundation said it was to celebrate his 10th decade of creating music. The multiple Grammy winner learned that he had again been nominated for the award the night before his surgery.


"It's one of the biggest losses for the music world," said Kartic Seshadri, a Shankar protege, sitar virtuoso and music professor at the University of California, San Diego. "There's nothing more to be said."


As early as the 1950s, Shankar began collaborating with and teaching some of the greats of Western music, including violinist Menuhin and jazz saxophonist Coltrane. He played well-received shows in concert halls in Europe and the United States, but faced a constant struggle to bridge the musical gap between the West and the East.


Describing an early Shankar tour in 1957, Time magazine said. "U.S. audiences were receptive but occasionally puzzled."


His close relationship with Harrison, the Beatles lead guitarist, shot Shankar to global stardom in the 1960s.


Harrison had grown fascinated with the sitar, a long-necked string instrument that uses a bulbous gourd for its resonating chamber and resembles a giant lute. He played the instrument, with a Western tuning, on the song "Norwegian Wood," but soon sought out Shankar, already a musical icon in India, to teach him to play it properly.


The pair spent weeks together, starting the lessons at Harrison's house in England and then moving to a houseboat in Kashmir and later to California.


Gaining confidence with the complex instrument, Harrison recorded the Indian-inspired song "Within You Without You" on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," helping spark the raga-rock phase of 60s music and drawing increasing attention to Shankar and his work.


Shankar's popularity exploded, and he soon found himself playing on bills with some of the top rock musicians of the era. He played a four-hour set at the Monterey Pop Festival and the opening day of Woodstock.


Though the audience for his music had hugely expanded, Shankar, a serious, disciplined traditionalist who had played Carnegie Hall, chafed against the drug use and rebelliousness of the hippie culture.


"I was shocked to see people dressing so flamboyantly. They were all stoned. To me, it was a new world," Shankar told Rolling Stone of the Monterey festival.


While he enjoyed Otis Redding and the Mamas and the Papas at the festival, he was horrified when Hendrix lit his guitar on fire.


"That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God," he said.


In 1971, moved by the plight of millions of refugees fleeing into India to escape the war in Bangladesh, Shankar reached out to Harrison to see what they could do to help.


In what Shankar later described as "one of the most moving and intense musical experiences of the century," the pair organized two benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden that included Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr.


The concert, which spawned an album and a film, raised millions of dollars for UNICEF and inspired other rock benefits, including the 1985 Live Aid concert to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia and the 2010 Hope For Haiti Now telethon.


Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury was born April 7, 1920, in the Indian city of Varanasi.


At the age of 10, he moved to Paris to join the world famous dance troupe of his brother Uday. Over the next eight years, Shankar traveled with the troupe across Europe, America and Asia, and later credited his early immersion in foreign cultures with making him such an effective ambassador for Indian music.


During one tour, renowned musician Baba Allaudin Khan joined the troupe, took Shankar under his wing and eventually became his teacher through 7 1/2 years of isolated, rigorous study of the sitar.


"Khan told me you have to leave everything else and do one thing properly," Shankar told The Associated Press.


In the 1950s, Shankar began gaining fame throughout India. He held the influential position of music director for All India Radio in New Delhi and wrote the scores for several popular films. He began writing compositions for orchestras, blending clarinets and other foreign instruments into traditional Indian music.


And he became a de facto tutor for Westerners fascinated by India's musical traditions.


He gave lessons to Coltrane, who named his son Ravi in Shankar's honor, and became close friends with Menuhin, recording the acclaimed "West Meets East" album with him. He also collaborated with flutist Jean Pierre Rampal, composer Philip Glass and conductors Andre Previn and Zubin Mehta.


"Any player on any instrument with any ears would be deeply moved by Ravi Shankar. If you love music, it would be impossible not to be," singer Crosby, whose band The Byrds was inspired by Shankar's music, said in the book "The Dawn of Indian Music in the West: Bhairavi."


Shankar's personal life, however, was more complex.


His 1941 marriage to Baba Allaudin Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, ended in divorce. Though he had a decades-long relationship with dancer Kamala Shastri that ended in 1981, he had relationships with several other women in the 1970s.


In 1979, he fathered Norah Jones with New York concert promoter Sue Jones, and in 1981, Sukanya Rajan, who played the tanpura at his concerts, gave birth to his daughter Anoushka.


He grew estranged from Sue Jones in the 80s and didn't see Norah for a decade, though they later re-established contact.


He married Rajan in 1989 and trained young Anoushka as his heir on the sitar. In recent years, father and daughter toured the world together.


The statement she and her mother released said, "Although it is a time for sorrow and sadness, it is also a time for all of us to give thanks and to be grateful that we were able to have him as part of our lives."


When Jones shot to stardom and won five Grammy awards in 2003, Anoushka Shankar was nominated for a Grammy of her own.


Shankar himself won three Grammy awards and was nominated for an Oscar for his musical score for the movie "Gandhi." His album "The Living Room Sessions, Part 1" earned him his latest Grammy nomination, for best world music album.


Despite his fame, numerous albums and decades of world tours, Shankar's music remained a riddle to many Western ears.


Shankar was amused after he and colleague Ustad Ali Akbar Khan were greeted with admiring applause when they opened the Concert for Bangladesh by twanging their sitar and sarod for a minute and a half.


"If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more," he told the confused crowd, and then launched into his set.


___


Nessman reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writer Julie Watson in San Diego contributed to this report.


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DA investigating Texas' troubled $3B cancer agency


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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Experts: Station's royal hoax call may be illegal


SYDNEY (AP) — The Australian radio station behind a hoax phone call to the London hospital where the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge was being treated could face criminal charges for airing the conversation, legal experts said Tuesday.


Last week's prank was widely condemned days after it aired, after the still-unexplained death of a nurse who answered the phone and helped two DJs get confidential information about the former Kate Middleton's health. But when it comes to a potential criminal case, the question is not about the death; it's whether a private conversation was broadcast without the permission of the participants.


Violators could be sentenced to prison, but it's unclear who at radio station 2DayFM or its parent company, Southern Cross Austereo, made the decision to air the call. The DJs have said executives above them made the decision, but a former 2DayFM host who orchestrated many pranks for the station said DJs were always involved in such decisions while she was there.


Southern Cross Austereo has said the station had tried five times to contact the hospital, but privacy law expert Barbara McDonald said that could prove to be an inadequate defense.


"Seems to me that saying, 'We tried to call,' shows that they knew they should, and they've made a decision to go ahead knowing that they have not got permission," said McDonald, a law professor at the University of Sydney. "I don't know whether it makes the situation better, or worse."


The New South Wales state Surveillance Devices Act prohibits the broadcast of recorded private conversations without participants' permission, with violations punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to 55,000 Australian dollars ($58,000).


McDonald said the Commercial Radio Code of Practice has a similar ban, but she added that even if Australia's media watchdog found violations, the most extreme punishment — loss of license — is almost unheard of.


Australian authorities have said little about any possible investigation. State police have said only that they've been in contact with their London counterparts and are ready to assist them in any British investigation.


Radio hosts Mel Greig and Michael Christian called London's King Edward VII Hospital last week. Pretending to be Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, they asked for word on the Duchess of Cambridge, who had been suffering from severe morning sickness. Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who answered the phone, put them through to the ward, and the duo received confidential information on the duchess' condition that was later aired.


The radio station trumpeted the prank call until Friday, when Saldanha was found dead. Police have not disclosed the cause of Saldanha's death, but many have assumed it was related to the stress from the call. An autopsy was to be held Tuesday.


Grieg and Christian tearfully apologized for the prank in televised interviews Monday, after days of condemnation in countless Internet posts around the world.


Southern Cross Austereo also has apologized, and stopped running any advertising on 2DayFM following Saldanha's death. On Tuesday it issued a statement announcing that ads would resume Thursday, with all profits for the rest of December to be donated to "an appropriate fund that will directly benefit" Saldanha's family. The company said it would donate at least 500,000 Australian dollars ($525,000).


Austereo has repeatedly insisted that it followed the law. The company said in a statement Monday that the segment underwent an internal legal review before it was broadcast.


The company "does not consider that the broadcast of the segment has breached any relevant law, regulation or code," Austereo said, adding it would cooperate with any investigation.


On Monday, Austereo CEO Rhys Holleran said 2DayFM had tried five times, without success, to contact the London hospital to discuss the prank before it aired. The King Edward VII Hospital denied its management had been contacted by 2DayFM.


Media law expert Mark Pearson said that even if the station had tried to contact the hospital, that isn't enough under the law. He said permission must be granted by the person involved.


If the case went to court, it is possible that a judge could decide that an attempt at getting permission was sufficient, but only if the lawyers could prove that any "reasonable person" would agree that enough was done, said Pearson, a journalism professor at Bond University in Queensland state. He considered such a ruling to be a longshot.


"I think lawyers would be hard-pressed to argue that a few unprovable phone calls was enough to show that there had been a reasonable attempt to get permission," he said.


The case also could be investigated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the country's media watchdog. McDonald, the University of Sydney professor, said that stations found in violation generally are given warnings or told to train staff in proper procedures.


The authority has said it has received complaints about the hoax call and is looking into the case, but has not yet launched an official investigation.


Greig and Christian's comments Monday about higher-ups making the decision to air the call only raised more questions for Wendy Harmer, who hosted a morning show at 2DayFM from 1993 until resigning in late 2003.


Harmer said that when she was a DJ, she played an integral role in those decisions, and personally approved the many on-air pranks that she was responsible for.


The program producer, program manager and station manager needed to approve segments as well, Harmer said. She added that some segments were brought even higher to the group station manager for approval.


"If you're a DJ, and you're in front of the microphone, this is a very powerful medium and you should be absolutely apprised of all your responsibilities and all the rights of the audience," Harmer said. "And so to hear a couple of DJs who didn't seem to understand what those were was, I must say, alarming."


She added the company's statements that it had sought permission five times, and that the hoax call underwent legal review, are signals that the company knew "there's something big going down."


"I would say, 'If we have to bring the lawyers in, I'm not going to do it.' But I can say that with hindsight," she said.


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Recent hacking of U.N. nuclear agency not first attempt: IAEA






WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A recently announced hacking of the U.N. nuclear agency’s computer servers was not the first time an attempt had been made to break into the organization’s computer system, the head of the agency said on Thursday.


Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that a few months ago a group broke into the agency’s computer system and stole personal information of scientists working on peaceful uses of nuclear energy.






In response to questions at a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington, Amano repeated what he said last week after the hacking was revealed: no sensitive information about the IAEA‘s nuclear inspections had been stolen.


The IAEA has shut down the server that had been hacked and is continuing an investigation, Amano said. But he also said it wasn’t the first attempt to break into the system.


“If you ask if this is the only case? I would say there have been some other tries but we are doing our best to protect our system,” Amano said.


The hackers – a group using an Iranian-sounding name – have posted scores of email addresses of experts who have been working with the U.N. agency on a website, and have urged the IAEA to investigate Israel’s nuclear activity.


Israel, which has an undeclared nuclear arsenal, and the United States accuse Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran denies such ambitions.


Amano would not say if he believed Iran was behind the attacks on the IAEA, whose missions include preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and which is investigating Iran’s disputed nuclear activities.


“The group … they have what looks like an Iranian name. But that does not mean that the origin is Iran,” he said.


There has been an increase in suspected Iranian cyber attacks this year, coinciding with a deepening standoff with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program.


(Reporting by Deborah Charles. Editing by Warren Strobel and Doina Chiacu)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News


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Spice Girls musical 'Viva Forever' opens in London


LONDON (AP) — It's time to find out whether Girl Power is still going strong, with the premiere of a new stage musical based on the songs of the Spice Girls.


The members of the 1990s girl group — Baby, Sporty, Scary, Ginger and Posh — are expected on the red carpet for Tuesday's opening night of "Viva Forever" at London's Piccadilly Theatre.


The musical uses Spice Girls songs including "Wannabe" and "Spice Up Your Life" in a tale of four friends whose bond becomes strained when their band enters a TV talent show.


It's a pop confection with heavyweight credentials. The show was written by comedian Jennifer Saunders, co-creator of celebrity-skewering sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous."


The producer is Judy Craymer, who produced stage and screen versions of the hugely successful ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!"


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New tests could hamper food outbreak detection


WASHINGTON (AP) — It's about to get faster and easier to diagnose food poisoning, but that progress for individual patients comes with a downside: It could hurt the nation's ability to spot and solve dangerous outbreaks.


Next-generation tests that promise to shave a few days off the time needed to tell whether E. coli, salmonella or other foodborne bacteria caused a patient's illness could reach medical laboratories as early as next year. That could allow doctors to treat sometimes deadly diseases much more quickly — an exciting development.


The problem: These new tests can't detect crucial differences between different subtypes of bacteria, as current tests can. And that fingerprint is what states and the federal government use to match sick people to a contaminated food. The older tests might be replaced by the new, more efficient ones.


"It's like a forensics lab. If somebody says a shot was fired, without the bullet you don't know where it came from," explained E. coli expert Dr. Phillip Tarr of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.


The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that losing the ability to literally take a germ's fingerprint could hamper efforts to keep food safe, and the agency is searching for solutions. According to CDC estimates, 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from foodborne illnesses each year, and 3,000 die.


"These improved tests for diagnosing patients could have the unintended consequence of reducing our ability to detect and investigate outbreaks, ultimately causing more people to become sick," said Dr. John Besser of the CDC.


That means outbreaks like the salmonella illnesses linked this fall to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter might not be identified that quickly — or at all.


It all comes down to what's called a bacterial culture — whether labs grow a sample of a patient's bacteria in an old-fashioned petri dish, or skip that step because the new tests don't require it.


Here's the way it works now: Someone with serious diarrhea visits the doctor, who gets a stool sample and sends it to a private testing laboratory. The lab cultures the sample, growing larger batches of any lurking bacteria to identify what's there. If disease-causing germs such as E. coli O157 or salmonella are found, they may be sent on to a public health laboratory for more sophisticated analysis to uncover their unique DNA patterns — their fingerprints.


Those fingerprints are posted to a national database, called PulseNet, that the CDC and state health officials use to look for food poisoning trends.


There are lots of garden-variety cases of salmonella every year, from runny eggs to a picnic lunch that sat out too long. But if a few people in, say, Baltimore have salmonella with the same molecular signature as some sick people in Cleveland, it's time to investigate, because scientists might be able narrow the outbreak to a particular food or company.


But culture-based testing takes time — as long as two to four days after the sample reaches the lab, which makes for a long wait if you're a sick patient.


What's in the pipeline? Tests that could detect many kinds of germs simultaneously instead of hunting one at a time — and within hours of reaching the lab — without first having to grow a culture. Those tests are expected to be approved as early as next year.


This isn't just a science debate, said Shari Shea, food safety director at the Association of Public Health Laboratories.


If you were the patient, "you'd want to know how you got sick," she said.


PulseNet has greatly improved the ability of regulators and the food industry to solve those mysteries since it was launched in the mid-1990s, helping to spot major outbreaks in ground beef, spinach, eggs and cantaloupe in recent years. Just this fall, PulseNet matched 42 different salmonella illnesses in 20 different states that were eventually traced to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter.


Food and Drug Administration officials who visited the plant where the peanut butter was made found salmonella contamination all over the facility, with several of the plant samples matching the fingerprint of the salmonella that made people sick. A New Mexico-based company, Sunland Inc., recalled hundreds of products that were shipped to large retailers all over the country, including Target, Safeway and other large grocery chains.


The source of those illnesses probably would have remained a mystery without the national database, since there weren't very many illnesses in any individual state.


To ensure that kind of crucial detective work isn't lost, the CDC is asking the medical community to send samples to labs to be cultured even when they perform a new, non-culture test.


But it's not clear who would pay for that extra step. Private labs only can perform the tests that a doctor orders, noted Dr. Jay M. Lieberman of Quest Diagnostics, one of the country's largest testing labs.


A few first-generation non-culture tests are already available. When private labs in Wisconsin use them, they frequently ship leftover samples to the state lab, which grows the bacteria itself. But as more private labs switch over after the next-generation rapid tests arrive, the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene will be hard-pressed to keep up with that extra work before it can do its main job — fingerprinting the bugs, said deputy director Dr. Dave Warshauer.


Stay tuned: Research is beginning to look for solutions that one day might allow rapid and in-depth looks at food poisoning causes in the same test.


"As molecular techniques evolve, you may be able to get the information you want from non-culture techniques," Lieberman said.


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Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick


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