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“Storage Wars” porn lawsuit: alleged Brandi Passante video distributor found in contempt
Label: TechnologyAdele Shops for Baby in Los Angeles
Label: Lifestyle
Caught in the Act
She may or may not win a trophy at Sunday's Golden Globe Awards, but Adele is already picking up some little treasures in Los Angeles.
After arriving Thursday, the new mom, whose son was born in October, shopped at upscale baby boutique Bel Bambini in West Hollywood on Friday.
"She was in a great mood and just focused on picking up essentials for her baby boy," an eyewitness tells PEOPLE.
What did her lucky little boy get? According to a customer, the British superstar spent an hour at the store and purchased a "lot of loot," including baby wash, shampoos and a changing pad.
A bodyguard type helped the mom, who wore head-to-toe black with a blue coat and a hat, load her purchases into a waiting car.
The Globes, which air live Sunday (8 p.m. ET) on NBC, will be the first official appearance for Adele since she and boyfriend Simon Konecki welcomed their son, whose name is still unknown.
She's nominated for best original song for her James Bond tune, "Skyfall."
• Reporting by PERNILLA CEDENHEIM
Flu more widespread in US; eases off in some areas
Label: HealthNEW YORK (AP) — Flu is more widespread across the nation, but the number of hard-hit states has declined, health officials said Friday.
Flu season started early this winter, and includes a strain that tends to make people sicker. Health officials have forecast a potentially bad flu season, following last year's unusually mild one. The latest numbers, however, hint that the flu season may already have peaked in some spots.
Flu was widespread in 47 states last week, up from 41 the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday. Many cases may be mild. The only states without widespread flu are California, Mississippi and Hawaii.
The hardest hit states fell to 24 from 29, with large numbers of people getting treated for flu-like illness. Dropped off that list were Florida, Arkansas and South Carolina in the South, the first region hit this flu season.
Recent flu reports have included the holidays when some doctor's offices were closed, so it will probably take a couple more weeks to know if the flu has peaked in some places or grown stronger in others, CDC officials said Friday.
"Only time will tell how moderate or severe this flu season will be," CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said in a teleconference with reporters.
Nationally, 20 children have died from the flu. There is no running tally of adult deaths, but the CDC estimates that the flu kills about 24,000 people in an average year.
Flu vaccinations are recommended for everyone 6 months or older, and health officials say it is not too late to get vaccinated. flu reports.
Nearly 130 million doses of flu vaccine were distributed this year, and at least 112 million have been used. Vaccine is still available, but supplies may have run low in some locations, health officials say.
Hyrmete Sciuto, of Edgewater, N.J., got a flu shot Friday at a New York City drugstore. She hadn't got one in years, but news reports on the flu this week made her concerned.
As a commuter by ferry and bus, "I have people coughing in my face," she said. "I didn't want to risk it this year."
The flu vaccine isn't foolproof; people who get vaccinated can still get sick.
On Friday, CDC officials said a recent study of more than 1,100 people has concluded the current flu vaccine is 62 percent effective. That means the average vaccinated person is 62 percent less likely to get a case of flu that's bad enough to require a trip to the doctor, compared to people who don't get the vaccine.
That's in line with how effective the vaccine has been in other years.
The flu vaccine is reformulated annually, and officials say this year's version is a good match to the viruses going around.
Flu usually peaks in midwinter. Symptoms can include fever, cough, runny nose, head and body aches and fatigue. Some people also suffer vomiting and diarrhea, and some develop pneumonia or other severe complications.
Most people with flu have a mild illness. But people with severe symptoms should see a doctor. They may be given antiviral drugs or other medications to ease symptoms.
Some shortages have been reported for children's liquid Tamiflu, a prescription medicine used to treat flu. But health officials say adult Tamiflu pills are available, and pharmacists can convert those to doses for children.
___
AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.
___
Online:
CDC flu: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/index.htm
Wall Street flat, pressured by Wells Fargo, banks
Label: BusinessNEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks were little changed on Friday after Wells Fargo & Co
Dow component Boeing
The U.S. Department of Transportation said the jet would be subject to a review of its critical systems by regulators. Boeing was the biggest loser on the Dow, falling 3.1 percent to $74.73.
Wells Fargo was the first major bank to report results and said its fourth-quarter net interest margin - a key measure of how much money banks make from loans - fell, even as profit jumped 24 percent. The bank also made fewer mortgage loans than in the third quarter.
"It (Wells Fargo results) is weighing on the sector. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this won't be a sector thing and more confined to Wells Fargo, but it's definitely playing a factor today," said Larry Peruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets LLC in Boston.
The bank's shares fell 1.4 percent to $34.91. The S&P 500 financial sector index <.gspf> fell 0.7 percent after rallying more than 1 percent on Thursday and the KBW Banks index <.bkx> fell 1.3 percent.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was off 3.24 points, or 0.02 percent, to 13,467.98. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 2.50 points, or 0.17 percent, to 1,469.62. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> dipped 0.64 points, or 0.02 percent, to 3,121.13.
Bank of America Corp
Overall earnings were expected to grow by 1.9 percent in this earnings season, according to Thomson Reuters data. But analysts say that with the bar so low, there's room for companies to beat expectations, even if their results are not stellar.
"People are going to be looking for a slowdown in Europe to hit revenues for companies in the U.S. that are exposed to that. I don't think the market is going to react to that, that's already built in," said Troy Logan, managing director and senior economist at Warren Financial Service, in Exton, Pennsylvania.
Best Buy
Basic materials shares were pressured after China's annual consumer inflation rate picked up to a seven-month high, narrowing the scope for the central bank to boost the economy by easing monetary policy. The S&P basic materials sector <.gspm> slipped 0.4 percent.
Dendreon Corp
(Editing by Bernadette Baum)
France Sends Troops to Mali to Help Counter Islamist Advance
Label: World
Romaric Hien/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Fighters of the hard-line Salafi group Ansar Dine in August. The group has controlled Timbuktu and much of northern Mali since a coup d’état and a successful revolt against the central authority in March.
BAMAKO, Mali — France sent armed forces into combat in Mali on Friday, answering an urgent plea from the government of its former colony in West Africa to help blunt a sudden and aggressive advance into the center of the country by Islamist extremist militants who have been in control of the north for much of the past year.
French officials confirmed that the French forces, which included paratroopers and helicopter gunships, had engaged in fighting with the Islamists after landing at a major airfield in the central Mali town of Sévaré.
It was unclear how many French troops had been sent or from where, but a Western diplomat in neighboring Niger said the Islamist forces numbered between 800 and 900 fighters, with about 200 vehicles.
“French forces brought their support this afternoon to Malian army units to fight against terrorist elements,” President François Hollande of France said in a statement to reporters in Paris. “This operation will last as long as is necessary.”
Mr. Hollande has been especially outspoken in his animosity toward northern Mali’s Islamist occupiers and their harsh practices, which rights activists say include arbitrary killings, stonings, amputations, forced marriages and the destruction of non-Islamist cultural shrines. Thousands of Malians have sought to flee the north in recent months.
“Mali is dealing with terrorist elements form the north, whose brutality and fanaticism are now clear to the entire world,” Mr. Hollande said. “The very existence of the friendly state of Mali is at stake, as is the security of its people and that of our citizens. There are 6,000 of them there.”
The French president was responding to an urgent request received the day before from Mali’s interim president, Dioncounda Traore, who said Malian government forces were in dire need of help to stop the Islamists, who have turned the northern half of the country into a militant haven since seizing the territory, about twice of the size of Germany, last April.
The United Nations Security Council, which has repeatedly condemned the Islamist takeover of northern Mali and last month authorized an African-led force to enter the country to help drive the Islamists out, said Thursday that it was closely monitoring events there and may take additional steps. Mr. Hollande is also to meet with the Malian president next week.
The swift French response came after two days of clashes between the Malian Army and militants around Konna, a sleepy mud-brick village that for months had marked the outer limit of the Malian Army’s control after it lost half of the country to the Islamists and their allies eight months ago.
“It’s a very serious situation, very dangerous,” said a Malian officer here in Bamako, the capital, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The Islamists had been threatening a major airfield 25 miles away in Sévaré, also the home of a significant army base. And 10 miles from Sévaré is the historic river city of Mopti, the last major town controlled by the Malian government, with a population of more than 100,000.
“There were hard fights, but we lost,” the officer said.
A spokesman for the Islamists, Sanda Ould Boumana, said Thursday from rebel-held Timbuktu: “We have taken the town of Konna. We control Konna, and the Malian Army has fled. We have pushed them back.” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, who was traveling in neighboring Niger, said he understood that French paratroopers and helicopter gunships had landed in Sévaré and had engaged the Islamists in combat. He also said the United States, which shares France’s deep concern about the Islamist seizure of northern Mali, was considering what it could do to help, perhaps by repositioning satellites or sending in surveillance drones.
This week’s clashes were the first time that the two sides had fought since Islamists and their Tuareg rebel allies conquered the north of Mali last spring, splitting the country in two and leaving the Malian Army in disarray.
For months, the United Nations and Mali’s neighbors have been debating and planning a military campaign to retake the north by force, if necessary, an international push that is supposed to be led by Malian forces. Analysts had previously said that the outcome of this week’s fighting at Konna would be a significant indicator of the army’s fitness to undertake the reconquest of the north.
Malian politicians reacted with shock to news of Konna’s loss.
“This is a very disagreeable surprise. Terrible. A dagger blow,” said Fatoumata Dicko, a deputy in Mali’s Parliament in Bamako. “People are fleeing Sévaré. They think there is nothing to hold the Islamists back.”
Video game retail sales continued to slide in December, down 22% from 2011
Label: TechnologyTitle Post: Video game retail sales continued to slide in December, down 22% from 2011
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Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult Split: Report
Label: LifestyleJennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult
Gregg DeGuire/Wireimage; Landov
Will Jennifer Lawrence be flying solo this awards season?
The Silver Linings Playbook star, 22, has split from her longtime boyfriend, British actor Nicholas Hoult, according to a report.
Neither Holt nor Lawrence's rep has commented.
The couple met while both starring in 2011's X-Men: First Class, in which they coincidentally played each other's love interest.
The pair have kept their relationship fairly low-key, however they were snapped sharing a passionate post-Valentine's Day smooch last year.
"[My boyfriend] is honestly my best friend, and hopefully I'm his best friend, too," Lawrence told Elle magazine in its December issue. "He's my favorite person and makes me laugh harder than anybody."
Lawrence is nominated in the best actress – comedy or musical category and expected to attend the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards Sunday. She was also nominated for a Best Actress Oscar Thursday.
China's one-child law: Less competitive adults?
Label: HealthBEIJING (AP) — They're called "little emperors" — the children born in China under a law that generally limits urban families to having just one child.
They grow up as the sole focus of doting parents. How does this affect them? What does it mean to Chinese society if generations of kids are raised this way?
Concerns about the "only child" practice in China have been expressed before. Now researchers present new evidence that these children are less trusting, less competitive, more pessimistic, less conscientious and more risk-averse than people born before the policy was implemented.
The study's authors say the one-child policy has significant ramifications for Chinese society, leading to less risk-taking in the labor market and possibly fewer entrepreneurs.
"Trust is really important, not just social interactions but in terms of negotiations in business, working with colleagues in business, negotiating between firms," said one of the authors, Lisa Cameron. "If we have lower levels of trust, that could make these kinds of negotiations and interactions more difficult."
China introduced its family planning policy in 1979 to curb a surging population. It limits most urban couples to one child.
The new work by Cameron of Monash University in Australia and co-authors is published online Friday in the journal Science. The researchers said the results don't necessarily apply to children born outside of the situation they studied: modern-day, urban China.
They recruited 421 Beijing men and women who were born within an eight-year period that included dates just before and just after the policy took effect in 1979. About 27 percent of the participants born in 1975 were the only child in their families, rising to 82 percent of those born in 1980 and 91 percent of those born in 1983. Researchers said the sample was better educated than the general population of Beijing but otherwise similar.
They administered tests to measure their altruism, trust, trustworthiness, risk attitudes and competitiveness, and gave them personality surveys. Cameron said the participants' ages and views on ideological changes in China didn't appear to affect the results.
The findings — including indications that those in the study were more sensitive and nervous — are no surprise, said Zou Hong of the School of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, who was not involved in the research.
"Only children in Chinese families are loved and given almost everything by their families and they can get resources at home without competition," she said. "Once they enter society, they are no different from other people. Having been overly protected, they feel a sense of loss and show less competitiveness."
Zou said parents of an only child tend to become overly nervous, when they are ill, for example, and "that feeling will be passed on to the children and make them become more sensitive and nervous."
The Chinese government credits the one-child policy with preventing hundreds of millions of births and helping lift countless families out of poverty. But the strict limits have led to forced abortions and sterilizations, even though such measures are illegal. Couples who flout the rules face hefty fines, seizure of their property and loss of their jobs.
Last year, a government think tank urged China's leaders to start phasing out the policy and allow two children for every family by 2015, saying the country had paid a "huge political and social cost." It said the policy had resulted in social conflict, high administrative costs and led indirectly to a long-term gender imbalance because of illegal abortions of female fetuses and the infanticide of baby girls by parents who cling to a traditional preference for a son.
The researchers in Australia noted that children born long after 1979 will have grown up with very limited extended family and in a society dominated by those born into one-child families. So the psychological effects of the one-child policy "would, if anything, be magnified," they wrote.
Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas in Austin who studies these children, was puzzled that the study's findings showed poor performance so consistently in virtually all measures. She said she would have expected a more mixed picture, and she hopes follow-up research is done.
In any case, there's no reason to think that the results would be similar for children in the United States, she said. In China the only child grows up with different expectations, Falbo said, with Chinese authorities emphasizing that "these kids have to be the best possible. Most Americans want their kid to be happy; they're not aiming for a world-class child of some sort."
Careful studies done elsewhere that look for certain qualities in the only child find that "on average, they're pretty much like everybody else," she said.
__
Science writer Malcolm Ritter in New York and AP researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed to this report.
___
Online:
Journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org
Wall Street climbs on China data; S&P nears resistance
Label: BusinessNEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks climbed on Thursday on optimism about global growth spurred by stronger-than-expected exports in China, the world's second-biggest economy, and the S&P 500 hovered around a five-year high.
Financial and energy stocks were the day's top gainers in afternoon trading. The financial sector index <.gspf> rose 1 percent and the energy sector <.gspe> was up 0.7 percent.
Financials benefited from events this week that added clarity to mortgage rules and banks' potential exposure to the housing market.
The government's consumer finance watchdog announced mortgage rules on Thursday that will force banks to use new criteria to determine whether a borrower can repay a home loan.
Earlier this week, several big mortgage lenders reached a deal with regulators to end a review of foreclosures mandated by the government.
Bank of America
"It's a resolution. It's not hanging over their heads," said Kurt Brunner, portfolio manager at Swarthmore Group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Data showed China's export growth rebounded sharply to a seven-month high in December, a strong finish to the year after seven straight quarters of slowdown.
"In and of itself it is being interpreted positively that they've stopped the downturn (in growth)," said Brunner. "If they continue to produce good growth, that's going to be supportive of our global manufacturers."
The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index hovered near a five-year closing peak of 1,466.47. On Friday, the index had closed at its highest since December 2007.
"The market is technically right at the level of resistance, near 1,465-1,467," said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab.
"A solid breakthrough above the level would be the start of a next leg higher, but it looks like it is going to be difficult to break above that level for now," Frederick said, citing concerns about the corporate earnings season and impending negotiations over the U.S. debt ceiling.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 40.53 points, or 0.30 percent, to 13,431.04. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> rose 5.41 points, or 0.37 percent, to 1,466.43. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> edged up 0.42 points, or 0.01 percent, at 3,106.23.
Thursday's session had earlier included a dip that traders said was triggered by a trade in the options market that prompted a large amount of S&P futures to hit the market at the same time. That sent the S&P 500 index down rapidly but those losses were recouped by late afternoon.
Shares of upscale jeweler Tiffany
Herbalife Ltd
(Editing by Nick Zieminski)
Two Separate Bombs Kill 32 in Pakistan
Label: World
Waheed Khan/European Pressphoto Agency
A bomb in Quetta, Pakistan, on Thursday killed 11 people and wounded 27 others.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) — Bomb blasts in two Pakistani cities on Thursday killed 32 people and injured more than 100, police and hospital officials said.
A bomb in Quetta, the capital of the western province of Balochistan, killed 11 people and injured more than 40, police officer Zubair Mehmood said. A local militant group claimed responsibility.
Another 21 were killed and more than 60 injured in a bombing where people had gathered to hear a religious leader speak in Mingora, the largest city in the northwestern province of Swat, police and officials at the Saidu Sharif hospital said.
“The death toll may rise as some of the injured are in critical condition and we are receiving more and more injured people,” said Dr. Niaz Mohammad.
Police initially said the Swat blast was caused by an exploding gas cylinder but later police chief Akhtar Hayat said it was a bomb.
It has been more than two years since a militant attack has claimed that many lives in Swat.
The mountainous region, formerly a tourist destination, has been administered by the Pakistani army since their 2009 offensive drove out Taliban militants who had taken control.
But the Taliban retain their ability to mount attacks in Swat and shot schoolgirl campaigner Malala Yousafzai in Mingora last October.
The bomb in a market in Quetta targeted a police patrol and mostly killed sellers of vegetable and second-hand clothes, officer Mehmood said.
Three police officers nearby were injured and a child was among the dead, he said.
The United Baloch Army claimed responsibility for the blast.
The group is one of several who are fighting for independence for Balochistan, an arid and impoverished region with substantial gas, copper and gold reserves.
It constitutes just under half of Pakistan’s territory and is home to about 8 million of the country’s population of 180 million.
Human rights groups say hundreds of bodies have been recovered in the region since 2011. Many have broken limbs, cigarette burns or other signs of torture. Local activists blame the security services.
The state denies the accusations and says that insurgents sometimes put on military uniforms before kidnapping people.
Sectarian attacks are also on the rise, and militant groups frequently bomb or shoot Shia passengers on buses travelling to neighbouring Iran.
(Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Louise Ireland)
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 10, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Balochistan Province. It is in western Pakistan, not eastern.
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