Suspect in brazen rape on L.A. bus arrested

The woman boarded the 217 Metro bus in Culver City at about 5 p.m., on her way home from her special education school. The 18-year-old with the mental capacity of a 10-year-old had only recently been allowed to start taking the trip on her own.

A stranger boarded behind her.

He followed her to the back of the bus, authorities said, and without warning began raping her.

The attack lasted for 10 minutes Wednesday afternoon as the bus traveled south through Baldwin Hills, making two stops as the rape continued, authorities said. There were several people on the bus when the two boarded, but some exited during the attack, possibly unaware of what was happening at the back of the bus.

The assailant only ended the attack as the bus was reaching its final stop, where he left the bus, authorities said.

The brazen crime reverberated around the sprawling Metro system Friday. Portions of the rape were captured on a surveillance camera and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials arrested a suspect, Kerry Trotter, Friday morning just hours after releasing still photos of the alleged attacker.

Authorities said Trotter, 20, is a parolee and a transient who had previously been investigated on suspicion of sexual assault.

"It was a crime of opportunity," said sheriff's Sgt. Dan Scott. "Unfortunately, [the victim] was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He followed her onto the bus and assaulted her."

Metro officials were quick to note that sexual assaults and other violent crimes are relatively rare on its network of buses and rail lines. Three rapes have been reported this year on a system that recorded millions of commuter trips.

But despite the numbers, passengers said Friday that the rape left them uneasy. In a region where getting around is usually about being in a car alone, bus commuters say mass transit exposes them to all kind of people and situations, both good and bad.

Faydra Caldwell, 23, said every time she rides the bus she instinctively notes what other passengers are wearing in case she might have to report them to the police. It's a habit she has developed since her phone was snatched by another bus rider.

"You don't know what people are capable of doing," said Caldwell, a student at West L.A. College.

Another rider, John Wilson, said that a few months ago he had to shove a man off the bus because the man was patting a woman's head and making sexual remarks. No one else intervened.

"The bus driver was really angry at me," said the 54-year-old church executive. "He said, 'Don't take the law into your own hand.' I said, well, you weren't doing anything and the passengers sure as hell weren't."

In this week's incident, both the suspect and the victim got onto the bus at about 5 p.m. at the corner of La Cienega and Jefferson boulevards, near the new Expo Line rail station.

Sheriff's officials said they doubt the bus driver or the passengers on the bus knew what was happening. Scott said detectives believe Trotter was riding buses looking for potential victims.

"He immediately went to her and began the assault," Scott said. "…The suspect had his back to the front of the bus. People generally think of a rape as some kind of attack where someone's thrown down. Its not always the case."

"The victim did not scream," he added. "The victim told our detective that she was shocked, and didn't know what to do, and was in fear of her safety and her life."

Detectives are seeking riders on the bus, including one passenger they believe may have witnessed the incident, though they can't be sure. He "did not jump up and scream rape or that someone was being assaulted," Scott said.

Trotter has a history of run-ins with the law, according to records. Last year, he was convicted of drug possession. In April, he was convicted of grand theft and sentenced to a year in jail, but did not serve his full sentence. In June he was arrested again, and in September admitted to violating probation. He was released from jail Sept. 28. On Oct. 15 he was arrested again by Redondo Beach police and served 10 days in jail. Records did not include specifics on that offense.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Part of the Tarantula Nebula

One square degree image of the Tarantula Nebula and its surroundings. The spidery nebula is seen in the upper-centre of the image. Slightly to the lower-right, a web of filaments harbours the famous supernova SN 1987A (see below). Many other reddish nebulae are visible in the image, as well as a cluster of young stars on the left, known as NGC 2100. Technical information: the image is based on observations carried out by Joao Alves (Calar Alto, Spain), Benoit Vandame and Yuri Beletski (ESO) with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at the 2.2-m telescope on La Silla. These data consist of a 2x2 WFI mosaic in the B- and V-bands, and in the H-alpha and [OIII] narrow bands. The data were first processed with the ESO/MVM pipeline by the Advanced Data Products (ADP) group at ESO.

Image: ESO/R. Fosbury (ST-ECF) [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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Mick Jagger’s love letters to singer Marsha Hunt up for auction

(Reuters) – Love letters written by Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger to American singer Marsha Hunt, discussing poetry and his personal turmoil, will hit the auction block next month.

Hunt, with whom Jagger had his first child, Karis, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper she was selling the letters, written in July and August 1969, because she had been unable to pay her bills.

“I’m broke,” Hunt, who lives in France, told the newspaper.

The Guardian said on Friday the 10 letters would be sold by Sotheby’s on December 12.

The auction house values the letters from between 70,000 and 100,000 pounds ($ 111,000-$ 160,000).

Jagger wrote them to Hunt while filming the Tony Richardson movie “Ned Kelly” in Australia.

They are described as showing a sensitive side of the then-young singer, who wrote about the poetry of Emily Dickinson, meeting author Christopher Isherwood and an unrealized multimedia project.

Jagger’s relationship with Hunt, who is African-American, was kept under wraps until 1972.

“The sale is important,” Hunt told The Guardian. “Someone, I hope, will buy those letters as our generation is dying and with us will go the reality of who we were and what life was.”

Hunt has said she was the inspiration for the Rolling Stones‘ song “Brown Sugar,” which Jagger wrote while in Australia.

The rock star also cites in the letters the disintegration of his relationship with singer Marianne Faithful, whom he was also dating at the time, and the death of Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Peter Cooney)

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The New Old Age Blog: More Time to Enroll in Medicare If You Live in Storm Areas

Medicare beneficiaries battered by Hurricane Sandy have one fewer problem to worry about: Federal officials have extended the Dec. 7 deadline to enroll in a private medical or drug plan for next year for those still coping with storm damage.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “understands that many Medicare beneficiaries have been affected by this disaster and wants to ensure that all beneficiaries are able to compare their options and make enrollment choices for 2013,” Arrah Tabe-Bedward, acting director for the Medicare Enrollment and Appeals Group, wrote in a Nov. 7 letter to health insurance companies and state health insurance assistance programs.

Beneficiaries hit by the storm can still enroll after the Dec. 7 midnight deadline if they call Medicare’s 24-hour information line: 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227). Representatives will be able to review available plans and complete the enrollment process over the phone.

“We are committed to giving people with Medicare the information and the time they need to make important decisions about their coverage,” a Medicare spokeswoman, Isabella Leung, said in an e-mail message. Medicare officials have not set a new deadline but have encouraged beneficiaries to make their decisions soon if possible.

People currently in a plan will be automatically re-enrolled for next year in the same plan.

The extra time also applies to any beneficiaries who normally get help from family members or others to sort through dozens of plans, but who have been unable to do so this year because they live in areas affected by the storm. Neither beneficiaries nor those who provide them assistance will be required to prove that they experienced storm damage.

“This is a really important recognition by CMS to accommodate Medicare enrollees affected by Hurricane Sandy,” said Leslie Fried, director for policy and programs at the National Council on Aging, an advocacy group in Washington.

After the hurricane, the Obama administration declared Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island “major disaster areas,” according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In addition, FEMA issued emergency declarations for parts of Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.

More than four million older people in those states are enrolled in drugs-only plans, and more than 2.8 million have Medicare Advantage policies, which includes medical and drug coverage.

Susan Jaffe is a writer for Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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L.A. housing authority rife with fiscal mismanagement, audit finds

Los Angeles' housing authority, which runs on about $1 billion a year in taxpayer funds, is plagued by bad financial management that causes "questionable practices and poor decisions," according to an audit released Thursday by City Controller Wendy Greuel.

Greuel launched the audit last year amid an outcry over hefty taxpayer-funded restaurant tabs for agency officials and a $1-million-plus payout for the authority's fired executive director. The agency is responsible for sheltering about 75,000 of the city's neediest households.

A previous audit found instances of questionable spending by some agency officials, including double and triple billing for some travel and meal expenses. This audit, which looked at the agency's fiscal operations, did not uncover wrongdoing. But it did find that despite the authority's hefty budget and history of scandal going back decades, agency officials have done little to make sure money is properly managed.

Financial oversight was so lax, the audit found, that the agency's board of commissioners did not receive any financial statements or budget status reports during much of 2011 or the early part of 2012, except for one oral report last spring and one annual financial report that was presented nine months after the year had ended. A proposed budget presented to the board for 2012 was not balanced and contained contradictory statements.

"All of this suggests an agency that is out of control," said Greuel, a candidate for mayor. "The city cannot afford to continue spending its housing dollars irresponsibly."

One tenant advocate, Larry Gross, executive director of the L.A. Coalition for Economic Survival, said the lack of financial information given to the board and public was baffling.

"Whoever was on that board was clearly asleep at the wheel," he said. Many of the board members have been replaced in recent years.

Housing authority officials said they agreed with many of the audit's conclusions and will use the findings to guide reforms. Under recently hired Chief Executive Doug Guthrie, officials said they have already instituted a number of new practices, including financial training for all board members, stepped up financial reporting to the board and public, and the arrival of a new chief financial officer with expanded powers.

"We asked for this audit, we paid for the audit and we worked closely with the city controller's office" as the audit was underway, Guthrie said. "There's a lot of good stuff in the audit that helps us."

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released a statement expressing support for Guthrie, who was hired last spring after the previous executive director, Rudolf Montiel, was fired and then paid $1.2 million to settle allegations that he was let go in retaliation for reporting improper spending by board members. Montiel had earlier drawn the ire of city leaders when his agency tried to evict nine tenants who protested the agency's policies outside his home.

"The housing authority has worked diligently to win back the trust of the people," Villaraigosa said.

But some City Council members expressed anger at the latest audit findings.

"There's a lot of problems over there, and obviously, the problems haven't gone away," said Councilman Dennis Zine, a candidate for controller. "Maybe it's time for the grand jury to investigate."

Zine also said he would like the City Council to have more authority over the agency. Under a hybrid governing structure, the mayor appoints the authority's seven board members, but the council lacks the ability to review spending decisions, a power it has over many other city departments.

The audit also found that the agency's list of assets contained at least $100 million worth of property that had been disposed of or no longer had much value, such as refrigerators and stoves that had been purchased in the 1970s. No inventory of its fixed assets had been performed in at least seven years.

In addition, the agency did not always follow its own rules when it came to awarding contracts to vendors, in one case allowing someone to sit on a bid selection panel after he had declared a conflict of interest.

jessica.garrison@latimes.com

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Mr. Bond's Carbon-Fiber Tuxedo

James Bond is nothing if not consistent — shot, drowned, pushed out of an airplane with no parachute, he always comes back. And he’s always wearing an impeccable tux. That’s what makes an icon. And that rule to consistently deliver the goods — and to look good doing it — is one followed not only by Mr. Bond, but also by one of his favorite automakers.

Aston Martin has remained consistent for most of its 99-year history, producing sharply designed, poshly appointed and distinctly British sports cars for the luxury market. The company has stuck to the formula with its new range-topping Vanquish.

But consistency can be a double-edged sword. Just as you can throw out a Bond film title and your average Joe may struggle to tell you which actor portrayed 007 in that particular flick, show anyone (aside from Aston enthusiasts) a contemporary Aston Martin and they won’t be able to tell you whether it’s a Vantage, Virage, or DBS. That holds true for the new Vanquish — it’s essentially the same tuxedo with some new bits underneath.

Because Aston does bespoke like Chevy does floor mats, there will likely be a completely naked carbon fiber Vanquish available.

It is a damn good-looking thing though, building subtly on the shape of the Vanquish that debuted in 2001. While similarly sized, the new Vanquish looks leaner, its lines sharper and more tapered amidships. It also borrows cues from Aston’s recent One-77 supercar (out of production after just 77 were built) including the tighter waistline, elongated side strakes, and LED light blade rear clusters. There are hints of carbon fiber, too, visible on the front splitter, side skirts, door mirrors and rear diffuser.

Every body panel on the new Vanquish is constructed from carbon fiber, a choice Aston made because of its high strength-to-weight ratio and reduction in mass (though Ferrari would disagree). Fewer individual body panels are required and the panel gap on the C-pillar joint is no longer present. A new rear Aero Duct (fancy spoiler) is fashioned via an innovative method of laying-up carbon fiber.

Because Aston does bespoke like Chevy does floor mats, there will likely be a completely naked carbon-fiber Vanquish available. (Aston already has a “cutaway” Vanquish display model in exposed carbon.)

Beneath the carbon cloak sits an evolution of Aston’s decade-old VH platform. Aston insists VH — “vertical horizontal” — is a methodology rather than an architecture, so we’ll just call it the re-engineered DBS chassis. The lightweight bonded aluminum structure incorporates a tub with carbon-fiber components. Compared to the outgoing DBS, according to Aston, the weight is down, 75 percent of the parts are new, and rigidity is up 25 percent.

The engine is a considerably re-engineered 6.0-liter V12 (Bond requires 12 cylinders). The block has been revised, there are new heads with dual variable valve timing, an uprated fuel pump, enlarged throttle bodies and an improved “big wing” intake manifold, to cite a few changes. Peak power is 565 hp at 6,750 rpm, and peak torque is 457 pound-feet at 5,500 rpm. With a curb weight around 3,834 pounds, Aston reports the Vanquish can attain 60 mph in 4.0 seconds on the way to a 183 mph top speed.

It feels that fast, especially on the narrow “B” roads (about 1.5 lanes) of the English midlands where I drove it. These are some of the most gritty, undulating, curvy roads in the U.K., and Aston develops its cars on them. The Vanquish’s three-mode (Normal, Sport, Track) suspension handles them with aplomb, combining admirable compliance with excellent body control. The stiff chassis provides the foundation for front and rear double wishbones with coil springs and adjustable shocks. Cocktails all ’round for the Adaptive Damping System engineers who’ve done a bang-up job.

The steering is similarly well-sorted, giving little up to that of the new Porsche 911 I got into following the Vanquish launch. Aston’s rear-mid mounted, six-speed Touchtronic 2 automatic/sequential manual gearbox does the business well and more smoothly than competitors’ double-clutch transmissions. That said, it was flummoxed twice whilst puttering through quaint English villages.

The Vanquish isn’t really a track car, but it’s quite capable of outrunning the bad guys. Your fairer driving companions will approve of the fine-scented cockpit materials like Bridge of Weir Luxmil leather and Alcantara, all hand-stitched. Even the headliner looks tailored.

If there’s one area where the Vanquish falls flat, it’s in ergonomics and infotainment. Familiar elements from the glass key/starter module to the gear-selection buttons remain, though the center stack is a bit different. The speedometer and tach dials are attractive but difficult to read, hence a new digital speedo display. Suspension mode and cruise control buttons on the steering wheel look like afterthoughts. Aston trumpets the center information screen’s haptic feedback, but it’s still too small and saddled by lackluster navigation and menu logic.

The standard Bang & Olufsen sound system wasn’t quite tuned up on the early production cars I drove. Aston says final adjustments on the audio system is ongoing. Tire noise on the funky roads was an unexpected issue. Space wasn’t, though, the Vanquish enjoying more occupant space than the DBS. Back seats are optional, but most suitable for those bound and gagged. Rear and rear three-quarter visibility isn’t great, but the exhaust note is.

The Vanquish breaks little new styling ground — but then, Daniel Craig could probably throw on Sean Connery’s old tuxedo and look just right. That’s a good thing. Class doesn’t go out of style, and neither will the Vanquish. Carbon fiber? That’s another question.

WIRED Sexy shape. Highly composed driving dynamics and near 600 horsepower. Hand-finished interior smells like Ralph Lauren’s saddle cabinet.

TIRED Occasional hitches in the auto-trans at low speed. Standard paddle-shifters should be longer. The optional squared-off steering wheel feels awkward when cruising. As nice as the shape is, there’s just something too familiar about it.

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Call me JackSUN, says singer Jermaine

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Jackson 5 singer Jermaine Jackson has petitioned to change his name, according to court documents filed earlier this week in Los Angeles.

The older brother of pop stars Michael and Janet Jackson, Jermaine wants to change his famous last name to Jacksun for “artistic reasons.”

Asked why Jermaine wanted to change his name, his attorney Bret D. Lewis, who filed the petition on Jackson’s behalf, told Reuters “If Prince and P Diddy can do it, why can’t and shouldn’t Jermaine?”

If all goes to plan, Jackson’s name will officially change following a court hearing set for February 22.

Jermaine, 57, and brothers Jackie, Marlon and Tito are currently in Europe on a Unity Tour, under the name The Jacksons, performing hits made famous by the Jackson 5 along with a tribute to their late sibling Michael.

Jermaine Jackson unofficially adopted the name Mohammad Abdul Aziz after converting to Islam in 1989.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Bernard Orr)

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Recipes for Health: Sweet Potato and Apple Kugel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

I’ve looked at a number of sweet potato kugel recipes, and experimented with this one a few times until I was satisfied with it. The trick is to bake the kugel long enough so that the sweet potato softens properly without the top drying out and browning too much. I cover the kugel during the first 45 minutes of baking to prevent this. After you uncover it, it’s important to baste the top every 5 to 10 minutes with melted butter.

 

4 eggs

Salt to taste

2 large sweet potatoes (1 3/4 to 2 pounds total), peeled and grated

2 slightly tart apples, like Gala or Braeburn, peeled, cored and grated

1 tablespoon fresh lime juice

1 tablespoon mild honey or agave nectar

3 to 4 tablespoons melted unsalted butter, as needed

 

1. Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 2-quart baking dish.

2. In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs with salt to taste (I suggest about 1/2 teaspoon). Add the grated sweet potatoes and the apples. Pour the lime juice over the grated apples and sweet potatoes, then stir everything together. Combine the honey and 2 tablespoons of the melted butter and stir together, then toss with the sweet potato mixture and combine well.

3. Transfer the mixture to the prepared baking dish. Cover the dish tightly with foil and place in the oven. Bake 45 minutes. Remove the foil and brush the top of the kugel with melted butter. Return to the oven and bake for another 15 to 20 minutes or longer, brushing every 5 minutes with butter. The kugel is ready when the edges are browned, the top is browned in spots and the mixture is set. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for 10 to 15 minutes before serving.

Yield: 8 servings.

Advance preparation: You can make this a day ahead and reheat in a medium oven.

Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 187 calories; 7 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 2 grams monounsaturated fat; 104 milligrams cholesterol; 28 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 5 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Blue reign in Sacramento: Democrats dominate California voting

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats are on the cusp of a coveted supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate, giving them the rare power to raise taxes without any Republican support.

No single party has held such a supermajority in Sacramento since 1933.

To cement the dual two-thirds majorities when the Legislature gets down to business next year, Democrats must hold onto one of two Senate seats to be vacated and a few Assembly seats won in tight races. The Senate seats will be filled in special elections expected in March.

The supermajorities would mark a dramatic shift in Sacramento's balance of power, where GOP legislators have aggressively used their ability to block state budget plans and prevent revenue increases to scale back the scope of state government.

Coupled with the approval of Brown's tax plan, Proposition 30, the Democrats now have not only the power but also the money to break free of the deficit that has paralyzed state government for years.

The pressure on Democrats to restore funding for the many services slashed to balance the budget in recent years will be intense.

Already, activists are pressing lawmakers to pump new money into such programs as college scholarships, dental care for the needy and, of course, public schools.

But the first move Brown and legislative leaders made Wednesday was to reassure voters that they would show restraint.

They promised there would be no frenzy of tax hikes.

"Voters have trusted the elected representatives, maybe even trusted me to some extent, and now we've got to meet that trust," Brown said at a Wednesday news conference in the Capitol. "We've got to make sure over the next few years that we pay our bills, we invest in the right programs, but we don't go on any spending binges."

Still, lawmakers can appear to hold the line on revenue generation without actually doing so.

Supermajorities allow lawmakers to impose new fees to pay for infrastructure and other programs that are not technically defined as taxes.

And the same Democrats who are talking tough about fiscal responsibility this week have for years been touting the programs they want to restore or start once the opportunity is there. In addition to raising revenue, they would also be empowered to bring constitutional changes and other measures to voters without any GOP signoff — and to override gubernatorial vetoes.

Given a supermajority, "We're going to use it," Senate President Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said Wednesday.

"It will be an awesome responsibility," Steinberg said. "But it's very exciting.''

Steinberg briefed the media on his desire to overhaul the tax code.

The result, he acknowledged, could be more money for the state budget.

Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles), who vowed there would be no additional tax increases next year, laid out goals that could trigger more government spending, such as helping students pay for college.

The success Tuesday of Brown's Proposition 30, which raises billions of dollars through temporary income-tax increases on high earners and a quarter-cent surcharge on sales, gives lawmakers breathing room they have not had in years.

With one election, a deficit that has rendered Sacramento dysfunctional and threatened to ravage public schools has been largely wiped out.

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In Bounties They Trust, But Does Paying for Security Bugs Make a Safer Web?

The night before the end of Google’s Pwnium contest at the CanSecWest security conference this year in Vancouver, a tall teen dressed in khaki shorts, tube socks and sneakers was hunkered down on a hallway bench at the Sheraton hotel hacking away at his laptop.

With a $60,000 cash prize on the line, the teen, who goes by the hacker handle “Pinkie Pie,” was working hard to get his exploit for the Chrome browser stabilized before the close of the competition.

The only other contestant, a Russian university student named Sergey Glazunov, had already made off with one $60,000 prize for a zero-day exploit that attacked 10 different bugs.

Finally, with just hours to go before the end of the three-day competition, Pinkie Pie achieved his goal and dropped his exploit, a beauty of a hack that ripped through six zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome and slipped out of the browser’s security sandbox.

Google called both hacks “works of art,” and within 24 hours of receiving each submission, had patched all of the bugs that they exploited. Within days, the company had also added new defensive measures to Chrome to ward off future similar attacks.

Google’s Pwnium contest is a new addition to its year-round bug bounty programs, launched in 2010, that are aimed at encouraging independent security researchers to find and report security vulnerabilities in Google’s Chrome browser and web properties, and to get paid for doing so.

Vendor bounty programs like Google’s have been around since 2004, when the Mozilla Foundation launched the first modern pay-for-bugs plan for its Firefox browser.* In addition to Google and Mozilla, Facebook and PayPal have also launched bug bounty programs, and even the crafts site Etsy got into the game recently with a program that pays not only for new bugs, but also retroactively for previously reported bugs, to thank researchers who contributed to the site’s security before the bounty program began.

The Mozilla Foundation has paid out more than $750,000 since launching its bounty program; Google has paid out more than $1.2 million.

But some of the biggest vendors, who might be expected to have bounty programs, don’t. Microsoft, Adobe and Apple are just three software makers who have been criticized for not paying independent researchers for bugs they have found, even though the companies benefit greatly from the free work done by those who uncover and disclose security vulnerabilities.

Microsoft says its new BlueHat security program, which pays $50,000 and $250,000 to security pros who can devise defensive measures for specific kinds of attacks, is better than paying for bugs.

“I don’t think that filing and rewarding point issues is a long-term strategy to protect customers,” Microsoft security chief Mike Reavey said recently.

All of which begs the question: Eight years down the line, have bug bounty programs made browsers and web services more secure? And is there any way to really test that proposition?

*Netscape actually launched the first bounty program in 1995, but the idea never really caught on beyond Netscape at the time.

There’s no scientific method for determining if software is more secure than it used to be. And there’s no way to know how much a bounty program has improved the security of a particular software program, as opposed to other measures undertaken by software makers. Security isn’t just about patching bugs; it’s also about adding defensive measures — such as browser sandboxes — to mitigate entire classes of bugs. The combination of these two make software more secure.

But everyone interviewed for this story says the anecdotal evidence strongly supports the conclusion that bounty programs have indeed improved the security of software. And more than this, the programs have yielded other security benefits that go far beyond the individual bugs they’ve helped fix.

In the most obvious sense, bounty programs make software more secure simply by the fact that they reduce the number of security holes hackers can attack.

“There’s a finite number of bugs in these products, so every time you can knock out a bunch of them, you’re in a better place,” says top security researcher Charlie Miller, who’s responsible for finding a number of high-profile vulnerabilities in Apple’s iPhone and other products.

But one of the biggest indications that bounty programs have improved security is the decreasing number of bug reports that come in, according to Google.

“It’s a hard measurement to take, but we’re seeing a fairly sustained drop-off in the number of incoming reports we’re receiving for the Chromium program,” says Chris Evans, information security engineer at Google who leads the company’s Chromium vulnerability rewards program as well as its new Pwnium contest, launched this year.

Google has its own internal fuzzing program to uncover security vulnerabilities, and the rate at which that team is finding bugs has dropped, too, Evans says. Google recently asked some of its best outside bug hunters why bug reports had declined and was told it was just “harder to find” vulnerabilities these days. Harder-to-find bugs for researchers also means harder-to-find bugs for hackers.

Bounty programs also improve security by encouraging researchers to disclose bugs responsibly — that is, passing the information to vendors first, so that they can release a patch to customers before the information is publicly disclosed. And they help mend the fractious relationship that has long existed between researchers and vendors.

In 2009, Miller and fellow security researchers Alex Sotirov and Dino Dai Zovi launched a “No More Free Bugs” campaign to protest freeloading vendors who weren’t willing to pay for the valuable service bug hunters provided and to call attention to the fact that researchers often got punished by vendors for trying to do a good deed.

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Ex-oil man to be next Anglican leader: UK media

LONDON (Reuters) – A former oil executive who went to the same exclusive school as Prime Minister David Cameron will shortly be named Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, British newspapers said on Thursday.

Justin Welby, 56, the Bishop of Durham, who has had a meteoric rise up the Church of England hierarchy since quitting the world of commerce in 1992, will be announced as the next archbishop as early as Friday, the reports said.

The nomination follows weeks of speculation that the Church body assigned to elect the future archbishop was split over choosing a reformer or a safe pair of hands to maintain the status quo.

Cameron’s spokesman said an announcement would come “soon”.

Welby, who went to the same exclusive school, Eton College, as Cameron, London mayor Boris Johnson and Princes William and Harry, has already accepted the position, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Bookmaker William Hill stopped taking bets on the future archbishop after a run of bets on Welby on Tuesday.

“In the space of less than an hour we had to cut the odds three times, so took the decision to close the book as we know a decision is already overdue and it seems word may have leaked out,” the bookmaker said in a statement

Welby will replace left-leaning incumbent Rowan Williams, who has said his successor as head of the global Anglican Communion will need “the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros”.

Welby is widely reported to be against gay marriage but broadly in favor of the ordination of women bishops, two of the most divisive issues in the communion.

The new archbishop will earn about 74,000 pounds ($ 120,000) a year. He will have lodgings in the Old Palace in Canterbury, southeast England, and the historic riverside Lambeth Palace in London. His tenure will last until retirement at 70 or until he decides to move on.

(Reporting By Alessandra Prentice; editing by Steve Addison/Maria Golovnina)

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Recipes for Health: Cabbage, Onion and Millet Kugel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Light, nutty millet combines beautifully with the sweet, tender cabbage and onions in this kugel. I wouldn’t hesitate to serve this as a main dish.

 

1/2 medium head cabbage (1 1/2 pounds), cored and cut in thin strips

Salt to taste

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1/4 cup chopped fresh dill

Freshly ground pepper

1 cup low-fat cottage cheese

2 eggs

2 cups cooked millet

 

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Oil a 2-quart baking dish. Toss the cabbage with salt to taste and let it sit for 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until it begins to soften, about 3 minutes, then add a generous pinch of salt and turn the heat to medium-low. Cook, stirring often, until the onion is soft and beginning to color, about 10 minutes. Add the cabbage, turn the heat to medium, and cook, stirring often, until the cabbage is quite tender and fragrant, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the dill, taste and adjust salt, and add pepper to taste. Transfer to a large bowl.

3. In a food processor fitted with the steel blade, purée the cottage cheese until smooth. Add the eggs and process until the mixture is smooth. Add salt (I suggest about 1/2 teaspoon) and pepper and mix together. Scrape into the bowl with the cabbage. Add the millet and stir everything together. Scrape into the oiled baking dish. Drizzle the remaining oil over the top and place in the oven.

4. Bake for about 40 minutes, until the sides are nicely browned and the top is beginning to color. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature, cut into squares or wedges.

Yield: 6 servings.

Advance preparation: The cooked millet will keep in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 days and freezes well. The kugel will keep for 3 days in the refrigerator. Reheat in a medium oven.

Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 195 calories; 7 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 4 grams monounsaturated fat; 64 milligrams cholesterol; 23 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 148 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 10 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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DealBook: On Wall Street, Time to Mend Fences With Obama

Del Frisco’s, an expensive steakhouse with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Boston harbor, was a festive scene on Tuesday evening. The hedge fund billionaires Steven A. Cohen, Paul Singer and Daniel Loeb were among the titans of finance there dining among the gray velvet banquettes before heading several blocks away to what they hoped would be a victory party for their presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

The next morning was a cold, sobering one for these executives.

Few industries have made such a one-sided bet as Wall Street did in opposing President Obama and supporting his Republican rival. The top five sources of contributions to Mr. Romney, a former top private equity executive, were big banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Wealthy financiers — led by hedge fund investors — were the biggest group of givers to the main “super PAC” backing Mr. Romney, providing almost $33 million, and gave generously to outside groups in races around the country.

On Wednesday, Mr. Loeb, who had supported Mr. Obama in 2008, was sanguine. “You win some, you lose some,” he said in an interview. “We can all disagree. I have friends and we have spirited discussions. Sure, I am not getting invited to the White House anytime soon, but as citizens of the country we are all friendly.”

Wall Street, however, now has to come to terms with an administration it has vilified. What Washington does next will be critically important for the industry, as regulatory agencies work to put their final stamp on financial regulations and as tax increases and spending cuts are set to take effect in the new year unless a deal to avert them is reached. To not have a friend in the White House at this time is one thing, but to have an enemy is quite another.

“Wall Street is now going to have to figure out how to make this relationship work,” said Glenn Schorr, an analyst who follows the big banks for the investment bank Nomura. “It’s not impossible, but it’s not the starting point they had hoped for.”

Traditionally, the financial industry has tended to support Republican candidates, but, being pragmatic about power, has also donated to Democrats. That script got a rewrite in 2008, when many on Wall Street supported Mr. Obama as an intelligent leader for a country reeling from the financial crisis. Goldman employees were the leading source of campaign donations for Mr. Obama, who reaped far more contributions — roughly $16 million — from Wall Street than did his opponent, John McCain.

The love affair between Wall Street and Mr. Obama soured soon after he took office and championed an overhaul in financial regulations that became the Dodd-Frank Act.

Some financial executives complained that in meetings with the president, they found him uninterested and disengaged, while others on Wall Street never forgave Mr. Obama for calling them “fat cats.”

The disillusionment with the president spawned reams of critical commentary from Wall Street executives.

“So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire,” Mr. Loeb wrote in one letter to his investors.

The rhetoric at times became extreme, like the time Steven A. Schwarzman, co-founder of the private equity firm Blackstone Group, compared a tax proposal to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” (Mr. Schwarzman later apologized for the remark.)

Mr. Loeb was not alone in switching allegiances in the recent presidential race. Hedge fund executives like Leon Cooperman who had supported Mr. Obama in 2008 were big backers of Mr. Romney in 2012. And Wall Street chieftains like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, who have publicly been Democrats in the past, kept a low profile during this election. But their firms’ employees gave money to Mr. Romney in waves.

Starting over with the Obama White House will not be easy. One senior Wall Street lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity said Wall Street “made a bad mistake” in pushing so hard for Mr. Romney. “They are going to pay a price,” he said. “It will soften over time, but there will be a price.”

Mr. Obama is not without supporters on Wall Street. Prominent executives like Hamilton James of Blackstone, and Robert Wolf, a former top banker at UBS, were in Chicago on Tuesday night, celebrating with the president.

“What we learned is the people on Wall Street have one vote just like everyone else,” Mr. Wolf said. Still, while the support Wall Street gave Mr. Romney is undeniable, Mr. Wolf said, “Mr. Obama wants a healthy private sector, and that includes Wall Street.

“If you look at fiscal reform, infrastructure, immigration and education, they are all bipartisan issues and are more aligned than some people make it seem.”

Reshma Saujani, a former hedge fund lawyer who was among Mr. Obama’s top bundlers this year and is planning to run for city office next year, agreed.

“Most people in the financial services sector are social liberals who support gay marriage and believe in a woman’s right to choose, so I think many of them will swing back to Democrats in the future,” she said.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 8, 2012

An earlier version of this article misidentified Reshma Saujani as a male.

A version of this article appeared in print on 11/08/2012, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: On Wall Street, Time to Mend Fences With Obama.

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Jerry Brown, California Democrats appear to be big winners in election

Gov. Jerry Brown’s $6-billion-a-year tax initiative to rescue California schools and the state's finances appeared to squeak by with a victory early Wednesday, and Democrats' grip on Sacramento tightened as the party crept toward winning a super-majority in both houses of the Legislature.

Tuesday's election also brought an end to the three-decade-long congressional career of Rep. Howard Berman, who early Wednesday morning conceded defeat in his political slugfest against fellow Democrat Brad Sherman in the San Fernando Valley.

The bitter contest between Sherman and Berman, awash in more than $13 million in campaign spending by the candidates and independent political groups, was triggered when California's newly drawn political boundaries put the two incumbents in the same district.

"I congratulate Brad. ... I will do whatever I can to ensure a cooperative and orderly transition," Berman said in a concise concession statement early Wednesday.

In a similar high-profile mash-up between Democrats, Rep. Janice Hahn of San Pedro was cruising to an easy win against Rep. Laura Richardson of Long Beach in a newly drawn district that includes many minority, working-class communities, election results showed.

Among other closely watched races for California House seats, Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D-Oak Park) narrowly defeated state Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Moorpark) in Ventura County, and Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) bested former Republican Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, according to results with all voter precincts reporting in those districts.

California's senior U.S. senator, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, won an easy reelection victory over nonprofit executive Elizabeth Emken, her underfunded, little-known Republican challenger.

The governor woke up Wednesday as one of the biggest apparent victors in Tuesday’s election, however.

Facing well-funded opposition, Brown campaigned heavily for Proposition 30 as a way to restore fiscal sanity to Sacramento and to stave off deep cuts to public schools and universities. The initiative calls for a quarter-cent increase to sales taxes for four years and a seven-year tax hike on California’s highest earners.

Californians have not approved a statewide tax increase since 2004.

Voters overwhelmingly rejected a competing measure bankrolled by millionaire civil rights lawyer Molly Munger -- Proposition 38 – which would have increased income taxes for most Californians to raise funds primarily for schools and early childhood education.

In one of the highest-profile state ballot measures, labor unions appeared to defeat Proposition 32, which would have reduced their political influence by barring unions from using paycheck deductions for political purposes.

Californians also soured on a measure to abolish the death penalty -– Proposition 34 -- which was trailing badly with most of the voter precincts reporting Wednesday morning.

Other law-and-order measures were greeting more warmly. Voters favored Proposition 36, which would change the three-strikes sentencing law so offenders whose third strikes were minor, nonviolent crimes could no longer be given 25 years to life in prison.

Voters also supported Proposition 35, which promoted increased punishment for sex trafficking of a minor. Both led by wide margins with most ballots counted.

With most ballots tallied across California, initiatives to label genetically engineered foods and change state law to create a new car insurance discount appeared headed for defeat.

One of the biggest surprises of the election was the Democrats' strong showing in legislative races. Democrats appear on the verge of winning a two-thirds majority in the state Senate and Assembly, enough to approve tax measures without Republican support.

In Los Angeles County, veteran prosecutor Jackie Lacey became the county's first female and first African American district attorney after defeating Deputy Dist. Atty. Alan Jackson. Jackson conceded early Wednesday morning.

Lacey, 55, touted herself as the only candidate with the experience to run the office. She had the support of her boss, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who is retiring after three terms.

Los Angeles County voters also approved a local measure requiring adult film actors to wear condoms. With most precincts reporting, a measure to fund transportation projects by extending a countywide sales-tax increase for an additional 30 years remained just shy of the two-thirds vote required for approval.

Some races remained too close to call, including the San Diego congressional race between Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-Carlsbad) and Democrat Scott Peters, a San Diego environmental attorney. In the Coachella Valley, Democratic emergency room doctor Raul Ruiz was leading Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Palm Springs) with just under two-thirds of precincts reporting early Wednesday morning.

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SparkTruck's Surprise Lesson: Using Design Skills to Build Kids' Character

When Eugene Korsunskiy and seven of his fellow students from Stanford University’s d.school set out to tour the nation in a brightly painted truck full of laser cutters and rapid prototyping machines, they thought they were bringing a chance to play with high-tech maker tools to school kids who hadn’t had one yet.

And they were: SparkTruck, the educational make-mobile, made 73 stops this summer, treating 2,679 elementary and middle school students to hands-on workshops covering the basics of electrical engineering and digital fabrication, and giving a chance to make cool stuff in the process, like small robotic creatures and laser-cut rubber stamps.

But as the summer progressed, the SparkTruck team learned an unlikely lesson. The most rewarding part of the trip wasn’t introducing the kids to new technologies. Instead it was something far more basic: watching them struggle with design problems.

Only one of the SparkTruck team had training in education. But when the group planned its workshops, Korsunskiy explained, they knew they wanted to emphasize the same skills and processes they’d learned in design school. “Somewhere in each activity, we wanted the kids to get stuck, physically or mentally,” he said.

The point wasn’t to torture children, but to force them to work through an open-ended problem on their own.

Some teachers were skeptical. “One teacher told us, ‘My students are so conditioned to thinking that I’ll give them the right answers,’” Korsunskiy said. She didn’t think the group’s approach, which Korsunskiy summarized as “giving [kids] the space but not giving them the answers,” would work.

Sure enough, the SparkTruck team noticed kids’ resistance. Presented with a design problem, students would get stuck — and as the teacher predicted, they would come to the facilitators and ask, ‘How do I do this?’ They would beg, plead, and get frustrated. The SparkTruck team would withhold answers, instead asking a kid with, for example, no idea how to keep her robot from falling over, ‘How do you think it cold be done?’

Eventually, the hard-nosed approach paid off. “After an interaction like that, you see a gear shift in [a kid's] head,” said Korsunskiy. “Once you make it clear that you’re not there to provide the answer, they completely rise to the challenge.”

Unwittingly, the team had stumbled into a big problem — and a gathering cultural debate. According to social scientists (and the journalists who popularize their work), American children are said to be weenies, much more helpless and less resourceful than their age-matched peers in other countries. In educational settings, American kids are worryingly lacking in the faculty known as “grit,” the one that allows people to power through difficult problems, absorbing and learning from setbacks rather than giving up.

The point isn’t that young Americans are destined to be this way, but that somehow, amid all our prosperity, we’ve stopped giving kids the conditions they need to become self-sufficient.

Could hands-on, design-inspired education help? Korsunskiy and his team think so. Design lessons, Korsunisky noted, are based around creative problem-solving. They’re not about memorizing right answers but about developing critical thinking skills, learning to work through problems in a repeated process of brainstorming, testing solutions, and going back to the drawing board. In short, this kind of education builds the very skills of perseverance and intellectual independence that parents, teachers, and social critics say that American children have in short supply.

For Korsunskiy, watching students hit a wall — and then figure out a way over (or around) it — was the most rewarding part of the SparkTruck experience.

Students of today aren’t necessarily going to need to know how to operate, say, a CNC router, he noted. But if this generation is to succeed, it will absolutely need to know “how to approach hairy, multi-variate problems without freaking out” — he name-checked climate change and the obesity epidemic — i.e., to be able to leverage the skills and mindset that a shop-class environment can instill.

As the summer went on, the SparkTruck team shifted focus, beginning to feel more like emissaries for that problem-solving mindset and design process, rather than for the bright, shiny machines in the back.

Which isn’t to say that the machines aren’t helpful for grabbing the attention of students — and educators too.

“When we say we have laser cutters and 3-D printers on board, that makes it way more exciting to principals and teachers,” Korsunskiy said. “We sneak the thing about creativity in the back door.”

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CBS’s ‘Elementary’ gets prized post-Super Bowl slot

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – CBS’s freshman Sherlock Holmes drama “Elementary” will get a big boost in February, when it airs following Super Bowl XLVII, the network said Monday.

The series, which stars Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu, delivers a modern-day take on the Sherlock Holmes saga, with both the detective and his sidekick Watson living in contemporary New York.

The special episode will air Sunday, February 3 at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT, following the network’s post-game coverage.

The series, which also stars Aidan Quinn, has already proven to be a hit for the network, regularly winning its Thursday at 10 p.m. timeslot. “Elementary,” which premiered September 27, has averaged a 3.5 rating/10 share in the advertiser-cherished 18-49 demographic, and 14.2 million total viewers.

Even so, the exposure that a post-Super Bowl slot provides certainly can’t hurt. The second-season premiere of NBC‘s “The Voice” after the Super Bowl, meanwhile, scored the highest ratings of any entertainment telecast since 2006.

“The Voice” scored a 16.3 rating in the key demo and 37.6 million total viewers overall. It was the best rating since a 16.5 for “Grey’s Anatomy” after the Super Bowl on ABC in 2006, and provided a welcome boost for fourth-place network NBC. The show was up 47 percent in the demo and 40 percent in total viewers over the episode of “Glee” that aired after the Super Bowl on Fox last year. (“Glee” scored an 11.1 and 26.8 million total viewers.)

The ratings victory gave “The Voice” a huge start to its second season. It spent much of 2011-12 neck-in-neck with the Wednesday night edition of “American Idol” to be the highest-rated show on television after “Sunday Night Football.” “Idol” ultimately beat “The Voice” on Wednesdays, but just barely.

The Super Bowl is typically the most-watched program of the year, and this year’s game set a record as the most-watched television program in U.S. history, with 111.3 million total viewers.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Alarm Over India’s Dengue Fever Epidemic

Enrico Fabian for The New York Times

A man at the Yamuna River, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Filthy standing water abounds in New Delhi. More Photos »

NEW DELHI — An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world.

India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in just a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue (pronounced DEN-gay) is now endemic in half the world’s nations.

“The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse,” said Dr. Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization’s lead dengue coordinator.

The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm-weather vacations with the disease, which has reached the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.

Here in India’s capital, where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic’s growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets under the shade of a huge banyan tree outside the hospital entrance recently.

Among them was Neelam, who said her two grandchildren were deathly ill inside. Eight-year-old Sneha got the disease first, followed by Tanya, 7, she said. The girls’ parents treated them at home but then Sneha’s temperature rose to 104 degrees, a rash spread across her legs and shoulders, and her pain grew unbearable.

“Sneha has been given five liters of blood,” said Neelam, who has one name. “It is terrible.”

Officials say that 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.

“I’d conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations,” said Dr. Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert focused on dengue research.

A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue’s actual toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and that have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, “which was deliberated at the highest levels,” is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.

“There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher,” the official said. “Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure.”

The problem with that policy, said Dr. Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India’s “massive underreporting of cases” has contributed to the disease’s spread. Experts from around the world said that India’s failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness’s vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.

“When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it’s a joke,” said Dr. Harold S. Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to the World Health Organization, even though India’s population is 60 times larger.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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Fiscal Impasse Leads to Caution After Election

Business leaders and investors on Wall Street reacted cautiously to President Obama’s re-election early Wednesday, warning that the focus would quickly shift from electoral politics to the looming fiscal uncertainty in Washington.

Stocks opened sharply lower in New York, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index down 1.4 percent, while European shares drifted lower and Asian stocks were mixed. While many executives on Wall Street and in other industries favored Mitt Romney, most had already factored in the likelihood of Mr. Obama winning a second term.

“The bottom line is that this looks like a status quo election,” said Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays. “The problem with that is that it doesn’t resolve some of the main sources of uncertainty that are hanging over the economy.”

Companies in some sectors, like hospitals and technology, could see a short-term pop, said Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist with Citi. Other areas, like financial services as well as coal and mining, could be hurt as investors contemplate a tougher regulatory environment.

Mr. Levkovich predicted that the market would remain volatile between now and mid-January. If Congress and the president cannot come up with a plan to cut the deficit, hundreds of billions in Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the beginning of 2013 while automatic spending cuts will sharply cut the defense budget and other programs.

Known as the fiscal cliff, this simultaneous combination of dramatic reductions in government spending and tax increases could push the economy into recession in 2013, economists fear.

In early trading, the Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, fell 1 percent, while the FTSE 100 index in London was 0.4 percent lower.

The S.&P./ASX 200 in Australia closed up 0.7 percent, as did the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong. The Nikkei 225 stock average in Japan ended trading little changed.

“There’s a huge question mark hanging over what happens in the next few weeks,” said Aric Newhouse, senior vice-president of policy and government relations at the National Association of Manufacturers. “The fiscal cliff is the 800-pound gorilla out there.”

“We can’t wait,” he said. “We think the idea of going over the cliff has to be taken off the table. We’ve got to get to the middle ground.”

For all the anticipation, some observers said the election still left plenty of unanswered questions.

“While we have clarity on the players now, we don’t have any more clarity on what will happen in terms of the fiscal cliff,” Mr. Maki said. “We still have a divided government and they haven’t been able to agree on what to do.”

If the full package of tax increases and spending cuts go into effect, that would equal a $650 billion blow to the economy, Mr. Maki said, equivalent to 4 percent of the gross domestic product.

Mr. Maki envisions a partial compromise, with $200 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. Partly because of that, he estimates, the annual rate of economic growth will dip to 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013 from 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter. He predicted that if the full fiscal cliff were to hit, the economy would contract in the first half of 2013.

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Mothers from Central America search for missing kin in Mexico

SALTILLO, Mexico — The mothers knock on the doors of flophouses and morgues. They sift through pictures of prisoners and the dead. Clutching pictures of their own, some from long ago, they ask the same questions, over and over.

Have you seen him? Does she look familiar?

Occasionally, there is a reported sighting. More often, it's another shake of the head, a "Sorry, no." And with that, weariness stooping their shoulders and worry sagging their faces, they board their bus and move on to another town.

By last weekend, these mothers, wives and sisters of missing Central American migrants had already crossed some of Mexico's most dangerous territory in their two-bus caravan.

Following a route often used by migrants northward along the Gulf Coast to the U.S., they had entered the country in the south through Tabasco state. They traveled through Veracruz and Tamaulipas, sites recently of horrific massacres of Central Americans and others, stopping along the way to ask and search — against all the odds wishing for a happy ending.

By the time they finish what has become an annual mission organized by several migrant rights and church groups, they will have traveled to 23 cities and towns in 14 states in 19 days. A total of nearly 3,000 miles.

Aboard the buses, with the lived-in feel of ordered chaos, the women pass the time dozing, chatting, occasionally watching a movie.

Despite their pain, or perhaps because of it, they find friendship. The Nicaraguans share stories of their experiences during their country's civil war, telling of relatives killed or forced into armies; the Hondurans recount tales of their nation's utter, violent poverty that fuels one of the world's highest homicide rates and drives their children to seek lives elsewhere.

Emotions soar and fall. The women joke and tease one another and laugh. Then, suddenly, one remembers the son she is missing and breaks into sobs and another moves to her side to comfort her.

Another nine hours through hot, dusty cactus fields brought them here to Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila state, where the top leader of the notorious Zetas paramilitary cartel was slain by government forces last month. By all accounts, it is the Zetas who most routinely and viciously prey on the migrants, thousands of whom have gone missing in recent years — kidnapped, killed, pressed into involuntary labor by drug traffickers, or simply lost to poverty and desperation.

Dilma Pilar Escobar last heard from her daughter, Olga, in January 2010. Olga had taken off from their home in Progreso, Honduras, leaving behind five children, with the plan of reaching the United States. Like so many others, her idea was to earn a little money, make things a little easier for her mother and her children.

Now Escobar is raising her grandchildren, listening to their questions every night about when their mother might come home. She is running out of answers.

"I've looked in hospitals, in morgues," said Escobar, 55. "We see so much about what's happening in Mexico on TV. It puts a lot in your head."

Escobar was inspired to make the trip in part by a local radio program that attempts to help families with missing relatives.

"It gave me the push to come here," said the woman with dark, unsmiling eyes, grasping an 8-by-10 photo of Olga that hangs from her neck on a green cord.

In each city or town, the mothers stage a public event to make their presence known. A Mass. A march. Here in Saltillo, they converged on the downtown Plaza de Armas, the pale-blue-and-white that adorns all Central American flags fluttering in the breeze ahead of the slow march of mothers. They hung their photos of loved ones on clotheslines at the center of the square.

The women — about 40 on this year's caravan — sleep on cots in churches or in "migrant houses," shelters set up by a number of communities, where they also receive donated meals.

"We are facing a humanitarian tragedy," Tomas Gonzalez, a Franciscan friar who runs a shelter in Tabasco, told the women. "Mexico has become a cemetery for migrants."

In August 2010, 72 migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and a handful of other countries were slain execution-style, hands tied behind backs, shot once in the head, in Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas. Among the youngest was 15-year-old Yedmi Victoria Castro of El Salvador. The Zetas were presumed responsible. Dozens more bodies were found in the same region in the months that followed.

Not a week goes by, it seems, without fresh reports of hidden graves and unidentified dead. But the Mexican government has been slow to recognize the epidemic of missing persons, only this year moving to toughen legislation and expand the collection of DNA samples and other data.

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Simon Cowell Stamps His Sound on Sony's Top End

The concept of “personal music” has become so embedded in modern culture that we no longer even entertain the idea of not pocketing our music and piping it directly into our brains.

For those of us minted prior to the iPod age, the Sony brand is synonymous with creating and laying that foundation with its Walkman line of portable players. Clearly, much has changed since the early ’80s, and Sony has been leapfrogged by many competitors in portable music. But that doesn’t mean the big “S” doesn’t know a good thing when it hears it. That’s why the company has teamed up with British mega-producer and singing-show lightning rod Simon Cowell to develop the MDR-X10, a premium on-the-ear headphone.

The industrial design of these “X Factor” headphones, all matte and polished silver polycarbonate, is thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing. However, the ear pads on the X10 are rather deceiving — they’re not hollowed out like most bigger cans on the market. Instead, they’re flat, but when placed over your head, the cushy memory foam envelopes your ear without significantly altering the sound-channeling shape of the ear’s cartilage. This design creates an excellent acoustic seal that markedly diminishes the incursion of outside ambient sound. Another pleasing design element is the removable, single-sided flat cable that comes in two flavors — one is a plain straight cable with a mini phone jack, and the other is an iGadget-friendly cable with an in-line mic/remote assembly.

The X10s are tuned to accentuate the predominant sounds in popular music. And straight out of the box, the proprietary 50-millimeter driver pumps the bass and treble just the way you’d expect. That initial listen demonstrated to me how headphones with boosted bass often overshadow the subtleties of the midrange elements.

However, to get the truest impression of a speaker’s sound, whether it’s inside a headphone or a big wooden enclosure, they need to be “burned in” for 100 hours or so. It’s a simple process: Just connect them to your audio source, turn the music up to about six on the dial, and walk away for four days.

That’s exactly what I did. When I returned to Cowell’s cans, they were greatly improved. The midrange frequencies in the soundstage were much more defined. The bass and treble were still holding court, but the mids were definitely clearer and made space for themselves in my ears. The post-burn-in sound was deep, rich, full and well defined — much more balanced overall, and closer to what I’d expect from a set of headphones that costs $300.

Simon Cowell’s personality on television is definitely polarizing, but his success at discovering and launching musical talent is well documented. Sony’s development partnership with the notoriously nit-picky producer has actually served this product well.

Andrew Sivori, Sony’s VP of personal audio, tells me Cowell was involved in the development of the headphone’s sound signature throughout the entire process.

“He gave fantastic feedback,” Sivori says. “He listens for a living, and he’s been incredibly successful at it.”

It looks like Sony and Cowell may have another hit on their hands. The X10s are comfortable, they kick out some great sound, and they look great doing it.

WIRED Ear pads are plush and comfy. Deep, rich, dynamic sound. Comes with two replaceable flat cords and a 1/4-inch plug for an audiophile sound system. They fold up for portability. High-quality protective case.

TIRED Price is steep. Headband could use a little more padding at the top of the head. Tough to simultaneously wear glasses.

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American composer Elliott Carter dies at age 103

(Reuters) – Classical composer Elliott Carter, who twice won Pulitzer Prizes in a career that spanned more than 75 years, died on Monday in New York at age 103, music publisher Boosey & Hawkes said.

Carter was awarded Pulitzer Prizes in 1960 and 1973 for string quartet compositions. He composed 158 works, including several at over 100 years of age. One composition for chamber orchestra is scheduled for a world premier in February.

“The great range and diversity of his music has, and will continue to have, influence on countless composers and performers worldwide,” the publisher said. “He will be missed by us all but remembered for his brilliance, his wit and his great canon of work.”

He was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 1998 and celebrated his 100th birthday at New York‘s Carnegie Hall in 2008 with a new work performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Carter was presented the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the United States, in 1985. He also received national honors from Germany and France.

(Reporting by David Bailey; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Mohammad Zargham)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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New Drugs for Lipids Set Off Race

LOS ANGELES — A new class of powerful cholesterol-reducing drugs is showing promising results, potentially offering a new option for people who do not respond to medication now on the market, according to studies presented at a conference of heart specialists here on Monday.

Although the final word on the effectiveness of the drugs is still a few years away, the results so far are so promising that pharmaceutical companies are racing to bring them to market.

In early- and middle-stage trials, use of the experimental drugs reduced so-called bad cholesterol by about 40 to 70 percent in a matter of weeks, equivalent to the reduction achieved by the most effective statins like Lipitor. But it appears that the new drugs can be used along with statins, lowering cholesterol even further.

“With these drugs, together with statins, you can get virtually everyone to the goal,” Dr. Frederick Raal of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, who presented one of several studies on these new drugs at the American Heart Association’s scientific meeting here.

The most advanced of the drugs, which as a class are called PCSK9 inhibitors, is only now entering the final stages of clinical trials and is not likely to get to market until 2015 at the earliest.

And there are still some caveats. One is that while the drugs lower cholesterol, it has not yet been shown that they actually reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes or other cardiovascular problems.

Furthermore, many of the studies so far have lasted no more than 12 weeks and involved fewer than 200 people. Far longer and larger studies are needed to show that the drugs would keep working over a lifetime and would be safe.

So far, however, the studies show “quite good safety,” Dr. Peter Wilson of Emory University said in a presentation here discussing the studies. “This is extremely promising.”

The drugs have to be injected, typically every two to four weeks. That means that the PCSK9 inhibitors are not likely to be widely used for “garden variety high cholesterol,” said Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins.

Still, millions of Americans cannot lower their cholesterol sufficiently using statins alone, providing a market that could reach billions of dollars in annual sales for a successful drug.

Leading the race so far is the team of Sanofi, the big French drug company, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company in Tarrytown, N.Y.

The companies announced Monday that they were beginning a Phase 3 trial — usually the last step before filing for approval — involving 18,000 patients with a recent heart attack or worsening chest pain who cannot lower their cholesterol with statin therapy alone. The patients will inject themselves once every two weeks with either the drug or a placebo, while continuing to take statins.

The study, which will take at least two years, will determine whether the drug, known by the awkward code name SAR236553/REGN727, can reduce the rate of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular problems.

In a midstage study published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, patients who took the Sanofi drug plus a high dose of atorvastatin, the generic equivalent of Lipitor, had a mean 73 percent reduction in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, the so-called bad cholesterol, compared with a 17 percent reduction for those taking only the high dose of the statin.

Amgen seems to be next in line, saying it plans to begin Phase 3 trials early next year. Pfizer and Roche have drugs in midstage clinical trials. Others in pursuit include Eli Lilly & Company and Alnylam.

Dr. Evan A. Stein of the Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center in Cincinnati, said that about 10 to 20 percent of patients could not tolerate statins at all, or at least could not tolerate doses high enough to lower cholesterol sufficiently. Their main alternative now is Merck’s Zetia, which reduces cholesterol about 18 percent.

Dr. Stein, who is a consultant to Amgen, presented the results on Monday of a trial of Amgen’s drug, AMG 145, in such patients.

Patients receiving AMG 145 experienced an average reduction in LDL cholesterol after 12 weeks of 41 to 51 percent, depending on the dose. Those who received both AMG 145 and Zetia had an even greater average reduction — 63 percent. By contrast, those who received Zetia and a placebo had a drop in bad cholesterol of only 15 percent.

After 12 weeks, only 7 percent of the patients on Zetia alone reduced LDL to 100 milligrams per deciliter, which is the goal for many people. About 61 percent of those on the highest dose of AMG 145 did so, as did 90 percent on both AMG 145 and Zetia. The trial results were also published online by The Journal of the American Medical Association.

LDL cholesterol is removed from the blood when it binds to LDL receptors on the surface of liver cells, and then is taken inside the cells. PCSK9 — which stands for proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 — also binds to the LDL receptor, and when it does so, the receptor is destroyed along with the LDL.

But if PCSK9 does not bind, the receptor can return to the surface of the cell and remove more cholesterol. The drugs, which in general are proteins known as monoclonal antibodies, block PCSK9 from binding to the receptor.

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Antwerp Journal: Antwerp’s Diamond Industry Facing Challenges

Colin Delfosse for The New York Times

Indian businessmen in the diamond district of Antwerp, Belgium.

ANTWERP, Belgium — Step off the train here and you cannot miss the signs on the stores: Diamond World, Diamond Gallery, Diamond Creations or simply, Diamonds. Of late, there are the banners and posters reading simply, “Antwerp Loves Diamonds.”

Though this Belgian port has had a love affair with diamonds for centuries, of late it seems to be losing some of its passion. For years now, much of the lucrative but labor-intensive business of cutting and polishing stones has been drifting to low-wage centers in the developing world, like Mumbai, Dubai and Shanghai.

More ominously, in recent years, diamond traders have been accused of a range of violations, including tax fraud, money laundering and cheating on customs payments when buying and selling stones.

Local business leaders recognize the threat. This year, they embarked on what local newspapers described as a “charm offensive.” In a 160-page program, titled Project 2020, the World Diamond Center, a trade-promotion group, outlined plans to draw business back to Antwerp by simplifying and accelerating trading via online systems. That, the industry hopes, will win back some of the polishing business lost to Asian countries with new technology, like fully automated diamond polishers, and generally burnish the image of the diamond business in the public’s jaded eye.

“This is our strength,” said Ari Epstein, 36, a lawyer who is chief executive of the World Diamond Center and the son of a diamond trader, whose father emigrated from a village in Romania in the 1960s. “We have the critical mass so that every diamond finds a buyer and seller.”

Antwerp has by no means fallen out of love with the gems. In all, the market employs 8,000 people and creates work indirectly for 26,000 others as insurers, bankers, security guards and drivers. Last year, turnover in the local diamond business amounted to $56 billion, Mr. Epstein said, its best year ever.

While total revenues are expected to drop this year because of the troubled world economy, he acknowledged, a stroll along Hoveniersstraat, or Gardner’s Street, leads through the heart of the market, where almost 85 percent of the world’s uncut diamonds are still traded.

“I come here once a month,” said Sheh Kamliss, a trader in his 30s, who travels from his native India to buy uncut stones and sell polished diamonds. “This is the international market,” he added, chatting with fellow Indian traders outside the Diamond Club of Antwerp, one of many locations where deals are struck.

On any given day but Friday or the Jewish holidays, Hoveniersstraat, with its tiny Sephardic synagogue, is liberally sprinkled with Orthodox Jewish traders, many of them Hasidim.

But their once dominant presence has been squeezed by the arrival of traders from new markets, like Mr. Kamliss. Now people from about 70 nations are present, including Indians, Israelis, Lebanese, Russians, Chinese and others. Along neighboring Lange Herentalsestraat, Rachel’s Kosher Restaurant is now flanked by the Bollywood Indian Restaurant and the Shanti Shop Indian supermarket. In the nearby Jewish quarter, Patel’s Cash & Carry recently installed itself right next to Moszkowitz, the butcher.

Some here say this globalization of the business has opened the door to abuse.

Omega Diamonds, a major market maker, came under investigation and its executives fled Belgium when an employee-turned-whistle-blower revealed in 2006 how Omega had traded diamonds out of Africa for years, avoiding taxes by transacting deals through Dubai, Tel Aviv and Geneva, then moving the profits back to Belgium.

“Because of global changes, the trade routes have changed,” said David Renous, 47, the whistle blower, who is now writing a book on the subject. “New hubs, like Dubai, the Singapore of the Middle East, sometimes close their eyes to criminality.”

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