Bo Obama Adorns White House Christmas Card
Label: Lifestyle
People Pets
White House Christmas card
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It wouldn't be Christmas at the White House without Bo Obama.
After inspecting this season's holiday decorations – in which he is prominently featured through a life-size replica and Bo-flake ornaments – the first dog also graces the Obama family's Christmas card.
Iowa artist Larassa Kabel's painting depicts a snow-covered Bo running across the White House's North Lawn, an homage to this 2010 snapshot, which caught the 4-year-old playing in the snow during a February blizzard.
"He is my son," Michelle Obama said in March of the Portuguese Water Dog, whose paw print also appears in the interior of the card alongside the First Family's signatures. "He's a very sweet dog."
White House Christmas card
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Celebrations planned as Wash. legalizes marijuana
Label: HealthSEATTLE (AP) — Legal marijuana possession becomes a reality under Washington state law on Thursday, and some people planned to celebrate the new law by breaking it.
Voters in Washington and Colorado last month made those the first states to decriminalize and regulate the recreational use of marijuana. Washington's law takes effect Thursday and allows adults to have up to an ounce of pot — but it bans public use of marijuana, which is punishable by a fine, just like drinking in public.
Nevertheless, some people planned to gather at 12:01 a.m. PST Thursday to smoke in public beneath Seattle's Space Needle. Others planned a midnight party outside the Seattle headquarters of Hempfest, the 21-year-old festival that attracts tens of thousands of pot fans every summer.
"This is a big day because all our lives we've been living under the iron curtain of prohibition," said Hempfest director Vivian McPeak. "The whole world sees that prohibition just took a body blow."
In another sweeping change for Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire on Wednesday signed into law a measure that legalizes same-sex marriage. The state joins several others that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.
That law also takes effect Thursday, when gay and lesbian couples can start picking up their wedding certificates and licenses at county auditors' offices. Those offices in King County, the state's largest and home to Seattle, and Thurston County, home to the state capital of Olympia, planned to open the earliest, at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, to start issuing marriage licenses. Because the state has a three-day waiting period, the earliest that weddings can take place is Sunday.
The Seattle Police Department provided this public marijuana use enforcement guidance to its officers via email Wednesday night: "Until further notice, officers shall not take any enforcement action — other than to issue a verbal warning — for a violation of Initiative 502."
Thanks to a 2003 law, marijuana enforcement remains the department's lowest priority. Even before I-502 passed on Nov. 6, police rarely busted people at Hempfest, despite widespread pot use, and the city attorney here doesn't prosecute people for having small amounts of marijuana.
Officers will be advising people to take their weed inside, police spokesman Jonah Spangenthal-Lee wrote on the SPD Blotter. "The police department believes that, under state law, you may responsibly get baked, order some pizzas and enjoy a 'Lord of the Rings' marathon in the privacy of your own home, if you want to."
Washington's new law decriminalizes possession of up to an ounce for those over 21, but for now selling marijuana remains illegal. I-502 gives the state a year to come up with a system of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores, with the marijuana taxed 25 percent at each stage. Analysts have estimated that a legal pot market could bring Washington hundreds of millions of dollars a year in new tax revenue for schools, health care and basic government functions.
But marijuana remains illegal under federal law. That means federal agents can still arrest people for it, and it's banned from federal properties, including military bases and national parks.
The Justice Department has not said whether it will sue to try to block the regulatory schemes in Washington and Colorado from taking effect.
"The department's responsibility to enforce the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged," said a statement issued Wednesday by the Seattle U.S. attorney's office. "Neither states nor the executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress" — a non-issue, since the measures passed in Washington and Colorado don't "nullify" federal law, which federal agents remain free to enforce.
The legal question is whether the establishment of a regulated marijuana market would "frustrate the purpose" of the federal pot prohibition, and many constitutional law scholars say it very likely would.
That leaves the political question of whether the administration wants to try to block the regulatory system, even though it would remain legal to possess up to an ounce of marijuana.
Colorado's measure, as far as decriminalizing possession goes, is set to take effect by Jan. 5. That state's regulatory scheme is due to be up and running by October 2013.
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Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle
Wall Street flat, Apple helps techs to rise
Label: BusinessNEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks drifted near the unchanged mark on Thursday as investors postponed big bets before the November employment report on Friday, but technology stocks rose on gains in Apple and Broadcom.
Monthly payroll numbers, to be released by the Labor Department, are expected to show a sharp slowdown in jobs growth because of superstorm Sandy.
Broadcom
The S&P technology index <.gspt> was the best performing of the 10 major S&P sectors, gaining 0.36 percent. The PHLX semiconductor index <.sox> rose 0.5 percent.
Apple was up 1.4 percent after losing as much as 3.7 percent at the open. The stock suffered its biggest one-day drop in four years on Wednesday due to concerns about higher capital gains taxes in 2013 and the company's market share in the tablet market.
Apple Inc's rank in China's smartphone market fell to No. 6 in the third quarter as it faces tougher competition from Chinese brands, research firm IDC said.
Broader moves were limited, however, as traders focused on the "fiscal cliff" debate. About three weeks remain before a series of tax increases and spending cuts would begin that could slow growth. Legislators are trying to come up with a deal to avoid some of the negative effects on the economy while still reducing the U.S. budget deficit.
While Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives insist that raising tax rates on the rich is not negotiable, some GOP lawmakers now see it as inevitable to avoid the fiscal cliff.
"As we get close to the last two weeks, things will pick up," said Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York. Congress and the White House will have final discussions near the end of the year about how to handle the "fiscal cliff," he said.
Without action from Congress, tax cuts on capital gains and dividends will expire at the end of 2012, which has contributed to selling certain stocks that have done extremely well in recent years, such as Apple.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> slipped 7.93 points, or 0.06 percent, at 13,026.56. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 0.14 point, or 0.01 percent, at 1,409.14. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> gained 8.31 points, or 0.28 percent, at 2,982.00.
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(Editing by Kenneth Barry)
U. S. and Russia to Meet on Syrian Conflict
Label: World
DUBLIN — A new round of diplomacy on the conflict in Syria will begin on Thursday afternoon when Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy, hosts an unusual three-way meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.
The session, which is being held on the margins of a meeting on European security, comes amid reports of heightened activity at Syria’s chemical weapons sites and signs that Russia may be shifting its position on a political transition in Syria.
“Secretary Clinton has accepted an invitation by U.N. Special Envoy Brahimi for a trilateral meeting on Syria this afternoon with Mr. Brahimi and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov,” a senior State Department official said Thursday morning.
This is not the first time that American and Russian consultations have spurred hopes of a possible breakthrough. In June, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Lavrov and the United Nations’s envoy on the Syrian crisis at the time, former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, appeared to be close to an agreement that a transitional government should be established and that President Bashar al-Assad give up power.
But that seeming understanding quickly broke down, with American officials complaining privately that the Russian side had pulled back from the deal. A major sticking point, it later emerged, was the American insistence that the United Nations Security Council authorize steps to pressure Mr. Assad if he refused to go along under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which could be used to authorize tougher economic sanctions and, in theory, the use of force.
It remained to be seen if the new round of negotiations would be more successful.
On the one hand, the military situation on the ground appears to be shifting in the rebels’ favor. Some Russian officials reportedly no longer believe that Mr. Assad will succeed in holding on to power and may have a new interest in working out arrangements for a transition. The changing battlefield, some experts say, may have led to a softening of the Russian position.
A senior Turkish official said that after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently met in Istanbul that Moscow was “softening” its “political tone” and would look for ways of getting Mr. Assad to relinquish power.
On the other hand, it was possible that Mr. Lavrov had, in effect, merely agreed to meet so that Russia could maintain influence over the discussions on Syria and find out what exactly Mr. Brahimi was prepared to propose.
There were indications on Thursday that Russian officials see the positions of Washington and Moscow on Syria moving slightly closer.
Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov of Russia expressed satisfaction in a Twitter message that the United States was moving to designate Al Nusra Front, a Syrian opposition group seen by American experts as linked to Al Qaeda, as an international terrorist organization.
The aim of the American move, which is expected soon, would be to isolate radical foes of the Assad government.
With the rebels making gains on the ground, American officials have been trying to ensure that military developments do not outpace political arrangements for a possible transition. American officials have hinted that the United States would upgrade relations with the Syria opposition, possibly to formal recognition, if the coalition made progress on a political structure by the time of a meeting of the so-called Friends of Syria in Morocco.
But emerging policy on the Al Nusra Front also acknowledges Russia’s longstanding argument that the Syrian opposition includes radical jihadists. Mr. Gatilov said that the American step “reflects understanding of the danger of escalating terrorist activity in Syria.”
A lawmaker with the dominant party, United Russia, told British legislators visiting Moscow that Russia saw Mr. Assad’s government struggling. “We think that the Syrian government should execute its functions,” he said, according to the Interfax news service. “But time shows that this task is beyond its strength.”
Dimitri K. Simes, a Russia expert the Center for the National Interest in Washington, said, based on conversations with top officials, that Russia has indeed softened its position in light of military setbacks for the Assad government, and it is now understood that neither Mr. Assad nor his close associates would take a central role in a new government.
However, he said Russia still wanted Iran to take part in negotiations about the transition. Iran’s presence, he said, would reassure Alawites, the Shiite Muslim minority of Mr. Assad and the core of the military, that they would be protected in the change of government.
Facebook’s Instagram cuts support for key Twitter integration
Label: TechnologySAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s recently acquired photo-sharing service, Instagram, removed a key element of its integration with Twitter, signaling a deepening rift between two of the Web’s dominant social media companies.
Instagram’s Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said Wednesday his company turned off support for Twitter “cards” in order to drive Twitter users to Instagram’s own website. Twitter “cards” are a feature that allows multimedia content like YouTube videos and Instagram photos to be embedded and viewed directly within a Twitter message.
Instagram’s move marked the latest clash between Facebook and Twitter since April, when Facebook, the world’s no. 1 social network, outbid Twitter to nab fast-growing Instagram in a cash-and-stock deal valued at the time at $ 1 billion. The acquisition closed in September for roughly $ 715 million, due to Facebook’s recent stock drop.
The companies’ ties have been strained since. In July, Twitter blocked Instagram from using its data to help new Instagram users find friends.
Beginning earlier this week, Twitter’s users began to complain in public messages that Instagram photos did not seem to display properly on Twitter’s website.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed Wednesday that his company had decided that its users should view photos on Instagram’s own Web pages and took steps to change its policies.
“We believe the best experience is for us to link back to where the content lives,” Systrom said in a statement, citing recent improvements to Instagram’s website.
“A handful of months ago, we supported Twitter cards because we had a minimal web presence,” Systrom said, noting that the company has since released new features that allow users to comment about and “like” photos directly on Instagram’s website.
The move escalates a rivalry in the fast-growing social networking sector, where the biggest players have sought to wall off access to content from rival services and to their ranks of users. Photos are among the most popular features on both Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram’s meteoric rise in recent years has further proved how picture-sharing has become a key front in the battle for social Internet supremacy.
Instagram, which has 100 million users, allows consumers to tweak the photos they take on their smartphones and share the images with their friends, a feature that Twitter has reportedly also begun to develop. Twitter’s executive chairman Jack Dorsey was an investor in Instagram and hoped to acquire it before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tabled a successful bid.
When Zuckerberg announced the acquisition in an April blog post, he said one of Instagram’s strengths was its inter-connectivity with other social networks and pledged to continue running it as an independent service.
“We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks.”
A Twitter spokesman declined comment Wednesday, but a status message on Twitter’s website confirmed that users are “experiencing issues,” such as “cropped images” when viewing Instagram photos on Twitter.
Systrom noted that Instagram users will be able to “continue to be able to share to Twitter as they originally did before the Twitter Cards implementation.”
(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic and Gerry Shih; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Teen Arrested in Bank Robbery Had Bragged of Heist on YouTube
Label: LifestyleThere are criminal masterminds, and then there's Hannah Sabata.
The 19-year-old high school dropout allegedly knocked off a bank in Nebraska, then posted a YouTube video bragging about it.
"Kind of a strange deal isn't it?" York County Sherriff Dale Radcliff tells PEOPLE.
In her eight-minute video, Sabata doesn't utter a word. Instead, she scribbles handwritten signs detailing her alleged armed robbery of the Cornerstone Bank in Waco, Neb., on Nov. 28, using "a gun, a pillow case, and a note."
During the course of her video, she also describes how she stole a "shiny new" Pontiac Grand Am, which she used as a getaway car after making off with $6,256 in cash.
"I told my mom today was the best day of my life," she writes in the video, while waving hundred-dollar bills in front of the camera. "She just thinks I met a new boy . . . I'm going for a shopping spree. Bite me."
According to police, Sabata is wearing the same clothes she wore when she allegedly handed bank tellers a slip of paper that read: "You are being robbed! NO ALARMS OR LOCKS OR PHONES or INK BAGS! I have a loaded gun. You have 2 minutes."
Sherriff Radcliff notes that law enforcement officials didn't even know about Sabata's video until after her arrest on Nov. 29.
Photographs of the robber, captured by the bank's security cameras, were quickly distributed throughout the community.
"We had lots of leads, but when her ex-husband notified us and said 'That's my ex-wife,' we got an arrest warrant for her," he said.
Sabata is currently being held in a York County jail on $300,000 bond. According to Radcliff, she faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted of armed robbery and auto theft.
Longer tamoxifen use cuts breast cancer deaths
Label: HealthBreast cancer patients taking the drug tamoxifen can cut their chances of having the disease come back or kill them if they stay on the pills for 10 years instead of five years as doctors recommend now, a major study finds.
The results could change treatment, especially for younger women. The findings are a surprise because earlier research suggested that taking the hormone-blocking drug for longer than five years didn't help and might even be harmful.
In the new study, researchers found that women who took tamoxifen for 10 years lowered their risk of a recurrence by 25 percent and of dying of breast cancer by 29 percent compared to those who took the pills for just five years.
In absolute terms, continuing on tamoxifen kept three additional women out of every 100 from dying of breast cancer within five to 14 years from when their disease was diagnosed. When added to the benefit from the first five years of use, a decade of tamoxifen can cut breast cancer mortality in half during the second decade after diagnosis, researchers estimate.
Some women balk at taking a preventive drug for so long, but for those at high risk of a recurrence, "this will be a convincer that they should continue," said Dr. Peter Ravdin, director of the breast cancer program at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio.
He reviewed results of the study, which was being presented Wednesday at a breast cancer conference in San Antonio and published by the British medical journal Lancet.
"The result of this trial will have a major, immediate impact on premenopausal women," Ravdin said.
About 50,000 of the roughly 230,000 new cases of breast cancer in the United States each year occur in women before menopause. Most breast cancers are fueled by estrogen, and hormone blockers are known to cut the risk of recurrence in such cases.
Tamoxifen long was the top choice, but newer drugs called aromatase inhibitors — sold as Arimidex, Femara, Aromasin and in generic form — do the job with less risk of causing uterine cancer and other problems.
But the newer drugs don't work well before menopause. Even some women past menopause choose tamoxifen over the newer drugs, which cost more and have different side effects such as joint pain, bone loss and sexual problems.
The new study aimed to see whether over a very long time, longer treatment with tamoxifen could help.
Dr. Christina Davies of the University of Oxford in England and other researchers assigned 6,846 women who already had taken tamoxifen for five years to either stay on it or take dummy pills for another five years.
Researchers saw little difference in the groups five to nine years after diagnosis. But beyond that time, 15 percent of women who had stopped taking tamoxifen after five years had died of breast cancer versus 12 percent of those who took it for 10 years. Cancer had returned in 25 percent of women on the shorter treatment versus 21 percent of those treated longer.
Tamoxifen had some troubling side effects: Longer use nearly doubled the risk of endometrial cancer. But it rarely proved fatal, and there was no increased risk among premenopausal women in the study — the very group tamoxifen helps most.
"Overall the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially," Dr. Trevor Powles of the Cancer Centre London wrote in an editorial published with the study.
The study was sponsored by cancer research organizations in Britain and Europe, the United States Army, and AstraZeneca PLC, which makes Nolvadex, a brand of tamoxifen, which also is sold as a generic for 10 to 50 cents a day. Brand-name versions of the newer hormone blockers, aromatase inhibitors, are $300 or more per month, but generics are available for much less.
The results pose a quandary for breast cancer patients past menopause and those who become menopausal because of their treatment — the vast majority of cases. Previous studies found that starting on one of the newer hormone blockers led to fewer relapses than initial treatment with tamoxifen did.
Another study found that switching to one of the new drugs after five years of tamoxifen cut the risk of breast cancer recurrence nearly in half — more than what was seen in the new study of 10 years of tamoxifen.
"For postmenopausal women, the data still remain much stronger at this point for a switch to an aromatase inhibitor," said that study's leader, Dr. Paul Goss of Massachusetts General Hospital. He has been a paid speaker for a company that makes one of those drugs.
Women in his study have not been followed long enough to see whether switching cuts deaths from breast cancer, as 10 years of tamoxifen did. Results are expected in about a year.
The cancer conference is sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research, Baylor College of Medicine and the UT Health Science Center.
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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Serbian Ambassador to NATO Is Said to Commit Suicide
Label: World
PARIS — The Serbian ambassador to NATO, Branislav Milinkovic, jumped to his death from a multistory parking garage on Tuesday afternoon at the Brussels airport, diplomats said Wednesday.
Reuters
Branislav Milinkovic, Serbia's ambassador to NATO, sits at the alliance headquarters in Brussels Dec. 14, 2006.
Mr. Milinkovic, 52, a respected diplomat, lawyer and intellectual appointed to the ambassadorship in 2009, was at the airport to meet a visiting Serbian delegation, officials said. B92, an independent broadcaster in Belgrade, Serbia, reported that the country’s assistant foreign minister, Zoran Vujic, was with Mr. Milinkovic at the time and witnessed his death.
Serbian officials said that the motive was not known, and that Mr. Milinkovic gave no sign of what he intended in the moments before he leapt to his death.
Diplomats attending a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels said they were shocked by the news. Serbia is not a member of the military alliance, but it belongs to a group of countries that cooperates with NATO on military and security issues.
Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for the alliance, said by telephone from Brussels that Mr. Milinkovic was a jovial and engaging man known for his gentle manner, and that he was widely liked and admired at NATO headquarters, where he had been recently seen playing tennis. He had a wife, who was in Dublin at the time of his death, and a son, B92 said.
When Serbia, the largest state to emerge from the disintegration of Yugoslavia, was ruled by the strongman Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s, NATO conducted a bombing campaign to force Mr. Milosevic to withdraw Serbian forces from the breakaway region of Kosovo. Mr. Milinkovic was an opposition activist during Mr. Milosevic’s rule, and he became a diplomat after his overthrow in 2000, helping to rebuild friendly ties with Western Europe.
“Everyone is totally shocked to hear what happened,” Ms. Lungescu said. “He was a totally open and lovely man and made an important contribution toward rapprochement between Serbia and NATO, making great efforts to bridge over a difficult history and to move forward rather than backward.”
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