More than 200 dead in Philippine typhoon
Label: BusinessNEW BATAAN, Philippines (AP) — The death toll from a powerful typhoon in the southern Philippines climbed to more than 200 people Wednesday and officials feared many more bodies could be found as rescuers reach hard-hit areas that had been isolated by landslides, floods and downed communications.
At least 151 people have died in the worst-hit province of Compostela Valley since Typhoon Bopha began lashing the region early Tuesday, including 66 villagers and soldiers who perished in a flash flood that swamped two emergency shelters and a military camp in New Bataan town, provincial spokeswoman Fe Maestre told The Associated Press.
About 80 people survived the deluge in New Bataan with injuries, but an unspecified number of villagers remain missing. On Wednesday, the farming town of 45,000 people was a muddy wasteland of collapsed houses and columns of coconut and banana trees felled by Bopha's ferocious winds.
Army Maj. Gen. Ariel Bernardo said 51 people died and 98 others are missing in nearby Davao Oriental province.
Disaster-response agencies reported seven other typhoon-related deaths elsewhere.
Officials: NATO to decide on missiles for Turkey
Label: WorldBRUSSELS (AP) — NATO foreign ministers are expected to approve Turkey‘s request for Patriot anti-missile systems to bolster its defense against possible strikes from neighboring Syria.
NATO foreign ministers are meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels. Parliaments in both nations must approve the deployment, which would also involve several hundred soldiers.
Ankara, which has been highly supportive of the Syrian opposition, wants the Patriots to defend against possible retaliatory attacks by Syrian missiles carrying chemical warheads. NATO leaders have repeatedly said they would provide any assistance Turkey needs.
Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Judge gives initial OK to revised Facebook privacy settlement
Label: Technology(Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Monday gave his preliminary approval to a second attempt by Facebook Inc to settle a class action lawsuit which charges the social networking company with violating privacy rights.
U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in California rejected a settlement in August over Facebook‘s ‘Sponsored Stories’ advertising feature, questioning why it did not award money to Facebook members for using their personal information.
But in a ruling handed down Monday, Seeborg said a revised settlement “falls within the range of possible approval as fair, reasonable and adequate.”
In a revised proposal, Facebook and plaintiff lawyers said users now could claim a cash payment of up to $ 10 each to be paid from a $ 20 million total settlement fund. Any money remaining would then go to charity.
The company also said it would engineer a new tool to enable users to view content that might have been displayed in Sponsored Stories and opt out if they desire, a court document said.
If it receives final approval, the proposed settlement would resolve a 2011 lawsuit originally filed by five Facebook Inc members.
The lawsuit alleged the Sponsored Stories feature violated California law by publicizing users’ “likes” of certain advertisers without paying them or giving them a way to opt out. The case involved over 100 million potential class members.
A spokesman for Facebook said the company was “pleased that the court has granted preliminary approval of the proposed settlement.” Lawyers for the plaintiffs weren’t immediately available for comment Monday evening.
Outside groups and class members will have a chance to object to the latest settlement before Seeborg decides whether to grant final approval. A hearing on the fairness of the deal has been set for June 28, 2013. The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Angel Fraley et al., individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated vs. Facebook Inc, 11-cv-1726.
(Reporting by Jessica Dye; Editing by Michael Perry)
Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, Don Cheadle Sign on for James Cameron’s Climate-Change Doc
Label: LifestyleLOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – James Cameron‘s climate-change documentary “Years of Living Dangerously” has lined up some high-level talent to get its message across. Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin and Don Cheadle have signed on to narrate the documentary, Showtime – which will air the project over multiple episodes next year – said Monday.
Actor Edward Norton is also expected to come aboard, Showtime said, with additional talent to be announced.
As previously reported exclusively by TheWrap, Cameron is teaming with producer and noted philanthropist Jerry Weintraub on the project, which will report on first-person accounts of people who’ve been affected by global warming. Cameron and Weintraub will executive “Years of Living Dangerously,” along with Arnold Schwarzenegger.la
“60 Minutes” producers Joel Bach and David Gelber are also executive-producing, along with climate expert Daniel Abbasi.
“The recent devastation on the East Coast is a tragic reminder of the direct link between our daily lives and climate change,” Showtime Networks’ president of entertainment David Nevins said. “This series presents a unique opportunity to combine the large-scale filmmaking styles of James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger – arguably some of Hollywood’s biggest movie makers – with the hard-hitting, intimate journalism of ’60 Minutes’ veterans Joel Bach and David Gelber. I believe this combination will make for a thought-provoking television event.”
“We’ll make it exciting,” added Cameron. “We’ll make it investigative. We’ll bring people the truth. And people are always hungry for the truth.”
In addition to the narrators, “Years of Living Dangerously” will use reporting from the field, with New York Times journalists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, columnist Mark Bittman and MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
“Years of Living Dangerously” will air over six to eight one-hour episodes, Showtime said.
Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NFL-Kansas City Chiefs murder/suicide key may never be unlocked
Label: Health* Player’s death adds to recent NFL suicides
* Player head injuries seen as ongoing problem
* Experts wonder if drugs such as steroids involved
Dec 3 (Reuters) – The murder/suicide committed on Saturday by Kansas City Chiefs football player Jovan Belcher left the National Football League, its fans and health professionals struggling to understand what drove him to do it.
Belcher, 25, shot and killed his 22-year-old girlfriend Kasandra Perkins, the mother of his three-month-old daughter, in front of his own mother at home before driving to Arrowhead Stadium where he shot himself dead in the parking lot after thanking team officials for all they had done for him.
For the NFL, arguably the most popular U.S. professional sport, the tragic shootings cast the league in a frightfully brutal light as Belcher became the fourth player this year to die of a self-inflicted gunshot.
Former players Junior Seau in May, Ray Easterling in April and Michael Current in January all committed suicide.
A fifth suicide victim, former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson killed himself by gunshot less than two years ago, leaving a note requesting that his brain be examined for a post-concussive disease that might have led to his severe depression.
An brain analysis showed that Duerson had a degenerative brain disease, as he had believed.
Details on Belcher’s health have been slow to emerge.
Dr. Alan Hilfer, Director of Psychology at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, said just why Belcher suddenly snapped could remain a mystery.
“We may never know the reasons,” Hilfer told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday. “Something was terribly wrong.”
The league has come under fire from former players who have joined to sue the NFL, claiming league officials looked the other way while the players were absorbing concussions that have led to long-term disabilities.
LOOKING FOR AN EDGE
Others suspect that the high-speed, muscular contact game leads players to look for a doping edge despite drug testing, and that can lead to psychological instability.
Chiefs Chairman Clark Hunt said Sunday that doctors and coaches told him they knew of no physical or emotional issues bothering Belcher, who reached the NFL as a free agent after going to the University of Maine.
“What do you look for? It’s a very hard question to answer,” Hilfer said. “Certainly you look for mood changes. Certainly you look for increased levels of impulsively and anger.
“These things sometimes occur so suddenly. Sometimes there is just no way you could possibly know that someone is going to perpetrate an act of violence of this magnitude.”
Don Hooton, who founded the Taylor Hooton Foundation to promote steroids education in 2004, seven months after his son, Taylor, committed suicide following his use of anabolic steroids, suspects doping.
“Every time I hear a story like this, my mind runs immediately to anabolic steroids,” Hooton said. “Not necessarily to the exclusion of anything else, but because anabolic steroids can affect the mind in these crazy ways.
“I hope when they do the autopsy on this young man, that they look for these substances because it’s possible that what we saw was ‘Roid Rage’” – a label given to the exhibition of anger among steroid users.
Hooton said that despite efforts in professional leagues to stem the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PED), recent studies showed that steroids use was on the rise among U.S. school children.
“It’s not getting better – it’s getting worse,” said Hooton. “We better wake up, America.”
LARGER SOCIETAL PROBLEMS
Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, said he saw the Belcher tragedy as something that speaks to societal problems transcending sports.
“This is an issue of men’s violence against women, not just football players being too violent,” Lebowitz said.
“When I look at it, I try to take it out of the realm of sport. I just think about the way we acculturate young boys in this country and our whole view of manhood.”
Lebowitz’s group has worked for the NFL on a 2010 training program aimed at gender equality and respect in the workplace, and ran a training project at the soccer World Cup in South Africa on preventing gender violence.
“If you look at how many NFL players commit gender violence in proportion to the overall population, the percentage falls in line with the general population, three to five percent.
“From what I hear she came home from a concert late and he reacted horrifically. We don’t have a healthy concept of what manhood is and how certain things that we see as an affront to manhood probably aren’t that at all.”
Lebowitz said the awful incident could spawn an opportunity to educate others.
“Nothing happens in a bubble. This is the fifth NFL player to commit suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot … this one was (preceded) by a murder. Right now there is an absolute heightened spotlight on all the issues around sports in general.
“How do we make a healthier sport, and how do we make a healthier man? How do we engage in a real conversation about respect for women’s rights and freedoms?”
Dr. Hilfer said athletes were often reluctant to seek help.
“They can benefit from additional help, especially considering the rash of suicides from concussive syndromes,” he said. “I would have loved to get this guy into some form of counseling therapy.
“It would have been wonderful if they could ask for help but athletes are often reluctant because their image is that of a tough guy who can handle things. They are as a rule some of the people who are least likely to access mental health services.”
Mike Paul, who runs a New York public relations business specializing in reputation management, said the incident would challenge NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“This is a big one for him,” Paul told Reuters. “The helmet (safety) issue and the steroids and PED issue, continue. Now it is right back in his face again and he has two choices.
“He can confront it head on and say it is time for further examination as we go into 2013 … or he can try to slide it under the rug by saying it’s a one-off.
“I think it would be a big mistake to say it was a one-off.” (Editing by Philip Barbara)
Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News
U.S., allies weighing military options if Syria uses WMD
Label: BusinessWASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and its allies are weighing military options to secure Syria's chemical and biological weapons, after U.S. intelligence reports show the Syrian regime may be readying those weapons and may be desperate enough to use them, U.S. officials said Monday.
President Barack Obama, in a speech at the National Defense University on Monday, pointedly warned Syrian President Bashar Assad not to use his arsenal.
"Today I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command: The world is watching," Obama said. "The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will be held accountable."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Prague for meetings with Czech officials, said she wouldn't outline any specifics.
"But suffice it to say, we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur," Clinton said.
Options now being considered range from aerial strikes to limited raids by regional forces to secure the stockpiles, according to one current U.S. official, and one former U.S. official, briefed on the matter. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.
The administration remains reluctant to dispatch U.S. forces into Syria, but a U.S. special operations training team is in neighboring Jordan, teaching troops there how to safely secure such sites together with other troops from the region, the officials said.
The warnings to Syria come after U.S. intelligence detected signs the Syrian regime was moving the chemical weapons components around within several of Syria's chemical weapons sites in recent days, according to a senior U.S. defense official and two U.S. officials speaking on Monday. The activities involved movement within the sites, rather than the transfer of components in or out of various sites, two of the officials said.
But they were activities they had not seen before, that bear further scrutiny, one said.
Another senior U.S. official described it as "indications of preparations" for a possible use of the chemical weapons. The U.S. still doesn't know whether the regime is planning to use them, but the official says there is greater concern because there is the sense that the Assad regime is under greater pressure now.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about intelligence matters.
U.S. intelligence officials also intercepted one communication within the last six months they believe was between Iran's infamous Quds Force, urging Syrian regime members to use its supplies of toxic Sarin gas against rebels and the civilians supporting them in the besieged city of Homs, a former U.S. official said. That report was not matched by other intelligence agencies, and other intelligence officials have said Iran also does not want the Syrians to use their chemical weapons.
The Assad regime insists it would not use such weapons against Syrians, though it carefully does not admit to having them. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the government "would not use chemical weapons — if there are any — against its own people under any circumstances." The regime is party to the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons in war.
The Syrian assurances did not placate the White House.
"We are concerned that in an increasingly beleaguered regime, having found its escalation of violence through conventional means inadequate, might be considering the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people," said White House press secretary Jay Carney.
"Assad has killed so many of his people, I just wouldn't be surprised if he turned these weapons on them," added Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, after intelligence briefings Monday.
An administration official said the trigger for U.S. action of some kind is the use of chemical weapons, or movement with the intent to use them, or the intent to provide them to a terrorist group like Hezbollah. The U.S. is trying to determine whether the recent movement detected in Syria falls into any of those categories, the official said. The administration official was speaking on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
Israeli officials have repeatedly expressed concerns that Syrian chemical weapons could slip into the hands of Hezbollah or other anti-Israel groups, or even be fired toward Israel in an act of desperation by Syria.
Syria has some 75 sites where weapons are stored, but U.S. officials aren't sure they have tracked down all the locations, and fear some stockpiles may have already been moved. Syria is believed to have several hundred ballistic surface-to-surface missiles capable of carrying chemical warheads, plus several tons of material stored in either large drums, or in artillery shells, which become deadly once fired.
"In Syria, they have everything from mustard agent, Sarin nerve gas, and some variant of the nerve agent VX," according to James Quinlivan, a Rand Corp. analyst who specializes in the elimination of weapons of mass destruction.
A primary argument against sending in U.S. ground troops is that whoever takes possession of the chemical weapons will be responsible for destroying them, as part of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. Destroying Syria's stockpiles could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and take more than a decade, Quinlivan said.
Syria's arsenal is a particular threat to the American allies, Turkey and Israel, and Obama singled out the threat posed by the unconventional weapons earlier this year as a potential cause for deeper U.S. involvement in Syria's civil war. Up to now, the United States has opposed military intervention or providing arms support to Syria's rebels for fear of further militarizing a conflict that activists say has killed more than 40,000 people since March 2011.
Activity has been detected at Syrian weapons sites before.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in late September the intelligence suggested the Syrian government had moved some of its chemical weapons in order to protect them. He said the U.S. believed that the main sites remained secure.
Asked Monday if they were still considered secure, Pentagon press secretary George Little declined to comment about any intelligence related to the weapons.
Senior lawmakers were notified last week that U.S. intelligence agencies had detected activity related to Syria's chemical and biological weapons, said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door meetings. All congressional committees with an interest in Syria, from the intelligence to the armed services committees, are now being kept informed.
"I can't comment on these reports, but I have been very concerned for some time now about Syria's stockpiles of chemical weapons and its stocks of advanced conventional weapons like shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles," said House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich.
"We are not doing enough to prepare for the collapse of the Assad regime, and the dangerous vacuum it will create. Use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would be an extremely serious escalation that would demand decisive action from the rest of the world," he added.
The U.S. and Jordan share the same concern about Syria's chemical and biological weapons — that they could fall into the wrong hands should the regime in Syria collapse and lose control of them.
___
Associated Press writers Bradley Klapper in Prague, Josef Federman in Jerusalem, Albert Aji in Damascus and Matthew Lee, Lolita C. Baldor and Julie Pace in Washington contributed to this report.
Gunmen assassinate peasant leader in Paraguay
Label: WorldASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — Gunmen murdered one of the surviving leaders of a peasant movement whose land dispute with a powerful politician prompted the end of Fernando Lugo‘s presidency last June.
Vidal Vega, 48, was hit four times early Saturday by bullets from a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver fired by two unidentified men who sped away on a motorcycle, according to an official report prepared at the police headquarters in the provincial capital of Curuguaty.
A friend, Mario Espinola, told The Associated Press that Vega was shot down when he stepped outside to feed his farm animals.
Vega was among the public faces of a commission of landless peasants from the settlement of Yby Pyta, which means Red Dirt in their native Guarani language.
He had lobbied the government for many years to redistribute some of the ranchland that Colorado Party Sen. Blas Riquelme began occupying in the 1960s.
By last May, the peasants finally lost patience and moved onto the land. A firefight during their eviction on June 15 killed 11 peasants and six police officers, prompting the Colorado Party and other leading parties to vote Lugo out of office for allegedly mismanaging the dispute.
Twelve suspects, nearly all of them peasants from Yby Pyta, have been jailed without formal charges since then on suspicion of murdering the officers, seizing property and resisting authority. The prosecutor had six months to develop the case and will present his findings Dec. 16.
Vega was expected to be a witness at the criminal trial, since he was among the few leaders who weren’t killed in the clash or jailed afterward.
He wasn’t charged because he was away getting supplies when the violence erupted at the settlement erected by the peasants inside Riquelme’s ranch, the Naranjaty Commission’s secretary, Martina Paredes, told the AP.
“We think he was assassinated by hit men who were sent, we don’t know by whom, perhaps to frighten us and frustrate our fight to recover the state lands that were illegally taken by Riquelme,” she said.
Riquelme, who died of natural causes about a month after the battle in June, occupied the land during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, whose government gave away land for free to anyone willing to put it to productive use.
A local court in Curuguaty upheld Riquelme’s claim to the land years later. Lugo’s government later sought to overturn the decision, but the case remains tied up in court.
Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Olly Murs tops UK single and album charts
Label: LifestyleLONDON (Reuters) – Singer Olly Murs‘s single “Troublemaker“, featuring U.S. rapper Flo Rida, retained the No. 1 spot in Britain’s pop charts for a second week in a row on Sunday, the Official Charts Company said.
“Troublemaker” is Murs’s fourth No. 1 single in the British charts.
The former contestant on the British version of television talent show ‘The X Factor’ also nabbed the top spot in the album charts with ‘Right Place Right Time’, leaving popular boy band One Direction in second place.
(Reporting by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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