Powerful winter storm throttles Midwest travelers


CINCINNATI (AP) — A powerful winter storm system pounded the nation's midsection Wednesday and headed toward the Northeast, where people braced for the high winds and heavy snow that disrupted holiday travel, knocked out power to thousands of homes and were blamed in at least six deaths.


Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed, scores of motorists got stuck on icy roads or slid off into drifts, and blizzard warnings were issued across Indiana and Ohio amid snowy gusts of 30 mph that blanketed roads and windshields, at times causing whiteout conditions.


"The way I've been describing it is as a low-end blizzard, but that's sort of like saying a small Tyrannosaurus rex," said John Kwiatkowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis. He said the storm's winds were just high enough to classify the storm as a blizzard, making it one of the strongest snowstorms in years to strike central and southern Indiana.


"It's ugly out," said Elizabeth Brinker, 26, in downtown Indianapolis as she hurried to her car after the law firm where she works sent employees home Wednesday morning.


Some 40 vehicles got bogged down trying to make it up a slick hill in central Indiana, and four state snowplows slid off slick roads near Vincennes as snow fell at the rate of 3 inches within an hour in some spots.


Two passengers in a car on a sleet-slickened Arkansas highway were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision, and two people, including a 76-year-old Milwaukee woman, were killed Tuesday on Oklahoma highways. Deaths from wind-toppled trees were reported in Texas and Louisiana. The system that spawned nearly three dozen tornadoes across Gulf Coast states on Tuesday was headed to New England and the Eastern Seaboard.


National Guardsmen were called out to help cope with the storm in Indiana and Arkansas.


In Arkansas, Humvees transported medical workers and patients in areas with 10 inches of snow. Gov. Mike Beebe sent out National Guard teams after the storm left 192,000 customers without power Wednesday morning. The largest utility, Entergy Arkansas, said some people could be without power for as long as a week because of snapped poles and wires after ice coated power lines ahead of 10 inches of snowfall.


Other states to the east also had widely scattered outages and treacherous roads.


Traffic crawled at 25 mph on Interstate 81 in Maryland, where authorities reported scores of accidents.


"We're going to go down south and get below it (the storm)," said a determined Richard Power, traveling from home in Levittown, N.Y., to Louisville, Ky., in a minivan with his wife, two children and their beagle, Lucky. He said they were well on their way until they hit snow near Harrisburg, Pa., then 15 mph traffic on Interstate 81 at Hagerstown, Md. "We're going to go as far as we can go. .... If it doesn't get better, we're going to just get a hotel."


About two dozen counties in Indiana and Ohio issued snow emergency travel alerts, urging people to go out on the roads only if necessary.


"People need not to travel," said Rachel Trevino, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service bureau in Paducah, Ky. "They need to just go where they're going to be there and stay there."


Jennifer Miller, 58, was taking a bus Wednesday from Cincinnati to visit family in Columbus.


"I wish this had come yesterday and was gone today," she said, struggling with a rolling suitcase and three smaller bags on a slushy sidewalk near the station. "I'm glad I don't have to drive in this."


More than 900 flights were canceled by midday, according to FlightAware.com.


Snow was blamed for scores of vehicle accidents as far east as Maryland. As the storm moved east, New England state highway departments were treating roads and getting ready to mobilize with snowfall forecasts of a foot or more.


"People are picking up salt and a lot of shovels today," said Andy Greenwood, an assistant manager at Aubuchon Hardware in Keene, N.H.


In Manchester, N.H., public works officials said plow trucks were ready, as were a variety of emergency notification systems including blinking strobe lights at major intersections, and email, text and social media alerts.


Early indications were that day-after-Christmas mall traffic was down, too, with people holding off in the storm-affected areas on returning that ugly sweater or other unwanted gifts.


"I can't feel my feet, and the ice is hurting when it hits my face," said Tracy Flint, a Columbus, Ohio, hairstylist who was trudging to work across a shopping center lot where only a handful of cars were parked. "But it could be worse."


Behind the storm, Mississippi's governor declared states of emergency in eight counties with more than 25 people reported injured and 70 homes left damaged.


Cindy Williams, 56, stood near a home in McNeill, Miss., where the front was collapsed into a pile of wood and brick, with a balcony and porch ripped apart. Large Oak trees were uprooted and winds sheared off nearby treetops in a nearby grove. But she was focused on that all the family members from her husband to their grandchildren had escaped harm.


"We are so thankful," she said. "God took care of us."


___


Associated Press writers Rick Callahan and Charles Wilson in Indianapolis, Kelly P. Kissel in Little Rock, Ark.; Jim Van Anglen in Mobile, Ala.; Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Miss.; Julie Carr Smyth and Mitch Stacy in Columbus, Ohio; Amanda Lee Myers in Cincinnati, David Dishneau in Hagerstown, Md., and Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H., contributed to this report.


___


Contact Dan Sewell at http://www.twitter.com/dansewell


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Ticket rush: Film fans hand Hollywood record cash






LOS ANGELES (AP) — The big deal for Hollywood is not the record $ 10.8 billion that studios took in domestically in 2012. It’s the fact that the number of tickets sold went up for the first time in three years.


Thanks to inflation, revenue generally rises in Hollywood as admission prices climb each year. The real story is told in tickets, whose sales have been on a general decline for a decade, bottoming out in 2011 at 1.29 billion, their lowest level since 1995.






The industry rebounded this year, with ticket sales projected to rise 5.6 percent to 1.36 billion by Dec. 31, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. That’s still well below the modern peak of 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, but in an age of cozy home theater setups and endless entertainment gadgets, studio executives consider it a triumph that they were able to put more butts in cinema seats this year than last.


“It is a victory, ultimately,” said Don Harris, head of distribution at Paramount Pictures. “If we deliver the product as an industry that people want, they will want to get out there. Even though you can sit at home and watch something on your large screen in high-def, people want to get out.”


Domestic revenue should finish up nearly 6 percent from 2011′s $ 10.2 billion and top Hollywood‘s previous high of $ 10.6 billion set in 2009.


The year was led by a pair of superhero sagas, Disney’s “The Avengers” with $ 623 million domestically and $ 1.5 billion worldwide and the Warner Bros. Batman finale “The Dark Knight Rises” with $ 448 million domestically and $ 1.1 billion worldwide. Sony’s James Bond adventure “Skyfall” is closing in on the $ 1 billion mark globally, and the list of action and family-film blockbusters includes “The Hunger Games,” ”The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part Two,” ”Ice Age: Continental Drift,” ”Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” ”The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Brave.”


Before television, movies were the biggest thing going, with ticket sales estimated as high as 4 billion a year domestically in the 1930s and ’40s.


Movie-going eroded steadily through the 1970s as people stayed home with their small screens. The rise of videotape in the 1980s further cut into business, followed by DVDs in the ’90s and big, cheap flat-screen TVs in recent years. Today’s video games, mobile phones and other portable devices also offer easy options to tramping out to a movie theater.


It’s all been a continual drain on cinema business, and cynics repeatedly predict the eventual demise of movie theaters. Yet Hollywood fights back with new technology of its own, from digital 3-D to booming surround-sound to the clarity of images projected at high-frame rates, which is being tested now with “The Lord of the Rings” prelude “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” shown in select theaters at 48 frames a second, double the standard speed.


For all of the annoyances of theaters — parking, pricy concessions, sitting next to strangers texting on their iPhones — cinemas still offer the biggest and best way to see a movie.


“Every home has a kitchen, but you can’t get into a good restaurant on Saturday night,” said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros. “People want to escape. That’s the nature of society. The adult population just is not going to sit home seven days a week, even though they have technology in their home that’s certainly an improvement over what it was 10 years ago. People want to get out of the house, and no matter what they throw in the face of theatrical exhibition, it continues to perform at a strong level.”


Even real-life violence at the movie theater didn’t turn audiences away. Some moviegoers thought twice about heading to the cinema after a gunman killed 12 people and injured 58 at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Colorado last summer, but if there was any lull in attendance, it was slight and temporary. Ticket sales went on a tear for most of the fall.


While domestic revenues inch upward most years largely because of inflation, the real growth areas have been overseas, where more and more fans are eager for the next Hollywood blockbuster.


Rentrak, which compiles international box office data, expects 2012′s foreign gross to be about $ 23 billion, 3 percent higher than in 2011. No data was yet available on the number of tickets sold overseas this past year.


International business generally used to account for less than half of a studio film’s overall receipts. Films now often do two or even three times as much business overseas as they do domestically. Some movies that were duds with U.S. audiences, such as “Battleship” and “John Carter,” can wind up being $ 200 million hits with overseas crowds.


Whether finishing a good year or a bad one, Hollywood executives always look ahead to better days, insisting that the next crop of blockbusters will be bigger than ever. The same goes this time as studio bosses hype their 2013 lineup, which includes the latest “Iron Man,” ”Star Trek,” ”Hunger Games” and “Thor” installments, the Superman tale “Man of Steel” and the second chapter in “The Hobbit” trilogy.


Twelve months from now, they hope to be talking about another revenue record topping this year’s $ 10.8 billion.


“I’ve been saying we’re going to hit that $ 11 billion level for about three years now,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. “Next year I think is the year we actually do it.”


___


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http://www.hollywood.com


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Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage






NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon‘s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc‘s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.


The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.






Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.


Evers said the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing center in Virginia and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.


The event marks the latest in a series of outages from Amazon Web Services, with one occurring in April of last year that knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare.


“We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented,” Evers of Netflix said.


“We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night,” he added.


Officials at Amazon Web Services were not available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company’s contracts with Amazon.


(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and Matt Driskill)


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Toronto reaches skyward, but how dark the clouds?






TORONTO (Reuters) – Barry Fenton walked to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows in his 30th-floor uptown Toronto penthouse suite and declared, “This is the best view of the city.”


To the south, a mass of steel-and-glass skyscrapers glinted in the bright autumn sun. Several cranes were in motion on unfinished buildings, a common sight in a city in the midst of a residential building boom.






“If you look around the core, every building you look at has a different look to it, a different ambience,” said the energetic co-founder of Lanterra Developments, one of the city’s most active builders. “That’s important.”


Fenton, 56, says he is confident the city’s condominium market will remain strong — despite warnings that it is all moving too far, too fast — and has an ambitious lineup for future development. And he is not alone in his optimism.


Toronto‘s seams are bursting with new condo and hotel towers designed by star architects like Frank Gehry and built by famed developers like Donald Trump.


But Fenton and others who see Toronto emerging from its “pokey” past — as a columnist in the Globe and Mail recently described it — face some formidable obstacles: an infrastructure buckling under soaring density rates, the laws of supply and demand and preservationists who say too many new towers are destroying the city’s character.


Canada’s central bank drew a bead on the city of 2.6 million this month in its weighty “Financial System Review,” warning of “potential future supply imbalances” in the condo market.


The Bank of Canada noted that the number of unsold condominiums in pre-construction has doubled, to 14,000, over the past year.


Greater Toronto home sales have slowed after years of steady increases. Sales fell 16 percent in November from the same month a year ago, according to the Toronto Real East Board. So far, however, prices are flattening, not falling, as some analysts have predicted.


In defiance of warnings by the central bank and economists, two mega-projects were unveiled within days of each other in October — a three-tower condo complex to be designed by Gehry and a multi-tower office project that includes a massive casino.


RACE TO THE TOP


More skyscrapers — 147 of them — are being built in Toronto than anywhere in North America, according to Emporis, the German data provider. That is twice as many as in New York, a city with about three times the population.


Toronto is getting taller fast. Fifteen buildings that will be more than 150 meters (492 feet) high are under construction, more than anywhere in the western hemisphere.


The recently completed Trump International Hotel topped out at 277 meters, just shy of Toronto’s tallest skyscraper, the 72-story First Canadian Place, which is 298 meters. That height could be exceeded by a couple of major projects on the drawing boards, including the Mirvish project.


(The city’s tallest freestanding structure, however, is the CN Tower, which soars over Toronto at 553 meters.)


“Toronto is creating a very sustainable future by building condos downtown,” said Daniel Libeskind, the American architect, who was in Toronto in October for a ceremony for one of his latest projects, the 57-story L Tower, with its sweeping, curvaceous, design that rises above the city’s modernist Sony Center for Performing Arts.


“It fights urban sprawl and brings people into the heart of the city.”


While building in big American cities and in Western Europe cratered following the financial crisis four years ago, Toronto never stopped booming. Demand for residential space has been strong, and while the office market has also been healthy, most of the new developments have been for condo projects.


Lanterra’s Fenton said his company has built some 9,000 condominium units in Toronto over the past 10 years and now has “in the hopper” up to 6 million square feet of property in downtown Toronto that is being rezoned for new projects.


Lanterra gained prominence over the past five years for the development of Maple Leaf Square, which included two condo towers, a hotel and office space, near the city’s hockey shrine, Air Canada Center, on land that had sat vacant for years.


Now it is “one of the hottest places to be,” said Fenton.


“ONE TOWER LEADS TO ANOTHER”


Some worry that Toronto can’t handle much more development.


“We have accumulated a serious infrastructure deficit,” wrote Ken Greenberg, a Toronto architect, in the Globe and Mail in October. “We have failed to make the investments in public transit that are urgently needed. Our narrow sidewalks and poorly designed streets are already jammed.”


He criticized the city officials and developers for a lack of coordinated planning. “One tower leads to another,” he said.


Despite decades of debate about transportation policy, Toronto has just two subway lines, a fleet of charming but lumbering streetcar lines and crumbling roadways.


Commuters in Toronto spend at least 80 minutes in traffic a day, on average — worse than what commuters face in London or Los Angeles — according to the Toronto Board of Trade.


Toronto’s City Planning Department did not respond to numerous requests for comment.


There is also concern about soaring neighborhood density rates. The city’s waterfront area has seen the most growth. Its population has soared 134 percent in a decade and is up 66 percent in the past five years, to 43,295, according to city data.


Toronto’s aging energy grid is strained. In July, downtown Toronto endured an eight-hour blackout after a transformer blew due to high demand. There was a similar outage last January.


THE MEGA-PROJECTS


Now two of the most ambitious projects the city has ever seen are being floated.


First out of the gate was theater impresario David Mirvish, who with his father, the late Ed Mirvish, helped create Toronto’s vibrant arts and theater scene.


In early October, Mirvish unveiled a plan for three condominium towers, with up to 85 floors each, that would be the city’s tallest buildings.


A podium at the buildings’ base would house two museums, including one for the Mirvish family’s contemporary art collection.


The Mirvish buildings would be designed by Gehry, the celebrated Canadian-born architect whose 76-story 8 Spruce Street residential tower was just completed in New York.


“These towers can become a symbol of what Toronto can be,” the 83-year-old Gehry said at project’s unveiling. “I am not building condominiums, I am building three sculptures for people to live in.”


Two weeks later, Oxford Properties Group, a Canadian developer with a $ 20 billion global real estate portfolio, announced a $ 3 billion makeover of the downtown convention center, just south of the Mirvish and Gehry project. It envisions a casino, two hotel towers and two office towers that would be among the tallest in the city.


Adam Vaughan, a city councilor whose district would encompass both projects, said a lot more planning is needed. He had kinder words for the Mirvish proposal — “it’s a transformative and astonishing proposal” — than for Oxford’s project, which he called “all out of proportion.”


“It’s time to have a really smart conversation about how we are building this neighborhood because there is a hell of lot of density arriving not just with this project but with all the projects that have been approved,” he said in an interview.


AT THE KIT KAT


Al Carbone, owner for the past three decades of the Kit Kat restaurant, doesn’t think people like Vaughan are listening to him, as the councilor and other politicians are not heeding the growing concerns about the rapid pace of development.


He said buildings are springing up too close to lot lines, creating jammed sidewalks and alleyways. And the sun does not shine on the streets like it once did.


He supports the Mirvish project, which would preserve his street, known as Restaurant Row. But he is battling a separate 47-story building that would go up steps away from his restaurant.


The plan, which still must be approved, would retain the historic facades of buildings on the street, which Carbone believes will destroy the character of the row.


“It’s a tough battle,” said Carbone, who launched the website SaveRestaurantrow.com to drum up support in opposition to the project. “You can’t have a condo on every corner.”


WHERE IS TORONTO HEADED?


Some believe Toronto is at a crossroads as developers, politicians and citizens debate the rapid changes the city’s urban landscape.


The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee dismissed the idea that the development was somehow bad for the city in a column in October, saying the condo boom “has transformed our once-pokey downtown into a vibrant, around-the-clock urban community.”


David Lieberman, an architect who also teaches at the University of Toronto’s architectural school, agrees the new developments have been good for the city, but he is not sure the city’s citizens are ready for it.


“We have such an excellent opportunity to get things right, but there is the Canadian conservatism,” Lieberman said, sipping coffee in his studio in an old downtown Toronto house. “Canadians in their city building are not risk takers.”


(Reporting By Russ Blinch. Editing by Janet Guttsman and Douglas Royalty)


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Wife’s Garbled Text a Sign of Stroke






Dec 25, 2012 12:57pm



8ae4a  gty texting ll 121225 main Wifes Garbled Text a Sign of Stroke

Sending garbled texts may be a sign of stroke. Image credit: Stone/Getty Images.







Smartphone autocorrect is famous for scrambling messages into unintelligible gibberish but when one man received this garbled text from his 11-week-pregnant wife, it alarmed him:


“every where thinging days nighing,” her text read. “Some is where!”


Though that may sound like every text you’ve ever received, the woman’s husband knew her autocorrect was turned off. Fearing some medical issue, he made sure his 25-year-old wife went immediately to the emergency room.


When she got there, doctors noted that she was disoriented, couldn’t use her right arm and leg properly and had some difficulty speaking. A magnetic resonance imaging scan — MRI — revealed that part of the woman’s brain wasn’t getting enough blood. The diagnosis was stroke.


Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. A short hospital stay and some low-dose blood thinners took care of the symptoms and the rest of her pregnancy was uneventful.


Click here to read about how texting pedestrians risk injuries


The three doctors from Boston’s Harvard Medical School, who reported the case study online in this week’s Archives of Neurology, claim this is the first instance they know of where an aberrant text message was used to help diagnose a stroke. In their report, they refer to the woman’s inability to text properly as “dystextia,” a word coined by medical experts in an earlier case.


Dystextia appears to be a new form of aphasia, a term that refers to any trouble processing language, be it spoken or written. The authors of the Archives paper said that at least theoretically, incoherent text messages will be used more often to flag strokes and other neurological abnormalities that lead to the condition.


“As the accessibility of electronic communication continues to advance, the growing digital record will likely become an increasingly important means of identifying neurologic disease, particularly in patient populations that rely more heavily on written rather than spoken communication,” they wrote.


Even though jumbled texts are so common, Dr. Larry Goldstein, a neurologist who is the director of the stroke center at Duke University, said he also believes it’s possible they can be used to sound the alarm on a person’s neurological state, especially in a case like this where the text consisted of complete words that amounted to nonsense rather than the usual autocorrected muddle.


“It would have been very easy to dismiss because of the normal problems with texting but this was a whole conversation that wasn’t making sense,” Goldstein said. “I might be concerned about a patient based on a text like this if they were telling me they hadn’t intended to send a disjointed jumble but they weren’t able to correct themselves.”


In diagnosing stroke, Goldstein said both patients and medical professionals tend to discount aphasic symptoms, even in speech, but they can often be the first clue something is up. In this woman’s case, other signs were there. Her obstetrician realized in retrospect that she’d had trouble filling out a form earlier in the day. She had difficulties speaking too which might also have been picked up sooner if a recent upper respiratory infection hadn’t reduced her voice to a whisper.


But unlike this woman, most people leave their autocorrect turned on. If we relied solely on maddeningly unintelligible text messages to determine neurological state, neurologists might have lines out the door.



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Egypt constitution passes with 63.8 percent


CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's disputed Islamist-backed constitution passed with a 63.8 percent "yes" in a referendum, the election commission announced Tuesday, rejecting opposition allegations of significant vote fraud.


Turnout of 32.9 percent of Egypt's nearly 52 million registered voters was quite a bit lower than most other elections since the uprising nearly two years ago that ousted authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak.


Mohammed Badie, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, offered congratulations on the passing of the constitution and said Egyptians continue to "teach" the world.


"Let's all begin to build the renaissance of our country with free will, good intentions and strong determination, men, women, Muslims and Christians," Badie said on his Twitter account. The Brotherhood was the main group that backed the charter.


This is the first constitution since Mubarak's ouster. The opposition had campaigned against it with massive street protests that sometimes turned deadly, arguing that it will usher in Islamic rule in Egypt and restrict freedoms. It has vowed to challenge the referendum results and fight for a share of power in the upcoming parliamentary vote expected within two months.


Judge Samir Abou el-Maati, the head of the electoral commission, denied allegations that judicial supervision was lacking in the vote. He said the total number of people who voted against the constitution was 6.06 million out of 16.7 million valid votes, or about 36.2 percent.


Opposition spokesman Khaled Dawoud said the judge didn't address complaints about overcrowding of polling stations. The opposition says the overcrowding was due to a boycott by some judges who traditionally oversee elections and that was a major factor in the low turnout.


He also said Abou el-Maati did not address violations such as backers of the constitution instructing voters to cast a "yes" ballot within the polling stations.


"We still believe because of the low turnout, this is not the constitution the Egyptians people had aspired for," Dawoud said. "This is not a constitution that will last for a long time."


Dawoud said the National Salvation Front, the main opposition group that brings together liberal, leftists parties and groups, will continue to fight the constitution through preparing for the parliamentary elections. In the parliament, the group will work to amend the constitution, which he said restricts freedoms and undermines social and economic rights of Egyptians.


Abou el-Maati said results were thrown out from polling stations where violations, such as closing early or improper supervision.


He also denied that Christians were preventing from casting their ballots at some stations, a claim widely reported during the two stages of voting on Dec. 15 and Dec. 22.


The official results closely mirror unofficial results announced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which said 64 percent voted "yes."


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Queen delivers 1st Christmas message in 3D






LONDON (AP) — Queen Elizabeth II has hailed the holidays in a new dimension, delivering her Christmas message for the first time in 3D.


In the annual, prerecorded broadcast, the monarch paid tribute to the armed forces, “whose sense of duty takes them away from family and friends” over the holidays, and expressed gratitude for the outpouring of enthusiasm for her Diamond Jubilee celebrations.






The queen said she was struck by the “strength of fellowship and friendship” shown by well-wishers to mark her 60 years on the throne.


“It was humbling that so many chose to mark the anniversary of a duty which passed to me 60 years ago,” she said as footage showed crowds lining the Thames River in the rain earlier this year for a boat pageant. “People of all ages took the trouble to take part in various ways and in many nations.”


The queen also reflected on Britain’s hosting of the Olympic games in 2012, praising the “skill, dedication, training and teamwork of our athletes” and singling out the volunteers who devoted themselves “to keeping others safe, supported and comforted.”


Elizabeth’s message aired shortly after she attended a traditional church service at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk.


Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, the monarch rode to church in a Bentley, accompanied by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie. Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other members of the royal family.


Three familiar faces were missing from the family outing. Prince William is spending the holiday with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury. Prince Harry is serving with British troops in Afghanistan.


After the church service, the royals usually gather to watch the queen’s prerecorded television broadcast, a tradition that began with a radio address by King George V in 1932.


The queen has made a prerecorded Christmas broadcast on radio since 1952 and on television since 1957. She writes the speeches herself and the broadcasts mark the rare occasion on which the queen voices her own opinion without government consultation.


Her switch to 3D was not the only technological leap for prominent British figures this Christmas.


The Archbishops of Canterbury and York chose to tweet their sermons for the first time, in order to bring Christmas to a new digital audience.


In his speech, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he has been inspired by meeting victims of suffering over the past decade while leading the world’s 80 million-strong Anglican Communion.


Delivering his final Christmas Day sermon from Canterbury Cathedral, Williams also acknowledged how a vote against allowing women to become bishops has damaged the credibility of the church.


Still, he said, it was “startling” to see after the vote how many people “turned out to have a sort of investment in the church, a desire to see the church looking credible and a real sense of loss when — as they saw it — the church failed to sort its business out.”


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10 Talented Dogs Playing the Piano









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Bolivia’s Morales visits Cuba after Chavez surgery






HAVANA (AP) — Bolivian President Evo Morales has made a lightning trip to Havana where key ally Hugo Chavez is convalescing after cancer surgery.


Morales did not speak to foreign journalists during his weekend visit. Cuban state-run media didn’t confirm that he visited Chavez, but said he came “to express his support” for the Venezuelan president. The Cuban government had invited media to cover Morales’ arrival Saturday and departure Sunday but withdrew the invitation with no explanation.






Photos released by Cuban media showed President Raul Castro greeting Morales at the airport in Havana.


Morales aides said Monday he planned to make a statement later about Chavez.


Chavez underwent on Dec. 11 his fourth cancer-related operation since last year, two months after winning reelection to a six-year term. Venezuelan officials say his condition is stable.


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Lawmakers play waiting game with “fiscal cliff” deadline in sight






WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With only a week left before a deadline for the United States to go over a “fiscal cliff,” lawmakers played a waiting game on Monday in the hope that someone will produce a plan to avoid harsh budget cuts and higher taxes for most Americans from New Year’s Day.


Though Republicans and Democrats have spent the better part of a year describing a plunge off the cliff as a looming catastrophe, the nation’s capital showed no outward signs of worry, let alone impending calamity.






The White House has set up shop in Hawaii, where President Barack Obama is vacationing.


The Capitol was deserted and the Treasury Department – which would have to do a lot of last-minute number-crunching with or without a deal – was closed.


So were all other federal government offices, with Obama having followed a tradition of declaring the Monday before a Tuesday Christmas a holiday for government employees, notwithstanding the approaching fiscal cliff.


Expectations for some 11th-hour rescue focused largely on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, in part because he has performed the role of legislative wizard in previous stalemates.


But McConnell, who is up for re-election in 2014, was shunning the role this year, his spokesman saying that it was now up to the Democrats in the Senate to make the next move.


“We don’t yet know what Senator Reid will bring to the floor. He is not negotiating with us and the president is out of town,” said McConnell’s spokesman, referring to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat. “So I just don’t know what they’re going to do over there,” he said.


Two-day-old tweets on leadership websites told the story insofar as it was visible to the public.


House Speaker John Boehner‘s referred everyone to McConnell. McConnell’s tweet passed the responsibility along to Obama, saying it was a “moment that calls for presidential leadership.”


Reid’s tweet said: “There will be very serious consequences for millions of families if Congress fails to act” on the cliff.


The next session of the Senate is set for Thursday, but the issues presented by across-the-board tax hikes and indiscriminate reductions in government spending, were not on the calendar.


The House has nothing on its schedule for the week, but members have been told they could be called back at 48 hours notice, making a Thursday return a theoretical possibility.


However, aides to the Republican leaders in Congress said there were no talks with Democrats on Monday and none scheduled after negotiations fell off track last week when Boehner failed to persuade House Republicans to accept tax increases on incomes of more than $ 1 million a year.


“Nothing new, Merry Christmas,” an aide to Boehner responded when asked if there was any movement on the fiscal cliff.


SCALED-BACK EXPECTATIONS


If there is some last-minute legislation, Republicans and Democrats agreed on Sunday news shows that it will not be any sort of “grand bargain” encompassing taxes and spending cuts, but most likely a short-term deal putting everything off for a few weeks or months, thereby risking a negative market reaction.


A limited agreement would still need bipartisan support, as Obama has said he would veto a bill that does not raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.


On Monday, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison urged fellow Republicans to be flexible.


“We’re now at a point where we’re not going to get what we think is right for our economy and our country because we don’t control government. So we’ve got to work within the system we have,” she told MSNBC.


Two bills in Congress could conceivably form the basis for a last-minute stopgap measure.


Last spring, Republicans in the House passed a measure that would extend Bush-era tax cuts for everyone, reflecting the party’s deep reluctance to increase taxes.


The Democratic-controlled Senate passed a bill in August, extending lower tax rates for everyone except the wealthiest Americans – a group defined at that point as households with a net income of $ 250,000 or above. Obama has since increased that to $ 400,000 a year, in an effort to win Republican support.


Analysts say Democrats might be able to get the backing of enough Republicans in both the House and Senate, especially if they are willing to raise the number to $ 500,000.


Under that scenario, lawmakers might also put off spending cuts of $ 109 billion that would take effect from January and agree to Republican demands for cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, the government-run health insurance plans for seniors and the poor.


However, with only a few work days left in Congress after Christmas, there is a good chance that no deal can be worked out and tax rates would then go up, at least briefly, until an agreement is reached in Washington.


“We may go off the cliff on January 1, but we would correct that very quickly thereafter,” Democratic Representative John Yarmuth told MSNBC.


The prospects of the United States going over the fiscal cliff dampened enthusiasm on Wall Street for a “Santa rally” in the holiday season, when stocks traditionally rise.


The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 51.76 points, or 0.39 percent, in Monday’s shortened holiday session.


Failure to work out tax rates in the coming days would cause chaos at the Internal Revenue Service, said analyst Chris Krueger of Guggenheim Securities.


“Next weekend is going to be a total, total debacle,” he said. The IRS is unlikely to have enough time to revise its tables for withholding taxes.


“The withholding tables are sort of like an aircraft carrier, you can’t turn the thing on a dime.” he said.


(Additional reporting by Alina Selyukh, Patrick Temple-West and David Lawder; Editing by Alistair Bell, Fred Barbash and David Brunnstrom)


Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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