Nintendo seeks to shake up gaming again with Wii U

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It can scan zombies, replace a TV remote, open a window into virtual worlds and shoot ninja stars across a living room. It’s the Wii U GamePad, the 10-by-5-inch touchscreen controller for the successor to the Wii out Sunday, and if you ask the brains behind the “Super Mario Bros.” about it, they say it’s going to change the way video games are made and played.

“You can’t manufacture buzz,” said Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. “You can’t manufacture word of mouth. All we can do is to provide the product and the games to foster some sparks that hopefully enable that to happen. We think we have that with Wii U.”

Much like the iPad, the curvaceous GamePad features a touchscreen that can be manipulated with the simple tap or swipe of a finger, but it’s surrounded by the kinds of buttons, bumpers, thumbsticks and triggers that are traditionally found on a modern-day game controller. There’s also a camera, stylus, microphone, headphone jack and speakers.

While the Wii U can employ its predecessor’s motion-control remotes with a sensor bar that similarly detects them in front of the TV, the console’s focus on two-screen experiences makes it feel more like a high-definition, living-room rendition of the Nintendo DS and 3DS, the Japanese gaming giant’s dual-screen hand-held devices, than the original Wii.

“It’s a second screen like a tablet or a cellphone, but it’s different,” said Mark Bolas, professor of interactive media at the University of Southern California. “In addition to providing more information, the GamePad is also a second viewpoint into a virtual world. Nintendo is letting you turn away from the TV screen to see what’s happening with the GamePad.”

The touchscreen controller can also serve as a makeshift TV remote control and online video aggregator for services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. (Nintendo cheekily calls it TVii and announced Friday that it won’t be available until December.) Some games have the ability to flip-flop between the TV screen and the GamePad screen, allowing for non-gaming use of the TV.

There are limitations to the GamePad: it won’t work after it’s been moved 25 feet away from the Wii U console; it lasts about three to five hours after charging; and while its touchscreen is intuitive as those that have come before it, the GamePad is not quite as simple to use as the Wii controllers that had everyone bowling in their living rooms.

“Is the GamePad more complex than the Wii Remote was six years ago? Certainly,” said Fils-Aime. “On the other hand, I believe consumers will easily grasp the GamePad and what we’re trying to do with the varied experiences we’ll have not only at launch but over the next number of years in this system’s life.”

The abilities of the GamePad are most notably showcased by Nintendo Co. in the amusement park-themed mini-game collection “Nintendo Land,” which comes with the deluxe edition of the console. “Nintendo Land” turns the GamePad into several different tools, such as the dashboard of a spaceship or the ultimate advantage in a game of hide-and-seek.

In other titles, the controller mostly eliminates the need to pause the action to study a map in order to figure out where to go next or scour an inventory for just the right weapon. That can all be achieved simultaneously on the GamePad screen, which is best illustrated among the launch titles in Ubisoft’s survival action game “ZombiU.”

The GamePad acts as a high-tech scanner in “ZombiU” that can analyze a player’s surroundings in a version of London overrun by zombies. It pumps up the terror by drawing players’ attention away from the horrors lurking around them.

Will gamers who’ve grown up with their eyes glued to the TV and hands gripped on a controller adapt to glimpsing at another screen? The Wii U edition of “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” for example, invites players to customize their arsenal on the fly on the GamePad, as well as engage in multiplayer matches without needing to split the TV in half.

Nintendo expects 50 games will be available for the Wii U by March 2013. There will be 23 games released alongside the console when it debuts Sunday, including the platformer “New Super Mario Bros. U,” karaoke game “Sing Party,” an “armored edition” of “Batman: Arkham City” and the Mickey Mouse adventure “Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two.”

“New consoles come along and nobody exploits their full capabilities for the first two to three years,” said Warren Spector, creative director at “Epic Mickey 2″ developer Junction Point Studios. “It’s only after you’ve had two or three projects that you fully understand what the hardware is capable of doing. We’re going to be experimenting with it more.”

Fils-Aime said he’s already envisioning ways that developers will innovate with future games. He pointed to some of the console’s features that aren’t on display in the launch line-up, such as the ability to play with two GamePads at once or utilize the console’s near-field communication technology to interact with other gadgets in the room.

“I think that developers and consumers are ready for new experiences,” said Fils-Aime. “More than anything else, I think that’s what is driving excitement for Wii U. They’ve experienced what this generation has to offer. They’re ready for something new.”

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Online:

http://www.nintendo.com/wiiu

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang.

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Gaza hospitals stretched, need supplies to treat wounded: WHO

GENEVA (Reuters) – Gaza hospitals are overwhelmed with casualties from Israel‘s bombings and face critical shortages of drugs and medical supplies, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday.

The U.N. health agency appealed for $ 10 million from donors to meet the need for drugs and supplies over the next three months.

Officials in Gaza said 43 Palestinians, nearly half of them civilians including eight children, had been killed since Israel began its air strikes. Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket fired from the enclave on Thursday.

Israel unleashed its massive air campaign on Wednesday with the declared goal of deterring Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years.

The WHO, quoting Health Ministry officials in Gaza, said 382 people have been injured – 245 adults and 137 children.

“Many of those injured have been admitted to hospitals with severe burns, injuries from collapsing buildings and head injuries,” the WHO said in a statement issued in Geneva.

Health authorities have declared an emergency situation in all hospitals to cope with patients, it said.

“Before the hostilities began, health facilities were severely over stretched mainly as a result of the siege of Gaza,” the WHO said. Israel maintains a tight blockade on the Gaza Strip with the help of neighboring Egypt.

The Gaza Ministry of Health‘s supplies of many life-saving drugs and disposable equipment were at “zero stock”, it said.

“The Ministry of Health has postponed all elective surgeries due to the emergency and shortages in anaesthesia drugs,” it said. Non-urgent cases are being transferred to hospitals run by aid groups and health personnel have been asked to report to the nearest health facility for extended shifts, it said.

“WHO appeals to the international and regional community for urgent financial support to provide essential medicines to cover pre-existing shortages, as well as emergency supplies for treating casualties and the chronically ill,” it said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Alison Williams)

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Santander plans to invest in Spain’s bad bank

MADRID (Reuters) – Spain‘s Santander plans to invest in the country’s so-called bad bank in a sign that healthy domestic lenders are willing to support the entity created to clean up the aftermath of a 2008 property crash.

“The bank plans on investing in the bad bank,” a spokesman for Santander, Spain‘s biggest bank, told Reuters on Saturday.

Spain has set up the bad bank to siphon off toxic real estate assets from bank balance sheets that date from the property crash. The bad bank’s creation is a condition of receiving up to 100 billion euros ($ 127 billion) of aid in a European bail-out of the country’s financial sector.

Spain’s second biggest bank, BBVA , is considering investing in the vehicle, but has yet to make a decision, a BBVA spokesman told Reuters on Saturday.

Sabadell is also considering investing but has not yet made a decision, a Sabadell spokesman said.

The bad bank’s managers are currently in talks with BBVA, Sabadell and Barcelona-based Caixabank about them investing in the vehicle, a banking source said. Caixabank was not immediately available for comment.

An Economy Ministry source said on Friday the bad bank could go ahead just with backing from domestic investors but foreign investors would give it credibility.

The bad bank will initially have equity of 3.9 billion euros. But the government needs private investors to stump up 2.2 billion euros, or 55 percent of this, in December, the Economy Ministry source said on Friday.

Private sector support is key because the government wants to keep its stake in the bad bank below 50 percent to reduce the burden on state finances.

The bad bank, known as Sareb, will initially receive assets – such as soured loans to housebuilders and foreclosed property – from four state-rescued banks, including Bankia , worth 45 billion euros. It will have a maximum asset value of 90 billion euros.

The equity in the bad bank could rise to 5 billion euros after including assets from a further group of banks, aside from those taken from the state-rescued banks, the source said.

The government hopes eventually to capture 500 million euros of investment from foreign investors, or 10 percent of the final equity tranche.

The rest of the bad bank will be financed by senior state-backed bonds.

Government sources said on Friday that Spain’s bank restructuring fund, the FROB, could use part of the European aid to invest in the bad bank, and as such, would not need to tap markets.

(Reporting By Sonya Dowsett. Editing by Jane Merriman)

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Israel hits Hamas buildings, shoots down Tel Aviv-bound rocket

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli aircraft bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza, and the “Iron Dome” defense system shot down a Tel Aviv-bound rocket on Saturday as Israel geared up for a possible ground invasion.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, said Israeli missiles wrecked the office building of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh – where he had met on Friday with the Egyptian prime minister – and struck a police headquarters.

Along the Tel Aviv beachfront, volleyball games came to an abrupt halt and people crouched as sirens sounded. Two interceptor rockets streaked into the sky. A flash and an explosion followed as Iron Dome, deployed only hours earlier near the city, destroyed the incoming projectile in mid-air.

With Israeli tanks and artillery positioned along the Gaza border and no end in sight to hostilities now in their fourth day, Tunisia’s foreign minister travelled to the enclave in a show of Arab solidarity.

In Cairo, a presidential source said Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi would hold four-way talks with the Qatari emir, the prime minister of Turkey and Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in the Egyptian capital on Saturday to discuss the Gaza crisis.

Egypt has been working to reinstate calm between Israel and Hamas after an informal ceasefire brokered by Cairo unraveled over the past few weeks. Meshaal, who lives in exile, has already held a round of talks with Egyptian security officials.

Officials in Gaza said 43 Palestinians, nearly half of them civilians including eight children, had been killed since Israel began its air strikes. Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket on Thursday.

Israel unleashed its massive air campaign on Wednesday with the declared goal of deterring Hamas from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years.

The Israeli army said it had zeroed in on a number of government buildings during the night, including Haniyeh’s office, the Hamas Interior Ministry and a police compound.

Taher al-Nono, a spokesman for the Hamas government, held a news conference near the rubble of the prime minister’s office and pledged: “We will declare victory from here.”

Hamas‘s armed wing claimed responsibility for Saturday’s rocket attack on Tel Aviv, the third against the city since Wednesday. It said it fired an Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of Gaza.

“Well that wasn’t such a big deal,” said one woman, who had watched the interception while clinging for protection to the trunk of a baby palm tree on a traffic island.

In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.

Among those killed in airstrikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding on motorcycles.

Israel’s operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel’s right to self-defense, along with appeals to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas, shunned by the West over its refusal to recognize Israel, says its cross-border attacks have come in response to Israeli strikes against Palestinian fighters in Gaza.

RESERVIST CALL-UP

At a late night session on Friday, Israeli cabinet ministers decided to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000, political sources said, in a signal Israel was edging closer to an invasion.

Around 16,000 reservists have already been called up.

Asked by reporters whether a ground operation was possible, Major-General Tal Russo, commander of the Israeli forces on the Gaza frontier, said: “Definitely.”

“We have a plan … it will take time. We need to have patience. It won’t be a day or two,” he added.

A possible move into the densely populated Gaza Strip and the risk of major casualties it brings would be a significant gamble for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, favorite to win a January national election.

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-09, killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

But the Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.

“Israel should understand that many things have changed and that lots of water has run in the Arab river,” Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdesslem said as he surveyed the wreckage from a bomb-blast site in central Gaza.

One major change has been the election of an Islamist government in Cairo that is allied with Hamas, potentially narrowing Israel’s manoeuvering room in confronting the Palestinian group. Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979.

“DE-ESCALATION”

Netanyahu spoke late on Friday with U.S. President Barack Obama for the second time since the offensive began, the prime minister’s office said in a statement.

“(Netanyahu) expressed his deep appreciation for the U.S. position that Israel has a right to defend itself and thanked him for American aid in purchasing Iron Dome batteries,” the statement added.

The two leaders have had a testy relationship and have been at odds over how to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

A White House official said on Saturday Obama called Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to discuss how the two countries could help bring an end to the Gaza conflict.

Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told reporters that Washington “wants the same thing as the Israelis want”, an end to rocket attacks from Gaza. He said the United States is emphasizing diplomacy and “de-escalation”.

In Berlin, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had spoken to Netanyahu and Egypt’s Mursi, stressing to the Israeli leader that Israel had a right to self-defense and that a ceasefire must be agreed as soon as possible to avoid more bloodshed.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt next week to push for an end to the fighting in Gaza, U.N. diplomats said on Friday.

The Israeli military said 492 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel since the operation began. Iron Dome intercepted another 245.

In Jerusalem, targeted by a Palestinian rocket on Friday for the first time in 42 years, there was little outward sign on the Jewish Sabbath that the attack had any impact on the usually placid pace of life in the holy city.

Some families in Gaza have abandoned their homes – some of them damaged and others situated near potential Israeli targets – and packed into the houses of friends and relatives.

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams and Douglas Hamilton in Tel Aviv, Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem, Jeff Mason aboard Air Force One, Writing by Jeffrey Heller; editing by Crispian Balmer)

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Samsung goes after HTC deal to undercut Apple-filing

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When Apple Inc and HTC Corp last week ended their worldwide legal battles with a 10-year patent licensing agreement, they declined to answer a critical question: whether all of Apple‘s patents were covered by the deal.

It’s an enormously important issue for the broader smartphone patent wars. If all the Apple patents are included -including the “user experience” patents that the company has previously insisted it would not license – it could undermine the iPhone makers efforts to permanently ban the sale of products that copy its technology.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which could face such a sales ban following a crushing jury verdict against it in August, now plans to ask a U.S. judge to force Apple to turn over a copy of the HTC agreement, according to a court filing on Friday.

Representatives for Apple and Samsung could not immediately be reached for comment.

Judges are reluctant to block the sale of products if the dispute can be resolved via a licensing agreement. To secure an injunction against Samsung, Apple must show the copying of its technology caused irreparable harm and that money, by itself, is an inadequate remedy.

Ron Laurie, managing director of Inflexion Point Strategy and a veteran IP lawyer, said he found it very unlikely that HTC would agree to a settlement that did not include all the patents.

If the deal did in fact include everything, Laurie and other legal experts said that would represent a very clear signal that Apple under CEO Tim Cook was taking a much different approach to patent issues than his predecessor, Steve Jobs.

Apple first sued HTC in March 2010, and has been litigating for more than two years against handset manufacturers who use Google’s Android operating system.

Apple co-founder Jobs promised to go “thermonuclear” on Android, and that threat has manifested in Apple’s repeated bids for court-imposed bans on the sale of its rivals’ phones.

Cook, on the other hand, has said he prefers to settle rather than litigate, if the terms are reasonable. But prior to this month, Apple showed little willingness to license its patents to an Android maker.

HOLY PATENTS

In August, a Northern California jury handed Apple a $ 1.05 billion verdict, finding that Samsung’s phones violated a series of Apple’s software and design patents.

Apple quickly asked U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh to impose a permanent sales ban on those Samsung phones, and a hearing is scheduled for next month in San Jose, California.

In a surprise announcement on Saturday, however, Apple and HTC announced a license agreement covering “current and future patents” at both companies. Specific terms are unknown, though analysts have speculated that HTC will pay Apple somewhere between $ 5 and $ 10 per phone.

During the Samsung trial, Apple IP chief Boris Teksler said the company is generally willing to license many of its patents – except for those that cover what he called Apple’s “unique user experience” like touchscreen functionality and design.

However, Teksler acknowledged that Apple has, on a few occasions, licensed those holy patents – most notably to Microsoft, which signed an anti-cloning agreement as part of the deal.

In opposing Apple’s injunction request last month, Samsung said Apple’s willingness to license at all shows money should be sufficient compensation, court documents show.

Apple has already licensed at least one of the prized patents in the Samsung case to both Nokia and IBM. That fact was confidential until late last year, when the court mistakenly released a ruling with details that should have been hidden from public view.

In a court filing last week, Apple argued that its Nokia, IBM and Microsoft deals shouldn’t stand in the way of an injunction. Microsoft’s license only covers Apple patents filed before 2002, and IBM signed several years before the iPhone launched, according to Apple.

“IBM’s agreement is a cross license with a party that does not market smartphones,” Apple wrote.

Apple’s seeming shift away from Jobs-style war, and toward licensing, may also reflect a realization that injunctions have become harder to obtain for a variety of reasons.

Colleen Chien, a professor at Santa Clara Law in Silicon Valley, said an appellate ruling last month that tossed Apple’s pretrial injunction against the Samsung Nexus phone raised the legal standard for everyone.

“The ability of technology companies to get injunctions on big products based on small inventions, unless the inventions drive consumer’s demand, has been whittled away significantly,” Chien said.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846.

(Reporting By Dan Levine and Poornima Gupta; Editing by Bernard Orr)

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Can NBC keep up its ratings swagger without NFL, “The Voice”?

NEW YORK (Reuters) – NBC is expected to wrap up its fall season as the No. 1 broadcast network in the key 18-49 advertising demographic for the first time in a decade.

The network’s catapult to first place from fourth in the ratings is the biggest surprise so far of the young TV season. The question is how long can its ratings momentum last.

The Comcast-owned network has seen a surge in the fall fueled by two shows that won’t be around by the end of December, its red-hot Sunday Night NFL telecast and the hugely popular singing competition “The Voice.”

The numbers are shining a positive light on Entertainment Chief Bob Greenblatt, in his second year since moving over from the Showtime cable network. In the first quarter of 2013, however, analysts and advertising buyers say holes in NBC‘s lineup can’t make up for the loss of its two top shows.

“I’m skeptical about whether their ratings are sustainable,” said Brad Adgate, who heads research for the advertising firm Horizon Media. “Once those shows go on hiatus or they are doing repeats, I’d be surprised if what they replace with them with will deliver those type of numbers.”

When the TV season started, NBC boosted its ratings by adding a second season of the “The Voice” in the fall, instead of airing it only during the spring, and showing it on Mondays and Tuesdays.

The show gave NBC ratings victories in the 18-49 demographic, the age group that advertisers seek, has consistently won its time slots while boosting shows like “Revolution” and “Go On” that followed it.

Total viewers increased from a year ago by 20 percent, to an average of 8.8 million per night, while rivals CBS, FOX and ABC are all down in total viewers.

NBC‘s ratings engines throttle back without “The Voice,” which goes off the air from Dec 17 until March 25. When it returns, it also faces an uncertain reception as new judges Shakira and Usher replace Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green.

On December 30, NBC will air its final Sunday night football game of the year, taking prime time’s top-rated show with it, Jeff Bader, NBC‘s president of program planning, strategy and research, said in an interview on Thursday.

NBC‘s ratings will weaken in January, he conceded. The January-to-March period won’t be “necessarily about winning” in the ratings but about getting one or two shows to stick with viewers, he said.

“I wish we had Sunday night football all year, but hopefully these other returning shows will keep us in the hunt,” Bader said.

UBS analyst John Janedis predicts that CBS and FOX will move past the Peacock network by the end of the TV season, and CBS’ Chief Executive Les Moonves vowed on a November 7 earnings call that his network will finish “on top” and “strong in every single one of the key demos.”

“The Voice” served as a launch pad for the hit drama “Revolution,” a post-apocalyptic thriller that airs on Mondays and is set 15 years after all the world’s electricity stopped functioning. But that show, like “The Voice,” is going on hiatus from November 26 to March 25.

Greenblatt has “to make sure that ‘Revolution’ stays strong, said Optimedia media buyer Maureen Bosetti. “I’m a little bit cautious to say he’s a huge success until he’s got more solid hits under his belt that he’s developed.”

NBC will air the weight-loss reality show “The Biggest Loser” in the place of “the Voice” on Mondays, followed by “Deception,” a one-hour soap opera about a murder in a wealthy family that replaces “Revolution.” On Tuesdays, a reality show called “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers” featuring senior citizens playing pranks will take “the Voice” slot.

Ad agency GroupM media buyer Shari Cohen is more optimistic about NBC‘s chances without “The Voice” and said she is impressed by the network’s comeback this season.

“The void will be felt, but there’s confidence enough in their strategy and other nights of the week where they have been gaining traction and things that will be coming back in 2013 like ‘Smash’,” Cohen said.

“Smash,” a lavishly produced and heavily promoted musical drama about a Broadway show starring Katharine McPhee and Debra Messing, finished as NBC‘s top drama in its first season in 18-49 age group and will return for its second season February 5.

The show is heavily championed by Greenblatt, the programming chief who came to Comcast in 2011 after it took control of NBC in a $ 30 billion deal. When he left the CBS-owned Showtime cable channel, it was in the midst of a phenomenal run of developing hit shows such as “Dexter,” “Weeds,” and “The L Word” for cable’s Showtime network.

Greenblatt’s programming performance has been mixed at NBC. He inherited the “The Voice,” and had the benefit of this summer’s NBC Olympic telecast, which enabled him to promote the fall lineup before the more than 30 million people who tuned into the London games each night.

That gave a boost to “Revolution, “Go On” and “The New Normal,” a sitcom from “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy, which were all ordered for full-seasons and are all highly rated new shows. But “Animal Practice,” another program that aired in a special preview after one Olympics telecast, was canceled after six episodes.

NBC is coming off a strong third quarter in which its revenue jumped 31.2 percent to $ 6.8 billion thanks Deto the London Olympics. Excluding the Olympics, its revenue increased 8.3 percent, the company said.

Amy Yong, a sell-side analyst for Macquarie bank, raised her estimates on Comcast in October, citing ratings growth at NBC as a contributing factors.

The NBC model for continued success resembles a strategy employed by Fox, which scheduled shows like “House” and “Bones” after the then-towering ratings champ “American Idol.”

Bader, the NBC scheduling executive, said his network will continue to use “The Voice”‘s momentum as best it can even as it heads toward its three-month break. After the December 17 finale, NBC will air a preview of a new comedy set in the White House called “1600 Penn.”

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker; Editing by Ronald Grover and Leslie Gevirtz)

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4th Grader Writes on Mom’s Cancer

A tear rolled down Veronica Marion-Rawlins‘s cheek when she discovered there weren’t ample resources that could help her explain her breast cancer diagnosis to her then four-year-old son. The single mom and her son, James “Trey” Rawlins III, searched everywhere – from local booksellers to online retailers – for reading materials that could help them better understand the journey they were about to embark on together. When they ended up with nothing,Trey decided to write a book himself.

Five years later, Trey, now age nine and a fourth-grader at Edgewood Magnet School in New Haven, Conn., is a published author, with help from a $ 1,000 donation from Howard University Hospital, in Washington, D.C., and his mom’s credit cards. “When Mommy Came Home” is targeted toward children ages four to seven. By word-of-mouth the book, available for $ 10 through his mother, became so popular among local schools, clinics and hospitals that it is now sold out. The mother-son team hopes that with donations, they will be able to order more books that can be distributed to the people and places that may need them most.

In his book Trey writes how his mom “would see Nurse Karen for her treatments … she’d sit in a big comfy chair … eat treats and snacks and sometimes do her nails.” Although he wasn’t able to accompany his mom around the hospital, “I waited until she came home” and the two would nap on the couch. Trey recounts helping his mom by doing “little jobs” like dusting or emptying out the trash. The book contains over 20 illustrations from Jean Marie Sanchez of Hamden, a children’s book writer and illustrator.

Having only ordered 100 initial copies, Marion-Rawlins said she did not expect the book to garner all the attention it has. Hospitals and clinics as far as Augusta, Ga., are now requesting copies. Although she admitted to “maxing out my credit card” to finance the book, Marion-Rawlins hopes that the book will get picked up by more publishing outlets.

“We’re not looking to make a profit,” Marion-Rawlins, currently an education consultant for the State Education Resource Center in Connecticut, said. “We want to donate them to hospitals, so when other moms are diagnosed, now they’ll have a tool that I didn’t have. So if they have a young child, they’ll know what to expect.”

Marion-Rawlins, whose son was in school when ABC News spoke with her, said both she and her son have had an amazing journey. Neither expected the outcome “to be so big.”

Although she is now happy to report, “I’m doing great,” Marion-Rawlins was diagnosed back in 2007. The former first-grade teacher said the first thing she asked the hospital social workers for was a children’s book.

“She came back with really technical medical pamphlets and I thought to myself, ‘No, this isn’t going to do it,’” Marion-Rawlins said. “I figured that if I could just show him in a book with pictures what Mommy was going to go through and that we’re going to be O.K., then it would be O.K.”

In “When Mommy Came Home,” the “adventures” between mother and son during the treatment help drive the book forward and show readers that the little moments are what helped them get through the ordeal.

“He had always wanted to wear a [beanie] that he saw his older cousins wearing, so when I lost my hair, we wore matching ones,” she said.

When her taste buds changed, Marion-Rawlins recommended her son “eat everything Mommy can’t eat anymore,” and after her treatment, when her body ached so much she couldn’t walk to her bedroom upstairs, she and Trey pretended to be in the wilderness and “camped out” in their living room.

But Marion-Rawlins said although the book is a team effort, her son really takes the spotlight for his proactive attitude that was initially triggered when more and more families began to share their stories, asking Trey to talk to other children about his experience. When the mother of Trey’s friends across the street was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, Trey was more than willing to talk to them about what he was going through.

Karen Underwood, aka Nurse Karen, told ABC News that she was “speechless” when she learned she was a character in the book. Underwood’s role was to administer Marion-Rawlins’ chemotherapy and “assess and take care of her.”

“I think this will definitely have a positive impact on children,” said Underwood, a registered nurse at Yale New Haven. “That population goes through a lot of stuff and many parents wonder what’s going to happen to their children.”

Trey’s main focus during this time was “being brave,” and Marion-Rawlins said she is “blown away” by her son’s care and compassion. The young author has been asked to speak to other children and parents in the community and Marion-Rawlins said instead of getting nervous like most other kids his age, he doesn’t shy away because he “knows it’s going to help other moms and children.”

Jennifer Quirk, library media specialist at Trey’s school, said although they do have children’s literature on breast cancer and other diseases, many of the material is non-fiction and “doesn’t talk about real people going through the experience.” Quirk said this will be the first book in the school’s library that chronicles a personal experience.

“It’s always a taboo subject, so having literature like this will help to make it something that parents can talk about with their kids,” Quirk said.

Andrea Seigerman, LCSW, of the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New-Haven, said there is still a great need for materials for “children of all ethnic groups and of all educational levels.” Seigerman worked closely with Marion-Rawlins as her social worker during her treatment at Yale.

“There is a real need for easily understandable, easily communicated information from parents – both mothers and fathers going through cancer treatment – to children,” Seigerman, who was with Marion-Rawlins since day one, said. “It touches on a universal need – the idea that a little boy or girl can look at a book and feel that they’re not the only one who’s going through this.”

“Parents want to protect and inform them, but many aren’t sure how to do that,” Seigerman said. “So the most important outcome of this book is that it will help other parents feel comfortable opening up about this topic with their children.”

But the mother-and-son duo’s journey doesn’t end here. Marion-Rawlins, who has a niece who wears a cochlear implant because of a hearing impairment, said they are currently discussing the possibilities of writing a second book about her to “provide awareness regarding that community.”

“[Trey] knows what it feels like to be different,” Marion-Rawlins said. “I think it’s so important to share with children what’s going on at a level they can understand.”

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Why Mommy Can’t Get Ahead

In political terms, it was a good year for American women. Female voters were a decisive factor in the presidential race, with 55 percent casting ballots for President Barack Obama, vs. 44 percent for Mitt Romney; the only year the spread was higher was in 1996, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. A record number of female candidates ran for national office—18 for the Senate, up from the 2010 high of 14, and 166 for the House of Representatives, vs. 141 in 2004—which means the 113th Congress will have at least 98 female members, the most ever, including a record 20 Senators. “We hope that this 20 percent will make a difference in the macaroni-and-cheese issues that we want to focus on, along with the macro issues,” Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) told the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 8.

Mikulski and her colleagues have reason to celebrate the female power surge, but those hard-won electoral victories should be kept in perspective. While the sweep of women into office is encouraging to anyone who believes that Washington is badly in need of fresh ideas, not to mention a political class that better reflects the population at large, there’s one area where it’s unlikely to make a difference, at least in the near future: the workplace.

For many working women, the most revealing moment of this political season came during the second presidential debate, on Oct. 16. A 24-year-old teacher named Katherine Fenton asked both candidates what they planned to do about the reality that women still earn, on average, 23 percent less than men. Obama cited the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first major piece of legislation he signed after taking office, which makes it easier for employees to sue employers for discrimination based on disparities in pay. Romney seemed dumbfounded, rambling about how as governor of Massachusetts he’d searched out qualified females to hire, flipping through “binders full of women” like a bachelor shopping for a mail-order bride.

The ridicule Romney earned for that exchange obscured the fact that neither man attempted to address how to close the pay gap now. This failure was stunning considering that women comprise 47 percent of the workforce and earn more college degrees than men. The number of dual-income households in which women are the primary breadwinner reached 29 percent in 2009, reflecting a radical upending of the traditional model. Women are an increasingly vital part of the workforce—yet, despite talk of the downfall of men, they still don’t come close to economic parity. Obama’s answer in particular highlights the widely held belief that there’s only so much Washington can do.

Illustration by Mark Todd

A mini-industry has sprung up around the question of why women don’t go as far, and earn less, than their male counterparts. But the answer is actually straightforward. After accounting for experience and education, as well as occupation—male-dominated fields tend to be higher-paying than female-dominant ones—the pay gap falls from 23 percent to about 9 percent, according to Cornell University labor economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn. Outright discrimination plays a part, but a larger proportion of the disparity can be attributed to the hit women take for absorbing most of the child-care duties that crop up at home, a burden one might call the “caregiver tax.”

Illustration by Mark Todd

The answer to Fenton’s question is thus only partly about discrimination (as Obama suggested) and has almost nothing to do with the failure of managers to identify qualified women (in Romney’s formulation). Instead, says Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University who’s researched gender and the labor market, “The problem she’s concerned about is almost entirely rooted in the fact that women take care of children a lot more than men.” (Women also shoulder more of the burden of caring for siblings, grandparents, and in-laws.) There are “differences in the ways in which men and women respond to competition, bargain, search for jobs, and so on,” says Goldin. Compared with the caregiver burden, however, “everything that I have seen and have done using the best data on the planet indicates that everything else is second order.”

These issues were barely mentioned during the presidential campaign. The U.S. remains one of the only industrialized nations not to guarantee mothers (or fathers, for that matter) some paid time off after the birth of a child. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 provides for 12 weeks of unpaid leave for pregnancy or other reasons, but it falls short on several fronts: It’s too brief (Germany, Canada, and many other countries offer up to 12 months of subsidized leave), and it excludes vast segments of the workforce employed by small companies that don’t qualify or who couldn’t afford to take it anyway.

Illustration by Mark Todd

When it comes to taking care of the kid after it’s born, the situation is no better: Most working parents must navigate an expensive landscape of day-care centers and nannies with few clues about the quality of what they’re paying for. “The investment that the United States makes in early childhood care and education pales by comparison to the investments being made by other countries,” writes Jane Waldfogel in “International Policies Toward Parental Leave and Child Care,” published by the Future of Children, a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and Princeton University.

More family-friendly public policies in these two areas would make a difference, but they only go so far. Reaching true economic and professional equality between the sexes will require a re-imagining of workplace culture—which continues to penalize women who need flexible schedules, even as it actively disincentivizes men from assuming more duties at home, lest they step off the career track. The attention generated by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and Yahoo!/ticker] Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer’s two-week maternity leave, reflect the broad desire for a change. “Employers have an increasing incentive to address work-family issues,” Blau says. “This is disproportionately important to women, but it’s also important to men.”

Much like the Republican Party, companies are facing changing demographics, and the sooner they embrace them, the stronger they’ll be. “I call this the business case for gender diversity,” says Iris Bohnet, academic dean and professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Bohnet mentions several studies, including one by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, showing that companies with more women on their boards perform better. Increasingly, women are better-equipped to perform essential jobs, so businesses need to adjust to their needs. “In many ways we have a mid-20th century workplace for a mid-21st century workforce,” Goldin says.

In some cases, change is forced upon a profession from the inside. Pediatric medicine, for instance, used to be a primarily male specialization, yet women now comprise 57 percent of pediatricians and 70 percent of pediatric residents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. And, Goldin points out, 35 percent to 40 percent of pediatricians work fewer than 35 hours per week, a drastic shift. “It happened because as a lot more women became pediatricians, a lot more shopped around for more predictable hours and more ability to have fewer and more flexible hours,” Goldin says. Pharmacy and veterinary medicine have shown similar trends.

At the other end of the earnings spectrum are nursing home workers, who tend to be paid by the hour. If one of those workers needs to miss an hour of work one day, she—“it’s almost always a she,” Goldin says—is often told not to bother coming in at all, losing a whole day’s pay. A group at Harvard is experimenting with ways to manage employee schedules that would allow greater flexibility. Instead of a fixed group of 25 workers, for example, a facility could hire 28, with more fluid scheduling. The arrangement could benefit the employees and give the nursing home a more stable workforce.

Katherine Fenton may not have received a satisfying answer to her question, but that doesn’t mean answers are out of reach. Fixing the pay gap will demand more progressive public policies as well as businesses to modernize their cultures to accommodate both halves of the workforce. This isn’t about being generous; it’s self-interest. We shouldn’t need a president to tell us that.

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Israel moves on reservists after rockets target cities

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli ministers were on Friday asked to endorse the call-up of up to 75,000 reservists after Palestinian militants nearly hit Jerusalem with a rocket for the first time in decades and fired at Tel Aviv for a second day.

The rocket attacks were a challenge to Israel‘s Gaza offensive and came just hours after Egypt‘s prime minister, denouncing what he described as Israeli aggression, visited the enclave and said Cairo was prepared to mediate.

Israel’s armed forces announced that a highway leading to the Gaza Strip and two roads bordering the enclave would be off-limits to civilian traffic until further notice.

Tanks and self-propelled guns were seen near the border area on Friday, and the military said it had already called 16,000 reservists to active duty.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened senior cabinet ministers in Tel Aviv after the rockets struck to decide on widening the Gaza campaign.

Political sources said ministers were asked to approve the mobilization of up to 75,000 reservists, in what could be preparation for a possible ground operation.

No decision was immediately announced and some commentators speculated in the Israeli media the move could be psychological warfare against Gaza’s Hamas rulers. A quota of 30,000 reservists had been set earlier.

Israel began bombing Gaza on Wednesday with an attack that killed the Hamas military chief. It says its campaign is in response to Hamas missiles fired on its territory. Hamas stepped up rocket attacks in response.

Israeli police said a rocket fired from Gaza landed in the Jerusalem area, outside the city, on Friday.

It was the first Palestinian rocket since 1970 to reach the vicinity of the holy city, which Israel claims as its capital, and was likely to spur an escalation in its three-day old air war against militants in Gaza.

Rockets nearly hit Tel Aviv on Thursday for the first time since Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fired them during the 1991 Gulf War. An air raid siren rang out on Friday when the commercial centre was targeted again. Motorists crouched next to cars, many with their hands protecting their heads, while pedestrians scurried for cover in building stairwells.

The Jerusalem and Tel Aviv strikes have so far caused no casualties or damage, but could be political poison for Netanyahu, a conservative favored to win re-election in January on the strength of his ability to guarantee security.

“The Israel Defence Forces will continue to hit Hamas hard and are prepared to broaden the action inside Gaza,” Netanyahu said before the rocket attacks on the two cities.

Asked about Israel massing forces for a possible Gaza invasion, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: “The Israelis should be aware of the grave results of such a raid and they should bring their body bags.”

Officials in Gaza said 28 Palestinians had been killed in the enclave since Israel began the air offensive with the declared aim of stemming surges of rocket strikes that have disrupted life in southern Israeli towns.

The Palestinian dead include 12 militants and 16 civilians, among them eight children and a pregnant woman. Three Israelis were killed by a rocket on Thursday. A Hamas source said the Israeli air force launched an attack on the house of Hamas’s commander for southern Gaza which resulted in the death of two civilians, one a child.

SOLIDARITY VISIT

A solidarity visit to Gaza by Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil, whose Islamist government is allied with Hamas but also party to a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, had appeared to open a tiny window to emergency peace diplomacy.

Kandil said: “Egypt will spare no effort … to stop the aggression and to achieve a truce.”

But a three-hour truce that Israel declared for the duration of Kandil’s visit never took hold. Israel said 66 rockets launched from the Gaza Strip hit its territory on Friday and a further 99 were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

Israel denied Palestinian assertions that its aircraft struck while Kandil was in the enclave.

Israel Radio’s military affairs correspondent said the army’s Homefront Command had told municipal officials to make civil defence preparations for the possibility that fighting could drag on for seven weeks. An Israeli military spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.

The Gaza conflagration has stoked the flames of a Middle East already ablaze with two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to leap across borders.

It is the biggest test yet for Egypt’s new President Mohamed Mursi, a veteran Islamist politician from the Muslim Brotherhood who was elected this year after last year’s protests ousted military autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are spiritual mentors of Hamas, yet Mursi has also pledged to respect Cairo’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, seen in the West as the cornerstone of regional security. Egypt and Israel both receive billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to underwrite their treaty.

Mursi has vocally denounced the Israeli military action while promoting Egypt as a mediator, a mission that his prime minister’s visit was intended to further.

A Palestinian official close to Egypt’s mediators told Reuters Kandil’s visit “was the beginning of a process to explore the possibility of reaching a truce. It is early to speak of any details or of how things will evolve”.

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-2009, killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

Tunisia’s foreign minister was due to visit Gaza on Saturday “to provide all political support for Gaza” the spokesman for the Tunisian president, Moncef Marzouki, said in a statement.

The United States asked countries that have contact with Hamas to urge the Islamist movement to stop its rocket attacks.

Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist. By contrast, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules in the nearby West Bank, does recognize Israel, but peace talks between the two sides have been frozen since 2010.

Abbas’s supporters say they will push ahead with a plan to have Palestine declared an “observer state” rather than a mere “entity” at the United Nations later this month.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell, Jeffrey Heller and Crispian Balmer in Jerusalem; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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GameStop profit beats forecast; cautiously eyes holiday

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – GameStop Corp, the world’s largest retailer of videogame products, reported a stronger-than-expected profit on Thursday but lowered its sales forecast for this year due to uncertainty around the holiday shopping season as the video game market struggles.

Grapevine, Texas-based GameStop forecast same-store sales in 2012 would drop 6 percent to 9 percent, compared with a 2 to 10 percent decline projected previously.

“We’ve continued to find new ways to drive revenues and margins in our stores and that’s enabled us to hold on to some earnings in these difficult times,” Chief Financial Officer Rob Lloyd said in an interview.

“We’re still a little bit cautious in that it’s a difficult environment in which to forecast because the industry has been down,” Lloyd said. “And we’ve got uncertainty surrounding what the supply of the (Nintendo)Wii U is going to be.”

Nintendo Co Ltd is gearing up to launch its Wii U video game console on November 18. It is the first new home console device to be sold by a major gaming company in more than six years.

GameStop hopes the start of a new console cycle with the Wii U launch and just-released high quality games like Microsoft Corp’s “Halo 4″ and Activision Blizzard’s “Call of Duty: Black Ops II” will boost hardware and software sales this holiday season.

GameStop’s shares rose 4.25 percent to $ 24.48 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said investors seem more comfortable now with the company’s recent efforts to drive profitability.

In the last two years, the company has been tackling decelerating video game sales in a tough market by diversifying its revenue sources, selling electronics like tablets, digital video games and used games.

The games retailer said it had repurchased stock worth $ 76.8 million in the third quarter and announced that its board had approved a new $ 500 million share buy-back plan to replace its existing $ 242 million repurchase plan. It also announced a quarterly dividend of 25 cents, same as last quarter.

The company reported adjusted net earnings per share of 38 cents in the third quarter, beating analysts’ expectations of 32 cents.

“Earnings per share was quite impressive, driven by gross margins being strong and cost control,” Sterne Agee’s Bhatia said.

GameStop said it expects comparable store sales to range between down 7 percent and up 1 percent in the fourth quarter. It forecast earnings per share between $ 2.07 to $ 2.27 for the period.

Sales of traditional videogame products such as consoles have been pressured globally by lower-priced online offerings and gamers spending more time on tablet computers and cell phones.

Total U.S. sales of videogame software in October dropped 25 percent from a year ago, following a similar trend throughout the third quarter, according to a report by market research firm NPD.

GameStop said sales fell 8.9 percent to $ 1.77 billion. Analysts were expecting sales of $ 1.79 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Adjusted earnings were $ 47.2 million, compared with $ 53.9 million a year ago. The company maintained its previously announced full-year earnings outlook of between $ 3.10 per share to $ 3.30 per share.

(Reporting by Malathi Nayak; editing by John Wallace, Maureen Bavdek, David Gregorio and Dan Grebler)

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ABC Adapting Disney Theme-Park Ride for “Big Thunder Mountain” Pilot

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – ABC found ratings success by adapting Disney‘s finest fairy tales into the one-hour drama series “Once Upon a Time,” so it’s not surprising that the network has turned to a theme-park ride from its parent company for inspiration as well.

Popular roller coaster Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is being adapted for a television pilot by the Disney-owned network, an individual with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap.

Chris Morgan (“Wanted,” “Fast Five”) will co-write the story with “Ice Age: Continental Drift’s” Jason Fuchs, who will write the teleplay. ABC has ordered a script from ABC Studios, the individual said.

No word on what the show will have in common with the ride, but if it sticks with the theme presented to visitors at parks in California, Florida, Paris and Tokyo, it should have something to do with a mining town being destroyed by a natural disaster after settlers desecrate sacred Native American land.

Two other film projects have been developed based on Disney rides, “Pirates of the Caribbean” and 2003′s not-equally-successful “The Haunted Mansion.”

Morgan is represented by ICM Partners and McKuin Frankel, while Fuchs is repped by WME and Brookside and Bloom Hergott.

The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news on “Big Thunder Mountain.”

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People overestimate benefits of prevention

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Patients asked to estimate how many lives would be saved through cancer screening or how many hip fractures can be prevented with bone-building medication mostly overestimate the benefits of these preventive measures, according to a survey of New Zealanders.

Annette O’Connor of the University of Ottawa, who studies how patients weigh risk and make decisions, said she would expect that people would overvalue any given prevention effort.

“Most people would overestimate because they’re told about their benefits, but with no numbers…so why would you think that it’s going to be really low?” said O’Connor, who was not involved in the new study.

Doctors, nurses and others who communicate health information often don’t detail how much a given test or drug can help, but only say that people ought to have it, O’Connor told Reuters Health.

“I think it’s led to more people taking part in screening or availing themselves of preventive medication than would have been the case if they were presented the information in more meaningful terms,” said Dr. Ben Hudson, the new study’s lead author and a professor at the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“I would also be concerned that it’s led to people having over-heightened expectations of what these things can achieve, and that may lead to disappointment when the inevitable breast cancer happens despite screening,” he added.

Hudson said that in talking with his patients about screening, he found they were surprised by how small the benefits were.

To get a broader sense of patients’ expectations for preventive measures, Hudson and his colleagues asked 354 people about the benefits of breast cancer screening with mammography, bowel cancer screening with stool testing, taking antihypertension medication and taking bone-strengthening medication.

Specifically, participants were asked to imagine scenarios in which 5,000 people between ages 50 and 70 undergo one of these preventive interventions for 10 years, then asked how many “events” the participants thought would be avoided as a result of the measure.

For three of the four interventions in the survey, the event to be avoided was death and in the case of bone drugs, it was hip fracture.

For breast cancer screening, only seven percent of the participants answered in the correct range of one to five lives being saved with screening, whereas 90 percent overestimated how many lives would be saved. Fully a third thought that 1,000 deaths would be averted.

The numbers were similar for bowel cancer screening, which is thought to save five to 10 lives for every 5,000 people tested, Hudson’s group reports in the Annals of Family Medicine.

Eighty-two percent of participants overestimated the number of fractures prevented by bone-strengthening medication, which in reality is about 50 for every 5,000 patients given the drug.

And 69 percent of participants reported that 500 or more lives would be saved if 5,000 people took blood pressure medication, when the correct range should have been 50 to 100.

“It’s probably unreasonable to expect people to make an accurate guess at the absolute number (of lives saved or fractures prevented), but what we found was a consistent trend toward higher levels,” Hudson told Reuters Health.

“I don’t think most patients are likely to have access to good numerical data presented in a simple and informative way. I think that’s part of the problem here,” he said.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issues screening recommendations and other guidelines for disease prevention, which doctors, nurses and public health groups often consult when counseling patients.

A survey of U.S. physicians found that most of them don’t fully grasp what the numbers mean when it comes to cancer screening (see Reuters Health story of March 5, 2012).

O’Connor said that when health care professionals repeat these guidelines to patients, they often don’t include the numbers when talking about benefits or they only refer to something called the “relative risk.”

The relative risk describes the change in a person’s chances of developing a disease, but it does not give any sense of how much risk that person had to begin with.

For example, a “50 percent reduction in risk” may be less significant than it sounds if a person’s absolute risk for a condition – how likely they are to develop it at some point in life – was originally five percent, and drops to 2.5 percent.

“Professionals and people who provide health information need to know absolute benefits,” O’Connor said.

The relative risk of dying from breast cancer is 17 percent lower among a population of women aged 50 to 69 who get screened, compared to women who do not get screened, for instance.

But in absolute terms, that means that instead of 23 in 100,000 women dying of breast cancer, screening would reduce that number to 19 in 100,000 women.

Hudson said that one of the potential problems that can arise when people overvalue a test is that if recommendations are scaled back because of insufficient benefits, people get upset.

In 2009, for instance, the USPSTF changed its guidelines for regular mammograms from beginning at age 40 to beginning at 50, because the number of lives saved through screening during that extra decade of life was too small compared to the potential harms from the screening itself and follow-up procedures.

A survey of women at the time found that most of them considered the new guidelines to be “unsafe,” at least in part because they feared that insurers would no longer cover screening for women in their 40s who wanted it.

“The other thing that happens when you have an established screening program for which people have heightened expectations, it becomes very politically difficult to make any changes insofar as recommending reduced access, even when the evidence is pretty convincing that the outcomes are better,” said Hudson.

Hudson advocated for better informing patients of the benefits and harms of any preventive intervention.

“I have a feeling this would all be easier if we could present (patients) with this information, trust them with their decisions and support them in doing so,” he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/XINd5u Annals of Family Medicine, November/December 2012.

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Wal-Mart 3Q profit up but sees sales shortfall

NEW YORK (AP) — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. reported a 9 percent increase in net income for the third quarter, but revenue for the world’s largest retailer fell below Wall Street forecasts as its low-income shoppers continue to grapple with an uncertain economy.

The discounter issued a fourth-quarter profit outlook that fell short of Wall Street expectations, and the company’s stock price slid more than 3 percent.

Wal-Mart is considered an economic bellwether because the retailer accounts for nearly 10 percent of nonautomotive retail spending in the U.S. The company’s latest results show that many low-income Americans — it’s estimated that the typical Wal-Mart customer has an average household income of between $ 30,000 and $ 60,000, rents their homes and doesn’t own stock — continue to struggle even as the housing and stock markets are improving.

The disappointing revenue comes as Wal-Mart, like other retailers, is preparing for the busy winter holiday shopping season in the U.S. next week. The period, which runs roughly from November throughout December, is a time when stores can make up to 40 percent of their annual revenue. Wal-Mart has said that it plans to offer deeper discounts and a broader assortment of merchandise during this year’s season to draw in shoppers.

“Macroeconomic conditions continue to pressure our customers,” said Charles Holley, Wal-Mart’s chief financial officer. “The holiday season is predicted to be very competitive but we are well prepared to deliver on the value and low prices our customers expect.”

The disappointing revenue results come a year after Wal-Mart’s U.S. namesake business turned a corner by reemphasizing low prices and restocking stores with thousands of basic items that it had gotten rid of in an overzealous bid to reduce clutter.

During the third quarter of last year, the division reversed nine straight quarters of declines in revenue at stores opened at least a year, which is considered a key measure of a retailer’s health. The U.S. namesake business has recorded five consecutive quarters of gains since the division rebounded, including a 1.5 percent increase in the third quarter.

But the third-quarter gain is just shy of the 1.8 percent increase analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting. It’s also a slowdown in growth from the 2.2 percent gain the business posted in the second quarter and the 2.6 percent increase it had in the first quarter.

Analysts say that Wal-Mart’s previous results had benefited from the increase in prices shoppers were paying for groceries due to inflation for some items, a trend that is now subsiding. They also say that Wal-Mart is facing tougher revenue comparisons from a year ago when its business first began to rebound.

Ken Perkins, president of Retail Metrics, a research company, said Wal-Mart’s revenue is headed in the right direction. But he cautioned that the company will need to continue to keep prices low in order to compete with rivals that have stepped up discounting.

“Overall, it’s a relatively good report,” he said. “But it shows that its consumer is still struggling.”

In the third quarter, Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart earned $ 3.63 billion, or $ 1.08 per share, in the quarter ended Oct. 31. That compares with $ 3.33 billion, or 96 cents per share, in the year-ago period.

Net revenue, excluding Sam’s Club membership fees, rose 3.4 percent to $ 113.2 million. Excluding the currency impact, net revenue would have been $ 114.9 million. Analysts were expecting $ 1.07 per share on net revenue of $ 114 billion.

Nearly all areas, including food and clothing, registered gains. However, the company’s entertainment category, which includes gaming, suffered a decline, dragged down by price deflation. Part of the weakness is also due to the company’s layaway business, which winds up deferring sales to the fourth quarter.

For the entire U.S. business, sales at stores opened at least a year rose 1.7 percent, below the 2.1 percent Wall Street estimate. At Sam’s Club, the figure was up 2.7 percent, below the 3.8 percent increase Wall Street expected and the 4.2 percent gain it posted in the second quarter.

The company said its business members at Sam’s Clubs are being hurt by the economic downturn, and are switching to less-expensive chicken from beef. To boost sales, Sam’s Club is increasing its offering of rotisserie chicken, and has reduced prices in several varieties of apples and beauty products.

“Our business members continue to experience economic pressure and uncertainty,” said Rosalind Brewer, president of Sam’s Clubs.

For the full year, Wal-Mart now said it expects earnings per share to be between $ 4.88 per share and $ 4.93 per share. It originally expected earnings per share of $ 4.83 to $ 4.93. For the fourth quarter, it forecasts earnings per share to be $ 1.53 per share and $ 1.58 per share. Analysts had expected $ 1.59 per share.

Separately, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Wal-Mart said Thursday that it was looking into potential violations related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Brazil, China and India. This comes after Wal-Mart initially began investigating its Mexico operations following report that surfaced in April that the retailer allegedly failed to notify law enforcement when company officials authorized millions of dollars in bribes in Mexico to speed building permits and gain other favors. The company continues to work with government officials in the U.S. and Mexico on that investigation.

On Thursday, Wal-Mart’s stock fell $ 2.61 to close at $ 68.70. Over the past 52 weeks, Wal-Mart stock has been trading between $ 56.26 and $ 77.60.

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France urges Mali to step up talks with rebels

PARIS (AP) — France‘s president called Thursday for stepped-up talks between Mali’s government and any leaders from its breakaway north “who reject terrorism,” even as African nations geared up for a possible military operation against Islamic extremists there.

President Francois Hollande‘s comments suggested a growing openness to dialogue with the extremists, but he remained committed to supporting the military planning effort.

Northern Mali fell to Islamic extremists in April, after coup leaders toppled the government in Bamako, Mali‘s capital. Fearing that northern Mali could become the latest hotbed of terrorism, France has been a driving force in international efforts to bolster Mali’s army to drive the Islamists from power.

Hollande spoke with interim Mali President Dioncounda Traore by phone on Thursday, partly to detail European efforts to help strengthen Mali’s army.

In recent days, representatives from the most moderate of three al-Qaida-linked groups that control northern Mali have been meeting with Burkina Faso‘s president, appointed as a mediator.

“France reiterates its wish that political dialogue will intensify between Malian authorities and representatives of northern populations who reject terrorism,” Hollande’s office said in a statement. “The acceleration of this dialogue must accompany the progress in African military-planning efforts.”

Earlier this week, the African Union approved a plan that calls for 3,300 African troops to be deployed in order to win back Mali’s north. European countries including France and Germany have expressed a willingness to provide military trainers and logistics support, but have stopped short of committing combat troops.

France, like many European countries, fears that the arid, northern Sahel region of Mali could become a breeding ground for terrorism, where al-Qaida and its allies could plot hostage-takings and attacks in Europe or beyond.

France has millions of people whose families hail from former French colonies in north and west Africa. Authorities have long been concerned that French-born militants could travel abroad for terrorism training and return home later to possibly carry out attacks.

French authorities are already investigating two French citizens who were arrested in Mali and neighboring Niger and are suspected of seeking to join up with the al-Qaida-linked extremists, a judicial official told The Associated Press.

Ibrahim Ouattara, a 24-year-old native of the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers who has dual French and Malian nationality, was arrested inside Mali this month and remains in custody there, the official said.

Separately, a 27-year-old Frenchman was arrested in August in Niger and has since been handed over to authorities in France, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss terrorism cases publicly.

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NASCAR’s Keselowski can’t tweet in car anymore

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Brad Keselowski became a social media darling after hopping on Twitter during a lengthy delay in the Daytona 500.

Keselowski was the center of attention, and NASCAR seemed trendy and hip — a description its executives surely adored.

Turns out, tweeting from the car isn’t cool with NASCAR.

Keselowski was fined $ 25,000 on Monday for tweeting during the red flag at Phoenix International Raceway. The punishment was confusing to fans who vented on Twitter, of course, wondering why Keselowski was punished for Sunday’s tweets when he was celebrated by NASCAR for doing the exact same thing in February’s season-opening race.

Some alleged the Sprint Cup Series points leader was actually being disciplined for his profanity-laced outburst after Sunday’s crash- and fight-marred race.

NASCAR spokesman Kerry Tharp on Tuesday dismissed the conspiracy theories, and said drivers had been told after the Daytona 500 that electronic devices — including cellphones — could not be carried inside the race cars going forward.

“Brad’s tweeting at the Daytona 500 was really our first introduction to the magnitude of the social media phenomenon at the race track, especially how we saw it unfold that evening,” Tharp said. “We encourage our drivers to participate in social media. We feel we have the most liberal social media policy in all of sports, and the access we provide is the best in all of sports.

“But we also have rules that pertain to competition that need to be enforced and abided by. Once the 500 took place, and in the days and weeks following the 500, NASCAR communicated to the drivers and teams that while social media was encouraged and we promoted it, the language in the rule book was clear and that drivers couldn’t carry onboard their cars electronic devices, like a phone.”

Keselowski, who takes a 20-point lead over Jimmie Johnson into Sunday’s season finale in his quest to win his first Sprint Cup Series title, has not commented on his penalty.

But with the championship on the line, his crew chief indicated Tuesday he’ll be doing his best to keep the phone out of the No. 2 Dodge this weekend.

“Never even crossed my mind, to be honest with you,” Paul Wolfe said. “We get so involved in worrying about how to make the race car go around the track that, obviously, Brad’s cellphone is not on my mind a whole lot. I’ll definitely remind him this weekend.”

The Daytona 500 was stopped for nearly two hours when Juan Pablo Montoya crashed into a jet dryer that was cleaning the track during a caution period. The crash caused a fuel explosion, and Keselowski used his phone to tweet pictures, answer questions and give updates on the cleanup during the delay.

The race, which had been rained out for the first time in 54 runnings, was being aired on Monday night in prime time for the first time in history and Keselowski’s tweeting drew worldwide headlines.

Afterward, NASCAR specifically said Keselowski did not violate a rule barring onboard electronic devices and would not be penalized.

“Nothing we’ve seen from Brad violates any current rules pertaining to the use of social media during races,” NASCAR said the day after the race. “We encourage our drivers to use social media to express themselves as long as they do so without risking their safety or that of others.”

NASCAR did not issue a technical bulletin to clarify phones could no longer be inside cars, and the clarification to drivers was apparently done quietly. In fact, Keselowski tweeted from Victory Lane at Bristol in March, and from inside his car parked on pit road during a rain delay at Richmond in September. It’s possible someone could have handed him his phone both times.

A year ago, the outspoken Penske Racing driver was fined $ 25,000 headed into the finale for criticizing electronic fuel injection. At the time, NASCAR had been privately punishing drivers for making disparaging remarks about the series, but word of Keselowski’s fine leaked and forced NASCAR to change its policy during the offseason.

Still, many fans were convinced this week’s fine against Keselowski was actually for his post-race comments about the aggressive racing at Phoenix.

He’d been criticized by several drivers for racing Johnson hard over a pair of late restarts at Texas a week earlier, and felt his aggressive driving paled in comparison to Jeff Gordon intentionally wrecking Clint Bowyer with two laps to go on Sunday. Gordon’s retaliation also collected Joey Logano and Aric Almirola, and forced Keselowski to weave his way around the accident.

“It just drives me absolutely crazy that I get lambasted for racing somebody hard without there even being a wreck and then you see stuff like this … from the same people that criticized me,” he said. “It’s OK to just take somebody out. But you race somebody hard, put a fender on somebody and try to go for the win, and you’re an absolute villain. We can just go out and retaliate against each other and come back in and smile about it, and it’s fine. That’s not what this sport needs. It needs hard racing, it needs people that go for broke, try to win races and put it all out there on the line. Not a bunch of people that have anger issues.”

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Scientists identify new risk gene for Alzheimer’s

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Two international teams of scientists have identified a rare mutation in a gene linked with inflammation that significantly increases the risk for the most common form of Alzheimer’s disease, the first such discovery in at least a decade.

The findings, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, offer new insights into the underpinnings of Alzheimer’s, a deadly, brain-wasting disease that robs people of their memories, their independence and their lives.

In separate studies, teams led by privately held deCode Genetics and John Hardy of University College London found that people with a mutation in a gene called TREM2 were four times as likely to have Alzheimer’s as people who did not have the gene.

“It quadruples the risk of Alzheimer’s,” said Dr. Kari Stefansson of Reykjavik-based deCode in a telephone interview.

The level of risk compares with ApoE4, the best-known genetic cause of late-onset Alzheimer’s, the form of the disease that occurs in older adults.

But this new gene variant is 10 times more rare than ApoE4, which is present in about 40 percent of people with late-onset Alzheimer’s.

Rare or not, scientists say the discovery represents a big breakthrough for Alzheimer’s research.

“This is one of the most common, most devastating illnesses in humans and we still don’t have a very good understanding of what causes the disease,” said Dr. Allan Levey, director of the Emory Alzheimer’s Disease Center of Excellence in Atlanta, which helped confirm the deCode findings.

“In my mind, this is very important. It gives us another important clue as to one of the biological factors that contribute to causing the disease,” he said.

Despite numerous costly attempts, drug companies have been stymied in their efforts to develop drugs that can alter the steady course of Alzheimer’s, which affects more than 5 million Americans and costs the United States more than $ 170 billion annually to treat.

Current research efforts have focused on removing sticky clumps of a protein called beta amyloid that accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. But several drugs that have been developed to remove these proteins have failed to produce a significant improvement in patients with mild to moderate forms of dementia.

With the new finding, researchers say the focus will turn on the role of inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease.

INFLAMMATORY RESPONSE

TREM2 is a gene that affects a protein expressed on the surface of cells in various tissues that “clean up garbage,” Stefansson said. These cells, called microglia, are often associated with inflammatory response.

A genetic mutation that alters the function of these housekeeping cells could affect how well the brain deals with an excess of toxic proteins from beta amyloid, Stefansson and others said.

And that suggests that even though TREM2 is rare, the way it works in the brain may be important for brain health.

“It is certainly plausible that TREM2 is involved in all of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Andrew Singleton of the National Institute on Aging, who worked on the paper with Hardy and colleagues at University College London.

“I think it may be very generalizable,” Singleton said.

For their study, Hardy and colleagues used a number of gene sequencing techniques to study 988 people with Alzheimer’s disease and 1,004 healthy volunteers.

The team also tested brain tissues from deceased Alzheimer’s patients, and they studied the expression of the TREM2 gene in genetically engineered mice.

For the deCODE study, researchers sequenced the genomes of 2,261 Icelanders and identified variations likely to affect protein function. Then, they looked specifically for these variants in people with Alzheimer’s and those with healthy brains, and found those with the TREM2 variant had a significantly higher risk.

To make sure the gene was not specific to Iceland, they replicated their findings in populations at Emory University in the United States, as well as groups in Norway, the Netherlands and Germany.

“We’ve essentially found exactly the same thing,” said Singleton of the NIA, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. “In a way which you don’t often see in science, the two studies point in the same direction.

In July, a team at deCODE discovered a rare mutation in a gene called APP that protects against Alzheimer’s.

“It is a complex disease,” Stefansson said. “I’m not surprised to see there are many ways to bring about this deterioration in cognitive function.”

Levey said while the TREM2 mutation is rare, it is likely changing the function of brain cells.

“It helps identify the microglial cells as an important possible (drug) target,” he said.

Dr. Ralph Nixon, director of the New York University Center of Excellence on Brain Aging and a scientific adviser to the Alzheimer’s Association, said the findings suggest there are likely many more genes that increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

“It’s a good illustration that we need to intensify this type of research and identify what these genes are doing so we can finally translate it into therapy,” he said.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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