Pope's sudden resignation sends shockwaves through Church

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict stunned the Roman Catholic Church on Monday when he announced he would stand down, the first pope to do so in 700 years, saying he no longer had the mental and physical strength to carry on.

Church officials tried to relay a climate of calm confidence in the running of a 2,000-year-old institution, but the decision could lead to uncertainty in a Church already besieged by scandal for covering up sexual abuse of children by priests.

The soft-spoken German, who always maintained that he never wanted to be pope, was an uncompromising conservative on social and theological issues, fighting what he regarded as the increasing secularization of society.

It remains to be seen whether his successor will continue such battles or do more to bend with the times.

Despite his firm opposition to tolerance of homosexual acts, his eight year reign saw gay marriage accepted in many countries. He has staunchly resisted allowing women to be ordained as priests, and opposed embryonic stem cell research, although he retreated slightly from the position that condoms could never be used to fight AIDS.

He repeatedly apologized for the Church's failure to root out child abuse by priests, but critics said he did too little and the efforts failed to stop a rapid decline in Church attendance in the West, especially in his native Europe.

In addition to child sexual abuse crises, his papacy saw the Church rocked by Muslim anger after he compared Islam to violence. Jews were upset over rehabilitation of a Holocaust denier. During a scandal over the Church's business dealings, his butler was accused of leaking his private papers.

In an announcement read to cardinals in Latin, the universal language of the Church, the 85-year-old said: "Well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of St Peter ...

"As from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours (1900 GMT) the See of Rome, the See of St. Peter will be vacant and a conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is."

POPE DOESN'T FEAR SCHISM

Benedict is expected to go into isolation for at least a while after his resignation. Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Benedict did not intend to influence the decision of the cardinals in a secret conclave to elect a successor.

A new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics could be elected as soon as Palm Sunday, on March 24, and be ready to take over by Easter a week later, Lombardi said.

Several popes in the past, including Benedict's predecessor John Paul, have refrained from stepping down over their health, because of the division that could be caused by having an "ex-pope" and a reigning pope alive at the same time.

Lombardi said the pope did not fear a possible "schism", with Catholics owing allegiances to a past and present pope in case of differences on Church teachings.

He indicated the complex machinery of the process to elect a new pope would move quickly because the Vatican would not have to wait until after the elaborate funeral services for a pope.

It is not clear if Benedict will have a public life after he resigns. Lombardi said Benedict would first go to the papal summer residence south of Rome and then move into a cloistered convent inside the Vatican walls.

The resignation means that cardinals from around the world will begin arriving in Rome in March and after preliminary meetings, lock themselves in a secret conclave and elect the new pope from among themselves in votes in the Sistine Chapel.

There has been growing pressure on the Church for it to choose a pope from the developing world to better reflect where most Catholics live and where the Church is growing.

"It could be time for a black pope, or a yellow one, or a red one, or a Latin American," said Guatemala's Archbishop Oscar Julio Vian Morales.

The cardinals may also want a younger man. John Paul was 58 when he was elected in 1978. Benedict was 20 years older.

"We have had two intellectuals in a row, two academics, perhaps it is time for a diplomat," said Father Tom Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. "Rather than electing the smartest man in the room, they should elect the man who will listen to all the other smart people in the Church."

Liberals have already begun calling for a pope that would be more open to reform.

"The current system remains an 'old boy's club' and does not allow for women's voices to participate in the decision of the next leader of our Church," said the Women's Ordination Conference, a group that wants women to be able to be priests.

"GREAT COURAGE"

The last pope to resign willingly was Celestine V in 1294 after reigning for only five months, his resignation was known as "the great refusal" and was condemned by the poet Dante in the "Divine Comedy". Gregory XII reluctantly abdicated in 1415 to end a dispute with a rival claimant to the papacy.

Lombardi said Benedict's stepping aside showed "great courage". He ruled out any specific illness or depression and said the decision was made in the last few months "without outside pressure". But the decision was not without controversy.

"This is disconcerting, he is leaving his flock," said Alessandra Mussolini, a parliamentarian who is granddaughter of Italy's wartime dictator. "The pope is not any man. He is the vicar of Christ. He should stay on to the end, go ahead and bear his cross to the end. This is a huge sign of world destabilization that will weaken the Church."

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, secretary to the late Pope John Paul, said the former pope had stayed on despite failing health for the last decade of his life as he believed "you cannot come down from the cross."

While the pope had slowed down recently - he started using a cane and a wheeled platform to take him up the long aisle in St Peter's Square - he had given no hint recently that he was considering such a dramatic decision.

Elected in 2005 to succeed the enormously popular John Paul, Benedict never appeared to feel comfortable in the job.

"MIND AND BODY"

In his announcement, the pope told the cardinals that in order to govern "... both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me."

Before he was elected pope, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was known as "God's rottweiler" for his stern stand on theological issues. After a few months, he showed a milder side but he never drew the kind of adulation that had marked the 27-year papacy of his predecessor John Paul.

U.S. President Barack Obama extended prayers to Benedict and best wishes to those who would choose his successor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the pope's decision must be respected if he feels he is too weak to carry out his duties. British Prime Minister David Cameron said: "He will be missed as a spiritual leader to millions."

The Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the worldwide Anglican communion, said he had learned of the pope's decision with a heavy heart but complete understanding.

CHEERS AND SCANDAL

Elected to the papacy on April 19, 2005, Benedict ruled over a slower-paced, more cerebral and less impulsive Vatican.

But while conservatives cheered him for trying to reaffirm traditional Catholic identity, his critics accused him of turning back the clock on reforms by nearly half a century and hurting dialogue with Muslims, Jews and other Christians.

After appearing uncomfortable in the limelight at the start, he began feeling at home with his new job and showed that he intended to be pope in his way.

Despite great reverence for his charismatic, globe-trotting predecessor -- whom he put on the fast track to sainthood and whom he beatified in 2011 -- aides said he was determined not to change his quiet manner to imitate John Paul's style.

A quiet, professorial type who relaxed by playing the piano, he showed the gentle side of a man who was the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer for nearly a quarter of a century.

The first German pope for some 1,000 years and the second non-Italian in a row, he traveled regularly, making about four foreign trips a year, but never managed to draw the oceanic crowds of his predecessor.

The child abuse scandals hounded most of his papacy. He ordered an official inquiry into abuse in Ireland, which led to the resignation of several bishops.

Scandal from a source much closer to home hit in 2012 when the pontiff's butler, responsible for dressing him and bringing him meals, was found to be the source of leaked documents alleging corruption in the Vatican's business dealings.

Benedict confronted his own country's past when he visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Calling himself "a son of Germany", he prayed and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, most of them Jews, were killed there.

Ratzinger served in the Hitler Youth during World War Two when membership was compulsory. He was never a member of the Nazi party and his family opposed Adolf Hitler's regime.

(Additional reporting by James Mackenzie, Barry Moody, Cristiano Corvino, Alexandra Hudson in Berlin, and Dagamara Leszkowixa in Poland; Editing by Peter Graff)

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Digital gap: why aren’t moviemakers learning narrative from videogames and the web?

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – From killing off film prints to designing fantastical CGI worlds, movies are going digital in every way except one – storytelling.

Unlike the eras when the advent of photography inspired the fine arts to embrace abstraction, or when the rise of mass-media pushed writers into modernist and eventually post-modern terrain, movies remain largely impervious to the narrative techniques employed across the internet.

Hollywood views videogames and the web as an existential threat, but instead of radically altering its approach, most movies unfold over the course of two hours in a linear fashion, just as they have done for a century. Over the course of its history the medium has had no problem embracing change in film as long as its technologically driven, hence the shift from silent movies to talkies, or black and white to color. It has remained more precious, however, about how it spins its celluloid fantasies.

Today’s top directors are more interested in aping classical cinema than forging a new filmmaking vernacular. That’s in contrast to 10 years ago when movies like “The Matrix,” “Memento,” or “Being John Malkovich” turned cinematic storytelling on its head, gleefully experimenting with an inter-textuality that mirrored our hyperlinked world.

With a few exceptions like Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina,” which re-imagined Leo Tolstoy’s tragedy as a series of intersecting operas, or Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths,” a bloody crime movie that is also a comment on the art of screenwriting, that flowering of experimentation is over.

“The films of early aughts engaged with virtuality in a way they don’t today,” Alissa Quart, a cultural critic and the author of the forthcoming “Republic of Outsiders,” told TheWrap. “You had people like Steven Spielberg working on ‘Minority Report,’ now you have ‘Lincoln.’ Or Paul Thomas Anderson going from ‘Magnolia’ to ‘The Master.’

“Those movies engaged with multiplicity and technology and surveillance, and now those same filmmakers are looking at these huge commanding triumphal figures in stories set in the past that look antique.”

Films like “The Master” or “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Django Unchained” are referential, but their influences lie in film’s history, mimicking the wide vistas favored by John Ford or the atmosphere of exquisite paranoia in 1970s thrillers like “All the President’s Men.” The directors gaze lingers in the past and rarely looks toward the future.

“A way to get serious as a filmmaker is to be very clearly dealing with your influences,” Kurt Anderson, host of the arts and culture program “Studio 360,” told TheWrap. “Now, I have no doubt that ‘Pulp Fiction’ was full of Quentin Tarantino’s influences, but at the time it seemed like a new way of telling stories. When you get to ‘Django,’ it becomes all about his cinematic influences.”

Even the methods that Hollywood has kicked up to convince teenagers to give up their game consoles and hit the multiplex are bizarrely retro.

Souped-up theatrical exhibition offerings like 3D are a throwback to the 1950s, when Hollywood was facing a different, though no less grave incursion from television. Likewise, what is IMAX and its mammoth projections but a reincarnation of Cinerama, the colossal wide-screen format the flourished in the Eisenhower era?

In contrast, television shows like “Lost” or “Once Upon a Time,” which are set in fantasy worlds and tease out mysteries in episodic fashion, are more akin to what players expect from videogames.

That’s not to say there isn’t some cross-pollination. Flint Dille is a game designer on the likes of “Dead to Rights” and the screenwriter of movies like “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.” He says that both mediums steal from one another, claiming that the plot of 99 percent of videogames is derived from ‘80s action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In turn, today’s action movies design their set pieces to appeal to audiences who grew up with “Mass Effect” and “World of Warcraft.”

“When you look at ‘The Hobbit’ – that escape from the goblins’ lair is a Nintendo game,” Dille said. “It’s like a videogame in its velocity. Or a movie like ‘Jack Reacher’ is like a game in that the main character arrives with no back story, and that’s something we’ve been conditioned to accept from playing games where the protagonist is a cipher.”

To be sure, studios have shown an appetite for persistent experimentation when it comes to using apps and viral marketing to generate excitement for tent pole films like “The Dark Knight” or “Star Trek Into Darkness.” Yet the emphasis is on promotion, not narrative.

So why is it that, while computer technology has opened up brave new worlds in terms of special effects and advertising, it has not altered storytelling?

The culprit is a hodgepodge of commercial realities and artistic preferences.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the question what is a modern film?” Howard Suber, professor of film history at UCLA, told TheWrap. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it is basically everything that was made after the 1960s — but that’s 50 years. The reason why that’s still modern is that not a hell of a lot has changed.”

Suber said that when he shows a movie in his class from earlier eras, his students are unable to deal with the slower pacing and editing, but they have a less difficult time adjusting to anything made after that date.

“The entire field of modern film is 50 years long, which is staggering when you compare it to any earlier age films,” he said. “The films of the ‘20s looked antique to audiences in the ‘30s, and the same was true with the way audiences in the ‘50s viewed films from 10 years earlier.”

Quart thinks that the kind of cultural permanence that Suber describes may be a conscious choice by artists who are looking to create spaces that are distinct from the fragmented world wrought by social media.

In a recent piece in the New York Times, Quart argued that “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” are popular in part because they allow viewers to take a break from Twitter, texts and other technologically enabled forms of multi-tasking.

She argues the same appeal underlies movies.

“My gut tells me that filmmakers are trying to give viewers respite from what the virtual world is offering,” Quart said. “It’s motivated by an esthetic defensiveness because we are inundated with all these modes of communication.”

It hasn’t helped that films that have exploded conventional approaches to storytelling sunk at the box office.

Sure, “The Matrix” was a worldwide blockbuster, grossing $ 463 million and spawning two sequels, but “Magnolia” ($ 48.4 million) and “Adaptation” ($ 32.8 million) were lucky to break even. More recent mind-bending films like “Anna Karenina” ($ 49 million globally), and “Synecdoche, New York” ($ 4.3 million globally) continued the trend of hardly making a ripple at ticket counters. Studios’ obsession with tentpole films that can cross language and cultural barriers to appeal to global audiences have likely made them less receptive to films that revel in narrative complexity.

That could change. If filmmakers like J.J. Abrams get their way, blockbuster films will seep off the screen and into other platforms, rivaling the sprawling nature of the web.

The big shake up could come with Transmedia – the notion that stories should be told over various mediums ranging from comic books to videogames. This approach to popular culture has been a buzz word for over a decade, but its adherents believe the film industry is poised to take a dramatic leap forward.

“They’re are a lot of film purists who believe their job is to get the script shot and make it beautiful,” Jeff Gomez, president of Starlight Runner Entertainment and a trans media consultant on films like “Avatar,” said. “But there’s also a growing number of young people, who were weaned on videogames and immersed in multiple media platforms, for whom these new kinds of storytelling are intuitive.”

Gomez notes that Joss Whedon’s decision to set his upcoming ABC show “S.H.I.E.L.D.” in the world of “The Avengers” films is a perfect example of a platform-agnostic approach.

It’s a boundary that could keep eroding when Abrams gets hold of the “Star Wars” franchise. The director already has experimented with transmedia in television shows like “Lost,” but the saga of the Skywalkers and new owner Disney’s consumer products heft could open up whole new galaxies in terms of storytelling – ones that jet from games to toys to movies, creating a vast universe of narrative possibilities.

In 1977, “Star Wars” gave birth to the modern blockbuster. Nearly 40 years later when “Star Wars Episode 7″ is scheduled to hit theaters, will it change the face of film again?From killing off film prints to designing fantastical CGI worlds, movies are going digital in every way except one – storytelling.

Unlike the eras when the advent of photography inspired the fine arts to embrace abstraction, or when the rise of mass-media pushed writers into modernist and eventually post-modern terrain, movies remain largely impervious to the narrative techniques employed across the internet.

Hollywood views videogames and the web as an existential threat, but instead of radically altering its approach, most movies unfold over the course of two hours in a linear fashion, just as they have done for a century. Over the course of its history the medium has had no problem embracing change in film as long as its technologically driven, hence the shift from silent movies to talkies, or black and white to color. It has remained more precious, however, about how it spins its celluloid fantasies.

Today’s top directors are more interested in aping classical cinema than forging a new filmmaking vernacular. That’s in contrast to 10 years ago when movies like “The Matrix,” “Memento,” or “Being John Malkovich” turned cinematic storytelling on its head, gleefully experimenting with an inter-textuality that mirrored our hyperlinked world.

With a few exceptions like Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina,” which re-imagined Leo Tolstoy’s tragedy as a series of intersecting operas, or Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths,” a bloody crime movie that is also a comment on the art of screenwriting, that flowering of experimentation is over.

“The films of early aughts engaged with virtuality in a way they don’t today,” Alissa Quart, a cultural critic and the author of the forthcoming “Republic of Outsiders,” told TheWrap. “You had people like Steven Spielberg working on ‘Minority Report,’ now you have ‘Lincoln.’ Or Paul Thomas Anderson going from ‘Magnolia’ to ‘The Master.’

“Those movies engaged with multiplicity and technology and surveillance, and now those same filmmakers are looking at these huge commanding triumphal figures in stories set in the past that look antique.”

Films like “The Master” or “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Django Unchained” are referential, but their influences lie in film’s history, mimicking the wide vistas favored by John Ford or the atmosphere of exquisite paranoia in 1970s thrillers like “All the President’s Men.” The directors gaze lingers in the past and rarely looks toward the future.

“A way to get serious as a filmmaker is to be very clearly dealing with your influences,” Kurt Anderson, host of the arts and culture program “Studio 360,” told TheWrap. “Now, I have no doubt that ‘Pulp Fiction’ was full of Quentin Tarantino’s influences, but at the time it seemed like a new way of telling stories. When you get to ‘Django,’ it becomes all about his cinematic influences.”

Even the methods that Hollywood has kicked up to convince teenagers to give up their game consoles and hit the multiplex are bizarrely retro.

Souped-up theatrical exhibition offerings like 3D are a throwback to the 1950s, when Hollywood was facing a different, though no less grave incursion from television. Likewise, what is IMAX and its mammoth projections but a reincarnation of Cinerama, the colossal wide-screen format the flourished in the Eisenhower era?

In contrast, television shows like “Lost” or “Once Upon a Time,” which are set in fantasy worlds and tease out mysteries in episodic fashion, are more akin to what players expect from videogames.

That’s not to say there isn’t some cross-pollination. Flint Dille is a game designer on the likes of “Dead to Rights” and the screenwriter of movies like “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.” He says that both mediums steal from one another, claiming that the plot of 99 percent of videogames is derived from ‘80s action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In turn, today’s action movies design their set pieces to appeal to audiences who grew up with “Mass Effect” and “World of Warcraft.”

“When you look at ‘The Hobbit’ – that escape from the goblins’ lair is a Nintendo game,” Dille said. “It’s like a videogame in its velocity. Or a movie like ‘Jack Reacher’ is like a game in that the main character arrives with no back story, and that’s something we’ve been conditioned to accept from playing games where the protagonist is a cipher.”

To be sure, studios have shown an appetite for persistent experimentation when it comes to using apps and viral marketing to generate excitement for tent pole films like “The Dark Knight” or “Star Trek Into Darkness.” Yet the emphasis is on promotion, not narrative.

So why is it that, while computer technology has opened up brave new worlds in terms of special effects and advertising, it has not altered storytelling?

The culprit is a hodgepodge of commercial realities and artistic preferences.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the question what is a modern film?” Howard Suber, professor of film history at UCLA, told TheWrap. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it is basically everything that was made after the 1960s — but that’s 50 years. The reason why that’s still modern is that not a hell of a lot has changed.”

Suber said that when he shows a movie in his class from earlier eras, his students are unable to deal with the slower pacing and editing, but they have a less difficult time adjusting to anything made after that date.

“The entire field of modern film is 50 years long, which is staggering when you compare it to any earlier age films,” he said. “The films of the ‘20s looked antique to audiences in the ‘30s, and the same was true with the way audiences in the ‘50s viewed films from 10 years earlier.”

Quart thinks that the kind of cultural permanence that Suber describes may be a conscious choice by artists who are looking to create spaces that are distinct from the fragmented world wrought by social media.

In a recent piece in the New York Times, Quart argued that “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” are popular in part because they allow viewers to take a break from Twitter, texts and other technologically enabled forms of multi-tasking.

She argues the same appeal underlies movies.

“My gut tells me that filmmakers are trying to give viewers respite from what the virtual world is offering,” Quart said. “It’s motivated by an esthetic defensiveness because we are inundated with all these modes of communication.”

It hasn’t helped that films that have exploded conventional approaches to storytelling sunk at the box office.

Sure, “The Matrix” was a worldwide blockbuster, grossing $ 463 million and spawning two sequels, but “Magnolia” ($ 48.4 million) and “Adaptation” ($ 32.8 million) were lucky to break even. More recent mind-bending films like “Anna Karenina” ($ 49 million globally), and “Synecdoche, New York” ($ 4.3 million globally) continued the trend of hardly making a ripple at ticket counters. Studios’ obsession with tentpole films that can cross language and cultural barriers to appeal to global audiences have likely made them less receptive to films that revel in narrative complexity.

That could change. If filmmakers like J.J. Abrams get their way, blockbuster films will seep off the screen and into other platforms, rivaling the sprawling nature of the web.

The big shake up could come with Transmedia – the notion that stories should be told over various mediums ranging from comic books to videogames. This approach to popular culture has been a buzz word for over a decade, but its adherents believe the film industry is poised to take a dramatic leap forward.

“They’re are a lot of film purists who believe their job is to get the script shot and make it beautiful,” Jeff Gomez, president of Starlight Runner Entertainment and a trans media consultant on films like “Avatar,” said. “But there’s also a growing number of young people, who were weaned on videogames and immersed in multiple media platforms, for whom these new kinds of storytelling are intuitive.”

Gomez notes that Joss Whedon’s decision to set his upcoming ABC show “S.H.I.E.L.D.” in the world of “The Avengers” films is a perfect example of a platform-agnostic approach.

It’s a boundary that could keep eroding when Abrams gets hold of the “Star Wars” franchise. The director already has experimented with transmedia in television shows like “Lost,” but the saga of the Skywalkers and new owner Disney’s consumer products heft could open up whole new galaxies in terms of storytelling – ones that jet from games to toys to movies, creating a vast universe of narrative possibilities.

In 1977, “Star Wars” gave birth to the modern blockbuster. Nearly 40 years later when “Star Wars Episode 7″ is scheduled to hit theaters, will it change the face of film again?

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Wiz Khalifa Wants Amber Rose to 'Stay Pregnant Forever'

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/10/2013 at 08:00 PM ET

Lester Cohen/WireImage

Bump, there it is!

With only three weeks left until baby boy’s big arrival, Amber Rose and her fiancé Wiz Khalifa graced the red carpet in coordinated black and white ensembles during Sunday’s Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

“[I'm feeling] good. It’s different, it’s weird,” Rose, 29, whose budding belly was front and center in her black floor-length Donna Karan gown, told E! News.

“I want her to stay pregnant forever,” quipped Khalifa, 25.

And while the couple are staying mum on their son’s name — “We haven’t told anybody,” says the dad-to-be — they’re not shy about sharing their birth plan.

“We watched The Business of Being Born with Ricki Lake and we just got inspired. We’ve got a pool, everything,” explains Rose.

“We’ve been taking classes, we got a doula, midwife — we’re going the whole thing,” says Khalifa, who adds he’s looking forward to taking part in the delivery process.

“I want to have a role in it, too. I wanted to get taken on a ride,” he admits.

– Anya Leon

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After early start, worst of flu season may be over

NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.

The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.

The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.

For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.

Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.

"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.

In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.

Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications

But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.

So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.

Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.

The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.

According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.

Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

___

Online:

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

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US Air, AMR near $11 billion merger, deal seen within week : sources

NEW YORK (Reuters) - US Airways Group Inc and AMR Corp are nearing an $11 billion merger that would create the world's largest airline and could announce a deal within a week, after resolving key differences on valuation and management structure, people familiar with the matter said.

Under terms of a deal that are still being finalized, US Airways Chief Executive Doug Parker would become CEO, while AMR's Tom Horton would serve as non-executive chairman of the board until spring of 2014, when the combined company holds its first annual meeting, the sources said.

The deal would come more than 14 months after the parent of American Airlines filed for bankruptcy in November 2011, and would mark the last combination of legacy U.S. carriers, following the Delta-Northwest and United-Continental mergers.

The all-stock merger is expected to value the combined carrier at between $10.5 billion and $11 billion, and would give AMR creditors 72 percent of the ownership in the new company and US Airways shareholders the rest, they said.

The board of each airline is expected to meet in the middle of the coming week to vote on the proposed deal, and an announcement would likely come in the latter part of the week, the sources said, asking not to be named because the matter is not public.

Negotiations are continuing and could still be delayed or fall apart, they cautioned.

The companies had initially tried to schedule board meetings for Monday, the day that AMR's creditors committee planned to convene, and had aimed to announce a deal as soon as Tuesday, sources told Reuters previously.

But AMR needed more time to finalize details and the boards of the two airlines are now not expected to gather until around Wednesday, the sources said.

The AMR creditors committee is still meeting on Monday in New York, as initially scheduled, and will continue discussions as the airlines finalize negotiations, they added.

A lawyer for the creditors committee declined to comment. Representatives for AMR and US Airways declined to comment.

A combination with US Airways would create the world's top airline by passenger traffic and help the two carriers better compete with rivals United Continental Holdings and Delta Air Lines Inc .

A near-$11 billion valuation of the combined American-US Airways compares to some $12.4 billion market capitalization for Delta, and $8.7 billion for United Continental.

The currently planned equity split ratio between AMR creditors and US Airways shareholders implies a roughly $3 billion valuation for US Airways and some $7.5 billion to $8 billion valuation for AMR.

NEW AMERICAN AIRLINES

US Airways will follow through on its agreement with AMR labor unions last year that the combined carrier would be branded American Airlines and be based in Fort Worth, Texas, where AMR is currently based, sources said. US Airways has its headquarters in Tempe, Arizona.

As part of the merger, US Airways will also leave the Star Alliance to join the oneworld global airline alliance, of which American Airlines is an anchor member along with British Airways, the people familiar with the matter said.

The airlines are estimating that a merger will bring about $1 billion in revenue and cost benefits, they said.

Horton rebuffed an aggressive takeover push from US Airways early in the bankruptcy process, saying the airline preferred to exit court protection on its own and consider a deal later. But after several months of talks with its own creditors as well as with US Airways, Horton has softened his approach and agreed to consider all options.

A combined American-US Airways would provide the scale to match bigger rivals that are upgrading service and expanding international routes. The merged company would have revenue of $38.69 billion based on 2012 figures, ahead of United Continental which had revenue of $37.15 billion last year.

The new American would have a solid presence on the important U.S. East and West coasts and on North Atlantic routes, given American's revenue-sharing joint venture with British Airways and Iberia.

(Reporting by Soyoung Kim in New York, additional reporting by Nick Brown and Karen Jacobs; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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Gunbattle rocks Gao after rebels surprise French, Malians

GAO, Mali (Reuters) - Islamist insurgents launched a surprise raid in the heart of the Malian town of Gao on Sunday, battling French and local troops in a blow to efforts to secure Mali's recaptured north.

Local residents hid in their homes or crouched behind walls as the crackle of gunfire from running street battles resounded through the sandy streets and mud-brick houses of the ancient Niger River town, retaken from Islamist rebels last month by a French-led offensive.

French helicopters clattered overhead and fired on al Qaeda-allied rebels armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades who had infiltrated the central market area and holed up in a police station, Malian and French officers said.

The fighting inside Gao was certain to raise fears that pockets of determined Islamists who have escaped the lightning four-week-old French intervention in Mali will strike back with guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings.

After driving the bulk of the insurgents from major northern towns such as Timbuktu and Gao, French forces are trying to search out their bases in the remote and rugged Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, far up in the northeast.

But with Mali's weak army unable to secure recaptured zones, and the deployment of a larger African security force slowed by delays and kit shortages, vast areas to the rear of the French forward lines now look vulnerable to guerrilla activity.

"They infiltrated the town via the river. We think there were about 10 of them. They were identified by the population and they went into the police station," said General Bernard Barrera, commander of French ground operations in Mali.

He told reporters in Gao that French helicopters had intervened to help Malian troops pinned down by the rebels, who threw grenades from rooftops.

Malian gendarme Colonel Saliou Maiga told Reuters the insurgents intended to carry out suicide attacks in the town.

SUICIDE BOMBERS

No casualty toll was immediately available. But a Reuters reporter in Gao saw one body crumpled over a motorcycle. Malian soldiers said some of the raiders may have come on motorbikes.

The gunfire in Gao erupted hours after French and Malian forces reinforced a checkpoint on the northern outskirts that had been attacked for the second time in two days by a suicide bomber.

Abdoul Abdoulaye Sidibe, a Malian parliamentarian from Gao, said the rebel infiltrators were from the MUJWA group that had held the town until French forces liberated it late last month.

MUJWA is a splinter faction of al Qaeda's North African wing AQIM which, in loose alliance with the home-grown Malian Islamist group Ansar Dine, held Mali's main northern urban areas for 10 months until the French offensive drove them out.

Late on Saturday, an army checkpoint in Gao's northern outskirts came under attack by a group of Islamist rebels who fired from a road and bridge that lead north through the desert scrub by the Niger River to Bourem, 80 km (50 miles) away.

"Our soldiers came under heavy gunfire from jihadists from the bridge ... At the same time, another one flanked round and jumped over the wall. He was able to set off his suicide belt," Malian Captain Sidiki Diarra told reporters.

The bomber died and one Malian soldier was lightly wounded, he added. In Friday's motorbike suicide bomber attack, a Malian soldier was also injured.

Diarra described Saturday's bomber as a bearded Arab.

Since Gao and the UNESCO World Heritage city of Timbuktu were retaken last month, several Malian soldiers have been killed in landmine explosions on a main road leading north.

French and Malian officers say pockets of rebels are still in the bush and desert between major towns and pose a threat of hit-and-run guerrilla raids and bombings.

"We are in a dangerous zone... we can't be everywhere," a French officer told reporters, asking not to be named.

One local resident reported seeing a group of 10 armed Islamist fighters at Batel, just 10 km (6 miles) from Gao.

OPERATIONS IN NORTHEAST

The French, who have around 4,000 troops in Mali, are now focusing their offensive operations several hundred kilometers (miles) north of Gao in a hunt for the Islamist insurgents.

On Friday, French special forces paratroopers seized the airstrip and town of Tessalit, near the Algerian border.

From here, the French, aided by around 1,000 Chadian troops in the northeast Kidal region, are expected to conduct combat patrols into the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains.

The remaining Islamists are believed to have hideouts and supply depots in a rugged, sun-blasted range of rocky gullies and caves, and are also thought to be holding at least seven French hostages previously seized in the Sahel.

The U.S. and European governments back the French-led operation as a defense against Islamist jihadists threatening wider attacks, but rule out sending their own combat troops.

To accompany the military offensive, France and its allies are urging Mali authorities to open a national reconciliation dialogue that addresses the pro-autonomy grievances of northern communities like the Tuaregs, and to hold democratic elections.

Interim President Dioncounda Traore, appointed after a military coup last year that plunged the West African state into chaos and led to the Islamist occupation of the north, has said he intends to hold elections by July 31.

But he faces splits within the divided Malian army, where rival units are still at loggerheads.

(Additional reporting by Tiemoko Diallo and Adama Diarra in Bamako; Writing by Joe Bavier and Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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Tiger Woods & Lindsey Vonn Are 'Spending More Time' Together: Source

Buzz

By Steve Helling

02/09/2013 at 06:00 PM EST

Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn

Mick Tsikas/Reuters/Landov; Luis Guerra/Ramey

It was quite the gesture.

After Lindsey Vonn suffered a devastating injury during the Alpine World Championships in Austria, she got a bit of help from Tiger Woods. Walking on crutches, Vonn – who tore two ligaments in her right knee and fractured her shin when she crashed on Tuesday ­– boarded Woods's private jet to return home.

Is it a sign that the rumored relationship between Woods and Vonn is heating up?

"Tiger and Lindsey have been friends for a while, and nothing started out romantically at all," a source tells PEOPLE. "But they really have a lot in common and got closer and closer. He still refers to her as 'my very good friend,' but he's been spending more and more time talking to her – and talking about her."

Last month, Vonn's reps kept mum about the rumored relationship, telling PEOPLE that her "focus is solely on competing and on defending her titles and thus she will not participate in any speculation surrounding her personal life at this time."

But the source close to Woods tells PEOPLE that Woods, 37, and Vonn. 28, talk and text frequently.

"Tiger really does want a woman who he can have good conversations with," he says. "He wants shared interests and outlooks. He is finding that with [Lindsey]."

Woods made international headlines in 2009 when he was linked to dozens of women while still married to his ex-wife, Elin Nordegren.

Since then, he has dated sporadically, but struggled to find someone who wanted a relationship for the right reasons.

"She's not freaked out by his past, and that's really appealing to him," says the source. "He really does deserve to be happy. He has been flogging himself for three years, and it's good to see him moving forward."

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After early start, worst of flu season may be over

NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.

The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.

The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.

For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.

Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.

"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.

In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.

Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications

But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.

So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.

Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.

The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.

According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.

Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

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Online:

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

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US Air, AMR near $11 billion merger, deal seen within week : sources

NEW YORK (Reuters) - US Airways Group Inc and AMR Corp are nearing an $11 billion merger that would create the world's largest airline and could announce a deal within a week, after resolving key differences on valuation and management structure, people familiar with the matter said.

Under terms of a deal that are still being finalized, US Airways Chief Executive Doug Parker would become CEO, while AMR's Tom Horton would serve as non-executive chairman of the board until spring of 2014, when the combined company holds its first annual meeting, the sources said.

The deal would come more than 14 months after the parent of American Airlines filed for bankruptcy in November 2011, and would mark the last combination of legacy U.S. carriers, following the Delta-Northwest and United-Continental mergers.

The all-stock merger is expected to value the combined carrier at between $10.5 billion and $11 billion, and would give AMR creditors 72 percent of the ownership in the new company and US Airways shareholders the rest, they said.

The board of each airline is expected to meet in the middle of the coming week to vote on the proposed deal, and an announcement would likely come in the latter part of the week, the sources said, asking not to be named because the matter is not public.

Negotiations are continuing and could still be delayed or fall apart, they cautioned.

The companies had initially tried to schedule board meetings for Monday, the day that AMR's creditors committee planned to convene, and had aimed to announce a deal as soon as Tuesday, sources told Reuters previously.

But AMR needed more time to finalize details and the boards of the two airlines are now not expected to gather until around Wednesday, the sources said.

The AMR creditors committee is still meeting on Monday in New York, as initially scheduled, and will continue discussions as the airlines finalize negotiations, they added.

A lawyer for the creditors committee declined to comment. Representatives for AMR and US Airways declined to comment.

A combination with US Airways would create the world's top airline by passenger traffic and help the two carriers better compete with rivals United Continental Holdings and Delta Air Lines Inc.

A near-$11 billion valuation of the combined American-US Airways compares to some $12.4 billion market capitalization for Delta, and $8.7 billion for United Continental.

The currently planned equity split ratio between AMR creditors and US Airways shareholders implies a roughly $3 billion valuation for US Airways and some $7.5 billion to $8 billion valuation for AMR.

NEW AMERICAN AIRLINES

US Airways will follow through on its agreement with AMR labor unions last year that the combined carrier would be branded American Airlines and be based in Fort Worth, Texas, where AMR is currently based, sources said. US Airways has its headquarters in Tempe, Arizona.

As part of the merger, US Airways will also leave the Star Alliance to join the oneworld global airline alliance, of which American Airlines is an anchor member along with British Airways, the people familiar with the matter said.

The airlines are estimating that a merger will bring about $1 billion in revenue and cost benefits, they said.

Horton rebuffed an aggressive takeover push from US Airways early in the bankruptcy process, saying the airline preferred to exit court protection on its own and consider a deal later. But after several months of talks with its own creditors as well as with US Airways, Horton has softened his approach and agreed to consider all options.

A combined American-US Airways would provide the scale to match bigger rivals that are upgrading service and expanding international routes. The merged company would have revenue of $38.69 billion based on 2012 figures, ahead of United Continental which had revenue of $37.15 billion last year.

The new American would have a solid presence on the important U.S. East and West coasts and on North Atlantic routes, given American's revenue-sharing joint venture with British Airways and Iberia.

(Reporting by Soyoung Kim in New York, additional reporting by Nick Brown and Karen Jacobs; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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Israel's Lieberman says Palestinian peace accord impossible

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has no chance of signing a permanent peace accord with the Palestinians and should instead seek a long-term interim deal, the most powerful political partner of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.

The remarks by Avigdor Lieberman, an ultranationalist whose joint party list with Netanyahu narrowly won a January 22 election while centrist challengers made surprise gains, seemed designed to dampen expectations at home and abroad of fresh peacemaking.

A spring visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories by U.S. President Barack Obama, announced this week, has stirred speculation that foreign pressure for a diplomatic breakthrough could build - though Washington played down that possibility.

In a television interview, ex-foreign minister Lieberman linked the more than two-year-old impasse to pan-Arab political upheaval that has boosted Islamists hostile to the Jewish state.

These include Hamas, rivals of U.S.-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who control the Gaza Strip and spurn coexistence with Israel though they have mooted extended truces.

"Anyone who thinks that in the center of this socio-diplomatic ocean, this tsunami which is jarring the Arab world, it is possible to arrive at the magic solution of a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians does not understand," Lieberman told Israel's Channel Two.

"This is impossible. It is not possible to solve the conflict here. The conflict can be managed and it is important to manage the conflict ... to negotiate on a long-term interim agreement."

Abbas broke off talks in late 2010 in protest at Israel's settlement of the occupied West Bank. He angered Israel and the United States in November by securing a U.N. status upgrade that implicitly recognized Palestinian independence in all the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Israel insists it will keep East Jerusalem and swathes of West Bank settlements under any eventual peace deal. Most world powers consider the settlements illegal because they take up land seized in the 1967 Middle East war.

Lieberman, himself a West Bank settler, said the ball was "in Abu Mazen's (Abbas') court" to revive diplomacy.

Abbas has demanded Israel first freeze all settlement construction. With two decades gone since Palestinians signed their first interim deal with Israel, he has ruled out any new negotiations that do not solemnize Palestinian statehood.

Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev noted that Lieberman, in the Channel Two interview, had said he was expressing his own opinion.

Asked how Netanyahu saw peace prospects for an accord with the Palestinians, Regev referred to a speech on Tuesday in which the conservative prime minister said that Israel, while addressing threats by its enemies, "must also pursue secure, stable and realistic peace with our neighbors".

Netanyahu has previously spoken in favor of a Palestinian state, though he has been cagey on its borders and whether he would be prepared to dismantle Israeli settlements.

Lieberman's role in the next coalition government is unclear as he faces trial for corruption. If convicted, he could be barred from the cabinet. Lieberman denies wrongdoing and has said he would like to regain the foreign portfolio, which he surrendered after his indictment was announced last year.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Stephen Powell)

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