Bomb shakes Damascus, opposition holds unity talks

AMMAN (Reuters) – A bomb exploded near army and security compounds in Damascus, Syrian television reported, and fractured opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad began unity talks abroad to win international respect and arms supplies.

The 50-kilogram (110-pound) bomb, near a large hotel in a heavily guarded district, was described by state media as an attack by “terrorists” – the government’s term for insurgents in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad.

Opposition activists said Sunday’s blast appeared to be the work of the Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) Brigade, an Islamist militant unit that attacked military and intelligence targets several times in the last two months.

The mainly Sunni rebels have carried out a series of bombings targeting government and military buildings in Damascus this year, extending the war into the seat of Assad’s power.

The Syrian conflict has aggravated divisions in the Islamic world, with Shi’ite Iran supporting Assad — whose Alawite faith derives from Shi’ite Islam — and U.S.-allied Sunni nations such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar backing his foes.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an activist monitoring group, said government forces had killed 179 people on Sunday. It said most of the dead were civilians killed in shelling of Damascus suburbs and included 14 women and 20 children. The rest were rebels killed in battles in the capital and the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo.

Opposition campaigners said the Syrian army shelled rebel positions inside a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus on Sunday, killing at least 20 people. They said the Yarmouk camp had become the latest battleground in the war.

In northern Idlib, opposition sources said rebels were forced to halt an offensive to take a big air base because of a shortage of ammunition, a problem that has dogged their campaign to cement a hold on the north by eliminating Assad’s devastating edge in firepower.

Islamist insurgents had launched the attack on the Taftanaz military airport at dawn on Saturday, using rocket launchers and at least three tanks captured from the military.

The Syrian government restricts journalists’ access in Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from the ground.

The Jaafar bin Tayyar Division, a rebel unit in Deir al-Zor, said its fighters had taken control of the al-Ward oilfield near the Iraqi border on Sunday, after overrunning a loyalist outpost that had 40 militiamen defending it.

Rebel commanders, former Syrian officials and the Syrian head of an oil services company familiar with oil production in the area said the fields, mostly not operational, had been under de facto rebel control for months.

FEARS OF WIDER CONFLAGRATION

The conflict began with peaceful protest rallies that morphed into armed revolt when Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since 1971, tried to stamp them out with military might. About 32,000 people have been killed, wide swathes of the major Arab state have been wrecked and the civil war threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration.

The opposition talks that began in Qatar marked the first concerted attempt to meld feuding, disparate groups based abroad and coordinate strategy with rebels fighting in Syria.

Divisions between Islamists and secularists as well as between those inside Syria and opposition figures based abroad have foiled prior attempts to forge a united opposition and deterred Western powers from intervening militarily.

Analysts were skeptical the planned four days of opposition talks in the Qatari capital Doha would bring immediate results.

They aim to broaden the Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest of the overseas-based opposition groups, from some 300 members to 400, to pave the way for talks in Doha on Thursday including other anti-Assad factions to crystallise a coalition.

“The main aim is to expand the council to include more of the social and political components. There will be new forces in the SNC,” Abdulbaset Sieda, current leader of the Syrian National Council, told reporters in Doha ahead of the meeting.

The meetings would also elect a new executive committee and leader for the SNC, he said.

A Qatar-based security analyst, who asked not to be named, said the meetings would bring a small step forward, at most. “The Syrian National Council is just too divided,” he said.

In Cairo, the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, called on Sunday for world powers to issue a U.N. Security Council resolution based on a deal they reached in June to set up a transitional Syrian government.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the same news conference, dismissed the need for a resolution and said others were stoking violence by backing rebels. His comments highlighted the impasse over Syria’s civil war.

Russia and China, both permanent council members, have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad’s government for the violence. The other three permanent members are the United States, Britain and France.

(Additional reporting by Rania el Gamal and Regan Doherty in Qatar, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Stephen Powell)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The app's the thing as Shakespeare goes digital

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Bac Films shops Gael Garcia Bernal starrer to AFM buyers

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Bac Films International has picked up sales duties on “The Ardor,” an Amazon-set feature from director, Pablo Fendrik.

Gael Garcia Bernal, left, and Alice Braga will star in this modern day Western, which is being sold at this week’s American Film Market.

Bernal will play an Amazon shaman who seeks revenge in the jungle after witnessing an attack. The film is due to start filming in March. Bac‘s AFM slate also includes Baltasar Kormakur‘s real life survival tale “The Deep,” which is Iceland’s entry for the 2013 foreign film Oscars.

Other films that Bac is handling at the AFM include “Hidden Diary” with Catherine Deneuve.

The film tells the story of an independent and single woman who lives in Canada. She is pregnant. Her parents still live in France in the small town she grew up. But while visiting them for holidays, she discovers her grand-mother’s hidden story, a woman who gave up her home and family in the fifties and never came back. Audrey will try to know more about it and this investigation will force her own mother to reveal a secret deeply buried.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Merkel coalition agrees welfare changes as poll looms

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s center-right coalition reached agreement on Monday on contentious social welfare issues that it hopes will bolster its support in the countdown to federal elections next September.

After nearly eight hours of talks that underlined the degree of discord simmering within her three-party government, Merkel and other leaders agreed to scrap an unpopular health surcharge and to introduce extra child benefits, coalition leaders said.

Merkel’s junior coalition partners, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), are particularly eager to impress voters after opinion polls have regularly shown them failing to clear the five percent threshold for staying in parliament next year.

The FDP has long had to accept that tax cuts, one of the party’s traditional policy cornerstones, are not possible at a time of fiscal austerity, with Merkel leading the euro zone’s efforts to overcome its three-year-old sovereign debt crisis.

Instead, the FDP has pushed hard for abolition of the 10-euro-per-quarter payments for visits to the doctor, saying they have spawned red tape without reducing waiting times.

Merkel’s FDP health minister, Daniel Bahr, rejected the center-left opposition’s charges that the deal amounted to an attempt to bribe voters ahead of a state election in Lower Saxony in January and federal elections in September.

“This is about helping our citizens. It’s not about whether opinion polls are better are worse from week to week but making the right decision for Germany,” Bahr told German radio.

The coalition, plagued by squabbles since taking power in 2009, aims to balance Germany’s budget by 2014, helped by robust economic growth that has bucked the euro zone trend, although strong tax revenues are expected to tail off next year.

“HORSE-TRADING”

In return, the FDP reluctantly backed benefit payments for parents who keep their toddlers at home, a policy championed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), the conservative Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).

Critics, including in the FDP, CDU and the opposition say this will keep women out of the workplace and children of poorer immigrants out of kindergartens where they would learn German and integrate.

The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), who have taken a more assertive political stance since choosing former finance minister Per Steinbrueck as their candidate for chancellor next year, have vowed to challenge the child benefit plan in court.

The payments will only start from next August, shortly before the federal election, to coincide with the deadline for the government to provide kindergarten places for all toddlers.

SPD parliamentary floor leader Thomas Oppermann denounced the coalition deal as political “horse-trading” and told German radio: “Taxpayers will be financing this election gift”.

In their talks, billed as the last chance to launch large projects in this parliament, coalition leaders also spoke about investment in transport and steps to help poorer pensioners.

Economy Minister Philipp Roesler, the FDP leader, said the costs of the deal would be financed from the hefty surpluses of health insurance schemes, meaning the changes “contribute directly to the target of a balanced budget for 2014″.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, attending G20 talks in Mexico, was absent from the meeting, but ensured there would be no generous tax promises by bringing forward the balanced-budget goal set by Germany’s “debt brake” law by two years from 2016.

Merkel’s conservatives remain the most popular force in German politics with 38 percent support, an opinion poll published showed on Sunday, well ahead of the SPD’s 29 percent.

But the poll, published in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, confirmed the FDP, on just 4 percent, would fail to win seats in the new Bundestag, or lower house of parliament. The SPD’s favored coalition partner, the Greens, were on 13 percent.

Such electoral arithmetic suggests Merkel might have to build a ‘grand coalition’ with the center-left SPD after the 2013 election, like the one she led from 2005 until 2009.

(Reporting by Thorsten Severin and Andreas Rinke; Writing by Gareth Jones and Stephen Brown; Editing by Paul Simao and Alistair Lyon)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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One more day: Obama and Romney make their final arguments

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney make a frenetic dash to a series of crucial swing states on Monday, delivering their final arguments to voters on the last day of an extraordinarily close race for the White House.

After a long, bitter and expensive campaign, national polls show Obama and Romney are essentially deadlocked ahead of Tuesday's election, although Obama has a slight advantage in the eight or nine battleground states that will decide the winner.

Obama plans to visit three of those swing states on Monday and Romney will travel to four to plead for support in a fierce White House campaign that focused primarily on the lagging economy but at times turned intensely personal.

The election's outcome will impact a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues, from the looming "fiscal cliff" of spending cuts and tax increases that could kick in at the end of the year to questions about how to handle illegal immigration or the thorny challenge of Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The balance of power in Congress also will be at stake on Tuesday, with Obama's Democrats now expected to narrowly hold their Senate majority and Romney's Republicans favored to retain control of the House of Representatives.

In a race where the two candidates and their party allies raised a combined $2 billion, the most in U.S. history, both sides have pounded the heavily contested battleground states with an unprecedented barrage of ads.

The close margins in state and national polls suggested the possibility of a cliffhanger that could be decided by which side has the best turnout operation and gets its voters to the polls.

In the final days, both Obama and Romney focused on firing up core supporters and wooing the last few undecided voters in battleground states.

Romney reached out to dissatisfied Obama supporters from 2008, calling himself the candidate of change and ridiculing Obama's failure to live up to his campaign promises. "He promised to do so very much but frankly he fell so very short," Romney said at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday.

Obama, citing improving economic reports on the pace of hiring, argued in the final stretch that he has made progress in turning around the economy but needed a second White House term to finish the job. "This is a choice between two different versions of America," Obama said in Cincinnati, Ohio.

FINAL SWING-STATE BLITZES

Obama will close his campaign on Monday with a final blitz across Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa - three Midwestern states that, barring surprises elsewhere, would be enough to get him more than the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

Polls show Obama has slim leads in all three. His final stop on Monday night will be in Iowa, the state that propelled him on the path to the White House in 2008 with a victory in its first-in-the nation caucus.

Romney will visit his must-win states of Florida and Virginia - where polls show he is slightly ahead or tied - along with Ohio before concluding in New Hampshire, where he launched his presidential run last year.

The only state scheduled to get a last-day visit from both candidates is Ohio, the most critical of the remaining battlegrounds - particularly for Romney.

The former Massachusetts governor has few paths to victory if he cannot win in Ohio, where Obama has kept a small but steady lead in polls for months.

Obama has been buoyed in Ohio by his support for a federal bailout of the auto industry, where one in every eight jobs is tied to car manufacturing, and by a strong state economy with an unemployment rate lower than the 7.9 percent national rate.

That has undercut Romney's frequent criticism of Obama's economic leadership, which has focused on the persistently high jobless rate and what Romney calls Obama's big spending efforts to expand government power.

Romney, who would be the first Mormon president, has centered his campaign pitch on his own experience as a business leader at a private equity fund and said it made him uniquely suited to create jobs.

Obama's campaign fired back with ads criticizing Romney's experience and portraying the multimillionaire as out of touch with everyday Americans.

Obama and allies said Romney's firm, Bain Capital, plundered companies and eliminated jobs to maximize profits. They also made an issue of Romney's refusal to release more than two years of personal tax returns.

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Christopher Wilson)

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Brazil’s ‘pop-star priest’ gets mammoth new stage

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil‘s “pop-star priest” is already packing in the crowds at the newly opened mammoth sanctuary that he built for his campaign to stem the exodus of faithful from the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America’s biggest nation.

Brazil still has more Catholics than any other country in the world, with about 65 percent of its 192 million people identifying themselves that way in the 2010 census. But that is down from 74 percent in 2000 and is the lowest since records began tracking religion 140 years ago.

That’s where Father Marcelo Rossi‘s Mother of God sanctuary comes in. The not-yet-finished structure will seat 6,000 people and have standing room for 14,000 more, church leaders say. In addition, the grounds outside can hold 80,000 people who could watch Mass on outdoor video screens.

After the inaugural Mass on Friday attracted upward of 50,000 people, a beaming Rossi told reporters: “They couldn’t all fit in. There was a crowd that had to stand outside! That’s a sign we’re on the right path, and it’s this sanctuary.”

Similar numbers jammed into the huge church Saturday.

It’s a fitting stage for Rossi, a Latin Grammy-nominated singer who is known for tossing buckets of holy water on worshippers and performing rollicking Christian songs backed by a blasting live band during Mass.

The church sits on 323,000 square feet (30,000 square meters) of land. Church officials declined to confirm how big the actual building is, though local reports put it at 91,500 square feet (8,500 square meters). That would make it one of the world’s 10 biggest churches. A cross soaring 138 feet (42 meters) into the air is the focal point.

The Mother of God sanctuary is anything but traditional. Designed by noted Brazilian architect Ruy Ohtake, it has a wide-open layout giving it the feel of a warehouse. Concrete walls hold up a sloping blue roof that from the outside looks more like a basketball arena than a house of worship. With the church several years away from completion, white plastic chairs were in the place of pews for a lucky few thousand to grab a seat. The rest had to stand.

Rossi dismisses the idea his huge church is a response to the explosion of the evangelical Christian faith in Brazil. Rather, the priest seems to be battling what recent studies indicate is Catholicism’s biggest enemy: indifference.

While millions of Brazilian Catholics joined Pentecostal congregations in the 1990s, a study conducted last year by Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation based on census data found that the Catholics leaving the church these days are mostly becoming nonreligious. Experts have said the trend of Brazilians deciding organized religion isn’t for them poses a more potent threat to Catholic leaders than losses to the Pentecostals.

Rossi chose to open his new church on the Brazilian holiday of Finados, the nation’s version of the Day of the Dead. “A day, a day that was dead, was transformed!” the priest told worshippers during the service, using his gold-plated microphone.

The “pop-star priest” is seen by Brazilian Catholicism as its biggest weapon against the lack of interest, and his new sanctuary adds to his tools of best-selling books and music recordings to keep worshippers interested in what many complain has become a staid institution.

There was nothing stale about his Mass on Friday.

Singing as loud as they could, waving white hankies and swaying with a rocking band, the 20,000 people who jammed into the Mother of God sanctuary hammed it up for TV cameras and shed tears down their cheeks as their superstar priest waved to them from the pulpit. An estimated 30,000 other people had gathered outside, where young boys climbed up into nearby trees trying to get a glimpse of the church grounds as they squinted over a sea of heads streaming out of the sanctuary.

“We have problems, everyone has problems,” worshipper Zuleima de Oliveira Sales said as she stood in the tightly packed sea of people under the soaring blue roof of the structure, her voice choking. “They don’t come to an end, but I have faith, I have faith in Our Lady.”

That’s the sort of belief the Catholic Church is counting on in Brazil and other developing nations. Leaders from the Vatican on down are looking to them as bulwarks against losses in Europe and the U.S., where sex abuse scandals have inspired many people to leave the church. About half of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America.

Pentecostalism was once seen as a major threat to Brazil’s Catholic Church. Pentecostal churches, many of them founded by U.S. evangelicals, saw their membership double to more than 12 percent of the country’s population over the 1990s, with about half of the congregants estimated to be former Catholics.

During the 1990s, Brazil’s economy suffered from hyperinflation and other woes, and Pentecostal churches aggressively recruited in the slums and poor outskirts of Brazil’s cities by offering nuts-and-bolts self-improvement advice as well as Christian ministry.

Since 2003, however, Pentecostal churches have seen growth slow. The percentage of Brazilians calling themselves Pentecostals edged up from 12.5 percent of the population to 13.3 percent.

Yet the Catholic Church has continued to lose parishioners, and church leaders have had little success so far in halting that trend.

Brazil was the first nation outside Europe that Pope Benedict XVI visited, during a five-day tour in 2007 largely aimed at stopping losses in Latin America. During the trip, the pope canonized Brazil’s first native-born saint.

Then Benedict announced last August during the church’s World Youth Day, which drew 1.5 million people to Spain, that the next version of the gathering would be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. The pope is expected to attend.

For now, Rossi hopes his big church will bring together tens of thousands of faithful for every Mass, giving new energy to the Catholic faith.

“People want big spaces. They want grand places for prayer,” he told the Globo TV network. “One candle illuminates, 10 candles illuminate — and 100,000 candles light up so much more.”

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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DA seeks rehearing in Anna Nicole Smith drug case

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Prosecutors refusing to accept an appellate court‘s ruling in the Anna Nicole Smith case asked the court on Friday to change its decision and allow her former boyfriend and manager to be retried.

California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled last month that Howard K. Stern could not be retried without violating the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy. Attorneys in the office of District Attorney Steve Cooley filed a 19-page motion for rehearing that contends the court misinterpreted the law.

The court said a trial judge erred in dismissing conspiracy convictions against Stern and Smith’s psychiatrist, Dr. Khristine Eroshevich, in a case that partially revolved around obtaining prescription drugs for the celebrity model under false names. The defendants were not charged with causing her death.

Superior Court Judge Robert Perry found it was not unusual in the celebrity world Smith inhabited for fake names to be used to protect privacy. The appellate court sent the case back to Perry but gave no guidance on what the judge should do next.

The motion filed Friday asked that the court modify its ruling so that Stern can be retried, or to grant a rehearing on the issue.

The defendants’ nine-week trial was the final act of the long-running drama centering on the blond beauty’s troubled life, which was documented on reality TV, in tabloids and in trial testimony. The defendants were acquitted of most charges, and the judge suggested prosecutors had chosen the wrong case in which to make its point about prescription drug abuse.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Israel’s Neuronix offers new Alzheimer’s treatment

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel-based Neuronix, which has developed a non-invasive medical device to help to treat Alzheimer’s disease, expects the system to be approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration in late 2014.

The device, which combines electromagnetic stimulation with computer-based cognitive training, is already approved for use in Europe, Israel and several Asian countries. In Singapore it is approved for clinical trial use and the application for registration of the product is still under evaluation.

“You stimulate the brain on a biological level as well as on a cognitive level,” Neuronix CEO Eyal Baror told Reuters, saying this double approach created longer-lasting benefits.

The device, which consists of a chair containing an electronic system and software in the back and a coil placed at the head, has been tested on mild to moderate Alzheimer’s patients who suffer from dementia but are not totally dependent.

The system is in trials at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre. Patients are treated for one hour a day, five days a week over six weeks.

“We see improvement lasting for 9-12 months and the good thing is that patients can return and undergo treatment again,” Baror said. “If out of 10 years the patients have left to live we can keep them at home in a relatively mild state of the disease for three, four, five years, it’s a lot.”

According to Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the hospital’s Berenson-Allen Centre for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation, brain stimulation – or transcranial magnetic stimulation – involves a very low current applied to a specific part of the brain and is approved by the FDA for treatment of a variety of ailments and diagnostic applications.

“The application in Alzheimer’s disease and in combination with cognitive training is novel,” Pascual-Leono said in a phone interview from Boston.

About 20 percent of patients experience a mild headache but there are no long-term negative effects, he said.

Pascual-Leone, who is principal investigator in the Harvard trial, said that of 12 patients in the study, six received the real treatment and all showed cognitive improvement. Their improvement was significantly more than the average seen in patients taking just medication, he said.

The study’s results will be submitted for publication in the coming weeks and a follow-up study on 30 patients is planned.

Neuronix received European approval several months ago and has installations in the UK and Germany. In Israel, a few dozen patients are being treated with the device.

The U.S. trials are expected to run till the end of 2013. Neuronix is also running a trial in Israel for pre-Alzheimer’s patients.

The company expects to sell half a dozen systems in the second half of 2012 and three dozen in 2013. In Israel, the treatment costs $ 6,000.

“Our target for becoming profitable is in parallel to entering the U.S. market around 2015,” Baror said.

Neuronix has raised $ 8 million from private individuals as well as in grants from the Israeli Chief Scientist’s Office and is exploring options to raise more money in the coming year, including the possibility of going public.

(This version of the October 24 story corrects paragraph two that company corrects to say that in Singapore, device is approved for clinical trial use and its application for registration of the product is under evaluation, not that device is approved for commercial use.)

(Reporting by Tova Cohen; editing by Stephen Nisbet)

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Campaigning for victory, Romney speeches shift

NEWINGTON, N.H. (AP) — From an airport runway on a cold New Hampshire morning, Mitt Romney faced 2,000 supporters and delivered the same speech he had given the day before — three times on the day before, actually.

Romney told his supporters on Saturday, "I won't just represent one party, I'll represent one nation."

His stump speech is a carefully crafted 15 minutes that opens a window into campaign strategy. For the Republican nominee, it's an evolving tool that has shifted sharply in recent weeks to appeal to the political center.

Let there be no doubt that Romney, who once described himself as "severely conservative," is aggressively courting the narrow slice of undecided voters — largely women and moderates — who have yet to settle on a candidate.

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