How Can Professional Santas Avoid the Flu?

A lot of kids must sit on Santa’s lap before he can hop in his sleigh on Christmas Eve, but Santa has to be extra careful during flu season if he wants to stay healthy into the New Year.

John Sullivan, a professional Santa Claus in Chicago, said he never turns down a child, even if the child’s nose is runny.

“I’ll see him. I’ll talk to him,” Sullivan said. “That’s just a risk that frankly comes with the job … Santa can’t go around wearing a surgical mask!”

Since children actually exhale more flu virus than adults because their immune systems are immature, Santa and other people who work with children are at greater risk for coming down with the flu, said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventative medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

“Of course, Santa is leaning over the child and listening carefully. He’s in the breathing zone of all these children,” Schaffner said. “They come into very close contact with a myriad of children, and children are the great distributor of respiratory viruses.”

Not only do children exhale more of the virus in each breath than adults do, but they also exhale it longer: 24 hours before they start feeling sick until after they feel better.

“It is likely because children are experiencing these viruses probably for the first time, and that their immune systems are not trained to combat the viruses and shut down the virus production mechanism quickly,” Schaffner said.

Schaffner said it’s important for professional Santa performers like Sullivan to get their flu shots, keep up their fluids and get enough sleep and exercise during the holiday season so that their bodies can fight the flu if they come in contact with it.

Sullivan has been Santa Claus every holiday season for more than two decades, and he never misses a flu shot, he said. He started in malls and now does private events at homes, offices and daycares.

“A lot of times when you pick up a baby, you can feel in their lungs that there’s congestion,” he said. “I’ll tell the parent the baby has cold … Frankly, if I’m Santa, I never reject a child.”

He said he’s gotten mild colds, but nothing serious, and he’s always mindful to avoid getting other people sick if he’s not feeling well.

Near Orlando, Greg Thompson runs The Santa Company, which has seven Santas, including Thompson himself, who has been dressing as Santa since he was 14. (“I’d discovered Santa’s secret, so I decided I wanted to be him.”) That first year, Thompson was 129 lbs., so his grandmother helped him stuff a pillow under his puffy jacket to complete the costume.

Although Thompson’s size may have been a problem, the flu wasn’t, he said. In fact, The Santa Company hasn’t had anyone call out sick since it was founded in 1999.

“We have not had it happen yet – knock on wood – but if someone were to come in and say, ‘Greg, I’m just sick and I can’t come in,’ we’d make sure to have a Santa for him,” Thompson said. “We’re more concerned about people bringing their kids to us. If a kid is obviously sick, you can look at him and tell, sometimes.”

Of the 80 appearances The Santa Company does each year, Thompson does about a quarter of them. When a child approaches Thompson-as-Santa with a runny nose and red eyes, Thompson said he will ask the child to sit down in front of him instead of on his lap.

“I’ll be happy to speak with him,” he said.

Thompson added that his Santas always wear clean gloves as part of the classic red suit with white trim, and they cough only into their elbows.

But Schaffner said gloves can quickly become contaminated, and probably don’t offer much protection against the virus as Santa touches a child and strokes his beard or touches his nose. Even surgeons are taught to wash their hands after they remove gloves, he said.

“They are at risk. There’s no doubt about it,” Schaffner said. “But maybe Santa’s beard and mustache can act like a filter and keep the virus out,” he joked with a laugh.

Santa is magical, after all.

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A Minute With: Jessica Chastain on “Zero Dark Thirty”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jessica Chastain carries the weight of starring in one of the year’s most anticipated films, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the decade-long hunt and eventual killing of Osama bin Laden.

Critics say Chastain pulls it off seamlessly as “Maya,” based on a real-life CIA agent who played a major role in tracking down bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan.

As the film opens in limited U.S. release on Wednesday, Chastain, who is tipped as a likely best actress Oscar nominee for the role, talked to Reuters about playing a character she could not meet and why the film is an important look at America’s role in a dark war.

Q. What did you think when you saw this film finished?

A. “It is a tough one for me to watch, because there is so much responsibility with playing this woman. I find her to be incredible. And I didn’t want to change her story or make her a Hollywood version, with a lot of makeup. I didn’t want to trivialize what she did … I want her to like it, but I don’t know if she will ever see it.”

Q. How did you play someone you had never met?

A. “There was three months of working with (screenplay writer) Mark Boal, doing research, reading lists and talking to people. And then anything I could not solve through research, like what is her favorite candy – ’cause when we are all overseas we have something we do when we are homesick – I had to answer that question myself.”

Q. Boal hasn’t gone into too much detail about her?

A. “We have to protect her because she is an undercover CIA operative, still working.”

Q. What else did you know about her?

A. “When we finished the movie, when the Navy Seal book ‘No Easy Day’ came out. I raced to go read it, because I was like, ‘I need to know if my character is in the book!’ And they talk about Jen, the young CIA girl. Well, everything matched up. She was the only one that said 100 percent ‘he is there.’… They talked about how she had been on it close to a decade and they were only on it for 40 minutes. They said she was crying on the airplane afterwards.”

Q. During filming, were you ever worried about your safety, that the film might be misconstrued?

A. “As an actor you always worry about that. Because you think, maybe someone will see a film and they won’t understand the difference between acting and reality. The good thing is, what (director Kathryn Bigelow) and Mark have done, is that they have not made a propaganda film. They tried to make it as authentic as possible and respectful of the actual historical event as they could. That includes showing the intense interrogation techniques that were used. The end of the film – it’s not a lot of fist pumping and saying, ‘Here is our journey over 10 years and it was so difficult and we finally did it.’ It ends actually on a very different note.”

Q. Can you elaborate on that?

A. “Well, for me the whole thing is about the arc of this woman. She shows up in the beginning and she is wearing her best suit. She thinks she knows what she is in for, and she is completely out of her element. But over the 10 years, this woman, who has been trained to be unemotional and analytically precise … we see her struggling to keep it contained for 10 years and as she descends down the rabbit hole of the world she is in.

“So finally at the end when she is asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ there is no way to answer that question. … She has no idea where she belongs, now that this is done. But not only does it speak in terms of that, but the movie ends with that question – where do you want to go? Where do we go now as a country? Where do we go as a society? It is not a movie that ends with an answer, and I find that powerful.”

Q. How did you cope with filming the torture scenes?

A. “We filmed in a real Jordanian prison, in the middle of nowhere. The environment wasn’t great, especially as a woman.

“They had a lot of trust between the actors, nothing was dangerous or unsafe. There was a lot of discussion to make sure that we weren’t doing something that was going to be salacious. They just wanted it to be accurate.

“I know I am playing a character who has trained to be unemotional. But I have spent my entire life allowing myself to be emotional, and allowing myself to feel everything. … There was actually one day that we were doing a scene, and I said, ‘I am sorry’ and I just had to walk away, and I just started crying … it was a very intense experience.”

Q. You are a top chance for Oscar nomination. Would that be more or less rewarding for this role?

A. “Because she is still an active member of the CIA and undercover, she can’t take credit for what she’s done. … And by making this film, it is my idea as a way of thanking her. It would be very emotional because of that.”

Q. You compare your character to getting lost down a CIA rabbit hole. What about your own dizzying rise as an actress?

A. “That’s a good question. I do think that next year I need to go somewhere for a month and be in a room by myself and be like, ‘Ok, what now Jessica?’ But I am nowhere near where she was at the end of this mission.”

(Reporting By Christine Kearney, editing by Jill Serjeant and Doina Chiacu)

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Canada serial killer inquiry finds “systemic bias” by police

(Reuters) – Police made critical errors in pursuing Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton partly because of “systemic bias” against his victims, sex trade workers from a rough Vancouver neighborhood, according to the final report from a public inquiry released on Monday.

Commissioner Wally Oppal was asked by the British Columbia government to investigate, in effect, why Pickton was not caught sooner. Women disappeared from the Downtown Eastside neighborhood for more than a decade before the pig farmer’s 2002 arrest.

“The investigations of missing and murdered women were characterized by blatant police failures, and by public indifference,” Oppal said at a press conference in Vancouver that was frequently interrupted by protesters.

Pickton was convicted of six murders, but prosecutors believe he killed many more – 20 other charges were stayed after he received the maximum possible sentence.

Oppal outlined a string of police errors, from failing to take proper reports when women went missing and communicate adequately with families, to ineffective coordination across jurisdictions. He called his more than 1,200-page report, which is based on eight months of hearings, “Forsaken”.

“After reviewing the evidence of the investigations, I have come to the conclusion that there was systemic bias by the police,” he said.

Oppal recommended that the provincial government establish a compensation fund for the children of the victims and consider creating a regional police force for Vancouver, instead of the patchwork of jurisdictions currently in place.

After Oppal’s announcement, B.C. Minister of Justice Shirley Bond wiped away tears as she spoke to victims’ families.

“I want you to know that, however inadequate these words sound, we are sorry for your loss,” she said. “We will work hard to prevent these circumstances from being repeated in our province.”

She announced the appointment of a former lieutenant governor, Steven Point, to serve as the report’s “champion”, guiding implementation. Bond said the government would immediately give new funding to WISH, a drop-in center for women who work in the Downtown Eastside’s sex trade.

POLICE RESPOND

The Vancouver Police Department said in a short statement that it is committed to learning from its mistakes and will study the report.

“We know that nothing can ever truly heal the wounds of grief and loss but if we can, we want to assure the families that the Vancouver Police Department deeply regrets anything we did that may have delayed the eventual solving of these murders,” it said.

Deputy Commissioner Craig Callens, who commands the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia, said in a statement that his force will review the report.

Oppal said many individual police officers were diligent, and he commended several by name. But he said that as a system, the authorities failed because of bias against Pickton’s victims, many of whom were poor and addicted to drugs.

“Would the reaction of the police and the public have been any different if the missing women had come from Vancouver’s (more affluent) west side? The answer is obvious,” he said.

Aboriginal women were overrepresented among the victims, and Oppal repeatedly referred to the broader “marginalization” of aboriginal people in Canada.

“There has to be community responsibility for what has taken place,” he said, highlighting poverty and the conditions on the Downtown Eastside. “The social reality is that racism and gender bias are prevalent within Canadian society, and we must do something to eradicate those.”

Victims’ families and activists were on hand for Oppal’s press conference, and he stopped speaking several times as audience members shouted criticism, chanted and played drums.

The provincial government did not offer funding to a number of community organizations that said they needed support to participate in the lengthy and complex inquiry. In protest, other groups boycotted the process.

In November, several organizations, including the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, released their own report, criticizing the inquiry for, among other things, excluding too many aboriginal women, sex trade workers and drug users.

Bond, the justice minister, said she did not regret the decision not to fund those groups, but said she saw them participating in the future. “I think going forward this is room for us to include other voices.” (Reporting by Allison Martell; Editing by Eric Beech)

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'Constant reminder': Newtown holds third day of funerals

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — For a third straight day Wednesday, funeral processions rolled through a grieving Connecticut town trying to make sense of the massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults in an elementary school less than two weeks before Christmas.

Dr. Joseph Young, an optometrist, said he has already been to one funeral and plans to attend two or three more.

"The first few days, all you heard was helicopters and now at my office all I hear is the rumble of motorcycle escorts and funeral processions going back and forth throughout the day," he said. "It's difficult. It's just a constant reminder."

Most students in Newtown went back to school Tuesday except those from Sandy Hook Elementary, where a gunman armed with a military-style assault rifle slaughtered the children and six teachers and administrators Friday. He also killed his mother at her home. If police know why, they have not said.

Students at Sandy Hook, which serves kindergarten through fourth grade, will resume classes in a formerly shuttered school in a neighboring community in January.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday pressed Congress to reinstate an assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004. He also called for stricter background checks for people who seek to purchase weapons and limited high capacity clips.

"This time, the words need to lead to action," said Obama, who set a January deadline for the recommendations.

In the meantime, mourners overlapped at back-to-back funerals that started Monday and will continue all week.

The first of Wednesday's funerals in Newtown was for 7-year-old Daniel Barden, a gap-toothed redhead and the youngest of three children whose family described him as "always smiling, unfailingly polite, incredibly affectionate, fair and so thoughtful towards others, imaginative in play, both intelligent and articulate in conversation: in all, a constant source of laughter and joy."

Hundreds of firefighters formed a long blue line outside St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church as bells sounded and bagpipes played. Daniel wanted to join their ranks one day, and many came from New York, where his family has relatives who are firefighters.

Family friend Laura Stamberg of New Paltz, N.Y., whose husband plays in a band with Daniel's father, Mark, said Daniel was a thoughtful boy who held doors for people and would sit with another child if he saw one sitting alone.

She said that on the morning of the shooting, Mark Barden played a game with his son and taught him a Christmas song on the piano.

"They played foosball and then he taught him the song and then he walked him to the bus and that was their last morning together," Stamberg said.

At the same time, in the town of Stratford, family and friends gathered to say goodbye to Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who has been hailed as a hero for dying while trying to shield her students, some of whom managed to escape.

"She had the perfect job. She loved her job," said Vicky Ruiz, a friend of Soto's since first grade. Every year, she said, Soto described her students the same way. "They were always good kids. They were always angels," even if, like typical first-graders, they might not always listen, Ruiz said.

Students Charlotte Bacon and Caroline Previdi were to be laid to rest later Wednesday, and calling hours were being held for popular 47-year-old principal Dawn Hochsprung. She and school psychologist Mary Sherlach rushed toward Lanza in an attempt to stop him and paid with their lives.

The massacre continued to reverberate around America as citizens and lawmakers debated whether Newtown might be a turning point in the often-polarizing national discussion over gun control.

Private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced Tuesday it plans to sell its stake in Freedom Group, maker of the Bushmaster rifle, following the school shootings. In Pittsburgh, Dick's Sporting Goods said it is suspending sales of modern rifles nationwide because of the shooting. The company also said it's removing all guns from display at its store closest to Newtown.

Lawmakers who have joined the call to consider gun control as part of a comprehensive, anti-violence effort next year included 10-term House Republican Jack Kingston, a Georgia lawmaker elected with strong National Rifle Association backing.

The National Rifle Association, silent since the shootings, said in a statement that it was "prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again." It gave no indication what that might entail.

And no indication has been made publicly about the motive of 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who, clad all in black, broke into Sandy Hook Elementary and opened fire on students and staff.

Authorities say the horrific events of Friday began when Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, at their home, and then took her car and some of her guns to the nearby school.

Investigators have found no letters or diaries that could explain the attack.

___

Zezima reported from Stratford. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed, Helen O'Neill, John Christoffersen and Pat Eaton-Robb in Newtown; Michael Melia in Hartford; Larry Margasak in Washington and AP Business Writer Joshua Freed in Minneapolis.

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Shooting renews argument over video-game violence

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the days since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a shell-shocked nation has looked for reasons. The list of culprits include easy access to guns, a strained mental-health system and the “culture of violence” — the entertainment industry’s embrace of violence in movies, TV shows and, especially, video games.

“The violence in the entertainment culture — particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera — does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said.

“There might well be some direct connection between people who have some mental instability and when they go over the edge — they transport themselves, they become part of one of those video games,” said Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, where 12 people were killed in a movie theater shooting in July.

White House adviser David Axelrod tweeted, “But shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?”

And Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting, “Video game violence & glorification must be stopped — it is creating monsters!”

There have been unconfirmed media reports that 20-year-old Newtown shooter Adam Lanza enjoyed a range of video games, from the bloody “Call of Duty” series to the innocuous “Dance Dance Revolution.” But the same could be said for about 80 percent of Americans in Lanza’s age group, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Law enforcement officials haven’t made any connection between Lanza’s possible motives and his interest in games.

The video game industry has been mostly silent since Friday’s attack, in which 20 children and six adults were killed. The Entertainment Software Association, which represents game publishers in Washington, has yet to respond to politicians’ criticisms. Hal Halpin, president of the nonprofit Entertainment Consumers Association, said, “I’d simply and respectfully point to the lack of evidence to support any causal link.”

It’s unlikely that lawmakers will pursue legislation to regulate the sales of video games; such efforts were rejected again and again in a series of court cases over the last decade. Indeed, the industry seemed to have moved beyond the entire issue last year, when the Supreme Court revoked a California law criminalizing the sale of violent games to minors.

The Supreme Court decision focused on First Amendment concerns; in the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that games “are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature.” Scalia also agreed with the ESA’s argument that researchers haven’t established a link between media violence and real-life violence. “Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively,” Scalia wrote.

Still, that doesn’t make games impervious to criticism, or even some soul-searching within the gaming community. At this year’s E3 — the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the industry’s largest U.S. gathering — some attendees were stunned by the intensity of violence on display. A demo for Sony’s “The Last of Us” ended with a villain taking a shotgun blast to the face. A scene from Ubisoft’s “Splinter Cell: Blacklist” showed the hero torturing an enemy. A trailer for Square Enix’s “Hitman: Absolution” showed the protagonist slaughtering a team of lingerie-clad assassins disguised as nuns.

“The ultraviolence has to stop,” designer Warren Spector told the GamesIndustry website after E3. “I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it’s in bad taste. Ultimately I think it will cause us trouble.”

“The violence of these games can be off-putting,” Brian Crecente, news editor for the gaming website Polygon, said Monday. “The video-game industry is wrestling with the same issues as movies and TV. There’s this tension between violent games that sell really well and games like ‘Journey,’ a beautiful, artistic creation that was well received by critics but didn’t sell much.”

During November, typically the peak month for pre-holiday game releases, the two best sellers were the military shooters “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” from Activision, and “Halo 4,” from Microsoft. But even with the dominance of the genre, Crecente said, “There has been a feeling that some of the sameness of war games is grating on people.”

Critic John Peter Grant said, “I’ve also sensed a growing degree of fatigue with ultra-violent games, but not necessarily because of the violence per se.”

The problem, Grant said, “is that violence as a mechanic gets old really fast. Games are amazing possibility spaces! And if the chief way I can interact with them is by destroying and killing? That seems like such a waste of potential.”

There are some hints of a sneaking self-awareness creeping into the gaming community. One gamer — Antwand Pearman, editor of the website GamerFitNation — has called for other players to join in a “Day of Cease-Fire for Online Shooters” this Friday, one week after the massacre.

“We are simply making a statement,” Pearman said, “that we as gamers are not going to sit back and ignore the lives that were lost.”

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Merck, GE to collaborate on Alzheimer’s drug development

(Reuters) – Merck & Co and General Electric Co‘s healthcare unit have agreed to collaborate on an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease, the companies said on Tuesday.

GE Healthcare will supply Flutemetamol, an investigational imaging agent, to Merck for use with its experimental Alzheimer’s disease drug MK-8931.

The companies hope GE’s imaging agent will help identify patients who might benefit from a therapy such as Merck’s, which targets beta amyloid, a protein that can clump together and form plaques in the brain. Such plaques have been found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

MK-8931 is Merck’s lead Alzheimer’s drug candidate and is designed to modify progression of the disease as well as improve symptoms. Alzheimer’s robs patients of their memory and can cause other cognitive disturbances.

Based on promising results from an early-stage clinical trial of MK-8931, Merck plans to move forward with a larger trial, called EPOCH, at multiple sites around the world.

Flutemetamol is a positron emission tomography (PET) imaging agent that has been able, in clinical trials, to detect beta amyloid in the brain.

GE Healthcare will supply Flutemetamol to help select patients for clinical trials and evaluate the agent as a companion diagnostic tool. Financial and other terms of the agreement between the companies were not disclosed.

(Reporting By Toni Clarke; editing by John Wallace)

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Syrian rebels take control of Damascus Palestinian camp

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels took full control of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp on Monday after fighting raged for days in the district on the southern edge of President Bashar al-Assad‘s Damascus powerbase, rebel and Palestinian sources said.

The battle had pitted rebels, backed by some Palestinians, against Palestinian fighters of the pro-Assad Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). Many PFLP-GC fighters defected to the rebel side and their leader Ahmed Jibril left the camp two days ago, rebel sources said.

“All of the camp is under the control of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army,” said a Palestinian activist in Yarmouk. He said clashes had stopped and the remaining PFLP fighters retreated to join Assad‘s forces massed on the northern edge of the camp.

The battle in Yarmouk is one of a series of conflicts on the southern fringes of Assad’s capital, as rebels try to choke the power of the 47-year-old leader after a 21-month-old uprising in which 40,000 people have been killed.

Government forces have used jets and artillery to try to dislodge the fighters but the violence has crept into the heart of the city and activists say rebels overran three army stations in a new offensive in the central province of Hama on Monday.

On the border with Lebanon, hundreds of Palestinian families fled across the frontier following the weekend violence in Yarmouk, a Reuters witness said.

Syria hosts half a million Palestinian refugees, most living in Yarmouk, descendants of those admitted after the creation of Israel in 1948, and has always cast itself as a champion of the Palestinian struggle, sponsoring several guerrilla factions.

Both Assad’s government and the mainly Sunni Muslim Syrian rebels have enlisted and armed divided Palestinian factions as the uprising has developed into a civil war.

“NEITHER SIDE CAN WIN”

Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa said in a newspaper interview published on Monday that neither Assad’s forces nor rebels seeking to overthrow him can win the war.

Sharaa, a Sunni Muslim in a power structure dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, has rarely been seen since the revolt erupted in March 2011 and is not part of the president’s inner circle directing the fight against Sunni rebels. But he is the most prominent figure to say in public that Assad will not win.

Sharaa said the situation in Syria was deteriorating and a “historic settlement” was needed to end the conflict, involving regional powers and the U.N. Security Council and the formation of a national unity government “with broad powers”.

“With every passing day the political and military solutions are becoming more distant. We should be in a position defending the existence of Syria. We are not in a battle for an individual or a regime,” Sharaa was quoted as telling Al-Akhbar newspaper.

“The opposition cannot decisively settle the battle and what the security forces and army units are doing will not achieve a decisive settlement,” he said, adding that insurgents fighting to topple Syria’s leadership could plunge it into “anarchy and an unending spiral of violence”.

Sources close to the Syrian government say Sharaa had pushed for dialogue with the opposition and objected to the military response to an uprising that began peacefully.

In a veiled criticism of the crackdown, he said there was a difference between the state’s duty to provide security to its citizens, and “pursuing a security solution to the crisis”.

He said even Assad could not be certain where events in Syria were leading, but that anyone who met him would hear that “this is a long struggle…and he does not hide his desire to settle matters militarily to reach a final solution.”

In Hama province, rebels and the army clashed in a new campaign launched on Sunday by rebels to block off the country’s north, activists said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-linked violence monitor, said fighting raged through the provincial towns of Karnaz, Kafar Weeta, Halfayeh and Mahardeh.

It said there were no clashes reported in Hama city, which lies on the main north-south highway connecting the capital with Aleppo, Syria’s second city.

Qassem Saadeddine, a member of the newly established rebel military command, said on Sunday fighters had been ordered to surround and attack army positions across the province. He said Assad’s forces were given 48 hours to surrender or be killed.

In 1982 Hafez al-Assad, father of the current ruler, crushed an uprising in Hama city, killing up to 30,000 civilians.

Qatiba al-Naasan, a rebel from Hama, said the offensive would bring retaliatory air strikes from the government but that the situation is “already getting miserable”.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes, Erika Solomon and Dominic Evans in Beirut, Afif Diab at Masnaa, Lebanon; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

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First of eight funerals begins at Newtown church

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — Family members have gathered for the first of eight funerals for school shooting victims to be held at a Catholic church in Newtown, Conn.

A motorcade of dozens of vehicles led by police motorcycles accompanied the family of 6-year-old James Mattioli to St. Rose of Lima on Tuesday. His funeral comes a day after two other 6-year-old boys were laid in the first of a long, almost unbearable procession of funerals.

Margarita Rosniak and her 10-year-old daughter, Charlotte, watched from the sidewalk as people entered the church. They had traveled from California for a Christmas vacation in New York and came to Newtown to join the residents in their grief.

Clutching her daughter close, Margarita Rosniak spoke of sympathizing with the parents. Her daughter says she plans to do a school project on the massacre. She asks, "What was the point of it? They're just little kids."

Gunman Adam Lanza shot his mother Friday, then headed to Sandy Hook Elementary where he killed 20 children and six adults, and himself.

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Merry Christmas, America-Haters?

When TNT was preparing its annual special “Christmas in Washington” with the president of the United States, you’d think the last star musician they would consider to join the official caroling would be Psy, the South Korean rapper. What on Earth is Christmasy about this man’s invisible-horse-riding dance to his dorky disco-rap hit “Gangnam Style”? It’s not exactly the natural flip-side to “O Holy Night.” But TNT couldn’t resist this year’s YouTube sensation.

This inane publicity stunt backfired when the website Mediaite reported on Dec. 7 that Psy (real name: Park Jae-sang) had participated in a 2002 protest in which he crushed a model of an American tank with a microphone stand. But that’s nothing compared to the footage of a 2004 performance after a Korean missionary was slaughtered by Islamists in Iraq. These lyrics cannot be misunderstood.

“Kill those f—-ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives … Kill those f—-ing Yankees who ordered them to torture … Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers … Kill them all slowly and painfully.”

This isn’t just anti-American. It’s anti-human.

Guess where this story first surfaced in the American media? CNN, from the same corporate family tree as TNT. It was posted back on Oct. 6 on CNN’s iReport, an open-source online news feature that allows users to submit stories for CNN consideration.

The Korean one-hit wonder put out the usual abject careerist apology, but he weirdly said, “I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted.” Those darn lyrics and those darn people who misinterpret lyrics about killing Yankees’ mothers. It is like Barack Obama expressing regret for the awful things said about Susan Rice, ignoring the awful things said by Susan Rice.

Psy is now a millionaire. As Jim Treacher wrote at the Daily Caller: “So far he’s made over $ 8 million from the song, about $ 3 million of it from the people he once wanted to kill.” Brad Schaeffer at Big Hollywood noted his own father fought for South Korea’s independence in the Korean War: “Had it not been for ‘f——-g Yankees’ like my Dad, this now-wealthy South Korean wouldn’t be ‘Oppan Gangnam Style’ so much as ‘Starving Pyongyang Style.’” (Gangnam is a posh district in the South Korean capital of Seoul.)

Despite the controversy, neither the Obama White House nor the TNT brass felt it was necessary to send Psy packing before the Dec. 9 taping. On Saturday, ABC reporter Muhammad Lila merely repeated, “the White House says the concert will go on and that President Obama will attend, saying that they have no control over who performs at that concert.”

What moral cowardice. On Monday morning, another pliant publicist, NBC correspondent Peter Alexander, calmly relayed that the White House did take control on the Psy front — on its own “We The People” website, where the people may post petitions to the president for their fellow citizens to sign. A petition asking Obama to dump Psy from the Christmas concert was itself dumped. Alexander explained: “But that petition was removed because the rules say the petitions only apply to federal actions. And, of course, the President had no say over who the private charity chose to invite.”

This is double baloney. The White House hasn’t removed silly “federal action” petitions like the one asking to “Nationalize the Twinkie Industry,” or one to “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.” They removed one that they didn’t want people to sign.

As for Obama having “no say over” who appeared on the TNT show, the president could easily declare he wasn’t going to share a stage with this America-hater. Or he could have obviously placed one phone call to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes (an Obama donor), and expressed the dismay of the President of the United States.

Instead, the Obamas came and honored Psy. Yes, the president honored a man who despised America enough to want its citizens slaughtered.

John Eggerton of Broadcasting and Cable magazine observed, “At the end of the taping, when the First Family customarily shakes hands and talks briefly with the performers, the First Lady gave Psy a hug, followed by a handshake from the President, who engaged Psy in a short, animated discussion — at one point Psy appeared to rock back with laughter — and patted the singer on the shoulder.”

I never thought I’d ever view a Christmas special featuring a hideous hater of America celebrated by the President of the United States.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

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Health insurance exchanges planned by 18 U.S. states: Sebelius

(Reuters) – A total of 18 U.S. states are planning to start their own health insurance marketplaces, which will be available to consumers and businesses in 2014, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a blog posting on Monday.

The deadline for states to inform the federal government if they would operate healthcare exchanges under President Barack Obama‘s healthcare reform law was December 14. The number of states participating was in line with expectations and leaves the government to create online marketplaces for the rest of the country.

The exchanges are one of the key aspects of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was enacted in 2010. They will create online marketplaces where individuals can buy health insurance from companies like UnitedHealth Group, Wellpoint Inc, Aetna Inc and Cigna Corp.

“The marketplace will provide consumers and small businesses one-stop shopping for health insurance with better information about plan benefits, quality and cost – simplifying the process for buying health insurance,” Sebelius said in her post.

Between the exchanges and expansion of Medicaid government healthcare for the poor, more than 30 million people are expected to become insured in the next decade.

Sebelius said the states that submitted applications for exchanges included: California, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont and Utah.

On Friday, the government conditionally approved the plans previously submitted by the District of Columbia, Kentucky and New York. It had previously backed plans from Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oregon and Washington.

The remaining 32 states have until February 15, 2013, to declare whether they want to set up a health exchange in partnership with the government.

(Reporting by Caroline Humerm Editing by G Crosse)

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