UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. General Assembly has voted by a more than two-thirds majority to recognize the state of Palestine.
The resolution upgrading the Palestinians' status to a nonmember observer state at the United Nations was approved by the 193-member world body late Thursday by a vote of 138-9 with 41 abstentions.
BANGKOK (AP) — The South Korean rapper behind YouTube's most-viewed video ever has set what might be a "Mission: Impossible" for himself.
Asked which celebrity he would like to see go "Gangnam Style," the singer PSY told The Associated Press: "Tom Cruise!"
Surrounded by screaming fans, he then chuckled at the idea of the American movie star doing his now famous horse-riding dance.
PSY's comments Wednesday in Bangkok were his first public remarks since his viral smash video — with 838 million views — surpassed Justin Bieber's "Baby," which until Saturday held the record with 803 million views.
"It's amazing," PSY told a news conference, saying he never set out to become an international star. "I made this video just for Korea, actually. And when I released this song — wow."
The video has spawned hundreds of parodies and tribute videos and earned him a spotlight alongside a variety of superstars.
Earlier this month, Madonna invited PSY onstage and they danced to his song at one of her New York City concerts. MC Hammer introduced the Korean star at the American Music Awards as, "My Homeboy PSY!"
Even President Barack Obama is talking about him. Asked on Election Day if he could do the dance, Obama replied: "I think I can do that move," but then concluded he might "do it privately for Michelle," the first lady.
PSY was in Thailand to give a free concert Wednesday night organized as a tribute to the country's revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who turns 85 next month. He paid respects to the king at a Bangkok shopping mall, signing his name in an autograph book placed beside a giant poster of the king. He then gave an outdoor press conference, as screaming fans nearby performed the pop star's dance.
Determined not to be a one-hit wonder, PSY said he plans to release a worldwide album in March with dance moves that he thinks his international fans will like.
"I think I have plenty of dance moves left," he said, in his trademark sunglasses and dark suit. "But I'm really concerned about the (next) music video."
"How can I beat 'Gangnam Style'?" he asked, smiling. "How can I beat 850 million views?"
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Associated Press writer Thanyarat Doksone contributed to this report.
BELLEVUE, Washington (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer defended his company’s record on innovation and financial performance at the annual shareholders’ meeting, but conceded that he should have moved faster to get into the booming tablet market dominated by Apple Inc‘s iPad.
Bill Gates, co-founder and now chairman of the world’s largest software company, was one of the first to champion tablet-sized devices more than 10 years ago, but Microsoft failed to come up with a product that worked as well as the iPad. Gates was silent throughout the meeting, attended by about 450 shareholders.
“We’re innovating on the seam between software and hardware,” said Ballmer, asked why his company had fallen behind rival Apple. “Maybe we should have done that earlier.”
A month ago, Microsoft launched the Surface tablet – its first own-brand computer – but has not revealed sales figures.
In the tablet market, “we see nothing but a sea of upside,” Ballmer said, an acknowledgement that until now Microsoft has effectively had zero presence in the tablet market.
“I feel pretty good about our level of innovation,” he added.
Ballmer said smartphones running Microsoft’s new Windows software were selling four times as much as they did at this time last year. Microsoft has never given sales numbers of Windows phones, primarily made by Nokia, Samsung and HTC.
Windows currently has 2 to 4 percent of the global smartphone market, according to various independent data providers. Its overall market share will not likely grow in proportion to its own sales, given that sales of other smartphones – mostly running Google’s Android system – are also growing quickly.
Ballmer, flanked by Gates and Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein, was asked by several shareholders to explain Microsoft’s lackluster share price, which has been stuck for a decade, and has been outperformed by Apple and Google Inc stock in recent years.
“I understand your comment,” he told one shareholder. He went on to explain that Microsoft had “done a phenomenal job of driving product volumes” and was focusing on profiting from that growth.
He suggested that whether investors recognized that value at any given time was out of his hands.
“The stock market‘s kind of a funny thing,” he said, adding that Microsoft had handed back $ 10 billion in dividends and share buybacks to investors in the last fiscal year.
Several shareholders at the meeting in Bellevue, an upscale suburb of Seattle, complimented the executives on how they had grown and managed the company.
Microsoft’s shares rose almost 18 percent during fiscal 2012, which ended in June of this year, compared with a 3 percent rise in the Standard & Poor’s 500.
Despite such fluctuations, Microsoft’s shares stand around the same level they did 10 years ago.
To see a graphic on U.S. tech share price performance, 1990 to present, click on http://link.reuters.com/rug53t
(Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Gary Hill)
Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (AP) — You remember that Beatles classic "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"? Turns out Yoko Ono had other things in mind.
Ono's new menswear collection inspired by John Lennon includes pants with large handprints on the crotch, tank tops with nipple cutouts and even a flashing LED bra.
The collection of menswear for Opening Ceremony is based on a series of drawings she sketched as a gift for Lennon for their wedding day in 1969. Ono said she the illustrations were designs for clothing and accessories to celebrate Lennon's "hot bod."
Also in the collection are a "butt hoodie" with an outline suggesting its name, pants with cutouts at the behind, a jock strap with an LED light, open-toed boots and a transparent chest plaque with bells and a leather neck strap.
CHICAGO (AP) — Preventing surgery-linked infections is a major concern for hospitals and it turns out some simple measures can make a big difference.
A project at seven big hospitals reduced infections after colorectal surgeries by nearly one-third. It prevented an estimated 135 infections, saving almost $4 million, the Joint Commission hospital regulating group and the American College of Surgeons announced Wednesday. The two groups directed the 2 1/2-year project.
Solutions included having patients shower with special germ-fighting soap before surgery, and having surgery teams change gowns, gloves and instruments during operations to prevent spreading germs picked up during the procedures.
Some hospitals used special wound-protecting devices on surgery openings to keep intestine germs from reaching the skin.
The average rate of infections linked with colorectal operations at the seven hospitals dropped from about 16 percent of patients during a 10-month phase when hospitals started adopting changes to almost 11 percent once all the changes had been made.
Hospital stays for patients who got infections dropped from an average of 15 days to 13 days, which helped cut costs.
"The improvements translate into safer patient care," said Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the Joint Commission. "Now it's our job to spread these effective interventions to all hospitals."
Almost 2 million health care-related infections occur each year nationwide; more than 90,000 of these are fatal.
Besides wanting to keep patients healthy, hospitals have a monetary incentive to prevent these infections. Medicare cuts payments to hospitals that have lots of certain health care-related infections, and those cuts are expected to increase under the new health care law.
The project involved surgeries for cancer and other colorectal problems. Infections linked with colorectal surgery are particularly common because intestinal tract bacteria are so abundant.
To succeed at reducing infection rates requires hospitals to commit to changing habits, "to really look in the mirror and identify these things," said Dr. Clifford Ko of the American College of Surgeons.
The hospitals involved were Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; Cleveland Clinic in Ohio; Mayo Clinic-Rochester Methodist Hospital in Rochester, Minn.; North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Great Neck, NY; Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago; OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill.; and Stanford Hospital & Clinics in Palo Alto, Calif.
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Online:
Joint Commission: http://www.jointcommission.org
American College of Surgeons: http://www.facs.org
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AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner
(Michael D'Antuono/www.artandresponse.com)
WASHINGTON—If aliens landed in Washington, D.C. right now, they might assume in their search for a terrestrial leader that a bespectacled man called "Grover Norquist" controlled the planet's most powerful nation. They might also conclude that this person had magical powers.
The misunderstanding wouldn't necessarily be their fault.
Grover Fever has swept the nation's capital this week, shortly after thousands of politicos waddled back into the city after a Thanksgiving break. After years of notoriety in Washington but near obscurity elsewhere, Norquist is becoming a household name around the dinner table.
"The Colbert Report" recently devoted a feature to Norquist, portraying the 56-year-old Harvard graduate as an omniscient creature whose power knows no bounds. Norquist has been all over cable news shows and the subject of lengthy profiles in prestigious newspapers and magazines. Outside Washington's Metro stations this week, hawkers handed out free tabloid dailies bearing the image of his face. Politico devoted an entire hour to him at a newsmakers breakfast on Wednesday morning.
His name is on the lips of top Democrats in Congress who blame him for single-handedly bringing the United States of America to an immediate standstill. Norquist is "one obstacle standing between Congress and compromise," Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid exclaimed from the Senate floor on Tuesday morning.
His crime? Norquist has persuaded more than 1,000 politicians to sign a pledge never to raise taxes through his organization, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). But with Congress now debating how to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff—a series of tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to kick in Jan. 1 if a budget deal isn't reached with President Barack Obama—some Republicans appear to be wiggling away from Norquist's grip.
A few GOP lawmakers have voiced a willingness to eliminate deductions within the tax code, which, without offsetting tax cuts elsewhere, would technically violate the pledge. One of the possible pledge violators, Republican Rep. Peter King of New York, called Norquist a "low-life" and said his wife would "knock his head off" after Norquist compared the taxpayer pledge to King's marriage vows.
But Norquist is like a bearded Lernaean Hydra, which grows only more powerful the more you attack it. The evidence? A majority of Republicans have not publicly joined the rogue moderates, reinforcing the narrative that they remain under Norquist's binding spell.
But Norquist isn't necessarily the most powerful conservative activist in town. And many conservatives don't always move in lockstep with him, which is clear in the current debate over the fiscal cliff.
While there is a consensus among Republicans against increasing marginal tax rates for the sake of a deal, the disagreement lies in whether to eliminate deductions and close loopholes in the tax code.
Norquist insists that eliminating the loopholes without offsetting them by tax cuts would violate the pledge, but others say the deductions violate conservative principles by inserting the hand of government into the market.
"We look at things differently than Grover does," Chris Chocola, president of the free-market group the Club for Growth, told Yahoo News. "We have always been advocates of lowering the marginal rate, broadening the base, eliminating what we think are market-distorting tax credits and loopholes."
Chocola said the approach would produce benefits that could please both parties: It would force companies that manipulate the system of loopholes to pay more in taxes and increase revenue by growing the economy.
Matt Kibbe, who heads the tea party organizing network FreedomWorks, agreed that any deal that scrapped the thousands of tax code loopholes would be progress.
"An ideal tax code doesn't choose favorites, and it shouldn't matter that you have a great lobbyist in Washington, D.C.," Kibbe said. "I think all conservatives generally support fundamental tax reform—they don't like the idea that GE gets a special credit for green energy or that some other company gets different treatment from anyone else."
Despite the differences, Norquist remains the man in the spotlight. He seems to be enjoying every minute of it, using the opportunity to promote his organization and raising his own profile.
On Wednesday, Norquist presided over a gathering of conservative activists who piled into a massive conference room at ATR's Washington office. The hump-day confab, known as "The Wednesday Meeting," puts what Hillary Clinton famously called "the vast right-wing conspiracy" in one room for an hour and a half every week.
The meeting is strictly off the record, but reporters can attend if they agree not to disclose details of the discussion.
On each chair in the room, representatives stacked press releases, pamphlets and articles promoting their organizations. From ATR, everyone received a full-page, color picture of former Republican President George H.W. Bush, whose bid for a second term was foiled after he agreed to raise taxes. It was a warning to anyone who might be thinking of breaking the pledge.
This week's meeting was standing-room only, and Norquist, wearing a headset microphone, was in his element, roaring through presentations. Seated at the head of the table, he called on activists, think-tankers and members of Congress to share how they are promoting the conservative movement.
Despite his image as a puppeteer who controls the strings of Republican lawmakers, Norquist is not so much the Secret Master of the GOP as he is the Grand Facilitator of the coalitions that hold it together.
In the meantime, he doesn't seem to mind the confusion.
BEIJING (AP) — The online version of China's Communist Party newspaper has hailed a report by The Onion naming North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as the "Sexiest Man Alive" — not realizing it is satire.
The People's Daily on Tuesday ran a 55-page photo spread on its website in a tribute to the round-faced leader, under the headline "North Korea's top leader named The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive for 2012."
Quoting The Onion's spoof report, the Chinese newspaper wrote, "With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman's dream come true."
"Blessed with an air of power that masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side, Kim made this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle, and, of course, that famous smile," the People's Daily cited The Onion as saying.
The photos the People's Daily selected include Kim on horseback squinting into the light and Kim waving toward a military parade. In other photos, he is wearing sunglasses and smiling, or touring a facility with his wife.
People's Daily could not immediately be reached for comment. A man who answered the phone at the newspaper's duty office said he did not know anything about the report and requested queries be directed to their newsroom on Wednesday morning.
It is not the first time a state-run Chinese newspaper has fallen for a fictional report by the just-for-laughs The Onion.
In 2002, the Beijing Evening News, one of the capital city's biggest tabloids at the time, published as news the fictional account that the U.S. Congress wanted a new building and that it might leave Washington. The Onion article was a spoof of the way sports teams threaten to leave cities in order to get new stadiums.
Two months ago, Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency reprinted a story from The Onion about a supposed survey showing that most rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama. It included a quote from a fictional West Virginia resident saying he'd rather go to a baseball game with Ahmadinejad because "he takes national defense seriously."
NEW YORK (AP) — A Canadian actress accused of stalking Alec Baldwin has been locked up again.
New York City police detectives arrested Genevieve Sabourin (JEHN'-uh-veev SAB'-oo-rin) at a Manhattan courthouse Tuesday after she apparently violated a restraining order.
Baldwin and Sabourin met on the set of the 2002 sci-fi comedy "The Adventures of Pluto Nash," in which he had a cameo and she was a publicist. Baldwin says they had dinner together in 2010.
A judge had ordered Sabourin to stay away from Baldwin following her arrest earlier this year on harassment charges. Recent news reports said she had been tweeting angry comments about the "30 Rock" star's new wife.
Sabourin was in court Tuesday after her lawyer asked to be taken off the case. Her new lawyer has no comment on her re-arrest.
NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials say 1 in 5 new HIV infections occur in a tiny segment of the population — young men who are gay or bisexual.
The government on Tuesday released new numbers that spotlight how the spread of the AIDS virus is heavily concentrated in young males who have sex with other males. Only about a quarter of new infections in the 13-to-24 age group are from injecting drugs or heterosexual sex.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said blacks represented more than half of new infections in youths. The estimates are based on 2010 figures.
Overall, new U.S. HIV infections have held steady at around 50,000 annually. About 12,000 are in teens and young adults, and most youth with HIV haven't been tested.
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Online:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns
Arizona Sen. John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee—flanked by fellow committee …The White House sharply escalated its attacks Tuesday on Republicans trying to stop Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice from succeeding Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. Press secretary Jay Carney described GOP lawmakers as being gripped by a politically fueled "obsession" with a series of television appearances Rice made shortly after the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in which she wrongly suggested the attack had stemmed from a demonstration over an anti-Muslim video rather than a terrorist assault.
Carney's comments came after Rice met privately on Capitol Hill with Republican senators who have said they intend to block her nomination if President Barack Obama chooses her to replace Clinton as the nation's top diplomat. Rice also acknowledged for the first time, in a written statement issued by her office, that her initial public comments on the Benghazi assault were wrong because there had been no protest outside the compound.
Carney said the U.S. still does not know who carried out the assault, which claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But he said GOP focus on Rice's early statements was a politically motivated distraction from efforts to identify those responsible for the killings.
"The questions that remain to be answered have to do with what happened in Benghazi, who was responsible for the deaths of four Americans, including our ambassador, and what steps we need to take to ensure that something like that doesn't happen again." Carney said.
In appearance after appearance, Rice said that American intelligence had pinned the blame on the assault on extremists who took advantage of a demonstration outside the facility.
Tuesday, Rice acknowledged the information initially provided by the intelligence community was wrong.
"Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in this process, and the administration updated Congress and the American people as our assessments evolved," Rice said.
Rice, accompanied by Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, met with Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who have accused Rice (and the Obama administration in general) of misleading the public by tying the assault to the video. Republicans have suggested the administration hoped to blunt the potential political impact of the attack—the first to claim the life of an American ambassador in 30 years—shortly before the presidential election.
"Bottom line: I'm more disturbed now than I was before," Graham told reporters after the meeting. "We are significantly troubled by many of the answers that we got and some that we didn't get," McCain said.
Carney shot back, saying there were "no unanswered questions" about Rice's early televised statements.
"The focus on—some might say obsession on—comments made on Sunday shows seems to me and to many to be misplaced," Carney said. "I know that Sunday shows have vaunted status in Washington, but they have almost nothing to do—in fact zero to do—with what happened in Benghazi."
And neither, to hear Carney tell it, did Rice.
"Ambassador Rice has no responsibility for collecting, analyzing and providing intelligence, nor does she have responsibility as the United States ambassador to the United Nations for diplomatic security around the globe," he said.
So why, then, did the White House anoint Rice the administration point person to answer questions about a possible intelligence failure and consular security? Why not Secretary of State Clinton? Director of National Intelligence James Clapper? Defense Secretary Leon Panetta? National Security Adviser Tom Donilon?
"She is a principal on the president's foreign policy team," Carney said.
He added, "To this day it is the assessment of this administration and of our intelligence community … that they acted at least in part in response to what they saw happening in Cairo and took advantage of that situation."
In other words, according to one well-placed source, the perpetrators of the attack may have concluded that anger at the video gave them the maximum opportunity to get sympathy or support across the Muslim world, and might even inspire copycat attacks. Rice's much-dissected Sept. 16 comments broadly follow those lines.
Obama has fiercely defended Rice, while carefully declining to say whether he has chosen her to succeed Clinton. Another leading contender is the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry.
McCain and Graham have pledged to try to filibuster her confirmation, but they are well short of the votes needed to do so.
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