Lunar New Year celebrants get no rest after Western holidays

At her store in Chinatown, Tracy Tieu replaces red and green Christmas trinkets with red and gold Lunar New Year decorations as she greets shoppers fresh from Las Vegas.

A mother strokes a jade dragon leaping from a dark wood emblem. A man and his wife unfurl scrolls bearing symbols of wealth. A student buys assorted little Buddhas, lining them up by belly size.

Inside the shop, Wing Ha Hing Gifts & Arts, Asian travelers this past weekend talk about how many aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents they expect to host at noisy family gatherings.

One new year celebration may have ended — but for many Southern Californians the bustle of preparing for the Lunar New Year continues full force, with no time for holiday fatigue.

"We can't afford it," Tieu says. "We go with the season.... I order supplies six months in advance."

At crowded shopping plazas in Los Angeles' Chinatown and Koreatown, the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County's Little Saigon, seasonal foods line bakery shelves, holiday music plays on open-air speakers and Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese consumers are spending big — yet again — on their most important annual celebration.

The Year of the Snake begins Feb. 10. Those born under this sign are believed to have a good temper and strong passion, but can be suspicious.

The Lunar New Year is a time when debts are paid, arguments are laid to rest, hair is cut and homes are painted and polished and rituals are followed to sweep away ill fortune and welcome good luck. Doors and windows are decorated with themed images of happiness, prosperity and longevity, and incense is lighted in temples to pay respect to ancestors.

In the narrow, colorful shop her father opened in 1990, Tieu is surrounded by flowers, feng shui diaries, floating lotus candles and other traditional gifts.

Regina Gomez, a Chinese American from Nevada, was one of those hunting for bargains along Chinatown's main drag Sunday. She stopped at Tieu's store to prepare for the coming festivities. "When we buy for entertainment, it's better to buy for it here. It's less," she says, browsing with her kids, Shelby and Brittany. "I came to L.A. for Christmas and knew I should take a look before going home."

On the first morning of the new year, as everyone exchanges gifts and good wishes, Tieu plans to pass out crisp dollar bills in lucky red envelopes to some 20 nieces and nephews. "I have to give each of them at least $20 – anything smaller just isn't acceptable."

"It doesn't matter what we do or how much we gave for the previous holidays," adds Angie Tieu, her younger sister. "We have to remember the Lunar New Year, it's tradition, and we must spend."

On top of the financial costs, the extended holiday season carries health costs, said Calvin Ho, founder of the Plaid Bag Connection, a blog exploring the links between Asian groups outside their ethnic homeland. "We've been eating since the Moon Festival" in September "to Halloween, to Thanksgiving to Christmas and forward. Everyone overindulges because it's impossible not to."

Ho, who doesn't eat fried foods, says "with the holidays it's really hard to avoid it."

"Everything involves family," he said. "And when you are making multiple visits to different members of family day after day, you must sit down and share a meal. I get all my cravings in and it'll last until next fall."

Visiting Chinatown with her husband on Sunday, Elisa Aquino, who is half-Chinese, said she intends to serve dim sum dishes when she invites friends and relatives to her Carson home. "We go for a bang. High impact, lots of songs, lots of jokes.... I'm not cooking. We order," she adds.

Stephanie Yuan, working a souvenir kiosk nearby, said sales are brisk post-Christmas. "We are sold out of snake lucky charms," she says proudly, noting that the item features the animal highlighted in the 2013 Chinese zodiac.

"Here, you buy this one," she tells passing tourists, pointing to an Asian version of the Cheshire cat, complete with battery-operated paw, happy face and money pouch. On its white ceramic body is the Chinese character for $1 million. "It will lead you to a good way."

Merchants like Yuan and Thanh Ly, of neighboring Tambaba Fashion, can't take Lunar New Year off. "It's the day to sell," Ly says, folding traditional dresses made in Vietnam and Hong Kong. "We would like to have a vacation but we think about our living first. Some people buy last-minute."

Kevin Vong of Fresno isn't one of those. Outside Lien Hoa BBQ, he loads his truck with a whole roast pig, costing $195, carting it to a gathering to pray for the souls of his ancestors. He does this at the end of the Western new year, then again at the Lunar New Year. "I do not forget," he says. "I want someone doing that for me later. Years later."

anh.do@latimes.com

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The Best of Exploration: Top 8 Stories of Space Exploration in 2012

Our recap of the year’s best exploratory exploits continues today with a look at the biggest developments in space exploration. 2012 saw the stunning debut of new spacecraft (Curiosity), the continued contributions of geriatric ones (Voyager), and the first full year since the end of the Space Shuttle program. Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society nominated 8 particularly meaningful developments from the last twelve months.

Image: Dreier’s pick for image of the year, a Cassini photograph of Saturn’s north pole through an infrared filter. (Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / Emily Lakdawalla)

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Is Tom Cruise still a go-to action hero? Hollywood, “Jack Reacher” say yes

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Given his age and the tough year he’s had in the tabloids, is Tom Cruise still a go-to guy when Hollywood is looking for an action hero?

The answer is yes, based on the performance of his current movie, Paramount‘s “Jack Reacher.” It’s taken in $ 45 million in the 10 days since opening with $ 15.6 million in a very crowded and competitive holiday market. Its second week was a solid $ 14 million, and it’s added $ 22 million from overseas.

Holiday movies tend to have legs and “Reacher” has yet to roll out in the majority of major foreign territories, so both of those numbers, particularly the international, will be growing. All signs point to it surpassing $ 200 million at the worldwide box office. That’s not a blockbuster figure, and Paramount is staying mum on a sequel, but with a $ 60 million budget, “Jack Reacher” will make money for Paramount.

There were questions coming in. With his divorce from Katie Holmes and subsequent custody battle, Cruise is carrying plenty of public relations baggage. His foray earlier this year into musicals with “Rock of Ages” was critically applauded but proved a box-office dud. That’s on top of his well-known support for Scientology.

He’s 50 now, which might be the new 40 in the real world, but is starting to get on in years in the realm of action heroes. Daniel Craig is 44. Jeremy Renner is 41. We are a long way from “Top Gun” – that was 1986 – so it probably won’t be too, too long until “The Expendables” franchise comes calling for Cruise.

But in the meantime, “Reacher” is going to be profitable for Paramount and Cruise’s portrayal of the tough, ex-military drifter has drawn critical kudos, so there’s a bit of momentum now. And it’s clear from his upcoming schedule that Hollywood is still convinced he can carry an action film.

Next for Cruise will be two sci-fi movies: Universal’s “Oblivion” is due in April and “All You Need is Kill” is set for March 2014 from Warner Bros. After that, there’s a potential “Van Helsing” remake at Universal and “Mission: Impossible 5″ is on Paramount‘s 2015 slate.

His recent track record at the box office, particularly when you look at his performance in the action genre, suggests the studios are making a pretty good bet.

“Rock of Ages” may have crumpled, but “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” was a huge hit for Paramount, taking in nearly $ 700 million worldwide in 2011. “Knight & Day,” from Fox in 2010, and “Valkyrie,” from United Artists in 2008, both made over $ 200 million worldwide.

Supporting roles in “Tropic Thunder” and “Lions for Lambs” preceded those, but those came on the heels of two Paramount movies: “Mission Impossible 3,” which made nearly $ 400 million worldwide in 2006, and “War of the Worlds,” which did $ 592 million in the previous year.

The bottom line: Hollywood is still convinced you can still take Tom Cruise, movie action hero, to the bank.

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F.D.A. Approves Sirturo, a New Tuberculosis Drug

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that it had approved a new treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis that can be used as an alternative when other drugs fail.

The drug, to be called Sirturo, was discovered by scientists at Janssen, the pharmaceuticals unit of Johnson & Johnson, and is the first in a new class of drugs that aims to treat the drug-resistant strain of the disease.

Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease that is transmitted through the air and usually affects the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body, including the brain and kidneys. It is considered one of the world’s most serious public health threats. Although rare in the United States, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a growing problem elsewhere in the world, especially in poorer countries. About 12 million people worldwide had tuberculosis in 2011, according to Johnson & Johnson, and about 630,000 had multidrug-resistant TB.

A study in September in The Lancet found that almost 44 percent of patients with tuberculosis in countries like Russia, Peru and Thailand showed resistance to at least one second-line drug, or a medicine used after another drug had already failed.

Treating drug-resistant tuberculosis can take years and can cost 200 times as much as treating the ordinary form of the disease

“This is quite a milestone in the story of therapy for TB,” Dr. Paul Stoffels, the chief scientific officer at Johnson & Johnson, said in an interview. He said the approval was the first time in 40 years that the agency had approved a drug that attacked tuberculosis in a different way from the current treatments on the market. Sirturo works by inhibiting an enzyme needed by the tuberculosis bacteria to replicate and spread throughout the body.

Sirturo, also known as bedaquiline, would be used on top of the standard treatment, which is a combination of several drugs. Patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis often must be treated for 18 to 24 months.

Even as it announced the approval, however, the F.D.A. also issued some words of caution.

“Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis poses a serious health threat throughout the world, and Sirturo provides much-needed treatment for patients who have don’t have other therapeutic options available,” Edward Cox, director of the office of antimicrobial products in the F.D.A.’s center for drug evaluation and research, said in a statement. “However, because the drug also carries some significant risks, doctors should make sure they use it appropriately and only in patients who don’t have other treatment options.”

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen opposed approval in a letter to the F.D.A. in mid-December, saying that the results of a limited clinical trial showed that patients using bedaquiline were five times as likely to die than those on the standard drug regimen to treat the disease.

“Given that bedaquiline belongs to an entirely new class of drugs, it is entirely feasible that death in some cases was due to some unmeasured toxicity of the drug,” the letter said.

Sirturo carries a so-called black box warning for patients and health care professionals that the drug can affect the heart’s electrical activity, which could lead to an abnormal and potentially fatal heart rhythm. The warning also notes deaths in patients treated with Sirturo. Nine patients who received Sirturo died compared with two patients who received a placebo. Five of the deaths in the Sirturo group and all of the deaths in the placebo arm seemed to be related to tuberculosis, but no consistent reason for the deaths in the remaining Sirturo-treated patients could be identified.

Doctors Without Borders and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, both active in the fight against tuberculosis and other global diseases, applauded the F.D.A.’s decision.

Jan Gheuens, interim director of the TB Program for the Gates Foundation, called it a “long-awaited event” and said the fight against TB had not benefited from new drugs in the way H.I.V. had. Beyond the benefits of the drug itself, he said the quick approval process could be a model for other drugs sorely needed in the developing world.

He also suggested, however, that more trials should be conducted to get a better understanding of the side effects that led to the black box warning.

The F.D.A. approved bedaquiline under an accelerated program that allows the agency to conditionally approve drugs that are viewed as filling unmet medical needs with less than the usual evidence that they work. The drug’s approval was based on studies that showed it killed bacteria more quickly than a control group taking the standard regimen, but it did not measure whether in the end patients actually fared better on bedaquiline. Johnson & Johnson will conduct larger clinical trials to investigate whether the drug performs as predicted.

In a statement responding to Public Citizen’s letter, a spokeswoman for Johnson & Johnson said the company was committed to supporting appropriate use of Sirturo and would “work to ensure Sirturo is used only where treatment alternatives are not available.”

Dr. Stoffels said the hope was that other new tuberculosis drugs would also be approved that, when used in combination with bedaquiline, could shorten and simplify the current standard of treatment. “That is still a long time away,” he acknowledged, but “this is a first step in a new regimen for TB.”

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A Year of Market Gains, Despite Political Turmoil

A year ago, some thought 2012 was destined to be the year that the euro zone — and maybe even the entire European Union — broke up. The banks that supported their governments, and that in turn depended on those same governments for bailouts if they went broke, were deemed to be particularly vulnerable to disaster.

It did not happen, and while the euro zone countries hardly solved their economic problems, the Continent’s stock markets turned out to be good investments in 2012, with bank shares among the best performers. The same could be said about the United States, where the broad stock market posted double-digit gains and Bank of America shares doubled in 2012, albeit from a very depressed level.

Over all, the Standard & Poor’s Euro 350-stock index was up 13 percent for the year, measured in euros, and more than 15 percent measured in dollars. The S.& P. 500 wound up the year with a gain of 13 percent.

It may have been typical of 2012 that it was politicians and central bankers — not economic news or corporate developments — that dominated investor attention. As the year ended, the difference was that it was Washington, not Europe, where the squabbles were taking place.

For much of the year, it appeared that the European squabbles were leading nowhere, and by midsummer, markets were pessimistic about the outcome. Finally, Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, took decisive action to assure that the banks — and the governments that depended on them — would have access to funds. That did not turn around recessionary conditions in much of the euro zone, but it was enough to turn around financial markets. Prices of government bonds in many of the most troubled countries began to rise. Those who bet that Europe would solve its problems did well in the financial markets.

The accompanying charts show the performance of stocks in 10 economic sectors in both Europe and the United States, both in 2012 and since Oct. 9, 2007, the day that world stock markets peaked before what would turn out to be a world recession and credit crisis.

What stands out is how well financial stocks and consumer discretionary stocks did during 2012. The latter stocks are things purchased by consumers that are likely to do better when the economy is improving. In the United States, the two best such stocks in the S.& P. 500 were PulteGroup, a homebuilder, and Whirlpool, an appliance maker.

But while Europe did better in 2012, it remains much farther from recovering all of the losses experienced since the 2007 peak. The American index is just 9 percent lower than that, while the European index is about a third below where it was then. The only sectors that have completely made up their losses on both sides of the Atlantic are health care and consumer staples. In the United States, the consumer discretionary and information technology sectors have also done so, although the latter sector’s performance is largely because of Apple, whose shares are more than three times as high as they were in 2007.

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Hillary Clinton hospitalized with blood clot after concussion

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was hospitalized in New York on Sunday after doctors discovered a blood clot stemming from her concussion, the State Department said.

Clinton, 65, has been out of the public eye for the better part of December, at first because of what the State Department said was a stomach virus and later because of the concussion, which she suffered after fainting at her Washington home.

According to a spokesman, the clot was discovered in the course of a follow-up exam for the concussion at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She is being treated with anticoagulants and will remain at the hospital for the next 48 hours so doctors can monitor her response to the medication.

“Her doctors will continue to assess her condition, including other issues associated with her concussion,” Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines said in a statement. “They will determine if any further action is required.”

The State Department had said earlier that Clinton was set to resume her normal office schedule this week.

Earlier this month, the former first lady and New York senator had cited her concussion in canceling her scheduled appearance before a congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including the ambassador.

A separate high-level investigative panel issued a scathing report blaming the State Department for security lapses. Clinton took responsibility, writing to the congressional committee that she  accepted "every one" of the Accountability Review Board's 29 recommendations.

She also praised the board, saying it had offered "a clear-eyed look at serious, systematic challenges that we have already begun to fix." 

Some conservatives had accused her of faking her illness to avoid testifying before the committee -- an accusation that the State Department strenuously denied. 

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Wired Science's Top Image Galleries of the Year

Many of our most popular posts are image galleries, and this year our readers favorite collections included microscope photos, doomsday scenarios, auroras and lots of images of Earth from space.

The satellite image above of Brasilia is part of the most popular post of the year.

Above:

I think it's safe to say that our readers like looking at images of Earth from space almost as much as we do. Satellite imagery was the subject of four of Wired Science's 10 most popular galleries of 2012, with this gallery of planned cities topping the list.

See the full gallery.

Image: NASA/USGS

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Comedian Katt Williams arrested in LA

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Katt Williams, the comedian who has repeatedly found himself on the wrong side of the law, is out on bail after being arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of child endangerment and possession of a stolen gun.

Police Officer Norma Eisenman says Williams was taken into custody Friday after the LA County Department of Children and Family Services did a welfare check at his home. Authorities found more than one firearm, one of which had been reported stolen.

Eisenman says the DCFS did not specify how many children lived at the home or whether they were removed.

The 41-year-old was arrested this month on a felony warrant related to a police chase. In November, he was accused of hitting a man on the head with a bottle during a fight.

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Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Revolutionary in the Study of the Brain, Dies at 103

Fabio Campana/European Pressphoto Agency

Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian Nobel laureate, in 2007.

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks, opening the way for the study of how those processes can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer, died on Sunday at her home in Rome. She was 103.

Her death was announced by Mayor Gianni Alemanno of Rome.

“I don’t use these words easily, but her work revolutionized the study of neural development, from how we think about it to how we intervene,” said Dr. Gerald D. Fishbach, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at Columbia.

Scientists had virtually no idea how embryo cells built a latticework of intricate connections to other cells when Dr. Levi-Montalcini began studying chicken embryos in the bedroom of her house in Turin, Italy, during World War II. After years of obsessive study, much of it at Washington University in St. Louis with Dr. Viktor Hamburger, she found a protein that, when released by cells, attracted nerve growth from nearby developing cells.

In the early 1950s, she and Dr. Stanley Cohen, a biochemist also at Washington University, isolated and described the chemical, known as nerve growth factor — and in the process altered the study of cell growth and development. Scientists soon realized that the protein gave them a new way to study and understand disorders of neural growth, like cancer, or of degeneration, like Alzheimer’s disease, and to potentially develop therapies.

In the years after the discovery, Dr. Levi-Montalcini, Dr. Cohen and others described a large family of such growth-promoting agents, each of which worked to regulate the growth of specific cells. One, called epidermal growth factor and discovered by Dr. Cohen, plays a central role in breast cancer; in part by studying its behavior, scientists developed drugs to combat the abnormal growth.

In 1986, Dr. Levi-Montalcini and Dr. Cohen shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work.

Dr. Cohen, now an emeritus professor at Vanderbilt University, said Dr. Levi-Montalcini possessed a rare combination of intuition and passion, as well as biological knowledge. “She had this feeling for what was happening biologically,” he said. “She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was.”

One of four children, Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin on April 22, 1909, to Adamo Levi, an engineer, and Adele Montalcini, a painter, both Italian Jews who traced their roots to the Roman Empire. In keeping with the Victorian customs of the time, Mr. Levi discouraged his three daughters from entering college, fearing that it would interfere with their lives as wives and mothers.

It was not a future that Rita wanted. She had decided to become a doctor and told her father so. “He listened, looking at me with that serious and penetrating gaze of his that caused me such trepidation,” she wrote in her autobiography, “In Praise of Imperfection” (1988). He also agreed to support her.

She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Turin medical school in 1936. Two years later, Mussolini issued a manifesto barring non-Aryan Italians from having professional careers. She began her research anyway, setting up a small laboratory in her home to study chick embryos, inspired by the work of Dr. Hamburger, a prominent researcher in St. Louis who also worked with the embryos.

During World War II, the family fled Turin for the countryside, and in 1943 the invasion by Germany forced them to Florence. The family returned at the close of the war, in 1945, and Dr. Hamburger soon invited Dr. Levi-Montalcini to work for a year in his lab at Washington University.

She stayed on, becoming an associate professor in 1956 and a full professor in 1958. In 1962, she helped establish the Institute of Cell Biology in Rome and became its first director. She retired from Washington University in 1977, becoming a guest professor and splitting her time between Rome and St. Louis.

Italy honored her in 2001 by making her a senator for life.

An elegant presence, confident and passionate, she was a sought-after speaker until late in life. “At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20,” she said in 2009.

She never married and had no children. In addition to her autobiography, she was the author or co-author of dozens of research studies and received numerous professional awards, including the National Medal of Science.

“It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain,” Dr. Levi-Montalcini wrote in her autobiography, “and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 30, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mussolini issued a manifesto barring non-Aryan Italians from having professional careers. It was 1938, not 1936.

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Webster, N.Y., sniper's ex-neighbor charged with buying him guns

WASHINGTON — A former neighbor of the Webster, N.Y., sniper who killed two volunteer firefighters on Christmas Eve illegally bought the guns used in the killing, federal authorities charged Friday.

Dawn M. Nguyen, 24, of Greece, N.Y., was charged in federal court with acting as a straw purchaser for William Spengler, who as a felon could not legally buy guns for himself. Spengler was convicted of killing his grandmother in 1980. Nguyen also faces state felony charges on allegations of falsifying business records.

U.S. Atty. William J. Hochul Jr. said Nguyen purchased a Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle and a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun from the Gander Mountain store in Rochester on June 6, 2010. But in truth, he said, she "knowingly made a false statement in connection with the purchase of the two firearms" and actually was acquiring them for Spengler.

She did not immediately enter a plea in the more serious federal case, in which she could face 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Spengler fatally shot himself after killing volunteer firefighters Michael Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowka and wounding two other firefighters and an off-duty police officer.

Authorities say Spengler created a ruse by setting his car on fire in a blaze that spread to his home and six other houses on Lake Road in Webster. Spengler then opened fire on the emergency crew as they arrived at the neighborhood on the shore of Lake Ontario.

Sean J. Martineck, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said in a court affidavit that authorities learned of Nguyen from a suicide note Spengler left behind in which he said he obtained the weapons from his neighbor's daughter.

Nguyen lived next door to Spengler in 2008, two years after he was paroled from prison for killing his grandmother.

When officials spoke with Nguyen, Martineck said, she admitted that Spengler accompanied her to the gun shop and that he "picked out the firearms Nguyen purchased." But she said she wanted the weapons for her own personal safety and that they later were stolen from her vehicle. She never reported them stolen, however.

Finally, Martineck said, Nguyen "admitted that she purchased the guns for the guy who was her old neighbor," even though on the federal purchase form she had stated the weapons were for her own use.

richard.serrano@latimes.com

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So Last Year: RIM Dumps Cloud Hosting Acquisition

Last year, RIM — maker of the BlackBerry smartphone line — acquired NewBay, a cloud hosting service, for $100 million. But on Friday, Synchronoss, a mobile software company, announced that it is buying NewBay from RIM for $55 million cash.

The New Bay acquisition was seen as a way for RIM to compete with other file hosting and sync services, such as Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Google Docs (now Google Drive). File sync services were hot at the time. Box was rumored to have turned down a $500,000+ acquisition deal, and Dropbox reportedly turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer from Apple. And Citrix acquired ShareFile, a lesser-known player.

RIM had been acquiring companies like contact management firm Gist and appointment management tool Tungle, suggesting the company was building out a stack of cloud-based mobile apps that would be independent of its own BlackBerry line. Meanwhile, rumor spread that the company would release a cross-platform version of BlackBerry Messenger as competing services like Beluga, GroupMe, and Kik began to challenge the product’s dominance.

As RIM bled market share to Apple and Samsung, these moves suggested that RIM could save itself by becoming a hardware-agnostic mobile software company. That hasn’t happened.

Although RIM began supporting Android and iOS on its popular BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the device management market has dozens of other players, including Good, which actually licenses RIM technology, and Microsoft, which has only recently joined the fray. And RIM shuttered both Gist and Tungle earlier this year to focus on developing similar BlackBerry-only products, and denies that a cross-platform version is on the roadmap.

With the sale of NewBay, it appears any hope for a cross-platform RIM is dead.

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Fans to join Beyonce onstage at Super Bowl

NEW YORK (AP) — All the single ladies — and fellas — will have a chance to join Beyonce onstage at the upcoming Super Bowl.

Pepsi announced Friday that 100 fans will hit the stage when the Grammy-winning diva performs on Feb. 3 at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. A contest that kicks off Saturday will allow fans to submit photos of themselves in various poses, including head bopping, feet tapping and hip shaking. Those pictures will be used in a TV ad introducing Beyonce’s halftime performance, and 50 people — along with a friend — will be selected to join the singer onstage.

The photo contest — at www.pepsi.com/halftime — ends Jan. 19, but Jan. 11 is the cut-off date for those interested in appearing onstage with Beyonce.

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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Senator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center.

NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients.

While the medical center had been treating many outpatients, it had farmed out surgery to other hospitals, which created scheduling problems that forced many patients to have their operations on nights and weekends, when staffing is traditionally low. Some patients and doctors had to postpone not just elective but also necessary operations for lack of space at other hospitals.

The medical center’s Tisch Hospital, its major hospital for inpatient services, between 30th and 34th Streets on First Avenue, had been closed since the hurricane knocked out power and forced the evacuation of more than 300 patients, some on sleds brought down darkened flights of stairs.

“I think it’s a little bit of a miracle on 34th Street that this happened so quickly,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said Thursday.

Mr. Schumer credited the medical center’s leadership and esprit de corps, and also a tour of the damaged hospital on Nov. 9 by the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, W. Craig Fugate, whom he and others escorted through watery basement hallways.

“Every time I talk to Fugate there are a lot of questions, but one is, ‘How are you doing at NYU?’ ” the senator said.

The reopening of Tisch to surgery patients and associated services, like intensive care, some types of radiology and recovery room anesthesia, was part of a phased restoration that will continue. Besides providing an essential service, surgery is among the more lucrative of hospital services.

The hospital’s emergency department is expected to delay its reopening for about 11 months, in part to accommodate an expansion in capacity to 65,000 patient visits a year, from 43,000, said Dr. Andrew W. Brotman, its senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy.

In the meantime, NYU Langone is setting up an urgent care center with 31 bays and an observation unit, which will be able to treat some emergency patients. It will initially not accept ambulances, but might be able to later, Dr. Brotman said. Nearby Bellevue Hospital Center, which was also evacuated, opened its emergency department to noncritical injuries on Monday.

Labor and delivery, the cancer floor, epilepsy treatment and pediatrics and neurology beyond surgery are expected to open in mid-January, Langone officials said. While some radiology equipment, which was in the basement, has been restored, other equipment — including a Gamma Knife, a device using radiation to treat brain tumors — is not back.

The flooded basement is still being worked on, and electrical gear has temporarily been moved upstairs. Mr. Schumer, a Democrat, said that a $60 billion bill to pay for hurricane losses and recovery in New York and New Jersey was nearing a vote, and that he was optimistic it would pass in the Senate with bipartisan support. But the measure’s fate in the Republican-controlled House is far less certain.

The bill includes $1.2 billion for damage and lost revenue at NYU Langone, including some money from the National Institutes of Health to restore research projects. It would also cover Long Beach Medical Center in Nassau County, Bellevue, Coney Island Hospital and the Veterans Affairs hospital in Manhattan.

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Senate Leaders Set to Work on a Last-Minute Tax Agreement

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

In a televised statement at the White House after meeting with Congressional leaders on Friday, President Obama said he was “modestly optimistic” that an agreement could be reached.

WASHINGTON — At the urging of President Obama, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate set to work Friday night to assemble a last-minute tax deal that could pass both chambers of Congress and avert large tax increases and budget cuts next year, or at least stop the worst of the economic punch from landing beginning Jan. 1.

After weeks of fruitless negotiations between the president and Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama turned to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader — two men who have been fighting for dominance of the Senate for years — to find a solution. The speaker, once seen as the linchpin for any agreement, essentially ceded final control to the Senate and said the House would act on whatever the Senate could produce.

“The hour for immediate action is here. It is now,” Mr. Obama said in the White House briefing room after an hourlong meeting with the two Senate leaders, Mr. Boehner and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader. He added, “The American people are not going to have any patience for a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy, not right now.”

Senate Democrats want Mr. McConnell to propose an alternative to Mr. Obama’s final offer and present it to them in time for a compromise bill to reach the Senate floor on Monday and be sent to the House. Absent a bipartisan deal, Mr. Reid said Friday night that he would accede to the president’s request to put to a vote on Monday Mr. Obama’s plan to extend tax cuts for all income below $250,000 a year and to renew expiring unemployment compensation for as many as two million people, essentially daring Republicans to block it and allow taxes to rise for most Americans.

Bipartisan agreement still hinged on the Senate leaders finding an income level above which taxes will rise on Jan. 1, most likely higher than Mr. Obama’s level of $250,000. Quiet negotiations between Senate and White House officials were already drifting up toward around $400,000 before Friday’s White House meeting. The two sides were also apart on where to set taxes on inherited estates.

But senators broke from a long huddle on the Senate floor with Mr. McConnell on Friday night to say they were more optimistic that a deal was within reach. Mr. McConnell, White House aides and Mr. Reid were to continue talks on Saturday, aiming for a breakthrough as soon as Sunday.

“We’re working with the White House, and hopefully we’ll come up with something we can recommend to our respective caucuses,” said Mr. McConnell, who has played a central role in cutting similar bipartisan deals in the past.

The emerging path to a possible resolution, at least on Friday, appeared to mirror the end of the protracted stalemate over the payroll tax last year. In that conflict, House Republicans refused to go along with a short-term extension of the cut, but Mr. McConnell reached an agreement that permitted such a measure to get through the Senate, and the House speaker essentially forced members to accept it from afar, after they had left forChristmas recess.

This time, the consequences are more significant, with more than a half-trillion dollars in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts just days from going into force, an event most economists warn would send the economy back into recession if not quickly mitigated. With the House set to return to the Capitol on Sunday night, Mr. Boehner has said he would place any Senate bill before his chamber and let the vote proceed and the chips fall. The House could also change the legislation and return it to the Senate.

If the Senate is able to produce a bill that is largely bipartisan, there is a strong belief among House Republicans that the same measure would easily pass the House, with a large number of Republicans. While Mr. Boehner was unable to muster enough votes for his alternative bill that would have protected tax cuts for income under $1 million, that was because the measure lacked Democratic support, and was roughly a few dozen votes shy of passage with Republicans alone.

Helene Cooper and Ron Nixon contributed reporting.

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Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf dies at 78

Retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who topped an illustrious military career by commanding the U.S.-led international coalition that drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in 1991 but kept a low public profile in controversies over the second Gulf War against Iraq, died Thursday. He was 78.

Schwarzkopf died in Tampa, Fla., where he had lived in retirement, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to release the information publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A much-decorated combat soldier in Vietnam, Schwarzkopf was known popularly as "Stormin' Norman" for a notoriously explosive temper.

He served in his last military assignment in Tampa as commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, the headquarters responsible for U.S. military and security concerns in nearly 20 countries from the eastern Mediterranean and Africa to Pakistan.

Schwarzkopf became “CINC-Centcom” in 1988, and when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait three years later to punish it for allegedly stealing Iraqi oil reserves, he commanded Operation Desert Storm, the coalition of some 30 countries organized by President George H.W. Bush that succeeded in driving the Iraqis out.

“Gen. Norm Schwarzkopf, to me, epitomized the 'duty, service, country' creed that has defended our freedom and seen this great nation through our most trying international crises," Bush said in a statement. "More than that, he was a good and decent man — and a dear friend."

At the peak of his postwar national celebrity, Schwarzkopf — a self-proclaimed political independent — rejected suggestions that he run for office, and remained far more private than other generals, although he did serve briefly as a military commentator for NBC.

While focused primarily in his later years on charitable enterprises, he campaigned for President George W. Bush in 2000 but was ambivalent about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying he doubted victory would be as easy as the White House and Pentagon predicted.

In early 2003 he told the Washington Post the outcome was an unknown: “What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan,” he said.

Initially Schwarzkopf had endorsed the invasion, saying he was convinced that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had given the United Nations powerful evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. After that proved false, he said decisions to go to war should depend on what U.N. weapons inspectors found.

He seldom spoke up during the conflict, but in late 2004, he sharply criticized then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon for mistakes that included inadequate training for Army reservists sent to Iraq and for erroneous judgments about Iraq.

"In the final analysis I think we are behind schedule. … I don't think we counted on it turning into jihad," he said in an NBC interview.

Schwarzkopf was born Aug. 24, 1934, in Trenton, N.J., where his father, Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., founder and commander of the New Jersey State Police, was then leading the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnap case, which ended with the arrest and 1936 execution of German-born carpenter Richard Hauptmann for stealing and murdering the famed aviator's infant son.

The elder Schwarzkopf was named Herbert, but when the son was asked what his H stood for, he would reply, "H." Although reputed to be short-tempered with aides and subordinates, he was a friendly, talkative and even jovial figure who didn't like "Stormin' Norman" and preferred to be known as "the Bear," a sobriquet given him by troops.

He also was outspoken at times, including when he described Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, as "a horse's ass" in an Associated Press interview.

As a teenager Norman, accompanied his father to Iran, where the elder Schwarzkopf trained the country's national police force and was an adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the young Shah of Iran.

Young Norman studied there and in Switzerland, Germany and Italy, then followed in his father's footsteps to West Point, graduating in 1956 with an engineering degree. After stints in the U.S. and abroad, he earned a master's degree in engineering at the University of Southern California and later taught missile engineering at West Point.

In 1966 he volunteered for Vietnam and served two tours, first as a U.S. adviser to South Vietnamese paratroops and later as a battalion commander in the U.S. Army's Americal Division. He earned three Silver Stars for valor — including one for saving troops from a minefield — plus a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and three Distinguished Service Medals.

While many career officers left military service embittered by Vietnam, Schwarzkopf was among those who opted to stay and help rebuild the tattered Army into a potent, modernized all-volunteer force.

After Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Schwarzkopf played a key diplomatic role by helping to persuade Saudi Arabia's King Fahd to allow U.S. and other foreign troops to deploy on Saudi territory as a staging area for the war to come.

On Jan. 17, 1991, a five-month buildup called Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm as allied aircraft attacked Iraqi bases and Baghdad government facilities. The six-week aerial campaign climaxed with a massive ground offensive on Feb. 24-28, routing the Iraqis from Kuwait in 100 hours before U.S. officials called a halt.

Schwarzkopf said afterward he agreed with Bush's decision to stop the war rather than drive to Baghdad to capture Saddam, as his mission had been only to oust the Iraqis from Kuwait.

But in a desert tent meeting with vanquished Iraqi generals, he allowed a key concession on Iraq's use of helicopters, which later backfired by enabling Saddam to crack down more easily on rebellious Shiites and Kurds.

While he later avoided the public second-guessing by academics and think tank experts over the ambiguous outcome of Gulf War I and its impact on Gulf War II, he told the Washington Post in 2003, “You can't help but… with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, 'Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'"

After retiring from the Army in 1992, Schwarzkopf wrote a best-selling autobiography, "It Doesn't Take A Hero." Of his Gulf war role, he said, "I like to say I'm not a hero. I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war." He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and honored with decorations from France, Britain, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain.

Schwarzkopf was a national spokesman for prostate cancer awareness and for Recovery of the Grizzly Bear, served on the Nature Conservancy board of governors and was active in various charities for chronically ill children.

"I may have made my reputation as a general in the Army, and I'm very proud of that," he once told the AP. "But I've always felt that I was more than one-dimensional. I'd like to think I'm a caring human being. … It's nice to feel that you have a purpose."

Schwarzkopf and his wife, Brenda, had three children: Cynthia, Jessica and Christian.

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John McAfee Tells World How He Fooled Cops and Escaped Belize

One of the reporters who snuck out of Belize with John McAfee earlier this month said the adventure was “dangerous, amazing, touching, and many other adjectives that I cannot remember right now.”

Turns out that the words that eluded him were “rainy” and “lucky.”

On the day after Christmas, McAfee posted a long blog post describing how he gave Belizean authorities the slip and snuck out of the country to avoid questioning (and in his estimation, wrongful prosecution) following the murder of his neighbor, Greg Faull.

“It’s visually interesting and it is mostly a happy story — in line with most Christmas stories,” he wrote.

The former software executive describes an operation that was heavy in advance planning and trickery. He says he planted a lookalike (“my double — a man I have known for over 30 years and who years ago and who years ago legally changed his name to John McAfee”) and had him picked up by authorities in the northern Belize-Mexico border, while he and a group of friends and reporters loaded up a truck and headed in the opposite direction, to a southern town called Punta Gorda. With the news that he’d been arrested broadcasting on a local news station, McAfee figured that checkpoint security would relax.

McAfee followed another friend who was driving one of his pickup trucks to avoid checkpoints on the highway. This was another decoy, McAfee said. “If they stopped the truck, I knew the checkpoint officers would be swarming all over it. Subsequent traffic would be likely to be waved through.”

But then, he also had a secret weapon: the weather. McAfee made sure that his dash happened on a rainy day. “In Belize, no checkpoint officers will ever stop a car in the rain,” he wrote.

He says he blew through all three highway checkpoints on that early December day without ever being stopped.

From Punta Gorda, he his 20-year-old girlfriend Samantha Vanegas and two Vice reporters sailed into Livingston, Guatemala.

A few days later, he was arrested in Guatemala, after the Vice reporters he was traveling with inadvertently disclosed his location. He was deported to Miami on December 12 and is now slowly driving west along back roads, his hair color changed, “staying at cut-rate motels and eating at Denny’s.”

He says he plans to tell his side of the story more completely — including, no doubt, a shot or two at his nemesis, the government of Belize — next Thursday. “People sometimes forget that I founded one of the largest computer security firms in the world, and I didn’t achieve that by not knowing how to access protected or secret information,” he wrote on Monday.

“I wear construction clothes one day, farmers clothes the next, and the next day dress like a traveling salesman,” he wrote on his blog. “I think my best friends would not recognize me.”

Or so he says.

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‘Rescue Me’ singer Fontella Bass dies

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Fontella Bass, a St. Louis-born soul singer who hit the top of the R&B charts with “Rescue Me” in 1965, has died. She was 72.

Bass died Wednesday night at a St. Louis hospice of complications from a heart attack suffered three weeks ago, her daughter, Neuka Mitchell, said. Bass had also suffered a series of strokes over the past seven years.

“She was an outgoing person,” Mitchell said of her mother. “She had a very big personality. Any room she entered she just lit the room up, whether she was on stage or just going out to eat.”

Bass was born into a family with deep musical roots. Her mother was gospel singer Martha Bass, one of the Clara Ward Singers. Her younger brother, David Peaston, had a string of R&B hits in the 1980s and 1990s. Peaston died in February at age 54.

Bass began performing at a young age, singing in her church’s choir at age 6. She was surrounded by music, often traveling on national tours with her mother and her gospel group.

Her interest turned from gospel to R&B when she was a teenager and she began her professional career at the Showboat Club in north St. Louis at age 17. She eventually auditioned for Chess Records and landed a recording contract, first as a duet artist. Her duet with Bobby McClure, “Don’t Mess Up a Good Thing,” reached No. 5 on the R&B charts and No. 33 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1965.

She co-wrote and later that year recorded “Rescue Me,” reaching No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 4 on the Billboard pop singles chart. Bass’s powerful voice bore a striking resemblance to that of Aretha Franklin, who is often misidentified as the singer of that chart-topping hit.

Bass had a few other modest hits but by her own accounts developed a reputation as a troublemaker because she demanded more artistic control, and more money for her songs. She haggled over royalty rights to “Rescue Me” for years before reaching a settlement in the late 1980s, Mitchell said. She sued American Express over the use of “Rescue Me” in a commercial, settling for an undisclosed amount in 1993.

“Rescue Me” has been covered by many top artists, including Linda Ronstadt, Cher, Melissa Manchester and Pat Benatar. Franklin eventually sang a form of it too — as “Deliver Me” in a Pizza Hut TV ad in 1991.

Bass lived briefly in Europe before returning to St. Louis in the early 1970s, where she and husband Lester Bowie raised their family. She recorded occasionally, including a 1995 gospel album, “No Ways Tired,” that earned a Grammy nomination.

Bass was inducted into the St. Louis Hall of Fame in 2000.

Funeral arrangements for Bass were incomplete. She is survived by four children. Bowie died in 1999.

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7-Eleven Stores Focus on Healthier Food Options

The chain that is home of the Slurpee, Big Gulp and self-serve nachos with chili and cheese is betting that consumers will stop in for yogurt parfaits, crudité and lean turkey on whole wheat bread.

7-Eleven, the convenience store chain, is restocking its shelves with an eye toward health. Over the last year, the retailer has introduced a line of fresh foods for the calorie conscious and trimmed down its more indulgent fare by creating portion-size items.

The change is as much about consumers’ expanding waistlines as the company’s bottom line. By 2015, the retailer aims to have 20 percent of sales come from fresh foods in its American and Canadian stores, up from about 10 percent currently, according to a company spokesman.

“We’re aspiring to be more of a food and beverage company, and that aligns with what the consumer now wants, which is more tasty, healthy, fresh food choices,” said Joseph M. DePinto, the chief executive of 7-Eleven, a subsidiary of the Japanese company, Seven & i Holdings.

Convenience stores have typically been among the most nimble of retailers. In the 1980s, they added Pac-Man arcade games as a way to keep customers in stores longer and to buy more merchandise. They installed A.T.M.’s a decade later, taking a slice of the transaction fees. More recently, they built refrigerated dairy cases, with milk, eggs, cheese and other staples.

But just as they have taken business from traditional supermarkets, convenience stores have faced increased competition from the likes of Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, which offer a basic menu of fresh foods for consumers on the go.

At the same time, a major profit driver for convenience stores — cigarettes — has been in steady decline over the last decade as the rate of smoking has dropped in the United States.

Fresh foods can help offset some of those losses. The markup on such merchandise can be significant, bolstering a store’s overall profits. It’s also a fast-growing category.

“If you can figure out how to deliver consistent quality and the products consumers want, fresh food is attractive because margins are higher, and it addresses some of the competitive issues you’re facing,” said Richard Meyer, a longtime consultant for the convenience store industry. “But it’s not easy to do.”

7-Eleven has been selling fresh food since the late 1990s. But much of its innovation has been limited to the variety of hot dogs spinning on the roller grill or the breakfast sandwiches languishing beneath a heating lamp.

As 7-Eleven refocuses its lineup, the retail chain has assembled a team of culinary and food science experts to study industry trends and develop new products. Such groups have been around for a while at fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and packaged-goods manufacturers like Kraft. But it’s a relatively new concept for players like 7-Eleven, which have typically relied on their suppliers to provide product innovation.

“We’re working to create a portfolio of fresh foods,” said Anne Readhimer, senior director of fresh food innovation, who joined the company in May from Yum Brands, where she had worked on the KFC and Pizza Hut brands. “Some will be for snacking, some for a quick meal, but we hope everything we offer our guests is convenient and tasty.”

One new menu item just hitting stores is a Bistro Snack Protein Pack, which includes mini pita rounds, cheddar cheese cubes, grapes, celery, baby carrots and hummus. The meal in a box, similar to one carried by Starbucks, is part of a broader menu with healthier items under 400 calories.

The company is also taking existing products and retooling them for single portions. For example, customers can now buy jelly doughnuts and tacos, in mini sizes.

“There are definitely customers who want healthy options, but there are also lots of customers who are excited about the new sandwich options that aren’t low calorie — and minidoughnuts are doing very well,” said Lori Primavera, senior manager of fresh food innovation at 7-Eleven, who previously worked for Food and Drink Resources, a consulting firm for restaurant companies.

Norman Jemal, a franchisee, said sales of the new products are growing steadily in the three 7-Eleven stores that he owns in Manhattan. “At first, people are surprised when they come in here and see a bag of carrots and celery,” Mr. Jemal said. “They say, ‘I came in here for a bag of chips — I can’t believe you have fruit cups or yogurt cups.’ ”

He said the Yoplait Parfait, a cup of vanilla yogurt topped with fresh strawberries or blueberries and granola, is his best-selling fresh food item, while the 7 Smart turkey sandwich is his top sandwich.

The fresh food in Mr. Jemal’s stores and other locations around the country are supplied from a system of 29 commissaries and bakeries that fulfill orders from 7-Eleven. They tailor menu items for specific markets. In the Miami area, they produce a hot Cuban sandwich with ham, cheese, pickles and mustard. The Turkey Gobbler with turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce sells in Northeastern stores around the holidays.

Each store has a data system that allows it to see exactly what is selling, which helps manage waste. Stores can track consumers’ purchase habits over a month, and adjust their orders based on those behaviors.

“In this 28-day cycle, I know I sold 3,563 bananas to customers in this store,” said Todd Ferguson, who owns five 7-Eleven locations in Las Vegas.

Mr. Ferguson has owned 7-Eleven franchises since 1986, and he said the variety of fresh food options in the stores is far better than before. The category already accounts for 20 percent of his sales, and his goal is to reach a quarter of sales volume.

“We used to be a place for people to buy beer, wine, cigarettes, candy and chips, and people would occasionally ask where they could go to get something to eat,” Mr. Ferguson said. “We’re no longer getting that question because now you can get something to eat right here.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 27, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified a 7-Eleven franchisee in Las Vegas. He is Todd Ferguson, not Tom Ferguson.

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Latest Netflix Disruption Highlights Challenges of Cloud Computing

For some on Christmas Eve, “White Christmas” was a blackout on Netflix.

That’s because problems with Amazon’s cloud computing service, which provides storage and computing power for all kinds of Web sites and services, caused Netflix to go down for much of the day.

In updates on a Web site that reports on the status of its online services, Amazon traced the trouble to Elastic Load Balancing, a part of its service that helps spread heavy traffic among multiple servers to prevent overload. The company gave few details about the problems in its data center in Northern Virginia beyond this.

Social networks filled with complaints. Some customers also complained that Amazon’s own streaming service, Amazon Prime, was down. Amazon said it had fixed the problem completely by the afternoon of Christmas Day, and Netflix said it had restored its services to most of the affected consumers by late Christmas Eve. But the episode highlighted how consumers are increasingly using “the cloud.”

As more everyday devices, appliances and even automobiles rely on services connected to the Internet, consumers expect those services to be available at all times. Yet all sorts of disruptions — harsh weather conditions or an apparent overload — can knock a service out for hours.

In October, problems with the same Amazon data center in Virginia took down Reddit, Foursquare and Heroku. The instance was explained on the status Web site as “degraded performance” in some parts of Amazon’s storage service. In June, a lightning storm hit the Virginia data center, taking Netflix as well as Pinterest, Instagram and other sites off line for hours. That time, too, customers were offered little insight into what had happened.

In April 2011, an Amazon failure took down many smaller sites that had rented cloud storage space from the Internet giant. That time, the companies that were most affected were start-ups that were less likely to pay for so-called redundancies, or backup systems that kick in when a service fails. Netflix was not affected then, and said at the time it was because it had taken advantage of the redundancies that Amazon offers.

Netflix has said that it has built several redundancies into its cloud-based system. For instance, it stores its data across multiple “zones,” so if there is a failure in one zone, it can retry in another. It says it also spends money on more capacity than it needs, so that if there are large spikes in customer activity, the service is less likely to go down.

Joris Evers, a Netflix spokesman, declined to elaborate on why Netflix went down despite these safeguards. He said the company was investigating the cause and would do what it could to prevent the interruption from recurring.

“We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix-capable devices on Christmas morning could watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused Christmas Eve,” Mr. Evers said.

Tera Randall, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the company has been “heads down” to ensure services are running smoothly and that a full summary of the incident would be published in a few days.

Amazon is one of the biggest players in online services, hosting data storage and computation for hundreds of companies, including Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest. Once a sideline Amazon set up six years ago, the cloud service has since exploded into a business that is expected to bring in about $1 billion to the company this year.

Other companies offer similar services, notably Google, which introduced its competitor in June. Microsoft is also in the business with Windows Azure.

Although the service disruptions may annoy some companies and their customers, it’s unlikely many businesses will end their partnerships with Amazon in light of this latest Netflix failure, said James McQuivey, an analyst for Forrester Research. He added that it was unlikely that a temporary service failure for Netflix was going to cause many to cancel subscriptions.

He said companies can pay extra to Amazon to add safeguards that increase reliability of their online services, but they typically choose to save costs and take the risk of their services going down temporarily. He said that Amazon has been especially popular among businesses because it has been gradually improving its services and lowering its costs.

Businesses, “of course, are going to say, ‘Gee, Amazon, what’s going on?’ ” Mr. McQuivey said. “But in reality they’re all getting such a great deal. I don’t see them getting that upset about it.”

For consumers, though, it may be a different matter. On Christmas Eve, Merrilee and Alex Barton were watching an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” when their Netflix feed started to stammer and finally froze, then began to buffer excessively. “It would try to load and get to about 2 to 7 percent of the way through and then just hang there for five minutes,” Mrs. Barton said.

Eventually the two said they gave up and — with nothing else going on in Farmingdale, N.Y. — decided to “nerd it up.” They played a few games of Minecraft, a video game in which the players can build whatever they wish. In the game, all the technology worked.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 28, 2012

An article on Thursday about problems with Amazon’s cloud computing service referred incorrectly at one point to the company’s public comments on the issue. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, Tera Randall, an Amazon spokeswoman, said that the company was working to ensure services were running smoothly and that Amazon would publish a full summary within a few days. It is not the case that Amazon “did not offer an official statement or explanation.” The article also misstated the month that problems at an Amazon data center in Virginia took down Reddit, Foursquare and Heroku. That occurred in October, not last month.

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Deadly storm moves on to Northeast

A massive storm system upended post-Christmas travel plans Wednesday as it marched toward the Northeast after dumping snow and sleet on the middle of the country and producing tornadoes through the South on Christmas Day.

The storm stretched from Michigan to Florida and had been blamed for seven deaths so far.

The nation's airlines had canceled more than 1,800 flights and delayed more than 9,000 by at least 15 minutes, mostly into and out of Dallas, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Indianapolis and New York, according to the airline monitoring website Flightstats.com.

PHOTOS: Northeast braces for winter storm

Los Angeles International Airport, the nation's fifth-busiest, has been largely spared the impact of the storm, with only a handful of delays and cancellations Wednesday, to airports including New York's John F. Kennedy International and Chicago's O'Hare International.

The storm could dump 12 to 18 inches of snow from the lower Great Lakes to northern New England, the National Weather Service said.

A tornado watch had been in effect for part of the day in eastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina.

"It is a significant storm in terms of its size and its range of impacts from severe weather to winter weather," said Chris Vaccaro, spokesman for the weather service.

The storm was expected to clear most of the mid-Atlantic states Wednesday night, the service said, and northern New England could expect steady snow starting Thursday morning.

On Christmas Day alone, the weather service received 34 reports of tornadoes in eastern Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, Vaccaro said.

A twister touched down in Mobile, Ala., on Tuesday, blowing roofs off homes and knocking down trees and power lines. Several mobile homes north of the city were toppled, but no serious injuries were reported.

"Right now it's cleanup and damage assessment," said Donald Leeth, plans and operations officer with the Mobile County Emergency Management Agency.

The storm caused tens of thousands of customers to lose power across Alabama, but most had it back by Wednesday.

Snow and ice hit Arkansas hard, with about 200,000 customers losing power. Gov. Mike Beebe declared a statewide disaster Wednesday. The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management said two counties had opened shelters for those without heat.

The department received a report that a man died when a tree fell on his house in Saline County. Two children died on Christmas when the car they were in crossed the center line of an icy Arkansas highway and struck an SUV.

In Oklahoma, two people were killed in separate crashes Tuesday.

On Christmas, the storm's winds were blamed for toppling a tree onto a pickup in Texas, killing the driver, and for knocking another tree onto a house in Louisiana, killing a man there, the Associated Press reported.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant declared a state of emergency for several counties after the storm injured more than 25 people.

The New York City Office of Emergency Management issued a travel advisory for Wednesday evening through Thursday morning, citing forecasts of "snow with sleet and freezing rain." The area was also under a high wind warning, with gusts of up to 60 mph possible, Vaccaro said.

The worst of the weather should be gone by Friday, he said. "Come Friday morning, it will largely be a sunny day across the eastern third of the country."

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

Times staff writer Hugo Martin contributed to this report.

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Google Music Self-Censoring Naughty Lyrics for Some Users

Cee-Lo’s F*#$ You has a great beat and all, but it’s not the type of thing you want queuing up with grandma in the room. No worries. Google’s got you covered. Some Google Music users complain the service is randomly replacing expletive-intensive songs with the duller, cleaner versions.

The Google Music Scan and Match feature has earned the wrath of some users by replacing explicit versions of songs with the kid-friendly clean versions. Even less fun, Droid Life reports that some people are seeing clean versions of songs replaced with explicit versions. That’s bad news when you expect to hear the sanitized version of Radiohead’s Creep while hanging out with your kids. Now you have to spend the rest of winter vacation explaining to them why they can’t sing how so f’ing special they are on the playground.

Google Music isn’t the first service to experience trouble determining which version of a song is being matched. Apple’s iTunes Match experienced the same issue when it launched. The problem stems from a few issues. First, the metadata for a particular song might not be correct, or it might be missing vital information. Like which version of the album the song was ripped or purchased from.

Also, it’s tougher for Google Music and other song-matching services to determine if a song is clean or explicit if a curse word only appears once or twice during the song. Cee-Lo’s F*#$ You is easier to rate because the change takes place throughout the entire song.

If you find that your favorite 2 Live Crew songs are completely unlistenable, Google told Wired that listeners could change the version of the song from within the Google Music player. In the Google Music Player, right-click the track with the incorrect version. Select “Fix incorrect match” from the contextual menu. The actual song file will be uploaded to the service instead of using Google’s matching system.

Not exactly user friendly, but better than listening to beeps over your favorite swear words. Everyone knows all the best music is full of swear words.

Roberto is a Wired Staff Writer for Gadget Lab covering augmented reality, home technology, and all the gadgets that fit in your backpack. Got a tip? Send him an email at: roberto_baldwin [at] wired.com.

Read more by Roberto Baldwin

Follow @strngwys on Twitter.

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Police investigate NBC News anchor for showing gun clip

(Reuters) – NBC News anchor David Gregory is being investigated by police after displaying what he said was a high-capacity gun clip on Sunday’s broadcast of “Meet the Press,” Washington‘s Metropolitan Police Department said Wednesday.

Gregory held up what appeared to be a 30-round gun magazine – which would be barred under Washington municipal code – while hosting the nationally broadcast interview with National Rifle Association Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre.

“Here is a magazine for ammunition that carries 30 bullets,” Gregory said as he held aloft the black cartridge, according to video posted on the network’s website.

“Now isn’t it possible that, if we got rid of these, if we replaced them and said ‘Well, you could only have a magazine that carries five bullets or ten bullets,’ isn’t it just possible that we can reduce the carnage in a situation like Newtown?” Gregory asked LaPierre.

“I don’t think it’s what will work,” LaPierre responded.

The network had contacted the police department prior to Sunday’s broadcast “inquiring if they could use a high capacity magazine for the segment,” police spokesman Araz Alali said on Wednesday.

“NBC was informed that possession of a high-capacity magazine was not permissible and their request was denied.”

Alali, the police spokesman, declined to elaborate on the investigation into NBC.

Washington’s municipal code prohibits possession, sale or transfer of “any large capacity ammunition feeding device, regardless of whether the device is attached to a firearm.”

The maximum penalty for conviction on such a charge is a $ 1,000 fine and one year in prison.

NBC spokeswoman Erika Masonhall, contacted by email, said the network had no comment on the investigation.

After the broadcast, which originated in Washington, a number of bloggers and websites questioned Gregory’s actions and the legality of the gun clip.

(Reporting by Chris Francescani and Paul Eckert; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Andrew Hay and Gunna Dickson)

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New York’s Mental Health System Thrashed by Services Lost to Storm

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Dr. Richard Rosenthal of Continuum Health Partners, which owns Beth Israel, Roosevelt and St. Luke's hospitals, said he noticed more mentally ill people in the streets now  than he had in years.

When a young woman in the grip of paranoid delusions threatened a neighbor with a meat cleaver one Saturday last month, the police took her by ambulance to the nearest psychiatric emergency room. Or rather, they took her to Beth Israel Medical Center, the only comprehensive psychiatric E.R. functioning in Lower Manhattan since Hurricane Sandy shrank and strained New York’s mental health resources.

The case was one of 9,548 “emotionally disturbed person” calls that the Police Department answered in November, and one of the 2,848 that resulted in transportation to a hospital, a small increase over a year earlier.

But the woman was discharged within hours, to the shock of the mental health professionals who had called the police. It took four more days, and strong protests from her psychiatrist and caseworkers, to get her admitted for two weeks of inpatient treatment, said Tony Lee, who works for Community Access, a nonprofit agency that provides supportive housing to people with mental illness, managing the Lower East Side apartment building where she lives.

Psychiatric hospital admission is always a judgment call. But in the city, according to hospital records and interviews with psychiatrists and veteran advocates of community care, the odds of securing mental health treatment in a crisis have worsened significantly since the hurricane. The storm’s surge knocked out several of the city’s largest psychiatric hospitals, disrupted outpatient services and flooded scores of coastal nursing homes and “adult homes” where many mentally ill people had found housing of last resort.

One of the most affected hospitals, Beth Israel, recorded a 69 percent spike in psychiatric emergency room cases last month, with its inpatient slots overflowing. Instead of admitting more than one out of three such cases, as it did in November 2011, it admitted only one out of four of the 691 emergency arrivals this November, records show. Capacity was so overtaxed that ambulances had to be diverted to other hospitals 15 times in the month, almost double the rate last year, in periods typically lasting for eight hours, officials said.

Dr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum Health Partners, Beth Israel’s parent organization, said he was proud of how much Continuum’s hospitals had done to handle psychiatric overflow since storm damage shuttered Bellevue Hospital Center, the city’s flagship public hospital; NYU Langone Medical Center; and the Veterans Affairs Hospital. But these days, he said, as he walks on Amsterdam Avenue between Continuum’s Roosevelt hospital on West 59th Street and its St. Luke’s hospital on West 114th Street, he notices more mentally ill people in the streets than he has seen in years.

“When you have the most vulnerable folks, all you need is one chink in the system and you lose them,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “Whether they lost their housing, or the outpatient services they usually go to were closed and they were lost to follow-up, they have become disconnected, with predictable results.”

Similar patterns are playing out in Brooklyn, where Maimonides Medical Center has been overwhelmed with mental health emergencies from the Coney Island vicinity since Coney Island Hospital, one of the city’s largest acute care psychiatric hospitals, suspended operations, hospital officials said.

“Triage has reached a different level: You have to get sicker to get in,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the chairman of psychiatry at Maimonides, citing a 56 percent increase in psychiatric emergency room visits there from Oct. 26 to Dec. 7, compared with the same period last year, and a 24 percent rise in admissions. The increase in admissions was possible only with emergency permission from the state to exceed licensed limits.

“Not only is there decreased capacity, because Bellevue and Coney Island are off line,” Dr. Kolodny added, “but there’s increased demand because the storm or the loss of their residence has been a stressor for mental illness.”

The storm battered a mental health system that still relies heavily on private nursing homes and substandard adult homes to house people with mental illness. Such institutions have a sordid history of neglect and exploitation, and the courts have repeatedly found that their overuse by the state isolated thousands of people in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Plans are under way to increase supportive housing — dwellings where mentally ill people can live relatively independently, with support services. But even before Hurricane Sandy, the expansion fell far short of demand.

The storm underscored the fragility of the system. Many disabled evacuees who were sent first to makeshift school shelters lost access to the psychiatric medications that kept their symptoms at bay, Dr. Kolodny said. Even those lucky enough to have the drugs they need are at greater risk of relapse as they experience crowded living conditions. “If they’re now sleeping in a gym with 100 people, that can tip them over the edge and start making them really paranoid,” he said.

On Staten Island, where the chief of psychiatry at Richmond University Medical Center says psychiatric resources have been stretched to the limit, clergy members report that mentally ill people transferred to a large adult home in New Brighton from one that was washed away in Far Rockaway, Queens, are now showing up at church rectories, begging for socks and underwear.

“It’s heartbreaking, because they just found us by chance,” said Margaret Moschetto, a missionary at the Church of Assumption-St. Paul in New Brighton. “They were just walking around the neighborhood. They really didn’t know where they were.”

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