Madonna fan guilty in NYC resisting arrest trial

NEW YORK (AP) — A former firefighter with a crush on Madonna has been convicted of resisting arrest outside her former New York City apartment building as he spray-painted poster boards with love notes.

A jury delivered its verdict Friday in Robert Linhart's trial. He could face up to a year in jail.

Defense lawyer Lawrence LaBrew tells the New York Post (http://bit.ly/ZgI4jl) that Linhart will appeal.

Linhart was arrested in September 2010. Police say he parked his SUV outside the singer's Manhattan apartment, laid out a tarp and wrote out such messages as "Madonna, I need you."

Jurors told the Post they felt it was fine for Linhart to express himself to the Material Girl. But they said they believed police testimony that he resisted arrest by flailing his arms.

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Malaria vaccine a letdown for infants

LONDON (AP) — An experimental malaria vaccine once thought promising is turning out to be a disappointment, with a new study showing it is only about 30 percent effective at protecting infants from the killer disease.

That is a significant drop from a study last year done in slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — though that is still far below the protection provided from most vaccines. According to details released on Friday, the three-shot regimen reduced malaria cases by about 30 percent in infants aged 6 to 12 weeks, the target age for immunization.

Dr. Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders, described the vaccine's protection levels as "unacceptably low." She was not linked to the study.

Scientists have been working for decades to develop a malaria vaccine, a complicated endeavor since the disease is caused by five different species of parasites. There has never been an effective vaccine against a parasite. Worldwide, there are several dozen malaria vaccine candidates being researched.

In 2006, a group of experts led by the World Health Organization said a malaria vaccine should cut the risk of severe disease and death by at least half and should last longer than one year. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and kills more than 650,000 people every year, mostly young children and pregnant women in Africa. Without a vaccine, officials have focused on distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, spraying homes with pesticides and ensuring access to good medicines.

In the new study, scientists found babies who got three doses of the vaccine had about 30 percent fewer cases of malaria than those who didn't get immunized. The research included more than 6,500 infants in Africa. Experts also found the vaccine reduced the amount of severe malaria by about 26 percent, up to 14 months after the babies were immunized.

Scientists said they needed to analyze the data further to understand why the vaccine may be working differently in different regions. For example, babies born in areas with high levels of malaria might inherit some antibodies from their mothers which could interfere with any vaccination.

"Maybe we should be thinking of a first-generation vaccine that is targeted only for certain children," said Dr. Salim Abdulla of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, one of the study investigators.

Results were presented at a conference in South Africa on Friday and released online by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study is scheduled to continue until 2014 and is being paid for by GlaxoSmithKline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

"The results look bad now, but they will probably be worse later," said Adrian Hill of Oxford University, who is developing a competing malaria vaccine. He noted the study showed the Glaxo vaccine lost its potency after several months. Hill said the vaccine might be a hard sell, compared to other vaccines like those for meningitis and pneumococcal disease — which are both effective and cheap.

"If it turns out to have a clear 30 percent efficacy, it is probably not worth it to implement this in Africa on a large scale," said Genton Blaise, a malaria expert at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, who also sits on a WHO advisory board.

Eleanor Riley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the vaccine might be useful if used together with other strategies, like bed nets. She was involved in an earlier study of the vaccine and had hoped for better results. "We're all a bit frustrated that it has proven so hard to make a malaria vaccine," she said. "The question is how much money are the funders willing to keep throwing at it."

Glaxo first developed the vaccine in 1987 and has invested $300 million in it so far.

WHO said it couldn't comment on the incomplete results and would wait until the trial was finished before drawing any conclusions.

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How 'poor judgment' felled military star Petraeus

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Petraeus was a star on the battlefield, commanding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but was undone by "poor judgment" in engaging in an extramarital affair that led to his downfall as CIA director.

Just two days after his 60th birthday, Petraeus stepped down from the spy agency where he had held the top office since September 6, 2011.

"After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation," Petraeus told the shadow warriors he commanded at CIA.

It was a stunning downfall for a revered military man who was seen as one of the top American leaders of his generation and was once considered a potential contender for the White House.

Petraeus was credited with pulling Iraq from the brink of all-out civil war and for battlefield successes in Afghanistan after overseeing a surge of 30,000 troops ordered by President Barack Obama in late 2009. He became known for counter-insurgency strategies that were seen as gaining ground against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"I don't think he was professionally overrated. His were genuine accomplishments," said James Carafano, a war historian with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

At the time of his nomination to the CIA post, some Washington insiders had said the White House wanted to find a prominent position for Petraeus to ensure he would not be recruited by Republicans as a challenger to the 2012 Obama-Biden ticket.

When he was nominated to lead the CIA there were some concerns in intelligence circles that the high-profile four-star Army general might not be able to lead from the shadows as appropriate for a spy chief.

But once he took over the head office at the U.S. spy agency, Petraeus kept a decidedly low public profile.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, expressed regret about the resignation of "one of America's best and brightest" and said it was an "enormous loss" for the country.

"At CIA, Director Petraeus gave the agency leadership, stature, prestige and credibility both at home and abroad. On a personal level, I found his command of intelligence issues second to none," she said.

RESIGNATION ACCEPTED

After accepting his resignation about a year-and-a-half after nominating Petraeus to the CIA post, Obama said: "By any measure, he was one of the outstanding General officers of his generation, helping our military adapt to new challenges, and leading our men and women in uniform through a remarkable period of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he helped our nation put those wars on a path to a responsible end."

Earlier this week, in a Newsweek article entitled "General David Petraeus's Rules for Living," he listed 12 lessons for leadership. Number 5 was: "We all will make mistakes. The key is to recognize them and admit them, to learn from them, and to take off the rear­ view mirrors - drive on and avoid making them again."

In 2010 Petraeus stepped into the breach as the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to replace General Stanley McChrystal who was fired by Obama in a scandal over an article in which McChrystal and his aides made mocking comments about the president and some of his top advisers.

In 2009 Petraeus was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer and underwent radiation treatment. The media-friendly general joked at that time at a Washington event that reporters were only gathered "to see if the guy is still alive."

Petraeus, born in Cornwall, New York, lives in Virginia with his wife Holly. They have two grown children, a son who was an Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, and a daughter.

Petraeus's wife, Holly, is an activist and volunteer who champions military families, and she continued that work after her husband retired from the military and moved to the CIA.

She currently is assistant director of the office of servicemember affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she tries to keep unscrupulous lenders from taking advantage of military personnel. The bureau was championed by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts this week.

Holly Petraeus is the daughter of four-star General William Knowlton, who was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when Petraeus was a cadet.

She briefed the press at the Pentagon on her efforts recently and was introduced by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who called her "a true friend of the Department of Defense and a dedicated member of our military family."

Petraeus has four Defense Distinguished Service Medal awards, three Distinguished Service Medal awards, the Bronze Star Medal for valor, and the State Department Distinguished Service Award.

He has a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University.

(Additional reporting by David Alexander, Matt Spetalnick and Diane Bartz; Editing by Warren Strobel and Jackie Frank)

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Aging former Chinese leaders retain huge influence

BEIJING (AP) — When China's ranking communists file into the Great Hall of the People, you can spot the invited guests, the retired but still-influential men in their 70s, 80s and even 90s. Most of them no longer dye their hair the requisite jet black of Beijing's working leaders.

These men typically have no official posts anymore, but continue to make their preferences known and work behind the scenes to promote their proteges and allies to top posts on the party's Politburo.

Foremost among them is ex-President Jiang Zemin. An aide helped him to his seat next to outgoing President Hu Jintao at Thursday's opening of a pivotal Communist Party congress. Jiang watched the proceedings through enormous glasses.

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US video game sales drop 25 percent in October

NEW YORK (AP) — A research firm says U.S. retail sales of new video game hardware, software and accessories fell 25 percent in October.

The drop marks the 11th straight month of declining sales for physical game products. Many gamers are waiting for big holiday releases such as Activision Blizzard Inc.‘s “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.”

The NPD Group said Thursday that sales fell to $ 755.5 million from $ 1 billion a year earlier.

Sales of video games themselves, excluding PC titles, fell 25 percent to $ 432.6 million. Sales of hardware such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 fell 37 percent to $ 187.3 million. Sales of accessories, meanwhile, grew 5 percent to $ 135.6 million.

NPD estimates that retail sales account for about half of all video game spending. The rest is downloads, apps and the like.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Calif. city plans to provide transgender surgeries

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco is preparing to become the first U.S. city to provide and cover the cost of sex reassignment surgeries for uninsured transgender residents.

The city's Health Commission voted Tuesday to create a comprehensive program for treating transgender people experiencing mental distress because of the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities. San Francisco already provides transgender residents with hormones, counseling and routine health services, but has stopped short of offering surgical interventions, Public Health Director Barbara Garcia said Thursday after the vote was announced.

The idea for a new program that included surgeries came out of conversations between public health officials and transgender rights advocates who wanted mastectomies, genital reconstructions and other surgeries that are recommended for some transgender people covered under San Francisco's 5-year-old universal health care plan.

At the urging of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center, the commission agreed this week to drop sex reassignment surgery from the list of procedures specifically excluded from the Healthy San Francisco plan.

But Garcia described the move as "a symbolic process" for now because the city currently does not have the expertise, capacity or protocols in place to provide the surgeries through its clinics and public hospital.

"The community felt the exclusion on Healthy San Francisco was discriminatory and we wanted to change that as the first step," she said.

Instead of expanding the existing plan, the Health Commission approved the establishment of a separate program that covers all aspects of transgender health, including gender transition. Garcia hopes to have it running by late next year, but said her department first needs to study how many people it would serve, how much it would cost, who would perform the surgeries and where they would be performed.

"Sex reassignment surgery is not the end all. It's one service that some transgender people want and some don't," she said. "We can probably manage this over the next three years without much of a budget increase because we already have these (other) services covered."

San Francisco in 2001 became the first city in the country to cover sex reassignment surgeries for government employees. Last year, Portland, Ore. did the same. The number of major U.S. companies covering the cost of gender reassignment surgery for transgender workers also doubled last year, reflecting a decades-long push by transgender activists to get insurance companies to treat such surgeries as medically necessary instead of elective procedures.

Kathryn Steuerman, a member of a transgender health advocacy group in San Francisco, said the city's latest move would help residents avoid going into debt to finance operations related to gender transition, as she did.

"I am filled with hope and gratitude that we are achieving this level of support for the well-being of the transgender community," Steuerman said.

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Obama breaks down while speaking to staff, volunteers

The morning after he won re-election, an emotional President Barack Obama credited his youthful staff of several hundred with running a campaign that will "go on in the annals of history."

"What you guys have accomplished will go on in the annals of history and they will read about it and they'll marvel about it," said Obama told his team Wednesday morning inside the Chicago campaign headquarters, tears streaming down his face.

"The most important thing you need to know is that your journey's just beginning. You're just starting. And whatever good we do over the next four years will pale in comparison to whatever you guys end up accomplishing in the years and years to come," he said.

The moment, captured by the Obama campaign's cameras and posted online, offers a rare glimpse at the president unplugged and emotional. During the first four years of his presidency, Obama has never been seen publicly crying.

He first came to Chicago, he told the campaign staff, "knowing that somehow I wanted to make sure that my life attached itself to helping kids get a great education or helping people living in poverty to get decent jobs and be able to work and have dignity. And to make sure that people didn't have to go to the emergency room to get health care."

"The work that I did in those communities changed me much more than I changed those communities because it taught me the hopes and aspirations and the grit and resilience of ordinary people," he said, as senior strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager Jim Messina looked on. "And it taught me the fact that under the surface differences, we all have common hopes and we all have common dreams. And it taught me something about how I handle disappointment and what it meant to work hard on a common endeavor, and I grew up."

"So when I come here and I look at all of you, what comes to mind is, it's not that you guys remind me of myself, it's the fact that you are so much better than I was in so many ways. You're smarter, you're so better organized, you're more effective," he said.

Obama said he expected many of those who helped to re-elect him will assume new roles in progressive politics, calling that prospect a "source of my strength and inspiration."

Senior campaign officials said Thursday that the Obama campaign infrastructure - the field offices and network of hundreds of thousands of volunteers - would undergo a period of transition in the coming weeks to determine how to remain sustainable and influential.

"We have remarkable staff, and the campaign that Jim [Messina] put together, you know, is the best in history," said senior Obama adviser David Plouffe. "But the reason those people got involved was because they believed in Barack Obama. It was the relationship between them and our candidate."

Also Read

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Insurgents kill 8 Afghan police, soldiers

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Five Afghan soldiers and three policemen died Thursday in attacks in the south and east of the country, the latest insurgent strikes against Afghanistan's security forces, officials said.

A suicide bomber struck in the southern city of Kandahar, killing the three policemen and wounding two others, said Ahmad Jawed Faisal, a provincial governor spokesman.

The five troops died when their convoy hit a land mine in eastern Laghman province, according to Sarhadi Zewak, also a governor spokesman.

Also Thursday, two boys were killed by a roadside bomb in Zabul province in southern Afghanistan. Deputy provincial chief Ghulam Gilani Farahi said the device had probably been planted by insurgents targeting police officers patrolling the area.

Insurgents have been increasingly targeting Afghan authorities and security forces now that NATO is drawing down toward a final withdrawal of foreign combat troops in 2014.

Although the Afghan police and army have expanded rapidly to their planned strength of 352,000 members, they are plagued with low morale and a high desertion rate.

Meanwhile, the spate of so-called insider attacks by members of Afghan security forces against foreign troops and their own colleagues has undermined trust between international forces and the Afghan army and police.

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Siemens to sharpen its game with 6 billion euros of savings

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Rihanna a rock star on Victoria's Secret catwalk

NEW YORK (AP) — Rihanna rocked the lingerie look at Wednesday night's Victoria's Secret fashion show in New York, providing the highlight of the live-music soundtrack and holding her own on the catwalk with some of the world's top models.

And those models even had props, including Adriana Lima's ringmaster wand, Doutzen Kroes' body cage and several pairs of the oversized wings that the retailer has made its signature. It would be a close contest who got the biggest wings: Toni Garrn's giant poppy pair or Miranda Kerr's swan-style feathered pouf. Only Lily Aldridge could boast star-spangled wings that shot out silver sparkles.

Alessandra Ambrosio's orchid-petal wings might have lacked a little grandeur, but she made up for it with a $2.5 million jeweled "floral fantasy bra."

Still, wearing a sheer pink mini that gave glimpses of her bra, Rihanna sang "Fresh Out the Runway" at the end of the corset-and-garter parade and she was the one to grab the audience's biggest applause.

The fashion show has become a pre-holiday season tradition for the retailer. CBS will turn it into a one-hour special, which also had performances from Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars, to be shown on Dec. 4.

This year's event had a slight twist. It started with an announcer noting that Victoria's Secret and CBS had each made a donation to relief efforts for Superstorm Sandy, and a thank you to the National Guard members who are based out of the Lexington Avenue Armory that has for years been home to the show.

Mostly, though, models are encouraged to smile, ham it up and show off the extra time at the gym that most admit to in the weeks beforehand. "It's highly televised, and you take that into consideration," said model Joan Smalls ahead of the show. "This is kind of not the same as other runways. You have to prepare your body: No. 1 is the wings are heavy, and No. 2 is you have to be comfortable with your body because the camera will pick up on it if you're not comfortable and confident."

There's an emphasis on glitz, skin and dramatic production here, not wearable undergarment trends for typical Victoria's Secret shoppers. It was divided into six sections: Circus, complete with acrobats, contortionists and a sword eater; Dangerous Liaisons; Pink Is Us; Silver Screen Angels; Angels in Bloom; and Calendar Girls, which allowed Bruno Mars to serenade a model for each month of the year.

For his first song, "Beauty and the Beat," Bieber, wearing low-slung white pants and a white leather studded vest, sat alone with his guitarist in the mellowest part of the show. For "As Long As You Love Me," however, he brought in backup dancers and interacted with the models while moving around a giant makeshift pinball machine.

"It's like a dream come true," said Bieber on the pink carpet before the show. "I would rather be here than anywhere in the world."

___

AP reporter John Carucci contributed to this report.

___

Samantha Critchell tweets fashion at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Fashion

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