LONDON, Dec 13 (Reuters) - Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins has not ruled out an attempt at retaining the title next year. "As it stands, I'm probably going to try and win a second Tour de France, so I don't know, maybe we'll have two leaders (with Chris Froome)," the Team Sky rider, who became the first Briton to win the race, told BBC Radio 5 Live on Thursday. "We are resetting the goals, trying to win a second Tour de France, but you cannot replicate those circumstances. ...
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Here’s the Pope’s First Tweet
Label: TechnologyThe long wait is over and we’ve finally got the first words of Twitter wisdom from Pope Benedict XVI.
Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.
— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012
Ok, so not that funny, but it was all spelled right and we got blessed by a pope, so that’s a good start. And the Pope did actually send the message himself. Pope Benedict appeared on Wednesday morning for his regular weekly address in front of throngs of media and worshipers, and personally hit the tweet button himself on his iPad. Vatican officials say that before the end of the day he will be answering three questions that were submitted to the #askpontifex hashtag earlier this month. Here’s the first of those:
How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?
— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012
By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the Gospel and looking for him in those in need
— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012
He actually tweeted in Italian first and his other language accounts weren’t far behind. Follow @Pontifex for more 140 character sermons.
Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Justin Timberlake & Jessica Biel (and One Direction) Had You Searching, Says Google
Label: LifestyleJustin Timberlake and Jessica Biel; Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively
Everyone loves a wedding ... and Google has the data to prove it!
Next up was Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively's super-secret ceremony. Almost a year after the couple was first publicly linked, Lively and Reynolds escaped to Mt. Pleasant, S.C., just outside of Charleston, for an intimate wedding.
According to the Google Zeitgeist – an in-depth look at the stories, people and topics searched for in 2012 – PEOPLE brought you the top three searched for weddings in the United States.
Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel's wedding took top honors as the most searched wedding of the year. Could it have been Biel's pink wedding dress? Or the couple's fun wedding photos?
Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves
The third biggest search was for Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves, who tied the knot during a private ceremony in Austin, Texas. Around 120 guests were on hand to celebration the longtime couple's love, including Reese Witherspoon, Woody Harrelson and Kenny Chesney.
As for most-searched images of the year, boy band One Direction ranked number one. Now that heartthrob Harry Styles has been linked to Taylor Swift, chances are they'll stay on top in 2013!
Meanwhile, the second most-searched image topic is something we've got plenty of.
DA investigating Texas' troubled $3B cancer agency
Label: HealthAUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Turmoil surrounding an unprecedented $3 billion cancer-fighting effort in Texas worsened Tuesday when its executive director offered his resignation and the state's chief public corruption prosecutor announced an investigation into the beleaguered agency.
No specific criminal allegations are driving the latest probe into the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, said Gregg Cox, director of the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit. But his influential office opened a case only weeks after the embattled agency disclosed that an $11 million grant to a private company bypassed review.
That award is the latest trouble in a tumultuous year for CPRIT, which controls the nation's second-largest pot of cancer research dollars. Amid the mounting problems, the agency announced Tuesday that Executive Director Bill Gimson had submitted his letter of resignation.
"Unfortunately, I have also been placed in a situation where I feel I can no longer be effective," Gimson wrote in a letter dated Monday.
Gimson said the troubles have resulted in "wasted efforts expended in low value activities" at the agency, instead of a focused fight against cancer. Gimson offered to stay on until January, and the agency's board must still approve his request to step down.
His departure would complete a remarkable house-cleaning at CPRIT in a span of just eight months. It began in May, when Dr. Alfred Gilman resigned as chief science officer in protest over a different grant that the Nobel laureate wanted approved by a panel of scientists. He warned it would be "the bomb that destroys CPRIT."
Gilman was followed by Chief Commercialization Officer Jerry Cobbs, whose resignation in November came after an internal audit showed Cobbs included an $11 million proposal in a funding slate without a required outside review of the project's merits. The lucrative grant was given to Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics, a biomedical startup.
Gimson chalked up Peloton's award to an honest mistake and has said that, to his knowledge, no one associated with CPRIT stood to benefit financially from the company receiving the taxpayer funds. That hasn't satisfied some members of the agency's governing board, who called last week for more assurances that no one personally profited.
Cox said he has been following the agency's problems and his office received a number of concerned phone calls. His department in Austin is charged with prosecuting crimes related to government officials; his most famous cases include winning a conviction against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2010 on money laundering charges.
"We have to gather the facts and figure what, if any, crime occurred so that (the investigation) can be focused more," Cox said.
Gimson's resignation letter was dated the same day the Texas attorney general's office also announced its investigation of the agency. Cox said his department would work cooperatively with state investigators, but he made clear the probes would be separate.
Peloton's award marks the second time this year that a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant authorized by CPRIT instigated backlash and raised questions about oversight. The first involved the $20 million grant to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston that Gilman described as a thin proposal that should have first been scrutinized by an outside panel of scientific peer-reviewers, even though none was required under the agency's rules.
Dozens of the nation's top scientists agreed. They resigned en masse from the agency's peer-review panels along with Gilman. Some accused the agency of "hucksterism" and charting a politically-driven path that was putting commercial product-development above science.
The latest shake-up at CPRIT caught Gilman's successor off-guard. Dr. Margaret Kripke, who was introduced to reporters Tuesday, acknowledged that she wasn't even sure who she would be answering to now that Gimson was stepping down. She said that although she wasn't with the agency when her predecessor announced his resignation, she was aware of the concerns and allegations.
"I don't think people would resign frivolously, so there must be some substance to those concerns," Kripke said.
Kripke also acknowledged the challenge of restocking the peer-review panels after the agency's credibility was so publicly smeared by some of the country's top scientists. She said she took the job because she felt the agency's mission and potential was too important to lose.
Only the National Institutes of Health doles out more cancer research dollars than CPRIT, which has awarded more than $700 million so far.
Gov. Rick Perry told reporters in Houston on Tuesday that he wasn't previously aware of the resignation but said Gimson's decision to step down was his own.
Joining the mounting criticism of CPRIT is the woman credited with brainstorming the idea for the agency in the first place. Cathy Bonner, who served under former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, teamed with cancer survivor Lance Armstrong in selling Texas voters in 2007 on a constitutional amendment to create an unprecedented state-run effort to finance a war on disease.
Now Bonner says politics have sullied an agency that she said was built to fund research, not subsidize private companies.
"There appears to be a cover-up going on," Bonner said.
Peloton has declined comment about its award and has referred questions to CPRIT. The agency has said the company wasn't aware that its application was never scrutinized by an outside panel, as required under agency rules.
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Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber
Stock futures gain as investors anticipate fresh Fed stimulus
Label: BusinessNEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock futures rose on Wednesday, setting Wall Street up for a sixth day of gains, as investors anticipated the U.S. Federal Reserve will announce a fresh stimulus plan to support the economy at the end of a two-day monetary policy meeting.
The Fed is expected to unveil a new round of bond buying later on Wednesday to boost a fragile economic recovery threatened by political wrangling over the government's budget. The monetary policy committee's decision is expected around 12:30 p.m. ET.
"I think the market has already discounted that the Fed is going to announce more stimulus, so what's more important is what Chairman Bernanke says, which may give us clues on economic activity going forward," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital in New York.
"We might see a bit of selloff after Bernanke's comments, but we've been up for five straight days, so that shouldn't be surprising."
Negotiations intensified to avert the "fiscal cliff" - tax hikes and spending cuts that kick in early in 2013 - ahead of a year-end deadline as President Barack Obama and U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner spoke by phone on Tuesday after exchanging new proposals.
BlackRock, one of the world's biggest asset managers, expects the S&P 500 to scale new heights in 2013, with the broad measure of U.S. stocks reaching 1,600 by the end of the year. That's a gain of more than 12 percent from current levels and would surpass the index's previous peak of 1,576.09 set in 2007.
On the macroeconomic front, import and export price data is due at 8:30 a.m. ET. Economists in a Reuters survey expect import prices edged down by 0.5 percent last month, while export prices remained flat.
S&P 500 futures rose 3.7 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures gained 22 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures added 7.75 points.
India's government announced an inquiry into lobbying practices by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Costco Wholesale Corp
Sprint Nextel Corp
U.S. stocks rose on Tuesday, led by technology companies. The S&P 500 closed at its highest since Election Day on November 6.
(Editing by Bernadette Baum)
IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Dec. 11
Label: WorldNEWS Besieged by economic woes and insistent questions about its future, the European Union accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Monday with calls for further integration and a plea to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln as he addressed a divided nation at Gettysburg. Andrew Higgins reports from Oslo.
North Korea said on Monday that a technical issue had been found in the rocket it had planned to launch as early as this week to put a satellite in orbit, but that it still planned to try the launching by the end of the month. Choe Sang-Hun reports from Seoul.
Some Moroccans wonder whether the Arab Spring brought only cosmetic changes, questioning whether the king and his entourage gave up any of their power. Suzanne Daley reports from Tangier, Morocco.
Italian stock and bond prices fell on Monday after a weekend of political turmoil in Italy gave rise to fears that the country was headed for renewed instability. Shares of Italian banks, which are big holders of the government’s bonds, were among the hardest hit. Elisabetta Povoledo and David Jolly report.
Returns from Romania’s parliamentary elections on Monday gave an overwhelming victory to the center-left alliance of Prime Minister Victor Ponta, leaving the country poised for Round 2 of a political standoff that has destabilized one of the European Union’s newest and poorest members. Dan Bilefsky reports.
Huawei Technologies, a Chinese maker of telecommunications equipment, said on Monday that it planned to open a research and development center in Helsinki next year, accelerating its investments in Europe, where its business is expanding rapidly. Eric Pfanner reports from Paris.
FASHION The Chanel show that Karl Lagerfeld put on last week at Linlithgow Palace, near Edinburgh, was spectacular in every sense of the word. The burning braziers, sending quivering light over old stone, and the dinner held in a tented space, arising like magic on the hillside, were outshone only by an exceptional collection. Suzy Menkes reviews from Edinburgh.
ARTS “Tarzan” is only one of the shows that proves that even out-and-out flops on Broadway can go on to lucrative afterlives in Hamburg, as long as the shows have the spectacle and pageantry that theater producers here say enthrall a German audience. Patrick Healy reports from Hamburg.
SPORTS The essence of Lionel Messi is not in the bare statistic that now makes him the most prolific scorer of goals in a single year in the history of the game. It is in the way that he does it. Rob Hughes reports from London.
Amanda Seyfried: 'Everyone Wants to Have Sex' with Channing Tatum
Label: LifestyleAmanda Seyfried has worked with a lot of good-looking men, but there's one in particular who rises to the top of her list.
"Channing [Tatum] was amazing. He's a superstar," the actress, 27, tells the January issue of InStyle about PEOPLE's 2012 Sexiest Man Alive.
Seyfried, who starred opposite Tatum in 2010's Dear John, is well-aware of her former costar's appeal.
"Everybody wants to have sex with him. And the only person he wants to have sex with is his wife, Jenna [Dewan-Tatum]. He's the most loyal husband," she says.
But while Tatum and Dewan-Tatum have managed to find marital bliss in spite of being in the spotlight, Seyfried admits she's not as lucky.
"The thing is, I can't date anybody without it being portrayed as a serious relationship in the tabloids. It sucks! Like Josh Hartnett and I were friends; we hung out, we dated. I don't actually have sex with every male I come into contact with," she says.
Another of Seyfried's costars getting a lot of attention is Anne Hathaway, who chopped off her locks and went on a drastic diet for her role in the upcoming Les Misérables, opening Dec. 25 (Seyfried plays Cosette, and Hathaway is Fantine).
"I would have done that for sure," Seyfried says of the haircut, but she draws the line there. "I probably wouldn't lose or gain weight for a role, though. I'm too health-conscious. And I don't think I could actually lose weight because I couldn't be on that kind of a diet. I would lose my mind."
Stripping for Lovelace
But playing the late porn-star-turned-feminist Linda Lovelace for the upcoming biopic Lovelace did have Seyfried focusing on her physique, which she doesn't mind."It's not about my body. It's not about me," she says of doing nude scenes. "You're playing somebody else. You're not going to believe a love scene if the people are dressed. You're not going to believe a stripper who has on a bra and underwear the whole time. At the same time, it has to do with how comfortable you are with letting people see your skin. For me, I'm okay with it."
Seyfried also says that being diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder – which she manages with Lexapro – has positively contributed to her acting.
"I don't feel like I'm struggling with it. I think OCD is a part of me that protects me. It's also the part of me that I use in my job, in a positive way," she tells the magazine. "The only thing I'd like to get beyond is my fear of driving over bridges and through tunnels. I can't overcome it."
• See Amanda Seyfried's best red carpet looks at Instyle.com
New tests could hamper food outbreak detection
Label: HealthWASHINGTON (AP) — It's about to get faster and easier to diagnose food poisoning, but that progress for individual patients comes with a downside: It could hurt the nation's ability to spot and solve dangerous outbreaks.
Next-generation tests that promise to shave a few days off the time needed to tell whether E. coli, salmonella or other foodborne bacteria caused a patient's illness could reach medical laboratories as early as next year. That could allow doctors to treat sometimes deadly diseases much more quickly — an exciting development.
The problem: These new tests can't detect crucial differences between different subtypes of bacteria, as current tests can. And that fingerprint is what states and the federal government use to match sick people to a contaminated food. The older tests might be replaced by the new, more efficient ones.
"It's like a forensics lab. If somebody says a shot was fired, without the bullet you don't know where it came from," explained E. coli expert Dr. Phillip Tarr of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that losing the ability to literally take a germ's fingerprint could hamper efforts to keep food safe, and the agency is searching for solutions. According to CDC estimates, 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from foodborne illnesses each year, and 3,000 die.
"These improved tests for diagnosing patients could have the unintended consequence of reducing our ability to detect and investigate outbreaks, ultimately causing more people to become sick," said Dr. John Besser of the CDC.
That means outbreaks like the salmonella illnesses linked this fall to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter might not be identified that quickly — or at all.
It all comes down to what's called a bacterial culture — whether labs grow a sample of a patient's bacteria in an old-fashioned petri dish, or skip that step because the new tests don't require it.
Here's the way it works now: Someone with serious diarrhea visits the doctor, who gets a stool sample and sends it to a private testing laboratory. The lab cultures the sample, growing larger batches of any lurking bacteria to identify what's there. If disease-causing germs such as E. coli O157 or salmonella are found, they may be sent on to a public health laboratory for more sophisticated analysis to uncover their unique DNA patterns — their fingerprints.
Those fingerprints are posted to a national database, called PulseNet, that the CDC and state health officials use to look for food poisoning trends.
There are lots of garden-variety cases of salmonella every year, from runny eggs to a picnic lunch that sat out too long. But if a few people in, say, Baltimore have salmonella with the same molecular signature as some sick people in Cleveland, it's time to investigate, because scientists might be able narrow the outbreak to a particular food or company.
But culture-based testing takes time — as long as two to four days after the sample reaches the lab, which makes for a long wait if you're a sick patient.
What's in the pipeline? Tests that could detect many kinds of germs simultaneously instead of hunting one at a time — and within hours of reaching the lab — without first having to grow a culture. Those tests are expected to be approved as early as next year.
This isn't just a science debate, said Shari Shea, food safety director at the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
If you were the patient, "you'd want to know how you got sick," she said.
PulseNet has greatly improved the ability of regulators and the food industry to solve those mysteries since it was launched in the mid-1990s, helping to spot major outbreaks in ground beef, spinach, eggs and cantaloupe in recent years. Just this fall, PulseNet matched 42 different salmonella illnesses in 20 different states that were eventually traced to a variety of Trader Joe's peanut butter.
Food and Drug Administration officials who visited the plant where the peanut butter was made found salmonella contamination all over the facility, with several of the plant samples matching the fingerprint of the salmonella that made people sick. A New Mexico-based company, Sunland Inc., recalled hundreds of products that were shipped to large retailers all over the country, including Target, Safeway and other large grocery chains.
The source of those illnesses probably would have remained a mystery without the national database, since there weren't very many illnesses in any individual state.
To ensure that kind of crucial detective work isn't lost, the CDC is asking the medical community to send samples to labs to be cultured even when they perform a new, non-culture test.
But it's not clear who would pay for that extra step. Private labs only can perform the tests that a doctor orders, noted Dr. Jay M. Lieberman of Quest Diagnostics, one of the country's largest testing labs.
A few first-generation non-culture tests are already available. When private labs in Wisconsin use them, they frequently ship leftover samples to the state lab, which grows the bacteria itself. But as more private labs switch over after the next-generation rapid tests arrive, the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene will be hard-pressed to keep up with that extra work before it can do its main job — fingerprinting the bugs, said deputy director Dr. Dave Warshauer.
Stay tuned: Research is beginning to look for solutions that one day might allow rapid and in-depth looks at food poisoning causes in the same test.
"As molecular techniques evolve, you may be able to get the information you want from non-culture techniques," Lieberman said.
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Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mcjalonick
Stock futures rise after German data; Fed eyed
Label: BusinessNEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock futures were higher on Tuesday after unexpectedly cheery data out of Europe and as the Federal Reserve was set to kick off its two-day policy meeting.
Though the pace of talks in Washington to avert impending U.S. tax hikes and spending cuts quickened, senior politicians on both sides cautioned that an agreement on all the outstanding issues remained uncertain.
The lack of progress in negotiations about the "fiscal cliff" has kept investors from making aggressive bests in recent weeks, though most expect a deal will eventually be reached.
In Germany, analyst and investor sentiment rose sharply in December, entering positive territory for the first time since May, a leading survey showed. The data helped drive European shares higher.
"We've been getting a lot of the beginning of our day from seeing what Europe has been doing and I think that's going to hold true today," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.
The Fed will begin its policy-setting meeting on Tuesday. The central bank is expected to announce a new round of Treasury securities purchases when the meeting ends on Wednesday, according to a Reuters poll. The program would replace its "Operation Twist" stimulus which expires at the end of the year.
S&P 500 futures rose 3.2 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures gained 34 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures added 7 points.
The U.S. Treasury is selling its remaining stake in insurer American International Group Inc , bringing an end to government ownership of the company about four years after a $182 billion bailout. AIG's shares were up 1.2 percent at $33.75 in premarket trade.
Texas Instruments Inc
Also in the tech sector, Intel Corp
Morgan Stanley
On the macro front, U.S. international trade data for October is due at 8:30 am ET (1330 GMT) and wholesale inventories is due at 10:00 am ET (1500 GMT).
Romania Faces Upheaval as Ponta Coalition Wins Vote
Label: World
PARIS — Romania’s center-left government overwhelmingly won parliamentary elections, according to partial results released Monday, an outcome that threatened to push the country into further political upheaval because of bitter rivalry between the prime minister and the president.
The central electoral office said the center-left alliance led by Prime Minister Victor Ponta won about 59 percent of the seats in the 452-seat legislature, followed by about 17 percent for a center-right group linked to President Traian Basescu. Around 81.45 percent of the votes have been counted.
The clear victory in Sunday’s election made Mr. Ponta the front-runner for prime minister. But Mr. Basescu, who has the power to appoint a prime minister, has indicated that he would not select Mr. Ponta, in part because Mr. Ponta tried to have him impeached over the summer.
During the campaign, Mr. Basescu called Mr. Ponta a “compulsive liar” and an “ogre” and said that appointing the man who tried to oust him would be like swallowing a pig. Mr. Ponta’s coalition, in turn, threatened a new impeachment effort if it won a majority and Mr. Ponta was not named prime minister.
Analysts said Mr. Basescu could be forced to back down due to the large margin of the center-left’s victory, which made Mr. Ponta’s reappointment seem inevitable. As of Monday morning, the president had not announced his intentions.
If he refused to appoint Mr. Ponta, the standoff threatened to produce a protracted political fight that could destabilize the country, undermine its struggling economy and delay a loan deal from the International Monetary Fund that Romania is hoping to negotiate when its current arrangement expires early next year.
In Bucharest, the Romanian capital, political commentators called the election “Basescu’s revenge.”
“The most we can hope for is that it is not a long war, and the parties find a compromise,” said Cosmin Stan, a leading Romanian broadcaster with Realitatea Television.
Romania, a poor Balkan country that has struggled to shed the legacy of decades of dictatorship under Nicolae Ceausescu, has undergone some of its worst political turbulence in recent memory. The country has weathered a series of unstable governments and come under criticism from the European Union and the United States. In October, the European Commission, the union’s executive body, said that concerns about corruption and fraud had prompted it to block development aid potentially worth billions of euros. All the while, the public remains deeply disillusioned amid a simmering dissatisfaction with austerity — including a 25 percent cut in public sector wages — for which many voters blame Mr. Basescu.
Mr. Ponta, at 40 the youngest prime minister in the European Union, has been locked in a bitter power struggle with Mr. Basescu, a 61-year-old former sea captain. The acrimony was made worse by the July impeachment vote, which Mr. Basescu called a “coup d’état” and which drew sharp criticism from the European Union and the United States. Mr. Ponta had accused Mr. Basescu of overreaching his mandate by, among other things, refusing to appoint ministers chosen by the prime minister.
Many Romanians say they are tired of the dueling leaders, and in a sign of that discontent, the populist People’s Party of Dan Diaconescu, a flamboyant television station owner who campaigned in a white Rolls-Royce and is being investigated for fraud, won about 14 percent of the vote, according to the partial results. As part of his campaign, Mr. Diaconescu has promised around $26,000 to every Romanian who starts a business.
But the feud between Mr. Ponta and Mr. Basescu dominated the election.
Under the Constitution, the president must name a prime minister from the party that receives a majority, in consultation with the party. Mr. Ponta is the coalition’s choice. The candidate for prime minister then needs to be approved by the Parliament, where Mr. Ponta’s center-left coalition has won a strong majority. While the Constitution gives the president the prerogative to name the prime minister, he cannot ignore the popular vote.
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