Eastern Congo rebels thrive on fear, chaos

Los Angeles Times

RUTSHURU, Democratic Republic of Congo — The rebels materialized out of the moist, heavy air, startling the woman as she tended her crops in the lush volcanic hills near the Rwandan border.

They wanted a bag of salt. No salt, and they'd kill her.

"You just do what they say," said Solange, a widow struggling to support a family in the midst of war.

To people like her who live in eastern Congo's North Kivu province, the M23 fighters who have taken control of their region are bandits, not rebels. After they seized Solange's village of Rutshuru in July and plundered all her beans, she fled south to the provincial capital, Goma.

It would prove to be no refuge. The rebels and the violence followed her.

The awesome serenity of the cloud-swathed emerald hills, twittering with bird life, home to mountain gorillas, is almost deep enough to erase, for a moment, successive waves of gruesome violence.

The region, an important source of minerals used in laptops and cellphones, was swept up in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Since then, it has become the scene of one of the great tragedies of the last century: Wars fueled by a toxic blend of resource riches, ethnic hatred and interfering neighbors have killed 5 million people.

In recent years, the area settled into a fragile peace. But militias still drain the country's wealth. There now are fears that eastern Congo could spiral into another long and bloody conflict.

United Nations experts say Rwanda armed and commanded M23, which rebelled against the Congolese army in April, and directly supported the rebels' attack on Goma.

Rwanda has been accused of backing militias and fueling conflict in the region for years, but it denies interfering. It has a security interest because Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 genocide fled into eastern Congo, where they continue to mount attacks. And with few mineral resources of its own, Rwanda has a strong economic interest in the region.

Among M23's reputed leaders is Bosco Ntaganda, a commander nicknamed the Terminator who was indicted in July by the International Criminal Court on suspicion of atrocities including murder, rape, sexual slavery and pillaging.

The M23 political leaders wear shiny silk suits, with labels like "High Class" left ostentatiously on the sleeve. They made Rutshuru their base, imposed compulsory weekend cleanup brigades for the entire population, planted grass around the administrative building and put up signs condemning corruption. They made the town look like a miniature copy of Rwanda, a country so tidy that all plastic bags are banned and seized at the border.

They also looted villages and killed an undetermined number of people.

Solange is 35 and belongs to the Nande tribe, the main ethnic group in North Kivu. Her husband was a government soldier who earned $55 a month before his death three years ago from malaria. They had no children.

On the farm, she grew cassava and beans to sell in the local market and always had plenty to eat. "Life was good," she said. After her husband's death, she had to support not only her family, including her parents and a younger sister with children, but her late husband's family too. In all, there were 15 mouths to feed.

M23 disrupted all that.

After fleeing to Goma, she stayed at a friend's house. She registered with an aid agency, hoping to get food assistance, but never received any.

"It's very difficult. Sometimes we don't have enough food," said Solange, who preferred not to use her last name out of concern for her safety.

Goma's idyllic lakeside setting could be a tourist haven in a parallel universe. But in this one, teenage boys and grimy men push heavy loads of water, wooden poles or potatoes. Women pound cassava leaves or fry tennis-ball-size lumps of dough in bubbling oil.

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How Two Hardware Geeks Leveraged Kickstarter for Serial Success

Brad Leong and Sam Gordon have a 3-0 record for crowdfunding projects, something they’ve done by bringing an app store-like model to platforms like Kickstarter that could herald a new way of launching a multi-product hardware startup.

The pair have raised $1,054,666 since June 2011 crowdsourcing their Oona iPhone stand, Brydge keyboard and iPhone ReadyCase. It’s especially impressive considering Kickstarter has a success rate of 43.74 percent. Leong and Gordon have found a consistent formula for financing multiple products and an entire business. The crowdfunding sites have essentially made it possible for them to take their multiple hardware ideas and put them in front of potential buyers to get immediate feedback and predict (and fuel) their success, much like app developers do.

“It’s a study in how an ‘app store’ ports to hardware as a company that has ‘apps’ in a marketplace,” Nick Pinkston, who started the SF Hardware Startup Meetup, said.

It’s a unique approach that few other entrepreneurs and tinkerers seem to be doing. The vast majority of Kickstarter campaigns are one-off projects. But considering the minimal venture capital and limited retail routes in the hardware space, it’s a very smart model. Still, Leong and Gordon can’t use Kickstarter indefinitely, and don’t want to.

“The goal is not to do Kickstarter projects forever,” Gordon says. “The goal is to have the products start us off, build capital, and really start a products company off of that. It’s been a good way to kick-start our business, some might say.”

The duo hoped to achieve serial success to build their business, named Brydge for their most successful campaign. Most of the money they’ve raised has gone back into producing product. The duo’s new warehouse is incredibly sparse, with only a few long tables. On the day I visited, they had some friends helping pack a shipment of Brydge keyboards. Such is the glamour of a startup. Both Gordon and Leong live with their parents.

Yet with Leong’s hoodie and Gordon’s Silicon Valley flair — sandals with jeans and a button-down shirt — the two look like the quintessential young entrepreneurs. Surprisingly, neither of them has an engineering degree. Gordon knows communications and PR, while Leong comes from a film background. They met in a college leadership class in 2006 at the University of Southern California, and have been bouncing ideas off each other since.

“What I like to do is tinker and make physical things. That was just the realm we went into because of that,” Leong says. “I think we’ve always known that we were going to do something entrepreneurial…. We didn’t really socially talk. We never called and said, ‘How’s it going?’ It would just be, ‘I have this idea, let’s talk about it.’”

Kickstarter was the perfect testbed. After seeing the Lunatik iPod mini watch kit blow up on the site, they decided to try it out.

Leong’s and Gordon’s excitement while talking about their first project, the Oona iPhone stand, is palpable. They didn’t expect much, and their goal was a modest $10,000.

“It was the first week we met our goal,” Gordon said. “But then it really took off. This was crazy. We realized it could be a full-time real thing we could do.”

The Oona iPhone stand, which raised $131,220, taught them a lot about the manufacturing and production process — something many people with Kickstarter hardware projects struggle through after getting funded. For example, the Pebble smartwatch was slated to ship in September, but is now three months late.

“Seventy-five percent of Kickstarter projects are significantly late,” Leong says. Wharton School of Business professor Ethan Mollick found that only 25 percent of projects deliver by their estimated delivery date. The slow turnaround is why alternatives like Christie Street have launched to ensure that backers don’t end up losing money on a product. Kickstarter itself has been very straightforward, however, in saying that it is not a store, though many hardware products use the rewards system like a pre-ordering platform.

You might argue that Kickstarter is meant to finance a project, not a company. But Kickstarter doesn’t seem to have a problem with people running multiple campaigns to, er, kick-start their business.

“Millions of people have come to Kickstarter to cultivate a more vibrant and verdant creator culture that values the creative process as much as the end result,” a Kickstarter spokesman told Wired in an e-mail. “We’ll continue to be home to imaginative ideas from all corners of the creative universe.”

Vague, yes, but Brydge isn’t the first to go down this road. Studio Neat has funded both of its products, the Glif and the Cosmonaut, on Kickstarter.

Gordon points out that one of the most challenging part of a Kickstarter campaign is not raising funds, but figuring out what to do afterward. The logistics of producing and shipping something, especially if you’re working in China, is incredibly difficult. Many of the people posting to Kickstarter, particularly makers and tinkerers, are not familiar with the process.

“If you look at a lot of Kickstarter projects, they’ve made one and they know how to make one, but then they have no idea the process of having to make thousands,” Gordon said. Multiple campaigns has helped them hone those skills.

The Brydge keyboard, a sleek aluminum rig that turns your iPad into a MacBook Air look-a-like, has been the duo’s most popular campaign, raising $797,979 — nearly nine times their goal. They’ve taken more than 5,000 orders. It was a tricky enough piece of hardware that they had to go back to Kickstarter after Oona.

“It has a whole bunch of little pieces in it and since it’s a higher price point product it means it’s a much larger initial investment to get it up and going,” Leong said. “Oona was successful but it was not so successful that it could fund Brydge.”

ReadyCase, their most recent project, has raised $125,467. It’s more of a side project, and it got started on Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo.

“Kickstarter has a policy of no knives on their site,” Leong said. “It’s a little fine print thing and because ReadyCase has a small multitool knife blade, they would not allow it.”

Aside from raising capital, one of the best reasons to keep going back to Kickstarter is it provides immediate feedback. Bad ideas won’t go far. If people hadn’t backed Brydge, the guys would have known it was a dog and dropped it.

With three successful projects in the bag, Leong and Gordon have some tips for Kickstarting a project. First and foremost, be innovative. Nobody wants something they’ve seen before, so don’t reinvent the wheel or offer some incremental improvement of your own gadget. Remember that you’re selling yourself along with your project, so express who you are. And if you plan on having multiple projects, don’t go nuts with your first one — start simple, get the manufacturing down, and then move on to something a little more complex. And whatever you do, don’t wear out your welcome.

“The thing that’s bad on Kickstarter is these companies using it just to promote,” Leong says. “That’s completely against the idea of what Kickstarter is. If we have the means to make the product, then we’ll make the product. We’re not going to sneak it in there. People say, ‘Oh it’s new because we slightly tweaked something,’ but it’s really a product they’ve been selling for five or ten years. We don’t want to do that.”

“We believe in the spirit of Kickstarter, which is to help people to make something that couldn’t be made without it,” Gordon said. “It sucks to sometimes see products that don’t do that.”

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Elijah Wood, Aaron Paul rally fans to save north Hollywood taco joint

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Elijah Wood and Aaron Paul are on a mission to save a North Hollywood taco stand.

The actors are rallying fans around Henry‘s Tacos, which has been on the corner of Tujunga and Moorpark for 51 years and is closing December 31 due to a conflict with the building’s landlord.

In an announcement posted on Facebook, the stand’s owner, Janis Hood, said that running the restaurant is too much of a burden for her – but the landlord, Mehran Ebrahimpour, isn’t allowing “prospective buyers committed to continuing the tradition” to take over the lease.

The reason, Hood believes, is because she “unwittingly” angered him by nominating Henry’s to become for a Historic Cultural Monument a year ago. Ultimately, the city council never voted on her request, but the damage was done.

Once loyal customer Wood heard the news, he immediately took to Twitter: “Los Angeles institution, Henry’s Tacos to shut,” Wood tweeted. “Please retweet. Very sad situation.”

Over 250 followers and counting have heard his cry, including a few famous friends like Aaron Paul, Colin Hanks and “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig.

“This can’t happen. Save LA history,” Feig added, after retweeting Wood’s words.

But instead of just wishing for a Christmas miracle, Paul has a plan – not to mention a cool opportunity for his fans. The “Breaking Bad” star is asking “the masses” to join him for lunch this coming Sunday.

“We must save @HenrysTacos from closing,” he tweeted. “Come join me for lunch this Sunday at 2pm!! Join the masses and eat some tacos!! Tell your friends.”

While he may bring Henry’s some extra business before serving its last burrito, owner Hood makes it seem like the chances of changing Henry’s fate are slim.

“The current prospective buyers have agreed to all the landlord’s terms, but he has ceased communicating with them,” she wrote. “Therefore, I have given my notice and it has been accepted by the landlord.”

Neither Hood nor Ebrahimpour immediately responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Personal Health: When Daily Stress Gets in the Way of Life

I was about to give an hourlong talk to hundreds of people when one of the organizers of the event asked, “Do you get nervous when you give speeches?” My response: Who, me? No. Of course not.

But this was a half-truth. I am a bit of a worrier, and one thing that makes me anxious is getting ready for these events: fretting over whether I’ve prepared the right talk, packed the right clothes or forgotten anything important, like my glasses.

Anxiety is a fact of life. I’ve yet to meet anyone, no matter how upbeat, who has escaped anxious moments, days, even weeks. Recently I succumbed when, rushed for time just before a Thanksgiving trip, I was told the tires on my car were too worn to be driven on safely and had to be replaced.

“But I have no time to do this now,” I whined.

“Do you have time for an accident?” my car-savvy neighbor asked.

So, with a pounding pulse and no idea how I’d make up the lost time, I went off to get new tires. I left the car at the shop and managed to calm down during the walk home, which helped me get back to the work I needed to finish before the trip.

It seems like such a small thing now. But everyday stresses add up, according to Tamar E. Chansky, a psychologist in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., who treats people with anxiety disorders.

You’ll be much better able to deal with a serious, unexpected challenge if you lower your daily stress levels, she said. When worry is a constant, “it takes less to tip the scales to make you feel agitated or plagued by physical symptoms, even in minor situations,” she wrote in her very practical book, “Freeing Yourself From Anxiety.”

When Calamities Are Real

Of course, there are often good reasons for anxiety. Certainly, people who lost their homes and life’s treasures — and sometimes loved ones — in Hurricane Sandy can hardly be faulted for worrying about their futures.

But for some people, anxiety is a way of life, chronic and life-crippling, constantly leaving them awash in fears that prevent them from making moves that could enrich their lives.

In an interview, Dr. Chansky said that when real calamities occur, “you will be in much better shape to cope with them if you don’t entertain extraneous catastrophes.”

By “extraneous,” she means the many stresses that pile up in the course of daily living that don’t really deserve so much of our emotional capital — the worrying and fretting we spend on things that won’t change or simply don’t matter much.

“If you worry about everything, it will get in the way of what you really need to address,” she explained. “The best decisions are not made when your mind is spinning out of control, racing ahead with predictions about how things are never going to get any better. Precious energy is wasted when you’re always thinking about the worst-case scenarios.”

When faced with serious challenges, it helps to narrow them down to specific things you can do now. To my mind, Dr. Chansky’s most valuable suggestion for emerging from paralyzing anxiety when faced with a monumental task is to “stay in the present — it doesn’t help to be in the future.

“Take some small step today, and value each step you take. You never know which step will make a difference. This is much better than not trying to do anything.”

Dr. Chansky told me, “If you’re worrying about your work all the time, you won’t get your work done.” She suggested instead that people “compartmentalize.” Those prone to worry should set aside a little time each day simply to fret, she said — and then put aside anxieties and spend the rest of the time getting things done. This advice could not have come at a better time for me, as I faced holiday chores, two trips in December, and five columns to write before leaving mid-month. Rather than focusing on what seemed like an impossible challenge, I took on one task at a time. Somehow it all got done.

Possible Thinking

Many worriers think the solution is positive thinking. Dr. Chansky recommends something else: think “possible.”

“When we are stuck with negative thinking, we feel out of options, so to exit out of that we need to be reminded of all the options we do have,” she writes in her book.

If this is not something you can do easily on your own, consult others for suggestions. During my morning walk with friends, we often discuss problems, and inevitably someone comes up with a practical solution. But even if none of their suggestions work, at least they narrow down possible courses of action and make the problem seem less forbidding. “If other people are not caught in the spin that you’re in, they may have ideas for you that you wouldn’t think of,” Dr. Chansky said. “We often do this about small things, but when something big is going on, we hesitate to ask for advice. Yet that’s when we need it most.”

Dr. Chansky calls this “a community cleanup effort,” and it can bring more than advice. During an especially challenging time, like dealing with a spouse’s serious illness or loss of one’s home, friends and family members can help with practical matters like shopping for groceries, providing meals, cleaning out the refrigerator or paying bills.

“People want to help others in need — it’s how the world goes around,” she said. Witness the many thousands of volunteers, including students from other states on their Thanksgiving break, who prepared food and delivered clothing and equipment to the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Even the smallest favor can help buffer stress and enable people to focus productively on what they can do to improve their situation.

Another of Dr. Chansky’s invaluable tips is to “let go of the rope.” When feeling pressured to figure out how to fix things now, “walk away for a few minutes, but promise to come back.” As with a computer that suddenly misbehaves, Dr. Chansky suggests that you “unplug and refresh,” perhaps by “taking a breathing break,” inhaling and exhaling calmly and intentionally.

“The more you practice calm breathing, the more it will be there for you when you need it,” she wrote.

She also suggests taking a break to do something physical: “Movement shifts the moment.” Take a walk or bike ride, call a friend, look through a photo album, or do some small cleaning task like clearing off your night table.

When you have a clear head and are feeling less overwhelmed, you’ll be better able to figure out the next step.

This is the first of two columns about anxiety.

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DealBook: U.S. and Britain Take Cooperative Approach on 'Too Big to Fail'

It is one of the thorniest problems hanging over the financial system: how should authorities deal with the collapse of a sprawling global bank to protect the financial system at large?

In an attempt to find ways to address this problem, regulators in the United States and Britain said on Monday that they were cooperating on measures that would be used to seize an ailing financial company that does a lot of business abroad.

The intent is to avoid the problems that occurred when Lehman Brothers failed in 2008. The unwinding of Lehman was complicated by the fact that it had substantial operations in London that were subject to British law. The same problem could recur because most of the largest American and British banks have major subsidiaries in each other’s countries.

In a new joint paper, the Bank of England and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation laid out their preferred strategy for handling such bank crashes.

“It’s great that these two organizations are pushing forward on it,” said Phillip L. Swagel, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, who was assistant secretary for economic policy under Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. “If they do get it right, then, yes, ‘too big to fail’ has ended.”

“Too big to fail” is the label for the problem that confronts governments when a large bank is on its last legs. Officials want to avoid a future large taxpayer bailout of the bank, but letting it collapse could cause a run on the financial system. In 2008, Lehman was allowed to fail but American International Group was saved because its collapse was seen as too much for the system to bear.

Since the crisis, legislators in the United States and Britain have passed laws intended to give regulators ways to avoid either outcome. In essence, they aim to take control of the sick bank and keep it operating while inflicting losses on its shareholders and, if necessary, its creditors.

The paper from the Bank of England and the F.D.I.C. focused on one way to accomplish this. The relevant regulator would take control of the bank’s parent company, then embark on a restructuring. By saying they are focusing on the parent company, regulators hope to shape expectations in the market and minimize destabilizing uncertainty when a bank implodes. This approach, “will give greater predictability for market participants about how resolution authorities may approach a resolution,” the regulators wrote.

The strategy then aims to put a seized bank back on its feet. In most cases, the bank would be insolvent, meaning that losses had eaten all its equity. To right the bank, the regulator would take the parent company’s debt and turn it into enough equity to support the bank’s operations in the future.

But questions surround the strategy. The paper is little more than a commitment to cooperate. In other words, it does not give either regulator the power to reach into a foreign jurisdiction to restructure a bank. Some of the jurisdictional problems that hampered the Lehman bankruptcy could therefore recur.

Some analysts doubt regulators would use the tools in the heat of a crisis. Fearing financial instability, officials may balk at doing anything to harm the interests of creditors and opt for some form of bailout instead. “It’s about the courage to use those tools in the face of a panic,” said Mark A. Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute.

Whether bank parent companies have the financial resources to contribute meaningfully to balance sheet repairs is also a question. JPMorgan Chase’s parent company, for instance, has $116 billion of long-term debt, which is 5 percent of the overall bank’s $2.3 trillion in assets. At Goldman Sachs, the percentage is much higher at 14 percent.

Regulators would have to decide on the appropriate amount of parent company debt. As a result, they might press some banks to strengthen the financial standing of their parent companies.

But banks may resist, saying that action would make it harder for them to produce reasonable returns. “They need to consider the burdens that would be placed on banks’ ability to provide credit for the global economy,” said David Schraa, regulatory counsel for the Institute of International Finance, an industry group.

Skeptics also say the measures laid out Monday may not be able to cope with the collapse of several large global banks at once. “The big problems we’ve seen are almost always systemic,” said Simon Johnson, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “So, does it solve the core of the too-big-too-fail problem? No.”

Still, the American-British cooperation could, in theory, cover a large majority of foreign business done in the country’s banks. The five biggest American banks on average did 88 percent of their foreign activity in Britain, according to an F.D.I.C. presentation in July. “By and large, the same is true for U.K. companies,” Michael H. Krimminger, a partner with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, wrote by e-mail. “This approach would have been invaluable in 2008,” said Mr. Krimminger, whose previous job was general counsel at the F.D.I.C.

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Latin music star Jenni Rivera believed dead in plane crash

MEXICO CITY — Mexican American singer Jenni Rivera, the "diva de la banda" whose commanding voice burst through the limits of regional Latin music and made her a cross-border sensation and the queen of a business empire, was believed to have died Sunday when the small jet carrying her and members of her entourage crashed in mountainous terrain.

Rivera, a native of Long Beach, was 43. Mexico's ministry of transportation did not confirm her death outright, but it said that she had been aboard the plane and that no one had survived the crash. Six others, including two pilots, also were on board.

"Everything suggests, with the evidence that's been found, that it was the airplane that the singer Jenni Rivera was traveling in," said Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexico's secretary of communications and transportation. Of the crash site, Ruiz said: "Everything is destroyed. Nothing is recognizable."

Word of the accident ricocheted around the entertainment industry, with performer after performer expressing shock and grief. Fans gathered outside Rivera's four-acre estate in Encino.

"She was the Diana Ross of Mexican music," said Gustavo Lopez, an executive vice president at Universal Music Latin Entertainment, an umbrella group that includes Rivera's label. Lopez called Rivera "larger than life" and said that based on ticket sales, she was by far the top-grossing female artist in Mexico.

"Remember her with your heart the way she was," her father, Don Pedro Rivera, told reporters in Spanish on Sunday evening. "She never looked back. She was a beautiful person with the whole world."

Rivera had performed a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, on Saturday night — her standard fare of knee-buckling power ballads, pop-infused interpretations of traditional banda music and dizzying rhinestone costume changes.

At a news conference after the show, Rivera appeared happy and tranquil, pausing at one point to take a call on her cellphone that turned out to be a wrong number. She fielded questions about struggles in her personal life, including her recent separation from husband Esteban Loaiza, a professional baseball player.

"I can't focus on the negative," she said in Spanish. "Because that will defeat you. That will destroy you.... The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up."

Hours later, shortly after 3 a.m., Rivera is believed to have boarded a Learjet 25, which took off under clear skies. The jet headed south, toward Toluca, west of Mexico City; there, Rivera had been scheduled to tape the television show "La Voz" — Mexico's version of "The Voice" — on which she was a judge.

The plane, built in 1969 and registered to a Las Vegas talent management firm, reached 11,000 feet. But 10 minutes and 62 miles into the flight, air traffic controllers lost contact with its pilots, according to Mexican authorities. The jet crashed outside Iturbide, a remote city that straddles one of the few roads bisecting Mexico's Sierra de Arteaga national park.

Wreckage was scattered across several football fields' worth of terrain. An investigation into the cause of the crash was underway, and attempts to identify the remains of the victims had begun.

Rivera, a mother of five and grandmother of two, was believed to have been traveling with her publicist Arturo Rivera, who was not related to her, as well as with her lawyer, hairstylist and makeup artist; reports of their names were not consistent. Their identities were not confirmed by authorities. The pilots were identified as Miguel Perez and Alejandro Torres.

In the world of regional Latin music — norteño, cumbia and ranchera are among the popular niches — Rivera was practically royalty.

Her father was a noted singer of the Mexican storytelling ballads known as corridos. In the 1980s he launched the record label Cintas Acuario. It began as a swap-meet booth and grew into an influential and taste-making independent outfit, fueling the careers of artists such as the late Chalino Sanchez. Jenni Rivera's four brothers were associated with the music industry; her brother Lupillo, in particular, is a huge star in his own right.

Born on July 2, 1969, Rivera initially showed little inclination to join the family business. She worked for a time in real estate. But after a pregnancy and a divorce, she went to work for her father's record label and found her voice, literally and figuratively.

She released her first studio album in 2003, when she was 34.

Her path had not been easy, but rather than running from it, she wrote it into her music — domestic violence; struggles with weight; raising her children alone, or "sin capitan," without a captain. She was known for marathon live shows that left audiences exhilarated and exhausted; by the fifth hour of one recent performance, she was drinking straight from a tequila bottle and launching into a cover of "I Will Survive."

In a witty and sometimes baffling stew of Spanish and English, she sang about her three husbands, about drug traffickers, in tribute to her father, in tribute to her gynecologist.

She became, in a most unlikely way, a feminist hero among Latin women in Mexico and the United States and a powerful player in a genre of music dominated by men and machismo. Regional Mexican music styles had long been seen as limiting to artists, but Rivera shrugged off the labels and brought traditional-laced music — some of which sounded perilously close to polka — to a massive pop audience.

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NYC Blacked Out and Abandoned: Sandy's Wake Creates Historic Photo Opp

It was the “zombie-like” traffic lights that first alerted photographer Colin Gray that something was seriously wrong in Manhattan. Instead of the bright red, orange and greens, the lights sat dormant.

Armed with just an iPhone and a point-and-shoot, Gray and a group of buddies had crossed the Williamsburg Bridge on foot to get a first-hand look at the damage. Hurricane Sandy had passed through the night before and when they saw the empty streets and abandoned subway stations, they quickly realized that they were witnessing a unique moment in New York City history.

For one of the busiest cities in the world, this level of desertion could usually only be seen with computer graphics in big-budget movies. While the city has faced previous blackouts in 1965, 1977 and 2003, each with their own set of problems and coping challenges, Sandy is the first time a blackout has been paired with flooding and evacuation.

“We had heard that the power was out but didn’t really understand what that meant until we got over there,” says Gray, who waited out the rain and wind in a part of Brooklyn that didn’t get much damage.

At the time, Gray had no idea that in addition to knocking out power to more than eight million homes in New York and 16 other states, Hurricane Sandy would kill more than 100 people, cause billions of dollars of damage and bring transportation to a standstill, with some of New York City’s subway stations filled with water from the tracks to the ceiling. All he knew was that he had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and needed to act fast.

To make the pictures he wanted, his current gear wasn’t going to cut it. He and his crew hiked over to the MTV studios where Gray works as a photo editor. He grabbed a Canon 5D Mark II and his tripod and headed back out. For hours they scoured the area under 26th street, documenting a city lit only by car headlights, emergency sirens and the ambient glow of the upper-half of the city’s light bouncing off the clouds.

“It was surreal for sure,” Gray says.

The blackout caused by Sandy is also the first for the city since Instagram and YouTube, creating a larger visual footprint and document for the event. We’ve seen several photos series like Gray’s float across the internet since the storm, but none capture the eeriness or stillness quite as well.

One of his favorite shots is of a pitch-black street in SOHO lit up only by the glow of the Chrysler Building in the background.

“I felt like that one summed it up the best,” he says.

In another photo, a shuttered Dunkin’ Donuts has been turned all shades of pink and purple by the sirens of emergency vehicles. The area around the Union Square subways station, which is normally defined by an ongoing buzz of people, was so empty and unfamiliar Gray says that he and his friends didn’t realize where they were until they almost stumbled down the stairs of the stop.

One by one, Gray says his friends decided to call it a night and took cabs home, but he stayed out until the sun came up the next day. With no sleep he walked into work at MTV at 8 a.m. and was told to go home–they gave everyone the day off.

“I knew that I was probably never going to have a chance to shoot like that again,” he says.

All Photos: Colin Douglas Gray

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Gabrielle Aplin tops UK charts with Power of Love

LONDON (Reuters) – English singer Gabrielle Aplin scored her first British number one on Sunday with a cover of the Frankie Goes To Hollywood hit “The Power of Love”, the Official Charts Company said.

Aplin climbed to number one from sixth place with the song, which first entered the charts in 1984 and is the theme for a Christmas television advert for British retailer John Lewis.

In the album charts, Olly Murs, a former runner-up in television’s X-Factor talent contest, held on to the top spot with his release “Right Place Right Time”, but saw his “Troublemaker” slip to third place in the singles ranks.

American singer Pink was the week’s highest climber in the singles top ten, jumping to eighth place from number 26 with “Try”.

(Reporting by Tim Castle; editing by Jason Webb)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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A Breakthrough Against Leukemia Using Altered T-Cells

PHILIPSBURG, Pa. — Emma Whitehead has been bounding around the house lately, practicing somersaults and rugby-style tumbles that make her parents wince.

It is hard to believe, but last spring Emma, then 6, was near death from leukemia. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy, and doctors had run out of options.

Desperate to save her, her parents sought an experimental treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one that had never before been tried in a child, or in anyone with the type of leukemia Emma had. The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells.

The treatment very nearly killed her. But she emerged from it cancer-free, and about seven months later is still in complete remission. She is the first child and one of the first humans ever in whom new techniques have achieved a long-sought goal — giving a patient’s own immune system the lasting ability to fight cancer.

Emma had been ill with acute lymphoblastic leukemia since 2010, when she was 5, said her parents, Kari and Tom. She is their only child.

She is among just a dozen patients with advanced leukemia to have received the experimental treatment, which was developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Similar approaches are also being tried at other centers, including the National Cancer Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

“Our goal is to have a cure, but we can’t say that word,” said Dr. Carl June, who leads the research team at the University of Pennsylvania. He hopes the new treatment will eventually replace bone-marrow transplantation, an even more arduous, risky and expensive procedure that is now the last hope when other treatments fail in leukemia and related diseases.

Three adults with chronic leukemia treated at the University of Pennsylvania have also had complete remissions, with no signs of disease; two of them have been well for more than two years, said Dr. David Porter. Four adults improved but did not have full remissions, and one was treated too recently to evaluate. A child improved and then relapsed. In two adults, the treatment did not work at all. The Pennsylvania researchers were presenting their results on Sunday and Monday in Atlanta at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Despite the mixed results, cancer experts not involved with the research say it has tremendous promise, because even in this early phase of testing it has worked in seemingly hopeless cases. “I think this is a major breakthrough,” said Dr. Ivan Borrello, a cancer expert and associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. John Wagner, the director of pediatric blood and marrow transplantation at the University of Minnesota, called the Pennsylvania results “phenomenal” and said they were “what we’ve all been working and hoping for but not seeing to this extent.”

A major drug company, Novartis, is betting on the Pennsylvania team and has committed $20 million to building a research center on the university’s campus to bring the treatment to market.

Hervé Hoppenot, the president of Novartis Oncology, called the research “fantastic” and said it had the potential — if the early results held up — to revolutionize the treatment of leukemia and related blood cancers. Researchers say the same approach, reprogramming the patient’s immune system, may also eventually be used against tumors like breast and prostate cancer.

To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell — and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turn malignant in leukemia.

The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.

The T-cells home in on a protein called CD-19 that is found on the surface of most B-cells, whether they are healthy or malignant.

A sign that the treatment is working is that the patient becomes terribly ill, with raging fevers and chills — a reaction that oncologists call “shake and bake,” Dr. June said. Its medical name is cytokine-release syndrome, or cytokine storm, referring to the natural chemicals that pour out of cells in the immune system as they are being activated, causing fevers and other symptoms. The storm can also flood the lungs and cause perilous drops in blood pressure — effects that nearly killed Emma.

Steroids sometimes ease the reaction, but they did not help Emma. Her temperature hit 105. She wound up on a ventilator, unconscious and swollen almost beyond recognition, surrounded by friends and family who had come to say goodbye.

But at the 11th hour, a battery of blood tests gave the researchers a clue as to what might help save Emma: her level of one of the cytokines, interleukin-6 or IL-6, had shot up a thousandfold. Doctors had never seen such a spike before and thought it might be what was making her so sick.

Dr. June knew that a drug could lower IL-6 — his daughter takes it for rheumatoid arthritis. It had never been used for a crisis like Emma’s, but there was little to lose. Her oncologist, Dr. Stephan A. Grupp, ordered the drug. The response, he said, was “amazing.”

Within hours, Emma began to stabilize. She woke up a week later, on May 2, the day she turned 7; the intensive-care staff sang “Happy Birthday.”

Since then, the research team has used the same drug, tocilizumab, in several other patients.

In patients with lasting remissions after the treatment, the altered T-cells persist in the bloodstream, though in smaller numbers than when they were fighting the disease. Some patients have had the cells for years.

Dr. Michel Sadelain, who conducts similar studies at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, said: “These T-cells are living drugs. With a pill, you take it, it’s eliminated from your body and you have to take it again.” But T-cells, he said, “could potentially be given only once, maybe only once or twice or three times.”

The Pennsylvania researchers said they were surprised to find any big drug company interested in their work, because a new batch of T-cells must be created for each patient — a far cry from the familiar commercial strategy of developing products like Viagra or cholesterol medicines, in which millions of people take the same drug.

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DealBook: A.I.G. to Sell Most of Leasing Unit to Chinese Investors

The American International Group agreed on Sunday to sell up to 90 percent of its extensive airplane leasing unit to a group of Chinese investors in a deal that valued the business at about $5.28 billion. It is part of the insurance giant’s effort to sell assets that it considers nonessential to its core operations as the company continues to recover from the financial crisis.

Under the terms of the deal, A.I.G. will sell an 80 percent stake to a group that includes the New China Trust Company, the China Aviation Industrial Fund and P3 Investments. The consortium has the option of buying an additional 9.9 percent stake. If exercised, the move would bring in two additional investors: New China Life Insurance and an arm of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

A.I.G. will hold onto at least 10 percent of the business, and the insurer’s chief executive, Robert H. Benmosche, will keep a seat on the company’s revamped board.

The deal is one of the biggest acquisitions of an American company by Chinese investors, and is expected to undergo scrutiny by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the government body that reviews the national security implications of deals involving foreign buyers. The deal is also subject to other American and Chinese regulatory reviews.

The transaction is yet another asset sale by A.I.G. as it continues to sell off nonessential businesses, largely to help pay back its taxpayer-financed rescue. Since its government bailout in the fall of 2008, it has disposed of major units like AIA, a big Asian life insurance operation, and the American Life Insurance Company, another large international operation.

A.I.G. said it expected to eventually record a loss of about $4.4 billion on the sale, including an accounting charge of about $1.8 billion tied to the use of tax assets in the deal. The International Lease Finance Corporation, or I.L.F.C. as the division is commonly known, is one of the biggest in the world and has long been regarded as one of A.I.G.’s crown jewels. The nearly 40-year-old company claims as customers over 200 airlines in 80 countries. It owned about 918 planes in its fleet as of Nov. 15, according to a securities filing, and has commitments to buy 229 new fuel-efficient aircraft.

I.L.F.C. came under pressure during the financial crisis, burdened by an enormous debt load, though it has since rebounded. For the first nine months of the year, it earned $339.7 million, in contrast to a $736.4 million loss in the period a year earlier.

The insurer had long identified the business as one it was willing to part with, in part because the aircraft leasing business requires an intensive amount of capital to support. Last fall, A.I.G. filed to take the unit public. But a sale of the company proved more attractive, providing a quicker and more certain path to disposing of the business.

“This transaction creates a solid and strategic partnership for I.L.F.C.,” Mr. Benmosche said in a statement. “While I.L.F.C. is an extremely strong business platform and A.I.G. will retain a minority stake as a passive investor, the aircraft leasing business is not core to our insurance operations.”

The investor consortium will take advantage of the leasing operation’s booming business in China, which the company said it expected to account for much of its future growth. About 176 of its owned planes are operated by Chinese airlines like Air China, China Southern and Shanghai Airlines, and I.L.F.C. opened offices in Singapore and Beijing this year to help keep up with demand.

“Our group shares a commitment to I.L.F.C.’s experienced management team, its operating philosophy, and its presence in the United States,” Weng Xianding, the chairman of New China Trust, said in a statement. “This transaction allows I.L.F.C. to continue to serve its worldwide partners in the aviation industry with world-class service while accelerating its growth in important markets, including Asia.”

A.I.G. was advised by Citigroup and the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, while the buyers were represented by Credit Suisse and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

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