JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's foreign minister says he is resisting calls to resign following his indictment on a breach of trust charge.
Avigdor Lieberman told a news conference Thursday night that under the law, he does not have to resign. He says he will confer with his lawyers before making any decision.
He gave no timeframe for his decision and hinted it could come after parliamentary elections on Jan. 22.
The holiday season is a good time to catch up with old friends. If you’re an Xbox fan, you’re probably getting reacquainted with galactic warrior Master Chief in his new adventure, “Halo 4.” If you’re a Nintendophile, you’re probably frolicking with Mario on your new Wii U.
Sony, meanwhile, has expanded its holiday guest list to invite nearly two decades worth of characters to mix it up in “PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale” (for the PlayStation 3, $ 59.99; Vita, $ 39.99). Fans of the original PlayStation can welcome back old pals like Sir Daniel Fortesque of “MediEvil” and the title character of “Parappa the Rapper.” Younger gamers who have only known the PS3 will be happy to see Nathan Drake from “Uncharted” and Cole MacGrath from “Infamous.” Turn them loose in an assortment of game-inspired arenas and you’ve got chaos.
It’s not an original idea: Nintendo has been pitting its lovable characters against each other since 1999′s “Super Smash Bros.” As you’d expect, “All-Stars” lets up to four players choose their favorite personalities and pound on each other until one is left standing.
The technique is a change from most fighting games. Most of the time, kicking or punching your opponent doesn’t do much damage. Instead, each blow adds to an attack meter; build up enough energy and you can unleash three levels of truly deadly moves. There’s a little more strategy, but most players won’t find it too complicated.
The solo campaign is awfully skimpy, but “All-Stars” makes for a lively party when you have a few friends over. Two-and-a-half stars out of four.
— Sony’s burlap-clad goofball Sackboy is part of the “All-Stars” lineup, but he takes center stage in “LittleBigPlanet Karting” ($ 59.99).
Yes, it’s a go-kart racer — a genre that has already made room for Mario, Donkey Kong and Sonic the Hedgehog — but Sony freshens it up by giving you the ability to build your own racetracks and share them online. By exploring the game’s built-in courses, you can find hundreds of elements to add to your own, and they all share the homespun “arts-and-crafts” aesthetic of the original “LittleBigPlanet.”
Unfortunately, “LBP Karting” also revives the weird, floaty physics of its parent. That worked fine in the two-dimensional fantasy world of “LBP,” but it’s annoying when you’re behind the wheel. The tracks are filled with the power-ups, obstacles and gravity-defying leaps you’d expect in a kart racer, but the vehicles themselves feel sluggish and unresponsive. Two stars.
—Insomniac Games’ popular “lombax”-robot buddies are celebrating their 10th anniversary, both in “All-Stars” and their own “Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault” ($ 19.99). The latter game, however, is a big disappointment, stripping away most of what made the team so endearing.
It’s a “base defense” game, meaning you’re plopped down on a planet and then have to protect your turf from waves of invading enemies. That eliminates the exploration and discovery that made most of the “R&C” games so absorbing, replacing it with a tiresome cycle of building fortifications, having them destroyed, then rebuilding them. Instead of the comedy that was once this series’ trademark, you get drudgery. One star.
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Follow Lou Kesten on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lkesten
Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Alexis Welch and Amar'e Stoudemire
Amanda Schwab/Startraks
The New York Knicks power forward, 30, married his longtime girlfriend Alexis Welch on the rooftop deck of their Manhattan home on Wednesday, a date they picked because it was 12-12-12.
"I feel blessed," says Stoudemire, who posted a photo of the couple's wedding rings on Twitter.
"12.12.12 now has a special & spiritual meaning for us," he wrote.
The couple – who have been together for a decade and have three children – had just 12 people at the ceremony.
The bride wore a custom dress and the groom was in a tuxedo by Calvin Klein. They both have rings by Shayan Afshar, and her wedding band is by Harry Glinberg.
Following the ceremony, they visited the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief at Madison Square Garden before heading to STK for a reception.
Stoudemire and Welch, who were engaged June 2 in Paris, plan to celebrate their love again this summer at a bigger wedding with friends, teammates and family.
Alexis Welch and Amar'e Stoudemire's rings
Courtesy Amar'e Stoudemire
• Reporting by Lesley Messer
LONDON (AP) — Nearly everywhere around the world, people are living longer and fewer children are dying. But increasingly, people are grappling with the diseases and disabilities of modern life, according to the most expansive global look so far at life expectancy and the biggest health threats.
The last comprehensive study was in 1990 and the top health problem then was the death of children under 5 — more than 10 million each year. Since then, campaigns to vaccinate kids against diseases like polio and measles have reduced the number of children dying to about 7 million.
Malnutrition was once the main health threat for children. Now, everywhere except Africa, they are much more likely to overeat than to starve.
With more children surviving, chronic illnesses and disabilities that strike later in life are taking a bigger toll, the research said. High blood pressure has become the leading health risk worldwide, followed by smoking and alcohol.
"The biggest contributor to the global health burden isn't premature (deaths), but chronic diseases, injuries, mental health conditions and all the bone and joint diseases," said one of the study leaders, Christopher Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
In developed countries, such conditions now account for more than half of the health problems, fueled by an aging population. While life expectancy is climbing nearly everywhere, so too are the number of years people will live with things like vision or hearing loss and mental health issues like depression.
The research appears in seven papers published online Thursday by the journal Lancet. More than 480 researchers in 50 countries gathered data up to 2010 from surveys, censuses and past studies. They used statistical modeling to fill in the gaps for countries with little information. The series was mainly paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
As in 1990, Japan topped the life expectancy list in 2010, with 79 for men and 86 for women. In the U.S. that year, life expectancy for men was 76 and for women, 81.
The research found wide variations in what's killing people around the world. Some of the most striking findings highlighted by the researchers: — Homicide is the No. 3 killer of men in Latin America; it ranks 20th worldwide. In the U.S., it is the 21st cause of death in men, and in Western Europe, 57th.
— While suicide ranks globally as the 21st leading killer, it is as high as the ninth top cause of death in women across Asia's "suicide belt," from India to China. Suicide ranks 14th in North America and 15th in Western Europe.
— In people aged 15-49, diabetes is a bigger killer in Africa than in Western Europe (8.8 deaths versus 1 death per 100,000).
— Central and Southeast Asia have the highest rates of fatal stroke in young adults at about 15 cases per 100,000 deaths. In North America, the rate is about 3 per 100,000.
Globally, heart disease and stroke remain the top killers. Reflecting an older population, lung cancer moved to the 5th cause of death globally, while other cancers including those of the liver, stomach and colon are also in the top 20. AIDS jumped from the 35th cause of death in 1990 to the sixth leading cause two decades later.
While chronic diseases are killing more people nearly everywhere, the overall trend is the opposite in Africa, where illnesses like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are still major threats. And experts warn again shifting too much of the focus away from those ailments.
"It's the nature of infectious disease epidemics that if you turn away from them, they will crop right back up," said Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders.
Still, she acknowledged the need to address the surge of other health problems across Africa. Cohn said the agency was considering ways to treat things like heart disease and diabetes. "The way we treat HIV could be a good model for chronic care," she said.
Others said more concrete information is needed before making any big changes to public health policies.
"We have to take this data with some grains of salt," said Sandy Cairncross, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
He said the information in some of the Lancet research was too thin and didn't fully consider all the relevant health risk factors.
"We're getting a better picture, but it's still incomplete," he said.
___
Online:
www.lancet.com
http://healthmetricsandevaluation.org
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks retreated after six days of gains on Thursday as encouraging reports on retail sales and jobless claims were outweighed by the uncertainty surrounding the "fiscal cliff" negotiations in Washington.
Drawn-out fiscal negotiations between Democrats and Republicans have constrained trading. There is concern that tax hikes and spending cuts set to begin in 2013 if a deal is not reached in Washington will hurt growth, but overall, the stock market has taken it in stride.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday accused President Barack Obama of "slow-walking" the economy off the fiscal cliff.
"Today's there's a certain sense that both sides are still apart," said Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York, describing Thursday's trading as "tweaking" while investors watch Washington's back-and-forth drama.
"I think it's imperative they cooperate on some levels, and if they do, I think we'll see a Santa Claus rally."
The S&P 500 managed gains for six straight sessions and touched its highest level since October 22 on Wednesday.
Best Buy Co
Weekly claims for jobless benefits dropped to nearly the lowest level since February 2008 and retail sales rose in November after an October decline, improving the picture for consumer spending.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> lost 50.86 points, or 0.38 percent, to 13,194.59. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> slid 7.80 points, or 0.55 percent, to 1,420.68. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> fell 20.67 points, or 0.69 percent, to 2,990.14.
A day after the Federal Reserve announced a new round of stimulus for the economy, markets focused on Chairman Ben Bernanke's reiteration that monetary policy would not be sufficient to offset the impact of going over the fiscal cliff.
The S&P energy index <.gspe> slid 1 percent as Nabors Industries Ltd
European Union finance ministers reached agreement to make the European Central Bank the bloc's top banking supervisor, which could boost confidence in EU leaders' ability to confront the euro zone's sovereign debt crisis.
CVS Caremark Corp
(Editing by Kenneth Barry and Jan Paschal)
SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook is trying to make its privacy controls easier to find and understand in an effort to turn the world’s largest social network into a more discreet place.
The fine-tuning announced Wednesday will include several revisions that will start rolling out to Facebook Inc.‘s more than 1 billion users in the next few weeks.
The biggest change will be a new “privacy shortcuts” section that will appear as a tiny lock on the right-hand side at the top of people’s news feeds. This feature offers a drop-down box where users will be able to get answers to common questions such as “Who can see my stuff?”
Other updates will include a tool that will enable individuals to review all the publicly available pictures identifying them on Facebook.
Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Music News
Paul McCartney; Nirvana (Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic)
INF, Everett
Sir Paul McCartney will front a Nirvana reunion as part of Wednesday night's 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief, a source confirms to PEOPLE.
The performance comes 18 years after lead singer Kurt Cobain took his own life at just 27 in 1994.
The Sun reports that McCartney, 70, has been "secretly working" with the former band members, Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic, following a recent session at a studio.
As for whether the trio will perform new music ...
"I won't say it's not true," is all another source will add. No word yet on the possibility of it being a Nirvana classics-heavy set.
Other performers include Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Roger Waters, Kanye West and The Who. The concert will be live-streamed on PEOPLE.com as well as 121212concert.org.
Whether you think it's a great idea or not, here's what fans have to say on social media about McCartney fronting a Nirvana reunion.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressional committee has opened a hearing to examine the science behind a human growth hormone test the NFL wants to start using on its players.
Nearly two full seasons have passed since the league and the players' union signed a labor deal that set the stage for HGH testing.
The NFL Players Association won't concede the validity of a test that's used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball, and the sides haven't been able to agree on a scientist to help resolve that impasse.
Among the witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday is Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dick Butkus. In his prepared statement, Butkus writes: "Now, let's get on with it. The HGH testing process is proven to be reliable."
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks climbed to session highs on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve announced a new stimulus plan at the end of its two-day monetary policy meeting in its latest attempt to kickstart a struggling economy.
The central bank replaced a more modest stimulus program due to expire at year-end with a fresh round of Treasury purchases that will increase its balance sheet, as was widely expected. It committed to monthly purchases of $45 billion in Treasuries on top of the $40 billion per month in mortgage-backed bonds it started buying in September.
"The market was expecting this - they basically stopped doing the Operation Twist, and it looks like they are going to be doing $45 billion a month in Treasury purchases, which was the expectation," said Troy Logan, managing director and senior economist at Warren Financial Service, in Exton, Pennsylvania.
"This was expected, and the market is waiting for the year-end 'fiscal cliff' issue to be solved, so what we have to do is have confidence our political system can actually make a functional decision."
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Wednesday "serious differences" remain with President Barack Obama in talks to avert the "fiscal cliff" of steep tax hikes and budget cuts set for the end of the year.
The S&P 500 was up for a sixth straight day, its longest winning streak since August, although gains have been less than 0.5 percent per day, on average, in part due to uncertainty over the cliff negotiations.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 71.44 points, or 0.54 percent, to 13,319.88. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> rose 10.19 points, or 0.71 percent, to 1,438.03. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> advanced 12.29 points, or 0.41 percent, to 3,034.59.
Shares of Aetna , the third-largest U.S. health insurer, jumped 4.8 percent to $46.61 a day after the company gave a higher forecast for profit and revenue growth next year.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc
(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)
BAMAKO, Mali — Soldiers arrested Mali’s prime minister at his residence late Monday night, signaling new turmoil in a West African nation racked by military interference and an Islamist takeover in the north.
Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra appeared on state television and announced his government’s resignation on Tuesday.
Hours later, Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra appeared grim-faced on national television to announce his government’s resignation. A spokesman for soldiers who seized power earlier in the year — and later nominally relinquished it to Mr. Diarra — confirmed the prime minister’s arrest on Tuesday morning, accusing him of “playing a personal agenda” while the country faced a crisis in the north. The soldiers arrived at Mr. Diarra’s home around 11 p.m. Monday as he was preparing for a flight to Paris for a medical checkup, said the military spokesman, Bakary Mariko. The prime minister was taken to the military encampment at Kati, just outside Bamako, the capital, where Capt. Amadou Sanogo, the officer who led the March military coup, and others told him “there were proofs against him that he was calling for subversion,” Mr. Mariko said.
On Tuesday morning, the streets of Bamako appeared calm following what appeared to be the country’s second coup d’état in less than a year. But the new upheaval is likely to be considered a setback to Western efforts to help Mali regain control of territory lost to Qaeda-linked militants earlier in the year.
The West has watched with growing alarm as Islamist radicals have constructed a stronghold in the country’s vast north. The United Nations, regional African bodies, France and the United States have tried to aid the faltering Malian Army in a military strike to take back the lost north. Those efforts have so far not coalesced into a coherent plan, despite numerous meetings and United Nations resolutions. More meetings at the United Nations are planned for later this month.
The latest political turmoil in the capital will almost certainly slow down any campaign in the north, however. Already, the United States has expressed reluctance to provide too much direct military assistance, given the shakiness of the political order here. Those doubts are only likely to increase following the latest upheaval.
Mr. Diarra — appointed last spring as a caretaker prime minister until new elections could be organized — was known to disagree with Captain Sanogo on military policy.
He has been an advocate of immediate international military assistance to recapture the north from the Islamists. Captain Sanogo has rebuffed suggestions that the Malian military is incapable of handling the job on its own. Indeed, the captain for weeks resisted the notion that troops from other African nations should even approach the capital.
While Mr. Diarra has made the rounds of foreign capitals, pleading for help to fight the increasingly aggressive Islamists, military leaders have remained at the Kati base, grumbling.
That conflict was evident in the declarations of the military’s spokesman on Tuesday. “Since he has been in power, he has been working simply to position his own family,” Mr. Mariko said. “There has been a paralysis in government.”
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