Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.

Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.

"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.

But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.

Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.

The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.

Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.

Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.

But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.

Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.

Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.

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Stock futures flat ahead of earnings season start

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock index futures were little changed in low volume on Tuesday ahead of the unofficial start of an earnings season expected to show sluggish corporate growth.

Profits in the fourth quarter were expected to top lackluster results in the previous quarter, but analysts' current estimates are down sharply from where they were in October. Fourth-quarter earnings are expected to grow by 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.

S&P 500 futures were up 0.2 point and slightly below 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 were unchanged, and Nasdaq 100 futures were also flat.

Shares of Yum Brands Inc fell 5 percent to $64.50 in light premarket trading a day after the KFC parent warned sales in China, its top market, shrank more than expected in the fourth quarter.

ConAgra Foods Inc priced a public offering of 8.1 million common shares at $29.75 per share, the foodmaker said on Monday. ConAgra closed at $30.17 during regular Monday trading.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

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IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read, Jan. 7

NEWS Sounding defiant, confident and, to critics, out of touch, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on Sunday used his first public address in six months to justify his crackdown, rally his supporters and leave recent efforts toward a political resolution of the civil war in tatters. Anne Barnard reports from Beirut.

A group of top regulators and central bankers on Sunday gave banks around the world more time to meet new rules aimed at preventing financial crises, saying they wanted to avoid the possibility of damaging the economic recovery. Jack Ewing reports.

Turmoil at a leading newspaper is posing an early challenge for the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, pitting pent-up demand for change against the Communist Party’s desire to maintain firm control. Ian Johnson reports from Beijing.

The French technology entrepreneur Xavier Niel has made a career of disrupting the status quo. Now his company, Free, has taken on Google and other Web companies by allowing its estimated 5.2 million Internet-access users in France to block Web advertising. Free is updating users’ software with an ad-blocking feature as the default setting. David Jolly reports from Paris.

John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer, says he did not intend to harm national security, and he doesn’t think he did. But in a first, he is set to be sentenced to 30 months in prison for disclosing classified information to a reporter. Scott Shane reports from Washington.

A year after Muscovites took to the streets to protest the government and Vladimir V. Putin’s ongoing rule, the excitement that gripped many of the capital’s young professionals appears to be gone. But in its place is a deepening sense of alienation that poses its own long-term risk to the system. Ellen Barry reports from Moscow.

At first glance the willingness of Al Jazeera, the satellite network owned by Qatar, to pay some $500 million for Current TV, Al Gore’s struggling channel, seems like a vanity project. And it may turn out that way. But Qatar has developed one of the more energetic and sophisticated foreign investment strategies of the Gulf oil and gas producers. Al Jazeera’s expansion plan in the United States can be seen as part of its overall plan to put itself on the map. Stanley Reed reports from London.

A small plane carrying four Italian tourists, including the head of the Missoni fashion business, disappeared off the coast of Venezuela on Friday morning, prompting a sea and air search. Vittorio Missoni, 58, an owner of the family-run label famed for its zigzag knitwear, and his wife were aboard the plane, which was missing after takeoff from the island resort of Los Roques. Eric Wilson reports.

EDUCATION Millions of children in Indonesian elementary schools may no longer have separate science classes if the government approves a curriculum overhaul that would merge science and social studies with other classes so more time can be devoted to religious education. Sara Schonhardt reports from Jakarta.

More Western education institutions are looking to open up in Asia — and U.S. art and design schools are no exception. While the potential for growth is huge, given Asia’s rising creative industries, the actual logistics can be complicated. Kelly Wetherille reports.

ARTS The principal problem with many Web sites is that their designers were neither rigorous nor imaginative enough in planning the way we will navigate them. Alice Rawsthorn on design.

SPORTS The first weekend of the year has its own folklore in England as the time when small clubs can rise and knock the giants out of the F.A. Cup. Rob Hughes on soccer.

On Sunday morning, the long-dormant N.H.L. began stirring to life. The 113-day lockout was over, finished at 5 a.m. after a 16-hour bargaining session at a hotel in Manhattan, and across North America, the game began to awaken from its slumber. Jeff Z. Klein reports.

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‘Facebook Dead’: How to ‘Kill’ Your Friends

Rusty Foster discovered he was dead last week, at least according to Facebook. He had been locked out of his account, which had been turned into a “memorial page,” because someone had reported the Maine man as deceased to the social media site.

He tweeted Thursday, “Facebook thinks I’m dead. I’m tempted to just let it,” then “Did you know that you can report any of your Facebook friends dead & Facebook will lock them out of their account with no evidence needed?”

As one of Foster’s friends discovered, it doesn’t take much to convince Facebook that somebody is dead. By simply going to the ” Memorialization Request” page and filling out a form, including a link to an obituary, anybody can take someone else off Facebook.

The obituary needs to have the same name (or at least a close name), but doesn’t need to match any other details on the profile. The obituary Foster’s friend used to prove Foster’s death was for a man who was born in 1924 and died in 2011 in a different state than the one Foster lists on Facebook as his home state.

Foster, 36, said he never got any notification his account was going to be locked, and only discovered it when he attempted to log in. He filled out a form to report the error, and received a response that began with “We are very sorry to hear about your loss.”

More than a full day later, Foster’s account still hadn’t been unlocked. Buzzfeed, tipped off by Foster, posted an article in which one editor “killed” another editor, John Herrman, on Facebook. According to the article, about an hour after Herrman reported the error to Facebook, his profile was reactivated. About an hour after that, 27 hours after Foster first reported his erroneous death, he was “resurrected” by Facebook and allowed back into his account.

Foster does not know the total amount of time he was “Facebook dead.” He told ABC that nothing was different with his account when he logged back in, only that some of his friends had a little fun with his status.

“The only thing that happened was some of my friends posted little mock-eulogies for me, because word got around that I was locked out, due to a temporary case of death,” Foster wrote in an email with the subject line, “Rusty, the Facebook zombie.”

When pages are memorialized, they are removed from sidebars, timelines and friend suggestions and searches. This is likely to prevent people from seeing their friends who have died pop up on their newsfeed, and to prevent people from hacking into the accounts of dead people.

Foster said he understands the position Facebook is in when it comes to the death of one of its users, but believes there are better options for the social media site.

“There ought to be an email sent to the account’s email address informing it that the account has been reported dead and providing a link or something to dispute the report before any action is taken,” Foster wrote.

Foster said the most frustrating part was not being able to get into his account to “click the ‘I’m not dead’ button that should also be there.”

This has apparently been the same “memorialization” process since at least 2009, when another user took to his personal blog to write about his experience of being “Facebook dead.” In his case, the obituary his friend used to have him declared dead wasn’t even close to his real name. Instead, the man who performed the funeral services had a similar name.

In a statement to ABC News, Facebook said the system is in place in order to respect the privacy of the deceased.

“We have designed the memorialization process to be effective for grieving families and friends, while still providing precautions to protect against either erroneous or malicious efforts to memorialize the account of someone who is not deceased,” the statement reads. “We also provide an appeals process for the rare instances in which accounts are mistakenly reported or inadvertently memorialized.”

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Prince Charles Wants a Better Environment for His Grandchild

By Stephen M. Silverman

01/07/2013 at 07:40 AM EST

Prince Charles (foreground), with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

Allpix/Splash News Online

With his son and daughter-in-law the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge expecting a baby in early summer, grandfather-to-be Prince Charles says he's determined to be greener than ever – and deliver his future descendant a healthier world, not "a poison chalice."

Long a champion of environment causes, the heir to the throne, 64, told ITV’s This Morning show on Monday: "I've gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long term in relation to environmental damage, climate change and everything else. We don't, in a sensible world, want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren, to leave them with the real problem."

Saying "I don’t want to be confronted by my future grandchild and have them say, 'Why didn’t you do something?' " Charles went on to state, "So clearly now that we will have a grandchild, it makes it even more obvious to try and make sure we leave them something that isn't a total poisoned chalice."

Charles – recently named among the U.K.'s best-dressed gents – also spoke of his concern for son Prince Harry, 27, currently serving in Afghanistan.

"If you are a parent or relation to a loved one and that person is away in incredibly dangerous and challenging circumstances, I know you worry all the time," he said. "Certainly every night I worry. But he loves what he is doing and he's brilliant at it."

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Stock futures slip after stocks hit five-year high

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock index futures fell on Monday, with markets expected to consolidate after the S&P 500 index closed at a five-year high on Friday.

Last week was the best for U.S. stocks in more than a year as a budget deal and economic data boosted investor confidence.

Financial shares will be in focus a day after global regulators gave banks four more years and greater flexibility to build up cash buffers, scaling back moves that aimed to help prevent another financial crisis.

By spurring credit, the easing of the bank rule may help support growth, boosting investments in equities and other risk assets.

S&P 500 futures dipped 1.3 points and were below 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 fell 13 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures added 1 point.

Walt Disney Co started an internal cost cutting review several weeks ago that may include layoffs at its studio and other units, three people with knowledge of the effort told Reuters.

Video-streaming service Netflix Inc said it will carry previous seasons of some popular shows produced by Time Warner's Warner Bros Television.

Major U.S. technology companies could miss estimates for fourth-quarter earnings as budget worries likely led some corporate clients to tighten their belts last month.

Amazon shares rose 2.3 percent in premarket trading after Morgan Stanley raised is rating on the stock to "overweight" from "equal weight."

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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Assad Outlines New Syria Peace Plan

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian President Bashar Assad on Sunday outlined his vision for a road map to end nearly 22 months of violence in Syria but also struck a defiant tone, calling on his countrymen to unite against "murderous criminals" whom he said are carrying out a foreign plot seeking to tear the nation apart.

In a one-hour speech to the nation in which he appeared confident and relaxed, Assad ignored international demands for him to step down and said he is ready to hold a dialogue but only with those "who have not betrayed Syria." He offered a national reconciliation conference, elections and a new constitution but demanded regional and Western countries stop funding and arming rebels trying to overthrow him first.

The proposal, however, is unlikely to win acceptance from Syria's opposition forces, including rebels on the ground, who have repeatedly said they will accept nothing less than the president's departure, dismissing any kind of settlement that leaves him in the picture. On top of that, Assad's new initiative is reminiscent of symbolic changes and concessions that his government made earlier in the uprising, which were rejected at the time as too little too late.

Speaking at the Opera House in central Damascus, Assad told the hall packed with his supporters that "we are in a state of war. We are fighting an external aggression that is more dangerous than any others, because they use us to kill each other."

"It is a war between the nation and its enemies, between the people and the murderous criminals," he added. The audience frequently broke out in cheers and applause.

Assad has rarely spoken since the uprising against his rule began in March 2011, and his speech Sunday was his first since June.

His last public comments were in an interview in November to Russian TV in which he vowed to die in Syria. On Sunday, he seemed equally confident in his troops' ability to crush the rebels fighting his rule, even as they edge in closer than ever to his seat of power, Damascus.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Assad's speech was "beyond hypocritical." In a message posted on his official Twitter feed, Hague said "empty promises of reform fool no one."

Wearing a suit and tie, the president spoke before a collage of pictures of what appeared to be Syrians who have been killed since March 2011.

At the end of his speech and as he was leaving the hall, he was mobbed by a group of loyalists shouting: "With our blood and souls we redeem you, Bashar!"

The president in turn waved and blew kisses to the crowd on his way out.

Assad, in his speech, acknowledged the enormous impact of the nation's conflict, which the United Nations recent estimated had killed more than 60,000 people.

"We meet today and suffering is overwhelming Syrian land. There is no place for joy in any corner of the country in the absence of security and stability," he said. "I look at the eyes of Syria's children and I don't see any happiness."

The Internet was cut in many parts of Damascus ahead of the address, apparently for security reasons.

As in previous speeches, Assad said his forces were fighting groups of "murderous criminals" and jihadi elements and denied that there was an uprising against his family's decades-long rule.

He stressed the presence of religious extremists and jihadi elements among those fighting in Syria, calling them "terrorists who carry the ideology of al-Qaeda" and "servants who know nothing but the language of slaughter."

He struck a defiant tone, saying Syria will not take dictates from anyone and urged his countrymen to unite to save the nation.

Outlining his peace initiative, he said: "The first part of a political solution would require regional powers to stop funding and arming (the rebels), an end to terrorism and controlling the borders."

He said this would then be followed by dialogue and a national reconciliation conference and the formation of a wide representative government which would then oversee new elections, a new constitution and general amnesty.

However, Assad made clear his offer to hold a dialogue is not open to those whom he considers extremists or carrying out a foreign agenda.

"We never rejected a political solution ... but with whom should we talk? With those who have extremist ideology who only understand the language of terrorism?" he said.

"Or should we with negotiate puppets whom the West brought? ... We negotiate with the master not with the slave."

As in previous speeches and interviews, he clung to the view that the crisis in Syria was a foreign-backed agenda and said it was not an uprising against his rule.

"Is this a revolution and are these revolutionaries? By God, I say they are a bunch of criminals," he said.

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News Summary: Tablet-tailored search engine debuts

TAILORED FOR TABLETS: Izik is billed as the first search designed especially for iPads and tablet computers running on Google Inc.‘s Android software. Free Izik apps for those devices were released Friday.

CAPSULE CATERING: For the more visual format of tablets, Izik displays search results in rows of capsules that can be easily scrolled with the swipe of a finger. This contrasts to showing a stack of blue links, the industry standard for laptops and desktops.

GOODBYE GOOGLE? Blekko, the maker of Izik, hopes people will break the Google search habit as tablets supplant traditional computers for Web surfing.

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Bethenny Frankel Divorcing Jason Hoppy

By Sarah Michaud

01/05/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy

Albert Michael/Startraks

It's official – Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy's marriage is over.

Having announced a separation over the holidays, the reality star began the divorce process by filing earlier this week in New York, TMZ reports.

"It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating," Frankel, 42, had said in a statement Dec. 23. "This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family."

The split comes after months of rumors that the pair – who married in 2010 and are parents to daughter Bryn, 2½ – were on the rocks.

"Bethenny is devastated," a friend tells PEOPLE.

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FDA: New rules will make food safer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration says its new guidelines would make the food Americans eat safer and help prevent the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that sicken or kill thousands of consumers each year.

The rules, the most sweeping food safety guidelines in decades, would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. The new guidelines were announced Friday.

Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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