CDC: Flu seems to level off except in the West

New government figures show that flu cases seem to be leveling off nationwide. Flu activity is declining in most regions although still rising in the West.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hospitalizations and deaths spiked again last week, especially among the elderly. The CDC says quick treatment with antiviral medicines is important, in particular for the very young or old. The season's first flu case resistant to treatment with Tamiflu was reported Friday.

Eight more children have died from the flu, bringing this season's total pediatric deaths to 37. About 100 children die in an average flu season.

There is still vaccine available although it may be hard to find. The CDC has a website that can help.

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CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

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S&P rises for seventh day but 1,500 too steep a climb

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The smallest of gains gave the Standard & Poor's 500 its seventh straight winning day on Thursday, but the index failed to hold above the 1,500 line, restrained by Apple's worst day in more than four years.

Apple Inc slid 12.4 percent to $450.50 a day after it posted revenue that missed Wall Street's forecast as iPhone sales were poorer than expected.

The sharp drop wiped out nearly $60 billion in Apple's market capitalization to less than $423 billion, leaving the company vulnerable to losing its status as the most valuable U.S. company to second-place ExxonMobil , at $416.5 billion.

The S&P 500, however, managed to hit its longest winning streak since October 2006.

"The market has sent the message it is no longer driven by the whims of Apple," said Ken Polcari, director of the NYSE floor division at O'Neil Securities in New York.

The S&P 500 briefly traded above 1,500 for the first time since December 12, 2007, but failed to hold above it, indicating that momentum is waning and a pullback is in the charts.

"If the market had a little bit more excitement to it, momentum players would have jumped after it broke through 1,500. Investors know the market is a little bit ahead of itself," Polcari said.

Economic data helped buoy equities as U.S. factory activity grew the most in nearly two years in January and new claims for jobless benefits dropped to a five-year low last week, giving surprisingly strong signals on the economy's pulse.

At the same time, Chinese manufacturing grew this month at the fastest pace in about two years, while data suggesting German growth picked up boosted hopes for a euro-zone recovery.

"PMI in Asia, Europe, and obviously, here in the United States, is moving in the right direction, and that's stuff people should be excited about," Polcari said.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 46 points or 0.33 percent, to 13,825.33 at the close. The S&P 500 <.spx> inched up just 0.01 of a point, or 0 percent, to finish at 1,494.82. The Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> dropped 23.29 points or 0.74 percent, to end at 3,130.38, with most of that loss on Apple's slide.

The broader Russell 2000 index <.rut> also hit a milestone as it closed above 900 points for the first time.

Video streaming service Netflix Inc surprised Wall Street with a quarterly profit after it added nearly 4 million customers in the United States and abroad. Netflix shares surged 42.2 percent to $146.86, its biggest percentage jump ever.

Earnings have helped drive the stock market's recent rally. Thomson Reuters data through early Thursday showed that of the 133 S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings so far, 66.9 percent have exceeded expectations - above the 65 percent average over the past four quarters.

About 6.8 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the daily average during January 2012 of about 6.93 billion shares.

Roughly five issues rose for every four that fell on both the NYSE and Nasdaq.

(Editing by Jan Paschal)

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India Ink: In India, a Rise of Private Universities and Liberal Arts Programs

Higher Education

The Choice on India Ink

Guidance on American college applications for readers in India from The Times’s admissions blog.

If you are a student who is interested in taking a variety of university courses and having time to narrow your career options, then a liberal arts education may be an ideal fit for you.

A number of new private universities with liberal arts programs have sprung up in India. There were fewer than 20 such schools in 2005, and there are more than 100 now, according to a report by Shiv Nadar University.

According to the report, since 2008 India has seen a 40-percent increase in students choosing to enroll in private universities instead of public schools, which require students to choose a discipline for admission (and are increasingly difficult to get into).

Private universities offer more choice, but they come at a much higher price. Annual tuition can run as high as 40,000 rupees, compared with 360 rupees at Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College, for example. That is because these private universities — which are often started by entrepreneurs and investors — are generally for-profit businesses, unlike the government schools, which are highly subsidized. Private university owners say the for-profit models gives them the ability to provide students with experienced, well-paid professors.

One of the newest of these private schools is Shiv Nadar University in Noida, a suburb of Delhi. The university, when it opened its doors last year, offered programs in engineering, math and natural sciences to its first batch of 274 students. This year, it began its School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the student population has risen to 574. As at liberal arts schools in the United States, students at Shiv Nadar University are required to take a core curriculum of varied subjects, regardless of their major.

In this week’s installment of The Choice on India Ink, we’re taking a look at the rise of private universities and liberal arts programs in India. We sat down with Nikhil Sinha, the vice chancellor at Shiv Nadar University, and Sanjeev Agrawal, the dean of studies, to find out more about why the university has chosen its interdisciplinary approach over the specializing method of most other Indian universities.

Some questions and answers have been edited, including for space and style.

Why do you feel it’s necessary for students to study a wide variety of subjects?

Mr. Agrawal: Whether you’re an economics or English major, you still have to take courses in things like history, biology and psychology in order to say you’ve had a well-rounded education. We aim for our students to be global citizens who are knowledgeable about many subjects, not just one.

Where do your professors come from?

Mr. Sinha: Despite the fact that the school is still in its early stages, professors from universities outside of India – from places like Harvard and Berkeley in the United States to Oxford in the United Kingdom – currently teach and continue to express interest in teaching at S.N.U. It’s an initiative that many want to be a part of building. Over 70 percent of our incoming faculty and half of our current faculty have either taught or studied abroad.

You can devise the right curricula, but unless you have the professors to back it up, you won’t get anywhere. I think many of them want to see this work.

Your students are required to do some kind of work over summer vacation. Can you tell us why that is?

Mr. Agrawal: We want our students to apply their studies to real-life situations, so they can also see where all their hard work is going. We feel the best way that can be done is through some kind of experience over the summer, whether that’s at an internship or doing research for a professor at the university or summer classes.

We want them to be able to compete alongside students from other universities in an international sense, and since many of those students are furthering their interests and working over summer while on break, we thought we’d make it a required part of our program so that they can have the same opportunities once they graduate.

Tell us a little bit about your plans for exchange programs.

Mr. Sinha: We’ve begun plans to collaborate with colleges in the United States for exchange programs and dual degrees, since that’s definitely something we’d like to offer our students and students abroad. We’ve been in contact with a few universities about students attending our university and theirs, and graduating with degrees from both schools. This will provide the students with experience both in India and overseas, and they’ll also have an easier time working abroad if that’s what they prefer. We want foreign students to look to S.N.U. one day as a place to come to study for all four years, not just for one year as exchange students.

---

For members of the Shiv Nadar University team, the road ahead is still long, but they feel it will be worth the wait.

“It will take some time before we’re able to offer everything we’d like to,” Mr. Agrawal said. “But our current students are really enjoying their courses, and the fact that they’re able to contribute to the making of the school curriculum and vision. A lot of feedback comes from them, and as long as they remain engaged and interested, we know we’re on the right track. Other universities are also beginning to be aware of that.”

This may be true. As the number of private universities continues to grow, public universities are beginning to follow their lead by offering interdisciplinary programs to their students. Examples of these universities include the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi, which announced the opening of its four-year liberal arts program, Meta College, at the start of this semester.

According to The Indian Express, University of Delhi admissions officers received an “overwhelming response” from students eager to get into the program.

“We received over 100 applications just two days after making the announcement,” said the program co-coordinator, Madar Chaturvedi.

Over all, the S.N.U. team is confident that this new trend will continue to grow within India.

“It’s important that students aren’t forced to commit to a field of study right out of eighth grade,” Mr. Sinha said. “They should have choices, and they should be familiar with the kinds of opportunities that are out there for them. Not just in India, but all over the world.”

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Nintendo Reaches into Wii U Grab Bag, Pulls Out Some Vague, Some Fascinating Promises

It’s been a ho-hum 2013 for Nintendo’s Wii U so far: some carry-over posturing about scads of “launch window” titles, but less than a handful of games with bankable release dates. When I checked the hopper for January, February and March, I counted four, maybe five Wii U titles with firm dates, all of them least a month or two off.

That’s not how you move systems, and Nintendo ran damage control Wednesday morning by trotting out company president Satoru Iwata in a broad-ranging (and reaching) “Wii U Direct” video effort to soothe jittery system owners and would-be buyers still waiting for slam dunks. Call it Nintendo circling its wagons…or maybe just an “if you squint you can make it out on the horizon” wagon-train parade.

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“In past Nintendo dialogues, we have focused more on games releasing in the near future, but it’s still early in 2013, so I’d like to change the format a little bit,” said Iwata before launching into a sneak preview of what Nintendo has cooking.

For starters, Iwata says the Wii U will see at least two major system updates this year: one in the spring, another during the summer. Arguably the most important of these involves a desperately needed fix for the crazy-long time it takes to launch apps or reload the Wii U Menu — a process that can take up to 30 seconds. Imagine if each time you backed out of an iOS app it took half a minute to bring up iOS’s icon overlay. That’d be insane, and it’s a shame quality control didn’t view load times as prohibitive enough to remedy before the launch in November. Thank goodness Nintendo’s working to put things right.

Iwata also mentioned finally debuting the long-awaited Wii U Virtual Console – Nintendo’s vehicle to sell old-school NES and Super NES games – just after the spring system update. The Virtual Console’s been missing in action since the Wii U launched, despite its longstanding availability on the original Wii. That, according to Iwata, is because Wii U Virtual Console games are poised to offer features their Wii counterparts didn’t, like being able to save backups of your game progress, the option to play away from the TV on the Wii U GamePad, access to Miiverse communities for these older games and support for additional platforms like the Game Boy Advance (never released on the Wii Virtual Console).

If you’ve already purchased the Wii Virtual Console version of a game, it sounds like you’ll have to pay again, though Nintendo says you’ll get “special pricing”: regularly priced games will run $ 5 to $ 6 (NES) or $ 8 to $ 9 (SNES), with those prices dropping to $ 1 and $ 1.50, respectively, if you bought the game for Wii Virtual Console. It’s better than no discount, I suppose, and Nintendo can probably justify the nominal buck to buck-and-a-half for research and development on the Wii U Virtual Console’s extras (it’s certainly taking the company long enough to pull everything together).

If you’d rather not wait for spring, Nintendo’s running a beta dubbed “Wii U Virtual Console Trial Campaign”: Between January and July, Nintendo will release a classic title every 30 days for $ 0.30 a pop (Nintendo’s tied the pricing and release timeframes in with the original Famicom‘s 30th anniversary in Japan, coming up this July). After July, the prices of the discounted titles will bounce back to normal, but you’ll be able to buy them at the reduced price if you participated in the beta. The games list is none too shabby, either: Balloon Fight, F-Zero, Punch-Out!!, Kirby’s Adventure, Super Metroid, Yoshi and Donkey Kong.

Wii U Virtual Console sounds like a clever little diversion for Nintendo wonks, but let’s not forget how fuzzy these games look nowadays on resolution-locked flat-screens. It’s not that I want high-res versions — these things are what they are at their native pixel counts — but you wouldn’t lay wax paper over a Monet, would you?

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Let’s cut to the chase: Nintendo fans want to know where the next Zelda game is, what comes after Super Mario Galaxy 2, when they’ll be able to sample the Wii U’s take on Mario Kart, what’s up with the next Super Smash Bros. game and so forth.

Iwata confirmed that Nintendo won’t offer new games in January or February and apologized for this, but said “Nintendo takes seriously its responsibility to offer a steady stream of new titles in the very early days of a new platform to establish a good lineup of software.” Why the delay? Because, says Iwata, “We firmly believe we have to offer quality experiences when we release new titles.” No argument there.

What’s coming between spring and summer? Iwata identified several titles: Game & Wario, Wii Fit U, Pikmin 3, LEGO City Undercover and The Wonderful 101. But don’t get too excited: These were originally slated to hit by March.

We also caught another glimpse of Bayonetta 2 (as well as the female protagonist’s backside), heard a bit about Super Smash Bros. U and why it’ll probably be a while before we see it (screens at E3), and then Iwata talked about, well, a bunch of stuff we already knew was in the offing: a new unnamed Super Mario game by the team that developed the Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D Land platformers, a new Mario Kart racer (both set to be playable at E3) and a new Wii Party game (Iwata showed video of someone shaking a Wii U GamePad to roll dice as well as two players using a GamePad like a mini-foosball table).

More intriguing were the two unannounced new games, like one from the developers behind Kirby’s Epic Yarn starring Yoshi (a kind of sequel to Yoshi’s Story for the Nintendo 64) or — wait for it JRPG wonks — a Shin Megami Tensei / Fire Emblem crossover from Atlus.

Last but not least, Iwata revealed the company’s plans for Zelda on the Wii U. The really good news: Nintendo says it’s planning to “rethink the conventions of Zelda,” tinkering with tenets like dungeon linearity and solo play. The merely good news: Nintendo’s remastering Zelda: The Wind Waker in HD for the system and tweaking the gameplay. The bad-good news: You’ll probably have to wait a long time for the new Zelda, but you’ll get The Wind Waker HD by “this fall.”

But the best news of all, from where I’m sitting: Taking a page from Apple, Iwata closed by invoking “one more important topic”: a new Wii U game from Monolith Soft, the company responsible for Xenoblade Chronicles, the best roleplaying game on any game system released in…well, when was Final Fantasy XII released? Has it been seven years already?

All told, a mixed performance from Nintendo, but here’s the thing: However vague much of the information in Iwata’s presentation was, I love the dignified, spare, wonderfully thorough way Nintendo’s chosen to address its audience lately. By contrast, I feel like a need to shower after watching most Microsoft/Sony pressers.

MORE: Sony Xperia Tablet Z Aims for ‘World’s Thinnest’ Crown

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Baby Born with Heart Outside Her Chest Goes Home from Hospital

By Dahvi Shira

01/24/2013 at 06:40 PM EST

Ashley and Audrina Cardenas

Three-month-old Audrina Cardenas is a survivor.

The infant, delivered on Oct. 15 with a rare genetic deformity called "ectopia cordis," was born with part of her heart outside of her body. Following a successful surgery in November, Cardenas finally left the hospital on Wednesday.

At the time of her procedure, the Texas Children's Hospital in Houston released a statement explaining, "A multidisciplinary team of surgeons saved Audrina's life during a miraculous six-hour, open-heart surgery where they reconstructed her chest cavity to make space for the one-third of her heart that was outside of her body."

Cardenas's mother Ashley told ABCNews.com that she knew about her daughter's condition when she was 16 weeks pregnant.

"They gave me the option to terminate the pregnancy [or] continue with the pregnancy and do something called comfort care at the time of delivery, where instead of doing anything painful to her or do surgery, they let you spend as much time with her until she passes, or opt for a high-risk surgery to help repair the heart," Ashley Cardenas said.

Although she's been released from the hospital, Audrina will still be on oxygen and use a feeding tube, according to her mom, who spoke to HLN affiliate KTRK.

With Audrina wearing a pink chest shield made by doctors, Ashley said, "She doesn't have the sternum. She doesn't have anything over her heart besides the skin and a little muscle that they put over, so this is very important for her to wear. Especially for a car seat, the straps go right on her heart, and if she didn't have anything hard, it would damage her heart."

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Penalty could keep smokers out of health overhaul

WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama's health care law, according to experts who are just now teasing out the potential impact of a little-noted provision in the massive legislation.

The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" to its detractors — allows health insurers to charge smokers buying individual policies up to 50 percent higher premiums starting next Jan. 1.

For a 55-year-old smoker, the penalty could reach nearly $4,250 a year. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5,100 on top of premiums.

Younger smokers could be charged lower penalties under rules proposed last fall by the Obama administration. But older smokers could face a heavy hit on their household budgets at a time in life when smoking-related illnesses tend to emerge.

Workers covered on the job would be able to avoid tobacco penalties by joining smoking cessation programs, because employer plans operate under different rules. But experts say that option is not guaranteed to smokers trying to purchase coverage individually.

Nearly one of every five U.S. adults smokes. That share is higher among lower-income people, who also are more likely to work in jobs that don't come with health insurance and would therefore depend on the new federal health care law. Smoking increases the risk of developing heart disease, lung problems and cancer, contributing to nearly 450,000 deaths a year.

Insurers won't be allowed to charge more under the overhaul for people who are overweight, or have a health condition like a bad back or a heart that skips beats — but they can charge more if a person smokes.

Starting next Jan. 1, the federal health care law will make it possible for people who can't get coverage now to buy private policies, providing tax credits to keep the premiums affordable. Although the law prohibits insurance companies from turning away the sick, the penalties for smokers could have the same effect in many cases, keeping out potentially costly patients.

"We don't want to create barriers for people to get health care coverage," said California state Assemblyman Richard Pan, who is working on a law in his state that would limit insurers' ability to charge smokers more. The federal law allows states to limit or change the smoking penalty.

"We want people who are smoking to get smoking cessation treatment," added Pan, a pediatrician who represents the Sacramento area.

Obama administration officials declined to be interviewed for this article, but a former consumer protection regulator for the government is raising questions.

"If you are an insurer and there is a group of smokers you don't want in your pool, the ones you really don't want are the ones who have been smoking for 20 or 30 years," said Karen Pollitz, an expert on individual health insurance markets with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. "You would have the flexibility to discourage them."

Several provisions in the federal health care law work together to leave older smokers with a bleak set of financial options, said Pollitz, formerly deputy director of the Office of Consumer Support in the federal Health and Human Services Department.

First, the law allows insurers to charge older adults up to three times as much as their youngest customers.

Second, the law allows insurers to levy the full 50 percent penalty on older smokers while charging less to younger ones.

And finally, government tax credits that will be available to help pay premiums cannot be used to offset the cost of penalties for smokers.

Here's how the math would work:

Take a hypothetical 60-year-old smoker making $35,000 a year. Estimated premiums for coverage in the new private health insurance markets under Obama's law would total $10,172. That person would be eligible for a tax credit that brings the cost down to $3,325.

But the smoking penalty could add $5,086 to the cost. And since federal tax credits can't be used to offset the penalty, the smoker's total cost for health insurance would be $8,411, or 24 percent of income. That's considered unaffordable under the federal law. The numbers were estimated using the online Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator.

"The effect of the smoking (penalty) allowed under the law would be that lower-income smokers could not afford health insurance," said Richard Curtis, president of the Institute for Health Policy Solutions, a nonpartisan research group that called attention to the issue with a study about the potential impact in California.

In today's world, insurers can simply turn down a smoker. Under Obama's overhaul, would they actually charge the full 50 percent? After all, workplace anti-smoking programs that use penalties usually charge far less, maybe $75 or $100 a month.

Robert Laszewski, a consultant who previously worked in the insurance industry, says there's a good reason to charge the maximum.

"If you don't charge the 50 percent, your competitor is going to do it, and you are going to get a disproportionate share of the less-healthy older smokers," said Laszewski. "They are going to have to play defense."

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Online:

Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator — http://healthreform.kff.org/subsidycalculator.aspx

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S&P up for sixth day, Apple slip could halt rally

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 rose for a sixth day on Wednesday after stronger-than-expected profits from IBM and Google but the rally could be halted as Apple's after-hours miss sent its shares lower.

The S&P was just 4.7 percent from its all-time closing high as IBM's and Google's earnings, released after Tuesday's close, followed on the heels of stronger U.S. economic data.

"People were kind of nervous about earnings coming into this quarter but numbers have shown so far strength in earnings," said King Lip, chief investment officer at Baker Avenue Asset Management in San Francisco.

But Apple , still the largest U.S. publicly traded company, fell 8 percent in extended trading after sales of its flagship iPhone came in below analyst targets and quarterly revenue slightly missed Wall Street expectations.

"One thing that stands out is the company's ballooning balance sheet, where they now have $137 billion dollars in cash and investments," said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at RDM Financial in Westport, Connecticut. "You've got to wonder when they're going to put some more of that to work."

Declining issues beat advancers in both the NYSE and Nasdaq during regular market hours, in a sign the market's rally may be overstretched. The broad Russell 2000 index <.rut> closed the day down 0.3 percent after earlier hitting and intraday historic high just below 900 points.

Shares in IBM Corp , the world's largest technology services company, climbed 4.4 percent during regular market hours to $204.72, providing just about all of the Dow's 67-point gain.

Also helping the tech sector was a 5.5 percent jump in Google Inc to $741.50. The Internet search company reported its core business outpaced expectations and revenue was higher than expected.

The S&P technology sector <.splrct> rose 1.2 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 67.12 points or 0.49 percent, to 13,779.33, the S&P 500 <.spx> gained 2.25 points or 0.15 percent, to 1,494.81, and the Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> added 10.49 points or 0.33 percent, to 3,153.67.

The benchmark S&P 500 is a mere 0.35 percent away from hitting 1,500, a level not seen since December 12, 2007.

S&P 500 futures fell 4.1 points, or 0.3 percent, while Nasdaq 100 futures fell 20 points or 0.7 percent.

Netflix shares soared 32 percent, above $136, after the video subscription service said it added subscribers in the United States and abroad and posted a quarterly profit.

LED maker Cree Inc jumped 22 percent to $40.85 after it forecast a higher-than-expected third-quarter profit, and reported results above analysts' estimates.

Upscale leather goods maker Coach Inc plunged 16.4 percent to $50.75 after reporting sales that missed expectations.

Clearing a market hurdle, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Republican-led plan to extend the country's borrowing authority until mid May. This delays a confrontation in Congress similar to one in 2011, which generated a stalemate that triggered the first-ever U.S. debt rating downgrade.

Thomson Reuters data through Wednesday showed that of the 99 S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings so far, 67.7 percent have topped expectations, above the 65 percent average beat over the past four quarters.

Overall, S&P 500 fourth-quarter earnings rose 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. That estimate is above the 1.9 percent forecast at the start of earnings season.

Top U.S. manufacturers sounded a confident note about their expectations for 2013 on Wednesday as fears of the year-end "fiscal cliff" faded into memory.

In the regular session, about 6.1 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the 2012 daily average of about 6.45 billion.

On the NYSE, roughly 15 issues fell for every 14 that rose and on Nasdaq seven declined for every five gainers.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos, additional reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Diane Craft)

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IHT Special: Syrians Struggle in an Uneasy Lebanon

Sam Tarling

A Syrian refugee camp in northern Lebanon.

AL-MINYA, LEBANON — For Mohammed al-Ahmad and his wife Zuhour, this is the second cold, wet winter of the war.

They passed the first in the Bab Amr district of Homs, a onetime rebel stronghold that was taken back by government forces last February, after a long and unrelenting siege. Much of the neighborhood was destroyed. They have no home to go back to.

This winter they are living in a soaked field some kilometers north of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city. The unofficial refugee camp here is home to more than 100. The mud in the narrow paths between tents is ankle-deep at spots and sticks to everything.

Inside Mohammed and Zuhour’s small tent, there is little respite from the harshness of life outside. In one corner, scraps of damp, moldy bread lie in a pile.

The roof, punched with holes, is not waterproof and offered little protection from the rain and sleet of the fierce storms this month. The tent flooded and water soaked their small stock of food.

Two of their five children lie on thin mattresses on the floor, tucked under blankets. They are still and quiet save for the sudden fits of coughing, an increasingly common sound in settlements like this. A third child, awake, has no coat or winter clothing. Zuhour is pregnant: Another child will soon be living in this flimsy shelter.

At the most recent count, there were 212,000 refugees in Lebanon, registered or awaiting registration with the United Nations refugee agency. A year ago, the agency had registered 5,000. The increase mirrors the intensification of a conflict across the border that the United Nations says has now killed 60,000.

In a report released this month, the International Rescue Committee, a crisis relief organization, characterized the situation of the 600,000 Syrian refugees spread across the region as a “deepening humanitarian disaster.” The millions more displaced inside Syria are “in desperate need and have little if any access to humanitarian relief,” it said.

According to the U.N.’s figures, Lebanon has taken in more refugees than any of Syria’s other neighbors. Unlike other countries hosting refugees though, it does not have any official refugee camps.

Camps are a “last resort,” said Ninette Kelley, the most senior representative of the U.N. refugee agency in Lebanon. Still, there is a “need to plan for camps in the event of a mass influx or in the event that local solutions are completely overwhelmed,” she added.

For now, the Lebanese government has no plans for camps, but Wael Abou Faour, the country’s minister of social affairs, conceded that may have to change: “I think that sooner or later we will have to go to camps because we are overstretched,” he said.

In the absence of official camps, unofficial ones are absorbing the rising flood of refugees into the country. Across Lebanon, tents are rigged between buildings, along the edges of highways and in vacant plots and fields.

In some areas close to the border, refugees squat in houses abandoned by the Lebanese who have fled the shelling and gunfire coming from Syria. In small apartments in cities, refugees sleep two to a bed to keep rents affordable. Without guaranteed shelter and with limited aid, many new arrivals say the basic cost of survival is their biggest challenge.

“We are living in a very desperate situation right now,” said Hassan Ali Afeer, 30, a refugee near the Syrian border in the Bekaa Valley town of Arsal. “We are barely living.”

Mr. Afeer’s situation is better than that of many. On a promontory on the edge of Arsal, a local official has donated a plot of land near a mosque where some refugees had been seeking shelter. Islamic charities have pitched in and built concrete huts for 45 families. They are cold, the roofs leak and supplies are scarce: but at least Mr. Afeer and the others living there pay no rent.

In contrast the landowner of the muddy camp in al-Minya charges refugees like Mohammed and Zuhour a monthly rent of $66 for their tent. It is cheaper than renting an apartment, but many struggle to pay even that much in this impoverished part of Lebanon — where work is hard to find for local people, let alone refugees.

Mohammed and Zuhour, like many others, cannot register with the U.N. refugee agency — an inability which limits the aid they can receive.

“We don’t have our family’s papers, we lost them in the shelling,” said 27-year-old Zuhour. “If we could register we would.”

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Let’s Welcome Back Hockey with This ESPN Commercial

We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:  

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Hockey, schmockey. As a whole, the Atlantic Wire staff is sort of ambivalent that the NHL is finally back. (Our Canadian correspondent, however, is thrilled.) But you know what we are thankful for? The ESPN commercial reminding us that the NHL is finally back: 

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These people are awesome (and, hey, maybe some of them play hockey):

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People are awesome, and also quite strange. Like this guy, who offers the world a video review of the Astor CB-100 (totally SFW), and the 33,000+ views his video has already gotten:

And finally, these are ponies in sweaters. Ponies in sweaters, people:

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Women have caught up to men on lung cancer risk

Smoke like a man, die like a man.

U.S. women who smoke today have a much greater risk of dying from lung cancer than they did decades ago, partly because they are starting younger and smoking more — that is, they are lighting up like men, new research shows.

Women also have caught up with men in their risk of dying from smoking-related illnesses. Lung cancer risk leveled off in the 1980s for men but is still rising for women.

"It's a massive failure in prevention," said one study leader, Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. And it's likely to repeat itself in places like China and Indonesia where smoking is growing, he said. About 1.3 billion people worldwide smoke.

The research is in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. It is one of the most comprehensive looks ever at long-term trends in the effects of smoking and includes the first generation of U.S. women who started early in life and continued for decades, long enough for health effects to show up.

The U.S. has more than 35 million smokers — about 20 percent of men and 18 percent of women. The percentage of people who smoke is far lower than it used to be; rates peaked around 1960 in men and two decades later in women.

Researchers wanted to know if smoking is still as deadly as it was in the 1980s, given that cigarettes have changed (less tar), many smokers have quit, and treatments for many smoking-related diseases have improved.

They also wanted to know more about smoking and women. The famous surgeon general's report in 1964 said smoking could cause lung cancer in men, but evidence was lacking in women at the time since relatively few of them had smoked long enough.

One study, led by Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto, looked at about 217,000 Americans in federal health surveys between 1997 and 2004.

A second study, led by Thun, tracked smoking-related deaths through three periods — 1959-65, 1982-88 and 2000-10 — using seven large population health surveys covering more than 2.2 million people.

Among the findings:

— The risk of dying of lung cancer was more than 25 times higher for female smokers in recent years than for women who never smoked. In the 1960s, it was only three times higher. One reason: After World War II, women started taking up the habit at a younger age and began smoking more.

—A person who never smoked was about twice as likely as a current smoker to live to age 80. For women, the chances of surviving that long were 70 percent for those who never smoked and 38 percent for smokers. In men, the numbers were 61 percent and 26 percent.

—Smokers in the U.S. are three times more likely to die between ages 25 and 79 than non-smokers are. About 60 percent of those deaths are attributable to smoking.

—Women are far less likely to quit smoking than men are. Among people 65 to 69, the ratio of former to current smokers is 4-to-1 for men and 2-to-1 for women.

—Smoking shaves more than 10 years off the average life span, but quitting at any age buys time. Quitting by age 40 avoids nearly all the excess risk of death from smoking. Men and women who quit when they were 25 to 34 years old gained 10 years; stopping at ages 35 to 44 gained 9 years; at ages 45 to 54, six years; at ages 55 to 64, four years.

—The risk of dying from other lung diseases such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis is rising in men and women, and the rise in men is a surprise because their lung cancer risk leveled off in 1980s.

Changes in cigarettes since the 1960s are a "plausible explanation" for the rise in non-cancer lung deaths, researchers write. Most smokers switched to cigarettes that were lower in tar and nicotine as measured by tests with machines, "but smokers inhaled more deeply to get the nicotine they were used to," Thun said. Deeper inhalation is consistent with the kind of lung damage seen in the illnesses that are rising, he said.

Scientists have made scant progress against lung cancer compared with other forms of the disease, and it remains the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. More than 160,000 people die of it in the U.S. each year.

The federal government, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the cancer society and several universities paid for the new studies. Thun testified against tobacco companies in class-action lawsuits challenging the supposed benefits of cigarettes with reduced tar and nicotine, but he donated his payment to the cancer society.

Smoking needs more attention as a health hazard, Dr. Steven A. Schroeder of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a commentary in the journal.

"More women die of lung cancer than of breast cancer. But there is no 'race for the cure' for lung cancer, no brown ribbon" or high-profile advocacy groups for lung cancer, he wrote.

Kathy DeJoseph, 62, of suburban Atlanta, finally quit smoking after 40 years — to qualify for lung cancer surgery last year.

"I tried everything that came along, I just never could do it," even while having chemotherapy, she said.

It's a powerful addiction, she said: "I still every day have to resist wanting to go buy a pack."

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Online:

American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org

National Cancer Institute: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/tobacco/smoking and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/lung

Medical journal: http://www.nejm.org

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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