Terrorist tweets: how Al Qaeda’s social media move could cause problems

Twitter isn’t just for Justin Bieber – terrorists are tweeting, too.

Somalia’s Al Qaeda affiliate, Al-Shabab, might not have as many followers as Mr. Bieber (1,800 versus 34 million), but it is still microblogging to get its message out.

“Our war against the West is a war for the sovereignty and dominance of Allah’s Law above all creation. No to democracy and #Kafir laws!” it tweeted recently, using the Arabic word for “infidel” to spread its propaganda.

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At other times, Al Shabab has used Twitter to give supporters updates on its fight against Kenyan forces: “Mujahiddeen ambush #KDF convoy between Kudhaa & Kulbiyow, Lower Jubba, destroying 3 vehicles and killing 11 #Kenyan Soldiers #JihadDispatches.”

After years of relying almost exclusively on websites and chat rooms to spread their doctrine online, Al Qaeda and its global affiliates are now beginning to embrace social media, according to “The State of Global Jihad Online,” a study by the New America Foundation.

On one hand, Twitter and Facebook offer terrorists new tools. Yet in many ways, terrorists have only moved onto social media because governments and hackers are taking down the websites that are their online headquarters. The concern among some experts is that the West’s efforts could backfire if social media proves more effective at winning converts than the traditional terrorist websites.

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“It’s like we have this beehive – and then you go and beat on it and the bees go everywhere,” says Aaron Y. Zelin, author of the study and a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in an e-mail interview. “It might be a lot easier to keep an eye on those bees and their activities while they’re still in the hive.”

Concerns that terrorists might embrace social media have been around for several years, but use of the platform has been limited. While Osama bin Laden was alive, terrorists did use social media to a degree for hate speech, recruitment, and training. Still, most Al Qaeda sympathizers remained tethered to Arabic and English-language websites, which require a login and password to chat, download literature, and view videos and other material.

But those forums are under increasing strain. Al Qaeda’s top-tier forum, Shamukh al-Islam, was down from Dec. 5, 2012 to Jan. 29, 2013, according to the study. That takedown, as well as two other major strikes last spring, left a void and accelerated migration to social media, which now is “beyond a point of no return,” Mr. Zelin says.

Other researchers have registered similar observations. Evan Kohlmann, an expert on online jihadism, tweeted in December that: “Due to the absence of top jihad chat forums, al-Shabab … in Somalia has been forced to rely on Twitter to distribute its latest video release. This may be the first time that any terrorist group allied with Al-Qaida has ever used Twitter as the exclusive point of release for media.”

New technology helps. New features on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube make it far easier for global “jihadi entrepreneurs” to share articles, news, and videos.

“The newer technologies lowered the bar for participation, making the involvement of low-level or non-jihadis in the online conversation a new feature of the global jihadi movement,” the study says. “Those so inclined can talk about jihad all day on the Web, even if they are geographically dispersed. This was not possible beforehand.”

For now, forums still comprise the core of Al Qaeda’s online presence because they can facilitate private conversations and are seen as authentic. (Social media sites and tweets are far easier to fake.) But social media have a growing role.

“Currently, the forums are the hubs where the al-Qaeda organization meets its grass-roots supporters in a relatively safe and exclusive environment,” the study notes. “The social media platforms are where the product or ideas are sold.”

What is unclear is whether Facebook would be more successful in selling the terrorist message than a forum. Statistics show that the English-language versions of jihadi websites are failing to spread the message to English-speaking Muslims in North America and Britain, the study says.

If social media proves to be more effective, governments will face big problems.

“It’s very difficult for law enforcement or intelligence agencies to police the entire social media landscape – they just don’t have the bandwidth,” says John Bumgarner, research director for the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a cybersecurity think tank. “Twitter could kick someone off for violating their terms of service, but nothing prevents those guys from coming back and creating an account under another Twitter handle.”

In January, Twitter shut down @HSMPress (which was linked with Al Shabab, whose full name is Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahidin) when it tweeted to its then 20,000 followers that it would kill French hostage Denis Allex. It followed with a tweet saying it had done just that. After the shutdown, though, @HSMPRESS1 popped up to fill its spot – its originator also apparently a resident of Somalia.

“For what it’s worth, shooting the messenger and suppressing the truth by silencing your opponents isn’t quite the way to win the war of ideas,” chided one of the first tweets from the new account.

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Kris Humphries: Why He Won't Divorce Kim Kardashian

02/07/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Despite Kim Kardashian's pressing for a divorce, Kris Humphries deeply believes their 72-day marriage should be annulled and he won't give up the fight, a source tells PEOPLE.

"Kris only wants an annulment," says the source close to Humphries. "He never wanted to be married more than once and he feels like she cheated him out of the chance to have a real, loving marriage."

The Brooklyn Nets forward is also not sympathetic to Kardashian's pleas to end the battle for the sake of the baby she's having with boyfriend Kanye West, adds the source.

"He feels that even if she's pregnant, she still has to deal with the mess she made," the source says. "He thinks their entire marriage was a fraud, and he's not going to just give up because of the situation."

Kardashian, who says she's due to deliver in early July, is asking a judge to start a divorce trial as soon as possible or at the very least to have their marriage legally dissolved while they litigate other issues.

"There was no fraud on my part," she says in papers filed last month in L.A. Superior Court. "I wish this issue to be tried immediately so that this false claim can be put to rest and I can move on with my life."

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Southern diet, fried foods, may raise stroke risk

Deep-fried foods may be causing trouble in the Deep South. People whose diets are heavy on them and sugary drinks like sweet tea and soda were more likely to suffer a stroke, a new study finds.

It's the first big look at diet and strokes, and researchers say it might help explain why blacks in the Southeast — the nation's "stroke belt" — suffer more of them.

Blacks were five times more likely than whites to have the Southern dietary pattern linked with the highest stroke risk. And blacks and whites who live in the South were more likely to eat this way than people in other parts of the country were. Diet might explain as much as two-thirds of the excess stroke risk seen in blacks versus whites, researchers concluded.

"We're talking about fried foods, french fries, hamburgers, processed meats, hot dogs," bacon, ham, liver, gizzards and sugary drinks, said the study's leader, Suzanne Judd of the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

People who ate about six meals a week featuring these sorts of foods had a 41 percent higher stroke risk than people who ate that way about once a month, researchers found.

In contrast, people whose diets were high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish had a 29 percent lower stroke risk.

"It's a very big difference," Judd said. "The message for people in the middle is there's a graded risk" — the likelihood of suffering a stroke rises in proportion to each Southern meal in a week.

Results were reported Thursday at an American Stroke Association conference in Honolulu.

The federally funded study was launched in 2002 to explore regional variations in stroke risks and reasons for them. More than 20,000 people 45 or older — half of them black — from all 48 mainland states filled out food surveys and were sorted into one of five diet styles:

—Southern: Fried foods, processed meats (lunchmeat, jerky), red meat, eggs, sweet drinks and whole milk.

—Convenience: Mexican and Chinese food, pizza, pasta.

—Plant-based: Fruits, vegetables, juice, cereal, fish, poultry, yogurt, nuts and whole-grain bread.

—Sweets: Added fats, breads, chocolate, desserts, sweet breakfast foods.

—Alcohol: Beer, wine, liquor, green leafy vegetables, salad dressings, nuts and seeds, coffee.

"They're not mutually exclusive" — for example, hamburgers fall into both convenience and Southern diets, Judd said. Each person got a score for each diet, depending on how many meals leaned that way.

Over more than five years of follow-up, nearly 500 strokes occurred. Researchers saw clear patterns with the Southern and plant-based diets; the other three didn't seem to affect stroke risk.

There were 138 strokes among the 4,977 who ate the most Southern food, compared to 109 strokes among the 5,156 people eating the least of it.

There were 122 strokes among the 5,076 who ate the most plant-based meals, compared to 135 strokes among the 5,056 people who seldom ate that way.

The trends held up after researchers took into account other factors such as age, income, smoking, education, exercise and total calories consumed.

Fried foods tend to be eaten with lots of salt, which raises blood pressure — a known stroke risk factor, Judd said. And sweet drinks can contribute to diabetes, the disease that celebrity chef Paula Deen — the queen of Southern cuisine — revealed she had a year ago.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, drugmaker Amgen Inc. and General Mills Inc. funded the study.

"This study does strongly suggest that food does have an influence and people should be trying to avoid these kinds of fatty foods and high sugar content," said an independent expert, Dr. Brian Silver, a Brown University neurologist and stroke center director at Rhode Island Hospital.

"I don't mean to sound like an ogre. I know when I'm in New Orleans I certainly enjoy the food there. But you don't have to make a regular habit of eating all this stuff."

___

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

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Wall Street ends flat as investors pull back

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks ended mostly flat on Wednesday, taking another pause in the recent rally that has driven the S&P 500 to five-year highs, as transportation and technology shares lost ground.

Transportation stocks were among the worst performers. Shares of CH Robinson Worldwide fell 9.7 percent to $60.50 and the stock was the biggest percentage loser on the Nasdaq 100 after the freight transport company posted a lower-than-expected adjusted quarterly profit.

Without a strong catalyst, the market could struggle to continue its rally, analysts said. The benchmark S&P 500 index has advanced 6 percent this year, reaching its highest since December 2007, while the Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> has risen above 14,000 recently.

Bank of America-Merrill Lynch analysts see a near-term pullback likely, based on strong equity inflows at the start of the year, said Dan Suzuki, the bank's equity strategist in New York.

"The fact that we've gone since November without seeing one, from a timing perspective, it wouldn't be a surprise to see one now."

With fourth-quarter earnings nearing an end, the market will be losing one of its big supports, said Frank Lesh, a futures analyst and broker at FuturePath Trading LLC in Chicago. "That's one thing that's been holding the market up," he said.

Shares of Time Warner Inc jumped 4.1 percent to $52.01 after reporting higher fourth-quarter profit that beat Wall Street estimates, as growth in its cable networks offset declines in film, TV entertainment and publishing units.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 7.22 points, or 0.05 percent, at 13,986.52. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 0.83 points, or 0.05 percent, at 1,512.12. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 3.10 points, or 0.10 percent, at 3,168.48.

Amazon.com shares, down 1.7 percent at $262.22, led the decline on the Nasdaq.

Also causing some strain on the market, investors have been speculating about leadership changes in Spain and Italy and watching for comments from European leaders, analysts said. European Central Bank policymakers are due to meet Thursday.

The Dow Jones Transportation average <.djt> was down 0.2 percent after hitting another record high on Tuesday. The average is up 10.7 percent for the year so far and has made a series of new highs since mid-January.

According to Thomson Reuters data, of 301 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings, 68.1 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, above a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters. In terms of revenue, 65.8 percent of companies have topped forecasts.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 4.7 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

Walt Disney Co's stock was up 0.4 percent at $54.52, after the company beat estimates for quarterly adjusted earnings and gave an optimistic outlook for the next few quarters.

Volume was roughly 6.5 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the 2012 average daily closing volume of about 6.45 billion.

Advancers outpaced decliners on the NYSE by roughly 17 to 12 and on the Nasdaq by about 13 to 11.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum, Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

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At War Blog: Interview With Gen. John R. Allen on Leaving Afghanistan

The New York Times interviewed Gen. John. R. Allen on Sunday, a week before his scheduled departure from Afghanistan after 19 months as the commander of the American and allied forces.

Following are some of General Allen’s comments. Brief explanations have been provided in brackets.

On his relationship with President Hamid Karzai:

“I wanted him to understand that he was always going to have my loyalty and I was always going to work with him. In fact, I said a number of times, ‘I’m proud to have served you at the same time I served my own leadership, whether it’s a NATO leadership or U.S. leadership.’ Now, I wanted him to believe it because it happened to be true. I think our personalities matched in that regard.”

“Now, we’ve had some tough times. This has been a time of really dramatic change for the campaign. When I got here, I measured success in how well we and how often we were fighting. Today, it’s a very different environment. The Afghans are virtually entirely in the lead across Afghanistan.”

“This is what I’ve learned about the president. If you listen to him, he’s got some pretty good ideas, and often the controversy that has arisen in the relationships hasn’t been because necessarily you disagree with the ideas. It’s because you haven’t listened to them early enough.”

“And sometimes it’s been strained. I don’t think he ever believes that actions that I have taken were ever intended to disadvantage him as the president, or not do everything I possibly could for the Afghan people. I told him, I’m prepared to die in this country on behalf of his people. I take that very seriously.”

On civilian casualties:

“I’ve met with the families of the casualties that we’ve inflicted. I’ve flown to the villages to personally apologize for the casualties, and do what I can to do the right thing for those families. I’ve taken measures with respect to the employment of certain kinds of fires.” ["Fires” is common military shorthand for a variety of munitions, from bullets to missiles to mortar shells.]

“We had a couple of pretty rough incidents where Afghans were killed by the delivery of aviation fires. I eventually said to President Karzai that civilian structures, tents, potential areas where civilians might be either taking refuge or hiding or living, I’m not going to deliver any more fires on those structures unless my troops are pinned down, can’t move, and the only option they have is to deliver fires on these structures, or I decide, the senior leader out here, I decide to deliver fires on these structures.”

“The civilian causalities as a result of air fires plummeted immediately. It was probably the decision I could have made long before that and none of our forces were put at risk, or a greater risk because of this.”

On the aftermath of the burning of Korans at Bagram Air Base:

“I have to tell you, I thought this could be it for the relationship.

“I immediately got on the phone to a number of Afghan media outlets, immediately cut a video apologizing for this as sincerely as I could possibly appear and sound because this was going to be bad, it could be really bad. I called the president, I went to see him, apologized to him for this. It was completely inadvertent but this culture deserved that apology. We were in their home, so to speak. We are guests in their home and even though it was an accident, even though it was not intentional, we had made a bad mistake, a real error and the people deserved my apology, the president deserved my apology.

“He accepted it and I think in many respects, the personal nature of our relationship was what tempered the language coming out of the palace, the relief, his own engagement with the media and so on. Because of both of our actions, both of them supporting each other, we were able to keep this from being the result of a bad mistake from being something that could have really fractured the relationship.”

On the fallout in March after an American soldier killed 16 villagers in the southern Afghan district of Panjwai, which he first heard about when he was in the United States to testify before Congress:

“The first phone call was something of the effect of — we’ve got mixed reporting from Panjwai. We think an American soldier maybe shot some people and my response was, ‘All right. Let’s develop the situation quickly. Tell me what we got in front of us because we’ve got to make the Afghans were included on this.’ ”

“Then the phone calls started coming in and the numbers started going up and pretty quick and this is as bad a circumstance as you might have imagined.”

“I called President Karzai from home and we had a long conversation about it. I promised him once again that we would take all steps, measures, take all actions necessary to get to the bottom of this and we would do a full and complete investigation and those people necessary would be held accountable.”

“This was still unfolding. It was one shooter. It was multiple shooters. There were wild rumors associated with things that he had done in addition to shooting. So the information environment was wide open at this point. And both for the purposes of internal stability in Afghanistan for the purposes of preserving our relationship we were working very, very hard to confirm what we knew to be the facts and try very hard to get after the rumors that were just flying.”

“Once again, when he could have been angry, when it could have been a very negative conversation, I mean, he was tutorial. He explained to me why this is bad for the relationship, why this is bad for the campaign, and why this will shake the confidence of the Afghan people, his personal gesture of measured conversation with me. He wasn’t angry.”

On why the United States should stay engaged in Afghanistan:

“I put it in the context of this has been worth it. This is bigger than anyone of us. It’s bigger than the president. It’s bigger than the president of Afghanistan, because this isn’t about today. This is about tomorrow. This is about doing all we can to facilitate President Karzai with his desire to be successful. But it’ll be about doing all we can do to set up his successor for success.”

On overcoming the skepticism of officials in Washington, who often express frustration with Mr. Karzai:

“For this president, at this moment of its history, the Afghanistan history, to be able to hold together these tribes and these ethnic groups with these kinds of challenges has got to be one of the hardest jobs going. And so I try to paint the context of the challenges that he faces, the history from which he originates and help conceivably, he will interpret our actions. He may not understand what we are trying to do, or may misinterpret what we’re trying to do or say. And frankly, one of the great things about our democracy is also one of the hardest things about our democracy: That is, we don’t always speak with the same voice.

“So he’ll hear a voice from one part of the government, it will be different for another part of the government and he’ll see to square the differences. It’s not a criticism, it just is who we are. The farther you are away from Kabul, the farther you are away from the palace, the farther you are away from the history of this country in the complexities of society, the easier it is to generalize, frankly.”

On the need for the Afghan government to better serve its people and stamp out corruption within its ranks:

“We’ve worked very hard, obviously, to build a capacity in those. But when your ability to survive the night, or put food on the table was — well, for many years are functionally, what tribe you were part of, or what group you were part of. And those patronage networks undertook economic opportunities which made them some respect, criminal patronage networks.

“They can only survive because institutions of governance are weak. And so now, we find ourselves in this — at this very moment when the future of the country relies on the strength of institutions. The criminal patronage networks recognized that their future, their survival can only be sustained by keeping these institutions weak. That’s the moment we find ourselves in, and the presidential directive on any corruption and government reform and the Mutual Accountability Framework came out of Tokyo.

“These created very helpful, very useful, both domestic and international expectations for reform. So we need to see how smoothing past the written word and the spoken word and start moving towards action. I think the president, if he were sitting here would tell you that they have achieved some good action, good results in his presidential decree. The Mutual Accountability Framework is constantly being audited to see that there’s progress on reform. But again, we’re still pretty fresh in the process and we’ve got to let this play out some more.”

On the future of the war and Afghanistan:

“Let me make sure I’m clear on this. Nothing is sure in a post-conflict society. But I think the indicators, as far as I’m concerned, are that we’re on the right trajectory. What you have to understand, what people have to understand is some of these reforms take a very long time. In an environment where human rights were crashed under multiple different invasions or civil wars or the Taliban, creating once again the kind of bias for human rights that we would all expect in the Western society, just doesn’t come easily to this country.

“Nothing will happen in this country without security. And that security is being purchased every single day by the Afghan National Security Forces. And then, on the platform of that security, this president has announced a program or platform that he intends to follow. Now, he’s moving forward in some areas, he’s having resistance in others, but we just have to expect this is going to take time. That’s where huge patience has to come in. That’s where the decade of transformation comes in.”

On the surge of “insider attacks” against Westerners that took place in 2012:

“The losses became to this particular means of attack became very troubling, very significant, and tragic. And while on the tactical level and on the operational level, we were able to deal with the problem. This was becoming a strategic crisis — a strategic crisis in capitals, a strategic crisis for the alliance — and the Taliban saw this. They knew this. They saw that. They saw that the future of the A.N.S.F. relied on our being close, partner or adviser inside the Afghan formations.

“We were very careful in our reaction to insider attacks. Not to wall ourselves off from the Afghans and create distance. I used to tell them, you may not be able to do anything about the linear distance that you have to deal with but there’s a lot you can do about your proximity and the closer you all feel to each other, the more secure you will be. And that’s in an environment where we’re transitioning to being advisers almost entirely across Afghanistan. That has to be one of the operative principles for philosophically how we’re going to live with the Afghans. You treat them like brothers. You live with them like they’re family. That reduces the unknowns, it reduces the potential for cultural affront, and it makes you more secure.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to keep a close eye on the environment. We still have these people called Guardian Angels because there are enemies in the ranks and they’re waiting to take that shot.”

“We took a lot of measures and the numbers are down. But I don’t in any way want anybody to become complacent about the number being down. I don’t want anyone to lift up on the security measures that they’re taking or reduce the attentiveness that they have to the environment around. So, I want everybody to be attentive and we’re going to periodically refresh our training both at the very lowest levels and for the units coming in. So, we’re not going to give up on this.”

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Director de Linux llega a Colombia a promover software libre y buscar talento

Juan David Mosos

Bogotá, 5 feb (EFE).- El presidente de Linux Internacional, Jon “Maddog” Hall, se encuentra en Colombia con el objetivo de promover el uso de software libre, al considerar que se trata de una oportunidad para toda América Latina en la generación de empleo, y además, buscar talento.

Hall expresó sus planes en una entrevista con Efe en Bogotá, en víspera de la inauguración de Boya.ca, la versión que Campus Party celebra desde mañana en Colombia y donde espera reclutar creativos.

“Yo estoy buscando los mejores programadores del mundo y seguramente no todos serán de Estados Unidos“, apuntó, al mostrarse confiado en que América Latina tiene mucho talento que puede aprovecharse para desarrollar la industria del software libre, en la que él trabaja a través de “Project Cauã”.

La ciudad de Tunja, capital del departamento de Boyacá y ubicada en el centro del país, recibirá hasta el 10 de febrero a cerca de 450 invitados dispuestos a debatir sobre desarrollo de software, hardware, electrónica, entre ellos el presidente de la empresa desarrolladora del sistema operativo Linux.

Hall, experto en software libre, trabaja desde 2007 en este proyecto con el que calcula que se pueden generar entre “uno y dos millones de empleos en el sector de la tecnología en Brasil y, por lo menos, uno o dos millones en el resto de América Latina”.

Por eso presentará “Project Cauã” en esta versión especial del Campus Party, donde espera que los asistentes entiendan las bondades del software libre, que, según él, puede ofrecer soluciones más sencillas de las que en ocasiones presentan empresas que venden sistemas cerrados.

Para Hall, trabajar con software libre permite dejar de depender de empresas desarrolladoras cuando se quiere un servicio tecnológico y se le puede pagar, por ejemplo, “a un programador colombiano, que compre con ese dinero una casa o comida en el país”, una dinámica que colabora en la generación de empleo en la región.

Los dispositivos móviles Raspberry Pi, desarrollados en el Reino Unido y disponibles en el mercado desde febrero de 2012, son para el presidente de Linux la prueba reina del buen funcionamiento de los sistemas libres, pues la mayoría de estos elementos tecnológicos utiliza el que desarrolla la empresa que él lidera.

“Alrededor de un millón de unidades han sido solicitadas en un año” de este producto, que ha estado a la venta por un precio de 35 dólares en Estados Unidos, recordó “Maddog”, quien remarcó la importancia de que los dispositivos permiten ver imágenes y vídeos de alta calidad.

El impacto, agregó, de los sistemas libres que promueve ha hecho que Wall Street y empresas como Google, Facebook y EBay lo usen para sus negocios, en lugar de implementar software cerrado.

“Ellos quieren una solución y por eso pagan, para que todo funcione como ellos quieren”, dijo Hall a Efe, al destacar que es necesario acabar con la idea de que lo libre es gratis.

Por eso, “Maddog” confía en encontrar talentos en Boya.ca que puedan aportar en sus proyectos, pues ya cuenta con las experiencias de pasadas versiones del Campus Party en Colombia, Brasil, Ecuador y España, de donde reconoció ha quedado sorprendido por la creatividad e innovación de sus participantes.

“Estoy en el proceso de reclutar personas y los Campus Party pueden servir”, afirmó el presidente de Linux al recordar que dos años atrás en un evento similar conoció a un colombiano que creó un busto humano robótico que mueve los ojos y la boca cuando recibe patrones de voz y ahora el inventor estudia en Estados Unidos.

También recordó a un joven que inició su empresa cuando tenía 18 años, después de haber diseñado una pequeña casa de madera que podía controlar completamente con su celular, así como a un español que comenzó su negocio tecnológico a los 12 años y a los 18 ya tenía más de 20.000 clientes.

Sin embargo, Hall alertó de que “hay gente que se quiere aprovechar y hacer que los creativos regalen su trabajo”.

“Eso hay que pagarlo y estoy ajustando mi plan de negocios para lograrlo” en “Project Cauã”, el que espera implementar en América Latina en los próximos años. EFE

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Leeza Gibbons: I Count My Blessings - Not My Stretch Marks

By Mike Fleeman

02/06/2013 at 07:30 PM EST

When TV personality Leeza Gibbons married Steven Fenton in 2011, she joked that she was finally embracing "my inner cougar" – on their first date he was 38 and she was 51.

Now approaching their two-year anniversary in April, Gibbons has given a little more thought to the dynamics of their relationship and concludes that "the term cougar has so much energy around it that doesn't really fit."

"We laugh about it all the time," Gibbons, now 54, tells PEOPLE. (Fenton is a longtime talent manager and former president of the Board of Education in Beverly Hills.) "I always joke that emotionally and with regard to maturity, he's much older than I am."

The theme of starting over – "rebooting your life," as Gibbons calls it – runs through her new book, Take 2: Your Guide to Creating Happy Endings and New Beginnings.

She's had much to draw on from her own life: She's been divorced (this is her fourth marriage), had high-profile jobs at Entertainment Tonight, Extra and Leeza, and seen her kids grow older. She became an activist for family caregivers as her mother and grandmother both had Alzheimer's.

She writes about navigating change, basking in one's past, handling disappointments, "test-driving our dreams," learning how to say no and embracing the "Goddess Quotient" – how to be "a good girlfriend to yourself."

As for her own big new beginning, Gibbons remembers how just a couple of years ago she privately worried about the age difference.

"I did play out all those fears," she says. "I went through the list: I've got kids, there's a lot in my life that is big and complicated, he should be starting a young family. I went through all of it. I decided that I needed to count my blessings and not my stretch marks. I recognized that my work in the relationship was not to decide what he felt about it."

In the end, she says, "It was up to Steven to decide how to receive. He didn't need me to protect him from our age difference. Now two years later, there's so much respect and so much fun and so much faith in each other. We truly are our biggest supporters. That's really love"

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New whooping cough strain in US raises questions

NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers have discovered the first U.S. cases of whooping cough caused by a germ that may be resistant to the vaccine.

Health officials are looking into whether cases like the dozen found in Philadelphia might be one reason the nation just had its worst year for whooping cough in six decades. The new bug was previously reported in Japan, France and Finland.

"It's quite intriguing. It's the first time we've seen this here," said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. cases are detailed in a brief report from the CDC and other researchers in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Whooping cough is a highly contagious disease that can strike people of any age but is most dangerous to children. It was once common, but cases in the U.S. dropped after a vaccine was introduced in the 1940s.

An increase in illnesses in recent years has been partially blamed on a version of the vaccine used since the 1990s, which doesn't last as long. Last year, the CDC received reports of 41,880 cases, according to a preliminary count. That included 18 deaths.

The new study suggests that the new whooping cough strain may be why more people have been getting sick. Experts don't think it's more deadly, but the shots may not work as well against it.

In a small, soon-to-be published study, French researchers found the vaccine seemed to lower the risk of severe disease from the new strain in infants. But it didn't prevent illness completely, said Nicole Guiso of the Pasteur Institute, one of the researchers.

The new germ was first identified in France, where more extensive testing is routinely done for whooping cough. The strain now accounts for 14 percent of cases there, Guiso said.

In the United States, doctors usually rely on a rapid test to help make a diagnosis. The extra lab work isn't done often enough to give health officials a good idea how common the new type is here, experts said.

"We definitely need some more information about this before we can draw any conclusions," the CDC's Clark said.

The U.S. cases were found in the past two years in patients at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. One of the study's researchers works for a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which makes a version of the old whooping cough vaccine that is sold in other countries.

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JournaL: http://www.nejm.org

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Wall Street bounces back after sell-off; results a boost

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks climbed on Tuesday, recovering a day after the market's biggest sell-off since November, as stronger-than-expected earnings brightened the profit picture.

Dell Inc's stock rose after the world's No. 3 computer maker agreed to be taken private in a $24.4 billion deal, the largest leveraged buyout since the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The stock gained 1.1 percent to $13.42.

All 10 S&P sectors were higher, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq gained more than 1 percent.

The market's bounce follows a sell-off on Monday that gave the S&P 500 its biggest percentage decline since mid-November. The benchmark remains up 6 percent since the start of the year and is less than 4 percent away from its all-time closing high of 1,565.15 from October 2007.

Analysts said fourth-quarter results have been among factors helping to boost stocks. On Tuesday, Archer Daniels Midland reported revenue and adjusted fourth-quarter earnings that beat expectations, boosted by strong global demand for oilseeds. Shares rose 3.3 percent to $29.38.

"There's not a huge upside surprise by any means, but we're definitely seeing slightly better-than-expected earnings overall," said Bryant Evans, portfolio manager at Cozad Asset Management, in Champaign, Illinois.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 99.22 points, or 0.71 percent, at 13,979.30. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 15.58 points, or 1.04 percent, at 1,511.29. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 40.41 points, or 1.29 percent, at 3,171.58.

The market shot higher at the start of the year after U.S. lawmakers were able to come to a last-minute agreement to avoid a national "fiscal cliff," but questions on spending cuts remain.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged Congress to pass a small package of spending cuts and tax reforms. Though the plan was quickly rebuffed by Republican leaders, investors are looking for an agreement.

"I think there's some hopefulness out there that a reasonable compromise will be made," Evans said.

Also in earnings, Estée Lauder Cos Inc reported a higher quarterly profit and raised its full-year profit forecast. The stock rose 6 percent to $64.71.

With results in from more than half of the S&P 500 companies, 69 percent have beaten profit expectations, compared with the 62 percent average since 1994 and the 65 percent average over the past four quarters. Sixty-six percent of companies have beaten on revenue.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are expected to rise 4.5 percent, according to the data, above the 1.9 percent forecast at the start of earnings season.

On the down side, McGraw-Hill shares slumped 10.7 percent to $44.92 after the U.S. Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit seeking $5 billion over mortgage bond ratings. Standard & Poor's, a McGraw Hill unit, was accused of inflating ratings and understating risk out of a desire to gain more business from investment banks.

On Monday, McGraw-Hill stock suffered its worst one-day decline since the 1987 market crash.

Volume was roughly 6.7 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the 2012 average daily closing volume of about 6.45 billion.

Advancers outpaced decliners on the NYSE by nearly 11 to 4 and on the Nasdaq by about 3 to 1.

(Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

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IHT Rendezvous: Worse Than Poisoned Water: Dwindling Water, in China's North

BEIJING — When 39 tons of the toxic chemical aniline spilled from a factory in Changzhi in China’s Shanxi province at the end of December, polluting drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people downstream along the Zhuozhang River and dangerously fouling the environment, it seemed a grave enough disaster. And it was.

So it’s hard to believe, perhaps, but in mid-January, just days after local officials belatedly revealed the spill to the public, a “rapid response team” sent by Greenpeace China to investigate found something even worse than the spill, the blogger Zhou Wei wrote in chinadialogue, an online magazine about China’s environment. Greenpeace found that the fast pace of water consumption by coal and chemical industries in the area is drying up all water resources further downstream. In fact, by 2015, water consumption by coal and chemical industry in China’s dry, western areas is set to use up a whopping quarter of the water flowing annually in the nearby Yellow River, which forms much of the border of Shanxi Province and is popularly known as China’s “Mother River,” wrote chinadialogue.

As chinadialogue wrote, citing Greenpeace, “Even more worrying than the chemical leak is the high water consumption of the coal and chemical industries in the area.”

The blog post, which chinadialogue says hasn’t been translated into English yet, cited Tong Zhongyu of Greenpeace’s East Asia office as saying that the situation was “growing more severe by the day.”

None of this may be news to hardened followers of China’s crumpling environment, but the scale of the water consumption in the water-scarce area is nonetheless shocking: The Tianji Coal Chemical Industry Group, which caused the spill, consumes water equivalent to the consumption of about 300,000 people per year, chinadialogue wrote, citing the Greenpeace investigation.

The coal and chemical industry is simply “a major water-eater,” the post said.

Water is a key challenge for the country as the racing economy guzzles it faster and faster. In the last 40 years, 13 percent of China’s lakes have disappeared, half its coastal wetlands have been lost to reclamation and 50 percent of cities left without drinking water that meets acceptable hygienic standards, the World Wildlife Fund said, according to another article in chinadialogue. The United Nations has singled China out as one of 13 countries with extreme water shortages.

“By any measure, the situation is bleak,” chinadialogue said. For now, the government is split between small-scale, practical solutions to the problem and huge engineering projects, such as the South-North water diversion scheme, which aims to transfer water from the rainy south to the dry north but has been widely criticized by environmentalists as too big, inefficient and ultimately unworkable.

“My heart is really out for the leadership trying to come up with solutions because China’s just so maddeningly complex,” Michael Bennett, an environmental economist, was quoted as saying. As evidence of serious efforts to solve the problem, Mr. Bennett pointed to widespread, small-scale, government-approved water conservation programs taking place around the country.

Will China solve its really serious water problems?

“The trend is in the right direction, the question is whether it’s going to be fast enough,” Mr. Bennett said.

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