After early start, worst of flu season may be over

NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.

The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.

The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.

For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.

Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.

"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.

In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.

Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications

But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.

So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.

Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.

The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.

According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.

Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

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Online:

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

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Stock futures flat after China, German data

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock index futures were little changed Friday following economic data out of China and Germany, though the benchmark S&P index, near five-year highs, was on track for its first weekly drop of the year.

Data showed Chinese exports grew more than expected in January, while imports climbed 28.8 percent, highlighting robust domestic demand, while German data showed a 2012 surplus that was the nation's second highest in more than 60 years, an indication of the underlying strength of Europe's biggest economy.

Comments from European Central Bank President Mario Draghi about the strength of the euro Thursday kindled concern about the euro zone economy and sent U.S. equities lower.

U.S. economic data due out on Friday includes December international trade at 8:30 a.m. ET (1330 GMT) and wholesale inventories for December at 10:00 a.m. (1500 GMT).

Economists in a Reuters poll expect a trade deficit of $46.0 billion versus a $48.7 billion deficit in November while inventories are expected to be up 0.4 percent versus a 0.6 percent increase in November.

"Not enough to move the needle here and the norm of just about anything we put in front of investors this week," said Art Hogan, managing director of Lazard Capital Markets in New York.

The S&P 500 <.spx> has risen for five straight weeks and is up 5.8 percent for the year. Its advance was helped by legislators in Washington averting a series of automatic spending cuts and tax hikes earlier in the year, as well as better-than-expected corporate earnings and data that pointed to modest economic improvement but no immediate change in the Federal Reserve's stimulus plans.

The index, hovering near five-year highs, has found it tougher to climb in recent days as investors await strong trading incentives to drive it further upward.

"The market has gotten to a point where we are going to need a significant positive catalyst to take us through the next level of resistance, but the good news is we tested the new levels of support right around 1,504 on the S&P multiple times and we've held," said Hogan.

S&P 500 futures were unchanged 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 lost 13 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures added 6 points.

LinkedIn Corp jumped 10.6 percent to $137.28 in premarket trading after announcing both blow-out quarterly profits and a bullish forecast for the new year that exceeded Wall Street's already lofty expectations.

According to Thomson Reuters data through Thursday morning, of 317 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings, 69 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, above a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies grew 5 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

European shares rose, recovering from a fall the previous session, as strong Chinese data boosted hopes that the global economy will strengthen and fuel demand for equities.<.eu/>

Asian shares also rose after China's data set the scene for economic recovery, although investors opted to book profit ahead of the Chinese new year holidays next week, limiting gains.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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Currents: Freedom Has Its Own Constraints

NEW YORK — On the surface, all they have in common is their Sunday airtime, at least in the United States. One television show is about English aristocrats, crisp, proper, well-dressed even in bed. The other is about four young women, often lost and very often unclothed, in a setting quite different from Yorkshire: Brooklyn, New York.

But “Downton Abbey” and “Girls,” both hugely popular, sometimes seem to be talking to each other. And it is a conversation of richer importance to our politics and culture than the nudity on one show and the costumes on the other might initially suggest.

On issue after issue, Americans continue to debate the limits of individual freedom — whether to abort a fetus or own a gun or sell stocks or buy drugs. And in different ways, the two television shows address the promise and limitations of the modern, Western emphasis on — even sacralization of — the individual.

“Downton” and “Girls” serve as bookends in an era defined by a growing cult of the self. “Downton” is about the flourishing of selfhood in a rigid, early-20th-century society of roles. “Girls” is about the chaos and exhaustion of selfhood in a fluid, early-21st-century society that says you can be anything but does not show you how.

“I don’t know what the next year of my life is going to be like at all,” says Marnie, a smart, pretty, rather lost twentysomething on “Girls.” “I don’t know what the next week of my life is going to be like. I don’t even know what I want. Sometimes I just wish someone would tell me, like, ‘This is how you should spend your days, and this is how the rest of your life should look.”’

“Downton” returns us to an earlier stretch of selfhood’s arc, when too little guidance was rarely the problem.

Set on a manor in which the hierarchy and fixedness of the country — indeed, of the Empire — are especially concentrated, “Downton” is a world where there is a way to do everything, from cleaning spoons to dressing for dinner. Status has been and still seems immovable, and servants must act at least as convinced of their inferiority as the masters are. Novelty and that great leveler, money, are reflexively suspected.

The drama is this world’s cracking under the pressure of new ideas like individualism. Thus the family driver, believing in equality and marrying for love, runs away with the family daughter; thus the men wear black tie instead of white to dinner one night; thus a new generation of servants is less servile, more willing to question.

Mary McNamara, a television critic at The Los Angeles Times, has described “Downton” as “the tale of an oppressive social and economic system that is finally being called into question.” The drama comes from watching our world slowly, inevitably defeat theirs: “the bondage of social bylaws and expectation, the fear of new technology, the desire to cling to old ways.”

But now fast-forward a century, and these social upheavals, beginning auspiciously, have ended badly on “Girls.”

What begins on “Downton” as a new liberty to follow your heart, to dare love that others find unwise, has culminated in “Girls” in romantic pursuits that are dully mercenary and often unwise.

The daughters of the sexual revolution are depicted without much agency: Far from being conquerors, initiators, even equals, the girls of “Girls” are reactors, giving in to an ex who changes his mind, or a gay man wanting to try something, or a financier seeking a threesome that he manages to upgrade to traditionally twosome marriage.

What begins on “Downton” as a welcome questioning of age and status roles has snowballed by the “Girls” era into grave role confusion: parents who cannot teach their children how to live because they feel guilty about parenting, or want to be friends more than guides, or still dress like teenagers and call their offspring “prude.”

Nowhere is this overshooting truer than with the roles of the sexes. If “Downton” shows a world in which women are starting to claim their own sexuality, “Girls” portrays a sexual dystopia in which those women seem to have negotiated poorly: Men now reliably get what they want, while women must often content themselves with scraps, as when the character Hannah celebrates “almost” satiation in bed as the best she is likely to get.

The creator of “Girls,” Lena Dunham, is a self-proclaimed liberal. But her show is, as some conservatives gleefully note, full of ammunition for their side.

“There are reasons for conservatives not to like or even to refuse to watch ‘Girls,”’ Peter Lawler, a political philosopher in the conservative Catholic tradition, wrote recently, adding: “But we have to admit that things that are really revolting from a moral or relational point of view are actually portrayed quite negatively.”

If seen as a work of criticism rather than celebration, “Girls” makes Mr. Lawler optimistic: “The hope the show gives us is the persistence of relational human nature,” despite the characters’ failures, for now, to achieve it.

“Girls” is about atoms that desire in vain to form molecules; about sex lives that breed more confusion than excitement; about people with the liberty to choose every day, on various dimensions, whom to be — and who grow very tired of the choosing.

Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly and follow on Twitter.com/anandwrites

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Honey Boo Boo's Mama June Shows Off Weight Loss over Holidays

You won't believe what Honey Boo Boo and family used to top their Christmas tree.

Or, if you're a regular viewer, maybe you would.

Either way, Mama June – showing the results of her 100-lb. weight loss over the holidays – oversees the annual assembly of the artificial white tree in this clip from the upcoming Here Comes Honey Boo Boo Christmas special.

Subtitled double entendres fly, Honey Boo Boo cracks cute and a farm animal is drafted into action before everything, literally, falls to the ground.

Just another day at the Thompson house.

The Honey Boo Boo Christmas special airs Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET on TLC.

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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."

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

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Stock index futures cut gains following jobless claims data

A Dallas woman has sued a national fitness company, alleging two employees sexually harassed her during personal training sessions. Jamie Johnson filed a lawsuit against Fitness International LLC, which does business under the name LA  Fitness, after the company denied her requests for a full...

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I.H.T. Special: Social Media Firms Move to Capitalize on Popularity in Middle East

Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Egyptian protesters look at Facebook during a demonstration in Cairo on January 14.

DUBAI — For its most recent advertising push, the Saudi Arabian telecommunications giant Mobily did not turn to the street or television to engage with customers. Mobily paid to promote itself on Twitter.

The use of social media exploded during the Arab Spring as people turned to cyberspace to express themselves. On the back of that, social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, have moved into the region commercially, setting up offices to sell advertising products to companies like Mobily, which has over 200,000 Twitter followers, to capitalize on the growing audience.

“In Saudi, social media gets everyone talking to everyone, which is something we just don’t have in the streets here,” said Muna AbuSulayman, a Saudi development consultant and formerly a popular television talk show host, who has over 100,000 followers on Twitter.

“It’s a unique opportunity that lets people have conversations in a boundary-less way that wasn’t possible before,” Ms. AbuSulayman said. “In addition to promoting social and political discussion, it carries a powerful economic incentive for businesses, too.”

The rise of social media in the Arab world is changing the game for regional advertisers, pushing growth in digital advertising in a part of the world where traditional methods like television and print advertising have so far remained dominant.

Digital advertising in the Middle East and North Africa accounts for only about 4 percent of the region’s total advertising spending, at a value of $200 million, according to the most recent available estimate, but it has become the fastest-growing media platform in the region, said a study by the business services firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, published in 2011. Deloitte’s Arab Media Outlook projected growth in digital advertising spending in the region of 35 percent a year over the next three years, generating about $580 million across the region by 2015.

“The fact is that consumers are online, so brands need to be online,” said Reda Raad, chief operating officer of TBWA\Raad, the Middle East arm of the global advertising agency TBWA. “The use of digital channels has continued to increase dramatically after the Arab Spring and advertising on social media has become a highly targeted, cost-efficient way of communicating with consumers.”

Major brands, including Pepsi Arabia, are taking note. Saudi Arabia has the highest number of Twitter users in the Arab world, holding 38 percent of the region’s two million users, according to a report by the Dubai School of Government’s Arab Social Media Report released in June. In the past year alone, the number of Twitter users in the Arab world tripled, according to Shailesh Rao, Twitter’s vice president for international operations.

Thanks to the platform’s popularity in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, Arabic is now the fastest-growing language on the Twitter platform.

“We prioritized a list of regions where we wanted to have a business presence, and the Mideast rises toward the top because the region’s user base is one of the fastest-growing in the world,” Mr. Rao said during an interview. “This represents a huge opportunity for brands looking for a large audience that is rapidly growing.”

Twitter has formed a partnership with the Egyptian digital advertising company Connect Ads to market and sell advertising services across the Middle East and North Africa region. Connect Ads will offer brand managers and marketers Twitter’s products, which include promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends.

Through these, a brand can reach broad Twitter audiences or more narrowly defined geographic or demographic segments. They can even target users of specific smartphone brands, like iPhones. Brands that have signed up so far include Mobily, Pepsi Arabia, the resort company Atlantis The Palm, and the events portal Dubai Calendar.

“Companies can learn a few things about their customers by optimizing for country and targeting those with specific interests,” said Mohamed El Mehairy, managing director of Connect Ads.

“They can probably uncover this type of information through market research,” he added, but it would come “at a higher expense and with more time and effort.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 7, 2013

A previous version of this article misspelled the name of the advertising agency TBWA. It is TBWA, not TWBA.

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Monster Worldwide reports loss; exits Brazil, Mexico & Turkey

(Reuters) – Online recruitment company Monster Worldwide Inc, which is up for sale, reported a quarterly loss and said it had exited its businesses in Brazil, Mexico and Turkey.

The company also said it sold its China operations to Saongroup, a Dublin-based recruitment firm, and took a 10 percent stake in the combined business.

Monster said in November it would sell its money losing business in China to focus on its core North American and European businesses.

Monster has been hurt by weak job markets in the United States and Europe, which generate the lion’s share of its revenue, as well as growing competition from social networking sites.

The parent of Monster.com retained Stone Key Partners and Bank of America Merrill Lynch in March 2012 to review strategic alternatives including a sale of the company.

Monster reported a net loss of $ 73 million, or 66 cents per share, in the fourth quarter, from $ 10.9 million, or 9 cents per share, a year earlier.

The company recorded pre-tax charges of $ 23 million during the quarter ended December, and said it expects additional charges in the range of $ 27 million to $ 37 million in the first half of 2013.

Excluding items, the company earned 8 cents per share.

Revenue dropped 10 percent to $ 211.2 million.

Monster’s shares have dropped about a fourth since the company said it was reviewing strategic alternatives. They closed at $ 5.85 on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Sagarika Jaisinghani in Bangalore; Editing by Akshay Lodaya)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Channing Tatum, Charlize Theron Join Oscars Telecast

By Tim Nudd

02/07/2013 at 08:20 AM EST

Channing Tatum and Charlize Theron

Dave Kotinsky/Getty; Dave M. Benett/Getty

PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive, Channing Tatum, will make his debut on the Academy Awards stage this month as one of four newly announced special guests who are joining the Feb. 24 broadcast.

Oscar winner Charlize Theron, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Daniel Radcliffe are the other three actors who will make special appearances, producers said Thursday.

The four join a list of previously announced Oscar presenters, including Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Octavia Spencer, Meryl Streep and Mark Wahlberg.

"We are quite excited to have Charlize, Chan, Joe and Dan join us on the show," said telecast producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron. "We are happy to feature them as special guests in our production."

Musical performers on the show will include Adele, Norah Jones, JUstin Timberlake and Barbra Streisand.

The 85th annual Academy Awards will air live on Sunday, Feb. 24, on ABC from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

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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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