Egypt announces cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr hold a news conference in Cairo to announce a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. (Egyptian State Television / November 21, 2012)

By Emily Alpert

November 21, 2012, 9:48 a.m.

Egypt announced a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas effective Wednesday evening local time, the Associated Press reported.

In details of the agreement obtained by the news agency, Israel will cease all military activity against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip at 9 p.m. local time (11 a.m. PST) and Palestinian militants will cease rocket attacks into Israel. After 24 hours of quiet, Gaza's border crossings with Israel will be opened further to allow freer movement of goods and people.

The announcement by Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton followed talks in Cairo between Clinton and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.

TIMELINE: Israel-Gaza conflict

The agreement comes after eight days of devastating fighting that had raised fears on both sides that an Israeli ground invasion might be next. The death toll had reached 144 Palestinians and five Israelis, according to news reports.

Some observers questioned whether the negotiations in Egypt had spurred an uptick in violence in recent days, with each side trying to intimidate the other ahead of the anticipated truce.

Morsi had said Tuesday that a cease-fire was imminent, only to have talks fail to reach an agreement. Arab League leaders and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also helped negotiate the deal.

ALSO:

Tel Aviv bus bombing wounds at least 21

More Afghan land cultivated for opium poppies, U.N. finds

Israeli-Hamas clash sends unsettling ripples throughout Mideast

Edmund Sanders in Gaza City contributed to this report.

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Suicide Drones, Mini Blimps and 3D Printers: Inside the New Army Arsenal

Flying grenades. Mini spy blimps. Robotic bomb-busters. Suicide-vest spotters. Battlefield 3D printers. The Army is retooling for a very austere, very remote way of war. And the gear that's required is very different from the hardware that came before.

Most American soldiers used to live and fight from massive bases, complete with all sorts of creature comforts and heavy defenses. Today's troops don't have it so good. They're increasingly operating from small, isolated outposts, where they need to spot and ward off attacks without all the gun turrets and heavy armor and surveillance towers found on the old super-bases.

Coming up with that new gear has become a top mission for the Rapid Equipping Force, the Army office charged with getting tools and gadgets out to troops in a hurry. They showed off their latest kit at Ft. Belvoir, Va. just before Thanksgiving. Here's a sample.

At Camp Nathan Smith outside of Kandahar, there's a 20-foot cargo container loaded with a 3D printer, a computer-controlled machine for cutting metal, and a couple of Ph.D.s. It's one of three REF "expeditionary labs" placed around Afghanistan that can quickly design and prototype tools for troops on the ground right now.

The Nathan Smith team, on the screen above, printed up new bolt links for the M240 machine gun on their remote weapons system when the old ones broke. They coded a program that plots enemy attacks on Google Earth. And over the course of three weeks, they built in the lab new adapters that extended the battery life of their metal detectors from 45 minutes to 30 hours. The Army liked the adapters so much, they ordered up another 2,000, which will be distributed all over Afghanistan.

Photo: Lexey Swall / Wired

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Elmo left behind on ‘Sesame Street’ as actor exits

NEW YORK (AP) — Even on “Sesame Street,” where everything is famously A-OK, problems can arise for its residents.

And that includes the Muppets. Cookie Monster grapples with an eating disorder. Oscar the Grouch gets cranky. Mr. Snuffleupagus gets the blues.

But Elmo seemed immune to any of that. Since enjoying his breakout success more than two decades ago, the 3 1/2-year-old red monster has radiated good cheer, love and trilling giggles. No wonder everyone — adults as well as children — adores him.

The key to Elmo is “his innocence, his positiveness and his sweetness,” according to Kevin Clash, the man who created him and once told The Associated Press, “I would love to be totally like Elmo.”

Now Clash has been scandalously separated from Elmo and from “Sesame Street,” the TV series where he reigned behind the scenes for 28 years.

Clash spoke of “personal matters” as the cause of his resignation Tuesday after an unthinkable nine-day stretch that began with an unnamed man in his 20s claiming he had sex with Clash at age 16. That allegation was quickly recanted. But then came another accusation of sexual abuse, and a lawsuit.

That second accuser, a 24-year-old college student named Cecil Singleton, said the actor had engaged in sexual behavior with him when he was 15. He is suing Clash for $ 5 million.

“I am deeply sorry to be leaving,” said Clash in his parting statement, “and am looking forward to resolving these personal matters privately.”

But privacy may no longer be possible for Clash, the 52-year-old divorced father of a grown daughter who acknowledged last week that he is gay. Singleton’s lawyer, Jeff Herman, said he has been contacted by two other potential victims of Clash and expects additional legal action.

At a news conference Tuesday, Singleton said he and Clash met on a gay chat line and then, for a two-week period, they engaged in sexual contact, though not intercourse. Sex with a person under 17 is a felony in New York if the perpetrator is 21 or older.

Singleton said he didn’t know Clash’s profession until years later, when he Googled the man’s name.

“I was shocked when I found out what he did for a living,” said Singleton.

Now that career has ended for Clash, who, in his dream job as a puppeteer for “Sesame Street,” was assigned a little-used puppet now known as Elmo, then turned him into a star. In the process, Clash won 23 daytime Emmy awards and one prime-time Emmy. He published his 2006 autobiography, “My Life as a Furry Red Monster,” and was the subject of the 2011 documentary “Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey.”

Elmo overshadowed Big Bird and other “Sesame” Muppets in popularity and screen time, while marginalizing the cast of live actors. Since 1998, he has had his own show-within-a-show on “Sesame Street” in addition to appearances elsewhere in the hour.

He is also a major moneymaker for Sesame Workshop, the New York-based company that produces the show, and for licensees. At his merchandising height in 1996, he inspired the Tickle Me Elmo doll, which became a cultural phenomenon and that Christmas season’s hottest toy.

This year’s Elmo dolls, “LOL Elmo,” which giggles, and “Let’s Rock! Elmo,” which sings and comes with a microphone and drum set, haven’t made any of this year’s hot toy lists. Even so, Elmo toys probably account for one-half to two-thirds of the $ 75 million in annual sales the “Sesame Street” toy line generates for toy maker Hasbro, estimates BMO Capital Markets analyst Gerrick Johnson.

Johnson said he wasn’t sure how this week’s news might affect sales of Elmo toys this holiday.

“How many people are going to want to explain to their kid why they’re not getting an Elmo?” he asked.

On Tuesday, Hasbro issued a statement saying “We are confident that Elmo will remain an integral part of Sesame Street and that Sesame Street toys will continue to delight children for years to come.”

Despite his resignation, Clash will remain an integral part of “Sesame Street” for the foreseeable future. Taping of season No. 44 will wrap by mid-December and will begin airing next September, according to someone close to the show who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of its production. That means new episodes with Clash performing as Elmo will presumably continue well into 2014.

As for who might take over as Elmo, other “Sesame Street” puppeteers were already being trained to serve as Clash’s stand-in, Sesame Workshop said. It’s part of an understudy policy being adopted for all the major Muppet characters.

But no one knows how Elmo will fare going forward. Will the jokes spurred by Clash’s downfall leave a lasting mark on Elmo’s image? Will there be parents who see him tainted by association with the man who brought him to life?

In the wake of a personal tragedy that may still be unfolding, Elmo’s innocence, positiveness and sweetness will be put to the test.

___

AP Television Writer David Bauder and AP Retail Writer Mae Anderson contributed to this report.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: Patience, Consciousness and White Lies

My wife and I are blessed with having three “semi-independent” parents in their mid-80s living within a few blocks of us. Our children grew up knowing their grandparents as integral parts of our nuclear family, within walking distance for most of their childhoods. But now that our nest is empty, we find ourselves reliving many of the parenting issues we faced when our children were little — now in geriatric versions, at close range. As it turns out, parenting was good practice for the issues we face with our own parents.

What exactly does semi-independence mean as applied to elderly parents? Among our three, we have two canes, five walkers, one wheelchair (for long walks), four artificial joints, a pacemaker, four hearing aids and a knee brace. The list of medical conditions is long, and the list of medications even longer, requiring different color pill box organizers for morning, afternoon and evening.

Our parents all live in the same homes they have been in for many years. Keeping them safe and healthy there, as well as when they leave the house, has become a big part of our day-to-day work these days. Therein the yin and yang of parenting has returned — independence versus helicoptering.

Children’s yearning for independence begins in toddlerhood: “I can do it myself!” It escalates through childhood, accelerates with the driver’s license, and crescendos, with pomp and circumstance, at high school graduation.

The urge for independence is seen in all animal species, but relinquishing independence and accepting assistance in old age is unique to humans. For most elderly, it comes with a struggle, reflecting how hardwired our brains are for independence. The thought of getting in-home help is antithetical to our parents’ sense of self worth, exceeded only by the dread of leaving their homes for assisted living facilities. So, as tasks that were once mundane and automatic have become onerous and stressful for them, we attempt to foster autonomy while protecting them from harm, as we did with our children just a few short years ago.

Childproofing – Our home has again become hazardous, as have theirs. Furniture must be rearranged, booster seats placed on chairs to ease standing up, slippery rugs removed, lighting improved, bathrooms accessorized with handles and rails.

Dressing – Body shapes change in childhood and in old age. Our parents’ wardrobes, like those of our children’s before them, need frequent attention to preserve self-esteem. Their unwillingness to part with old clothes turns us into tailors. And, once again, we shop for slip-on sneakers with Velcro ties.

Driving – For our teens, driving was the symbolic liberation from childhood to young adulthood. For our parents, driving is the symbolic resistance to infirmity and old age. Our attempt to wean them from their cars, in precisely the reverse order we used to phase our teens into driving, has been torture for our parents and for us.

Toys – We have filled our parents’ shelves with new toys to help them with everything from opening cartons of milk (I would like a word with whoever designed those plastic pull loops) and zipping their clothes, to opening jars and removing the protective seals from over-the-counter medicines. A “picker-upper” device helps them avoid bending too low, and a key turner gives them leverage to open their door. Large digital clock faces, easy-to-read telephone keypads, and magnifying glasses keep them in touch with the world, and an e-mail printer keeps them in touch with their grandchildren.

Medicating – Filling those plastic pill box organizers with a week’s worth of medicines has become a personal barometer of competence for our parents, yet, as with our children when they were young, we feel compelled to oversee the dosing.

Mobility – Despite numerous falls, it was only with much teeth gnashing (or denture gnashing, as the case may be) that our mothers consented to use canes; more gnashing when canes gave way to walkers. For long walks, we hide the wheelchair half way there and back so the neighbors don’t see.

The more we do for our parents, the more frail and guilty they feel. Our efforts are sometimes resented. Helping them get in and out of the car, or bracing them under the arm as they negotiate a bumpy sidewalk, can be an affront. “I can do it myself!”

Can I ride my bike to tennis practice if I’m really careful crossing Holly Street? Why can’t I take a cab home from the seniors program at the community center? Can I walk to grandma’s by myself this time? Can I take the bus to the supermarket today? Everyone is hanging out at the park after school, can I go? I’ll just walk down the block to the neighbor’s house this afternoon, O.K.?

What wisdom did we gain the first time around to help us now? Patience, consciousness and white lies.

Patience to wait for them to come to the same conclusions we did. Mom, do you think Rosalind would have fallen and broken both wrists if she had been using a walker?

Consciousness about their need for independence as ballast to our need for their well-being. Why don’t you just let us drive you at night for now?

And white lies: I’m going to the supermarket anyway, we can shop together.

The longer we can protect our parents from harm, the more we can share our lives with them and the more joy they can have from their grandchildren. The trick is doing it without hurting them in other ways.

We have been through this before. It was worth it then, and it is worth it now.

Dr. Harley A. Rotbart is professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of “No Regrets Parenting.”

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Square Feet: Nashville Gambles on Appeal of New $623 Million Convention Center

NASHVILLE — Nearly four years ago, as Tennessee was hemorrhaging tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, the Metro Council here passed a measure to create a three-mile tax district around a site that will soon open as the most expensive publicly financed complex in the state’s history: a $623 million downtown convention center whose campus stretches the length of more than a dozen football fields.

A keynote of Mayor Karl Dean’s pro-development administration, the Music City Center is nearing its completion alongside a 21-story Omni hotel, for which the city is putting up an additional $128 million. The twin projects are just south of lower Broadway, the province of honky-tonk row — once the city’s seedy skid row, it has since emerged as the pulse of the country music scene.

Although Middle Tennessee already has two convention centers, the Music City Center’s 350,000 square feet of exhibit space is triple the amount of the Nashville Convention Center, which is just a stone’s throw from the Music City Center, and exceeds Gaylord Opryland Resort’s space by more than a quarter. Its 1.2 million square feet in total space positions it among the largest of its kind in the South.

At the time, Mr. Dean admitted that it was “counterintuitive” to pass a costly project on the backs of taxpayers while the state’s jobless rate hit its highest point in decades. Yet with construction costs and interest rates at record lows, the mayor wagered that there was no better time to reap a greater share of convention business, capture new jobs and spawn development in the city’s core. Plus, the taxpayers in this case would be tourists, not residents, since hotel rooms and other types of visitor spending within the three-mile zone would be charged fees that, over time, would pay off the project’s debt.

Project boosters predict that the new center, which has been in planning since the late ’90s, will lure hundreds of thousands more visitors a year to Nashville. “The project is going to create a vitality that just radiates across downtown,” said Ralph Schulz, who leads Nashville’s chamber of commerce. “It shows that we’re really banking on Music City. We think it’ll be a great win.”

Worried that annual visitors will fall far below these estimates, some observers say there is a risk that the project will dip into the city’s budget at the expense of other city services. Butch Spyridon, president of the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau, disagrees, saying the building will pay for itself by taxing tourists. Hotel bookings so far, he said, signal a declaration of faith in the project’s prosperity. “Our revenue streams are outperforming our projections,” he said. “We didn’t need a bigger center because of our ego. We need a bigger center based on the marketplace, and this project will deliver.”

Colonizing four city blocks, the striking building, called a widescraper by some, has 150-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling windows and features an eco-roof with four acres of sedum plants to control water runoff. But some community leaders continue to question the wisdom of the project, whose 14-acre undulating roof is intended to conjure Tennessee’s high hills and pastoral basins. It also has a 162-foot guitar-shaped structure that weaves vertically through the building.

“Nashville has always been a tourism city,” said Jason Holleman, a city councilman who was among the minority to vote against the project. “The question was whether we should build this to grow the tourism pie or immediately invest in mass transit and other infrastructure needs,” he said. “Our choice to begin with the convention center has somewhat delayed our pursuit of mass transit.”

Other critics note that rehabbing and expanding downtown’s existing convention center, built in the mid-1980s, could have bolstered the city’s exhibit space at a fraction of the cost. Even so, there is ample evidence to suggest that the project has already been a catalyst for new investment. The Country Music Hall of Fame, adjacent to the new convention center, is in the midst of a $75 million expansion expected to double its size. Real estate brokers say that demand has surged for parcels in the shadow of the hulking structure, with several hotels in various stages of development. And restaurants and retailers have also recently opened or announced expansions.

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Feds charge former hedge fund manager in big insider-trading case

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a former hedge fund portfolio manager with securities fraud in connection with what they said was the most lucrative insider-trading case ever prosecuted.

In complaints filed in New York, authorities said investment advisors and hedge funds made more than $276 million in illegal profits or avoided losses by trading before the announcement in 2008 of negative results from clinical trials for an Alzheimer's disease drug being developed by Elan Corp. and Wyeth.

Prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former portfolio manager at CR Intrinsic, an unregistered investment adviser, with securities fraud for allegedly illegally using information about the clinical trial results that he obtained from a neurologist at a hospital involved in the testing.

The criminal complaint did not name the neurologist, which it said was a cooperating witness in the case.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a a related civil suit Tuesday against Martoma, CR Intrinsic and Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. The SEC suit said Gilman was chairman of the safety monitoring committee overseeing the clinical trials of the Alzheimer's drug.

Martoma met Gilman some time between 2006 and 2008 through paid consultations, the SEC complaint says. "During these consultations, Gilman provided Martoma with material, nonpublic information about the ongoing trial," the SEC complaint said.

In mid-July 2008, "Gilman provided Martoma with the actual, detailed results of the clinical trial" before an official announcement on July 29, 2008, the SEC said.

The FBI, SEC and U.S. attorney's office in New York scheduled a 12:30 p.m. EST news conference to discuss the case.

"The charges unsealed today describe cheating coming and going – specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent," said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for Manhattan.  "As alleged, by cultivating and corrupting a doctor with access to secret drug data, Mathew Martoma and his hedge fund benefited from what might be the most lucrative inside tip of all time."

Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

Also:

Senate moves insider trading bill to Obama's desk.

Baseball star Eddie Murray settles insider-trading investigation.

Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta guilty of insider trading.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/17/business/la-fi-sec-murray-20120818

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First Impressions: The Science of Meeting People

A strong handshake and assertive greeting may not be the best way to make a good first impression. New research suggests that people respond more positively to someone who comes across as trustworthy rather than confident.

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School is studying how we evaluate people we meet. Cuddy is known for her research on power posing, which she presented last year at TedGlobal and the annual Poptech conference in Maine. This research suggests that if you strike a strong pose — where you take up as much space as possible — your levels of testosterone rise, while cortisol levels drop. The result: If you do it for two minutes before going into a job interview or other public performance, you will have more confidence and perform better.

Cuddy returned to Poptech this year with an all-new talk about how we form first impressions. Turns out that when we meet individuals or groups for the first time, we mostly evaluate two metrics: trustworthiness and confidence. And the best part is that once you understand this, you can learn to make a better first impression. We asked her to tell us how this all works.

Wired: What have you learned about how we form first impressions?

Amy Cuddy: When we form a first impression of another person it’s not really a single impression. We’re really forming two. We’re judging how warm and trustworthy the person is, and that’s trying to answer the question, “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” And we’re also asking ourselves, “How strong and competent is this person?” That’s really about whether or not they’re capable of enacting their intentions. Research shows that these two trait dimensions account for 80 to 90 percent of an overall first impression, and that holds true across cultures.

Wired: Why did you get into this line of research?

Cuddy: Since just after World War II, social psychologists have been studying prejudice, really trying to understand what drives it. And the classic social-psychological model was that it’s all about love for the “in-group” and hatred for the “out-group.” The problem with this is that it assumed there’s a single evaluative dimension: You either have negative or positive feelings toward a person or group. And because that’s not really what’s happening, social psychologists were not able to use the in-group/out-group evaluation to predict discrimination. Ultimately, what we really want to know isn’t just what you think and feel about somebody but also how do you treat them. We didn’t know who was going to be a target of genocide, who was going to be neglected, who was going to be mocked.

Discrimination comes in very nuanced forms these days. And we wanted to be able to predict discrimination. Our research group was interested in how people categorize each other. When we meet somebody, what determines whether we see them as a member of a group or see them as an individual? And how do we determine if we like the other person or not? Through research we found that it really comes down to two traits: Trustworthiness and competence. People universally sort groups in a two by two matrix. And what you end up getting is that most groups are seen as high on one trait and low on the other. You don’t actually have many groups that are both not trusted and not respected, or that are both loved and respected.

Wired: How did you determine all this?

Cuddy: We would literally just go into a society and do a preliminary study asking people to freely list all the groups in their society. After going into about two-dozen different cultures we found that people tended to come up with about 15 to 20 groups in their society. Some of them are overlapping, so you have women and men but then you also have race and you’ve got profession and religion and all these other categories. Then we go in again and ask a different sample of people to rate all those groups on a long list of traits. Through factor analysis we were able to show show that people assess groups largely by these two main factors. Now, when you ask people “how much do you like a given group?” often they’re not going to tell you the truth. There’s too many social desirability concerns. But when you give them, say, 20 traits to evaluate, they’re much more willing to actually give you variance in the responses.

Wired: And you can somehow use this to predict who is at risk of genocide?

Cuddy: When the economy or the status quo is threatened, often it is the high-status minority groups that get targeted for genocide. If you look over the last 100 years at the groups that have been the targets, they are not groups that were seen as incompetent. They’re groups that were seen as highly competent. So the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Jews in Germany, educated people in Cambodia. These aren’t groups that were both not liked and not respected. They were groups that were hated but respected. That is the quadrant that gets targeted for genocide. Again this goes against the former popular thinking in social psychology, that it was just a mater of one group hating another.

Wired: What else do these two traits tell you about how one group views another?

Cuddy: The thing we found after sorting people into these four quadrants is that they predict four unique emotions and four unique behavioral responses. So groups that are seen as competent but disliked elicit a lot of respect and admiration but also a lot of resentment and antipathy. Groups that are seen as warm and trustworthy but incompetent illicit pity, which is about both compassion and sadness.

Wired: What if you see a group as warm and competent.

Cuddy: You think they’re just great all around. But this is rare, as is viewing someone as both cold and incompetent. We usually see one trait or the other.

Wired: At Poptech you also talked about how these reactions occur on a personal level. You mentioned that when we first meet someone we’re often looking for warmth or trust, but trying to project competence and confidence.

Cuddy: We want to see others as trustworthy but we want them to see us as competent or strong.

Wired: So knowing this when you’re going into interactions with people, can you use this knowledge to better make and give first impressions?

Cuddy: To make an accurate judgment of somebody, you want to bring out their true nature. People need to trust you in order to be themselves. So trying to be the more dominant one in the interaction is probably going to make it harder for you to get accurate information about the other person, because it’s going to shut them down. Or they’re going to feel defensive, or they’re going to feel threatened, or they’re going to try to out alpha you. It’s not going to be any sort of natural interaction. So I’m such a big believer in trying to establish trust, and there’s evidence that shows that trust begets trust. I know people find this very controversial but it’s true. If you are trusting, if you project trust, people are more likely to trust you.

Wired: How do you convey trust in a first interaction?

Cuddy: There are a lot of things that you can do. One is to let the other person speak first or have the floor first. You can do this by simply asking them a question. I think people make the mistake, especially in business settings, of thinking that everything is negotiation. They think, “I better get the floor first so that I can be in charge of what happens.” The problem with this is that you don’t make the other person feel warmth toward you. Warmth is really about making the other person feel understood. They want to know that you understand them. And doing that is incredibly disarming.

You can also establish trust by collecting information about the other person’s interests — get them to share things about themselves. Just making small talk helps enormously. Research proves that five minutes of chit-chat before a negotiation increases the amount of value that’s created in the negotiation. What’s funny about all this is that the things that you do to increase trust actually often are things that are seen as wastes of time. People say, “Oh, I don’t have time for small talk.” Well, you should make the time for small talk because it will really help.

Wired: But are there times when it’s better to project dominance and competence?

Cuddy: I’m sure there are, but it’s an empirical question and I’m not ready to answer it yet. We’re doing some work on that now. We’ll see. But in general I really think people make the mistake of over-weighting the importance of expressing strength and competence, at the expense of expressing warmth and trustworthiness. I think this is a mistake. How can you possibly be a good leader if the people who are supposed to be following you don’t feel that you understand them? How is it possible? No one is going to listen if they don’t trust you. Why would they? Why should they? Trust opens them up to what you have to say. It opens them up to your strength and confidence. Trust is the conduit through which ideas travel.

Can you rule through fear? Of course you can. But not for long.

Image: Wirawat Lian-udom/Flickr

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Phillip Phillips looks at life beyond “American Idol”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Like the 10 winners before him, Phillip Phillips faces the uneven road from “American Idol” victor to pop-chart mainstay.

After the success of his Top 10 hit, “Home,” the Georgia native is facing a new challenge – to replicate the mainstream successes of past “Idol” winners Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson on his debut album, “The World from the Side of the Moon,” released on Monday by Interscope Records.

Phillips, 22, spoke to Reuters about making his first proper studio album, what he might do differently on a second one, and whether he could have won “Idol” with this season’s panel of judges.

Q: How do you plan to transition from “American Idol” winner to a mainstream music career?

A: “It’s pretty funny that you mention that because the majority of the people I meet don’t even know that I was on ‘Idol.’ It’s really cool to hear that. When I go home, people ask, ‘What’ve you been doing? I’ve heard your song,’ but they don’t even know that I’ve been on ‘Idol.’”

Q: Your first single “Home” has gone twice platinum. You’ve said that it isn’t a song you would have written yourself. What’s your relationship now with your first hit?

A: “It’s amazing how well it has done, and I look at all the stories that I hear like how it has helped families out with their situation, or something’s happened with their kid, mom or dad, or if their child’s overseas in the war. Something like that’s pretty amazing how many different stories come out of it.”

Q: Did you have any ideas on how you wanted to develop your sound finally getting into a big-time studio?

A: “I already had the songs written, and it was just a matter of throwing in ideas and then just trimming it down to what felt right, because we only had three weeks to do this album. So it was kind of pressured, but that kind of helped out as well. It didn’t make us overthink anything.”

Q: Was there anything in particular you wanted to achieve?

A: “I wanted to make it similar to what I did on the show – a horn section and some rock. I tried to be a little artistic. I just wrote what came from my heart and what felt right.”

Q: Unlike many of the other contestants, you went into “Idol” as a songwriter, how many of the album’s songs did you write?

A: “I think five. Some of the co-writes, (the writers) really just kind of pushed me, so I kind of wrote most of those myself. But it was a lot of fun; it was a great experience.”

Q: Would you do anything differently next time?

A: “It’s still early, but I’d definitely want a little more time to do it. But that’s really about it, because three weeks is just really quick, and also I have just so many other things going on. … It was very kind of stressful and hopefully for the next record I’ll have a little more time.”

Q: What would that time allow you to do in the studio?

A: “Just being able to listen to it a little more. We all knew that it sounded really good but also having to listen to, like 17 songs in a row. You say, ‘Yeah that sounds great’ but you listen to it more and more and (say) ‘Maybe I would’ve brought this instrument down a little bit or brought it up a little bit more.’”

Q: Would you have fared any differently on ‘Idol’ with the current judges Nicky Minaj and Mariah Carey?

A: “I don’t know. I’m curious to see how they’re going to judge. It’s a completely different panel this year. … I don’t really know how I would’ve turned out. Maybe I’ll have to go out and audition again (laughs).”

Q: Would you have had to change your roots-y style?

A: “Naw, I would’ve still been the same dude. If they wouldn’t have sent me through, they wouldn’t have sent me through. And if they did, that’d be awesome.”

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Gunna Dickson)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Global Update: Meningitis Vaccine Gets Longer Window Without Refrigeration

In what may prove to be a major advance for Africa’s “meningitis belt,” regulatory authorities have decided that a new meningitis vaccine could be stored without refrigeration for up to four days.

The announcement was made last week at a conference in Atlanta of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. While a few days may seem trivial, the hardest part of protecting poor countries is often keeping a vaccine cold while moving it from electrified cities to villages with no power. In antipolio drives, for example, the freezers, generators and fuel needed to make ice for the shoulder bags of vaccinators can cost more than the vaccine.

The new vaccine, MenAfriVac, made in India for 50 cents a dose, was introduced in 2010. In bad years, epidemics during the hot harmattan winds have killed as many as 25,000 Africans and disabled 50,000 more. In Chad this year, vaccination drove down cases to near zero in districts where it was used, while others nearby had serious outbreaks.

Experts decided that the vaccine is safe for four days as long as it stays below 104 degrees.

While temperatures get higher than that in Africa, said Dr. Godwin Enwere, medical director for the Meningitis Vaccine Project, teams normally get the vaccine out of coolers at dawn, drive to villages and finish before the day heats up. Other experts said it should be kept in the shade and monitored with colored paper “dots” that darken after hours in the heat.

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DealBook: Hewlett-Packard Takes $8.8 Billion Charge

Hewlett-Packard said on Tuesday that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge, after discovering “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy, a British software maker that it bought for $10 billion last year.

It is a major setback for H.P., which has been struggling to turn around its operations and remake its business.

The charge essentially wiped out its profit. In the latest quarter, H.P. reported a net loss of $6.9 billion, compared with a $200 million profit in the period a year earlier. The company said the improprieties and misrepresentations took place just before the acquisition, and accounted for the majority of the charges in the quarter, more than $5 billion.

Shares in H.P. plummeted nearly 11 percent in early afternoon trading on Tuesday, to less than $12.

Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in the summer of 2011 in an attempt to bolster its presence in the enterprise software market and catch up with rivals like I.B.M. The takeover was the brainchild of Léo Apotheker, H.P.’s chief executive at the time, and was criticized within Silicon Valley as a hugely expensive blunder.

Mr. Apotheker resigned a month later. The management shake-up came about one year after Mark Hurd was forced to step down as the head of H.P. after questions were raised about his relationship with a female contract employee.

“I’m both stunned and disappointed to learn of Autonomy’s alleged accounting improprieties,” Mr. Apotheker said in a statement. “The developments are a shock to the many who believed in the company, myself included. ”

Since then, H.P. has tried to revive the company and to move past the controversies. Last year, Meg Whitman, a former head of eBay, took over as chief executive and began rethinking the product lineup and global marketing strategy.

But the efforts have been slow to take hold.

In the previous fiscal quarter, the company announced that it would take an $8 billion charge related to its 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, as well as added costs related to layoffs. Then Ms. Whitman told Wall Street analysts in October that revenue and profit would be significantly lower, adding that it would take several years to complete a turnaround.

“We have much more work to do,” Ms. Whitman said at the time.

Hewlett-Packard continues to face weakness in its core businesses. Revenue for the full fiscal year dropped 5 percent, to $120.4 billion, with the personal computer, printing, enterprise and service businesses all losing ground. Earnings dropped 23 percent, to $8 billion, over the same period.

“As we discussed during our securities analyst meeting last month, fiscal 2012 was the first year in a multiyear journey to turn H.P. around,” Ms. Whitman said in a statement. “We’re starting to see progress in key areas, such as new product releases and customer wins.”

The strategic troubles have weighed on the stock. Shares of H.P. have dropped to less than $12 from nearly $30 at their high this year.

The latest developments could present another setback for Ms. Whitman’s efforts.

When the company assessed Autonomy before the acquisitions, the financial results appeared to pass muster. Ms. Whitman said H.P.’s board at the time – which remains the same now, except for the addition of the activist investor Ralph V. Whitworth – relied on Deloitte’s auditing of Autonomy’s financial statements. As part of the due diligence process for the deal, H.P. also hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s work.

Neither Deloitte nor KPMG caught the accounting discrepancies. Deloitte said in a statement that it could not comment on the matter, citing client confidentiality. “We will cooperate with the relevant authorities with any investigations into these allegations,” the accounting firm said.

Hewlett-Packard said it first began looking into potential accounting problems in the spring, after a senior Autonomy executive came forward. H.P. then hired a third-party forensic accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to conduct an investigation covering Autonomy sales between the third quarter 2009 and the second quarter 2011, just before the acquisition.

The company said it discovered several accounting irregularities, which disguised Autonomy’s actual costs and the nature of the its products. Autonomy makes software that finds patterns, data that is used by companies and governments.

H.P. said that Autonomy, in some instances, sold hardware like servers, which has higher associated costs. But the company booked these as software sales. It had the effect of underplaying the company’s expenses and inflating the margins.

“They used low-end hardware sales, but put out that it was a pure software company,” said John Schultz, the general counsel of H.P. Computer hardware typically has a much smaller profit margin than software. “They put this into their growth calculation.”

An H.P. official, who spoke on background because of ongoing inquiries by regulators, said the hardware was sold at a 10 percent loss. The loss was disguised as a marketing expense, and the amount registered as a marketing expense appeared to increase over time, the official said.

H.P. also contends that Autonomy relied on value-added resellers, middlemen who sold software on behalf of the company. Those middlemen reported sales to customers that didn’t actually exist, according to H.P.

H.P. also claims that that Autonomy was taking licensing revenue upfront, before receiving the money. That improper assignment of sales inflated the company’s gross profit margins.pfront, before receiving the money. It had the effect, the company said, of significantly bolstering Autonomy’s gross margin.

Hewlett Packard turned over its findings to Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain with the last week. In a conference call with analysts, Ms. Whitman said the company might consider legal actions against several parties.

The former management team of Autonomy, which includes the company’s founder Mike Lynch, rejected H.P. claims about the accounting issues.

“H.P. has made a series of allegations against some unspecified former members of Autonomy Corporation PLC’s senior management team. The former management team of Autonomy was shocked to see this statement today, and flatly rejects these allegations, which are false,” the group said in a statement. “It took 10 years to build Autonomy’s industry-leading technology and it is sad to see how it has been mismanaged since its acquisition by H.P.”

While Mr. Schultz would not detail H.P.’s future legal strategy, he said “we intend to be aggressive in recovering value for our shareholders.” In addition to Mr. Lynch, the company indicated this could include other individuals, including perhaps former senior executives of H.P. who missed the bad accounting. “We’re not limiting it to Autonomy,” Mr. Shulz said.

H.P. also underscored the importance of Autonomy to the broader strategy, emphasized the quality of the products. “This is a very healthy company with good products that exist,” said Mr. Shultz. “At its core, these are very good products.”

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