Brazilian company releases the ‘IPHONE’ after trademarking the name back in 2000

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$66M Kinkade estate dispute secretly settled

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Thomas Kinkade‘s widow and girlfriend have reached a settlement after a dispute over the late artist’s $ 66 million estate, their attorneys said Wednesday.

The San Jose Mercury News reports (http://bit.ly/Wq5kti ) that counsel for Nanette Kinkade and his girlfriend Amy Pinto announced the settlement but wouldn’t provide further details, leaving it unclear who will inherit Kinkade’s San Francisco Bay area mansion and his warehouse of paintings.

In a statement, they said the women kept Kinkade’s message of “love, spirituality and optimism” in their amicable resolution.

The dispute went public after the 54-year-old artist died April 6 from an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription tranquilizers.

Pinto, who began dating Kinkade six months after his marriage of 28 years imploded, claimed Kinkade wrote two notes bequeathing her his mansion and $ 10 million to establish a museum of his paintings. Her lawyers filed court papers stating that she and Kinkade had planned to marry as soon as his divorce went through.

Nanette Kinkade disputed those claims and sought full control of the estate. She portrayed Pinto in court papers as a gold-digger who is trying to cheat the artist’s rightful heirs.

Kinkade, the self-described “Painter of Light,” was known for sentimental scenes of country gardens and pastoral landscapes. His work led to a commercial empire of franchised galleries, reproduced artwork and spin-off products that was said to fetch some $ 100 million each year in sales.

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Obama calls Army secretary over day care scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama called the Army secretary to express concerns over arrests and the discovery of problems with background checks at an Army day care center and to urge a speedy investigation, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The call at 10 p.m. Tuesday to Army Secretary John McHugh came against the backdrop of last week’s massacre of young children in a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

A White House official said the president relayed his concern about reports of abuse at the Fort Myer, Va., day care center and made clear that there must be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to protecting the children of service members.

The official said Obama urged McHugh to conduct the investigation into its hiring practices quickly and thoroughly.

Obama has been outspoken in his demands for a quick government reaction to the Newtown shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead, and he visited the Connecticut town Sunday to offer condolences to parents and the community.

The Army had no immediate comment on the president’s call.

The Pentagon is reviewing hiring procedures at military day care centers, schools, youth centers and other facilities where children are present, after revelations that some employees at the day care center had criminal records. Pentagon leaders were angry that it took months for the Army to disclose the problems to top officials and the public.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered the military-wide review Tuesday shortly after the Army disclosed problems with security background checks of workers at Fort Myer. Pentagon press secretary George Little said department leaders were surprised to hear of the problems and that “clearly this information did not get reported up the chain of command as quickly as we think it should have.”

Little said Wednesday that officials also are questioning why it took three months for the Army to inform Panetta about arrests and problems with background checks at the day care center. Two people were arrested in September on multiple charges of assault against children at the center.

Little also said reports that parents of children at the center weren’t told about the problems indicate there may have been a serious breakdown in communications.

“We need to do everything we can wherever our children are entrusted to the care of DOD-employed personnel to insure we have the right personnel with the right background taking care of them,” said Little. “We want to insure that there’s consistency in the standards and policies and practices in hiring wherever military youth are involved.”

The actions stem from the Sept. 26 arrests of two Army employees. One was charged with five counts of assault and the second was charged with four counts of assault.

But the problems at Fort Myer apparently went much deeper. Indications are that at least 30 workers at the facility have histories that call into question their suitability to care for children, according to two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation into worker backgrounds at Fort Myer has not been completed.

After the Fort Myer arrests, the Army replaced the day care center’s management team and found what the Army called “derogatory information” in the background of an unspecified number of other employees there. Army officials did not reveal the information, and officials said it’s not clear if the background checks were not done, were not sufficient or simply were not used appropriately in screening personnel.

Col. Fern Sumpter, the Fort Myer commander, said the day care center was closed “out of an abundance of caution” and the children moved to a separate day care center at Fort Myer. A Fort Myer spokeswoman, Mary Ann Hodges, said the center was closed on Dec. 13.

___

Associated Press writer Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.

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After Newtown, Gun Control Steps We Can Take

In September 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban into law. Some in the gun industry were distraught. “We’re finished,” Ron Whitaker, then the chief executive of Colt, told several other members of a firearm trade association. Colt made substantial profits from the AR-15, the quintessential assault rifle. Whitaker, it turned out, was wrong. The AR-15 was not finished. It was just getting going.

In the face of a ban that turned out to be laughably easy to evade, the industry kept making civilian versions of military rifles. The prohibition actually helped transform what had been a marginal product for most manufacturers into a gun-rights poster child, celebrated by the National Rifle Association and sought-after by a much bigger share of the gun-buying public. The law was written to last just 10 years, and in 2004 this porous excuse for gun regulation expired.

Now, in the wake of the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., President Obama and congressional Democrats are calling for a renewed ban on assault weapons. Proponents of the legislation vow they will do a better job this time. No loopholes, they promise. Skepticism is warranted. Senator Dianne Feinstein, author of the 1994 law, has conceded the bill she plans to introduce early next year will “grandfather in” weapons legally possessed on the date of enactment. Moreover, the California Democrat has said the legislation will exempt 900 weapons used for hunting and sporting purposes.

There you have the Democrats’ opening bid: Nine hundred exemptions, and millions of pre-ban weapons to remain in private hands. The legislative fight hasn’t even begun, and gun-control advocates are surrendering the all-important fine print.

While politicians in Washington are clearing their throats, the marketplace has responded. Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS), a national chain, suspended sales of a handful of semiautomatic rifles similar to the one used in the Connecticut rampage. Cerberus Capital Management, a $ 20 billion private equity firm, announced that, as a result of investor pressure, it will sell its controlling interest in Freedom Group, a North Carolina-based conglomerate of gun and ammunition makers. Hollywood, for the moment, is backing away from some gun- and death-themed television reality shows.

Maybe this time is different—different from Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, and Aurora, all of which were followed by calls for new restrictions on guns, and none of which led to any. Perhaps 20 tiny coffins will prove a catalyst for compromise previously beyond the reach of our polarized politics. Sounding uncharacteristically conciliatory, the NRA scheduled a press conference for Dec. 21, saying it would make “meaningful contributions” to avert another Newtown.

Like abortion, guns evoke irreconcilable ideological cleavages. We live in a big country. Our conflicting values cannot all be neatly squared. And if history provides a guide, the latest carnage could provide little more than an occasion for renewed culture war. That would be a shame, because there are steps that a majority of Americans ought to be able to agree to, even without resolving our deep-seated societal conflict over whether firearms represent self-reliance or a threat to children (or both). The Newtown tragedy is a chance for opposing sides to focus on potential consensus and enact reforms that would do what everyone says they want: keep guns out of the hands of criminals and psychotics.

This sad occasion is not, however, going to change the fundamental reality that the U.S., for better or worse, is a gun culture. Nearly half of American households have one or more firearms, according to Gallup. The hard truth for gun foes is that firearms are out there, and they’re not going away.

The defunct 1994 ban on assault weapons offers an instructive place to begin any serious conversation, if for no other reason than Democrats are placing so much emphasis on reviving it. Among its many flaws was a focus on particular rifle models and cosmetic features, such as whether the guns had a bayonet mount or flash suppressor. This emphasis on form over function allowed manufacturers quite easily to “sportify” the prohibited models, and voilà: A banned weapon became unbanned.

An even more fundamental weakness was that the law created confusion over just what makes a weapon an “assault weapon.” As the term has come to be used, it denotes a military-style rifle that fires one round for each pull of the trigger. These rifles are called semiautomatic because with each shot fired, they eject the empty shell case and load a new round into the firing chamber.

Fully automatic machine guns, by contrast, fire continuously as long as the trigger is held. They generally aren’t available for sale to civilians. Although they may have a tough military look, semiautomatic assault weapons, shot-for-shot, are no more lethal than Grandpa’s Remington wooden-stock deer-hunting rifle. Arguing about whether a particular rifle is an assault weapon makes no sense. Worse, it creates the impression among firearm advocates that gun-control proponents either don’t know what they’re talking about or that a ban on assault weapons is actually a precursor to broader prohibition. By labeling her forthcoming legislation an “updated assault-weapons bill” and hearkening to the misbegotten 1994 law, Feinstein undercut her credibility right out of the box.

The sole characteristic of a semiautomatic rifle that makes it especially deadly is ammunition capacity. The Newtown killer used multiple 30-round magazines to fire scores of times in a matter of minutes, according to police officials. Magazines are the spring-loaded containers of bullets that snap into the bottom of a rifle or the grip of a pistol. If a shooter couldn’t obtain large mags, he’d have to reload more often, possibly limiting bloodshed.

Feinstein says her bill will ban the manufacture, sale, or transfer of magazines holding more than 10 rounds. If she’s smart, she’ll streamline the legislation to focus strictly on magazine capacity, rather than inviting another confusing fracas over what qualifies as an assault weapon. Even if the bill does zero in on magazines, though, to make such a limitation meaningful, Congress would have to ban the possession of large magazines, not just the sale of new ones. Otherwise, the tens of millions of big magazines already on the market will provide an ample supply to future mass killers. Are lawmakers prepared to send sheriffs and police out to take away privately owned magazines exceeding 10 rounds? In the 1990s the answer was no. It’s doubtful that’s changed. (Imagine being the Texas or Florida cop given that assignment.)

That’s why a more promising response to Newtown would be one that stresses keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerous mentally ill. These are goals that the NRA cannot credibly oppose. Which does not mean the NRA will cooperate. The gun lobby thrives on controversy, not compromise. It needs enemies to raise money. Legislation framed as crime control, rather than gun control, stands a better chance of winning over firearm owners and Republican politicians.

Tightening the faulty federal background-check system ought to be the top priority on Capitol Hill. No serious person objects to the FBI-coordinated computerized record checks that prevent sales of firearms to felons, domestic-violence misdemeanants, and those formally deemed mentally ill. But the background check applies only to sales by federally licensed firearm dealers. Nonlicensed “private collectors” may sell to strangers, no questions asked. By some estimates, 40 percent of all gun transfers take place without background checks: an invitation to criminals if ever there was one. If Democrats lined up a battalion of police chiefs to demand universal application of background checks as a way to deter crime, they’d have an appealing pitch to the American public.

Would enactment of such a reform stop the determined school shooter, or even the violent career criminal, from obtaining weapons on the black market? No. The passage in the 1990s of the background-check and assault-weapons laws had negligible effects on crime, according to Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles and one of the country’s most independent-minded criminologists. An improved background-check system would not have prevented the Newtown shooter from getting hold of his mother’s legally acquired guns. Mass killers tend to be young men who, despite deranged minds and evil hearts, prepare carefully. Some have clean records before going berserk. Others obtain their weaponry from relatives or friends. Fixing background checks is still worth doing. It might deter some criminals, and the imposition on Second Amendment rights would be slight. To sell a gun to a neighbor, the owner could be required to conduct the transaction via a local licensed dealer, who, for a modest fee, would run the computerized check.

To make a universal record check more effective, lawmakers could begin what would be an arduous process of reviewing and reforming how we deal with serious mental illness in the U.S. Some steps seem embarrassingly obvious. At both the federal and state level, there are numerous agencies with mental health information that has not been entered into the background-check system. The president could remedy that with executive orders and additional financial incentives for states to comply. Then there is the much more daunting challenge of what to do about the unintended legacy of deinstitutionalizing the dangerous mentally ill.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. emptied many state mental hospitals because they provided dreadful care or none at all. We didn’t follow through on the promised community-based treatment. As a result, we created a de-facto policy of waiting until seriously mentally ill people commit crimes and then consigning them to prison. Over the past half-century, the number of psychiatric beds in the U.S. has decreased to 43,000 from 559,000, even as the overall population increased, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.

Other important research suggests that more effective treatment of the mentally ill can contribute to lower homicide rates. Steven Segal, a social work professor at the University of California at Berkeley, published a paper in November 2011 in the journal Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology showing that increased access to inpatient psychiatric care, better-performing mental health systems, and more flexible criteria for involuntary civil commitment account for 17 percent of the state-to-state variation in homicide rates.

One of the most troubling observations I’ve encountered since Newtown came from Dr. Carl Bell, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Shortly after the massacre, Bell and I appeared as guests on the National Public Radio program Tell Me More. The soft-spoken academic interrupted the conversation about the nuances of gun control to point out that random mass shootings are typically suicides augmented with multiple murders as a way of dramatizing the shooter’s pain and self-hatred. Copious amounts of research show that media publicity of suicides leads to copy-cat crimes. “It seems to me,” the professor politely interjected, “that the more we report that this sort of assault weapon was used, that this person had this kind of bulletproof vest, that this person entered the school this way—that gives other people who are depressed and suicidal and want to take a whole bunch of people with them the knowledge on how to pull it off.” The media, Bell said, should self-censor their sensational, detailed coverage of mass shootings.

That’s not going to happen—for the same reason that the inevitable commissions and hearings on violence in films and video games will conclude that there’s little for government to do about bloodshed in entertainment. The First Amendment protects a robust right to expression. A parallel exists with the Second Amendment, another emblem of freedom, forged in the 18th century yet still hallowed generations later. These uniquely American rights come with tremendous responsibilities—and haunting costs.

The bottom line: Stricter background checks are a start—but better care for the mentally ill will be more effective at reducing the number of shooting sprees.

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Worries grow in east Congo with fighter buildup

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Aid workers warned Wednesday that armed groups are setting up new front lines in and around the city of Goma in eastern Congo, where the U.N. said it now has documented at least 126 rape cases last month.

Thousands of fighters from the M23 rebel group withdrew several weeks ago from Goma, and the fighters have since taken steps toward negotiating with the Congolese government.

However, residents in Goma say M23 and other armed fighters are now positioning themselves in an around the city — including inside camps for people displaced by the violence.

The arrival of several thousand fighters within the last week is prompting fear among civilians, who already have experienced years of fighting and rebellions, said Tariq Riebl, Oxfam’s humanitarian coordinator there.

“They are very concerned — people are seeing this and they don’t know what it means,” he said. “I think what everyone is scared about is that it seems like people are ramping up, ramping up but for what purpose?”

Oxfam warns that more than 1 million people could come under attack if violence again flares in Goma, where more than 100,000 people already have fled from elsewhere in the region.

“Goma is typically the last refuge safe haven and now it’s being directly called into question. If Goma falls in a big battle, where are people going to go?” Riebl said.

“This is very, very disconcerting because you have a population of over 1 million people and if war were to break out, we’re looking at a horrific situation.”

The M23 rebel group, which is believed to be backed by neighboring Rwanda, is made up of hundreds of soldiers who deserted the Congolese army in April.

They took control of many villages and towns in the mineral-rich east over the last seven months, culminating in the seizure of Goma on Nov. 20. It took days of negotiations and intense international pressure, including from the U.N., for the thousands of fighters from M23 to finally withdraw from the regional capital.

The U.N. mission says it’s received allegations of serious rights violations, including killings and wounding of civilians, rape, looting, and forced recruitment of children, by elements of the M23 rebels in Goma and neighboring areas.

Congo’s armed forces are also blamed for a series of attacks as they fled Goma in retreat in late November.

The U.N. said Tuesday it now has been able to document at least 126 rapes during that period in the Minova area, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of Goma.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said that two Congolese soldiers so far have been arrested in connection with the rapes, while seven others had been implicated in looting in the area.

“The Congolese Armed Forces have started investigating those human rights violations,” he said. “The U.N. Mission is supporting the military justice procedure in conducting thorough investigations into these allegations to ensure that the perpetrators are identified and held accountable.”

Rape has long been used as a brutal weapon of war in eastern Congo, where both soldiers and various armed groups use sexual violence to intimidate, punish and control the population.

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Instagram tests new limits in user privacy

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Instagram, which spurred suspicions this week that it would sell user photos after revising its terms of service, has sparked renewed debate about how much control over personal data users must give up to live and participate in a world steeped in social media.

In forcefully establishing a new set of usage terms, Instagram, the massively popular photo-sharing service owned by Facebook Inc, has claimed some rights that have been practically unheard of among its prominent social media peers, legal experts and consumer advocates say.

Users who decline to accept Instagram’s new privacy policy have one month to delete their accounts, or they will be bound by the new terms. Another clause appears to waive the rights of minors on the service. And in the wake of a class-action settlement involving Facebook and privacy issues, Instagram has added terms to shield itself from similar litigation.

All told, the revised terms reflect a new, draconian grip over user rights, experts say.

“This is all uncharted territory,” said Jay Edelson, a partner at the Chicago law firm Edelson McGuire. “If Instagram is to encourage as many lawsuits as possible and as much backlash as possible then they succeeded.”

Instagram’s new policies, which go into effect January 16, lay the groundwork for the company to begin generating advertising revenue by giving marketers the right to display profile pictures and other personal information such as who users follow in advertisements.

The new terms, which allow an advertiser to pay Instagram “to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata)” without compensation, triggered an outburst of complaints on the Web on Tuesday from users upset that Instagram would make money from their uploaded content.

The uproar prompted a lengthy blog post from the company to “clarify” the changes, with CEO Kevin Systrom saying the company had no current plans to incorporate photos taken by users into ads.

Instagram declined comment beyond its blog post, which failed to appease critics including National Geographic, which suspended new posts to Instagram. “We are very concerned with the direction of the proposed new terms of service and if they remain as presented we may close our account,” said National Geographic, an early Instagram adopter.

PUSHING BOUNDARIES

Consumer advocates said Facebook was using Instagram’s aggressive new terms to push the boundaries of how social media sites can make money while its own hands were tied by recent agreements with regulators and class action plaintiffs.

Under the terms of a 2011 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook is required to get user consent before personal information is shared beyond their privacy settings. A preliminary class action lawsuit settlement with Facebook allows users to opt-out of being included in the “sponsored stories” ads that use their personal information.

Under Instagram’s new terms, users who want to opt-out must simply quit using the service.

“Instagram has given people a pretty stark choice: Take it or leave, and if you leave it you’ve got to leave the service,” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Internet user right’s group.

What’s more, he said, if a user initially agrees to the new terms but then has a change of mind, their information could still be used for commercial purposes.

In a post on its official blog on Tuesday, Instagram did not address another controversial provision that states that if a child under the age of 18 uses the service, then it is implied that his or her parent has tacitly agreed to Instagram’s terms.

“The notion is that minors can’t be bound to a contract. And that also means they can’t be bound to a provision that says they agree to waive the rights,” said the EFF’s Opsahl.

BLOCKING CLASS ACTION SUITS

While Facebook continues to be bogged in its own class action suit, Instagram took preventive steps to avoid a similar legal morass.

Its new terms of service require users with a legal complaint to enter arbitration, rather than take the company to court. It prohibits users from joining a class action lawsuit unless they mail a written “opt-out” statement to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park within 30 days of joining Instagram.

That provision is not included in terms of service for other leading social media companies like Twitter, Google, YouTube or even Facebook itself, and it immunizes Instagram from many forms of legal liability, said Michael Rustad, a professor at Suffolk University Law School.

Rustad, who has studied the terms of services for 157 social media services, said just 10 contained provisions prohibiting class action lawsuits.

The clause effectively cripples users who want to legally challenge the company because lawyers will not likely represent an individual plaintiff, Rustad argued.

“No lawyers will take these cases,” Rustad said. “In consumer arbitration cases, everything is stacked against the consumer. It’s a pretense, it’s a legal fiction, that there are remedies.”

Instagram, which has 100 million users, allows consumers to tweak the photos they take on their smartphones and share the images with friends. Facebook acquired Instagram in September for $ 715 million.

Instagram’s take-it-or-leave-it policy pushes the envelope for how social networking companies treat user privacy issues, said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“I think Facebook is probably using Instagram to see how far it can press this advertising model,” said Rotenberg. “If they can keep a lot of users, then all those users have agreed to have their images as part of advertising.”

(Additional reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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NY appeals court takes up Cameron Douglas case

NEW YORK (AP) — The Douglas name — first with patriarch Kirk and later with son Michael — has always meant gold for Hollywood. But drama for the third generation of the Douglas family has occurred mostly off-screen, where Cameron Douglas has battled drug addiction and legal troubles.

In papers submitted for appeals court arguments Wednesday, prosecutors and a lawyer for Cameron Douglas have retold in greater detail than before how a man who seemed to have so many advantages in life could land in prison for a decade on a drug conviction.

The dispute is over Manhattan Judge Richard M. Berman‘s decision to double Douglas’ five-year prison term after he committed several new drug infractions, including convincing a lawyer-turned-love interest to sneak drugs into prison for him in her bra on three or four occasions.

Berman said he had not “ever encountered a defendant who has so recklessly and wantonly and flagrantly and criminally acted in as destructive and (as) manipulative a fashion as Cameron Douglas has.”

In his brief, Douglas’ lawyer Paul Shechtman called the additional sentence “shockingly long,” saying it “may be the harshest sentence ever imposed on a federal prisoner for a drug possession offense.”

Douglas, 34, was originally accused of distributing and conspiring to distribute more than 4.5 kilograms of methamphetamine and 20 kilograms of cocaine from August 2006 until his July 28, 2009, arrest at a Manhattan hotel. At the time, he was so visibly high on heroin that he was taken first to a hospital before he was brought to court, and it was later learned he had been shooting heroin five to six times a day for five years, Shechtman noted.

He was released from custody on the condition that he remain under “house arrest” with a private security guard at his mother’s apartment, Shechtman said. Within days, he persuaded his girlfriend, Kelly Sott, to smuggle heroin to him, hidden in an electric toothbrush. Once discovered, his bail was revoked and he was incarcerated. Sott pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in a plea deal and was sentenced to the seven months she had already served.

Still, Douglas gained leniency from what otherwise could have been a mandatory 10-year prison sentence by cooperating with the government, contacting his suppliers by telephone and text messages as law enforcement agents watched. As a result, two drug suppliers were arrested and convicted. Douglas testified at the trial of one supplier.

Douglas was sentenced to five years in prison for a Jan. 27, 2010, guilty plea to narcotics distribution charges even before his cooperation was completed.

At sentencing, Berman noted that the Douglas family had staged interventions for Douglas that he had refused and that two decades of drug addiction treatment had been unsuccessful. He said it appeared incarceration had produced the longest period of sobriety for Douglas since he was 13.

However, it was learned afterward that even prior to the April 20, 2010, sentencing, Douglas had persuaded one of his attorneys — a 33-year-old associate at a law firm with whom lawyers said he also had a romantic relationship — to smuggle Xanax pills to him in prison. Shechtman said she “apparently became enamored of Cameron during frequent visits.”

He admitted that he had shared the 30 Xanax pills with other inmates and that he had also smoked cigarettes, gambled, snorted substances and committed other infractions while in prison.

Shortly after testifying at the Oct. 3, 2011, trial of a drug supplier, prison staff caught Douglas with the opioid dependence medication Suboxone and a white powdery substance believed to be heroin. The prison punished him with disciplinary segregation for 11 months and canceled nearly three months of his good conduct time.

On Oct. 20, 2011, Douglas again pleaded guilty to drug possession, agreeing in a plea deal that the sentencing range should be an additional 12 to 18 months in prison. Prosecutors say that within a week of the plea, the government learned from a cooperating defendant in another case that Douglas had misled the government about how he obtained heroin while in prison.

Douglas had claimed he got it in a television room or at a church service or that he obtained the heroin by chance, picking it up off the floor after another inmate dropped it, the government said. But prosecutors say the cooperator revealed he had brought Douglas the drugs directly to his cell.

In court papers, Shechtman blamed Cameron Douglas’ long history of substance abuse and growing up with little parental support.

“While still a young teenager, he drank heavily and began selling drugs after his father sharply limited snorting cocaine,” he said. “He used illegal drugs to self-medicate — to ward off depression and panic attacks.”

He began using intravenous cocaine at age 20 and then started using heroin so that by age 25, “his life revolved around heroin,” Shechtman said.

His friends were fellow users, who gravitated to him because of his access to family money, which supported their habits, the lawyer said. His drug habit led him to be fired from a movie in which he had a minor role in 2006.

“Exasperated, his father gave him an ultimatum: enter a drug rehabilitation program or have his access to family money sharply limited. Cameron declined to enter treatment; his father carried out his threat; and Cameron turned to drug dealing to support his habit,” Shechtman wrote.

Shechtman argued that the judge had gone too far with Cameron Douglas, punishing an addict for something beyond his control.

“While we recognize that many of the words that the district court used to describe Cameron’s conduct — ‘reckless,’ ‘manipulative,’ ‘destructive,’ — were apt, the simple truth is that Cameron Douglas is a heroin addict who has yet to shake his habit,” he said.

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Diabetes remission possible with diet, exercise

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – One in nine people with diabetes saw their blood sugar levels dip back to a normal or “pre-diabetes” level after a year on an intensive diet and exercise program, in a new study.

Complete remission of type 2 diabetes is still very rare, researchers said. But they added that the new study can give people with the disease hope that through lifestyle changes, they could end up getting off medication and likely lowering their risk of diabetes-related complications.

“Kind of a long-term assumption really is that once you have diabetes there’s no turning back on it, and there’s no remission or cure,” said Edward Gregg, the lead author on the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The research, he told Reuters Health, “is a reminder that adopting a healthy diet, physically-active lifestyle and reducing and maintaining a healthy weight is going to help manage people’s diabetes better.”

His team’s study can’t prove the experimental program – which included weekly group and individual counseling for six months, followed by less frequent visits – was directly responsible for blood sugar improvements.

The original goal of the research was to look at whether that intervention lowered participants’ risk of heart disease (so far, it hasn’t).

But the diabetes improvements are in line with better weight loss and fitness among people in the program versus those in a comparison group who only went to a few annual counseling sessions, Gregg’s team reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

IS IT COST-EFFECTIVE?

About eight percent of people in the United States have diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association. The new study included 4,503 of them who were also overweight or obese.

People randomly assigned to the intensive program had diet and exercise counseling with a goal of cutting eating and drinking back to 1200 to 1800 calories per day and increasing physical activity to just under three hours per week.

After one year, 11.5 percent of them had at least partial diabetes remission, meaning that without medication their blood sugar levels were no longer above the diabetes threshold. That compared to just two percent of participants in the non-intervention group who saw their diabetes improve significantly.

People who’d had diabetes for fewer years were more likely to have blood sugar improvements, as were those who lost more weight or had stronger fitness gains during the study.

However, less than one-third of people whose diabetes went into remission during the program managed to keep their blood sugar levels down for at least four years, the researchers found.

“Clearly lifestyle intervention is good for people with diabetes,” said Dr. John Buse, a diabetes researcher from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

“The question is how cost-effective is it, what are the long-term consequences (and) how would it really compare with alternative approaches like bariatric surgery and drug therapy?” Buse, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

Dr. David Arterburn, from Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, said some studies of weight-loss surgery, for instance, have found two-thirds of people who start out with diabetes have complete remission.

Arterburn, who co-wrote an editorial published with the new study, said anyone with diabetes – or at high risk – should consider either lifestyle interventions or surgery, if they’re eligible, to reduce future health risks.

Gregg said his team was working on a cost-analysis of the current program, but that it was fairly “resource-intensive.”

“If people have access to the support to make these sorts of changes, they may have the benefits that we’ve seen here,” he said. But, “What we should remember is that more modest changes in lifestyle are also effective.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JjFzqx Journal of the American Medical Association, online December 18, 2012.

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NBC’s Engel, TV crew escape abduction in Syria

BEIRUT (AP) — NBC‘s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel said Tuesday he and members of his network crew escaped unharmed after five days of captivity in Syria, where more than a dozen pro-regime gunmen dragged them from their car, killed one of their rebel escorts and subjected them to mock executions.

Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show, an unshaven Engel said he and his team escaped during a firefight Monday night between their captors and rebels at a checkpoint. They crossed into Turkey on Tuesday.

NBC did not say how many people were kidnapped with Engel, although two other men, producer Ghazi Balkiz and photographer John Kooistra, appeared with him on the “Today” show. It was not confirmed whether everyone was accounted for.

Engel said he believes the kidnappers were a Shiite militia group loyal to the Syrian government, which has lost control over swaths of the country’s north and is increasingly on the defensive in a civil war that has killed 40,000 people since March 2011.

“They kept us blindfolded, bound,” said the 39-year-old Engel, who speaks and reads Arabic. “We weren’t physically beaten or tortured. A lot of psychological torture, threats of being killed. They made us choose which one of us would be shot first and when we refused, there were mock shootings,” he added.

“They were talking openly about their loyalty to the government,” Engel said. He said the captors were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group, but he did not elaborate.

There was no mention of the kidnapping by Syria’s state-run news agency.

Both Iran and Hezbollah are close allies of the embattled Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, who used military force to crush mostly peaceful protests against his regime. The crackdown on protests led many in Syria to take up arms against the government, and the conflict has become a civil war.

Engel said he was told the kidnappers wanted to exchange him and his crew for four Iranian and two Lebanese prisoners being held by the rebels.

“They captured us in order to carry out this exchange,” he said.

Engel and his crew entered Syria on Thursday and were driving through what they thought was rebel-controlled territory when “a group of gunmen just literally jumped out of the trees and bushes on the side of the road.”

“There were probably 15 gunmen. They were wearing ski masks. They were heavily armed. They dragged us out of the car,” he said.

He said the gunmen shot and killed at least one of their rebel escorts on the spot and took the hostages into a waiting truck nearby.

Around 11 p.m. Monday, Engel said he and the others were being moved to another location in northern Idlib province.

“And as we were moving along the road, the kidnappers came across a rebel checkpoint, something they hadn’t expected. We were in the back of what you would think of as a minivan,” he said. “The kidnappers saw this checkpoint and started a gunfight with it. Two of the kidnappers were killed. We climbed out of the vehicle and the rebels took us. We spent the night with them.”

Engel and his crew crossed back into neighboring Turkey on Tuesday.

The network said there was no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom during the time the crew was missing.

NBC sought to keep the disappearance of Engel and the crew secret for several days while it investigated what happened to them. Major media organizations, including The Associated Press, adhered to a request from the network to refrain from reporting on the issue out of concern it could make the dangers to the captives worse. News of the disappearance did begin to leak out in Turkish media and on some websites on Monday.

Syria has become a danger zone for reporters since the conflict began.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Syria is by far the deadliest country for the press in 2012, with 28 journalists killed in combat or targeted for murder by government or opposition forces.

Among the journalists killed while covering Syria are award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier, photographer Remi Ochlik and Britain’s Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin. Also, Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died after an apparent asthma attack while on assignment in Syria.

The Syrian government has barred most foreign media coverage of the civil war in Syria. Those journalists whom the regime has allowed in are tightly controlled in their movements by Information Ministry minders. Many foreign journalists sneak into Syria illegally with the help of smugglers and travel with rebel escorts or drivers.

Engel joined NBC in 2003 and was named chief foreign correspondent in 2008. He previously worked as a freelance journalist for ABC News, including during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He has lived in the Middle East since graduating from Stanford University in 1996.

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