Adele touched down in Los Angeles on Thursday, carrying her most precious cargo: her baby boy who was born in October.
The singer, 24, is in town for Sunday's awards show, where she's up for a Globe for her James Bond title song "Skyfall."
It will be her first official appearance since she and boyfriend Simon Konecki welcomed their son, who is apparently a "cutie," but whose name is still unknown.
For the new mom to win, she'll have to beat out some strong contenders in the best original song category, including Taylor Swift's Hunger Games song, "Safe & Sound," Jon Bon Jovi's "Not Running Anymore" from Stand Up Guys and "Suddenly," which was sung in Les Misérables by Hugh Jackman.
The 70th Golden Globe Awards will air live Sunday, Jan. 13, on NBC at 8 p.m. ET (5 p.m. PT) from the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
After decades of qualms about lung cancer screening, the American Cancer Society says there now is enough evidence to recommend it, but only for current and former heavy smokers ages 55 to 74 and after a frank talk about risks and benefits.
The new guidelines, announced Friday, are a cautious but exciting step against the world's most deadly cancer, doctors who wrote the advice say.
It is based on a big study in 2011 that found annual, low-dose CT scans — a type of X-ray — could cut the chances of dying of lung cancer by 20 percent and from any cause by nearly 7 percent.
The study only included older people who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 30 years or the equivalent, such as two packs a day for 15 years. Whether screening would help others isn't known, so scans were not advised for them.
"We're trying to make sure we restrict harm that might come from screening," such as unneeded biopsies and follow-up procedures when scans falsely suggest cancer, said Dr. Richard Wender, family medicine chief at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Lung cancer is fairly rare before age 55, so "the benefits of screening are going to be less if you start at a younger age."
Wender, a former Cancer Society president, led the guidelines panel. Three of its 20 members have ties to companies that make cancer treatment or imaging products. The scans cost $100 to as much as $400 and are not covered by Medicare or private insurers.
"We believe insurance companies should cover this test for the right people — not for everybody," Wender said.
More than 160,000 people die of lung cancer in the United States alone each year, and the vast majority are diagnosed after the disease has spread.
Cancer screening has provoked great argument in recent years, especially over when and how often women should get mammograms and whether men should have PSA blood tests to look for prostate cancer.
Some of the most influential guidelines come from a government-appointed panel — the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — but it hasn't considered lung cancer screening since 2004, when it said there wasn't enough evidence to recommend for or against it. An update is in the works now.
The Cancer Society used to recommend screening with chest X-rays but withdrew that advice in 1980 after studies showed they weren't saving lives. Since then, the CT scans have come into wider use, and several medical groups backed limited screening with them.
Many private companies also market CT scans directly to the public, including for some who are at lower risk for lung cancer than the people in major studies have been.
WellStar Health System, a network of hospitals and private doctors in suburban Atlanta, has screened nearly 900 people since 2008. Less than 3 percent were referred for lung biopsies because of suspicious findings, and of those, 70 percent turned out to have lung cancer, said screening coordinator Vickie Beckler.
The system generally follows the advice of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a group of top cancer centers, but eligibility for scans is "a very fluid area" that's being refined, she said. Patients younger than 50 need a doctor's referral for a scan, but if they want one and have major risk factors, "it should be their prerogative to have access to screening as long as they understand the risks and benefits involved and come to that decision with their physician," she said.
Kathy DeJoseph, 62, of suburban Atlanta, is glad she was screened as part of a study at WellStar. Several years of scans found nothing but last year, one detected cancer.
"I'd have been dead had I not had that scan," she said. "I was very, very lucky."
She also finally quit smoking after 40 years to qualify for lung cancer surgery.
Counseling smokers on how to quit is part of the Cancer Society's guidance. Having a scare from a scan "is a great motivator for people to quit smoking — fear that they might have had lung cancer, that they dodged a bullet, really causes people to change and take a look at their behavior," Wender said.
People also should be told that a normal scan doesn't mean no change is needed.
"The absolute worse thing that would happen" is people thinking "now I'm safe and I can continue smoking," he said.
___
Online:
Cancer Society: www.cancer.org
National Cancer Institute: http://1.usa.gov/UZq7Vt
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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press
A woman walked past a wall plastered with election campaign posters of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in Caracas on Wednesday.
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez’s supporters have not ruled out swearing him in from his hospital in Havana. His detractors are calling for government investigators to go check his pulse themselves. The justices whom Mr. Chávez’s allies have named to the Supreme Court have decided that he can continue to govern in absentia.
In a country that Mr. Chávez has dominated for so long, his health crisis and the decision to proceed on Thursday with a quasi-presidential inauguration that he is unable to attend are producing a stream of bizarre developments and national angst about who is in charge.
“Who’s governing Venezuela?” Julio Borges, an opposition member of the National Assembly, said during a noisy legislative debate this week on the biggest issue facing the country, overshadowing other urgent matters like pressures for a painful currency devaluation, stagnant oil production and chronic shortages of food and other staples on store shelves.
Mr. Chávez has long said, “I am the people,” a mantra that his supporters are invoking as they plan to don the sash the president would have worn had he been able to attend his inauguration, symbolically becoming presidents themselves.
“Anyone who has a sash, bring it along, because tomorrow the people will be invested as president of the republic, because the people are Chávez,” Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly, said Wednesday. “All of us here are Chávez, the people in the street are Chávez, the lady who cooks is Chávez, the comrade who works as a watchman is Chávez, the soldier is Chávez, the woman is Chávez, the farmer is Chávez, the worker is Chávez; we’re all Chávez.”
To no one’s surprise, the Supreme Court, full of Chávez loyalists, ruled on the eve of the ceremony that Mr. Chávez’s inauguration could be postponed and that his team of advisers could smoothly move, in his absence, from one term to the next.
The court declined to set a time limit for the swearing in, raising the possibility that the country’s deepening uncertainty could go on for weeks or months. And it did nothing to clear up the stubborn mystery of the president’s condition.
Luisa Estella Morales, the president of the Supreme Court, said Wednesday at a news conference that there was no need at this time for a delegation to go to Cuba and report back on the condition of Mr. Chávez, 58. Asked if the swearing in could occur in Havana, she said the time and place of the ceremony had not been determined.
Ms. Morales said the Supreme Court’s ruling was meant to uphold the results of October’s presidential election.
“It’s one of the most important values that we should preserve as a constitutional court,” Ms. Morales said. “The sovereign Venezuelan people have expressed through their vote their desire to continue being governed by President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías.”
The government has been opaque for months, acknowledging that he suffered from a relapse of cancer in the pelvic area, but not specifying the type of cancer or detailing his prognosis.
The lack of information has left Venezuela tied in knots. Mr. Chávez has loomed so large for so long — with speeches that have lasted for hours, frequent Twitter posts and his outsized singing, ranting, poetry-reciting and foe-bashing personality — that his sudden silence has created a sizable vacuum.
“We don’t have a president,” lamented Estela Martínez, 63, a nurse who has supported Mr. Chávez throughout his 14 years in office. She said she was afraid that the public was not getting the full truth about the president’s condition and that there was far more shouting than clarity from political leaders. “Someone has to take the reins of the country.”
Henrique Capriles Radonski, the opposition candidate who lost to Mr. Chávez in October, criticized the Supreme Court’s decision endorsing a delay in the inauguration. “Institutions should not respond to the interests of a government,” he said.
The State Department in Washington, which has been cautious about getting involved in the contentious political back-and-forth, said Wednesday that it would be eager to improve relations with Venezuela, which have long been strained.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc unveiled a service that increases competition with Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes store.
Amazon launched Amazon AutoRip, which gives customers free digital versions of music CDs they purchase from the world’s largest Internet retailer.
The digital music files are automatically stored in customer libraries in remote datacenters run by Amazon, where they are available to play or download immediately through the company’s Cloud Player service, the company said.
Amazon customers who have bought AutoRip-eligible CDs at any time since the company started selling discs in 1998 will also get digital versions of that music stored in their Cloud Player libraries for free, the company added.
More than 50,000 albums are available for AutoRip and Steve Boom, head of digital music at Amazon, said the company focused on music that has been the most popular among its customers during the past 15 years.
Albums include “21″ by Adele; “Overexposed” by Maroon 5; “Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd and “Thriller” by Michael Jackson.
Boom declined to estimate how many CDs Amazon expects to digitize through the new service. However, he noted that the company has sold hundreds of millions of CDs to millions of customers.
“When we picked those 50,000 titles we focused on having a substantial majority of our physical CD sales covered,” he added.
Amazon is hoping the new service boosts digital music sales and encourages more people to use its cloud music service.
“People will be exposed to Cloud Player and our digital music offering, which is a good thing,” Boom said. “We want to take this global.”
Amazon’s MP3 digital music business has been around since 2007, but its market share is less than 15 percent, according to The NPD Group. Apple’s iTunes store is the clear leader, with over 50 percent of the market.
Amazon is making a bigger push against iTunes now that the company’s Kindle Fire tablets are in more consumers’ hands and its Cloud Player music application is available on a range of other mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
(Reporting By Alistair Barr; editing by Andrew Hay)
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The X Factor
The pop superstar is leaving The X Factor after a single season as a judge alongside Simon Cowell, Demi Lovato and L.A. Reid.
"She has made the decision that she won't be returning," a source close to the singer tells PEOPLE. "She wants to concentrate on her music."
(Reid announced in December that he is also leaving the show.)
As the coach of the teen group, Spears's top contestant, Carly Rose Sonenclar, was a fan favorite and made it to the finale, where she finished in second place.
But Spears, 31, earned mixed reviews as a judge, with PEOPLE's TV critic saying she brought plenty of charm yet lacked the rejuvenating presence that Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez earlier brought to American Idol.
Fox had no comment on Spears's status for upcoming seasons.
News of her decision comes just days after Fox entertainment chairman Kevin Reilly told reporters he was pleased with her work on the show.
"I thought it went very well," Reilly said Tuesday of her stint. "It was fraught with unknowns. I think [Britney] did a good job. People are fascinated with her and always will be. Maybe some people were waiting for more drastic displays – those did not happen. The ratings were higher last year but I think the show was better [this year]. She fit in on that panel nicely."
Spears told PEOPLE last month that working on the show had been a blessing.
"It's no secret I'm a shy person," she said. "I feel doing this show over the past year has allowed me to come out of my shell a lot more. Everyone on the show has been amazing and made me feel really comfortable."
• Reporting by JENNIFER GARCIA and PATRICK GOMEZ
WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, doctors have lamented that there's no Pap test for deadly ovarian cancer. Wednesday, scientists reported encouraging signs that one day, there might be.
Researchers are trying to retool the Pap, a test for cervical cancer that millions of women get, so that it could spot early signs of other gynecologic cancers, too.
How? It turns out that cells can flake off of tumors in the ovaries or the lining of the uterus, and float down to rest in the cervix, where Pap tests are performed. These cells are too rare to recognize under the microscope. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University used some sophisticated DNA testing on the Pap samples to uncover the evidence — gene mutations that show cancer is present.
In a pilot study, they analyzed Pap smears from 46 women who already were diagnosed with either ovarian or endometrial cancer. The new technique found all the endometrial cancers and 41 percent of the ovarian tumors, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
This is very early-stage research, and women shouldn't expect any change in their routine Paps. It will take years of additional testing to prove if the so-called PapGene technique really could work as a screening tool, used to spot cancer in women who thought they were healthy.
"Now the hard work begins," said Hopkins oncologist Dr. Luis Diaz, whose team is collecting hundreds of additional Pap samples for more study and is exploring ways to enhance the detection of ovarian cancer.
But if it ultimately pans out, "the neat part about this is, the patient won't feel anything different," and the Pap wouldn't be performed differently, Diaz added. The extra work would come in a lab.
The gene-based technique marks a new approach toward cancer screening, and specialists are watching closely.
"This is very encouraging, and it shows great potential," said American Cancer Society genetics expert Michael Melner.
"We are a long way from being able to see any impact on our patients," cautioned Dr. Shannon Westin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She reviewed the research in an accompanying editorial, and said the ovarian cancer detection would need improvement if the test is to work.
But she noted that ovarian cancer has poor survival rates because it's rarely caught early. "If this screening test could identify ovarian cancer at an early stage, there would be a profound impact on patient outcomes and mortality," Westin said.
More than 22,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and more than 15,000 die. Symptoms such as pain and bloating seldom are obvious until the cancer is more advanced, and numerous attempts at screening tests have failed.
Endometrial cancer affects about 47,000 women a year, and kills about 8,000. There is no screening test for it either, but most women are diagnosed early because of postmenopausal bleeding.
The Hopkins research piggybacks on one of the most successful cancer screening tools, the Pap, and a newer technology used along with it. With a standard Pap, a little brush scrapes off cells from the cervix, which are stored in a vial to examine for signs of cervical cancer. Today, many women's Paps undergo an additional DNA-based test to see if they harbor the HPV virus, which can spur cervical cancer.
So the Hopkins team, funded largely by cancer advocacy groups, decided to look for DNA evidence of other gynecologic tumors. It developed a method to rapidly screen the Pap samples for those mutations using standard genetics equipment that Diaz said wouldn't add much to the cost of a Pap-plus-HPV test. He said the technique could detect both early-stage and more advanced tumors. Importantly, tests of Paps from 14 healthy women turned up no false alarms.
The endometrial cancers may have been easier to find because cells from those tumors don't have as far to travel as ovarian cancer cells, Diaz said. Researchers will study whether inserting the Pap brush deeper, testing during different times of the menstrual cycle, or other factors might improve detection of ovarian cancer.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks inched higher on Thursday, helped by stronger-than-expected exports in China, the world's second-biggest economy, but gains were capped as the S&P 500 hovered near a 5-year high.
Financial and telecommunications stocks were the day's top gainers, while the material sector was the biggest drag. The S&P 500 material sector index <.gspm> was off 0.3 percent. The financial sector index <.gspf> rose 0.6 percent and the telecom sector <.gspl> was up 0.5 percent.
The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index was near a five-year closing high of 1,466.47. On Friday, the index had ended at the highest close since December 2007.
"The market is technically right at the level of resistance, near 1,465-1,467. A solid breakthrough above the level would be the start of a next leg higher, but it looks like it is going to be difficult to break above that level for now," said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. He cited concerns about the earnings season and upcoming debt ceiling talks.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 9.84 points, or 0.07 percent, at 13,400.35. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 2.55 points, or 0.17 percent, at 1,463.57. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 2.01 points, or 0.06 percent, at 3,103.80.
In company news, shares of upscale jeweler Tiffany
U.S.-traded Nokia shares
Herbalife Ltd
Data showed China's export growth rebounded sharply to a seven-month high in December, a strong finish to the year after seven straight quarters of slowdown, even as demand from Europe and the United States remained subdued.
In the U.S., claims for unemployment benefits rose last week, though seasonal volatility made it difficult to get a clear picture of the labor market's health.
Also, U.S. wholesale inventories rose more than expected in November and sales rose by the most in more than 1-1/2 years. The market's reaction to both reports was muted.
(Reporting By Angela Moon; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
Colombia’s chief prosecutor’s office has opened a preliminary criminal investigation into former President Álvaro Uribe over allegations he sponsored a deadly far-right militia as a regional governor in the 1990s. The inquiry ordered last Wednesday was made public Tuesday by Mr. Uribe’s lawyer, Jaime Granados. Mr. Uribe denounced it on Twitter as defamation based on the testimony of “manipulated prisoners.” The case stems from 2011 accusations by a leftist congressman, Ivan Cepeda, that a far-right militia that killed suspected rebel sympathizers operated from a ranch owned by Mr. Uribe and his brother Santiago. The prosecutor in charge of the case is Martha Lucia Zamora and she says it is based on the testimony of former militia members. Mr. Granados says it is built on lies. Mr. Uribe was president from 2002 to 2010.
(Reuters) – Attorneys for two Ohio teenage football players accused of raping a 16-year-old student have asked that the trial be moved because potential witnesses are afraid to come forward in defense of the boys, one of the lawyers said on Monday.
Walter Madison, the attorney for one of the accused rapists, Ma’lik Richmon, said social media efforts to bring the alleged rape into the national spotlight have led to an atmosphere of intimidation and coercion.
“This has a chilling effect on witnesses who could come forward to be part of this process so my client can get a fair and full proceeding,” he told Reuters. “So, we’re left without the opportunity to make our case. That’s pretty serious.”
Richmond and Trenton Mays, both 16 and members of the Steubenville High School football team, are charged with raping a 16-year-old fellow student at a party last August.
The two students are set to be tried as juveniles in February in Steubenville, a city of 19,000 about 40 miles west of Pittsburgh.
Madison said his client’s mother has had to change her cell phone number multiple times due to threats and harassment.
Last week, the online activist group Anonymous made public a picture allegedly of the rape victim, being carried by her wrists and ankles by two young men, and of a video that showed several other young men joking about an alleged assault.
Madison said that Richmond is not seen in the video.
A county sheriff under fire for how he has handled the high school rape investigation faced down a crowd of protestors on Saturday and said no new charges will be brought against anyone involved in the case.
Activists say there had been a cover-up by local officials to protect the integrity of the high school’s football program.
Meanwhile, a petition to the White House calling for the two rape suspects to be tried as adults reached 25,000 signatures Monday, the threshold required to receive a response from the Obama Administration.
Moving the case to the adult court system would allow for a jury trial and a more severe penalty, the petition says.
“This is a serious offense and this needs to be an example for everyone that this type of behavior should not, and will not be tolerated in our society,” it says.
The petition, created December 25, more than doubled its number of supporters overnight. It had 11,000 signatures on Sunday.
It was submitted to the White House through its online petition website, We The People. Now that it has the required 25,000 signatures, the Obama Administration will give an official statement at some point in the future. The petition has no legal impact.
(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Andrew Hay)
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