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China calls Bo Xilai scandal a profound lesson
Label: World
Move over, Obama; Twitter had a big night too
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Quiet media night explodes suddenly, Rove protests
Label: LifestyleNEW YORK (AP) — Careful media coverage of a close presidential election Tuesday exploded so suddenly Tuesday that it left the bizarre spectacle of Fox News Channel analyst Karl Rove, a major fundraiser for Republican Mitt Romney, publicly questioning his network's declaration that President Barack Obama had been re-elected.
ABC News was also frantically trying to repair a power outage that left much of its set inoperable precisely at the time the election was being decided.
For several hours, election coverage resembled the run-up to a Super Bowl, with plenty of talk signifying little. Then NBC News, at 11:12 p.m. ET, was the first to declare Obama had won by virtue of winning the battleground state of Ohio. "He remains president of the United States for a second term," said anchor Brian Williams.
Other networks followed suit, including Fox five minutes later. But Rove, the former top political aide to President George W. Bush whose on-air presence on Fox this campaign raised some eyebrows because of his prominent role supporting Romney, suggested the call was premature.
"We've got to be careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the candidates and a quarter of the vote left to count ... I'd be very cautious about intruding in this process," said Rove, a behind-the-scenes player in the wild 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore that took weeks to decide. (Gore was on TV Tuesday, too, as anchor of Current TV's election coverage).
It left Rove's colleagues struggling for words.
"That's awkward," said co-anchor Megyn Kelly. She then went backstage to interview on camera two men who were part of Fox's team in charge of making election calls. They had concluded that based on the precincts where votes were left to be counted, Romney couldn't beat Obama.
Later, Rove tried to make light of the encounter. "This is not a cage match," he said. "This is a light intellectual discussion."
As the evening had progressed for Fox and it became clear that Romney, the clear favorite of most of its audience, would find it hard to win, commentators like Sarah Palin and Peggy Noonan looked stricken.
"This was the referendum that Mitt Romney wanted on Barack Obama," said Huffington Post's Howard Fineman on MSNBC. "And guess what? Barack Obama won the referendum. And that's pretty darned emphatic."
Much of ABC's New York election studio was left powerless for about 20 minutes at the height of Tuesday's coverage. The network didn't inform viewers, and tried to compensate by taking anchors Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos away from their desks, and cutting away to crowd shots at Times Square.
Sawyer's relaxed, folksy delivery in her first presidential election night as anchor drew considerable social media attention. The rock group They Might Be Giants tweeted: "and Diane Sawyer declares tonight's winner is ... chardonnay!"
Sawyer and Stephanopoulos were a new election anchor team for ABC, and Scott Pelley led the CBS coverage. Of the three anchors for the biggest broadcast networks, only NBC's Williams was a returnee from 2008.
But it was a far different media world anyway. 2012 was notable for the vast array of outlets that an interested consumer could command to create their own media experience on multiple screens. Web sites offered deep drill-downs in data and social media hosted raucous conversations.
"If you started a drinking game with the words 'exit poll' in it, please stop now. You will die!" tweeted TV critic Tim Goodman.
Obama's Twitter account tweeted a picture of the president hugging First Lady Michelle Obama, and within 45 minutes it was retweeted more than 300,000 times.
Earlier in the evening, journalists took special care not to rely too heavily on exit polls. Perhaps they remembered how misleading exit polls in 2004 led TV networks astray then or perhaps, in CBS' Bob Schieffer's words, its results this year were too contradictory.
News outlets carefully parsed information and sometimes used the same facts for contradictory conclusions.
Fox News analyst Brit Hume noted an exit poll finding that 42 percent of voters said Superstorm Sandy was an important factor in their vote, suggesting that was a positive for Obama since he was widely considered to have been effective in his response. With the same information, the web site Politico headlined: "Exit Survey: Sandy Not a Factor."
There was a certain amount of vamping time, too. Glenn Beck's online network, The Blaze, had a blackboard straight out of the 1960s as a tote board. Beck killed time on the air by asking for cookie dough ice cream from the on-set food bar.
"Waffle cone, please," Beck said.
When Sawyer asked David Muir for the latest news from the Romney campaign, he reported the family had pasta for dinner and the candidate indulged in his favorite peanut butter and honey sandwich.
The media personality with perhaps the most on the line was Nate Silver of The New York Times, whose FiveThirtyEight blog was sought out by 20 percent of the people who visited the newspaper's website on Monday. He has used statistical data throughout the campaign to predict an Obama victory and by Tuesday, had forecast a 90.9 percent chance that Obama would win.
After Obama's victory became clear, Gavin Purcell, producer of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," tweeted that "Nate Silver is the only white male winning tonight." CNN's Piers Morgan tweeted Silver an invitation to appear on his show Wednesday.
___
Television Writers Frazier Moore in New York and Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Study: Stem cells from strangers can repair hearts
Label: HealthLOS ANGELES (AP) — Researchers are reporting a key advance in using stem cells to repair hearts damaged by heart attacks. In a study, stem cells donated by strangers proved as safe and effective as patients' own cells for helping restore heart tissue.
The work involved just 30 patients in Miami and Baltimore, but it proves the concept that anyone's cells can be used to treat such cases. Doctors are excited because this suggests that stem cells could be banked for off-the-shelf use after heart attacks, just as blood is kept on hand now.
Results were discussed Monday at an American Heart Association conference in California and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study used a specific type of stem cells from bone marrow that researchers believed would not be rejected by recipients. Unlike other cells, these lack a key feature on their surface that makes the immune system see them as foreign tissue and attack them, explained the study's leader, Dr. Joshua Hare of the University of Miami.
The patients in the study had suffered heart attacks years earlier, some as long as 30 years ago. All had developed heart failure because the scar tissue from the heart attack had weakened their hearts so much that they grew large and flabby, unable to pump blood effectively.
Researchers advertised for people to supply marrow, which is removed using a needle into a hip bone. The cells were taken from the marrow and amplified for about a month in a lab at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, then returned to Miami to be used for treatment, which did not involve surgery.
The cells were delivered through a tube pushed through a groin artery into the heart near the scarred area. Fifteen patients were given cells from their own marrow and 15 others, cells from strangers.
About a year later, scar tissue had been reduced by about one-third. Both groups had improvements in how far they could walk and in quality of life. There was no significant difference in one measure of how well their hearts were able to pump blood, but doctors hope these patients will continue to improve over time, or that refinements in treatment will lead to better results.
The big attraction is being able to use cells supplied by others, with no blood or tissue matching needed.
"You could have the cells ready to go in the blood bank so when the patient comes in for a therapy — there's no delay," Hare said. "It's also cheaper to make the donor cells," and a single marrow donor can supply enough cells to treat as many as 10 people.
Dr. Elliott Antman of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who heads the heart conference, praised the work.
"That opens up an entire new avenue for stem cell therapy, like a sophisticated version of a blood bank," he said. There's an advantage in not having to create a cell therapy for each patient, and it could spare them the pain and wait of having their own marrow harvested, he said.
The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Hare owns stock in a biotech company working on a treatment using a mixture of cells.
Juan Lopez received his own cells in the study, and said it improved his symptoms so much that at age 70, he was able to return to his job as an engineer and sales manager for a roofing manufacturer and ride an exercise bike.
"It has been a life-changing experience," said Lopez, who lives in Miami. "I can feel day by day, week by week, month by month, my improvement. I don't have any shortness of breath and my energy level is way up there. I don't have any fluid in my lungs."
And, he said happily, "My sex drive has improved!"
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP .
'We remain more than a collection of red states and blue states'
Label: BusinessPresident Barack Obama handily defeated Gov. Mitt Romney and won himself a second term on Tuesday after a bitter and historically expensive race that was primarily fought in just a handful of battleground states. Obama beat Romney after nabbing almost every one of the 12 crucial battleground states.
The Romney campaign's last-ditch attempt to put blue-leaning Midwestern swing states in play failed as Obama's Midwestern firewall sent the president back to the White House for four more years. Obama picked up the swing states of New Hampshire, Michigan, New Mexico, Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Ohio. Of the swing states, Romney picked up only North Carolina. Florida is still too close to call, but even if Romney wins the state, Obama still beat him in the Electoral College vote. The popular vote will most likely be narrower than the president's decisive Electoral College victory.
In a sweeping victory speech early Wednesday morning, Obama thanked every American who voted, and vowed to work with leaders from both parties to tackle the country's challenges.
"Our economy is recovering, a decade of war is ending, a long campaign is now over," he told a crowd of cheering supporters in Chicago. "And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you, I have learned from you and you have made me a better president." Obama added he has "never been more hopeful about America. ... We're not as divided as our politics suggest. We remain more than a collection of blue states and red states."
In his speech, he offered clues to the policy goals of his second term, which included a deficit reduction plan that combines tax increases with spending cuts, a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's federal immigration laws and tax reform. He called on Republicans to join him in achieving those goals.
The battle for the White House between Obama and Romney divided the nation, causing, at times, bitter disputes between the parties. Obama urged his supporters to look beyond the fight of the past several months and defended the process of choosing a president.
"I know that political campaigns can sometimes seem small, even silly," Obama said. "And that provides plenty of fodder for the cynics who tell us that politics is nothing more than a contest of evils or the domain of special interests. If you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out to our rallies and along the rope lines of high school gyms, or saw folks working late at campaign office or some tiny county a long way from home, you'll discover something else."
Romney conceded in Boston in a speech around 1 a.m. ET. "Like so many of you, Paul [Ryan] and I have left everything on the field. We have given our all to this campaign," Romney said. "I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead your country in another direction. But the nation chose another leader." Romney congratulated the president and his campaign on their victory.
The Obama victory marks an end to a years-long campaign that saw historic advertisement spending levels, countless rallies and speeches, and three much-watched debates.
The Romney campaign cast the election as a referendum on Obama's economic policies, frequently comparing him to former President Jimmy Carter and asking voters the Reagan-esque question of whether they are better off than they were four years ago. But the Obama campaign pushed back, blanketing key states such as Ohio early on with ads painting him as a multimillionaire more concerned with profits than people. The Obama campaign also aggressively attacked Romney on reproductive rights issues, tying Romney to a handful of Republican candidates who made controversial comments about rape and abortion.
The ads were one reason Romney faced a steep likeability problem for most of the race, until his expert performance at the first presidential debate in Denver in October. After that debate, and a near universal panning of Obama's performance, Romney caught up with Obama in national polls, and almost closed his favorability gap with the president. In polls, voters consistently gave him an edge over Obama on who would handle the economy better and create more jobs, even as they rated Obama higher on caring about the middle class.
But the president's Midwestern firewall—and the campaign's impressive grassroots operation—carried him through. Ohio tends to vote a bit more Republican than the nation as a whole, but Obama was able to stave off that trend and hold an edge there over Romney, perhaps due to the president's support of the auto bailout three years ago. Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, all but moved to Ohio in the last weeks of the campaign, trying and ultimately failing to erase Obama's lead there.
A shrinking electoral battleground this year meant that only 12 states were really seen as in play, and both candidates spent most of their time and money there. Though national polls showed the two candidates in a dead heat, Obama consistently held a lead in the states that mattered. That, and his campaign's much-touted get-out-the-vote efforts and overall ground game, may be what pushed Obama over the finish line.
Now, Obama heads back to office facing what will most likely be bitterly partisan negotiations over whether the Bush tax cuts should expire. The House will still be majority Republican, with Democrats maintaining their majority in the Senate.
The loss may provoke some soul searching in the Republican Party. This election was seen as a prime opportunity to unseat Obama, as polls showed Americans were unhappy with a sluggish economy, sky-high unemployment and a health care reform bill that remained widely unpopular. Romney took hardline positions on immigration, federal spending and taxes during the long Republican primary when he faced multiple challenges from the right. He later shifted to the center in tone on many of those issues, but it's possible the primary painted him into a too-conservative corner to appeal to moderates during the general election. The candidate also at times seemed unable to effectively counter Democratic attacks on his business experience and personal wealth.
"In the coming weeks and months I am looking forward to reaching out to leaders of both parties," Obama said.
He won't have much time to fulfill that promise. With tax hikes looming and a sequestration deal that will make enormous , automatic cuts in government funding, Congress and the White House must move quickly to find a compromise and put Obama's high-minded rhetoric into action.
Chris Moody contributed reporting from Chicago.
China hauls away activists in congress crackdown
Label: WorldBEIJING (AP) — Activists who try to bring their complaints against local officials to the central government in Beijing say they are being rounded up and detained ahead of a Communist Party leadership transition beginning later this week in the capital.
They include Wang Xiulan, who has been trying to draw attention to what she says was police mishandling of a serious assault she suffered in Harbin. She says she and several other petitioners were rounded up from a village on Beijing's outskirts. Many were sent back to their hometowns.
The crackdown reflects the leadership's nervousness over a transition taking place as slowing economic growth exacerbates public outrage over corruption, social injustice and pollution.
Apple sells three million iPads over first weekend
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Bob Dylan predicts Obama 'in a landslide'
Label: LifestyleMADISON, Wis. (AP) — Bob Dylan says he thinks President Barack Obama is going to win a landslide.
Dylan made the prediction Monday night midway through the song "Blowin' in the Wind" during a concert in the battleground state of Wisconsin.
Dylan spoke to the Madison audience as he was wrapping up his concert that came just hours after Obama appeared at a morning rally in the same city with rocker Bruce Springsteen.
Dylan made his comments during his encore when he said, "We tried to play good tonight since the president was here today."
He went on to say he thinks Obama will prevail Tuesday.
Dylan says, "Don't believe the media. I think it's going to be a landslide."
After his comments, Dylan completed the song to the roar of the crowd.
Study: Stem cells from strangers can repair hearts
Label: HealthLOS ANGELES (AP) — Researchers are reporting a key advance in using stem cells to repair hearts damaged by heart attacks. In a study, stem cells donated by strangers proved as safe and effective as patients' own cells for helping restore heart tissue.
The work involved just 30 patients in Miami and Baltimore, but it proves the concept that anyone's cells can be used to treat such cases. Doctors are excited because this suggests that stem cells could be banked for off-the-shelf use after heart attacks, just as blood is kept on hand now.
Results were discussed Monday at an American Heart Association conference in California and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study used a specific type of stem cells from bone marrow that researchers believed would not be rejected by recipients. Unlike other cells, these lack a key feature on their surface that makes the immune system see them as foreign tissue and attack them, explained the study's leader, Dr. Joshua Hare of the University of Miami.
The patients in the study had suffered heart attacks years earlier, some as long as 30 years ago. All had developed heart failure because the scar tissue from the heart attack had weakened their hearts so much that they grew large and flabby, unable to pump blood effectively.
Researchers advertised for people to supply marrow, which is removed using a needle into a hip bone. The cells were taken from the marrow and amplified for about a month in a lab at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, then returned to Miami to be used for treatment, which did not involve surgery.
The cells were delivered through a tube pushed through a groin artery into the heart near the scarred area. Fifteen patients were given cells from their own marrow and 15 others, cells from strangers.
About a year later, scar tissue had been reduced by about one-third. Both groups had improvements in how far they could walk and in quality of life. There was no significant difference in one measure of how well their hearts were able to pump blood, but doctors hope these patients will continue to improve over time, or that refinements in treatment will lead to better results.
The big attraction is being able to use cells supplied by others, with no blood or tissue matching needed.
"You could have the cells ready to go in the blood bank so when the patient comes in for a therapy — there's no delay," Hare said. "It's also cheaper to make the donor cells," and a single marrow donor can supply enough cells to treat as many as 10 people.
Dr. Elliott Antman of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who heads the heart conference, praised the work.
"That opens up an entire new avenue for stem cell therapy, like a sophisticated version of a blood bank," he said. There's an advantage in not having to create a cell therapy for each patient, and it could spare them the pain and wait of having their own marrow harvested, he said.
The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Hare owns stock in a biotech company working on a treatment using a mixture of cells.
Juan Lopez received his own cells in the study, and said it improved his symptoms so much that at age 70, he was able to return to his job as an engineer and sales manager for a roofing manufacturer and ride an exercise bike.
"It has been a life-changing experience," said Lopez, who lives in Miami. "I can feel day by day, week by week, month by month, my improvement. I don't have any shortness of breath and my energy level is way up there. I don't have any fluid in my lungs."
And, he said happily, "My sex drive has improved!"
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP .
___
Online:
Heart Association: http://www.heart.org
JAMA: http://www.jama.ama-assn.org
Long, bitter White House race finally in voters' hands
Label: BusinessWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney face the verdict of voters on Tuesday after a long and bitter White House campaign, with polls showing them deadlocked in a race that will be decided in a handful of states where it is extraordinarily close.
At least 120 million Americans are expected to vote on giving Obama a second term or replacing him with Romney. Their decision will set the country's course for four years on spending, taxes, healthcare and foreign policy challenges like the rise of China and Iran's nuclear ambitions.
National opinion polls show Obama and Romney in a virtual dead heat, although the Democratic incumbent has a slight advantage in several vital swing states - most notably Ohio - that could give him the 270 electoral votes he needs to win.
Romney, the multimillionaire former head of a private equity fund, would be the first Mormon president and one of the wealthiest Americans to occupy the White House. Obama, the first black president, is vying to be the first Democrat to win a second term since Bill Clinton in 1996.
Fueled by record spending on negative ads, the battle between the two men was focused primarily on the lagging economic recovery and persistent high unemployment, but at times it turned personal.
Polls will begin to close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. ESTon Tuesday, with voting ending across the country over the next six hours.
The first results, by tradition, were tallied in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, New Hampshire, shortly after midnight . Obama and Romney each received five votes in Dixville Notch. In Hart's Location, Obama got 23 votes to 9 votes for Romney and two votes for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
The close presidential race raises fears of a disputed outcome similar to the 2000 election, which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Both campaigns have assembled legal teams to deal with possible voting problems, challenges or recounts.
The balance of power in the U.S. Congress will also be at stake in Senate and House of Representatives races that could impact the outcome of "fiscal cliff" negotiations on spending cuts and tax increases, which kick in at the end of the year unless a deal is reached.
Obama's Democrats are now expected to narrowly hold their Senate majority, while Romney's Republicans are favored to retain House control.
Despite the weak economy, Obama appeared in September to be cruising to a relatively easy win after a strong party convention and a series of stumbles by Romney, including a secretly recorded video showing the Republican writing off 47 percent of the electorate as government-dependent victims.
But Romney rebounded in the first debate on October 3 in Denver, where his sure-footed criticism of the president and Obama's listless response started a slow rise for Romney in polls. Obama seemed to regain his footing in recent days at the head of federal relief efforts for victims of the storm Sandy.
The presidential contest is now likely to be determined by voter turnout - specifically, what combination of Republicans, Democrats, white, minority, young, old and independent voters shows up at polling stations.
Obama and Romney raced through seven battleground states on the final day of campaigning to hammer home their final themes, urge supporters to get to the polls and woo the last remaining undecided voters.
'WE KNOW WHAT CHANGE LOOKS LIKE'
Obama focused on Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa, the three Midwestern swing states that, barring surprises elsewhere, would give him 270 electoral votes. Romney visited the must-win states of Florida, Virginia and Ohio before finishing in New Hampshire, where he launched his presidential run in June 2011.
After two days of nearly round-the-clock travel, Obama wrapped up his final campaign tour in Des Moines, Iowa, with a speech that hearkened back to his 2008 campaign.
"I've come back to Iowa one more time to ask for your vote. I came back to ask you to help us finish what we've started, because this is where our movement for change began," he told a crowd of some 20,000 people.
Obama's voice broke and he wiped away tears from his eyes as he reflected on those who had helped his campaign.
Romney's final day included stops in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire. The former governor of Massachusetts ended the day at a raucous "Final Victory" rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, the city where he launched his campaign last year.
"We're one day away from a fresh start. We're one day away from a new beginning," the candidate, sounding hoarse at his fifth rally of the day, told the crowd of 12,000 at a sports arena in the center of the city.
Obama ridiculed Romney's claims to be the candidate of change and said the challenger would be a rubber stamp for a conservative Tea Party agenda. "We know what change looks like, and what he's selling ain't it," he said in Columbus, Ohio.
Romney argued he was the candidate who could break the partisan gridlock in Washington, and said four more years of Obama could mean another economic recession.
"His plan for the next four years is to take all the ideas from the first term - the stimulus, the borrowing, Obamacare, all the rest - and do them over again," he said in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The common denominator for both candidates was Ohio, the most critical of the battlegrounds, particularly for Romney. Without the state's 18 electoral votes, the path to victory becomes very narrow for the Republican.
Polls have shown Obama with a small but steady lead in the state for months, sparked in part by his support for a federal bailout of the auto industry, which accounts for one of every eight jobs in Ohio, and by a strong state economy with an unemployment rate lower than the 7.9 percent national rate.
That undercut the central argument of Romney's campaign - that his business experience made him uniquely qualified to create jobs and lead an economic recovery. Obama fought back through the summer with ads criticizing Romney's experience at the equity fund Bain Capital and portraying him as out of touch with ordinary Americans.
That was part of a steady barrage of advertising in the most heavily contested battleground states from both candidates and their party allies, who raised a combined $2 billion.
The rise of "Super PACs," unaffiliated outside groups that can spend unlimited sums on behalf of candidates, also helped fuel the record spending on political ads that swamped swing-state voters.
Romney planned to vote at home in Massachusetts on Tuesday morning before a final trip to Ohio and Pennsylvania, a Democratic-leaning state that he has tried to put in play in recent weeks.
Obama, who voted in October, will spend the day at his home in Chicago.
The two candidates took a break from campaign rallies to tape interviews that aired during halftime of Monday Night Football, a U.S. television institution.
Romney said the New England Patriots were his favorite football team and jokingly said that, as a former Massachusetts governor, he took credit for the team's Super Bowl victories.
Obama expressed faith that his hometown team, the Chicago Bears, can make it to the Super Bowl championship in January because they have the "best defense in the league."
(Additional reporting by Jeff Mason in Iowa and Patricia Zengerle and Herb Swanson in New Hampshire; Editing by Alistair Bell, Christopher Wilson and Paul Simao)
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