Hillary Clinton Suffers a Concussion After Fainting

WASHINGTON — The State Department said Saturday that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who skipped an overseas trip this past week because of a stomach virus, had suffered a concussion after fainting.

The agency said that she was recovering at home and was being monitored by doctors.

The department said Mrs. Clinton was dehydrated because of the virus and that she fainted, causing the concussion. No further details were immediately available.

An aide, Philippe Reines, said that Mrs. Clinton would work from home next week, at the recommendation of doctors.

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Connecticut Shooting: Bodies Removed from School, Positively Identified

By Mike Fleeman

12/15/2012 at 10:25 AM EST

Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance

Mary Altaffer/AP

A horrific day turned to a night of unspeakable grief as parents received formal notifications that their children were killed in the Connecticut school massacre.

The last of the dozens of bodies – most of them children – were removed by early Saturday from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

"Our objective certainly was to positively identify the victims to try to give the families some closure," State Police Spokesman Lt. Paul Vance tells CBS News. "Our detectives worked well through the night. By early this morning, we were able to positively identify all of the victims and make some formal notification to all of the families of the victims."

The gunman, identified by multiple law enforcement sources as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, killed 20 children between the ages of 5 and 10 and six adults, before taking his own life at the school. His mother also was killed at a different location, bringing the total death toll to 28.

Eighteen children were pronounced dead at the scene and two at the hospital; six adult victims were pronounced dead at the scene, the Los Angeles Times reports.

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Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants

ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.

The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.

To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.

But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.

When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.

In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."

The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.

Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.

Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.

A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.

California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.

And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.

If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.

Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.

The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.

"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."

Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.

There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.

Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.

For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.

"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."

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Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .

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Wall Street Week Ahead: Holiday "on standby" as clock ticks on cliff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last two weeks of December are traditionally quiet for stocks, but traders accustomed to a bit of time off are staying close to their mobile devices, thanks to the "fiscal cliff."

Last-minute negotiations in Washington on the so-called fiscal cliff - nearly $600 billion of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in January that could cause a sharp slowdown in growth or even a recession - are keeping some traders and analysts from taking Christmas holidays because any deal could have a big impact on markets.

"A lot of firms are saying to their trading desks, 'You can take days off for Christmas, but you are on standby to come in if anything happens.' This is certainly different from previous years, especially around this time of the year when things are supposed to be slowing down," said J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.

"Next week is going to be a Capitol Hill-driven market."

With talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at an apparent standstill, it was increasingly likely that Washington will not come up with a deal before January 1.

Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York, will also be on standby for the holiday season.

"It's a 'Look guys, let's just rotate and be sensible" type of situation going on," Charlop said.

"We are hopeful there is some resolution down there, but it seems to me they continue to walk that political tightrope... rather than coming up with something."

Despite concerns that the deadline will pass without a deal, the S&P 500 has held its ground with a 12.4 percent gain for the year. For this week, though, the S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent.

BEWARE OF THE WITCH

This coming Friday will mark the last so-called "quadruple witching" day of the year, when contracts for stock options, single stock futures, stock index options and stock index futures all expire. This could make trading more volatile.

"We could see some heavy selling as there is going to be a lot of re-establishing of positions, reallocation of assets before the year-end," Kinahan said.

RETHINKING APPLE

Higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends are part of the automatic tax increases that will go into effect next year, if Congress and the White House don't come up with a solution to avert the fiscal cliff. That possibility could give investors an incentive to unload certain stocks in some tax-related selling by December 31.

Some market participants said tax-related selling may be behind the weaker trend in the stock price of market leader Apple . Apple's stock has lost a quarter of its value since it hit a lifetime high of $705.07 on September 21.

On Friday, the stock fell 3.8 percent to $509.79 after the iPhone 5 got a chilly reception at its debut in China and two analysts cut shipment forecasts. But the stock is still up nearly 26 percent for the year.

"If you owned Apple for a long time, you should be thinking about reallocation as there will be changes in taxes and other regulations next year, although we don't really know which rules to play by yet," Kinahan said.

But one indicator of the market's reduced concern about the fiscal cliff compared with a few weeks ago, is the defense sector, which will be hit hard if the spending cuts take effect. The PHLX Defense Sector Index <.dfx> is up nearly 13 percent for the year, and sits just a few points from its 2012 high.

(Reporting by Angela Moon; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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Susan Rice’s Bluntness Endeared Her to President

Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

Susan E. Rice before a cabinet meeting last month at which President Obama lauded the job she was doing. She will now, presumably, stay in her job.

WASHINGTON — For President Obama, the decision to forgo the fight to make Susan E. Rice his secretary of state was a deeply painful one. It required publicly abandoning one of his most loyal aides, who had broken with the Democratic foreign policy establishment early to side with his improbable candidacy, and whose blunt-speaking style — which helped cost her the job — had always been, for Mr. Obama, a part of her appeal.

Typically, just hours before she called Mr. Obama to tell him she had decided to withdraw from contention as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s successor, she rebuked her Chinese counterpart in an informal meeting of the United Nations Security Council, telling him his views excusing a North Korean missile launching this week were “ridiculous.”

He shot back, according to witnesses, that she “better watch your language.”

It was the latest example of why Ms. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has so often been criticized as being an unusually undiplomatic diplomat, direct to the point of rudeness. But friends and former White House aides say that Ms. Rice’s style is a reflection of Mr. Obama’s own: impatient with niceties, uninterested in small talk or long dinners, focused solely on results.

“They share a common vision and a common style,” said Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, who has known Ms. Rice since she was 4 years old and a schoolmate of Ms. Albright’s children. “Some of it is a generational thing, and some of it is life’s experiences.”

“She is incredibly bright, but lots of people in Washington are bright,” Ms. Albright added. “What separates people out here is that some are loyal.”

By the account of White House aides, it is loyalty that led Ms. Rice to conclude that a confirmation battle would be long, bloody and harmful to both her and the president. Pundits will long argue about whether she was pushed into her decision or jumped. But it is clear that for Mr. Obama, giving up on Ms. Rice’s appointment was far different than accepting the resignation of David H. Petraeus, his C.I.A. director, or firing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, his commander in Afghanistan.

She began advising Mr. Obama after he was elected to the Senate. When he started his run for president in 2007, she took a significant career risk for a woman who had served in the Clinton administration as an assistant secretary of state and was presumed by her friends to be a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. Instead, she left the fold, backing an upstart candidate and substituting her own foreign policy experience for his lack of it.

Mark Alexander, an early campaign adviser and distant cousin of Ms. Rice’s, remembers Mr. Obama saying back then, “I have Susan Rice, and she’s going to be getting her networks going and making sure I have top-notch foreign policy people.” Before making a decision involving foreign policy, “she was the last call he would make.”

For two years, she spent untold hours advising Mr. Obama without pay, appearing on television, organizing position papers and counseling a candidate who often found himself on the defensive. He had opposed the Iraq war and she had been a skeptic; they jointly developed the argument that the United States should quickly end its involvement in Iraq, bolster the American presence in Afghanistan and focus on a “light footprint” strategy elsewhere.

Together they contended that there was no reason the United States should avoid negotiating with Iranian or North Korean dictators, taking on, among others, Mrs. Clinton, then Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival for the presidential nomination.

“Throughout the campaign, Susan was making an argument about challenging conventions, whether it was about Iraq or diplomacy with Iran,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy White House national security adviser and Mr. Obama’s national security speechwriter, said Thursday. “Susan has the expertise that comes from being within the foreign policy establishment, but she had the willingness to challenge it. And for the president, that was a pretty attractive quality.”

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Jodi Kantor from New York.

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Reese Witherspoon Spreads Holiday Cheer While Stuck in Traffic

12/14/2012 at 12:00 PM EST

Reese Witherspoon in Brentwood, Calif.

Splash News Online; Inset: FilmMagic

Reese Witherspoon beat the gridlock gloom with a pinch of holiday humor on Thursday.

The actress was spotted driving a car that would make her the envy of any Christmas fanatic. Witherspoon tricked out her Land Rover with reindeer antlers flanking each side and a red Rudolph nose on the front.

The silly decorations might not illicit giggles from baby Tennessee just yet, but Witherspoon's cute car surely cheered up other drivers lucky enough to catch a glimpse.

The actress, 36, recently joked that she's working on getting her pre-baby brain back. "I couldn't remember, the other day, what you call that thing that keeps the food cold. It was the refrigerator," said Witherspoon. "I couldn't remember the name of it!"

–Julia Haskins

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APNewsBreak: Texas cancer probe draws NCI scrutiny

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The federal National Cancer Institute says it's taking a fresh look at a troubled $3 billion cancer-fighting effort already being scrutinized by prosecutors and lawmakers in Texas.

The U.S. government's cancer research agency confirmed Friday that upheaval within the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas caught its attention. NCI spokeswoman Aleea Farrakh Khan told The Associated Press that officials are "evaluating recent events" at CPRIT.

CPRIT is on an exclusive list of NCI-approved funding entities, which includes the American Cancer Society. The designation is a federal seal-of-approval that signals high peer review standards and conflict of interest policies.

Khan says NCI has made no decisions about CPRIT or contacted the agency directly.

Prosecutors are investigating CPRIT following an $11 million award to a private company that bypassed review.

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Wall Street drops as Apple falls, "cliff" looms

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell on Friday, with the Nasdaq weighed down by another drop in shares of Apple, and as the overhang of "fiscal cliff" negotiations kept buying to a premium.

Apple slid 4 percent to $508.75 after UBS cut its price target on the stock to $700 from $780. The most valuable U.S. company has seen its stock hit hard in the last three months, and it fell on Friday after a tepid reception for iPhone 5 in China.

The S&P Information Technology Index <.gspt> dropped 0.9 percent as Apple fell and Jabil Circuit Inc lost 6.2 percent to $17.38 after UBS cut its price target.

The possibility of a "fiscal cliff" deal not taking place until early 2013 is rising. The back-and-forth negotiations over the fiscal cliff in Washington have kept markets on hold in what would already be a quiet period for stocks.

"We're faced with uncertainty ... and that's going to continue now into January. It basically puts everybody on hold, and (you) just have the markets kind of thrash around," said Larry Abruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets Inc in Boston.

President Barack Obama and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner held a "frank" meeting on Thursday at the White House to discuss how to avoid the tax hikes and spending cuts set to kick in early in 2013.

The S&P 500 dropped 0.6 percent on Thursday after six straight positive sessions. Investors are concerned that going over the cliff could tip the economy back into recession. While a deal is expected to ultimately be reached, a drawn-out debate - like the one seen over 2011's debt ceiling - can erode confidence.

"The markets are not being reactionary right now, though we lost ground yesterday," said Stephen Carl, head equity trader at the Williams Capital Group in New York.

"It doesn't look like anything has been resolved, or is leaning one way or another."

Still, expectations of an eventual agreement have helped the S&P 500 bounce back over the last month, and on Wednesday, the index hit its highest intraday level since late October. For the year, the S&P has advanced more than 12 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> slipped 24.09 points, or 0.18 percent, to 13,146.63. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> lost 4.81 points, or 0.34 percent, to 1,414.64. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> fell 15.50 points, or 0.52 percent, to 2,976.66.

Best Buy Co Inc slid 15.5 percent to $11.93 after the electronics retailer agreed to extend the deadline for the company's founder to make a bid. Shares jumped as much as 19 percent on Thursday after initial reports of a bid this week from founder Richard Schulze.

Consumer prices fell in November for the first time in six months, indicating U.S. inflation pressures were muted. A separate report showed manufacturing grew at its swiftest pace in eight months in December.

Data out of China was encouraging, as Chinese manufacturing grew at its fastest pace in 14 months in December. The news was seen as helping U.S. materials companies, including U.S. Steel , which rose 6.3 percent to $23.73.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jan Paschal)

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Top Russian Envoy for Syria and NATO Leader Say Assad Losing Control

Manu Brabo/Associated Press

Free Syrian Army fighters warmed themselves in the northern province of Aleppo on Wednesday.

MOSCOW — Russia’s top Middle East diplomat and the leader of NATO offered dark and strikingly similar assessments of the embattled Syrian president’s future on Thursday, asserting that he was losing control of the country after a nearly two-year conflict that has taken 40,000 lives and has threatened to destabilize the Middle East.

The bleak appraisals — particularly from Russia, a steadfast strategic Syrian ally — amounted to a new level of pressure on the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, who has been resorting to increasingly desperate military measures, including the use of Scud ballistic missiles, to contain an armed insurgency that has encroached on the capital, Damascus.

The Russian diplomat, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, acknowledged that Mr. Assad’s forces could be defeated by rebels, whom the Syrian leader has repeatedly dismissed as ragtag foreign-backed terrorists with no popular support.

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to exclude a victory of the Syrian opposition,” said Mr. Bogdanov — the clearest indication to date that Russia believed that Mr. Assad could lose.

Mr. Bogdanov’s remarks, reported by Russia’s Interfax news service, came as the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told reporters in Brussels that Mr. Assad’s use of ballistic missiles, which Western officials monitoring the Syrian conflict reported on Wednesday — and which Syria has denied — reflected his “utter disregard” for Syrian lives. Mr. Rasmussen also predicted the demise of Mr. Assad’s government.

“I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse,” he told reporters after a meeting with the Dutch prime minister at NATO headquarters. “I think now it is only a question of time.”

While the leaders of NATO member states have made similar predictions before, the assertion by Mr. Rasmussen, the leader of the Western military alliance, reinforced a growing consensus that Mr. Assad’s options for remaining in power had been all but exhausted — a view now apparently shared by Russia.

Throughout the Syria crisis, as it has grown from peaceful protests in March 2011 to engulf the country in armed conflict, Russia has acted as Syria’s principal international shield, protecting Mr. Assad diplomatically from Western and Arab attempts to oust him and holding out the possibility of his staying in power during a transition.

Only in recent days has Russia’s view seemed to shift, while Mr. Assad’s foes, grouped in a newly minted and still uncertain coalition, have garnered ever broader international support as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people.

“We must look squarely at the facts, and the trend now suggests that the regime and the government in Syria are losing more and more control and more and more territory,” Mr. Bogdanov said in remarks to Russia’s Public Chamber, a Kremlin advisory group, according to Interfax.

Russia, he said, was preparing to evacuate its citizens — a complex task, since for decades, Russian women have married Syrian men sent to study in Russia and returned to Syria with them to raise families.

It was the first time an official at Mr. Bogdanov’s level had announced plans for an evacuation, which sent a message to the Syrian government that Russia no longer held out hope that the government could prevail. He said Russia had a plan to withdraw its personnel from its embassy in the Syrian capital, Damascus, but that was s not yet necessary. Russia’s press attaché in Damascus confirmed this, telling Interfax that there was “no sharp deterioration” in conditions there.

Mr. Bogdanov offered a dark view of how the conflict would unfold from this point, saying that it took two years for the rebels to control 60 percent of Syria’s territory, and another year and a half will pass before they control the rest.

“If up until now 40,000 people have died, then from this point forward it will be crueler, and you will lose dozens or many hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “If you accept this price to topple the president, what can we do? We of course consider this totally unacceptable.”

As the Russian official spoke, fresh evidence of the intensity of the battle emerged. During the civil war, Moscow has been the principal arms supplier for the Damascus government, as it has been for decades. Obama administration and NATO officials said on Wednesday that Syrian government forces had resorted to firing Scud missiles at rebel fighters as the government struggled to slow the momentum of the insurgency.

Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.

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Review: PlayStation icons join in ‘Battle Royale’

The holiday season is a good time to catch up with old friends. If you’re an Xbox fan, you’re probably getting reacquainted with galactic warrior Master Chief in his new adventure, “Halo 4.” If you’re a Nintendophile, you’re probably frolicking with Mario on your new Wii U.

Sony, meanwhile, has expanded its holiday guest list to invite nearly two decades worth of characters to mix it up in “PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale” (for the PlayStation 3, $ 59.99; Vita, $ 39.99). Fans of the original PlayStation can welcome back old pals like Sir Daniel Fortesque of “MediEvil” and the title character of “Parappa the Rapper.” Younger gamers who have only known the PS3 will be happy to see Nathan Drake from “Uncharted” and Cole MacGrath from “Infamous.” Turn them loose in an assortment of game-inspired arenas and you’ve got chaos.

It’s not an original idea: Nintendo has been pitting its lovable characters against each other since 1999′s “Super Smash Bros.” As you’d expect, “All-Stars” lets up to four players choose their favorite personalities and pound on each other until one is left standing.

The technique is a change from most fighting games. Most of the time, kicking or punching your opponent doesn’t do much damage. Instead, each blow adds to an attack meter; build up enough energy and you can unleash three levels of truly deadly moves. There’s a little more strategy, but most players won’t find it too complicated.

The solo campaign is awfully skimpy, but “All-Stars” makes for a lively party when you have a few friends over. Two-and-a-half stars out of four.

— Sony’s burlap-clad goofball Sackboy is part of the “All-Stars” lineup, but he takes center stage in “LittleBigPlanet Karting” ($ 59.99).

Yes, it’s a go-kart racer — a genre that has already made room for Mario, Donkey Kong and Sonic the Hedgehog — but Sony freshens it up by giving you the ability to build your own racetracks and share them online. By exploring the game’s built-in courses, you can find hundreds of elements to add to your own, and they all share the homespun “arts-and-crafts” aesthetic of the original “LittleBigPlanet.”

Unfortunately, “LBP Karting” also revives the weird, floaty physics of its parent. That worked fine in the two-dimensional fantasy world of “LBP,” but it’s annoying when you’re behind the wheel. The tracks are filled with the power-ups, obstacles and gravity-defying leaps you’d expect in a kart racer, but the vehicles themselves feel sluggish and unresponsive. Two stars.

—Insomniac Games’ popular “lombax”-robot buddies are celebrating their 10th anniversary, both in “All-Stars” and their own “Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault” ($ 19.99). The latter game, however, is a big disappointment, stripping away most of what made the team so endearing.

It’s a “base defense” game, meaning you’re plopped down on a planet and then have to protect your turf from waves of invading enemies. That eliminates the exploration and discovery that made most of the “R&C” games so absorbing, replacing it with a tiresome cycle of building fortifications, having them destroyed, then rebuilding them. Instead of the comedy that was once this series’ trademark, you get drudgery. One star.

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Follow Lou Kesten on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lkesten

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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