Sens. Corker, Collins join in critiques of Susan Rice

WASHINGTON -- Two moderate Republican senators joined in criticism of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, after private meetings with her, in another setback for her hopes to be nominated as secretary of State.

Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) met with Rice on Wednesday afternoon at her request to discuss their concern that she had misled the public about the nature of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. The senators and other GOP lawmakers have criticized Rice for originally portraying the attack as an outgrowth of a spontaneous demonstration, rather than a terrorist attack, which officials now believe it was.

Rice is personally close to President Obama and apparently his leading choice to be secretary of State in the coming term. White House officials have strongly defended Rice, but have also been trying to gauge whether a nomination will come at a punitively high cost, even if Rice is confirmed.

The comments of Corker and Collins come after GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire strongly criticized Rice after a private meeting with her Tuesday. The criticism suggests that resistance to a Rice nomination has expanded from what appeared originally to be a small core of GOP members.

PHOTOS: U.S. ambassador killed in Libya

Corker, who will be the ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new congressional term, implied that he considered Rice too much of a partisan and urged Obama to pick a more “independent” person as chief diplomat.

“All of us here hold the secretary of State to a different standard than most Cabinet members,” he said. “We want somebody of independence.”

He implied that Rice, who is close to the president, was, instead, a “loyal soldier.” Corker also seemed to contrast Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, with whom he said he has had a positive and “transparent” relationship “from day one.”

Collins said that after a 75-minute session with Rice she still had many unanswered questions and remains “troubled” that on the Benghazi issue Rice played “a political role at the height of a contentious presidential election campaign.”

She said she also had questions about what role Rice played in the handling of the deadly 1998 terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, when Rice was assistant secretary of State for Africa. Collins seemed to be urging Obama to instead nominate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who she said would be an “excellent appointment and would be easily confirmed by his colleagues.”

A number of Republican members have now held out Kerry as a better choice for secretary, though Rice’s views on foreign military interventions is more aggressive than Kerry’s -- and thus closer to the Republican position.

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paul.richter@latimes.com

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Google Says Facebook is 'Injecting a Monetization Agenda' Into Intimate Moments

After playing second fiddle to Facebook for a year and a half, Google’s “time is now,” says Google’s social VP, citing what he calls the “Like-gate” controversy and a growing distaste for Facebook’s advertising practices.

Google VP Bradley Horowitz made his comments in an interview with Wired before a fireside chat on stage at the Ignition conference in New York. Horowitz, who helped lead the creation of the Google+ social network, is spending today talking up Google+ to potential advertisers. In the interview, he repeatedly cited Google+’s approach to business users and advertising as more elegant and effective for advertisers, less intrusive for users, and less awkward and even less condescending than Facebook’s approach.

Google’s new blunt public talk about Facebook and its purported flaws comes as Facebook is fighting back against a series of complaints from business owners, celebrities and other advertisers over how it distributes their posts. Google would clearly like to divert some of Facebook’s more than $3 billion in annual ad revenue into ads powered by its own social network, Google+. At the same time, Google’s overt criticism of a competitor highlights that it’s the runner up rather than the leader in social — at least at the moment. And it risks pushback from users who remember that Google, like Facebook, has stirred controversy over its plans to take personal information from social networks and leverage it for profit.

“They’re basically injecting the monetization agenda into the least appropriate moments, when I’m trying to look another human in the eyes.”

Google is especially keen to highlight that the core of Google+ is ad free. Unlike Facebook, Google+ does not include ads in users’ social streams but instead surfaces them in Google search results, in external ad networks run by Google, and elsewhere in the Google ecosystem. It uses data from Google+ to enhance that advertising, listing user “endorsements” of brands alongside ads for those brands.

Horowitz says such “social annotations” have lifted advertising click-through rates by double-digit percentages. Jeweler Swarovski, for example, was able to grow its clickthrough rate 50 percent; clothier H&M 22 percent; and snacks company Cadbury 17 percent.

Users benefit too, Horowitz says, by not having their most human moments interrupted by “the monetization agenda” of profit-hungry social networks – a group that, in Horowitz’s telling, clearly includes Facebook.

“When I’m having a conversation with my daughter, if a man with a sandwich board came and ran between us and danced around, that’s a bad experience,” Horowitz says. “It interrupts my connection to my daughter. And yet that’s the way that many of the social networks are monetizing. They’re basically injecting the monetization agenda into the least appropriate, least useful, most intimate moments when I’m trying to look another human in the eyes and create a connection of the heart…. We don’t have to do that.”

Facebook declined to comment.

Horowitz alluded to the recent controversies over how Facebook filters posts from business pages as “Like-gate” and implied business users are better off on Google+, where users and business owners can sort one another into “circles” rather than relying on an algorithm — like the one behind Facebook’s News Feed – to determine relevance. Horowitz called approaches like News Feed “patronizing [and] condescending.”

“In the wake of Like-gate and people doing a lot of navel-gazing about what is the value of acquiring a bunch of likes or a bunch of followers on these services, how does it really accrue to the bottom line?” Horowtiz asked. “I think we have some very different answers to those questions.”

“In the real world, there is this thing called context and it’s largely based on the laws of physics. When I’m in a room, I know who’s in the room. I can look around and I can adjust my vocabulary, my tone, my posture to be contextual and appropriate. For us these rooms are modeled with something we call circles. Now, I think some approaches basically say, ‘Don’t worry about who’s in the room, we’ll put people in the room for you. We’ll make sure that the right people hear this.’ It’s sort of a patronizing approach to your communication preferences. We don’t think that’s what people want….. Our philosophy is not a patronizing, condescending one where we think we know best and we’ll decide for each user who will see content or decide for each brand who their content will reach.”

Horowitz seems hopeful that publicity, discussion, and changing attitudes around social networks in general and Facebook in particular will bring more users to Google+.

“We launched to a lot of skepticism and I will be the first to admit in the wake of Orkut and Blogger and Buzz and Wave, the world had a right to be skeptical about Google. When we said this was different, people didn’t necessarily believe us…. What I think has happened in the intervening year [is] the world has changed a lot. And whereas a year ago, we may have been accused of wanting to be Facebook, it’s clear to the world now that Google would not want that outcome…”

“I think our time is now, and it may warrant us to be more proactive and lean into this a little bit more. But our ethos on the team is … to let the product speak for itself, to continue to ship these great innovations. And on that note, we are not done.”

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A Minute With: Pop star Ke$ha on new album “Warrior”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop star Ke$ ha made a name for herself with infectious dance-pop hits but the singer-songwriter is stepping out of her Auto-Tune comfort zone on “Warrior”, out this week.

Ke$ ha, 25, stormed the charts with hit songs about drinking, partying and having a good time, such as “TiK ToK” and “Your Love is my Drug” from her 2010 platinum-selling album “Animal”.

Ke$ ha talked with Reuters about the pressures of following up the success of her first album and responding to her critics.

Q: Did you feel additional pressure while working on this album after the success of your debut, “Animal”?

A: “Everybody keeps asking me about pressure, and I think a lot of other people maybe are feeling pressure about this record, but I just want to make a good record. If I sat around trying to make a number one record, I’d just be too consumed with that. I just want to make an awesome, kick-ass record that I love and that my fans love.”

Q: Was there anything that you weren’t happy with on the first album and that you wanted to change for the second?

A: “I just wanted to make sure my entire personality was presented more accurately. I feel like people really got to know the super-wild side of me but then sometimes a more vulnerable side. I didn’t really feel comfortable expressing it. So this time I kind of forced myself to express a little bit more vulnerability, less Auto-Tune, less vocal trickery. It’s a little more raw.”

Q: You received a lot of criticism for your use of Auto-Tune, masking your true singing voice. Was that a valid criticism for you, when many others use it?

A: “I remember having this conversation with my producer, and him saying, ‘We’re using a lot of vocal tricks,’ and I said, ‘People will get to know me as my career goes on, I just want it to sound really weird and cool and clubby right now, and super electronic.’ I made a conscious decision to use Auto-Tune for effect, as ear candy, and vocoders and chop up my words.

“This time around, I have heard so many different people say I can’t sing, it’s quite frankly irritating, so I … made a five-song acoustic EP (‘Deconstructed’, out on December 4) that’s kind of like my middle finger to all those people that said I couldn’t sing, and there’s more of my voice on this record. You know, haters are going to hate, you just have to do what you want to do.”

Q: Talk us through some of the collaborations on “Warrior”. There’s quite a variety, such as with Iggy Pop and Ben Folds.

A: “Ben Folds is a friend of mine. He gave me a giant glitter grand piano that’s in my house, so that one was natural. The Flaming Lips was probably surprising for a lot of people because we’re two super-different genres of music but we had the most fun and we made so many songs, it was super insane. We’re like best friends, we text everyday now, so that kind of came naturally. The one that I really have been working on for years was a collaboration with Iggy Pop. He’s one of my favorite musicians and artists of all time, so that was super exciting for me, because I respect him so much.”

Q: You’ve written tracks for Kelly Clarkson and Britney Spears, and you’ve written all the songs for “Warrior”. What did you want to bring out in your lyrics this time round?

A: “I definitely wanted to maintain the irreverence, because that’s why my fans like me. It’s because I’m super honest, not always PG rated … but I didn’t want to let the haters somehow cramp my style or get the best of me, so I maintain my irreverence … I also really wanted to show the other side of my personality, which kind of is more nerve-wracking to show people, being a real person and the vulnerable side of my personality and voice. So there are tracks on this record that are super vulnerable and were hard even to write. I had to force myself to sit down and write these songs.”

Q: You’ve carved a distinctive image and also just launched your latest collaboration with Baby-G watches. How do you want to evolve your career in the future?

A: “I think that with this record, I really wanted to show that there are no rules or boundaries in art, at all, like I sing and I can use crazy Auto-Tune vocoders and I can rap and I can do a song with Iggy Pop. You can do all these things that make sense. You don’t have to just be one thing, like, you don’t adhere to any sort of stereotype or any boundaries or any rules, so for me it’s really fun to break down these boundaries.”

Q: You came in at the forefront of the electronic dance music explosion in the pop charts two years ago. Why do you think EDM is doing so well?

A: “Dancing is one of the ways we, as adult human beings, still get to play and it’s socially acceptable. Little kids play all the time, but as we grow up, we’re supposed to just not play anymore, so our version of that is going out and dancing, and I think it’s one way people are still visceral and animal-like.”

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Dale Hudson)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Weight Loss Surgery May Not Combat Diabetes Long-Term

Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation.

The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years.

The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight.

“Some people are under the impression that you have surgery and you’re cured,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, the president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the study. “There have been a lot of claims about how wonderful surgery is for diabetes, and I think this offers a more realistic picture.”

The findings suggest that weight loss surgery may be most effective for treating diabetes in those whose disease is not very advanced. “What we’re learning is that not all diabetic patients do as well as others,” said Dr. David E. Arterburn, the lead author of the study and an associate investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. “Those who are early in diabetes seem to do the best, which makes a case for potentially earlier intervention.”

One of the strengths of the new study was that it involved thousands of patients enrolled in three large health plans in California and Minnesota, allowing detailed tracking over many years. All told, 4,434 adult diabetics were followed between 1995 and 2008. All were obese, and all underwent Roux-en-Y operations, the most popular type of gastric bypass procedure.

After surgery, about 68 percent of patients experienced a complete remission of their diabetes. But within five years, 35 percent of those patients had it return. Taken together, that means that most of the subjects in the study, about 56 percent — a figure that includes those whose disease never remitted — had no long-lasting remission of diabetes after surgery.

The researchers found that three factors were particularly good predictors of who was likely to have a relapse of diabetes. If patients, before surgery, had a relatively long duration of diabetes, had poor control of their blood sugar, or were taking insulin, then they were least likely to benefit from gastric bypass. A patient’s weight, either before or after surgery, was not correlated with their likelihood of remission or relapse.

In Type 2 diabetes, the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas tend to wear out as the disease progresses, which may explain why some people benefit less from surgery. “If someone is too far advanced in their diabetes, where their pancreas is frankly toward the latter stages of being able to produce insulin, then even after losing a bunch of weight their body may not be able to produce enough insulin to control their blood sugar,” Dr. Arterburn said.

Nonetheless, he said it might be the case that obese diabetics, even those whose disease is advanced, can still benefit from gastric surgery, at least as far as their quality of life and their risk factors for heart disease and other complications are concerned.

“It’s not a surefire cure for everyone,” he said. “But almost universally, patients lose weight after weight loss surgery, and that in and of itself may have so many health benefits.”

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State of the Art: Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? - Review

From left: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Everett Kennedy Brown/European Pressphoto Agency

From left, the Kindle PaperWhite, the iPad Mini and the  Nexus 7.

The other day, I joined NPR for a segment about high-tech holiday gifts. I was ready for the calls from listeners. I’d brushed up on cameras, phones, laptops, music players and game consoles. I was prepared to talk about limiting screen time, digital addiction, cyberbullying. I knew where to get the best deals.

But all six callers had the same question: “What tablet should I get?”

There were variations, of course. “— for my kid?” “— for my elderly father?” “— just for reading?” “— for not much money?” But in general, it was clear: the gadget most likely to be found under the tree this year is thin, battery-powered and flat.

No wonder people are confused. The marketplace has gone tablet-crazy. There’s practically a different model for every man, woman and child.

There’s the venerable iPad, of course. And now the iPad Mini. There are new tablets from Google, also in small and large. There are Samsung’s Note tablets in a variety of sizes, with styluses. There are $200 touch-screen color e-book/video players. There’s a new crop of black-and-white e-book readers. There are stunningly cheap plastic models you’ve never heard of. There are tablets for children (and I don’t mean baby aspirin).

So how are you, the confused consumer, supposed to keep tabs on all these tablets? By taking this handy tour through the jungle of tablets 2012. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

DIRT-CHEAP KNOCKOFFS You can find no-name tablets for $100 or even less. You can also find mystery-brand Chinese tablets in toy stores, marketed to children.

Don’t buy them. They don’t have the apps, the features, the polish or the pleasure of the nicer ones. The junk drawer is already calling their names.

E-BOOK READERS The smallest, lightest, least expensive, easiest to read tablets are the black-and-white e-book readers. If the goal is simply reading — and not, say, watching movies or playing games — these babies are pure joy.

Don’t bother with the lesser brands; if you’re going to get locked into one company’s proprietary, copy-protected book format, you’ll reduce your chances of library obsolescence if you stick with Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Each company offers a whole bunch of models. But on the latest models, the page background lights up softly, so that you can read in the dark without a flashlight. (These black-and-white models also look fantastic in direct sun — now you get the best of both lighting conditions.)

The one you want is the Kindle PaperWhite ($120), whose illumination is more even and pleasant than the equivalent Nook’s.

Of course, plain, no-touch, no-light Kindles, with ads on the screen saver, start as low as $70. But the light and the touch-screen are really worth having.

COLOR E-READERS/PLAYERS Amazon and B.& N. each sell a seven-inch tablet that, functionally, lands somewhere between an e-book reader and an iPad. They have beautiful, high-definition touch screens. They play music, TV shows, movies and e-books. They can surf the Web. They even run a few handpicked Android apps like Netflix and Angry Birds.

They’re nowhere near as capable as full-blown, computerlike tablets of the iPad/Nexus ilk, mainly because there are so few apps, accessories and add-ons. But they cost $200; you’re paying only a fraction of the price.

The big two here are, once again, Amazon and B.& N. If you’re not already locked in to one of those companies’ books and videos because you owned a previous model, the Nook HD is the one to get. It’s much smaller and lighter than the Kindle Fire HD. It has a much sharper screen. And the $200 price includes a wall charger (the Fire doesn’t) and no ads (the Fire does). Or get the classy Google Nexus 7, also $200. Although its book/music/movie catalog is far smaller, its Android app catalog is far larger (but see “iPad versus Android,” below).

BIG COLOR READERS/PLAYERS This year, both Amazon and B.& N. have introduced jumbo-screen (9-inch) versions of their HD tablets. Here again, B.& N. offers a better value than its 9-inch Kindle Fire HD rival. For $270, the Nook HD+ offers a sharper screen, lighter weight, no ads, a memory-card slot and a wall charger.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Can foes block Obama second term by blocking Electoral College?

While the work of governing goes on in Washington, some members of the permanent opposition to President Obama continue to register their disdain for not only the incumbent but for the electoral process that granted him a second term.

Their solution? Change the rules, or get out of the game.

On the latter front, protesters continue to signal their contempt for Obama with online petitions calling for their states to secede from the United States. Nearly 1 million people in all 50 states have now signed, according to McClatchy Newspapers, which totaled the signatures accumulating on a White House website.

That number could seem alarming to Obama supporters, but consider this: As of Tuesday afternoon, about 2,300 people had signed the petition “Grant peaceful secession to the state of California in order to form a new and independent sovereign state.”  That trailed the 3,900 who had signed a petition to the White House titled “Nationalize the Twinkie Industry.”

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

The Constitution makes no provision for states to secede from the union. But signing a petition is one way to blow off some steam.

Another fantasy maneuver has been making the rounds among Obama denialists in recent days. Under this construct, the Democrat could still be blocked from a second term if presidential electors from the states that favored Republican Mitt Romney simply boycotted the Electoral College voting.

Judson Phillips proposed that subterfuge a week ago on the far-right website World Net Daily.  Phillips, listed as a founder of the Tea Party Nation, suggested that the Electoral College could not have a quorum if enough states boycotted. He claimed that the 12th Amendment to the Constitution required two-thirds of the states to participate.  Without that quorum, Phillips wrote, the selection of the president would be thrown into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which would install Romney. (Never mind Obama’s 3.5-million popular-vote advantage and 126 electoral-vote margin.)

This idea had some extremists all atwitter for a few days.  Among those intrigued by the idea was a state senator from Idaho, Sheryl Nuxoll of Cottonwood, who used Twitter to send out a link to Phillips’ story. “A ‘last chance’ to have Mitt Romney as President in January (it’s still not too late),” Nuxoll said.

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

The fantasy scenario got a shot of new life Tuesday, when a couple of newspapers reported on Nuxoll’s interest in reworking the electoral math. Alas for the fanatics, if they had returned to the World Net Daily site and Phillips original story, they would see an editor's note had been appended.

“Since this column was posted,” it reads, “it has been discovered that the premise presented about the Electoral College and the Constitution is in error. According to the 12th Amendment, a two-thirds quorum is required in the House of Representatives, not the Electoral College.”

Romney electors can stamp their feet, hold their breath, or even stay away on Dec. 17, when the Electoral College is scheduled to meet in state capitols around the country. That will not prevent the 332 Obama electors from casting their ballots for the incumbent.

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James.rainey@latimes.com

Twitter: @latimesrainey

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SolarCity Preps for IPO, Prices Its Shares

After postponing its public market debut because of Superstorm Sandy (the irony of that can’t go unmentioned), SolarCity is on the verge of an IPO. Seven months after filing its prospectus, the company has priced its IPO shares between $13 and $15, according to its SEC filing.

The San Mateo-based solar-energy company is selling 10.07 million shares, hoping to raise $151 million. Public market trading in the stock is likely to start in the next few weeks.

Founded by brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, SolarCity installs solar-energy systems on the roofs of private homes, industrial and government buildings, schools, and shopping malls. Customers include Walmart, Stanford University, and SpaceX. The last contract is no coincidence. Tesla Motors (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is the cousin of the Rive brothers, is the SolarCity chairman. Having Musk on its board has seemed to help SolarCity, as it’s one of the most anticipated alternative energy IPO since Tesla.

If the IPO performs well, as is expected, it will be a bright end to a dismal year for U.S.-based green tech investments. Green energy companies raised 87 percent less on the public markets during the the first quarter of 2012 as compared to 2011. The overall environment was so dodgy for anything “green” that BrightSource Energy, a solar thermal power plant startup, pulled its IPO in April, saying it couldn’t get the valuation it wanted. And the bad news didn’t end there for North America-based green energy companies. Thanks to a surplus of low-cost Chinese-manufactured solar panels, prices for solar panels fell20 percent. That’s put the squeeze on solar-panel manufacturers like First Solar (FSLR) and Suntech Power (STP), both of which have taken stock price hits this year as they’ve struggled to compete.

But the falling cost of solar panels has been a boon for SolarCity, which acts as a third party between photovoltaic cell manufacturers, and the consumers and businesses that want to tap into savings that solar power can offer. As the price for panels has fallen, so has the cost of using solar energy in comparison to getting electricity from your local utility. “While these developments have adversely impacted panel manufacturers and the overall upstream market, we and other downstream companies have benefited significantly,” SolarCity wrote in its filing. “In 2006, the year we commenced business, solar panel prices were 472 percent higher than now.”

For the nine months ending September 2012, SolarCity lost $77 million on $103 million in revenue. In 2011, the company lost $73 million on $59 million in sales.

The company will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker SCTY. Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Needham & Company, Roth Capital Partners and BofA Merrill Lynch are underwriters.

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‘Two and a Half Men’ actor not expected on set

NEW YORK (AP) — The teenage actor who stars in “Two and a Half Men” and called the CBS comedy “filth” may have some time before he faces the show’s producers.

Angus T. Jones wasn’t expected at rehearsal Tuesday because he is not going to be in the episode they are filming, according to a person close to the show who spoke on condition of anonymity because producers were not commenting publicly.

Jones, 19, has been on the show, which used to feature bad-boy actor Charlie Sheen and remains heavy with sexual innuendo, since he was 10 but says in a video posted online by a Christian church that he doesn’t want to be on it anymore.

“Please stop watching it,” Jones said. “Please stop filling your head with filth.”

The person familiar with the production schedule said Jones does not appear in either of the two episodes filming before the end of the year, so he wouldn’t be expected back at work until after the New Year.

His character has been largely absent because he has joined the Army.

CBS and producer Warner Bros. Television have not commented.

“Two and a Half Men” survived a wild publicity ride less than two years ago, when Sheen was fired for his drug use and publicly complained about the network and the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre.

Jones plays Jake, the son of Jon Cryer’s uptight divorced chiropractor character, Alan, and the nephew of Sheen’s hedonistic philandering music jingle writer, Charlie. Sheen was replaced by Ashton Kutcher, who plays billionaire Walden.

In the video posted by Forerunner Chronicles in Seale, Ala., Jones describes a search for a spiritual home. He says the type of entertainment he’s involved in adversely affects the brain and “there’s no playing around when it comes to eternity.”

“You cannot be a true God-fearing person and be on a television show like that,” he said. “I know I can’t. I’m not OK with what I’m learning, what the Bible says, and being on that television show.”

The show was moved from Monday to Thursday this season, and its average viewership has dropped from 20 million an episode to 14.5 million, although last year’s numbers were somewhat inflated by the intense interest in Kutcher’s debut. It is the third most popular comedy on television behind CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” and ABC’s “Modern Family.”

The actors on “Two and a Half Men” have contracts that run through the end of the season.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Global Update: Investing in Eyeglasses for Poor Would Boost International Economy

BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

Eliminating the worldwide shortage of eyeglasses could cost up to $28 billion, but would add more than $200 billion to the global economy, according to a study published last month in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The $28 billion would cover the cost of training 65,000 optometrists and equipping clinics where they could prescribe eyeglasses, which can now be mass-produced for as little as $2 a pair. The study was done by scientists from Australia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The authors assumed that 703 million people worldwide have uncorrected nearsightedness or farsightedness severe enough to impair their work, and that 80 percent of them could be helped with off-the-rack glasses, which would need to be replaced every five years.

The biggest productivity savings from better vision would not be in very poor regions like Africa but in moderately poor countries where more people have factory jobs or trades like driving or running a sewing machine.

Without the equivalent of reading glasses, “lots of skilled crafts become very difficult after age 40 or 45,” said Kevin Frick, a Johns Hopkins health policy economist and study co-author. “You don’t want to be swinging a hammer if you can’t see the nail.”

If millions of schoolchildren who need glasses got them, the return on investment could be even greater, he said, but that would be in the future and was not calculated in this study.

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Dark Warnings About Future of Internet Access

PARIS — Every time an Internet user watches “Gangnam Style” on YouTube, packets of digital data course through the global telecommunications system, converging on an iPhone, a tablet or a laptop.

Having missed out on most of the lucrative revenue that the explosion of digital content has generated for Internet companies, telecommunications providers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere now want to charge them for carrying this traffic.

No way, the content providers say.

This commercial and ideological clash is set for a showdown next week, when representatives of more than 190 governments, along with telecommunications companies and Internet groups, gather in Dubai for a once-in-a-generation meeting.

The ostensible purpose of the World Conference on International Telecommunications is to update a global treaty on technical standards needed to, say, connect a telephone call from Tokyo to Timbuktu. The previous conference took place in 1988, when the Internet was in its infancy and telecommunications remained a highly regulated, mostly analog business.

Critics of the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations’ agency that is organizing the meeting, see a darker agenda. The blogosphere has been raging over supposed plans led by Russia to snatch away control of the Internet and hand it to the U.N. agency.

That seems unlikely. Any such move would require an international consensus, and opposition is widespread. Terry Kramer, the U.S. ambassador to the conference, has vowed to veto any change in how the Internet is overseen.

Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the telecommunications union, has repeatedly said that it has no desire to take over the Internet or to stifle its growth. On the contrary, he says, one of the main objectives of the conference is to spread Internet access to more of the four and a half billion people around the world who still do not use it.

And yet, groups as diverse as Google, the Internet Society, the International Trade Union Confederation and Greenpeace warn that the discussions could set a bad precedent, encouraging governments to step up censorship or take other actions that would threaten the integrity of the Internet.

“This is a very important moment in the history of the Internet, because this conference may introduce practices that are inimical to its continued growth and openness,” Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, said during a conference call.

Google set up a Web site last week, “Take Action,” encouraging visitors to sign a petition for a “free and open Internet.” The campaign is modeled on the successful drive last winter to defeat legislative proposals to crack down on Internet piracy in the United States.

Analysts say the outcry over censorship and Internet governance is a red herring; the real business of the conference is business.

“The far bigger issue — largely obscured by this discussion — are proposals that are more likely to succeed that envision changing the way we pay for Internet services,” Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, said by e-mail.

In one submission to the conference, the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, a lobbying group based in Brussels that represents companies like France Télécom, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, proposed that network operators be permitted to assess charges for content providers like Internet video companies that use a lot of bandwidth.

Analysts say the proposal is an acknowledgment by telecommunications companies that they cannot compete in the provision of digital content.

“The telecoms realize that they have lost the battle,” said Paul Budde, an independent telecommunications analyst in Australia. “They are saying, ‘We can’t beat the Googles and the Facebooks, so let’s try to charge them.”’

The European lobbying group says that without the new fees, there will be no money to invest in the network upgrades needed to deal with a surge in traffic. Regulators have required European telecommunications operators to open their networks to rivals, and the market for broadband is fiercely competitive, with rock-bottom prices.

In the United States, by contrast, most telecommunications companies have been permitted to maintain local monopolies — or duopolies, with cable companies — in broadband, keeping prices higher. And U.S. regulators have ordered broadband providers to give equal priority to all Internet traffic. Such “network neutrality” is incompatible with charging content providers for carriage.

Analysts say this may explain why U.S. telecommunications companies have not joined the European call for a new business model.

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