Sens. Feinstein, Graham clash on gun control

If Washington’s effort to reach a deal on the "fiscal cliff" looks daunting, just wait for the debate over what to do about mass shootings like the one that killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) clashed sharply over Feinstein’s proposal to ban military-style assault weapons.

“The question comes, what do we do about the growing sophistication of military weapons on the streets of our cities?” Feinstein said. 

“When you have someone walking in and slaying, in the most brutal way, 6-year olds, something is really wrong,” said Feinstein, who has made gun control a key issue since her days as president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978 when her colleague Harvey Milk and the city’s mayor, George Moscone, were shot and killed in City Hall by a rival politician.

PHOTOS: Notable moments of the 2012 presidential election

Feinstein has proposed a prohibition on the type of semi-automatic rifles used in the Newtown shooting and other recent mass killings, adding that her bill would be much tougher than the loophole-ridden assault weapons ban in place from 1994-2004. Assault rifles already in circulation would remain legal, but the owners would have to register them and become licensed. Her bill also would ban high-capacity magazines.

Limiting guns is precisely the wrong answer, Graham responded.

Crime is at record lows in part because guns are more widespread than ever, he said. He endorsed the proposal by the National Rifle Assn. to put armed guards in every school. He said he owns an AR-15, the type of semi-automatic rifled used by Adam Lanza in the Newtown school shooting.

“What she is proposing is a massive intervention,” Graham said. “Gun sales are up, and crime is down.  You’re not going to be able to stop mass murderers with no criminal record just by taking my AR-15 and making me pay $200 and get my fingerprints and say I can’t buy another one.

"The best solution to protect children is to have somebody there to stop the shooter, not get everybody’s gun in the country."

Feinstein responded that there was an armed guard at Columbine High School in 1999, but he was unable to “stop the shooters,” Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 15 people and wounded 23.

Appearing on NBC’s "Meet the Press," President Obama, who supports an assault weapons ban, said such measures could only be enacted if the public puts pressure on Congress.

“We're not going to get this done unless the American people decide it's important,” Obama said.

“And so this is not going to be simply a matter of me spending political capital," Obama said. "One of the things that you learn, having now been in this office for four years, is the old adage of Abraham Lincoln's -- that with public opinion there's nothing you can't do and without public opinion there's very little you can get done in this town.”

Obama said he would make a series of proposals and put “my full weight behind it … but ultimately the way this is going to happen is because the American people say, ‘That's right. We are willing to make different choices for the country and we support those in Congress who are willing to take those actions.’ And will there be resistance? Absolutely there will be resistance.”

The day of the Newtown shootings, he said, “was the worst day of my presidency.”

But the question is “whether we are actually shook up enough by what happened here that it does not just become another one of these routine episodes where it gets a lot of attention for a couple of weeks and then it drifts away.”

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ken.dilanian@latimes.com

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Wired Science's Top Image Galleries of the Year

Many of our most popular posts are image galleries, and this year our readers favorite collections included microscope photos, doomsday scenarios, auroras and lots of images of Earth from space.

The satellite image above of Brasilia is part of the most popular post of the year.

Above:

I think it's safe to say that our readers like looking at images of Earth from space almost as much as we do. Satellite imagery was the subject of four of Wired Science's 10 most popular galleries of 2012, with this gallery of planned cities topping the list.

See the full gallery.

Image: NASA/USGS

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‘The Hobbit’ stays atop box office for third week

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” continues to rule them all at the box office, staying on top for a third-straight week with nearly $ 33 million.

The Warner Bros. fantasy epic from director Peter Jackson, based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novel, has made $ 222.7 million domestically alone.

Two big holiday movies — and potential awards contenders — also had strong openings. Quentin Tarantino‘s spaghetti Western-blaxploitation mash-up “Django Unchained” came in second place for the weekend with $ 30.7 million. The Weinstein Co. revenge epic, starring Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, has earned $ 64 million since its Christmas Day opening.

And in third place with $ 28 million was the sweeping, all-singing “Les Miserables.” The Universal Pictures musical starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway has made $ 67.5 million since debuting on Christmas.

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Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongooses, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

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Negotiations Break Down on Debt Agreement

Pete Souza/The White House, via NBC

President Obama spoke with David Gregory of NBC's "Meet The Press" in the Blue Room of the White House during an interview taped on Saturday.

WASHINGTON — Negotiations over a last-ditch agreement to head off large tax increases and sweeping spending cuts in the new year appeared to resume Sunday afternoon after Republican senators withdrew their demand that a deal must include a new way of calculating inflation that would lower payments to beneficiaries programs like Social Security and slow their growth.

Senate Republicans emerged from a closed-door meeting to say they agreed with Democrats that the request — which had temporarily brought talks to a standstill — was not appropriate for a quick deal to avert the tax increases and spending cuts starting Jan. 1.

To hold the line against raising taxes on high-income households while fighting for cuts to Social Security was “not a winning hand,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said.

The concession could be a breakthrough, but Senate Republicans were still balking at an agreement on Sunday, adopting a new talking point that Democrats want to raise taxes just to increase spending, not to cut the deficit. That concern appears to center on a Democratic proposal to temporarily suspend across-the-board spending cuts to military and domestic programs as talks resume on a larger deficit deal.

The demand for the new way of calculating inflation, known as “chained CPI,” issued at 7:10 p.m. on Saturday, had stopped talks cold. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, went to the Senate floor a little after 2 p.m. Sunday to say that Republicans had made their last offer and had yet to receive a reply.

“I’m concerned about the lack of urgency. I think we all know we’re running out of time,” Mr. McConnell said.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, responded that “at this stage, we’re not able to make a counter offer.” He said that Mr. McConnell had negotiated in good faith but that “we’re apart on some pretty big issues.”

Mr. McConnell said he had made an emergency call to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to get the talks started again. The two spoke twice, and the White House dispatched the president’s chief legislative negotiator, Rob Nabors, to the Capitol to meet with Senate Democrats.

Talks foundered after Republicans dug in in an effort to get the largest deficit reduction deal in the time remaining, according to numerous Republican and Democratic officials familiar with the negotiations. Republicans told Democrats that they were willing to put off scheduled cuts in payments to health care providers who treat Medicare patients but that they wanted spending cuts elsewhere.

But it was the inflation calculation that forced Democrats from the negotiating table. President Obama has said that in a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction, he would go along with the change, which would slow the growth of programs whose outlays rise with consumer prices, and would raise more revenue by pushing people into higher tax brackets.

Democrats said that Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats would accept that change, called “chained C.P.I.,” only as part of a larger deal that included locking in well more than $1 trillion in revenue over 10 years, along with other Republican concessions. Democrats fear that any such concessions now would only increase demands for addition concessions in the coming weeks, when talks resume on a “grand bargain” to reduce the deficit.

They point to the $1 trillion in spending cuts agreed to last year in the Budget Control Act. Democrats say those should be included in a $4 trillion “grand bargain” package, but Republicans say those cuts should not be part of future negotiations. Republicans would likely do the same if Democrats agree now to concessions on the inflation calculation, Democratic aides said Sunday.

Mr. Reid made clear that Democrats did not intend to include Social Security in any stopgap package. Doing so would make it hard for him to round up votes from his own party, and he has resisted touching Social Security.

“We’re not going to have any Social Security cuts,” Mr. Reid said on the floor.

The breakdown came after Mr. Obama appeared on the NBC program “Meet the Press” on Sunday and implored Congress to act.

“We have been talking to the Republicans ever since the election was over,” Mr. Obama said in the interview, which was taped on Saturday. “They have had trouble saying yes to a number of repeated offers. Yesterday I had another meeting with the leadership, and I suggested to them if they can’t do a comprehensive package of smart deficit reductions, let’s at minimum make sure that people’s taxes don’t go up and that two million people don’t lose their unemployment insurance.”

“And I was modestly optimistic yesterday, but we don’t yet see an agreement,” Mr. Obama said. “And now the pressure’s on Congress to produce.”

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Some Arctic seals now officially listed as threatened with extinction

First came the polar bear. Now, the federal government has added two other marine mammals to the list of creatures threatened with extinction because of vanishing sea ice in a warming Arctic.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has officially listed bearded seal and the ringed seal as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The reason is not inadequate supplies of fish and other food for these seals, or excessive hunting by humans. It's the loss of their sea ice habitat.

Ringed seals give birth and nurse their pups in snow caves built on ice floes. Warming temperatures bring less snow and more rain, causing these snow caves to collapse and leaving pups vulnerable to freezing to death.

Bearded seals, with thick whiskers that help them find crabs, clams, cod and other bottom-dwelling prey, also give birth and nurse their pups on pack ice over shallow waters near food sources.

This September, the Arctic sea ice receded to record low levels, a troubling trend for sea ice-dependent animals.

"Sea ice is projected to shrink both in extent and duration, with bearded seals finding inadequate ice even if they move North," NOAA Fisheries said in announcing that two distinct populations of bearded seals and four subspecies of ringed seals qualified as threatened with extinction.

A team of federal scientists, said Jon Kurland, protected resources director for NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska region, "concluded that a significant decrease in sea ice is probable later this century and that these changes will likely cause these seal populations to decline.”

Unlike the fight over the polar bear listing, the fate of the seals garnered little attention. NOAA's Fisheries, the agency in charge of protecting most marine mammals, finalized the listing just before Christmas. It was timed to meet a court-ordered deadline that stemmed from a petition by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.

It's part of the center's broader campaign to push the federal government to designate Arctic sea ice as critical habitat and then take steps to protect it. The only known way to do that is to reduce emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.

ken.weiss@latimes.com

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Facebook Shares Fall Briefly Amid Report of Instagram Quitters

The fallout from Instagram’s terms of service change that wasn’t actually changed continued Friday. Facebook, which owns the popular social media app, saw its stock price fall 3 percent amid a report that the TOS flap cost Instagram 25 percent of its users.

Whether that number is accurate — Instagram insists it isn’t — was almost beside the point as Facebook saw shares fall to $25.22 before gaining almost all of it back a few hours later. It is further evidence that Instagram completely blew it by ticking everybody off with the idea that it would license user photos to advertisers without telling, or paying, users. Instagram insists the whole thing was due to confusion over the rewritten terms, then made the point moot by reverting to advertising rules set out in the TOS published in April, 2010.

Friday’s dust-up started when AppData — a research firm that tracks user numbers for iOS, Android and Facebook apps — said Instagram had lost 25 percent of its users since attempting to change its terms of service. According to AppData’s numbers, Instragram has about 16.4 million active daily users last week, but only 12.4 million as of Thursday. It appears that the New York Post broke the story; it was followed by a dozen or so tech blogs. Wall Street got wind of it, and Facebook’s stock price started falling even as Instagram insisted the report was bogus.

“This data is inaccurate,” an Instagram spokeswoman told Wired by email. “We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram.” She declined, however, to quantify “strong and steady growth” and would not provide actual user numbers.

Investors appear to have gotten the message, because Facebook shares had rebounded to $26.03, just three cents less than Thursday’s closing price, by mid-afternoon Friday.

AppData, widely cited my major tech publications (and many mainstream news outlets too) as an authority on such matters, also reported user drops for Pinterest, FarmVille, and a number of other popular apps. But while AppData’s findings are generally considered accurate, they don’t appear to paint a full picture in this case. AppData’s metrics come from Instagram users who have linked the app to their Facebook accounts. According to a report from Marketing Land, only about 20 to 30 percent Instagram users have done this. While AppData indeed did record a drop in Instagram’s active users over the last week, it did so by measuring a slice of Instagram users, not the entire pie.

Although Instagram denies there’s been a decline in users, its refusal to offer specifics makes you wonder just what’s happened during the past week since we already know some users jumped ship.

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Matt Damon tackles “fracking” issue in the “Promised Land”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The hot-button topic of “fracking” has finally made its way to Hollywood in the new movie “Promised Land,” out in U.S. theaters on Friday, with actors Matt Damon and John Krasinski teaming up to further the debate on the energy drilling technique.

The film explores the social impact of hydraulic fracturing drilling technique, or “fracking,” which has sparked nation-wide environmental and political battles over its impact on drinking water, U.S. energy use, seismic activity and other areas.

“Promised Land” will see Damon, 42, reunite with director Gus Van Sant for the third time, following their success with 1997 film “Good Will Hunting and 2002′s “Gerry.”

In their latest film, Damon plays a corporate salesman who goes to a rural U.S. town to buy or lease land on behalf of a gas company looking to drill for oil. He soon faces opposition from a slick environmentalist, played by Krasinski.

In real life, Damon hasn’t shied away from getting involved in political and social issues, working with charities and organizations to eradicate AIDS in developing countries, bringing attention to atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region, providing safe drinking water and stopping trees from being chopped and used for junk mail.

Yet “Promised Land,” which Damon also co-wrote and produced, doesn’t take a noticeable stance on “fracking.” The actor would not publicly state his own views, telling Reuters that he didn’t think his opinion had “any bearing” on the film.

“The point is that the movie should start a conversation. It’s certainly not a pro-fracking movie, but we didn’t want to tell people what to think,” Damon said.

The actor said he and Krasinski never set out to make a socially conscious film, and “fracking” was added in later, as a backdrop to the story.

“It wasn’t that we said we wanted to make a movie about ‘fracking’ as much as we wanted to make a movie about American identity, about real people. We wanted to make a movie about the country today, where we came from, where we are and where we are headed,” Damon said.

“‘Fracking’ was perfect because the stakes are so incredibly high and people are so divided. It asks all the questions about short-term thinking versus long-term thinking.”

Hydraulic fracturing entails pumping water laced with chemicals and sand at high pressure into shale rock formations to break them up and unleash hydrocarbons. Critics worry that “fracking” fluids or hydrocarbons can still leak into water tables from wells, or above ground.

FROM ‘ADJUSTMENT BUREAU’ TO ‘PROMISED LAND’

At first glance, the pairing of Damon with Krasinski may not come across as the perfect fit, as Damon has primarily been associated with longtime friend and collaborator Ben Affleck, both of whom won Oscars for writing “Good Will Hunting.”

Damon later become a colleague and friend to a number of key Hollywood players, including George Clooney and Brad Pitt, with whom he co-starred in the “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise.

Krasinski, 33, is best known for playing sardonic Jim Halpert on NBC’s long-running television series, “The Office,” and has had occasional supporting roles in films such as 2008′s “Leatherheads.”

Damon and Krasinski came together after meeting through Krasinski’s wife, Emily Blunt, who co-starred with Damon in the 2011 film “The Adjustment Bureau.” Damon said he and his wife started double-dating with Krasinski and Blunt, through which their collaboration on “Promised Land” came about.

The duo’s busy work schedules forced them to moonlight on weekends to make “Promised Land.”

“John showed up at my house every Saturday at breakfast and we would write all day until dinner,” Damon said. “Then we’d do it again on Sunday. I have four kids so he would come to me.”

But Damon’s determination to make the film his feature directorial debut fell through when his acting schedule changed, making it impossible to direct “Promised Land,” so he turned to Van Sant.

“My first inclination was to send the script to somebody I’d worked with before,” he said. “Gus seemed like the most obvious choice and I realized later that I’d never written anything that anyone else had directed, except Gus. I have a real comfort level with him.”

Damon said he has not given up on his dream of directing movies and has his eye on a project at movie studio Warner Bros., which has a deal with Damon and Affleck’s joint production company, Pearl Street Films.

With Affleck’s third directorial effort “Argo” becoming an awards contender, Damon joked that the film’s success can only be a good thing for his own budding directing career.

“I now happen to be partnered with the hottest director in Hollywood!” he said, laughing.

(Reporting By Zorianna Kit, Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Paul Simao)

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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Senator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center.

NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients.

While the medical center had been treating many outpatients, it had farmed out surgery to other hospitals, which created scheduling problems that forced many patients to have their operations on nights and weekends, when staffing is traditionally low. Some patients and doctors had to postpone not just elective but also necessary operations for lack of space at other hospitals.

The medical center’s Tisch Hospital, its major hospital for inpatient services, between 30th and 34th Streets on First Avenue, had been closed since the hurricane knocked out power and forced the evacuation of more than 300 patients, some on sleds brought down darkened flights of stairs.

“I think it’s a little bit of a miracle on 34th Street that this happened so quickly,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said Thursday.

Mr. Schumer credited the medical center’s leadership and esprit de corps, and also a tour of the damaged hospital on Nov. 9 by the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, W. Craig Fugate, whom he and others escorted through watery basement hallways.

“Every time I talk to Fugate there are a lot of questions, but one is, ‘How are you doing at NYU?’ ” the senator said.

The reopening of Tisch to surgery patients and associated services, like intensive care, some types of radiology and recovery room anesthesia, was part of a phased restoration that will continue. Besides providing an essential service, surgery is among the more lucrative of hospital services.

The hospital’s emergency department is expected to delay its reopening for about 11 months, in part to accommodate an expansion in capacity to 65,000 patient visits a year, from 43,000, said Dr. Andrew W. Brotman, its senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy.

In the meantime, NYU Langone is setting up an urgent care center with 31 bays and an observation unit, which will be able to treat some emergency patients. It will initially not accept ambulances, but might be able to later, Dr. Brotman said. Nearby Bellevue Hospital Center, which was also evacuated, opened its emergency department to noncritical injuries on Monday.

Labor and delivery, the cancer floor, epilepsy treatment and pediatrics and neurology beyond surgery are expected to open in mid-January, Langone officials said. While some radiology equipment, which was in the basement, has been restored, other equipment — including a Gamma Knife, a device using radiation to treat brain tumors — is not back.

The flooded basement is still being worked on, and electrical gear has temporarily been moved upstairs. Mr. Schumer, a Democrat, said that a $60 billion bill to pay for hurricane losses and recovery in New York and New Jersey was nearing a vote, and that he was optimistic it would pass in the Senate with bipartisan support. But the measure’s fate in the Republican-controlled House is far less certain.

The bill includes $1.2 billion for damage and lost revenue at NYU Langone, including some money from the National Institutes of Health to restore research projects. It would also cover Long Beach Medical Center in Nassau County, Bellevue, Coney Island Hospital and the Veterans Affairs hospital in Manhattan.

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USC football: Matt Barkley will not play in Sun Bowl

Matt Barkley winces in pain after being sacked during USC's loss to UCLA. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times / December 27, 2012)

By Gary Klein

December 27, 2012, 11:25 a.m.

Lane Kiffin finally made it official Thursday, announcing USC quarterback Matt Barkley will not play in the Sun Bowl.

Redshirt freshman Max Wittek will start for the Trojans on Monday against Georgia Tech.

Barkley suffered a shoulder sprain on Nov. 17 against UCLA and has not practiced since, but Kiffin had said the senior would be evaluated once the Trojans arrived in El Paso, Texas. Barkley did not practice Wednesday or Thursday, except to perform some conditioning drills.

“Matt really wanted to play in the game and he was very close to being able to play and unfortunately for him our doctors have decided against it,” Kiffin said. “It’s nothing long term....  We ran out of time.”

 TIMELINE: College football 2012-13 bowl schedule

Barkley passed for 36 touchdowns, with 15 interceptions, in 11 games this season.

"I've worked as hard as I could to get back for this game and nature's not allowing it and doctor's aren't allowing it, which is the most important thing--they're looking out for my best interest," Barkley said. "I trust their judgment."

Barkley finishes his career with 64.1% completion percentage and 12,327 passing yards. Barkley passed for a Pac-12 Conference record 116 touchdowns, with 48  interceptions.

This will be the second start for Wittek, who played in the Trojans’ loss to Notre Dame in the regular-season finale.

ALSO:

David Beckham has plenty of options next year

Tim Tebow snubbed again; Mark Sanchez to start Sunday for Jets

Mayors of Stanford, Wisconsin hometowns announce Rose Bowl wager

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