Experts: No link between Asperger's, violence

NEW YORK (AP) — While an official has said that the 20-year-old gunman in the Connecticut school shooting had Asperger's syndrome, experts say there is no connection between the disorder and violence.

Asperger's is a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.

"There really is no clear association between Asperger's and violent behavior," said psychologist Elizabeth Laugeson, an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Little is known about Adam Lanza, identified by police as the shooter in the Friday massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school. He fatally shot his mother before going to the school and killing 20 young children, six adults and himself, authorities said.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation, said Lanza had been diagnosed with Asperger's.

High school classmates and others have described him as bright but painfully shy, anxious and a loner. Those kinds of symptoms are consistent with Asperger's, said psychologist Eric Butter of Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who treats autism, including Asperger's, but has no knowledge of Lanza's case.

Research suggests people with autism do have a higher rate of aggressive behavior — outbursts, shoving or pushing or angry shouting — than the general population, he said.

"But we are not talking about the kind of planned and intentional type of violence we have seen at Newtown," he said in an email.

"These types of tragedies have occurred at the hands of individuals with many different types of personalities and psychological profiles," he added.

Autism is a developmental disorder that can range from mild to severe. Asperger's generally is thought of as a mild form. Both autism and Asperger's can be characterized by poor social skills, repetitive behavior or interests and problems communicating. Unlike classic autism, Asperger's does not typically involve delays in mental development or speech.

Experts say those with autism and related disorders are sometimes diagnosed with other mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"I think it's far more likely that what happened may have more to do with some other kind of mental health condition like depression or anxiety rather than Asperger's," Laugeson said.

She said those with Asperger's tend to focus on rules and be very law-abiding.

"There's something more to this," she said. "We just don't know what that is yet."

After much debate, the term Asperger's is being dropped from the diagnostic manual used by the nation's psychiatrists. In changes approved earlier this month, Asperger's will be incorporated under the umbrella term "autism spectrum disorder" for all the ranges of autism.

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AP Writer Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.

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Online:

Asperger's information: http://1.usa.gov/3tGSp5

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Video shows gunman fired at crowded shopping mall

A gunman fired at least 50 rounds in the crowded parking lot of the Fashion Island shopping mall, but Newport Beach police are unclear about a motive.

The gunfire sent shoppers scrambling for cover. A shopper in the parking lot recorded a video capturing the gunfire and posted it on YouTube.

Marcos Gurrola, 42, of Garden Grove was arrested in the parking lot
near the Macy’s department store shortly after firing the
shots about 4:30 p.m., said Kathy Lowe, a spokeswoman for the Newport
Beach Police Department. Officers on bike patrol apprehended the man.

Police searched the mall but did not find anyone who had been struck
by the gunfire. The shots were apparently fired either in the air or at
the ground.

More than 50 rounds were recovered at the scene, Deputy Chief
David McGill said. A handgun was recovered at the scene, but police did not
reveal any more details about the weapon.

The mall was crowded with holiday shoppers at the time of the shooting.

Shopper Dena Nassef said she and another person were walking toward Macy’s when people started yelling and running.

“With what happened in Connecticut, we were freaking out,” she said. “It was like crazy, people leaving stores.”

Ann Butcher, an employee at Macy’s, said she was on the patio at
Whole Foods when people started running and screaming. She said some
women left their purses and fled.

“That was very scary,” she said.

Shopper Eric Widmer said he was at the Barnes & Noble bookstore
when he saw a mother and daughter rush in crying. He said he heard
someone scream, “Shooter!”

He said he managed to exit the bookstore and head to Macy’s. Once there, he was not allowed to leave.

“I thought, ‘Great, I get to be scared twice,’” he said. “Lightning strikes twice.”

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-- Lauren Williams in Newport Beach and Rosanna Xia  in Los Angeles

Photo: A police car blocks an entrance to Fashion Island at San Miguel Drive and Newport Center Drive. Credit: Kevin Chang / Times Community News

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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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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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Apple falls on lower shipment forecasts, muted China debut

(Reuters) – Apple Inc shares fell 3.9 percent on Friday after the iPhone 5 debuted in China to a cool reception and two analysts cut shipment forecasts.

Jefferies analyst Peter Misek trimmed his iPhone shipment estimates for the Jan-March quarter, saying that the technology company had started cutting orders to suppliers to balance excess inventory.

Shares of Apple suppliers Jabil Circuit Inc, Qualcomm Inc, Skyworks Solutions Inc, TriQuint Semiconductor Inc, Avago Technologies Ltd, and Cirrus Logic Inc also fell in early trading.

Apple shares have lost a quarter of their value since they hit a life high of $ 705.07 on September 21, as it faces increasing competition from phones using Google Inc’s Android operating system.

Misek cut his first-quarter iPhone sales estimate to 48 million from 52 million and gross margin expectations for the company by 2 percentage points to 40 percent.

UBS Investment Research cut its price target on Apple stock to $ 700 from $ 780 on lower expected iPhone and iPad shipments for the March quarter.

The brokerage said it was modeling more conservative growth for the world’s biggest technology company after making supply chain checks that revealed that fewer iPhones were being built.

“Some of our Chinese sources do not expect the iPhone 5 to do as well as the iPhone 4S,” UBS analyst Steven Milunovich wrote in a note to clients.

Apple launched the iPhone 5 in China on Friday, a move widely expected to bring the Cupertino-based company some respite from a recent slide in market share in China, but early reports indicated that demand may not be as great as expected.

“The iPhone 5 China launch has been surprisingly muted but (we) are unsure how much weather (snow) or the required pre-ordering (to prevent riots) are factors,” Misek said.

Apple shares fell as low as $ 508.50 in morning trading on the Nasdaq on Friday.

(Editing by Supriya Kurane)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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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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Man sought to videotape girlfriend's murder for Christmas, DA says

A south Orange County man who solicited his ex-girlfriend's murder and asked that the killing be videotaped so he could watch it on Christmas was sentenced Thursday to 31 years to life in state prison.

Mark Alan Jarosik, a Ladera Ranch resident, was in custody at the time of the murder solicitation, being held on suspicion of raping his former girlfriend.

Jarosik, 46, was found guilty in October of forcible rape, solicitation to commit murder and attempted murder with premeditation and deliberation, according to the Orange County district attorney's office.

Prosecutors said Jarosik went to the Ladera Ranch home of his 41-year-old ex-girlfriend in May 2009 to use her computer. They had broken up a month before, after living together and dating for several years.

The woman was at dinner with friends and when she returned, prosecutors said, the two got into an argument. The woman allegedly thought Jarosik had been spying on her, driving past the restaurant where she had been having dinner.

Prosecutors said the argument escalated into a physical and sexual assault, with Jarosik raping the woman.

On May 16, 2009, the incident was reported to law enforcement, and within days, prosecutors had filed rape charges. Jarosik was held in lieu of $100,000 bail. 

A protective order was issued requiring him -- should he make bail -- to stay more than 200 yards away from the woman at all times and forbidding any contact, directly or through a third party.

But after he posted bail, prosecutors said, Jarosik attempted to break into the woman's home. The woman's two children saw a hand come through a window near the front door of the house and screamed, and Jarosik fled.

The next morning, prosecutors said, Jarosik violated the protective order, attacking the woman outside her home. He pushed her to the ground, punched her in the face and banged her head against the curb, according to prosecutors.

Neighbors who witnessed the attack pulled Jarosik off of her, called authorities and pinned him down until police arrived. The woman was left in serious condition with a concussion and lacerations to the head.

While he was in custody at the Orange County Jail, prosecutors said, Jarosik asked another inmate to have a relative murder the woman, requesting that he have it videotaped.

The solicitation was never carried out.

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-- Rick Rojas and Richard Winton

Photo: Mark Alan Jarosik. Credit: Orange County District Attorney.

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