Apple sells three million iPads over first weekend

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Springsteen, Jay-Z put the pop in Obama rally

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Someone has to introduce the president.


On Monday, the final day of the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama, however, didn’t bring along an opening act. He brought along two main acts.













Bruce Springsteen. Jay-Z. Theirs wasn’t an introduction, it was pop culture moment.


The Boss was spending the entire day with Obama, traveling on Air Force One from Madison, Wis., to Columbus, Ohio, and then to Des Moines, Iowa, where Obama planned a coda for his campaign, a finale where his run for the presidency began five years ago.


Jay-Z boomed his way into Columbus‘s Nationwide Arena, performing a rendition of his hit “99 Problems” with a political twist for a crowd estimated by fire officials at more than 15,000 people. He changed a key R-rated word to make his own political endorsement. “I got 99 problems but Mitt ain’t one,” he sang.


“They tell the story of what our country is,” Obama said of the two performers, “but also of what it should be and what it can be.”


Springsteen added a whole new sense of vigor, even giddiness, to the Obama entourage, with many of the president’s aides and advisers clearly star-struck by the rocker’s presence.


Springsteen, in jeans, black boots, a work shirt, vest and leather jacket, was not wearing the typical Air Force One attire. But the Obama camp has left formality aside; many aides are growing beards through Election Day and ties have been left behind in favor of sweaters for the chilly outdoor events during the last hours of the campaign.


Asked if there was any downside to using celebrity glitz instead of substance to drive voters to the polls in the final days, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki laughed. “I think Bruce Springsteen might be offended by you calling him glitzy,” she said.


“Bruce Springsteen, and some other celebrities who have been helping us, reach a broad audience that sometimes tune out what’s being said by politicians,” she said.


As Psaki spoke to reporters at the back of the plane, Obama was up front and on the phone with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie discussing the recovery from Superstorm Sandy. Christie, who says he has attended more than 100 Springsteen concerts, said Obama then handed the phone to Springsteen, a New Jersey native whose songs often have been tributes to his youth in the state.


Upon landing in Columbus, Springsteen told a reporter that it was his first trip on Air Force One. Grinning, he said, “It was pretty cool.” As for New Jersey, he said, “I’m feeling pretty hopeful” that the state’s hard-hit shore will recover.


In Madison and Columbus, Springsteen serenaded audiences with renditions of top anthems “No Surrender,” ”Promised Land” and “Land of Hope and Dreams.” But he also has a custom-made campaign song named after the Obama motto “Forward” — which he acknowledged was “not the best I’ve ever written.”


“How many things rhyme with Obama?” he asked.


Obama, no doubt, didn’t mind.


“I’m going to be fine with Bruce Springsteen on the last day that I’ll ever campaign,” he said above the din of the crowd.


“That’s not a bad way to bring it home. With The Boss. With The Boss.”


Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Osbourne Has Double Mastectomy

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Sharon Osbourne underwent a double mastectomy when she learned she carried a gene for breast cancer, she told Hello! magazine in an article that hit newsstands this morning.


Although Osbourne, the wife of Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne, was not diagnosed with breast cancer, she was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002, and said the experience prompted her to have both her breasts removed in a 13-hour operation.













“As soon as I found out I had the breast cancer gene, I thought, ‘The odds are not in my favor’,” Sharon told the magazine. “I’ve had cancer before and I didn’t want to live under that cloud. I decided to just take everything off, and had a double mastectomy.”


Osbourne had a foot of her colon removed in 2002 and underwent chemotherapy. Once she was in remission, she founded the Sharon Osbourne Colon Cancer Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California in 2004.


A new grandmother to her son Jack’s daughter, Pearl, Osbourne told Hello! she didn’t feel sorry for herself.


“For me, it wasn’t a big decision, it was a no-brainer,” she said. “I didn’t want to live the rest of my life with that shadow hanging over me. I want to be around for a long time and be a grandmother to Pearl.


Click here to read more about the Osbourne family’s woes.


Women who have the “breast cancer gene” have mutated BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, according to the National Cancer Institute. Normally, the genes are tumor suppressors, but a blood test can reveal that they don’t function properly.


A 2008 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology revealed that more women were choosing to have double mastectomies, removing both the breast with cancer and the other healthy breast. The study found that the rate of the procedure, called a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy, more than doubled between 1998 and 2003. Although the study author said the preventative surgery did not decrease cancer risk, women said they did not regret their decision to remove their healthy breasts.


Several other celebrities have opted for double mastectomies in the past, including Christina Applegate and Kathy Bates.


Applegate, 40, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. She told More magazine last month that she originally had two lumpectomies, but when she learned that she had a mutated BRCA1 gene, she decided to have the more extreme surgery.


Bates announced in September that she was recovering from a double mastectomy after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. Bates, an Oscar-winner, battled ovarian cancer in 2003.


Also Read
Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Three myths about women voters that wouldn’t go away in 2012

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Protesters stand together during a Planned Parenthood rally at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. (Joe …


In the bitterly fought battle for women voters this election season, both candidates dwelled on issues like equal pay, abortion, access to contraception and women's unemployment. And the news media eagerly speculated on the candidates' chance of success with female voters, who made up 53 percent of the electorate in 2008.


In the process, a few major myths emerged about the female voter, from their views on abortion to whether their dating life influences them in the voting booth. Here are three of the biggest ones:


Myth No. 1: Women are more in favor of abortion rights than men are


For the past year, Democrats argued Republicans are waging a "war on women" for wanting to make all abortions illegal, while Republicans  countered that Democrats don't want any restrictions on abortion. Each side is attempting to paint the other as extreme, hoping to pick up on-the-fence women voters in the process.


But, despite how they're sometimes portrayed in the news media and by political candidates, female voters are about as divided on abortion as men are.


"One of the central myths in American politics is that women are more pro-choice than men," Karen Kaufman, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who has researched the gender gap, told Yahoo News.


In 2011, 59 percent of men and 56 percent of women said in a Gallup poll that abortion should be legal in no circumstances or only in a few.


Men and women are much more divided on the issue of war (women oppose military interventions) and the role of government (women are more wary of federal spending cuts) than on abortion.


That fact may come as a surprise in this election in particular, as abortion and reproductive issues took on a huge role. Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama for requiring employers' insurance plans to provide free contraception, calling the health care reform's mandate an infringement on employers' freedom of religion. Meanwhile, to paint Romney as extreme and out of touch, Obama seized on the abortion-related comments of a handful of Republicans like Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who said women who are raped should not be allowed to access legal abortions because he believed, falsely, that they could not physically become pregnant.



Rutgers political scientist Susan Carroll told Yahoo News she has not seen a presidential election contest as focused on abortion and reproductive rights since 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade was decided.


"Candidates have wanted to run away from abortion in previous elections," Carroll sad. "When you talk about it, you alienate someone."


Despite the fact that women are about equally split on abortion, it still makes sense that the Obama campaign has relentlessly highlighted comments from Akin, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, and a few other Republicans explaining why they think abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. The majority of both men and women think abortions should be legal in cases of rape or the health of the mother, so the ads paint the candidates—and by extension, Romney—as outside of the mainstream.


Playing defense, Romney put up TV ads in three key swing states saying he would not outlaw abortion in these cases and does not oppose contraception. (An anti-abortion group, meanwhile, bought ads in swing states calling Obama "an abortion radical" for sending federal funding to clinics that perform abortions.)


According to a CBS News poll, more women than men (38 percent) will only support a candidate who shares their views on abortion. One such voter is Susan Moore, an anti-abortion physical education teacher in the Columbus, Ohio, suburb of Groveport. She told Yahoo News that she's voting for Romney even though she disagrees with the Republicans' tough line on teachers unions.


"It's economics versus values," she said. "I'd vote conviction over jobs, I guess." Moore said she would support Obama if he were against abortion.


Polls suggest that birth control and funding for Planned Parenthood are more clearly winning issues for the Obama campaign. A majority of both women and men in a Gallup/USA Today poll from last month rate Obama higher than Romney on his handling of birth control policy. (The poll found that more than 30 percent of women in 12 swing states said a candidate's birth control policy would be "very important" for how they vote.)


Myth No. 2: The gender gap is about the "war on women"


Carroll says the Obama campaign's focus on reproductive rights is ultimately a way to motivate women who already support Obama to vote on Election Day, rather than a way to sway women in the middle away from Romney. "The people in the base turn out the vote and they need to mobilize them," Carroll said. "Those issues, the fact that women might not be able to get contraception, that can help to motivate women in the base."


That prediction seems to be supported by polling. The latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll shows that the female gender gap in favor of Obama has held steady at 7 percentage points. Meanwhile, men back Romney by six points more than women, which keeps the race at a dead heat.


The 7-point female gap in favor of Obama is in line with the female-male spread that political scientists have observed for 30 years. (Women began consistently voting for Democrats in higher proportions than men starting in the 1980 presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.)


But you wouldn't know that if you turned on cable news, where pundits wonder whether women don't support Romney because Democrats say he and other Republicans are waging a "war on women" on abortion and contraception.


Right now, "the average gender gap is approximately the average of the past nine presidential elections," ABC News/Washington Post pollster Gary Langer told Yahoo News. "It doesn't come from any dynamic in this election. Women are about 10 percentage points more likely to describe themselves as Democrats than Republicans. [The gap] comes from a substantial sense among women that the Democratic party is better attuned to women's issues."


Political scientists say more women than men vote Democratic in part because men and women see the role of government fundamentally differently. Women are more wary of federal spending cuts, and tend to support safety net programs more than the average male voter. Women are also more opposed to military interventions than men.


Shirley Hutner, a manager at a manufacturing company in Indiana, told Yahoo News she voted for John McCain in 2008 but is voting for Obama this time around in part because of his stance on welfare programs.


"I've never been unemployed, I've always been lucky, I've always had a job," Hutner, 40, said. "But if I ever needed help, I would feel like I would be able to get help from the Obama administration and not so much from Romney."


Hutner said she also worries about older workers who were laid off and can't get companies to hire them.


Two of Hutner's female friends adamantly disagreed, however, saying many people on welfare feel "entitled" and are riding the system. "The problem is, everybody counts on that," said Hutner's friend Beverly Brouse, who is voting for Romney. "At some point, that's going to blow up."


Myth No. 3: Women vote like they date


Pundits often conflate a woman's voting and dating preferences. Matthew Dowd, a former aide to President George W. Bush, wrote in an ABC News article ("What women want in a president") that women "want to be in a relationship with a man who is clear, strong, kind ... and can make a woman feel protected and safe." Dowd used this dating prism to postulate that women voters moved to Romney after the first presidential debate in Denver because he came across as strong and the president as weak.


Kevin D. Williamson at National Review argued that because women select reproductive mates for their "status," Romney should emphasize his personal wealth to win the female vote by a landslide.


"From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. ... You can insert your own Mormon polygamy joke here, but the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs," Williamson wrote.


We're not quite sure where the trope that women approach the ballot box like it's an episode of "The Bachelorette" comes from. But pollsters are skeptical of the claims.


"I don't know where that comes from," Langer said.  "I think women base their political attitudes on substantive issues."


Studies have shown that both men and women tend to unconsciously vote for more attractive candidates, which fits in with a large body of research that shows physical attractiveness is rewarded in the workplace.


Because the major presidential candidates over the past 20 years have been wealthy, there's not much research on how a candidate's personal wealth affects voters, male or female.


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Bomb shakes Damascus, opposition holds unity talks

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AMMAN (Reuters) – A bomb exploded near army and security compounds in Damascus, Syrian television reported, and fractured opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad began unity talks abroad to win international respect and arms supplies.


The 50-kilogram (110-pound) bomb, near a large hotel in a heavily guarded district, was described by state media as an attack by “terrorists” – the government’s term for insurgents in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad.













Opposition activists said Sunday’s blast appeared to be the work of the Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) Brigade, an Islamist militant unit that attacked military and intelligence targets several times in the last two months.


The mainly Sunni rebels have carried out a series of bombings targeting government and military buildings in Damascus this year, extending the war into the seat of Assad’s power.


The Syrian conflict has aggravated divisions in the Islamic world, with Shi’ite Iran supporting Assad — whose Alawite faith derives from Shi’ite Islam — and U.S.-allied Sunni nations such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar backing his foes.


The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an activist monitoring group, said government forces had killed 179 people on Sunday. It said most of the dead were civilians killed in shelling of Damascus suburbs and included 14 women and 20 children. The rest were rebels killed in battles in the capital and the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo.


Opposition campaigners said the Syrian army shelled rebel positions inside a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus on Sunday, killing at least 20 people. They said the Yarmouk camp had become the latest battleground in the war.


In northern Idlib, opposition sources said rebels were forced to halt an offensive to take a big air base because of a shortage of ammunition, a problem that has dogged their campaign to cement a hold on the north by eliminating Assad’s devastating edge in firepower.


Islamist insurgents had launched the attack on the Taftanaz military airport at dawn on Saturday, using rocket launchers and at least three tanks captured from the military.


The Syrian government restricts journalists’ access in Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from the ground.


The Jaafar bin Tayyar Division, a rebel unit in Deir al-Zor, said its fighters had taken control of the al-Ward oilfield near the Iraqi border on Sunday, after overrunning a loyalist outpost that had 40 militiamen defending it.


Rebel commanders, former Syrian officials and the Syrian head of an oil services company familiar with oil production in the area said the fields, mostly not operational, had been under de facto rebel control for months.


FEARS OF WIDER CONFLAGRATION


The conflict began with peaceful protest rallies that morphed into armed revolt when Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since 1971, tried to stamp them out with military might. About 32,000 people have been killed, wide swathes of the major Arab state have been wrecked and the civil war threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration.


The opposition talks that began in Qatar marked the first concerted attempt to meld feuding, disparate groups based abroad and coordinate strategy with rebels fighting in Syria.


Divisions between Islamists and secularists as well as between those inside Syria and opposition figures based abroad have foiled prior attempts to forge a united opposition and deterred Western powers from intervening militarily.


Analysts were skeptical the planned four days of opposition talks in the Qatari capital Doha would bring immediate results.


They aim to broaden the Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest of the overseas-based opposition groups, from some 300 members to 400, to pave the way for talks in Doha on Thursday including other anti-Assad factions to crystallise a coalition.


“The main aim is to expand the council to include more of the social and political components. There will be new forces in the SNC,” Abdulbaset Sieda, current leader of the Syrian National Council, told reporters in Doha ahead of the meeting.


The meetings would also elect a new executive committee and leader for the SNC, he said.


A Qatar-based security analyst, who asked not to be named, said the meetings would bring a small step forward, at most. “The Syrian National Council is just too divided,” he said.


In Cairo, the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, called on Sunday for world powers to issue a U.N. Security Council resolution based on a deal they reached in June to set up a transitional Syrian government.


But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the same news conference, dismissed the need for a resolution and said others were stoking violence by backing rebels. His comments highlighted the impasse over Syria’s civil war.


Russia and China, both permanent council members, have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad’s government for the violence. The other three permanent members are the United States, Britain and France.


(Additional reporting by Rania el Gamal and Regan Doherty in Qatar, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Stephen Powell)


World News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Apple sells 3 million iPads over first weekend

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Sandy could cast doubt on election results

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The devastating storm that slammed into the U.S. East Coast last week could send winds of uncertainty through Tuesday's presidential election, narrowing an already close contest and casting doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome.


Though superstorm Sandy is unlikely to determine whether President Barack Obama or Republican Mitt Romney wins the White House, experts said it could expose flaws in how the United States conducts elections, leading to protracted legal wrangling and lingering bitterness in a country already fractured along partisan lines.


In a worst-case scenario, the storm disruption could cause Obama to lose the popular vote and still win re-election, stirring up vitriolic memories of the contested 2000 battle that allowed Republican George W. Bush to triumph over Democrat Al Gore.


Last-minute changes imposed by election officials also could


further arm campaign lawyers looking to challenge the result.


At minimum, low turnout would add another wild card to an election projected to be among the closest in U.S. history. Voting could be an afterthought for hundreds of thousands of people still struggling with power outages, fuel shortages and plummeting temperatures.


"It's a possibility that we'll see significant drops in turnout in some of these densely populated areas," said George Mason University professor Michael MacDonald, a voter turnout expert.


"The effects could be quite dramatic in terms of the popular vote," he said.


ONE MORE HEADACHE


Tuesday's election presents yet another headache for local officials in New York and New Jersey, which were hardest hit by the storm. Rescue workers are still recovering bodies, 1.9 million homes and businesses have no power, and tens of thousands of people are without heat as temperatures dip near freezing.


Sandy, one of the most damaging storms to hit the United States, hammered the region with 80-mile-per-hour (129-kph) winds, while walls of water overran seaside communities. At least 113 people in the United States and Canada died.


Election authorities now face unprecedented challenges. In New York City, 143,000 voters have been assigned new polling stations. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Sunday called the city's elections board "dysfunctional" and warned that it needs to clearly communicate changes to poll workers.


In New Jersey, where 25 percent of homes and businesses have no power, officials are allowing displaced voters to cast their ballots by email. In battered Monmouth County, officials are spreading the word about new polling locations in at least 29 towns and setting aside paper ballots to use if electronic voting machines fail.


"Whatever it takes, Asbury Park is voting," City Manager Terence Reidy said.


Legal experts said the late changes, however well-intentioned, may give the losing candidate a basis to challenge results.


"The devil is in the details and no doubt these new rules will be fertile ground for those who choose to challenge the results in the election." said Angelo Genova, a New Jersey election law expert who represents Democratic candidates in this election.


The post-Sandy chaos also could expose flaws in the arcane electoral college system the United States uses to elect presidents.


Candidates are not required to win the popular vote nationwide, but they must amass a majority of the 538 "electoral votes" that are awarded to each state based on population. The system was set up when the United States was founded, as a compromise between slave states and free states.


Usually the electoral college winner also wins the popular vote. But in two elections - 1876 and 2000 - the results diverged, creating historic controversies.


This year, Obama is expected to handily win New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the states most impacted by the storm. But his popular vote total could fall by hundreds of thousands if large numbers of storm-hit voters in Democratic areas are unable to participate. Conceivably, Obama could win the White House while losing the popular vote.


Several experts said they consider that outcome unlikely.


"You'll see lower turnout, yes, but it's not going to change the outcome of the election," said Hunter College political-science professor Jamie Chandler, who predicts Obama will win by at least 1 million votes.


If Obama carries the popular vote by a narrow margin, it could have implications on his ability to govern effectively, according to Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.


"The more Obama has a solid popular margin the better his victory," he said.


On Sunday, several Republicans said the storm gave Obama an advantage in the campaign's final week by shifting public attention away from the sluggish economy and other topics they hoped to emphasize.


"The hurricane is what broke Romney's momentum," former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said on CNN.


Obama campaign officials said that they are confident the storm will not interfere with the voting process. But they intend to have legal experts on standby just in case.


"We're going to have lawyers who are ready to make sure people can exercise their right to vote. We're going to protect that as fiercely as we can," Obama senior adviser David Plouffe said on Friday.


(Fixes typo in quote in 14th paragraph) (Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Erin Smith, Jonathan Spicer, Philip Barbara and Andrew Longstreth; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Paul Simao)


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Brazil’s ‘pop-star priest’ gets mammoth new stage

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SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil‘s “pop-star priest” is already packing in the crowds at the newly opened mammoth sanctuary that he built for his campaign to stem the exodus of faithful from the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America’s biggest nation.


Brazil still has more Catholics than any other country in the world, with about 65 percent of its 192 million people identifying themselves that way in the 2010 census. But that is down from 74 percent in 2000 and is the lowest since records began tracking religion 140 years ago.





















That’s where Father Marcelo Rossi‘s Mother of God sanctuary comes in. The not-yet-finished structure will seat 6,000 people and have standing room for 14,000 more, church leaders say. In addition, the grounds outside can hold 80,000 people who could watch Mass on outdoor video screens.


After the inaugural Mass on Friday attracted upward of 50,000 people, a beaming Rossi told reporters: “They couldn’t all fit in. There was a crowd that had to stand outside! That’s a sign we’re on the right path, and it’s this sanctuary.”


Similar numbers jammed into the huge church Saturday.


It’s a fitting stage for Rossi, a Latin Grammy-nominated singer who is known for tossing buckets of holy water on worshippers and performing rollicking Christian songs backed by a blasting live band during Mass.


The church sits on 323,000 square feet (30,000 square meters) of land. Church officials declined to confirm how big the actual building is, though local reports put it at 91,500 square feet (8,500 square meters). That would make it one of the world’s 10 biggest churches. A cross soaring 138 feet (42 meters) into the air is the focal point.


The Mother of God sanctuary is anything but traditional. Designed by noted Brazilian architect Ruy Ohtake, it has a wide-open layout giving it the feel of a warehouse. Concrete walls hold up a sloping blue roof that from the outside looks more like a basketball arena than a house of worship. With the church several years away from completion, white plastic chairs were in the place of pews for a lucky few thousand to grab a seat. The rest had to stand.


Rossi dismisses the idea his huge church is a response to the explosion of the evangelical Christian faith in Brazil. Rather, the priest seems to be battling what recent studies indicate is Catholicism’s biggest enemy: indifference.


While millions of Brazilian Catholics joined Pentecostal congregations in the 1990s, a study conducted last year by Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation based on census data found that the Catholics leaving the church these days are mostly becoming nonreligious. Experts have said the trend of Brazilians deciding organized religion isn’t for them poses a more potent threat to Catholic leaders than losses to the Pentecostals.


Rossi chose to open his new church on the Brazilian holiday of Finados, the nation’s version of the Day of the Dead. “A day, a day that was dead, was transformed!” the priest told worshippers during the service, using his gold-plated microphone.


The “pop-star priest” is seen by Brazilian Catholicism as its biggest weapon against the lack of interest, and his new sanctuary adds to his tools of best-selling books and music recordings to keep worshippers interested in what many complain has become a staid institution.


There was nothing stale about his Mass on Friday.


Singing as loud as they could, waving white hankies and swaying with a rocking band, the 20,000 people who jammed into the Mother of God sanctuary hammed it up for TV cameras and shed tears down their cheeks as their superstar priest waved to them from the pulpit. An estimated 30,000 other people had gathered outside, where young boys climbed up into nearby trees trying to get a glimpse of the church grounds as they squinted over a sea of heads streaming out of the sanctuary.


“We have problems, everyone has problems,” worshipper Zuleima de Oliveira Sales said as she stood in the tightly packed sea of people under the soaring blue roof of the structure, her voice choking. “They don’t come to an end, but I have faith, I have faith in Our Lady.”


That’s the sort of belief the Catholic Church is counting on in Brazil and other developing nations. Leaders from the Vatican on down are looking to them as bulwarks against losses in Europe and the U.S., where sex abuse scandals have inspired many people to leave the church. About half of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America.


Pentecostalism was once seen as a major threat to Brazil’s Catholic Church. Pentecostal churches, many of them founded by U.S. evangelicals, saw their membership double to more than 12 percent of the country’s population over the 1990s, with about half of the congregants estimated to be former Catholics.


During the 1990s, Brazil’s economy suffered from hyperinflation and other woes, and Pentecostal churches aggressively recruited in the slums and poor outskirts of Brazil’s cities by offering nuts-and-bolts self-improvement advice as well as Christian ministry.


Since 2003, however, Pentecostal churches have seen growth slow. The percentage of Brazilians calling themselves Pentecostals edged up from 12.5 percent of the population to 13.3 percent.


Yet the Catholic Church has continued to lose parishioners, and church leaders have had little success so far in halting that trend.


Brazil was the first nation outside Europe that Pope Benedict XVI visited, during a five-day tour in 2007 largely aimed at stopping losses in Latin America. During the trip, the pope canonized Brazil’s first native-born saint.


Then Benedict announced last August during the church’s World Youth Day, which drew 1.5 million people to Spain, that the next version of the gathering would be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. The pope is expected to attend.


For now, Rossi hopes his big church will bring together tens of thousands of faithful for every Mass, giving new energy to the Catholic faith.


“People want big spaces. They want grand places for prayer,” he told the Globo TV network. “One candle illuminates, 10 candles illuminate — and 100,000 candles light up so much more.”


Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Anorexic Bakes to Gain Control Over Food

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Camilla Kuhns of Kirkland, Wash., makes the best cookies in the world. Ask anyone but her.


Kuhns is a 29-year-old anorexic with a penchant for baking. She has never tasted one of her own confections. Her younger brother, Seth, samples dough and final products to let her know if anything is off, and her mother, Ilene, tastes the frosting.





















“Yeah, my mom’s my angel when it comes to the frosting,” Kuhns told ABC News Seattle affiliate KOMO-TV right before she entered an inpatient treatment program for her eating disorder two weeks ago. “I don’t know what it is, but it makes me very anxious.”


On her blog, Kuhns said she is 5’8″ and weighs 104 pounds with her shoes and clothes on and while holding her purse. She baked challah breads, cakes and pastries for others to enjoy while her own daily intake amounted to a head of cauliflower with hot sauce and a tablespoon of nuts. To ensure she burned off every single calorie consumed, she exercised for three to four hours a day.


Her best friend, Amber “Nic” Poppe, said that Kuhns has suffered from various eating disorders since she was 11. Both her anorexia and the baking escalated recently after a tough year that included the death of a friend and a messy divorce.


“Baking became therapeutic for her. I know it sounds strange but it seems like her way of overcoming her issues with food,” Poppe said.


Actually, it isn’t so strange. Experts have long noted the connection between eating disorders and baking, as well as cooking, watching cooking shows and collecting recipes.


In a famous 1943 study known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, men put on a semi-starvation diet for six months developed such an intense obsession with food, they daydreamed, read and talked about it constantly. The fixation was so persistent that more than 40 percent of them mentioned cooking as part of their post-experiment plans. After they left the study and regained their weight, three of the men changed their occupations to become chefs.


“I see it a lot this in my practice,” said Jennifer Thomas, an assistant psychologist at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center at McLean Hospital in Boston. “Patients will prepare elaborate meals for friends and family while they themselves go hungry. They get a vicarious joy and a sense of superiority from watching others indulge while they don’t allow themselves to eat.”


As someone who was anorexic for five years, Victoria Casciaro said she can relate. The 20-year-old college student admitted she was also a starving baker who constantly made treats she never considered eating herself.


“I would look at what I put in the mixing bowl and it would scare me because I didn’t have the nutrition facts, so I couldn’t calculate whether or not it was a safe or dangerous food,” she recalled.


Not only would Casciaro resist her sumptuous creations, she would wash her hands frequently during the baking process to prevent herself from accidentally tasting the ingredients. She’d carefully avoid taking even the tiniest nibble for fear that she’d gain weight or set off a binge.


Haley Anderson, a 20-year-old recovering anorexic, said she’d often whip up copious amounts of baked treats for everyone else, then talk herself out of trying them.


“I’d tell myself that taste buds have memory,” she said, “and if you can avoid a certain food long enough then you could forget what it tastes like and no longer be tempted by it.”


Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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