Leah Remini sued by former managers over “Family Tools” commissions






LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Leah Remini‘s new TV gig is already giving her a headache, months before it even starts. Former “King of Queens” star Remini is being sued by her former managers, the Collective Management Group, which claims that it’s owed $ 67,000 in commissions relating to her upcoming ABC comedy “Family Tools,” which debuts May 1.


In a complaint filed with Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, the Collective says that it entered into an agreement with the actress in November 2011 that guaranteed the company 10 percent of the earnings that emerged from projects that Remini “discussed, negotiated, contemplated, or procured/booked during Plaintiff’s representation of Remini,” regardless of whether the income was earned after she and the Collective parted ways.






According to the lawsuit, that would include the $ 1 million that it says Remini will earn for the first season of “Family Tools.” (The suit allows that it isn’t owed commission on a $ 330,000 talent holding fee that Remini received from ABC prior to officially being booked on the show.)


Remini, pictured above wearing the self-satisfied smirk of someone who just might stiff her former managers out of their commission, terminated her agreement with the Collective “without warning or justification” in October, the suit says.


Alleging breach of oral contract among other charges, the suit is asking for an order stipulating that it’s owed the $ 67,000, plus unspecified damages, interest and court costs.


Remini’s agent has not yet responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.


(Pamela Chelin contributed to this report)


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Amgen Workers Helped U.S. in Aranesp Marketing Inquiry





“I hope no one is taping this,” the Amgen manager remarked at a company sales meeting in 2005.




The manager then boasted of how she had given a $10,000 unrestricted grant to a pet project of a doctor who was an adviser to the local Medicare contractor. In turn, she said, the doctor would help persuade the contractor to provide reimbursement for an unapproved use of Amgen’s anemia drug, Aranesp.


Someone, it turned out, was taping it. Jill Osiecki, a longtime sales representative at Amgen, was wearing a recording device under her clothes, transmitting the proceedings to agents of the Department of Health and Human Services.


The result of Ms. Osiecki’s undercover work, and information provided by other whistle-blowers, led to Amgen’s agreement this week to pay $762 million to settle federal investigations regarding the marketing of some of its top-selling drugs.


Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of Federal District Court in Brooklyn accepted the settlement on Wednesday, clearing the way for 10 whistle-blower lawsuits to be unsealed.


Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology company, will pay $150 million in criminal penalties after pleading guilty to one misdemeanor count of marketing Aranesp for unapproved uses and in unapproved doses.


The rest of the money — $612 million — will go to settle civil false claims lawsuits filed by the federal government, states and whistle-blowers. These contain accusations that go well beyond the off-label marketing of Aranesp.


They include off-label marketing of other drugs like Enbrel for psoriasis and Neulasta, which increases the levels of white blood cells. Amgen is also accused of offering kickbacks to doctors and clinics to induce them to use its drugs. These reportedly came as cash, rebates, free samples, educational and research grants, dinners and travel, and other inducements. The government also accused the company of knowingly misreporting the prices of some of its drugs.


Except for those in the criminal count, Amgen denied the other accusations, though it did issue a statement on Wednesday acknowledging the settlement.


“The government raised important concerns in the criminal prosecution,” Cynthia M. Patton, chief compliance officer at Amgen, said in the statement. “Amgen acknowledges that mistakes were made, and we did not live up to our standards.”


Ms. Osiecki, 52, was one of the main whistle-blowers and will be entitled to a share of the settlement. The amount each whistle-blower will receive has not been determined or is being kept confidential, their lawyers said.


Ms. Osiecki worked as a sales representative for Merck for nine years before joining Amgen in 1990, soon after the biotechnology company won regulatory approval for its first product. The company, based outside Los Angeles, had “good science, good products, strong ethics,” Ms. Osiecki said in an interview.


But, she said, the corporate culture changed starting around 2000. That was when new management came in and Aranesp was approved, setting up a fierce marketing battle with Johnson & Johnson and its rival anemia drug, Procrit.


“It was more important to make your numbers than to follow the rules,” said Ms. Osiecki, who was based in Milwaukee and sold Aranesp.


In August 2004, with her concerns mounting, Ms. Osiecki called the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services and left a message. Within days, she was called back, and she went to see an agent, who persuaded her to secretly record meetings. She did that 13 times over about 15 months, mainly sales meetings.


Aranesp is used mainly in a hospital, clinic or physician’s office. It is bought by the medical practice, which can make a profit if the patient and insurers pay more for the use of the drug than the practice paid.


Ms. Osiecki said Amgen “marketed the spread,” trying to make it more profitable for doctors to use Aranesp rather than Procrit.


Such financial inducements could also spur greater overall use of a drug and can violate anti-kickback laws, said Ms. Osiecki’s lawyer, Brian P. Kenney of Kenney & McCafferty in Blue Bell, Pa.


Ms. Osiecki said the first sales meeting at which she wore the recording device, wrapped around her midriff under baggy clothes, was in October 2004 in a Milwaukee hotel. She could look down from the meeting room and see the car parked across the street containing the agent with the receiving device. She said she was not particularly nervous.


The speaker was a pharmacist from an oncology practice going through the numbers on how his practice could make a million dollars more a year using Aranesp rather than Procrit.


Ms. Osiecki said Amgen was careful to cover up such marketing. Spreadsheets showing doctors how much more money they could make using Aranesp were “homemade bread,” meaning they were created by each sales representative, not by the company. And representatives were told not to leave the presentations behind after showing them to doctors.


Her 107-page complaint, filed in late 2004, contains many other accusations.


Other whistle-blowers made other accusations. Kassie Westmoreland, a former sales representative, said Amgen overfilled vials of Aranesp, essentially providing free drugs to doctors. They could then bill Medicare or private insurers for the use of that drug, making an extra profit.


“Amgen was offering a kickback in the form of extra product subsidized by the taxpayers,” said Robert M. Thomas Jr., one of Ms. Westmoreland’s lawyers.


Elena Ferrante and Marc Engelman, both former sales representatives, contended that Amgen promoted Enbrel’s off-label use for mild psoriasis when the drug was approved only for moderate or severe cases of the disease.


Lydia Cotz, one of their lawyers, said the two refused to go along with the off-label marketing. They are now pursuing wrongful termination claims against Amgen in arbitration proceedings that Amgen requires be kept confidential, she said.


“It’s been a very long heroic journey for my clients,” she said.


Ms. Osiecki is now also a former Amgen sales representative. She said that she was fired in December 2005 after she let slip that she had retained a company voice mail message that she thought provided evidence of illegal activity. Leaving the pharmaceutical industry, she moved to Amelia Island, Fla. She now works for a small business.


Mosi Secret and Barry Meier contributed reporting.



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Adding to Rules for Online Privacy





In a move intended to give parents greater control over data collected about their children online, federal regulators on Wednesday broadened longstanding privacy safeguards covering children’s mobile apps and Web sites. Members of the Federal Trade Commission said they updated the rules to keep pace with the growing use of mobile phones and tablets by children.




The regulations also reflect innovations like voice recognition technology, global positioning systems and behavior-based online advertising, or ads tailored to an individual Internet user.


Regulators had not significantly changed the original rule, based on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or Coppa. That rule required operators of Web sites directed at children under 13 to notify parents and obtain their permission before collecting or sharing personal information — like first and last names, phone numbers, home addresses or e-mail addresses — from children.


The intent of that was to give parents control over entities seeking to collect information about their children so that parents could, among other things, prevent unwanted contact by strangers.


The new rule, unveiled at a news conference in Washington, significantly expands the types of companies required to obtain parental permission before knowingly collecting personal details from children, as well as the types of information that will require parental consent to collect.


Jon D. Leibowitz, the chairman of the trade commission, described the rule revision as a major advance for children’s privacy. “Congress enacted Coppa in the desktop era and we live in an era of smartphones and mobile marketing,” Mr. Leibowitz said. “This is a landmark update of a seminal piece of legislation.”


The agency’s expanded privacy protections for children also represent the first step in a larger effort by a few regulators and legislators to give adult consumers some rights to control data collected about them.


“The Coppa rule revisions which we are announcing today are a critical piece in our overall approach to how we deal with consumer privacy in this technological age,” said Julie Brill, a member of the commission.


Industry analysts said the new rule represented a partial victory for Web site operators, app developers and advertising networks because regulators watered down some of their original proposals to which companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter had objected. Apple and Google, for example, opposed proposals that suggested they would be responsible for the data collected by children’s apps sold in their app stores. Regulators have now clarified that general-interest app stores would not be held liable for that.


Yet, few companies lent any support to the commission at its news conference; Viacom and Disney sent representatives, but other companies were absent.


“What we’ve got here is an expansion of Coppa that some in the industry would say has gone too far,” said Alan Friel, a lawyer who leads the media and technology practice at the firm of Edwards Wildman Palmer. “But the F.T.C. has provided exceptions that continue to allow internal use of a child’s data, including one-time use of contact information for facilitating promotions and send-a-friend e-mails.”


In an era of widespread photo sharing, video chatting and location-based apps, the revised children’s privacy rule makes clear that companies must obtain parental consent before collecting certain details that could be used to identify, contact or locate a child. These include photos, video and audio as well as the location of a child’s mobile device.


While the new rule strengthens such safeguards, it could also disrupt online advertising. Web sites and online advertising networks often use persistent identification systems — like a cookie in a person’s browser, the unique serial number on a mobile phone, or the I.P. address of a computer — to collect information about a user’s online activities and tailor ads for that person.


The new rule expands the definition of personal information to include persistent IDs if they are used to show a child behavior-based ads. It also requires third parties like ad networks and social networks that know they are operating on children’s sites to notify and obtain consent from parents before collecting such personal information. And it makes children’s sites responsible for notifying parents about data collection by third parties integrated into their services.


Collecting data to show children contextual ads based on the content of a site or app, however, will not require parental consent. “The only limit we place is on behavioral advertising,” Mr. Leibowitz said. “Until and unless you get parental consent, you may not track children to create massive profiles” for behavior-based ads.


Stuart P. Ingis, a lawyer representing several marketing associations, said that reputable online marketers did not knowingly profile children to show them behavior-based ads. He added that industry guidelines prohibited the practice.


He agreed with regulators that privacy protections for children online needed to keep pace with new technologies. But he said he was concerned that the restrictions on cookie-based identifiers might cause some children’s sites to reduce their use of ad networks to avoid having to notify parents about data collection by those services.


“There might be overreaction that would limit just general third-party collection of data, which is very useful to businesses and consumers,” said Mr. Ingis, who represents the Direct Marketing Association and the Association of National Advertisers.


The revised rule also clarifies requirements for sites that are not primarily directed at young children but whose audience may include them, like a Disney family site, for example. Those sites can now screen visitors by age, but they will be required to obtain permission from a parent to collect personal data about children under 13.


Children’s advocates generally welcomed the strengthened protections.


“Clearly, this is a major step forward, but the devil is in the details,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, an advocacy group in Washington.


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Two more funerals in Newtown; NRA responds to school massacre









NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Two more of the children killed by a gunman who invaded a Connecticut elementary school were buried on Tuesday as officials released new details of the deadly spree that has reshaped the debate over gun control.

The National Rifle Assn., which has been under pressure to comment on the Newtown shootings, broke its silence and issued a statement saying it was ready to offer its plans at a Friday news conference.


“We were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown,” said the pro-gun rights lobbying group, which has repeatedly fought gun-control legislation on the national, state and local levels. “The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.”





PHOTOS: Mourning after the massacre


Both funerals were held at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, which has been one of the centers for consoling the bereaved and for memorial services that began Friday evening, hours after Adam Lanza opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School.


Primarily using a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle, Lanza killed 20 children and six adults in the school before turning a handgun on himself, authorities said. The rampage began Friday morning when Lanza killed his mother, Nancy, in the home they shared.


Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the state’s chief medical examiner, told reporters on Tuesday that Nancy Lanza was shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. She was most likely asleep when she was killed, Carver said, according to the Hartford Courant.


After shooting his mother, Adam Lanza took her car and several of her guns and went to the school, where he forcibly entered and opened fire. The Bushmaster and two handguns were later recovered from the building and a shotgun was found in the car, officials said.


Sandy Hook Elementary remains closed, most likely for months, as investigators continue their work seeking to understand why Lanza did what he did. The hundreds of students at the school are being relocated to a school in nearby Monroe, Conn.


In the rain and cold Tuesday, other Newtown students returned to their schools where teachers were prepared to help them cope with the massacre. Campuses also had a sizable police presence to reassure parents.


One Newtown school, Head O'Meadow Elementary, was locked down Tuesday due to an unspecified threat. The principal told parents to keep their children home, according to a letter from the principal published by WFSB-TV. Police have said they will deal harshly with hoaxes and threats, including two directed over the weekend at St. Rose.


The first funeral Tuesday morning was for James Mattioli, 6. In what has become an ongoing sight, mourners kept their heads down and walked quickly into the building, and refused to comment. The families have repeatedly asked for privacy for their grief, a position backed by local police.


James' funeral was the first of eight to be held at the church. By noon, flowers for the second service, for Jessica Rekos, also 6, had begun to arrive.


James has been described by family members as a budding “numbers guy.” Jessica was a horse enthusiast who wanted cowgirl boots for Christmas, relatives told reporters.


A wake was scheduled Tuesday night for slain teacher Victoria Soto. Police were to be part of an honor guard for Soto, who died trying to protect her students by getting them into a closet and putting her body between the gunman and her charges.


The shootings have reopened the debate on gun-control laws, specifically whether to renew the expired national ban on assault weapons. President Obama has asked his staff to come up with proposals, though no time frame for action has been given. Even staunch pro-gun rights lawmakers have also called for reopening discussion on some bans.


ALSO:

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L.A. girls pay tribute in visit, but Newtown is a day of hearses


'No, no, no': Harrowing 911 call, then 4 dead near Longmont, Colo.


Susman reported from Newtown, Conn., and Muskal from Los Angeles.






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Army Says This General Sexually Abused an Officer, Then Threatened Her Career



An Army general isn’t just accused of sexually assaulting a female subordinate. According to newly released military documents, the one-star general ”threaten[ed] to use his rank, position, and authority to damage or ruin [the captain's] military career if she ended their sexual relationship.” And he disobeyed a direct order from his superior officer to leave the female officer alone.


Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, the former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, “received a lawful command from Major General (O-8) James L. Huggins,” then Sinclair’s superior officer, to cease contact with an unnamed female Army captain that Sinclair stands accused of sodomizing “without [her] consent.” That’s according to Sinclair’s official charge sheet, which Danger Room has acquired. Sinclair “attempt[ed] to willfully disobey the same by calling her cell phone” in March 2012. That attempted contact occurred after Sinclair allegedly sexually abused the captain.


It is unclear from the charge sheet if Huggins knew that Sinclair had forced himself on the captain, who apparently maintained a sexual relationship with Sinclair for years. Huggins recently completed a tour as the 82nd’s commanding officer and commander of U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan. He is slated for a promotion to lieutenant general.


On Tuesday, officials at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, announced that Sinclair will definitely face a court-martial on charges of forcible sodomy, sexual misconduct, conduct unbecoming an officer, and other charges. Sinclair’s arraignment at Fort Bragg is scheduled for Jan. 22.



According to the charge sheet, the married Sinclair displayed “pornographic and sexually explicit photographs and movies” while serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan; used his government charge card for personal uses; and carried “inappropriate relationship[s]” with at least two other female officers, one a major and the other a lieutenant. The charge sheet does not accuse Sinclair of abusing those officers.


Sinclair is also charged with covering up his abuse of the female captain. In March of 2012, while he was serving in Kandahar, the charge sheet alleges Sinclair “wrongfully endeavor[ed]] to impede an investigation in the case of himself, by deleting nude photographs” and the e-mail account that either sent or received them.


As has been previously reported, when criticized for using “derogatory and demeaning words to refer to female staff officers,” Sinclair allegedly responded, “I’m a general, I’ll say whatever the [redacted] I want,” according to the charge sheet, which calls that “conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman.” The female captain allegedly abused by Sinclair testified at a pre-trial hearing at Fort Bragg in November.


Secrecy has surrounded the Sinclair case since it became public in September that Sinclair faced potential prosecution. It’s unusual for the sheet listing the charges facing an accused servicemember to be delayed for so long. Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, told Danger Room in November that it smelled of favoritism shown to a general officer that an enlisted soldier wouldn’t enjoy. The Army insists that’s flat wrong.


“We did not initially release the charge sheets because the Article 32 investigating officer needed to decide if the evidence presented was sufficient to bring forward to the General Court Martial Convening authority for his action,” says Col. Kevin Arata, the spokesman for the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. “Now that the GCMCA has made a decision on those charges, and the accused is being arraigned, we know explicitly what charges are being referred against the accused, thus the release of the redacted charge sheets at this time.”


Gary Solis, a military law scholar at Georgetown University, considers that a credible explanation. “There is much to criticize, when it comes to public access to disciplinary matters denied by the military, but this is not such a case,” Solis tells Danger Room. “To have publicly announced un-investigated charges in the case of a general officer, even this one, would have been a miscarriage of justice, had any of the charges been demonstrated at the 32 to be groundless.”


Davis, unconvinced, adds: “I can’t recall a case where there was public interest where the charges were withheld from public disclosure until after the Convening Authority decided to refer the case to trial.”


Sinclair is one of a number of prominent generals whose ethical lapses have prompted Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to launch an inquiry into whether the military needs to review its ethics training. (Dempsey’s initial findings, delivered last Friday, are that general and flag officers could benefit from ethics refreshers.)


But those other generals either misused small amounts of their official salaries for personal benefit, like Army Gen. William “Kip” Ward and Navy Adm. James Stavridis, or may have had “flirtatious” relationships over e-mail, like Marine Gen. John Allen. Sinclair stands accused of sexually assaulting, harassing and humiliating one of the officers under his command. It’s hard to imagine that a general officer needs a refresher course to understand how wrong that is.


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Newsman’s disappearance largely kept secret






NEW YORK (AP) — NBC was able to keep the abduction of chief Middle East correspondent Richard Engel in Syria largely a secret until he escaped late Monday because it persuaded some of this country’s most prominent news organizations to hold back on the story.


Otherwise, the disappearance of Engel — probably the most high-profile international television reporter on a U.S. network — would have been big news.






Engel and three colleagues, producers Ghazi Balkiz and Aziz Akyavas and photographer John Kooistra, escaped during a firefight between rebels and their captors, forces sympathetic to the Syrian government. The journalists were dragged from their cars, kept bound and blindfolded and threatened with death.


NBC said it did not know what had happened to the men until after their escape. The first sign of trouble came last Thursday, when Engel did not check back with his office at an agreed-upon time.


The Associated Press learned of Engel’s disappearance independently and was asked to keep the news quiet upon contacting NBC, said John Daniszewski, the AP’s vice president and senior managing editor.


“A general principle of our reporting is that we don’t want to write stories that are going to endanger the lives of the people that we are writing about,” Daniszewski said. The first few days after an abduction are often crucial to securing the captive’s release.


CBS News also said that it had honored NBC’s request, but a spokeswoman declined to discuss it. ABC, Fox News and CNN were also contacted by NBC.


CNN, in an editor’s note affixed to a website story on Engel’s escape, noted NBC’s request. CNN said it complied to allow fact-finding and negotiations to free the captors before it became a worldwide story.


“Hostage negotiators say that once the global spotlight is on the missing, the hostages’ value soars, making it much harder to negotiate their freedom,” CNN said.


For similar reasons, the AP did not report its own news several years ago when a photographer was kidnapped in the Gaza Strip, securing his release within a day. In one celebrated case of secrecy, The New York Times withheld news that reporter David Rohde was kidnapped while trying to make contact with a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. Rohde escaped after seven months in captivity.


It wasn’t clear whether Engel’s abductors knew what they had at the time. That knowledge, CNN argued, could have greatly complicated any negotiations. In this case, the captors did not make any ransom demands during the time he was missing.


This isn’t simply a professional courtesy; the AP has withheld news involving overseas contractors in the past, Daniszewski said. For similar reasons, the organization does not reveal details of military or police actions it learns about beforehand if the news will put people at risk, and doesn’t write about leaders heading into war zones until they are safely there.


Still, it’s not a decision lightly taken by news organizations. “The obligation of journalists is to report information, not withhold it, except in exceptional circumstances,” said Robert Steele, a journalism ethics professor at DePauw University.


The news that Engel was missing was first reported Monday by Turkish journalists who had heard about Akyavas’ involvement, and was picked up by the U.S. website Gawker.com. In explaining why the news was reported, Gawker’s John Cook wrote that no one had told him of a specific or even general threat to Engel’s safety.


“I would not have written a post if someone had told me that there was a reasonable or even remote suspicion that anything specific would happen if I wrote the post,” Cook wrote.


He also noted that China’s Xinhua News Agency and the Breitbart website had also reported on Engel’s disappearance. Breitbart’s John Nolte attached a note to his report saying that he wasn’t even aware of any news embargo until after hearing that Engel had been released.


The news was also tweeted by a small number of journalists, apparently unaware of the embargo request.


Whether a disappearance has become widely known could influence a decision by AP on whether to withhold the news, Daniszewski said. In this case, it wasn’t clear that it had been widely circulated, he said.


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Attackers in Pakistan Kill Anti-Polio Workers


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A Pakistani mother mourned her daughter, who was killed on Tuesday in an attack on health workers participating in a drive to eradicate polio from Pakistan.







ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gunmen shot dead five female health workers who were immunizing children against polio on Tuesday, causing the Pakistani government to suspend vaccinations in two cities and dealing a fresh setback to an eradication campaign dogged by Taliban resistance in a country that is one of the disease’s last global strongholds.




“It is a blow, no doubt,” said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, an adviser on polio to Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. “Never before have female health workers been targeted like this in Pakistan. Clearly there will have to be more and better arrangements for security.”


No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but most suspicion focused on the Pakistani Taliban, which has previously blocked polio vaccinators and complained that the United States is using the program as a cover for espionage.


The killings were a serious reversal for the multibillion-dollar global polio immunization effort, which over the past quarter century has reduced the number of endemic countries from 120 to just three: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.


Nonetheless, United Nations officials insisted that the drive would be revived after a period for investigation and regrouping, as it had been after previous attacks on vaccinators here, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.


Pakistan has made solid gains against polio, with 56 new recorded cases of the diseases in 2012, compared with 192 at the same point last year, according to the government. Worldwide, cases of death and paralysis from polio have been reduced to less than 1,000 last year, from 350,000 worldwide in 1988.


But the campaign here has been deeply shaken by Taliban threats and intimidation, though several officials said Tuesday that they had never seen such a focused and deadly attack before.


Insurgents have long been suspicious of polio vaccinators, seeing them as potential spies. But that greatly intensified after the C.I.A. used a vaccination team headed by a local doctor, Shakil Afridi, to visit Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, reportedly in an attempt to obtain DNA proof that the Bin Laden family was there before an American commando raid attacked it in May 2011.


In North Waziristan, one prominent warlord has banned polio vaccinations until the United States ceases drone strikes in the area.


Most new infections in Pakistan occur in the tribal belt and adjoining Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province — some of the most remote areas of the country, and also those with the strongest militant presence. People fleeing fighting in those areas have also spread the disease to Karachi, the country’s largest city, where the disease has been making a worrisome comeback in recent years.


After Tuesday’s attacks, witnesses described violence that was both disciplined and well coordinated. Five attacks occurred within an hour in different Karachi neighborhoods. In several cases, the killers traveled in pairs on motorcycle, opening fire on female health workers as they administered polio drops or moved between houses in crowded neighborhoods.


Of the five victims, three were teenagers, and some had been shot in the head, a senior government official said. Two male health workers were also wounded by gunfire; early reports incorrectly stated that one of them had died, the official said.


In Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, gunmen opened fire on two sisters participating in the polio vaccination program, killing one of them. It was unclear whether that shooting was directly linked to the Karachi attacks.


In remote parts of the northwest, the Taliban threat is exacerbated by the government’s crumbling writ. In Bannu, on the edge of the tribal belt, one polio worker, Noor Khan, said he quit work on Tuesday once news of the attacks in Karachi and Peshawar filtered in. “We were told to stop immediately,” he said by phone.


Still, the Pakistani government has engaged considerable political and financial capital in fighting polio. President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa have been at the forefront of immunization drives. With the help of international donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they have mounted a huge vaccination campaign aimed at up to 35 million children younger than 5, usually in three-day bursts that can involve 225,000 health workers.


The plan seeks to have every child in Pakistan immunized at least four times per year, although in the hardest-hit areas one child could be reached as many as 12 times in a year.


Declan Walsh reported from Islamabad, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.



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China cracking down on doomsday group









BEIJING — For members of a doomsday cult in China, the end may indeed be near.


Authorities have in recent weeks arrested more than 100 members of a fringe Christian-inspired group known as Almighty God that is prophesying the world will end Dec. 21, according to state media.


Members of the group had been distributing apocalyptic literature and sending text messages throughout China when the government began detaining them this month. On Dec. 8, police arrested 34 members in Fujian province, which lies on China's southeastern coast. On Thursday, they arrested 37 members, including seven leaders in Xining, a city in the west-central province of Qinghai. There have also been arrests in Sichuan and Hubei provinces and elsewhere.





"Dec. 21 is approaching, and on that day half of the world's good people will die, and all evil people will die out — only if you join the Almighty God movement can you avoid death and be saved," warned a pamphlet confiscated by police in Shaoxing city, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and quoted by state media. A text message predicted, "Great tsunamis and earthquakes are about to happen around the world."


Perhaps more threatening to the Chinese government, the group also urged followers to wage war on what it called the "big red dragon," referring to the Communist Party.


In Henan province, authorities said that the suspect held in a slashing attack that injured 23 schoolchildren Friday had acted "under the influence of doomsday beliefs." It was unclear, however, whether the authorities were linking the man to the same group.


The suspect, Min Yongjun, had believed a local woman who had been telling villagers that “the end of the world is coming and the Earth will explode,” Ouyang Mingxing, a deputy director of Guangshan’s public security bureau, told the state-run Global Times. The official added that police found more than 70 pamphlets in the woman's home.


Unmonitored religious sects are regarded as a serious threat by the Chinese Communist Party. Falun Gong, an indigenous religious group that began agitating against the government in the 1990s, likewise calls for the party's downfall.


The government's wariness stems in part from the powerful influence such groups can exert in a land largely devoid of organized religion but riddled with a lack of trust, said sociologist Zhou Xiaozheng of People's University.


"Because China has no established religion, people looking for a way to set their minds at ease may turn to cults," said Zhou. "People don't believe in what the government says, so they may wind up believing in wild rumors."


Major rebellions against Chinese authority have sprung from Christian sects in the past. The Taiping Rebellion in the 19th century, started by a man who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, led to civil war and contributed to the fall of the last Chinese dynasty.


Several Protestant groups currently active in China have published accounts of their dealings with the Almighty God movement, also known as Eastern Lightning. According to the Christian Research Journal, a man named Zhao Weishan founded the movement in Heilongjiang province in 1989. Zhao later moved to Henan province, where he began to teach that Jesus Christ had returned to Earth in the form of a Henan woman named Deng. Zhao reportedly immigrated to America in 2000.


The Almighty God movement has given other religious groups and the government cause for concern. Some Protestant groups say the sect — which one group, China for Jesus, estimates is 1 million strong — has engaged in kidnapping, coercion and blackmail directed against other churches.


Doomsday theories have proved popular in China in recent years. The film "2012," which describes a set of catastrophic geological events, set box-office records when it was released in China in 2009. Columbia Pictures released a 3-D version for the Chinese audience late this year.


Chinese authorities are trying to keep people from taking the latest apocalyptic scenario too seriously, warning that the rumors are causing "unrest and panic buying … undermining social order and cheating people out of their money," as the official China Daily newspaper put it.


Stores in some areas were reported to be out of candles because of predictions of three days of darkness.


Scientists have been urged to speak out in public about the fallacy of the predictions.


"Dec. 21 is the winter solstice and it's just the change of seasons.... The day is short and the night is long, but it's a normal, natural event," Yang Guang, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories satellite observation station in Changchun, was quoted as telling the China Daily.


At least one company in the southern city of Kunming was reported by state media to be offering its employees a day off work and survival kits — partly as a joke.


Fears of a fast-approaching day of reckoning have also provided inspiration to Chinese inventors. A farmer in Hebei province and a businessman in Yiwu, a town south of Shanghai, separately developed large survival pods for use in case of calamity. The Yiwu entrepreneur said customers had ordered 28 pods for delivery before Dec. 21.


Hannon is an intern in The Times' Beijing bureau. Times staff writer Barbara Demick contributed to this report.





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Cosmo the God Hijacks Twitter Account of Hateful 'Church'



The 15-year-old hacker known as Cosmo the God was behind the takeover of a Westboro Baptist Church member’s Twitter feed, a source with direct knowledge of the attack confirmed to Wired on Monday.


Cosmo gained access to the @DearShirley Twitter account via an e-mail account, and from there was able to leverage control of the Twitter feed itself, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. As of this writing, the account remains up and operating, and seemingly beyond the control of its owner.


Westboro Baptist Church is notorious for picketing funerals of American soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last week the organization apparently announced its intention to protest at the funerals of the children killed at Sandy Hook, with spokewoman Shirley Lynn Phelps-Roper tweeting the following: “Westboro will picket Sandy Hook Elementary School to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment.”


The sentiment was echoed on Westboro Baptist Church’s website, which included the line “God sent the shooter to Newton, CT.”


The announcement triggered astonished outrage from observers, and the hacker group Anonymous declared open season on the group, publishing contact information for many of its members, including Phelps-Roper. Phelps-Roper’s Twitter account @DearShirley was then taken over early Monday morning.


Cosmo the God has been able to keep control of the account using a flaw in Twitter’s Zendesk system that allows an attacker to close an account support ticket before it’s acted on, according to the source, who demonstrated inside knowledge of the account takeover.

Cosmo and his group UG Nazi took part in many of the highest-profile hacking incidents of 2012, including taking down websites for NASDAQ, CIA.gov, and UFC.com, redirecting 4Chan’s DNS to point to its own Twitter feed, and defeating CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince’s Google two-step authentication.


The teen’s social-engineering techniques allowed him to gain access to user accounts at Amazon, PayPal and a slew of other companies. He was arrested in June, as part of a multi-state FBI sting and was recently sentenced to probation until his 21st birthday, during which time he is prohibited from using the internet without supervision and prior consent.


The latest hack would seem to violate those terms. But it’s garnered Cosmo an unending stream of Twitter praise. “I love that @cosmothegod hacked @DearShirley!! I’m glad that there is one less hateful twitter account,” wrote one fan. “I think @cosmothegod deserves a medal for hacking @DearShirley and making everyone’s day,” another tweeted.


Wired sought to reach Westboro Baptist Church for comment, but its phone line was consistently busy.


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Amazon adds episodes of alt-comedy show “UnCabaret”






LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Amazon Instant Video has added four exclusive episodes of “UnCabaret,” an alt-comedy showcase for the likes of Margaret Cho and Andy Dick, to its Prime Instant Video service.


The show was created and hosted by comedian and entertainer Beth Lapides and features performances by such comedy stars as Sandra Bernhard, Garfunkle and Oates, Greg Fitzsimmons and Rob Delaney. Instead of punch-line driven sets, performers are encouraged to show off story-based stream-of-consciousness acts.






Amazon Prime members will get free access to the titles. The episodes will be available for rental or purchase for Amazon Instant Video customers on an a la carte basis.


Amazon Prime costs $ 79 annually and gives members free two-day shipping as well as streaming access to movies and shows from the likes of Paramount and Disney-ABC. The catalog of titles grew a little larger Monday. In addition to “UnCabaret,” Amazon announced an exclusive content licensing agreement with Turner Broadcasting System and Warner Bros. TV to add two TNT shows, “Falling Skies” and “The Closer” to its service.


TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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