China's new leadership faces obstacles to rule

BEIJING (AP) — Months of sharp behind-the-scenes jostling reach a climax Thursday with the announcement of a new Chinese leadership that almost regardless of its makeup is likely to be much like the one it replaces: divided, deliberative and weak.

All but officially announced, Xi Jinping is expected to head the new leadership as Communist Party chief, joined by Li Keqiang, the presumptive prime minster, in a choreographed succession that began five years ago when the two were anointed as successors. Alongside them at the apex of power, the Politburo Standing Committee, will be a handful of senior politicians drawn from top positions in the provinces and bureaucracies.

Their ascent was nudged along Wednesday when a weeklong party congress closed by naming Xi, Li and the other leading candidates to the Central Committee, a 205-member body which appoints the new leadership Thursday. Left off the list was Hu Jintao, who is retiring as party chief after 10 years. A top general told reporters that Hu is also relinquishing his sole remaining powerful post, as head of the military, a significant break from the past that would give Xi leeway to establish his authority.

Leadership lineups typically strike a balance between different interest groups in the 82 million-member party. None of new leaders owe their positions to Xi, but to other political patrons. Decisions are made largely by consensus, forcing Xi to bargain with his colleagues who have their own allegiances and power bases. Party elders, with Hu being the newest, exert influence over major policies through their proteges, further constraining Xi.

While China's leadership may have an image in the rest of the world as decisive and all-powerful, the reality is that decision-making tends to be a slow-going affair.

"It's a power game," said Zheng Yongnian, a China politics expert at the National University of Singapore. "The Standing Committee doesn't function well. They all have to agree, and there are too many checks on each other, so nothing gets done."

If not gridlock, the incremental, step-by-step policy-making of the past comes as China confronts slowing growth, a cavernous rich-poor gap and a clamor for change, in protests and on the Internet, for better government and curbing corruption and the privileges of the politically connected elite.

"Even for a coherent leadership, those problems are challenging, not to mention a divided leadership, which hasn't consolidated its own power base," said Zhu Jiangnan of Hong Kong University.

Unlike the stiff, ultra-reserved Hu, the 59-year-old Xi exudes a comfort with his authority, as befits the son of a hero of the revolution born into the Communist elite. Like Xi, the rest of the leadership came of age as China reopened universities and reached out to the world after the isolation of Mao Zedong's radical rule. As such, their educational backgrounds are more varied than those of Hu and the engineers he led, and they're believed to be more open to ideas.

Charisma is feared by the party, which promotes capable administrators. Bo Xilai, a telegenic top politician once considered a candidate for the leadership, was purged this year in a scandal that buffeted the party. Though he is accused of corruption and aiding the cover-up of his wife's murder of a British businessman, his crime may have been his populist rhetoric and policies that gave him a popular following, but alienated other leaders.

"The system discourages people of unique personalities. It often results in those with colorful characteristics losing out," said Wang Zhengxu of Britain's University of Nottingham.

China's long march to collective leadership marked a concerted attempt to move away from the ruinous later years of Mao when he was worshipped as infallible and factions battled each other like street gangs. Millions of Chinese died or saw their lives and careers upended in the persecution.

The victor in the struggle for power after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping, sought to end the cult of personality and put China on the path of market-oriented reforms. He was the last strongman from the revolutionary generation, able to summon alliances across the party, the government and the military and impose his vision on others. Ever since, each successive generation of leaders has been forced into painstaking coalition-building to get things done.

The most rumored leadership lineup among Beijing's political watchers seems to favor allies of Jiang Zemin, the 86-year-old former party supremo who stepped aside for Hu a decade ago. Aside from Xi, a Jiang protege, and premier-in-waiting Li, who is Hu's man, the contenders include Zhang Dejiang and Zhang Gaoli, two technocrats who worked with Jiang, and Liu Yunshan, the strict propaganda czar who counts Hu as an early career ally and Jiang as a later mentor.

Certain to be included is Wang Qishan, a longtime trouble-shooter who was named to the party's internal watchdog agency on Wednesday. Also in the running is Yu Zhengsheng, Shanghai's party secretary whose main qualification is his family's ties to long-dead reformist patriarch Deng, another sign of the lingering influence of party elders.

If true — and bargaining continued to take place over the past week, according to party-connected academics in Beijing — the roster leaves out key Hu allies. It's also heavy on older politicians who under current practice would have to retire at the next congress in five years. That's a recipe for continued wrangling as Hu's proteges, feeling left out, resist Xi's rule and campaign for the next leadership, political analysts said.

"China's not a democracy but the leadership is a not a monolithic group," said Cheng Li, a Chinese elite politics expert at the Brookings Institute in Washington. "Balance is important because it's in everyone's interests."

Even with unity in its ranks, Xi's collective leadership will need the better part of a year to assemble a full team. Government offices, like the prime minister or the ceremonial state presidency Hu still holds, do not change hands until the legislature meets in March, delaying the transition.

Should Hu give up his role as head of the military commission, he can still count on the commanders he has promoted across the services of the People's Liberation Army. Proof of that muscle came on the eve of the congress. A general whom Hu appointed to manage the military parade for the 60th anniversary of Communist rule in 2009, Fang Fenghui, was named chief of the general staff and a vice chairman of the commission.

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Associated Press writer Christopher Bodeen contributed to this report.

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Petraeus affair and the role of biographers

NEW YORK (AP) — The affair between retired Army Gen. David Petraeus and author Paula Broadwell is but an extreme example of the love/hate history between biographers and their subjects.

Even before their outing led to Petraeus' resignation as CIA director, Broadwell had been criticized for the rosy tone of "All In," which The Associated Press described in 2011 as "part hagiography and part defense" of his strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as long as biographies are written by and about human beings, scientific precision will remain an ideal. The stories of famous women and men often are colored by rapture and disenchantment, confusion and bias.

"As with psychiatrists, same with biographers, you shouldn't sleep with your subject," Blake Bailey, the prize-winning biographer of authors John Cheever and Richard Yates, said with a laugh.

"The ideal case is to have no assumptions. ... But it is possible to write a great book and have strong opinions. ('Eminent Victorians' author) Lytton Strachey, the father of all modern biographers, had a very distinctive voice and a very distinctive perspective — a person looking down from the world at a great distance, quite disparagingly, but with vast humor that informs every word."

Broadwell conducted extensive interviews with both critics and supporters of Petraeus, but the finished story was overwhelmingly positive. She is far from alone in allowing personal or professional regard to shape a biography, especially when the subject cooperates. Flattering books come out all the time, whether a biography of Dick Cheney by Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes or Chris Matthews' "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero."

Years spent together, as Broadwell had with Petraeus in Afghanistan, can make the biographer's experience intensely personal, whether sexual or not. Walter Isaacson did not avoid the unpleasant side of Steve Jobs, but acknowledged he had bonded strongly with the dying Apple CEO. Doris Kearns Goodwin was an aide to Lyndon Johnson who sometimes took notes while the ex-president lay in her bed, a relationship that she called platonic and described in her book on him, "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream."

Some relationships end in court. Jimmy McDonough spent years working on an authorized biography of Neil Young, only to have Young withdraw support and attempt to stop publication, leading to mutual lawsuits and delay in the release of "Shakey," which came out in 2002. Some biographers seem energized by perceived sins, like the late Albert Goldman and his takedowns of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Others use scholarship to build up or pick apart a figure from the distant past. Jon Meacham's new biography of Thomas Jefferson praises him as a subtle and effective politician, while a competing book, Henry Wiencek's "Master of the Mountain," faults Jefferson as a calculating slave holder who tolerated brutality.

David McCullough has likened the biographer's choice to picking a roommate, one you must live with for years. McCullough himself abandoned a Picasso book out of distaste for the painter's private life and chose men he related to for his two Pulitzer Prize winning presidential biographies, Harry Truman and John Adams. Former JFK aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. won a Pulitzer for "A Thousand Days," his book on the Kennedy administration. But his reverence for the late president led Gore Vidal to dismiss "A Thousand Days" as a "political novel."

Biography often is the art of reconciling opposites. Robert Caro, the prize-winning biographer of New York municipal builder Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, has taken on men who have both inspired and dismayed him. A former investigative journalist, Caro sees his job as collecting as much information as possible and only then forming opinions. There is no such thing as "objective truth," he says, but there are enough "objective facts" to bring you close.

For his Moses and Johnson books, Caro has relied upon countless documents and interviews. He has labeled his Johnson series, begun soon after the president's death and still going, as a narrative of darkness and light, of the basest cruelty and the noblest achievement. His Moses book, "The Power Broker," was another epic of greatness and destruction and even more complicated to write because he actually interviewed Moses.

"You were awed by seeing the scope of his vision as he talked about it to you and explained it to you. You see him standing in front of this map, with a yellow pencil and sharp point, just gesturing toward this tri-state area that he sees as one entity and has a vision for it," says Caro, whose book was harshly criticized by Moses, but won the Pulitzer in 1975 and is now standard reading.

"But I was simultaneously talking to the people he had displaced, hounded them out of their homes. You have to show both of these things, his genius and its effect on people."

Authors have followed paths they never imagined before starting a book or encountering the subject. Edmund Morris was a prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, but the chance to write about a living president led him to take unusual license. Granted years of access to Ronald Reagan, Morris was left so mystified that he inserted a fictionalized version of himself into the book, "Dutch," as a way of making sense out of the president.

Jane Leavy, author of a well-regarded biography on Mickey Mantle, said she had a hard time starting the book because of her childhood worship for the New York Yankees star. She decided the best way to move ahead was to acknowledge up front her memories, and map out the life of the flawed and troubled man she came to know and to hear about.

"He was multidimensional and far more complicated than the hagiographic biographies I read in school or the dark stories about him being a womanizer and an offensive drunk," she says. "No one is one way or another. The fact he was horrible to his wife doesn't invalidate his skill. So the task became why he treated people the way he did. And that's the biographer's job."

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Ireland probes death of ill abortion-seeker

DUBLIN (AP) — The debate over legalizing abortion in Ireland flared Wednesday after the government confirmed that a miscarrying woman suffering from blood poisoning was refused a quick termination of her pregnancy and died in an Irish hospital.

Prime Minister Enda Kenny said he was awaiting findings from three investigations into the death of Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian who was 17 weeks pregnant. Her case highlights the bizarre legal limbo in which pregnant women facing severe health problems can find themselves in predominantly Catholic Ireland.

Ireland's constitution officially bans abortion, but a 1992 Supreme Court ruling found the procedure should be legalized for situations when the woman's life is at risk from continued pregnancy. Five governments since have refused to pass a law resolving the confusion, leaving Irish hospitals reluctant to terminate pregnancies except in the most obviously life-threatening circumstances.

In practice the vast bulk of Irish women wanting abortions, an estimated 4,000 per year, simply travel next door to England, where abortion has been legal on demand since 1967. But that option is difficult, if not impossible, for women in failing health.

University Hospital Galway in western Ireland declined to say whether doctors believed Halappanavar's blood poisoning could have been reversed had she received an abortion rather than wait for the fetus to die on its own. In a statement, it described its own investigation into the death, and a parallel probe by the national government's Health Service Executive, as "standard practice" whenever a pregnant woman dies in a hospital. The Galway coroner also planned a public inquest.

Savita Halappanavar's husband, Praveen, said doctors determined she was miscarrying within hours of her hospitalization for severe pain on Sunday, Oct. 21. He said that over the next three days doctors refused their requests for an abortion to combat her surging pain and fading health.

"Savita was really in agony. She was very upset, but she accepted she was losing the baby," he told The Irish Times in a telephone interview from Belgaum, southwest India. "When the consultant came on the ward rounds on Monday morning, Savita asked if they could not save the baby, could they induce to end the pregnancy? The consultant said: 'As long as there is a fetal heartbeat, we can't do anything.'

"Again on Tuesday morning ... the consultant said it was the law, that this is a Catholic country. Savita said: 'I am neither Irish nor Catholic,' but they said there was nothing they could do," Praveen Halappanavar said.

He said his wife vomited repeatedly and collapsed in a restroom that night, but doctors wouldn't terminate the fetus because its heart was still beating.

The fetus died the following day and its remains were surgically removed. Within hours, Praveen Halappanavar said, his wife was placed under sedation in intensive care with blood poisoning and he was never able to speak with her again. By Saturday her heart, kidneys and liver had stopped working and she was pronounced dead early Sunday, Oct. 28.

The couple had settled in 2008 in Galway, where Praveen Halappanavar works as an engineer at the medical devices manufacturer Boston Scientific. His wife qualified as a dentist but had taken time off for her pregnancy. Her parents in India had just visited them in Galway and left the day before her hospitalization.

Praveen Halappanavar said he took his wife's remains back to India for a Hindu funeral and cremation Nov. 3. News of the circumstances that led to her death emerged Tuesday in Galway after the Indian community canceled the city's annual Diwali festival. Savita Halappanavar had been one of the festival's main organizers.

Opposition politicians appealed Wednesday for Kenny's government to introduce legislation immediately to make the 1992 Supreme Court judgment part of statutory law. Barring any such bill, the only legislation defining the illegality of abortion in Ireland dates to 1861 when the entire island was part of the United Kingdom. That British law, still valid here due to Irish inaction on the matter, states it is a crime punishable by life imprisonment to "procure a miscarriage."

In the 1992 case, a 14-year-old girl identified in court only as "X'' successfully sued the government for the right to have an abortion in England. She had been raped by a neighbor. When her parents reported the crime to police, the attorney general ordered her not to travel abroad for an abortion, arguing this would violate Ireland's constitution.

The Supreme Court ruled she should be permitted an abortion in Ireland, never mind England, because she was making credible threats to commit suicide if refused one. During the case, the girl reportedly suffered a miscarriage.

Since then, Irish governments twice have sought public approval to legalize abortion in life-threatening circumstances — but excluding a suicide threat as acceptable grounds. Both times voters rejected the proposed amendments.

Legal and political analysts broadly agree that no Irish government since 1992 has required public approval to pass a law that backs the Supreme Court ruling. They say governments have been reluctant to be seen legalizing even limited access to abortion in a country that is more than 80 percent Catholic.

Coincidentally, the government said it received a long-awaited expert report Tuesday night proposing possible changes to Irish abortion law shortly before news of Savita Halappanavar's death broke. The government commissioned the report two years ago after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland's inadequate access to abortions for life-threatening pregnancies violated European Union law.

An abortions right group, Choice Ireland, said Halappanavar might not have died had any previous government legislated in line with the X judgment. Earlier this year, the government rejected an opposition bill to do this.

"Today, some 20 years after the X case, we find ourselves asking the same question: If a woman is pregnant, her life in jeopardy, can she even establish whether she has a right to a termination here in Ireland?" said Choice Ireland spokeswoman Stephanie Lord.

Yet the World Health Organization identifies Ireland as an unusually safe place to be pregnant. Its most recent report on global maternal death rates found that only three out of every 100,000 women die in childbirth in Ireland, compared with an average of 14 in Europe and North America, 190 in Asia and 590 in Africa.

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FBI finds classified docs in Petraeus' lover's house

Paula Broadwell, the author who allegedly had an affair with former CIA
Director David Petraeus, is suspected of storing significant amounts of
military documents, including classified material, at her home,
potentially in violation of federal law.

A source familiar with case told ABC News that Broadwell admitted to the
FBI she took the documents from secure government buildings. The
government demanded that they all be given back, and when federal agents
descended on her North Carolina home on Monday night it was a
pre-arranged meeting.

Prosecutors are now determining whether to charge Broadwell with a
crime, and this morning the FBI and military are poring over the
material. The 40-year-old author, who wrote the biography on Gen.
Petraeus "All In," is cooperating and the case, which is complicated by
the fact that as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Military Reserve
she had security clearance to review the documents.

FULL COVERAGE: David Petraeus Scandal

The FBI found classified material on a computer voluntarily handed over
by Broadwell earlier in the investigation. Prosecutors will now have to
determine how important the classified material is before making a final
decision. Authorities could decide to seek disciplinary action against
her rather than pursue charges.

Senior FBI officials are expected to brief the House and Senate
Intelligence Committees today on their handling of the Petraeus
investigation. The officials are expected to lay out how the case was
developed and argue that there were no politics involved.

The case is so critical that FBI Director Robert Mueller may attend to
defend the bureau, ABC News has learned. Members of Congress have been
angry that they were not informed about the case before the story was
reported by the media, but FBI officials maintain that their guidelines
forbid them from discussing ongoing criminal cases.

This summer, Florida socialite and "honorary ambassador" to the military Jill Kelley
received anonymous emails accusing her of flaunting a friendly
relationship with military brass in Tampa. Kelley then called the FBI,
which traced those emails back to Broadwell's computer. Investigators
are said to have then found emails in Broadwell's inbox that pointed to
an intimate affair with Petraeus, who on Friday admitted to the affair
and announced his resignation as CIA director.

See the timeline of the Petraeus/Broadwell affair HERE.

The FBI has now uncovered "potentially inappropriate" emails between
Gen. John Allen, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, and
Kelley, according to a senior U.S. defense official who is traveling with
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. The department is reviewing between
20,000 and 30,000 documents connected to this matter, the official said.
The email exchanges between Kelley and Allen took place from 2010 to
2012.

The U.S. official said the emails were "innocuous" and mostly about
upcoming dinner parties and seeing him on TV. Allen denies he was
involved in an affair, a Pentagon official said. An intermediary for
Allen told ABC News that Allen and his wife are friends with Kelley and
her husband and most of the emails were sent from Kelley to Allen's
wife.

A U.S. official said Allen may have triggered the investigation when he
got an anonymous email a few months ago that was traced to Broadwell.
The email had a "Kelley Patrol" return address or subject line and
painted Kelley as a seductress, which Allen found alarming and mentioned
to Kelley in a subsequent email, the official said.

The official described Kelley as a "nice, bored rich socialite who drops
the honorary from her title... and tells people she is an ambassador.
She gets herself in anything related to Centcom and all the senior
people and has been for years."

MORE: Jill Kelley and Twin Closely Tied to Top Brass

Leon Panetta: 'No One Should Leap to Any Conclusions' Regarding Gen. Allen

Panetta cautioned that "no one should leap to any conclusions" about allegations against Allen over the investigation.

Panetta said he supports Allen, who has been in command in Kabul since
July 2011. He took over that summer for Petraeus, who retired from the
Army to take over as the head of the CIA.

"He certainly has my continued confidence to lead our forces and to
continue the fight," Panetta said at a news conference in Perth,
Australia, Wednesday.

Panetta declined to explain the nature of Allen's correspondence with
Kelley, connected to the scandal that led to Petraeus' resignation last
week as director of the CIA.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who appeared with Panetta,
declined to comment on the Allen case, but insured the scandal has not
harmed the war effort.

"There has been a lot of conversation, as you might expect, but no
concern whatsoever being expressed to us because the mission has been
set forth and it's being carried out," Clinton said.

Allen had been nominated as the next commander of U.S. European Command
and the commander of NATO forces in Europe, and despite President
Obama's backing, the nomination has been put on hold. The change of
command at NATO is currently slated to not take place until March at the
earliest.

Allen was supposed to appear before a Senate confirmation hearing this
Thursday alongside his designated replacement, Marine Gen. Joseph
Dunford. Panetta said that while the matter is being investigated by
the Defense Department IG, Allen will remain in his post as commander of
the International Security Assistance Force, based in Kabul.

Also Read

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A look at US generals in Afghan war

A look at what went wrong for the four U.S. generals who have led U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan since 2008:

Gen. David McKiernan, June 2008 to June 2009

-Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for McKiernan's resignation a year before his term as commander was set to end. The firing was seen as a rejection by newly elected President Barack Obama of McKiernan's conventional warfare approach in favor of the more targeted "counterinsurgency" strategy of working to undermine insurgents' pull on the population.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, June 2009 to June 2010

-McChrystal, who had a background in special operations, came in with a mandate to remake the war effort with the help of "surge" troops ordered by Obama. A year into that push, an article in Rolling Stone magazine quoted members of McChrystal's team making disparaging comments about their commander in chief and other senior administration officials. Obama called McChrystal back to Washington to explain and forced him to resign.

Gen. David Petraeus, July 2010 to July 2011

-Petraeus took over the Afghan command to fill the void left by McChrystal's abrupt departure and agreed to serve for one year. He completed that term and then retired from the military to become CIA director in September 2011. Petraeus resigned as CIA director on Nov. 9 after he had an extramarital affair with his biographer. The affair came out as part of an FBI investigation into suspicious emails between the biographer and another woman.

Gen. John Allen, July 2011 to present

-Allen was appointed by Obama to oversee the drawdown of U.S. and international forces ahead of the planned transfer of security responsibility to the Afghan government in 2014. Pentagon officials said early Tuesday that Allen is under investigation for thousands of alleged "inappropriate communications" with the second woman involved in the Petraeus case, a Florida socialite. Allen's nomination to become the next commander of U.S. European Command and the commander of NATO forces in Europe has now been put on hold.

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Day-Lewis heeded inner ear to find Lincoln's voice

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A towering figure such as Abraham Lincoln, who stood 6 feet 4 and was one of history's master orators, must have had a booming voice to match, right? Not in Daniel Day-Lewis' interpretation.

Day-Lewis, who plays the 16th president in Steven Spielberg's epic film biography "Lincoln," which goes into wide release this weekend, settled on a higher, softer voice, saying it's more true to descriptions of how the man actually spoke.

"There are numerous accounts, contemporary accounts, of his speaking voice. They tend to imply that it was fairly high, in a high register, which I believe allowed him to reach greater numbers of people when he was speaking publicly," Day-Lewis said in an interview. "Because the higher registers tend to reach farther than the lower tones, so that would have been useful to him."

"Lincoln" is just the fifth film in the last 15 years for Day-Lewis, a two-time Academy Award winner for best actor ("My Left Foot" and "There Will Be Blood"). Much of his pickiness stems from a need to understand characters intimately enough to feel that he's actually living out their experiences.

The soft, reedy voice of his Lincoln grew out of that preparation.

"I don't separate vocal work, and I don't dismember a character into its component parts and then kind of bolt it all together, and off you go," Day-Lewis said. "I tend to try and allow things to happen slowly, over a long period of time. As I feel I'm growing into a sense of that life, if I'm lucky, I begin to hear a voice.

"And I don't mean in a supernatural sense. I begin to hear the sound of a voice, and if I like the sound of that, I live with that for a while in my mind's ear, whatever one might call it, my inner ear, and then I set about trying to reproduce that."

Lincoln himself likely learned to use his voice to his advantage depending on the situation, Day-Lewis said.

"He was a supreme politician. I've no doubt in my mind that when you think of all the influences in his life, from his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana and a good part of his younger life in southern Illinois, that the sounds of all those regions would have come together in him somehow.

"And I feel that he probably learned how to play with his voice in public and use it in certain ways in certain places and in certain other ways in other places. Especially in the manner in which he expressed himself. I think, I've no doubt that he was conscious enough of his image."

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British medical journal slams Roche on Tamiflu

LONDON (AP) — A leading British medical journal is asking the drug maker Roche to release all its data on Tamiflu, claiming there is no evidence the drug can actually stop the flu.

The drug has been stockpiled by dozens of governments worldwide in case of a global flu outbreak and was widely used during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

On Monday, one of the researchers linked to the BMJ journal called for European governments to sue Roche.

"I suggest we boycott Roche's products until they publish missing Tamiflu data," wrote Peter Gotzsche, leader of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. He said governments should take legal action against Roche to get the money back that was "needlessly" spent on stockpiling Tamiflu.

Last year, Tamiflu was included in a list of "essential medicines" by the World Health Organization, a list that often prompts governments or donor agencies to buy the drug.

Tamiflu is used to treat both seasonal flu and new flu viruses like bird flu or swine flu. WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said the agency had enough proof to warrant its use for unusual influenza viruses, like bird flu.

"We do have substantive evidence it can stop or hinder progression to severe disease like pneumonia," he said.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends Tamiflu as one of two medications for treating regular flu. The other is GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza. The CDC says such antivirals can shorten the duration of symptoms and reduce the risk of complications and hospitalization.

In 2009, the BMJ and researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre asked Roche to make all its Tamiflu data available. At the time, Cochrane Centre scientists were commissioned by Britain to evaluate flu drugs. They found no proof that Tamiflu reduced the number of complications in people with influenza.

"Despite a public promise to release (internal company reports) for each (Tamiflu) trial...Roche has stonewalled," BMJ editor Fiona Godlee wrote in an editorial last month.

In a statement, Roche said it had complied with all legal requirements on publishing data and provided Gotzsche and his colleagues with 3,200 pages of information to answer their questions.

"Roche has made full clinical study data ... available to national health authorities according to their various requirements, so they can conduct their own analyses," the company said.

Roche says it doesn't usually release patient-level data available due to legal or confidentiality constraints. It said it did not provide the requested data to the scientists because they refused to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Roche is also being investigated by the European Medicines Agency for not properly reporting side effects, including possible deaths, for 19 drugs including Tamiflu that were used in about 80,000 patients in the U.S.

____

Online:

www.bmj.com.tamiflu/

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'Inappropriate’ emails, ‘shirtless’ photos

Gen. David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell in July 2011 (ISAF via Getty Images)It seemed the story behind Gen. David Petraeus' resignation as director of the CIA couldn't get stranger. New reports, however, now indicate that Marine Gen. John Allen, another well-respected, high-ranking general, might be involved in the growing scandal.

On the surface, the case so far involves the FBI; a slew of allegedly inappropriate emails (between Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell; Allen and socialite Jill Kelley; and allegedly threatening ones Broadwell sent to Kelley); the FBI agent who started the probe, who's now being investigated for sending "shirtless" photos to Kelley; and, as reported by the New York Post on Tuesday morning, a child custody battle involving Kelley's twin sister that allegedly concerns both Petraeus and Allen.

To help sort things out, here's a rundown of events, and where things currently stand.

Jill Kelley, a 37-year-old from Tampa, Fla., who organized local social events for the military as a volunteer, became friends with Petraeus and his family when he was stationed in Florida. Last spring, she began receiving harassing emails from an anonymous account and alerted a friend who worked for the FBI.

The FBI began an investigation, which eventually uncovered an affair between Petraeus and Broadwell, both of whom are married. The FBI believes Broadwell sent the harassing emails to Kelley because she perceived her to be a rival for Petraeus' affections.

The FBI found something else during the inquiry: 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other communications between Kelley and Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan and a nominee to become the new NATO supreme allied commander for Europe.

A senior defense official has told the Washington Post that the emails were "potentially inappropriate." Other sources strongly denied to the Post that anything inappropriate ever happened between Allen and Kelley, but said that Allen may have used terms of endearment such as "sweetheart" to refer to Kelley in his emails to her. The source said Allen, who is married, is "embarrassed" by this, but did not have an affair with her. Allen also received an email from the same account that was harassing Kelley, though it's unclear what the email said.

Both Petraeus and Allen also wrote letters submitted to a court on behalf of Kelley's twin sister, who was locked in a nasty custody fight with the father of her 4-year-old child. The generals vouched for the sister's abilities as a mother, the Post reported.

The Tampa party planner, who is married and has three children, is also at the center of another bizarre twist in the case. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday night that Kelley's FBI agent friend was taken off the Petraeus case and is currently being investigated because his superiors discovered that he sent "shirtless" photos to Kelley before the probe started. After the agent was removed from the case, the agent contacted Washington Rep. David Reichert to warn him that he thought FBI leaders would sweep the investigation under the rug.

Meanwhile, the Daily Beast, citing an anonymous source, reports that the harassing emails allegedly sent from Broadwell to Kelley did not say "stay away from my guy" as previously reported, and did not even directly reference Petraeus. The source described the tone of the emails as "more like, 'Who do you think you are? You parade around the base. You need to take it down a notch.'" The Wall Street Journal reported that one email, without elaborating, asked Kelley if her husband knew what she was doing. Another said the sender knew Kelley had touched "him," without specifying who the "him" was.

And, the Associated Press has uncovered the trick Broadwell and Petraeus used to email each other without creating an online trail. The pair set up anonymous email accounts and drafted emails to each other without ever pushing "send." Each one could log on to the other account and click the "drafts" folder to see if a message had been left for them. This avoids creating an easily traceable email trail, the AP reported.

One question the Daily Beast raised is why the FBI investigated the harassing emails sent to Kelley in the first place. There were no overt threats, such as "I'll kill you," in the emails, and some wonder if Kelley's friendship with the FBI agent may be why the agency investigated what seemed like a humdrum case better suited to local authorities.

Broadwell's father, for one, told the New York Daily News that he thinks the scandal is a smoke screen for a bigger story. "This is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out," Broadwell's father, Paul Krantz, told the Daily News. "There is a lot more that is going to come out."

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China slams Dalai Lama; Tibetan self-immolates

BEIJING (AP) — China accused the Dalai Lama on Monday of allying with Japanese right-wingers in an island dispute as a way of attacking China and blamed him for glorifying a wave of self-immolations among Tibetans. The comments came as another Tibetan set himself on fire to protest Chinese rule, Tibetan exiles and a rights group said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the Dalai Lama's comments in Japan on the island dispute showed his "reactionary nature" and determination to split China apart under the guise of religion.

"To achieve his separatist goal, he associated with the Japanese right-wing forces. Chinese people despise him for what he did. We are firmly opposed to any country's providing a stage for him," Hong said.

Chinese media have said the Dalai Lama called the islands by their Japanese name during a news conference in Yokohama last Monday but an Associated Press review of a tape of the event showed he referred to them only as "the islands."

On Monday in Okinawa, the Dalai Lama criticized Chinese media for making up a claim that he sided with the Japanese.

Tensions have run high over the islands, known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, since the Japanese government nationalized some of them in September in a bid to prevent Tokyo's right-wing governor from buying them. Violent anti-Japanese protests broke out in a number of Chinese cities, and Beijing has sent ships to conduct near-constant patrols near the uninhabited rocks.

Hong also attacked the Dalai Lama for reportedly accusing the Chinese government of failing to investigate the root cause of despair and hopelessness among Tibetans that many say have prompted people to take their lives as a form of protest. China has long accused the Dalai Lama and his supporters of inspiring such acts, despite his condemnation of all forms of violence.

"Not only did the Dalai not condemn them, but he actually glorified these acts, which are against the national law and religious principles," Hong said.

The remarks came as a 24-year-old Tibetan man set himself on fire at a prayer ceremony in Tongren county in western China's Qinghai province, becoming the seventh person in six days to self-immolate in the region, the rights group Free Tibet said.

Nyingkar Tashi is reported to have died in the protest in which he called out for freedom in Tibet and for the longevity of the Dalai Lama, the group said. A statement from the self-declared Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India, provided similar details.

A Tongren government official who picked up the phone said he could not comment, while Ma Chunyin, head of the Tongren Communist Party Propaganda Department, said he did not know about the reported self-immolation.

Tibet support groups overseas have said the increase in protests in recent days is meant to highlight Tibetan unhappiness with Chinese rule as the country's leaders hand over power to younger successors at a party congress in Beijing.

"Throughout the 18th Party Congress the new unelected leaders have been reminded on an almost daily basis of Tibetans' rejection of Chinese rule, and of the terrible failure of policies to cement the occupation," Free Tibet Director Stephanie Brigden said.

The Dalai Lama fled to India following an abortive 1959 uprising against Chinese rule over Tibet. He denies seeking the region's independence, saying that he wishes Tibetans to enjoy real autonomy and protection of their traditional Buddhist culture.

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Associated Press writers Christopher Bodeen in Beijing and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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Dutch teenagers sentenced in “Facebook murder”

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Two Dutch teenagers were sentenced to two years in juvenile detention and three years of compulsory therapy on Monday for ordering the death of a girl after an argument on Facebook.

The case, known in the Netherlands as the “Facebook murder”, has caused widespread debate about the role of social media in violent crime.

The victim, identified only as 15-year old Winsie, was fatally stabbed in January at the request of the boy and girl, who were aged 17 and 16 respectively at the time.

Winsie had argued for weeks with the girl, and they had swapped insults on the social networking site.

“The defendants are guilty of a particularly serious criminal offence. The fact that a friendship between two young girls can turn into deep hate and ultimately into murder being incited is shocking and hard to comprehend,” a court in the city of Arnhem said in a statement.

The killer, who Dutch media named only as Jinhua and who was 14 when he committed the crime, was sentenced in September to one year in juvenile detention.

(Reporting Gilbert Kreijger; Editing by Anthony Deutsch and Pravin Char)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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