Simple measures cut infections caught in hospitals

CHICAGO (AP) — Preventing surgery-linked infections is a major concern for hospitals and it turns out some simple measures can make a big difference.

A project at seven big hospitals reduced infections after colorectal surgeries by nearly one-third. It prevented an estimated 135 infections, saving almost $4 million, the Joint Commission hospital regulating group and the American College of Surgeons announced Wednesday. The two groups directed the 2 1/2-year project.

Solutions included having patients shower with special germ-fighting soap before surgery, and having surgery teams change gowns, gloves and instruments during operations to prevent spreading germs picked up during the procedures.

Some hospitals used special wound-protecting devices on surgery openings to keep intestine germs from reaching the skin.

The average rate of infections linked with colorectal operations at the seven hospitals dropped from about 16 percent of patients during a nine-month phase when hospitals started adopting changes to almost 11 percent once all the changes had been made.

Hospital stays for patients who got infections dropped from an average of 15 days to 13 days, which helped cut costs.

"The improvements translate into safer patient care," said Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the Joint Commission. "Now it's our job to spread these effective interventions to all hospitals."

Almost 2 million health care-related infections occur each year nationwide; more than 90,000 of these are fatal.

Besides wanting to keep patients healthy, hospitals have a monetary incentive to prevent these infections. Medicare cuts payments to hospitals that have lots of certain health care-related infections, and those cuts are expected to increase under the new health care law.

The project involved surgeries for cancer and other colorectal problems. Infections linked with colorectal surgery are particularly common because intestinal tract bacteria are so abundant.

To succeed at reducing infection rates requires hospitals to commit to changing habits, "to really look in the mirror and identify these things," said Dr. Clifford Ko of the American College of Surgeons.

The hospitals involved were Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; Cleveland Clinic in Ohio; Mayo Clinic-Rochester Methodist Hospital in Rochester, Minn.; North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Great Neck, NY; Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago; OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill.; and Stanford Hospital & Clinics in Palo Alto, Calif.

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AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

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GOP Senators More Troubled After Rice Meeting

United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice's attempts to "make nice" with a trio of Republican senators who have criticized her response to the Sept. 11 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, seem to have backfired.

The senators said they left their face-to-face meeting with Rice this morning "more concerned" and "significantly troubled."

The three Republicans, Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said not only did Rice, who was joined by Acting CIA Director Mike Morell, not answer all their questions about the attack but did little to assuage their overall worries.

"We are significantly troubled by many of the answers that we got, and some that we didn't get concerning evidence that was overwhelming leading up to the attack on the consulate," McCain said.

"The concerns I have are greater today than before, and we're not even close to getting the basic answers," Graham said.

Today's meeting was seen as part of Rice's Capitol Hill "charm offensive," as her possible nomination to become the next secretary of state has met with some vocal opposition – especially from McCain, Graham and Ayotte, who still seemed to steer clear of questions about whether they would stand in the way if Rice was nominated.

"Before anybody can make an intelligent decision about promoting someone involved in Benghazi, we need to do a lot more," Graham said. "To this date, we don't have the FBI interviews of the survivors conducted one or two days after the attack. We don't have the basic information about what was said the night of the attack ... as of this date."

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Graham compared the situation to 2006, when Senate Democrats blocked the nomination of John Bolton, President Bush's choice for U.N. ambassador.

What the senators seemed to find most problematic was Rice's statement on the Sunday morning news shows days after the attack. At first, she said it was a "spontaneous" attack and not a terrorist attack.

Ayotte said that in today's meeting Rice called the information she first gave to the American people wrong.

"It's certainly clear from the beginning that we knew that those with ties to al Qaeda were involved in the attack on the embassy, and clearly the impression that was given, the information given to the American people, was wrong," Ayotte said,

Rice said in a statement following the meeting: "We explained that the talking points provided by the intelligence community, and the initial assessment upon which they were based, were incorrect in a key respect: There was no protest or demonstration in Benghazi. While, we certainly wish that we had had perfect information just days after the terrorist attack, as is often the case, the intelligence assessment has evolved. We stressed that neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in this process, and the administration updated Congress and the American people as our assessments evolved."

Ayotte said that as the U.N. ambassador, Rice should have stepped up and said that she couldn't go on the Sunday morning news shows and talk about the attack without complete information.

Graham, like Ayotte, said it would have been better not to have given any information at all.

"If you can give nothing but bad information, isn't it better to give no information at all? It was unjustified to give the scenarios as presented by Ambassador Rice and President Obama three weeks before an election."

Rice is expected to meet with outgoing Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., later today. A close ally of McCain (Lieberman endorsed McCain for president in 2008), Lieberman has not been as quick to criticize Rice.

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Egyptians challenge Mursi in nationwide protests

CAIRO (Reuters) - Tens of thousands Egyptians protested on Tuesday against President Mohamed Mursi in one of the biggest rallies since Hosni Mubarak's overthrow, accusing the Islamist leader of seeking to impose a new era of autocracy.

Police fired tear gas at stone-throwing youths in streets near the main protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square, heart of the uprising that toppled Mubarak last year. Clashes between Mursi's opponents and supporters erupted in a city north of Cairo.

But violence could not overshadow the show of strength by the normally divided opponents of Islamists in power, posing Mursi with the biggest challenge in his five months in office.

"The people want to bring down the regime," protesters in Tahrir chanted, echoing slogans used in the 2011 revolt.

Protesters also turned out in Alexandria, Suez, Minya and other Nile Delta cities.

Tuesday's protest called by leftists, liberals and other groups deepened the worst crisis since the Muslim Brotherhood politician was elected in June, and exposed the deep divide between the newly empowered Islamists and their opponents.

A 52-year-old protester died after inhaling teargas in Cairo, the second death since Mursi last week issued a decree that expanded his powers and barred court challenges to his decisions.

Mursi's administration has defended the decree as an effort to speed up reforms and complete a democratic transformation.

But opponents say Mursi is behaving like a modern-day pharaoh, a jibe leveled at Mubarak. The United States, a benefactor to Egypt's military, has expressed concern about more turbulence in a country that has a peace treaty with Israel.

"We don't want a dictatorship again. The Mubarak regime was a dictatorship. We had a revolution to have justice and freedom," 32-year-old Ahmed Husseini said in Cairo.

The fractious ranks of Egypt's non-Islamist opposition have been united on the street by crisis, although they have yet to build an electoral machine to challenge well-organized Islamists, who have beaten their more secular-minded rivals at the ballot box in two elections held since Mubarak was ousted.

MISCALCULATION

"There are signs that over the last couple of days that Mursi and the Brotherhood realized their mistake," said Elijah Zarwan, a fellow with The European Council on Foreign Relations, adding the protests were "a very clear illustration of how much of a political miscalculation this was."

Mursi's move provoked a rebellion by judges and has battered confidence in an economy struggling after two years of turmoil. The president still has to implement unpopular measures to rein in Egypt's crushing budget deficit, action needed to finalize a deal for a $4.8 billion International Monetary Fund loan.

Some protesters have been camped out since Friday in Tahrir, and violence has flared around the country, including in a town north of Cairo where a Muslim Brotherhood youth was killed in clashes on Sunday. Hundreds have been injured.

Supporters and opponents of Mursi threw stones at each other and some hurled petrol bombs in the Delta city of el-Mahalla el-Kubra. Medical sources said almost 200 people were wounded.

"The main demand is to withdraw the constitutional declaration (decree). This is the point," said Amr Moussa, former Arab League chief and presidential candidate who has joined the new opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front. The group includes several top liberal politicians.

Some scholars from the prestigious al-Azhar mosque and university joined Tuesday's protest, showing that Mursi and his Brotherhood have alienated some more moderate Muslims. Members of Egypt's large Christian minority also joined in.

Mursi formally quit the Brotherhood on taking office, saying he would be a president for all Egyptians, but he is still a member of its Freedom and Justice Party.

The decree issued on Thursday expanded his powers and protected his decisions from judicial review until the election of a new parliament expected in the first half of 2013.

In Washington, White House spokesman Jay Carney urged demonstrators to behave peacefully.

"The current constitutional impasse is an internal Egyptian situation that can only be resolved by the Egyptian people, through peaceful democratic dialogue," he told reporters.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said the decree gives Mursi more power than the interim military junta from which he took over.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told an Austrian paper he would encourage Mursi to resolve the issue by dialogue.

TENSIONS

Trying to ease tensions with judges, Mursi assured Egypt's highest judicial authority that elements of his decree giving his decisions immunity applied only to matters of "sovereign" importance. That should limit it to issues such as declaring war, but experts said there was room for interpretation.

In another step to avoid more confrontation, the Muslim Brotherhood cancelled plans for a rival mass rally in Cairo on Tuesday to support the decree. Violence has flared in Cairo in the past when both sides have taken to the streets.

But there has been no retreat on other elements of the decree, including a stipulation that the Islamist-dominated body writing a new constitution be protected from legal challenge.

"The decree must be cancelled and the constituent assembly should be reformed. All intellectuals have left it and now it is controlled by Islamists," said 50-year-old Noha Abol Fotouh.

With its popular legitimacy undermined by the withdrawal of most of its non-Islamist members, the assembly faces a series of court cases from plaintiffs who claim it was formed illegally.

Mursi issued the decree on November 22, a day after he won U.S. and international praise for brokering an end to eight days of violence between Israel and Hamas around the Gaza Strip.

Mursi's decree was seen as targeting in part a legal establishment still largely unreformed from Mubarak's era, when the Brotherhood was outlawed.

Though both Islamists and their opponents broadly agree that the judiciary needs reform, Mursi's rivals oppose his methods.

Rulings from an array of courts this year have dealt a series of blows to the Brotherhood, leading to the dissolution of the first constitutional assembly and the lower house of parliament elected a year ago. The Brotherhood dominated both.

The judiciary blocked an attempt by Mursi to reconvene the Brotherhood-led parliament after his election victory. It also stood in the way of his attempt to sack the prosecutor general, another Mubarak holdover, in October.

In his decree, Mursi gave himself the power to sack that prosecutor and appoint a new one. In open defiance of Mursi, some judges are refusing to acknowledge that step.

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry, Seham Eloraby, Marwa Awad and Yasmine Saleh in Cairo and Michael Shields in Vienna; Writing by Edmund Blair and Tom Perry; Editing by Anna Willard, David Stamp, Alastair Macdonald and Giles Elgood)

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BBC Trust chief defends huge director-general payout

LONDON: The head of the BBC's governing body insisted Tuesday he had to give director-general George Entwistle a huge pay-off when he quit in the wake of paedophilia scandals engulfing the corporation.

BBC Trust chairman Chris Patten told lawmakers the £450,000 ($720,000, 560,000 euros) given to Entwistle after just 54 days in the job was "one hell of a lot of money", but there was no better option on the table.

The world's largest public broadcaster has been battered by claims that Jimmy Savile, one of its biggest stars, was among Britain's most prolific sex offenders -- as well as a television report wrongly accusing a politician of paedophilia.

There were bad-tempered exchanges as former Hong Kong governor Patten was grilled by parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee, a scrutiny panel of lawmakers.

Patten said Entwistle, who quit on November 10, had refused to resign if he received a pay-off of six months' salary, but agreed to go if he was given 12 months.

But Patten insisted that Entwistle was "a decent man who was overwhelmed by a very difficult job" and said he would not join in the "general trashing" of the character of a man who spent most of his career at the BBC.

"What's happened is a small tragedy which has been made rather larger by money," he said.

At one point in the crisis, Entwistle had asked Patten: "Are you urging me to go?" and got the reply: "We're not urging you to go but we're not urging you to stay", Patten revealed.

He said the trust did not have sufficient grounds to sack Entwistle and therefore had no choice but to accept his terms.

Otherwise, Patten added, the crisis would have stretched on and the BBC would have found itself "with a constructive dismissal and probably an unfair dismissal on top of that," which would have been even more expensive.

"It was better than any alternative course of action," he said.

On Thursday the BBC appointed Royal Opera House boss Tony Hall, its former news chief, as its new director-general to an almost universally warm reception. He is expected to start work in March.

An inquiry into the dropping of a report on Savile's abuse by the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Newsnight is due to report by the New Year.

A second independent probe is looking into the BBC's practices during the more than 20 years Savile spent at the corporation.

Patten said the costs, "however much they are", would be met from the licence fee, the compulsory £145.50-per-household annual levy.

Acting BBC director-general Tim Davie said around 40 people were interviewed for the Newsnight review, with the legal costs reaching £200,000 so far. There is a cap of £50,000 per person.

Patten admitted that the BBC had work to do to restore trust in its output and journalism, but insisted it remained superior to its counterparts elsewhere in the world.

"Trust in the BBC has taken a knock," he said. "We have shot ourselves in the foot. We have to rebuild that trust."

He added: "Anybody who rubbishes the BBC should be forced to watch Italian or French or American TV for a week or so."

Meanwhile Britain's top police officer Bernard Hogan-Howe said the investigation into Savile's abuse had cost around £2 million so far, and involves around 450 potential victims.

And police said they were now publicly acknowledging that the late Cyril Smith, a prominent 30-stone (190-kilogramme) lawmaker who died two years ago, had physically and sexually abused young boys in care homes in the 1960s.

-AFP/ac

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Will prune security further to VIPS: Sukhbir Badal

CHANDIGARH: Caught in a controversy over Punjab's free of cost security to the slain liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his brother Hardeep, Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Badal on Tuesday said that his government will further prune the security cover provided to VIPs.

"No one, irrespective of party affiliations and stature, will get security unless there was a real threat perception. The security moving with these VIPs outside the state is a concern. I've already had a long discussion with the state police head and security cover to VIPs will be reduced to 1,000-1,500 from 1,900," said Badal Jr, who holds the home portfolio, at a press meet.

He was replying to a query on BJP MP ( Himachal Pradesh) Anurag Thakur and INLD chief Om Prakash Chautala - both of whom are close to the Badal family - enjoying the security patronage of Punjab police personnel outside the state. Anurag, who is HP chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal's son and looks after the family business in Jalandhar, has two PSOs (personal security officers). Chautala has three PSOs for the family.

Badal Jr's comments came a day after state police chief DGP Sumedh Singh Saini had said that only those who have Punjab domiciles would be entitled for security cover from the state. In May, the Punjab government had overhauled its policy when Sukhbir made a public announcement to prune the security cover of self-styled VIPs. By June 14, nearly 2,000 personnel deployed across the state were pulled back and 109 vehicles used for protection duties withdrawn.

However, TOI learnt that around this time the security cover for the slain Chadha brothers was renewed and given the permission to use it indiscriminately outside Punjab. The shootout had revealed that the duo had been enjoying a free security cover - six PSOs with Hardeep and one with Ponty.

According to Punjab police's own admission, 1,900 personnel are guarding 740 political leaders and top businessmen like Chadhas, depleting the already limited resources of the force.

OUTSIDE SECURITY

INLD chief Om Prakash Chautala: 3

BJP MP Anurag Thakur: 2

SAD(B) Delhi president Manjeet Singh GK: 2

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CDC: HIV spread high in young gay males

NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials say 1 in 5 new HIV infections occur in a tiny segment of the population — young men who are gay or bisexual.

The government on Tuesday released new numbers that spotlight how the spread of the AIDS virus is heavily concentrated in young males who have sex with other males. Only about a quarter of new infections in the 13-to-24 age group are from injecting drugs or heterosexual sex.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said blacks represented more than half of new infections in youths. The estimates are based on 2010 figures.

Overall, new U.S. HIV infections have held steady at around 50,000 annually. About 12,000 are in teens and young adults, and most youth with HIV haven't been tested.

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Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns

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Bin Laden Manhunt Film Based on Controversial First-Hand Accounts

It was the greatest manhunt of all time, the stealthy nighttime raid by the elite SEAL Team Six on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, which led to the death of the world's most wanted terrorist leader.

It is the subject of "Zero Dark Thirty," a riveting new film by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, both of Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" fame. But when they began making a film about the hunt for bin Laden six years ago, right after they finished "The Hurt Locker," the movie they had in mind was about the failed attempt to find bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan.

That plan changed drastically on May 1, 2011 when bin Laden was killed. Boal, a meticulous investigative reporter, picked up the phone and started working his sources.

"It was a thrilling journey to go on and also thrilling to discover what the people who were involved in this mission were really like," Boal said.

In an exclusive interview with "Nightline," Bigelow and Boal talked about bringing "Zero Dark Thirty" to the screen based on Boal's interviews and Bigelow's dramatic vision.

"It was all based on first hands accounts so it really felt very vivid and very vital and very, very immediate and visceral of course which is very exciting as a film maker," Bigelow said.

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Watch ABC's Martha Raddatz's exclusive interview with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal on "Nightline" tonight at 11:35 p.m. ET

Bigelow said she and Boal were working in his office when they heard President Obama's now famous announcement that the United States had "conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden."

"It was a personal moment for me because I grew up in New York City," Boal said. "I think for a lot of people, just kind of an overwhelming moment."

All of a sudden, Bigelow said it put their project in a very different perspective.

"It was not just as a film concern, it was kind of a global concern," she said. "We both realized simultaneously that we had to pivot."

"I picked up the phone and started calling sources and asking them what they knew and taking referrals and knocking on doors and really approached it as comprehensively as I could," Boal said.

Almost immediately, the filmmakers found themselves in the middle of an election year firestorm, accused of receiving classified documents to bolster the president's role. It's something they both deny.

"I certainly did a lot of homework, but I never asked for classified material," Boal said. "To my knowledge I never received any."

In fact, President Obama makes only a fleeting appearance in the film. The star of this real-life drama is, surprisingly, a young female CIA officer, played by Jessica Chastain, who helps find bin Laden through a long-forgotten courier.

"It was a couple of months into the research when I heard about a woman, part of the team, and she has played a big role and she had gone to Jalalabad and been deployed with the SEALs on the night of the raid," Boal said.

"When I realized at the heart of this hunt, at the heart of this 10-year odyssey was this woman, this young woman who had a kind of tenacity and a dedication and a courage, she would never say no, I was excited to take it on," Bigelow said.

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Egypt's Mursi holds crisis talks over power grab

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's president negotiated with judges on Monday to try to defuse a crisis over his seizure of extended powers which set off violent protests reminiscent of the uprising that thrust his Islamist movement into government.

The justice minister said he thought President Mohamed Mursi would agree with a proposal from the highest judicial authority to curb the scope of new powers. Mursi was "very optimistic Egyptians would overcome the crisis", his spokesman said.

But the protesters, some camped in Cairo's Tahrir Square, have said only retracting the decree will satisfy them, a sign of the deep rift between Islamists and their opponents that is destabilizing Egypt nearly two years after Hosni Mubarak fell.

"There is no use amending the decree," said Tarek Ahmed, 26, a protester who stayed the night in Tahrir, where tents covered the central traffic circle. "It must be scrapped."

One person has been killed and about 370 injured in clashes between police and protesters since Mursi issued a decree on Thursday shielding his decisions from judicial review, emboldened by international plaudits for brokering an end to eight days of violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Mursi's political opponents have accused him of behaving like a dictator and the West has voiced its concern, worried by more turbulence in a country that has a peace treaty with Israel and lies at the heart of the Arab Spring.

Mursi's administration has defended his decree as an effort to speed up reforms and complete a democratic transformation. Leftists, liberals, socialists and others say it has exposed the autocratic impulses of a man once jailed by Mubarak.

Mursi's opponents have called for a protest on Tuesday and leading leftist, Hamdeen Sabahy, vowed peaceful demonstrations would continue until the decree was "brought down", saying Tahrir would a model of an "Egypt that will not accept a new dictator because it brought down the old one".

In a bid to lower tensions, the Brotherhood delayed its rival protest in support of Mursi that it had planned for Tuesday, a spokesman for the group's party said. The Salafi al-Nour Party also said it would stay away from the streets.

"President Mursi is very optimistic that Egyptians will overcome this challenge as they have overcome other challenges," presidential spokesman Yasser Ali told reporters, shortly before the president held his meeting with members of Egypt's highest judicial authority, the Supreme Judicial Council.

COMPROMISE?

The Supreme Judicial Council has hinted at a compromise, saying Mursi's decree should apply only to "sovereign matters". That suggests it did not reject the declaration outright.

Justice Minister Ahmed Mekky, speaking about the council statement, said: "I believe President Mohamed Mursi wants that."

Legal experts said "sovereign matters" could be confined to issues such as declaring war or calling elections that are already beyond legal challenge. But they said Egypt's legal system had sometimes used the term more broadly, suggesting that any deal could leave wide room for interpretation.

And any deal with a judiciary dominated by Mubarak-era judges, which Mursi has pledged to reform, may not placate them.

Though both Islamists and their opponents broadly agree that the judiciary needs reform, his rivals oppose Mursi's methods.

The Supreme Constitutional Court was responsible for declaring the Islamist-dominated parliament void, leading to its dissolution this year. One presidential source said Mursi was looking for ways to reach a deal to restructure that court.

A group of lawyers and activists has also challenged Mursi's decree in an administrative court, which said it would hold its first hearing on December 4. Other decisions by Mursi have faced similar legal challenges brought to court by opponents.

The protesters are worried that Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood aims to dominate the post-Mubarak era after winning the first democratic parliamentary and presidential elections this year.

Banners in Tahrir called for dissolving the assembly drawing up a constitution, an Islamist-dominated body Mursi made immune from legal challenge. Many liberals and others have walked out of the assembly saying their voices were not being heard.

FURTHER ESCALATION?

Only once a constitution is written can a new parliamentary election be held. Until then, legislative and executive power remains in Mursi's hands, and Thursday's decree puts his decisions above judicial oversight.

One Muslim Brotherhood member was killed and 60 people were hurt on Sunday in an attack on the main office of the Brotherhood in the Egyptian Nile Delta town of Damanhour, the website of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party said.

The party's offices have also been attacked in other cities.

One politician said the scale of the crisis could push opponents towards a deal to avoid a further escalation.

"I am very cautiously optimistic because the consequences are quite, quite serious - the most serious they have been since the revolution," said Mona Makram Ebeid, a former member of parliament and prominent figure in Egyptian politics.

Mursi's office repeated assurances that the steps would be temporary, and said he wanted dialogue with political groups to find "common ground" over what should go into the constitution.

But though the presidency has called for dialogue, that has been rejected by members of the National Salvation Front, a new opposition coalition of liberals, leftists and other politicians and parties, who until Mursi's decree had been a fractious bunch struggling to unite.

The Front includes Sabahy, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei and former Arab League chief Amr Moussa.

The military has stayed out of the crisis after leading Egypt through a messy 16-month transition to a presidential election in June. Analysts say Mursi neutralized the army when he sacked top generals in August, appointing a new generation who now owe their advancement to the Islamist president.

Though the military still wields influence through business interests and a security role, it is out of frontline politics.

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry, Patrick Werr and Marwa Awad in Cairo; Editing by Philippa Fletcher, Giles Elgood and Alastair Macdonald)

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NASA monitors massive dust storm on Mars

WASHINGTON: The US space agency says it is monitoring a massive dust storm on Mars that has produced atmospheric changes.

It's the first time since the 1970s that NASA is studying such a phenomenon both from orbit and with a weather station on the surface, NASA said on its website.

"This is now a regional dust storm," said Rich Zurek, chief Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It has covered a fairly extensive region with its dust haze, and it is in a part of the planet where some regional storms in the past have grown into global dust hazes."

Regional dust storms expanded and affected vast areas of the Red Planet in 2001 and 2007.

"One thing we want to learn is why do some Martian dust storms get to this size and stop growing, while others this size keep growing and go global," said Zurek.

Following decades of observations, experts know there is a seasonal pattern to the largest Martian dust storms, according to NASA. The most recent dust storm season began just a few weeks ago with the beginning of the spring in the southern hemisphere.

As of November 16, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected a warming of the atmosphere at about 25 kilometres above the storm. Since then, the region's atmosphere has increased by about 25 degrees Celsius.

The phenomenon is due to dust -- being lofted above the surface -- absorbing sunlight at that height, according to NASA.

Warmer temperatures have also been detected in a "hot spot" near northern polar latitudes due to changes in atmospheric circulation.

The storm, which came no closer than about 1,350 kilometres to NASA's Opportunity robot, on Mars since 2004, resulting in a "slight drop in atmospheric clarity over the rover," NASA said.

If the storm continues to spread out, Opportunity could be affected since it depends on solar energy for its power supply.

"More dust in the air or falling onto its solar panels would reduce the solar-powered rover's energy supply for daily operations," NASA said.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, which arrived on Mars on August 6 and is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator rather than solar cells, is likely to be less affected.

"The main effects of increased dust in the air at its site would be haze in images and increased air temperature," according to NASA.

Curiosity's weather station -- located halfway around the planet from Opportunity -- detected atmospheric changes tied to the storm, with sensors measuring a decrease in air pressure and a slight rise in overnight low temperature.

Curiosity is on a two-year, $2.5 billion mission to investigate whether it is possible to live on Mars and to learn whether conditions there might have been able to support life in the past.

- AFP/fa

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Narayan Rane clears the air, no plan to join Shiv Sena

MUMBAI: Keeping party politics away, two key DF ministers, NCP's Chhagan Bhujbal and Congress's Narayan Rane, on Monday paid tributes to their political mentor and former boss Balasaheb Thackeray at a condolence meeting held at Mantralaya, the state government headquarters.

Thackeray died after protracted illness at his Bandra residence on November 17.

Even as he fondly recalled his long association with the late Thackeray, Rane made it clear that he had no intention of going back to Shiv Sena, the party he quit in 2005 after irreconcilable differences with Uddhav Thackeray.

"Sena is my past and Congress my future," said Rane, scotching speculation in political circles that he may well be keen on worming his way back to the Sena fold, in the post-Thackeray era. Rane headed the Sena-BJP government for eight months in 1999. The fiesty Congressman is seen as a strong contender for the chief ministership in the DF.

Stating that Balasaheb lived life king-size, Rane said, "He taught his followers to think big and positive. He loved them like head of the family. His popularity across Maharashtra was phenomenal."

Rane said Thackeray never believed in sham democracy. If he made up his mind, he would act swiftly. There was no hemming and hawing. He chose me to succeed Manohar Joshi as CM and that was that. Unlike other political parties, the Sena didn't believe in striking a balance between factions or taking an arduous route to choose a chief minister,'' said the industries minister.

Bhujbal said Balasaheb had transcended the narrow limits of party politics. "He was not a politician in the sense we understand. He came from a family of social reformers. He combined oratory, organizational skills and charisma to put the Sena on a firm footing. To me, both Balasaheb and his wife, Meenatai, were like parents. I and Rane got plum positions in NCP and Congress because we had done long years of apprenticeship in the Sena. This happened because of Balasaheb," Bhujbal added.

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