Concussion Liability Issues Could Stretch Beyond N.F.L.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press

Insurers could raise premiums with a higher risk of lawsuits for concussions, like the one 49ers quarterback Alex Smith sustained a month ago.

As the N.F.L. confronts a raft of lawsuits brought by thousands of former players who accuse the league of hiding information about the dangers of concussions, a less visible battle that may have a more widespread effect in the sport is unfolding between the league and 32 of its current and former insurers.

The dispute revolves around how much money, if any, the insurers are obliged to pay for the league’s mounting legal bills and the hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages that might stem from the cases brought by the retired players.

Regardless of how it is resolved, the dispute could hurt teams, leagues and schools at all levels if insurers raise premiums to compensate for the increased risk of lawsuits from the families of people who play hockey, lacrosse and other contact sports.

The N.F.L., which generates about $9 billion a year, may be equipped to handle these legal challenges. But colleges, high schools and club teams may be forced to consider severe measures in the face of liability issues, like raising fees to offset higher premiums; capping potential damages; and requiring players to sign away their right to sue coaches and schools. Some schools and leagues may even shut down teams because the expense and legal risk are too high.

“Insurers will be tightening up their own coverage and make sports more expensive,” said Robert Boland, who teaches sports law at New York University. “It could make the sustainability of certain sports a real issue.”

The N.F.L. contends that the insurers, some of whom wrote policies in the 1960s, have a duty to defend the league, which has paid them millions of dollars in premiums. The question for the N.F.L. is not whether the insurers are required to help the league, but rather what percent of the league’s expenses each insurer is obliged to cover.

The 32 insurance companies have varying arguments against the league. Some wrote policies for a limited number of years and contend their obligations should also be limited. Others contend they wrote policies for the N.F.L.’s marketing arm — for licensing disputes, for example — not the league itself.

A few of the companies went bankrupt or merged with rivals. Some insurers wrote primary policies that covered up to the first $1 million of claims; the rest insured obligations in excess of that amount.

Creating a formula for how to apportion liability will in some cases depend on the broader case between the league and its players now in federal court in Pennsylvania. If the N.F.L. persuades the judge to dismiss the case, the league will be left trying to recoup its legal costs from the insurers. If the judge allows the players’ case to proceed, the definitions of when, how and whether a player’s concussions led to his illness will become critical in shaping the insurers’ exposure, and could take years to sort out.

“This is baby step 1 in the process for everyone figuring how deep in the soup they are,” said Christopher Fusco, a lawyer who has worked on similar insurance cases but is not involved in the N.F.L. litigation. “Baby step 2 will be to figure out the facts.”

Fusco and other lawyers said the facts would largely come from the underlying suit between the league and the more than 3,000 retired players, including determining when the players sustained the head trauma and their injuries. This will probably be a long process because many of the retired players in the underlying suit, some of whom are now having memory loss, played decades ago, when concussions were often undiagnosed or not recorded.

Many of the insurance companies named in the suits declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation. The N.F.L. also did not comment.

The two-tiered battle between the league and its former players and insurers echoes the litigation stemming from asbestos claims because both cases center on long-tail claims, or injuries that could take years to manifest themselves.

One of the critical points of contention in those cases was how to define an occurrence to determine an insurer’s liability. In the context of the N.F.L. case, the question will be whether a player’s injuries should be treated as a single claim or a series of claims based on the number of concussions he received or the number of seasons he played.

“This is an issue that gets to the crux of asbestos and environmental litigation,” said William M. Wilt, the president of Assured Research, an insurance advisory firm. “If an occurrence is defined as each player and each season he played, you could hit the policy limits multiple times.”

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U.S. selling its remaining stake in AIG

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury said it is selling the rest of its stake in American International Group Inc., in effect closing the books on one of the biggest and most reviled bailouts of the financial crisis that engulfed the world four years ago.

The sale of the Treasury Department's remaining 234 million shares in an offering announced Monday would wipe out the government's 15.9% stake and pad the $15.1-billion profit it has made already from the giant New York insurer.

The Treasury Department still would hold an undisclosed number of warrants in AIG, but taxpayers no longer would own a piece of a company that came to symbolize Wall Street's wild risk-taking during the subprime housing boom.

"In some ways, the AIG collapse was emblematic of the reckless and the deregulatory atmosphere that led up to the crisis," said Phil Angelides, who headed the government commission that investigated the causes of the crisis.

Although the bailout of AIG and the nation's major banks technically turned a profit, critics have said it took an enormous toll on the economy, fueled public anger and showed that some financial institutions were too big to fail.

AIG was at the top of that list.

Its Financial Products division sold billions of dollars in insurance in the form of credit-default swaps and other complex derivatives to companies, which were hedging their investments in the housing market.

When housing collapsed, it threatened to take AIG with it and wipe out conventional life, auto and home insurance policies of millions of customers in the U.S. and around the world.

"If there is a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can't think of one other than AIG," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said during a House hearing in early 2009.

"AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system," Bernanke said. "There was no oversight of the Financial Products division. This was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company."

As AIG teetered on the brink of bankruptcy after the collapse of investment bank Lehman Bros. in September 2008, the Fed swooped in to the rescue. It used emergency powers that Congress later eliminated in the 2010 overhaul of financial regulations.

In the panic of the crisis, U.S. officials feared AIG's failure would have seismic ripples through the global financial system.

The Treasury Department soon joined the Fed in pumping money into AIG to keep it afloat. At one point, the government committed more than $182 billion to AIG in a complex, multistep bailout. The company, though, ended up using about $125 billion.

Taxpayers got a 92% ownership stake in AIG. And the unprecedented rescue became a focal point of anger about the crisis.

Lawmakers fumed about AIG's decision to issue millions of dollars in bonuses to Financial Products employees and to fully pay counterparties, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., billions of dollars for the insurance on risky subprime investments.

Since its bailout, AIG has been selling assets to stabilize its finances and repay the bailout money.

Late Sunday, AIG said it was selling an 80% stake in International Lease Finance Corp., its Century City aircraft leasing company. A group of Chinese investors agreed to pay about $4.2 billion, with an option to acquire an additional 9.9% stake.

The Treasury Department's stock offering would generate about $7.8 billion in gains based on Monday's $33.36 closing price of AIG shares.

Angelides, a former California state treasurer who co-chaired the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that looked into the causes of the disaster, said it was good that taxpayers would no longer own a piece of AIG, but the time it took to unwind the government's stake showed how much of a mess the company had created.

"The fact that the United States government had to put forward $180 billion and had to remain a significant investor in a financial institution the size of AIG speaks to the depths and nature of the crisis we faced four years ago and its long aftershocks," Angelides said.

jim.puzzanghera@latimes.com

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Rise in renewable energy will require more use of fossil fuels

The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the California grid.

On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades — or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1% of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

As is true on many days in California when multibillion-dollar investments in wind and solar energy plants are thwarted by the weather, the void was filled by gas-fired plants like the Delta Energy Center.

One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the state is not yet prepared to meet — is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to produce one-third of California's electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel plants.

"The public hears solar is free, wind is free," said Mitchell Weinberg, director of strategic development for Calpine Corp., which owns Delta Energy Center. "But it is a lot more complicated than that."

Wind and solar energy are called intermittent sources, because the power they produce can suddenly disappear when a cloud bank moves across the Mojave Desert or wind stops blowing through the Tehachapi Mountains. In just half an hour, a thousand megawatts of electricity — the output of a nuclear reactor — can disappear and threaten stability of the grid.

To avoid that calamity, fossil fuel plants have to be ready to generate electricity in mere seconds. That requires turbines to be hot and spinning, but not producing much electricity until complex data networks detect a sudden drop in the output of renewables. Then, computerized switches are thrown and the turbines roar to life, delivering power just in time to avoid potential blackouts.

The state's electricity system can handle the fluctuations from existing renewable output, but by 2020 vast wind and solar complexes will sprawl across the state, and the problem will become more severe.

Just how much added capacity will be needed from traditional sources is the subject of heated debate by utility officials, government regulators and policy experts. The concerns are expected to come to a head next year when the state must adopt a 10-year plan for its energy needs.

"This issue is someplace between a significant concern and a major problem," said electricity system expert Severin Borenstein, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "There is definitely going to be a need for more reserves."

Borenstein said state legislators and the governor did not consider all of the details, such as unleashing this new demand for fossil fuel generators, when they set the 33% mandate for renewable energy. The state now gets 20% of its power from renewables, in part from older hydro and geothermal energy. Gov. Jerry Brown has advocated upping the goal to 40%.

The cost to consumers in the years ahead could be in the billions of dollars, according to industry experts. California's electricity prices are already among the highest in the nation and are projected to rise sharply in coming years. At the moment, the need for reserve power isn't considered a cost of renewable power, though consumers have to bear its costs as well.

The California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit company that runs the grid, estimates that by 2020 the state will need to double its reserve capacity. California now maintains a margin of 7% to 8% above projected daily demand, in case a nuclear power plant goes offline or outages occur. But when 33% of the state's power comes from renewables, that margin will have to rise to 15%, said Stephen Berberich, the firm's chief executive.

Nobody knows whether Berberich's estimate is right or how much the added capacity will cost. The California Energy Commission, which has responsibility for licensing new power plants and forecasting future power demand, said it doesn't have the analytical tools necessary to know how much reserve power will be needed.

"It is frankly in the development stage," said Mike Jaske, the commission's senior policy analyst for electricity supply.

The independent system operator is warning that by 2017 the state will be short by about 3,100 megawatts of flexible power that it can dedicate to meeting reserve needs — about what three nuclear reactors produce. The company is pushing the state Public Utility Commission to require that capacity. The commission has been noncommittal so far.

Solar and wind advocates reject those concerns. They say renewables can provide their own reserve cushion because solar and wind generators will be spread across vast areas of the state. If wind power is down in one region, it might be up in another. If wind power is down statewide, desert sunshine might boost solar.

On the day last month when wind energy provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide, a brilliant sun spiked solar plant output.

The independent system operator "likes to show these frightening graphs for shock value," said Nancy Rader, executive director of the California Wind Energy Assn.

Edward Randolph, director of the Public Utility Commission's energy division, said the independent system operator understandably wants more reserves because its primary focus is on the reliability of the system. The PUC is focused on cost. If there is an immediate problem with reserves, the PUC can order utilities to make more available. And in three to five years, batteries, flywheels or other new technology can provide storage that would make reserves much less necessary, he said.

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Singer feared dead in Mexican plane crash

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) — The wreckage of a small plane believed to be carrying Jenni Rivera, the U.S-born singer whose soulful voice and unfettered discussion of a series of personal travails made her a Mexican-American superstar, was found in northern Mexico on Sunday. Authorities said there were no survivors.

The singer's father, Pedro Rivera, said he thinks his daughter was on board the plane and that her brother will travel to Mexico on Monday to identify what they presumed were her remains.

Born in Long Beach, California, Jenni Rivera was at the peak of her career as perhaps the most successful female singer in grupero, a male-dominated regional style influenced by the norteno, cumbia and ranchero styles.

A 43-year-old mother of five children and grandmother of two, the woman known as the "Diva de la Banda" was known for her frank talk about her struggles to give a good life to her children despite a series of setbacks.

She was recently divorced from her third husband, was once detained at a Mexico City airport with tens of thousands of dollars in cash, and she publicly apologized after her brother assaulted a drunken fan who verbally attacked her in 2011.

Her openness about her personal troubles endeared her to millions in the U.S. and Mexico.

"I am the same as the public, as my fans," she told The Associated Press in an interview last March.

Rivera sold 15 million records, and recently won two Billboard Mexican Music Awards: Female Artist of the Year and Banda Album of the Year for "Joyas prestadas: Banda." She was nominated for Latin Grammys in 2002, 2008 and 2011.

Transportation and Communications Minister Gerardo Ruiz Esparza said "everything points toward" the wreckage belonging to the plane carrying Rivera and six other people to Toluca, outside Mexico City, from Monterrey, where the singer had just given a concert.

"There is nothing recognizable, neither material nor human" in the wreckage found in the state of Nuevo Leon, Ruiz Esparza said. The impact was so powerful that the remains of the plane "are scattered over an area of 250 to 300 meters. It is almost unrecognizable."

Rivera's father told dozens of reporters gathered in front of his Los Angeles-area home that "I believe my daughter's body is unrecognizable."

"My son Lupillo told me that effectively it was Jenni's plane that crashed and that everyone on board died," Pedro Rivera said.

Rivera said his son would travel to Monterrey early Monday morning.

No cause was given for the plane's crash, but its wreckage was found near the town of Iturbide in Mexico's Sierra Madre Oriental, where the terrain is very rough.

The Learjet 25, number N345MC, took off from Monterrey at 3:30 a.m. local time and was reported missing about 10 minutes later. It was registered to Starwood Management of Las Vegas, Nevada, according to FAA records. It was built in 1969 and had a current registration through 2015.

Media and celebrities in Mexico sent condolences to Rivera's family even though authorities still had not confirmed that she was aboard the plane and said an investigation would be conducted.

"My friend! Why? There is no consolation. God, please help me!" said Mexican pop singer Paulina Rubio on her official Twitter account. Singer Miguel Bose, who appears on the Mexican show "The Mexican Voice" along with Rivera, wrote on his Twitter account: "My dear Jenni, you will always be in my heart. Forever. I love you."

Also believed aboard the plane were her publicist, Arturo Rivera, her lawyer, makeup artist and the flight crew.

Though drug trafficking was the theme of some of her songs, she was not considered a singer of "narco corridos," or ballads glorifying drug lords like other groups, such as Los Tigres del Norte. She was better known for singing about her troubles in love and disdain for men.

Her parents were Mexicans who had migrated to the United States. Two of her five brothers, Lupillo and Juan Rivera, are also well-known singers of grupero music.

She studied business administration and formally debuted on the music scene in 1995 with the release of her album "Chacalosa". Due to its success, she recorded two more independent albums, "We Are Rivera" and "Farewell to Selena," a tribute album to slain singer Selena that helped expand her following.

At the end of the 1990s, Rivera was signed by Sony Music and released two more albums. But widespread success came for her when she joined Fonovisa and released her 2005 album titled "Partier, Rebellious and Daring."

Besides being a singer, she is also a businesswoman and actress, appearing in the indie film Filly Brown, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, as the incarcerated mother of Filly Brown.

She was filming the third season of "I love Jenni," which followed her as she shared special moments with her children and as she toured through Mexico and the United States. She also has the reality shows: "Jenni Rivera Presents: Chiquis and Raq-C" and her daughter's "Chiquis 'n Control."

In 2009, she was detained at the Mexico City airport when she declared $20,000 in cash but was really carrying $52,167. She was taken into custody. She said it was an innocent mistake and authorities gave her the benefit of the doubt and released her.

In 2011, her brother Juan assaulted a drunken fan at a popular fair in Guanajuato. In the face of heavy criticism among her fans and on social networks, Rivera publicly apologized for the incident during a concert in Mexico City, telling her fans: "Thank you for accepting me as I am, with my virtues and defects."

On Saturday night, Rivera had given a concert before thousands of fans in Monterrey. After the concert she gave a press conference during which she spoke of her emotional state following her recent divorce from former Major League Baseball pitcher Esteban Loaiza, who played for teams including the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers.

"I can't get caught up in the negative because that destroys you. Perhaps trying to move away from my problems and focus on the positive is the best I can do. I am a woman like any other and ugly things happen to me like any other woman," she said Saturday night. "The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up."

Rivera had announced in October that she was divorcing Loaiza after two years of marriage.

There have been several high-profile crashes involving Learjets, known as swift, longer-distance passenger aircraft popular with corporate executives, entertainers and government officials.

A Learjet carrying pro-golfer Payne Stewart and five others crashed in northeastern South Dakota in 1999. Investigators said the plane lost cabin pressure and all on board died after losing consciousness for lack of oxygen. The aircraft flew for several hours on autopilot before running out of fuel and crashing in a corn field.

Former Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker was severely injured in a 2008 Learjet crash in South Carolina that killed four people.

That same year, a Learjet slammed into rush-hour traffic in a posh Mexico City neighborhood, killing Mexico's No. 2 government official, Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino, and eight others on the plane, plus five people on the ground.

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Associated Press Writer Galia Garcia-Palafox and Olga R. Rodriguez contributed to this report from Mexico City.

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A Breakthrough Against Leukemia Using Altered T-Cells

PHILIPSBURG, Pa. — Emma Whitehead has been bounding around the house lately, practicing somersaults and rugby-style tumbles that make her parents wince.

It is hard to believe, but last spring Emma, then 6, was near death from leukemia. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy, and doctors had run out of options.

Desperate to save her, her parents sought an experimental treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one that had never before been tried in a child, or in anyone with the type of leukemia Emma had. The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells.

The treatment very nearly killed her. But she emerged from it cancer-free, and about seven months later is still in complete remission. She is the first child and one of the first humans ever in whom new techniques have achieved a long-sought goal — giving a patient’s own immune system the lasting ability to fight cancer.

Emma had been ill with acute lymphoblastic leukemia since 2010, when she was 5, said her parents, Kari and Tom. She is their only child.

She is among just a dozen patients with advanced leukemia to have received the experimental treatment, which was developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Similar approaches are also being tried at other centers, including the National Cancer Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

“Our goal is to have a cure, but we can’t say that word,” said Dr. Carl June, who leads the research team at the University of Pennsylvania. He hopes the new treatment will eventually replace bone-marrow transplantation, an even more arduous, risky and expensive procedure that is now the last hope when other treatments fail in leukemia and related diseases.

Three adults with chronic leukemia treated at the University of Pennsylvania have also had complete remissions, with no signs of disease; two of them have been well for more than two years, said Dr. David Porter. Four adults improved but did not have full remissions, and one was treated too recently to evaluate. A child improved and then relapsed. In two adults, the treatment did not work at all. The Pennsylvania researchers were presenting their results on Sunday and Monday in Atlanta at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Despite the mixed results, cancer experts not involved with the research say it has tremendous promise, because even in this early phase of testing it has worked in seemingly hopeless cases. “I think this is a major breakthrough,” said Dr. Ivan Borrello, a cancer expert and associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. John Wagner, the director of pediatric blood and marrow transplantation at the University of Minnesota, called the Pennsylvania results “phenomenal” and said they were “what we’ve all been working and hoping for but not seeing to this extent.”

A major drug company, Novartis, is betting on the Pennsylvania team and has committed $20 million to building a research center on the university’s campus to bring the treatment to market.

Hervé Hoppenot, the president of Novartis Oncology, called the research “fantastic” and said it had the potential — if the early results held up — to revolutionize the treatment of leukemia and related blood cancers. Researchers say the same approach, reprogramming the patient’s immune system, may also eventually be used against tumors like breast and prostate cancer.

To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell — and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turn malignant in leukemia.

The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.

The T-cells home in on a protein called CD-19 that is found on the surface of most B-cells, whether they are healthy or malignant.

A sign that the treatment is working is that the patient becomes terribly ill, with raging fevers and chills — a reaction that oncologists call “shake and bake,” Dr. June said. Its medical name is cytokine-release syndrome, or cytokine storm, referring to the natural chemicals that pour out of cells in the immune system as they are being activated, causing fevers and other symptoms. The storm can also flood the lungs and cause perilous drops in blood pressure — effects that nearly killed Emma.

Steroids sometimes ease the reaction, but they did not help Emma. Her temperature hit 105. She wound up on a ventilator, unconscious and swollen almost beyond recognition, surrounded by friends and family who had come to say goodbye.

But at the 11th hour, a battery of blood tests gave the researchers a clue as to what might help save Emma: her level of one of the cytokines, interleukin-6 or IL-6, had shot up a thousandfold. Doctors had never seen such a spike before and thought it might be what was making her so sick.

Dr. June knew that a drug could lower IL-6 — his daughter takes it for rheumatoid arthritis. It had never been used for a crisis like Emma’s, but there was little to lose. Her oncologist, Dr. Stephan A. Grupp, ordered the drug. The response, he said, was “amazing.”

Within hours, Emma began to stabilize. She woke up a week later, on May 2, the day she turned 7; the intensive-care staff sang “Happy Birthday.”

Since then, the research team has used the same drug, tocilizumab, in several other patients.

In patients with lasting remissions after the treatment, the altered T-cells persist in the bloodstream, though in smaller numbers than when they were fighting the disease. Some patients have had the cells for years.

Dr. Michel Sadelain, who conducts similar studies at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, said: “These T-cells are living drugs. With a pill, you take it, it’s eliminated from your body and you have to take it again.” But T-cells, he said, “could potentially be given only once, maybe only once or twice or three times.”

The Pennsylvania researchers said they were surprised to find any big drug company interested in their work, because a new batch of T-cells must be created for each patient — a far cry from the familiar commercial strategy of developing products like Viagra or cholesterol medicines, in which millions of people take the same drug.

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China's November trade weakens, import growth zero

China's overseas trade slowed sharply in November, with growth in imports falling to zero despite other signs the world's second-largest economy is recovering from a slowdown.

Growth in exports declined to 2.9 percent over a year earlier from the previous month's 11.6 percent, customs data showed Monday. Import growth fell from October's 2.4 percent.

The figures were in line with warnings by analysts who said a trade rebound that began in August was unsustainable due to weak global demand amid Europe's debt problems and a slow U.S. recovery.

Figures released on the weekend showed that November factory output rose 10.1 percent and consumer spending increased 14.9 percent in a sign China is recovering from a slump that dragged growth to a three-and-a-half-year low in the quarter ended September.

Forecasters say economic growth likely is rebounding in the current quarter.

The weak trade figures are a setback for Chinese exporters that employ millions of workers and were battered by the slump in Western consumer demand.

The import weakness caused China's global trade surplus to widen 35 percent over a year earlier to $19.5 billion. But that was well below October's $32 billion, the biggest surplus in many years.

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Egypt's Morsi reverses most of decree that expanded his powers

CAIRO — In a political reversal to calm weeks of unrest, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi early Sunday rescinded much of last month’s decree that expanded his powers and exposed a dangerous divide between the nation’s Islamists and the mainly secular opposition.

The announcement reverses most of the declaration the Islamist president issued Nov. 22, including putting his office beyond judicial oversight. The peeling away of that power was a major demand of protesters. But Morsi continued to defy the opposition by refusing to cancel a Dec. 15 referendum on a proposed constitution drafted by an Islamist-dominated assembly.

The turnaround by Morsi, who in a national address Thursday had refused to budge on his decree, was a signal that he wanted to ease tension that has resulted in clashes between his supporters and opposition groups that have left at least six people dead and hundreds injured.

It was unlikely, however, that reversing the decree but sticking to the referendum vote would appease the tens of thousands of protesters who have marched on his palace in the capital and in cities across Egypt.

“This is not a compromise; the president got all that he wanted,” said Bassem Sabry, an activist and writer. “What the Muslim Brotherhood wants [is to] get the constitution rammed through in a quick referendum before anyone gets a chance to properly discuss it.”

Morsi’s concessions came as news reports indicated that he was preparing to reimpose emergency law to allow soldiers to arrest civilians in response to the latest unrest.

Throughout the crisis the military has been a quiet, if uncomfortable, ally. In recent months, the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Morsi was long associated, has assured the army that its power and billions of dollars of business interests would not be upset by the Islamist-led government.

The generals and the Brotherhood are the nation’s dominant forces, onetime adversaries who have reached, at least for now, a strategic understanding amid the turmoil. The military — its reputation damaged during its months of oppressive rule after last year’s overthrow of Hosni Mubarak — wants to avoid presiding over the nation’s turbulent political passions.

Only hours before Morsi announced his concessions, the military said it viewed the crisis with “sorrow and concern” and indicated that it was preparing to tighten security. The escalation of “clashes and conflict is something we must avoid,” the army said in a statement. It added that without political dialogue, “the nation will be led to dark and disastrous consequences, which we will not allow.”

But the military “has no interest in going back into politics,” said Talaat Mosallam, a retired major general and security analyst. “They had an uncomfortable experience ruling during the aftermath of the [2011] uprising. The country is in need of political direction, and nobody has the cure.”

Morsi’s reliance on the generals, though, sharply illustrates Egypt’s altered political landscape, where what was unimaginable two years ago has been recast by new calculations and power plays.

Morsi and thousands of other Muslim Brotherhood members were jailed by the Mubarak government under an emergency declaration similar to what Morsi now is said to be proposing. It is a startling testament to his predicament and the urgency the Brotherhood feels amid the country’s increasingly violent divide between Islamists and liberal and secularist movements.

The Brotherhood has long been suspicious of the police and Interior Ministry, which Islamists believe have networks of Mubarak loyalists aiming to disrupt Morsi’s government. The military — still the country’s most revered institution — was viewed as the better choice for instilling order and reassuring diplomats and foreign investors about Egypt’s stability and regional political stature.

The Brotherhood has placated the generals by preserving the military’s broad powers in the proposed constitution. Liberals and Christians boycotted the drafting of the charter, but the secular army approved the document, despite its references to Islamic law, known as sharia.

The coming days will tell whether Morsi’s Sunday concessions will be enough to reach a compromise with the opposition. The political unrest began more than two weeks ago when Morsi seized near-absolute power and protected the Islamist-led constitutional assembly from judicial review. Those actions resulted in a rushed proposed charter that the opposition says endangers civil rights and allows clerics to influence the nation’s laws.

Morsi called for a national dialogue with dissident groups Saturday, but no major opposition figure attended. With the opposition promising more protests and marches on the presidential palace, Morsi, who is trying to attract billions of dollars in foreign investment for his beleaguered economy, sought to show that Egypt would not devolve into chaos.

“There are agreements between the armed forces, the U.S. and the Brotherhood,” said Ammar Ali Hassan, a political analyst. “They've agreed to stability because the U.S. absolutely needs stability in Egypt.”

Morsi’s relationship with the military has had many twists. The Brotherhood was co-opted, persecuted and outlawed through six decades when secular military men, including Mubarak, ran the country.

When Mubarak fell in early 2011, opposition groups criticized the Brotherhood for not joining them in battling against the military takeover of the country. The army and the Brotherhood, however, had set parameters of mutual interest that allowed the Islamist group to rise to political power while the military remained the ultimate authority to counter what it regarded as a threat from an emerging political Islam.

That balance was uneasy from the beginning. Morsi moved against the military in August, forcing the resignations of top generals, including Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who had ruled the country for more than 16 months until Morsi came to power. The purge was made possible by two dynamics: The army wanted to exit politics to protect its reputation from further damage, and younger officers were eager to clean the top ranks of an old guard they saw as out of step with the country’s modern strategic demands.

The military, which receives $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid, has many factions and could change course. But the country’s new defense minister, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi, is a pious Muslim; and the armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Sedky Sobhy, appears more in tune with Brotherhood sentiments than Tantawi, who in 2008 threatened to call out the troops to prevent the group’s candidates from winning seats in local elections.

In a 2005 paper from his training at the National War College in Washington, Sobhy echoed a stance closer to the Brotherhood than to the Mubarak regime, which at the time was a close U.S. ally criticized for its perceived deference to Israel.

“The one-sided nature of the United States-Israel strategic relationship has not only caused actual harm to the cause of peace with numerous victims among Arab populations ... but it has inflamed Arab passions,” Sobhy wrote.

The military, however, is not easy to read and is vested in a business empire estimated to account for at least 10% of the country’s economy. The majority of Egyptians, those far from protests and political battles, believe the generals will protect the nation ahead of any party. Some analysts suggest that could once again make the generals Morsi’s strongest rivals.

“The circumstances that the country is undergoing can allow the military back into the scene,” said Hassan, the political analyst.

“Unlike the Brotherhood, which seeks to change the Egyptian identity, the military might prove to be another better option for Egyptians. Egyptians believe that the military will at least not threaten their cultural identity, unlike the Brotherhood.”

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Abdellatif is a special correspondent.

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Twitter to Start War on Instagram In Time for Christmas

Holidays seem to be Instagram‘s bread and butter, so it makes sense that Twitter would fire their first shot in the war on Instagram when the app is at its most vulnerable. 

RELATED: Why You Can’t See Instagram Photos on Twitter Anymore

If we learned anything from Thanksgiving, it’s that people love to Instagram their holidays. Turkeys, stuffing, table settings: you Amaro’d it all. It was the service’s best day ever. There were 10 million pictures Instagrammed on Thanksgiving. So it’s not a logistical stretch to imagine the holiday season – Hanukkah starts tonight! —  will be big business for Instagram, too. Christmas day will probably be especially big since it combines dinner, like Thanksgiving, and presents. (Also: check your Instagram feed right now and you’re sure to see at least 3 Christmas trees.)

RELATED: Meet the Parade of Greedy Crybabies Who Didn’t Get iPhones for Christmas

And so comes a report from AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac saying Twitter will launch its own photo filters on time for Christmas, likely to try and capitalize on that rush of OMG I got a cool thing! photo-sharing. Instagram stopped their photos from being shown on Twitter, because they want people on their site. The move makes enough sense, because Instagram is owned by Facebook and not Twitter, but it still sucks for the rest of us. The two companies are now in a budding rivalry over photo-sharing, so this is it, it’s war, we guess. 

RELATED: How to Get Over the Twitter-Instagram War on Photos

If you’re having trouble watching these two former friends fight, please read The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield’s guide to getting over it. The holidays is no place for rivalries. Didn’t Jingle All The Way teach you people anything? 

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Rolling Stones hit NY for 50th anniversary gig

NEW YORK (AP) — "Time Waits for No One," the Rolling Stones sang in 1974, but lately it's seemed like that grizzled quartet does indeed have some sort of exemption from the ravages of time.

At an average age of 68-plus years, the British rockers are clearly in fighting form, sounding tight, focused and truly ready for the spotlight at a rapturously received pair of London concerts last month.

On Saturday, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts hit New York for the first of three U.S. shows on their "50 and Counting" mini-tour, marking a mind-boggling half-century since the band first began playing its unique brand of blues-tinged rock.

And the three shows — Saturday's at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, then two in Newark, N.J., on Dec. 13 and 15 — aren't the only big dates on the agenda. Next week the Stones join a veritable who's who of British rock royalty and U.S. superstars at the blockbuster 12-12-12 Sandy benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. Also scheduled to perform: Paul McCartney, the Who, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Eddie Vedder, Billy Joel, Roger Waters and Chris Martin.

The Stones' three U.S. shows promise to have their own special guests, too. Mary J. Blige will be at the Brooklyn gig, as well as guitarist Gary Clark Jr., the band has announced. (Blige performed a searing "Gimme Shelter" with frontman Jagger in London.) Rumors are swirling of huge names at the Dec. 15 show, which also will be on pay-per-view.

In a flurry of anniversary activity, the band also released a hits compilation last month with two new songs, "Doom and Gloom" and "One More Shot," and HBO premiered a new documentary on their formative years, "Crossfire Hurricane."

The Stones formed in London in 1962 to play Chicago blues, led at the time by the late Brian Jones and pianist Ian Stewart, along with Jagger and Richards, who'd met on a train platform a year earlier. Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts were quick additions.

Wyman, who left the band in 1992, was a guest at the London shows last month, as was Mick Taylor, the celebrated former Stones guitarist who left in 1974 — to be replaced by Wood, the newest Stone and the youngster at 65.

The inevitable questions have been swirling about the next step for the Stones: another huge global tour, on the scale of their last one, "A Bigger Bang," which earned more than $550 million between 2005 and 2007? Something a bit smaller? Or is this mini-tour, in the words of their new song, really "One Last Shot"?

The Stones won't say. But in an interview last month, they made clear they felt the 50th anniversary was something to be marked.

"I thought it would be kind of churlish not to do something," Jagger told The Associated Press. "Otherwise, the BBC would have done a rather dull film about the Rolling Stones."

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Associated Press writer David Bauder contributed to this report.

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Doping at U.S. Tracks Affects Europe’s Taste for Horse Meat

PARIS — For decades, American horses, many of them retired or damaged racehorses, have been shipped to Canada and Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter horses, and then processed and sold for consumption in Europe and beyond.

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times

A slaughterhouse in Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, where meat is processed for sale in Europe.

Lately, however, European food safety officials have notified Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses of a growing concern: The meat of American racehorses may be too toxic to eat safely because the horses have been injected repeatedly with drugs.

Despite the fact that racehorses make up only a fraction of the trade in horse meat, the European officials have indicated that they may nonetheless require lifetime medication records for slaughter-bound horses from Canada and Mexico, and perhaps require them to be held on feedlots or some other holding area for six months before they are slaughtered.

In October, Stephan Giguere, the general manager of a major slaughterhouse in Quebec, said he turned away truckloads of horses coming from the United States because his clients were worried about potential drug issues. Mr. Giguere said he told his buyers to stay away from horses coming from American racetracks.

“We don’t want them,” he said. “It’s too risky.”

The action is just the latest indication of the troubled state of American racing and its problems with the doping of horses. Some prominent trainers have been disciplined for using legal and illegal drugs, and horses loaded with painkillers have been breaking down in arresting numbers. Congress has called for reform, and state regulators have begun imposing stricter rules.

But for pure emotional effect, the alarm raised in the international horse-meat marketplace packs a distinctive punch.

Some 138,000 horses were sent to Canada or Mexico in 2010 alone to be turned into meat for Europe and other parts of the world, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Organizations concerned about the welfare of retired racehorses have estimated that anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the population sent for slaughter may have performed on racetracks in the United States.

“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian on the faculty of Tufts University and a co-author of a 2010 article that sought to raise concerns about the health risks posed by American racehorses. He said it was reckless to want any of the drugs routinely administered to horses “in your food chain.”

Horses being shipped to Mexico and Canada are by law required to have been free of certain drugs for six months before being slaughtered, and those involved in their shipping must have affidavits proving that. But European Commission officials say the affidavits are easily falsified. As a result, American racehorses often show up in Canada within weeks — sometimes days — of their leaving the racetrack and their steady diets of drugs.

In October, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumers found serious problems while auditing the operations of equine slaughter facilities in Mexico, where 80 percent of the horses arrive from the United States. The commission’s report said Mexican officials were not allowed to question the “authenticity or reliability of the sworn statements” about the ostensibly drug-free horses, and thus had no way of verifying whether the horses were tainted by drugs.

“The systems in place for identification, the food-chain information and in particular the affidavits concerning the nontreatment for six months with certain medical substances, both for the horses imported from the U.S. as well as for the Mexican horses, are insufficient to guarantee that standards equivalent to those provided for by E.U. legislation are applied,” the report said.

The authorities in the United States and Canada acknowledge that oversight of the slaughter business is lax. On July 9, the United States Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to an Ohio feedlot operator who sells horses for slaughter. The operator, Ronald Andio, was reprimanded for selling a drug-tainted thoroughbred horse to a Canadian slaughterhouse.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had tested the carcass of the horse the previous August and found the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone in the muscle and kidney tissues. It also discovered clenbuterol, a widely abused medication for breathing problems that can build muscle by mimicking anabolic steroids.

Because horses are not a traditional food source in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration does not require human food safety information as it considers what drugs can be used legally on horses. Patricia El-Hinnawy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said agency-approved drugs intended for use in horses carried the warning “Do not use in horses intended for human consumption.”

She also said the case against Mr. Andio remained open.

“On the warning letter, the case remains open and no further information can be provided at this time,” Ms. El-Hinnawy said.

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