GOP candidates target Romney, each other, in spirited debate

Mitt Romney coolly defended his solid New Hampshire lead Saturday night in a high-stakes debate as his rivals took aim at each other as they struggled to emerge as Romney's main challenger.

The six candidates fought, sometimes bitterly, over leadership qualities, job creation, military backgrounds, and a host of other issues three days before the nation's first presidential primary here.

Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who has a huge lead in New Hampshire polls, defended his role as a businessman and emerged from the debate largely unscathed. His opponents largely fired at each other, not him, and he concentrated his criticism on Barack Obama, cultivating his camp's contention that he's the Republican most able to defeat the Democratic incumbent.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who surged into a virtual tie with Romney in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, promoted his record of working in Congress on issues such as Iran as a better model for presidential leadership than Romney's record as a private-equity capitalist.

"Business experience doesn't necessarily match up with being the commander-in-chief," Santorum said, referring to Romney. "The commander-in-chief of this country isn't a CEO."

Romney, co-founder of the Bain Capital investment company, responded firmly and deliberately.

"People who spend a lot of time in Washington don't understand what happens in the real economy," he said. "They think people who start businesses are just managers... Those people are leaders. My experience is in leadership."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich also went after Romney's record at Bain, a company that invested in other businesses, sometimes forcing job layoffs.

"I'm not nearly as enamored of a Wall Street model where you can flip companies, you can go in and have leveraged buyouts, you can basically take out all the money, leaving behind the worker," Gingrich said.

"It always pained me" to downsize a business to make it financially successful, Romney said. But overall, he added, the businesses his company invested in "have now added more than 100,000 jobs.

Co-sponsored by Yahoo News and televised on ABC from Saint Anselm College, the two-hour debate was the first of a two-debate weekend showdown. The same group debates Sunday for 90 minutes on NBC's "Meet the Press." The first hour will be televised.

Together, the debates offered Romney a chance to solidify his overwhelming double-digit lead in the state, and a last chance for all the others to become the single conservative alternative before the race heads south to South Carolina, which votes on Jan. 21.

Polls show Romney with about 41 percent in New Hampshire, followed by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas with 20 percent. After that, it's a three-way fight for third between Santorum with 11 percent and Gingrich and former Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah each with 9 percent. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who's not campaigning in the state, trails with 1 percent.

The night's most aggressive exchanges did not involve Romney. Instead, Paul attacked Gingrich and Santorum sharply and persistently.

Paul echoed his earlier charge that Gingrich was a "chicken hawk" for supporting sending young people to war after not serving himself during the Vietnam War.

Gingrich was offended, saying that he was "an Army brat" whose family experience gives him "a pretty good sense of what military families and veterans' families need."

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/07/2579187/gop-candidates-target-romney-each.html

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Occupy 2012: Firmly disorganized, driven by dreams (Reuters)

Oakland, Calif./New York (Reuters) ? It's been a long, cold winter already for Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement that burst onto the scene in September to focus national attention on income inequality and the perceived greed of the rich and powerful.

Police have cleared the signature "Occupy" encampments in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and other major cities. Cold weather, and perhaps protest fatigue, have weakened the handful of camps that remain around the country. The lack of a coherent set of demands has made it difficult for the young movement to affect policy or otherwise score victories that might keep recruits coming.

But the movement has clearly influenced the national political conversation, with even President Barack Obama echoing some of its themes in calling for a "fair shot" and "fair share" for all.

Now, as Occupy heads into 2012, participants in the leaderless movement are developing a range of new strategies and tactics to keep what they view as the injustices of the economic system in the spotlight.

Here are some ways the Occupy movement is trying to evolve:

OCCUPY THE ELECTION

Occupy has been likened to the conservative Tea Party movement, which emerged in 2009 and helped elect dozens of Republicans. But many in the Occupy movement specifically reject electoral politics, which they see as hopelessly tainted by money. Relationships with labor unions, the natural allies of Occupy when it comes to electoral politics, have been a mixed bag, with some unions, notably National Nurses United, strongly backing the protesters while others have kept their distance.

In the current election cycles, it appears the main Occupy activities will be rallies, sit-ins, and heckling candidates on the stump. During the Iowa caucus campaign, a handful of occupiers interrupted speeches by Obama and by Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Small groups also targeted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as he campaigned for Gingrich's rival Mitt Romney, and stuck Romney himself, who got rich as a private equity investor, with the moniker "Mr. One Percent." New Hampshire campaign events have similarly been a target of small groups of protesters.

OCCUPY THE ECONOMY

The Occupy movement blames the banks for the worst U.S. recession in decades. And one of its more successful initiatives has been a campaign urging consumers to move their money from the commercial banks to not-for-profit credit unions; in a little over a month, credit unions pulled in hundreds of thousands of new customers. Bank of America also scrapped a widely criticized $5 monthly fee for debit cards, which the Occupy movement claimed as a victory. Occupy San Francisco is planning a big demonstration in that city's Financial District on Jan 20.

Some groups of protesters are trying to come up with alternative banking systems. Others are pushing for legislation. Protesters in Oakland and San Francisco have carried placards calling for a return to the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banking and commercial banking. Occupy the SEC, a committee of Occupy Wall Street, is calling for tough implementation of the so-called Volcker Rule, which would bar U.S. banks from using depositor's funds for speculative investments.

On the West Coast, demonstrators have twice picketed at ports, shutting down shipping terminals for up to 24 hours. But truckers, stevedores and longshoremen who refused to cross picket lines lost pay, raising the question of whom the action was helping, or hurting. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union publicly opposed the December 12 action that aimed to shut down ports, while the International Brotherhood of Teamsters took a neutral stance.

Judging from the history of social movements, Occupy's relationship with labor unions, as well as students, could ultimately be the key to its influence, says Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University.

"It has to be large-scale to continue to demonstrate force," he said. "It has to bring together more allied groups. And someone has to push this into specific policies."

OCCUPY HOUSING

In December protesters launched Occupy Our Homes, a bid to take back foreclosed homes. Occupiers took up residence in a home in Oakland, California and one in Brooklyn, New York, that day, demanding that lenders renegotiate mortgages for the homeowners. National Occupy Our Homes organizer Matt Browner Hamlin said protesters had set a goal of over 100 such "actions" around the country in the next few months.

The Atlanta group is already claiming victory; Occupy Atlanta member Tom Franzen says it forced JPMorgan Chase to offer more generous terms to homeowner Birgitte Walker, who ran into financial difficulties after being honorably discharged from the Army. Chase acknowledges that it modified Walker's loan, but spokesperson Nancy Norris said protesters had nothing to do with it. "We had been working with her for a year," she said.

Elsewhere, the Occupy Our Homes movement has run into stiff resistance. Just before New Year's Eve, police arrested squatters in an Oakland home they were holding "as collateral." It was the second time police had driven Oakland occupiers from a private residence, suggesting that squatting in homes may be just as challenging as camping in parks.

OCCUPY CYBERSPACE

The Occupy movement has been driven by social media, and activists are now moving to build on their successful use of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with new tools and technology. The group rolled out StudioOccupy.org, which allows protesters to easily share and edit videos and other multimedia presentations online. Occupydream.org aims to collect a million "statements of dreams" in advance of a march on Washington timed for Martin Luther King's birthday on January 16.

Some protesters have also begun to use "Vibe," an application for iPhones, iPads and Android that allows the user to send messages that are only visible to other users, and not to police or other outsiders. Vibe messages are anonymous, and users can control how far they are broadcast (from 150 feet to worldwide) and for how long (the messages disappear after a set time period ranging from 15 minutes to 30 days, leaving no trail).

The use of such technology enables the movement to mobilize and organize efficiently without a top-down hierarchy. Social movements in the past required a leader to put out orders to lieutenants who passed them along to the foot soldiers, but now any individual can call a protest at any time, with the crowd deciding on the spur of the moment whose call to action deserves attention.

OCCUPY REAL SPACE

Police raids on the big metropolitan camps created the appearance that all occupy camps were evicted. But tent communities have quietly persisted.

While no official count exists, Firedoglake, a news website sympathetic to the movement, counted 65 tent communities in the United States that were expected to last through the winter. Perhaps the most visible, an Occupy DC camp in Washington's McPherson Square, a couple of blocks from the White House, has weatherized its tents and obtained winter sleeping bags.

Other occupiers have moved indoors. Occupy Wall Street is renting office space in lower Manhattan, and Occupy Atlanta is in the top floor of a homeless shelter. Evicted campers have not all abandoned their former spaces either: on New Year's Eve, hundreds of people gathered at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where the largest Occupy camp once stood, and 68 were arrested when they tried to remove police barricades.

Questions about physical space have stimulated a debate within the movement. Some argue that camps are essential as bases for operations, as dramatic symbols or as model egalitarian communities. Others say housekeeping and organizational challenges in the camps have drained the group's energy away from more effective tactics for social change. But most predicted that spring would find a new blooming of tent communities around the country.

OCCUPY CULTURE

The protesters' slogan "We are the 99 percent," which refers to a view that the richest 1 percent have a virtual monopoly on money, power and influence, has struck a chord across the country, and the movement's rhetoric has quickly become a part of popular culture. Occupy this, occupy that -- there are few examples of a single word jumping so quickly from the middle pages of the dictionary to the forefront of public conversation. Chants like "Whose streets? Our streets" and "banks got bailed out, we got sold out" were suddenly as familiar as snatches of Bob Dylan songs were to a previous generation of protesters.

But Occupy protesters have a much more ambitious cultural agenda. In the way they have organized their movement, by welcoming everyone, eschewing hierarchy, and allowing a voice to whoever shows up, they hope to set an example for the rest of society.

(Reporting Laird Harrison and Michelle Nichols; Additional reporting by Peter Henderson and Malathi Nayak; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Christopher Wilson)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120109/us_nm/us_usa_occupy2012

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Education law's promise falls short after 10 years (AP)

WASHINGTON ? The No Child Left Behind education law was cast as a symbol of possibility, offering the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better prepared students in a competitive world.

Yet after a decade on the books, President George W. Bush's most hyped domestic accomplishment has become a symbol to many of federal overreach and Congress' inability to fix something that's clearly flawed.

The law forced schools to confront the uncomfortable reality that many kids simply weren't learning, but it's primarily known for its emphasis on standardized tests and the labeling of thousands of schools as "failures."

Sunday marks the 10-year anniversary of the day Bush signed it into law in Hamilton, Ohio. By his side were the leaders of the education committees in Congress, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. The bipartisanship that made the achievement possible in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks is long gone.

The same Senate committee approved a revamped education bill last year, but deep-rooted partisanship stalled the measure in the full Congress. In this election year, there appears little political will for compromise despite widespread agreement that changes are needed.

Critics say the law carries rigid and unrealistic expectations that put too much of an emphasis on tests for reading and math at the expense of a more well-rounded education.

Frustrated by the congressional inaction, President Barack Obama told states last fall they could seek a waiver around unpopular proficiency requirements in exchange for actions his administration favors. A vast majority of states have said they will go that route, seen as a temporary fix until lawmakers do act.

Like Obama, Republican presidential candidates have criticized the law. One, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, even saying he regrets voting for it.

"If you called a rally to keep No Child Left Behind as it is, not a single person would show up," said Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Denver's former school superintendent.

The view was drastically different 10 years ago, when Bush took what was an uncommon stance for a conservative in seeking an aggressive federal role in forcing states and districts to tackle abysmal achievement gaps in schools.

He was able to get fellow Republicans such as Boehner, the current House speaker, and Democratic leaders on education such as Kennedy, who died in 2009, and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., to join him. The mandate was that all students read and perform math on grade level by 2014.

"No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance. No longer is it acceptable to keep results from parents," Bush said when he signed the legislation. "We're never going to give up on a school that's performing poorly; that when we find poor performance, a school will be given time and incentives and resources to correct their problems."

The law requires annual testing. Districts must keep and publish data showing how subgroups of students perform. Schools that don't meet requirements for two years or longer face increasingly tough consequences, from busing children to higher performing schools to offering tutoring and replacing staff.

The test results were eye-opening, recalled Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

"People were stunned because they were always led to believe that things were going fine in this particular school. And the fact of the matter was, for huge numbers of students that was not the case," Miller said. "That led to a lot of anger, disappointment. That led to embarrassment. In many instances, the schools were being held out as exceeding in their mission, when it fact they were failing many, many of the children in those schools."

Under the law, watching movies and assigning irrelevant or no homework was no longer acceptable because suddenly someone was paying attention, said Charles Barone, a former aide to Miller who is director of federal policy with Democrats for Education Reform.

In low-performing urban schools, where teachers and principals once might have thrown up their hands and not known what to do, there was a new attitude along the lines of "we might not know what to do, but we've got to do something," said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Both spoke at a recent forum on the law at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

But many teachers

and principals started to believe they were being judged on factors out of their control and in ways that were unfair.

Jennifer Ochoa, an eighth-grade literacy teacher in New York who works with low-performing students, said the law has hurt morale among educators as well as students, who feel they have to do well on a standardized test or are failures, no matter how much progress they make.

"Afterward, it didn't matter how far you came if you didn't make this outside goal," Ochoa said. "We started talking about kids in very different ways. We started talking about kids in statistical ways instead of human being terms."

How successful the law has been academically remains under debate.

Scores on a national assessment show significant gains in math among the fourth- and eighth-graders, with Hispanic and African-American fourth-graders performing approximately two grade levels higher today than when the law was passed, said Mark Schneider, the former U.S. commissioner of education statistics who now serves as vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

"You cannot dismiss these gains, and I think ... people just aren't willing to credit NCLB or accountability in general because of ideological and political preferences," Schneider said.

As the years went by, however, the growth has largely plateaued, Schneider said. Similar large gains were not shown in reading, and some experts say more progress was made in reading before the law was passed. There are still huge differences in the performance of African-American and Hispanic students compared with white students.

As the 2014 deadline draws closer, more schools are failing to meet federal standards, with nearly half not doing so last year, according to the Center on Education Policy. Center officials said that's because some states today have harder tests or have high numbers of immigrant and low-income children, but it's also because the law requires states to raise the bar each year for how many children must pass the test.

Some states had long put off the largest increases to avoid penalties.

In Washington, much of the political debate over the law centers on how much federal control the government should have. Some Republicans want to go so far as to close the Education Department and end federally-imposed annual testing.

Even among Democrats there's been some dissension. The Obama administration, for example, opposed the Senate bill passed in committee under the leadership of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, because it said the measure didn't go far enough on accountability; Harkin said it wasn't a perfect bill, but compromise was necessary.

Many educators are now looking to other factors

such as online learning, an increased trend toward teacher evaluations tied to student performance, the federal Race to the Top competition that states have competed in, and the common core standards adopted in the vast majority of states as factors that could provide the next boost in education.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former education secretary, said he's hopeful Congress will do what's right and update No Child Left Behind, which became due for renewal in 2007.

"One of the things we ought to be able to do is fix No Child Left Behind," said Alexander, R-Tenn. "What we ought to do is set new realistic goals for it so that schools and schools can have those kinds of goals, and most importantly we need to move out of Washington and back to states and local communities decisions about whether schools and teachers are succeeding or failing."

___

Associated Press writer Dorie Turner in Atlanta contributed to this report.

___

Kimberly Hefling can be followed at http://twitter.com/khefling

___

Online:

Background on the law: http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

National Center for Education Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120107/ap_on_go_ot/us_no_child_left_behind10_years

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Herc?s Saturday TV Talkback!! Chat Here About The First New SNL Of 2012!! Plus DOG WHISPERER, MY CAT FROM HELL and the Weekend?s Two GOP Debates!! Who's High-Pitch??

Newt Gingrich is scheduled to tear a new poop-chute for archenemy Mitt Romney, whom Gingrich blames for his plummeting poll numbers. Two new GOP debates are scheduled in New Hampshire this weekend: one at 9 p.m. Saturday on ABC and another 12 hours later, at 9 a.m. Sunday on NBC. Though there was speculation Perry would skip New Hampshire following his poor showing in Iowa on Tuesday, he apparently will appear alongside Romney, Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman.

The final SNL of 2011, hosted by Jimmy Fallon, hit SNL?s best number in adults 18-49 since last May?s season finale with Lady Gaga.

Next week Daniel Radcliffe hosts with musical guest Lana Del Rey.

Look! Press release!

SNL RINGS IN 2012 WITH AN ALL-STAR LINEUP


?January 7 - Charles Barkley/ Kelly Clarkson; January 14 ? Daniel Radcliffe/ Lana Del Rey
?

New York, NY ? December 19, 2011 ? Saturday Night Live celebrates the new year starting off January 7 with Charles Barkley and Kelly Clarkson returning to studio 8H.

Barkley, returning for his third hosting appearance, played basketball for sixteen seasons in the NBA, is an eleven time NBA All Star, an NBA Most Valuable Player, a two-time Olympic gold medal winner with Team USA Basketball, one of the NBA?s 50 Greatest Players in History, and a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. Barkley is about to begin his twelfth year as a studio analyst for the Emmy Award-winning ?Inside the NBA? on TNT and his second year in studio for the NCAA?s ?March Madness? college basketball tournament coverage on CBS and TNT. Barkley has written four books.

Returning for her third appearance as musical guest, Clarkson recently released her fifth studio album, ?Stronger,? which includes the Billboard chart-topper ?Mr. Know It All.? Since bursting onto the music scene 10 years ago, Kelly Clarkson has released 5 studio albums, sold over 20 million albums worldwide, 10 million albums in the US and has had 7 singles in the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart. She is the recipient of 2 Grammy Awards, 4 American Music Awards, 3 MTV Awards and 12 Billboard Awards.

Daniel Radcliffe will make his hosting debut on January 14. Radcliffe will next be seen in the supernatural thriller, ?The Woman In Black,? due out February 3. Radcliffe rose to international fame starring in ?Harry Potter,? the highest grossing film series of all time. He also appeared on the Broadway stage in ?Equus? and ?How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.?

Lana Del Rey will make her debut appearance alongside Radcliffe. Her first studio album ?Born To Die,? will be released January 31. Her single, ?Video Games? has already received critical acclaim, and Rolling Stone recently featured her in their annual "Hot Issue."

"Saturday Night Live" is produced in association with Broadway Video. The creator and executive producer is Lorne Michaels.?

Also returning tonight:
The Dog Whisperer (National Geographic Wild)
My Cat From Hell (Animal Planet)

Primetime Saturdays, Nov. 26-Dec. 31, 2011
(Adults 18-49; repeats in gray; previous weeks in parentheses)
3.0 (---) (---) (---) (---) (---) ABC New Year?s
--- (1.2) (---) (---) (---) (---) America?s Most Wanted
--- (1.0) (1.3) (---) (1.5) (1.3) Cops
--- (1.0) (1.3) (1.2) (1.2) (1.1) 48 Hours
--- (0.9) (0.7) (---) (---) (1.1) Law & Order SVU
0.5 (---) (---) (---) (---) (---) Bourne Ultimatum
0.5 (0.5) (---) (---) (---) (---)??Grimm
0.5 (---) (---) (---) (---) (---) NBC New Year?s
0.5 (---) (0.6) (---) (0.6) (0.6) Terra Nova
0.4 (---) (---) (1.2) (0.8) (---) HIMYMother

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6 airports you don't want to get stuck in

Carlos Ortiz / Getty Images

A traveler sleeps on a baggage carousel at Chicago's Midway Airport after flights were canceled during a December 2005 snowstorm.

By By Sascha Segan, Frommers.com

Many airports are awful. Some are lovely, like the 10 prettiest airport terminals we profiled last week. But most are at best joyless econoboxes, at worst purgatorial warehouses of stalled lives.

Some airports deserve special condemnation, though. In some cases, they deserve to be literally condemned. Assembling this top 10 list of misfits, I scanned professional surveys and delay statistics and asked my frequent-traveler friends to come up with the 10 airports where you'd least like to spend an extra hour.

I'm sticking to major airports here. There are small airports around the world that consist of a shanty that swelters in the summer and freezes in the winter, with a hole in the wall for baggage claim and a single sad concession stand. (I'm actually describing my experience at Udaipur Airport in India in 1999.) But that's not fair. These 10 airports should deliver better service, and they don't.?

Frommers.com slideshow: More tragic terminals

Chicago Midway Airport
Chicago's Midway airport ranked as the nation's worst for on-time departures in the most recent federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, earning it a spot on this list. It isn't a bad place to hang out, with a new food court and a frequent subway connection to downtown Chicago, but any airport is the worst airport if you're stuck there and you aren't getting on a plane.

Consider this the least-worst of our set of bad airports. Midway's curse may come more from Chicago's notoriously difficult weather than from any problem the airport itself can fix.

"Paris" Beauvais Airport, France
A solid fifty miles north of Paris, this depressing low-cost box of an airport in Picardy got saddled with a bait-and-switch name by Ryanair, the ultimate bait-and-switch airline. It rated as one of the world's worst airports by Frommers.com friends SleepingInAirports.net because of its lack of seating, lack of services, and general half-tent, half-warehouse atmosphere.

It lacks a rail link to Paris and closes overnight, so hope that your flight doesn't get too delayed, or you may be camping out on the lawn.

LaGuardia Airport US Airways Terminal, New York City
I don't hate LaGuardia, but it was recently rated the worst major airport in America by both JD Power and Associates and Zagat Survey, so who am I to argue?

LaGuardia has no rail link to anywhere -- even between its own terminals -- and regularly suffers from congestion, overcrowding, and delays. While its terminals are shaping up, they're still each smaller and with fewer services than you'd expect from an airport at one of the top tourist destinations in the world.

I'm giving the US Airways Terminal the worst-terminal award here because at least the central terminal has an atrium and the Delta terminal just got some new food options. The US Airways terminal is dull and sad.

Moscow Sheremtyevo Airport Terminal B/C, Russia
One of the two airports rated "two stars" by global consulting firm Skytrax (nobody got one star), SVO B/C got particularly bad marks for anything where you have to interact with airport staff: their attitude, their language skills, and the speed with which they process passengers.?

Reviewers suggest that you brush up on your Russian if you intend to transfer flights, because signboards and staff tend not to work in English. Apparently, you can fix up a Russian airport, but it's harder to fix up Russian customer service. (In capitalist Russia, customer services you!)

Depressingly, SVO Terminal B/C is partially a new terminal, but it still got one or two-star rankings from Skytrax on "leisure facilities," "baggage hall," and "meet and greet." It's also several miles away from the rest of the airport and from its rail station, making inter-terminal connections difficult. Air France cautions "Take official claims of short transfer times with a pinch of salt: delays of up to two hours have been reported."

Manila Airport Terminal 1, Philippines
Last May, the ceiling at Manila airport's Terminal 1 caved in, injuring two people. That's part of why Sleeping in Airports rated it the world's worst terminal last year.

"The terminal has been a frequent target of criticism with travellers and the business community complaining it is congested, run-down and filthy, with toilets that do not work," Agence France Presse commented. According to SleepingInAirports.net, bribery and theft are also rampant in the terminal.

The negative press attention seems to have had some effect; this November the Philippine government said it would renovate the terminal starting in January. It looks like changes can't come too soon.

JFK Airport Terminal 3, New York City
In 1960, Pan American Airlines built the Worldport: a grand, flying-saucer-shaped gateway to the Jet Age.

Fifty one years later, this decrepit, crumbling chunk of concrete is still used by Delta as an international hub. Terminal 3 is the worst single airport terminal in America, and probably in the Western world. Even Delta acknowledges this: they're tearing it down and replacing it with a giant glass structure connected to the nearby Terminal 4. It's unsalvageable.

Terminal 3 is known for endless immigration lines in a dank basement, for an utter lack of food and shopping options, three crowded and confusing entry points, hallways that could have been designed by M.C Escher and for vomiting international travelers out onto an underground sidewalk with no cabs available. There's also a sense that the cleaning crew gave up in despair a while ago.

JFK's terminals range from the awful to the mediocre, but Delta's hubs take the rotten, worm-infested cake. Right next to T3 there's Terminal 2, an ugly box with an undermanned security line where I really hope you're never caught hungry.

More from Frommers.com

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Source: http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/28/9773678-6-airports-you-dont-want-to-get-stuck-in

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Mexico Prison Fight: 31 Killed In Altamira

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico ? A vicious fight among inmates armed with makeshift knives, clubs and even stones left 31 people dead in a prison in a drug cartel-plagued state in northern Mexico, authorities said.

Another 13 prisoners were wounded in the brawl in the penitentiary in the Gulf Coast city of Altamira, Tamaulipas state's Public Safety Department said in a statement.

The fight started when a group of inmates burst into a section of the prison they were banned from and attacked the prisoners housed there, the department said.

Local media said the fight was between members of the rival Gulf and Zetas drug cartels but authorities wouldn't confirm the reports. Tamaulipas state has been the scene of bloody turf battles between the two former allies.

Tamaulipas state officials said many of the dead were killed by makeshift knives. A state official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation said several of the inmates were beaten to death with clubs or stones.

Soldier and marines managed to take control of the prison, the official said.

The safety department said 22 of the inmates killed were serving sentences for state crimes and nine for federal offenses. It gave no other details.

The port of Altamira in southern Tamaulipas, near the border with the state of Veracruz, is in a region that has seen a spike in drug-violence in the last two months. Authorities say the port is used to bring in cocaine and precursor chemicals used to make methamphetamine into Mexico.

In 2010, four inmates at the Altamira prison were killed when an armed gang stormed the penitentiary as 11 inmates were being transferred. Authorities did not confirm reports that the raid was an attempt to free prisoners. Gang raids on prisons are common in Tamaulipas.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/mexico-prison-fight-altamira_n_1185228.html

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Kristen Bell Talks Wedding Plans?and a Veronica Mars Movie, Too!

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Source: www.eonline.com --- Thursday, January 05, 2012
Who doesn't love them some Kristin Bell? When you're chatting with Bell, there are two things you have to ask her about (besides her new show on Showtime House of Lies): When is... ...

Source: http://feeds.eonline.com/~r/eonline/kristin/~3/6kB4MEin0do/284179

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100% A Separation

All Critics (63) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (64) | Rotten (0) | DVD (2)

The film wraps us, with stunning directness, in the complex folds of its characters' passions.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

The miracle of A Separation is that it doesn't spare any of its characters, nor does it seek to indict them. It is a democratic portrait of a theocratic world.

Tensely involving Iranian drama with niche potential.

Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging.

A constant surprise, a film that captures the drama and suspense of real life as urgently as any picture released this year.

The audience is rocked back and forth in sympathy. . . in a tangled predicament. [N]one is one-dimensional in the superb ensemble [as] the point of view changes by minutes.

Farhadi's true focus is the flawed capacity for any law -- any form of cold rationality, period -- to address the slippery nature of human affairs. It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.

So much fun to watch that you could very nearly miss the important fact that it is also as piercing a critique of Iranian society as that country has produced in some time.

There are no heroes or villains in this story: there are only everyday figures who try their best and struggle to survive.

One of the year's most engrossing films, directed by Asghar Farhadi from his richly layered screenplay (some advice: pay particular attention to what occurs in the sequence following the opening credits)

It has an external layer that comments upon Iran's complex and seemingly unfair divorce system, as well as other social customs, but underneath it's not much more than a standard potboiler.

More Critic Reviews

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a_separation_2011/

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Israel's religion minister fears Jewish divides

(Reuters) -- Israeli society could be torn apart if disputes between ultra-Orthodox and less observant Jews continue to heat up, Israel's religious affairs minister said on Wednesday.

In a telephone interview, Yaacov Margy, who also serves as director-general of Shas, a religious party in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government, condemned an incident last month in which zealots seeking gender separation spat at a schoolgirl they accused of dressing immodestly.

That attack was disclosed by an Israeli television station, whose report on the violence stunned many in the Jewish state, where concerns over religious coercion are mounting among its mainly secular population.

Margy said such incidents and ultra-Orthodox protests - in the latest, on Saturday, children were dressed as Nazi Holocaust victims to suggest public persecution of the community - had been overblown in the media.

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"If they ganged up on an 8-year-old girl, this is something that must be uprooted. We have a police force, courts - anyone who is violent must be dealt with. But we don't have to go crazy," he said.

Margy accused media outlets of fuelling the religious-secular dispute by covering in detail ultra-Orthodox protests.

"If we have a problem in Israeli society we should deal with it through dialogue," he said. "I call on all people in the media and the extremists on both sides, crazy people: 'climb down off the roof'."

He said he feared that failure to do so "will tear Israeli society apart," and pointed to banners at a recent secular demonstration where protesters voiced their fear that Israel could become like Islamist-ruled Iran.

"Every morning I go to look at the window and check whether I see some pro-Khomeini protest at my doorstep," he said referring to the religious leader who led the 1979 Iranian revolution. "All I see are green fields, a good atmosphere and good neighbours."

That view contrasts sharply with a cautionary note sounded last month by Israeli President Shimon Peres who said the country was in the grip of a battle for its soul.

BACK OF THE BUS

An emotional national debate has been raging over issues such attempts to segregate sidewalks in areas where devout Jews live and back-of-the-bus seating for women on public buses that ply religious neighbourhoods and which are patronised by ultra-Orthodox passengers.

Turning to coalition politics in which his Shas party has traditionally been a king-maker, Margy said he was "very disappointed" in Netanyahu's right-wing government, where a major partner has promoted contentious legislation governing marriage.

The bill introduced by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party would give Israelis a freer hand at choosing rabbis to register them for marriage.

Jewish marriage in Israel is administered by Orthodox rabbis, whose refusal to register mixed couples poses difficulties for Yisrael Beitenu's considerable Russian immigrant constituency, some of whom are not Jewish according to ritual law.

"Nobody expects the Jewish state to permit mixed marriages," Margy said.

With 11 lawmakers in Netanyahu's 66-member coalition, Shas has enough sway to stand up and be heard as it helps assure the government of majority support in Israel's 120-seat legislature.

The next parliamentary election is not due until 2013, but Netanyahu has scheduled an early Likud leadership ballot for January 31, raising speculation the date of a national vote might be brought forward.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller)

Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/276438/20120104/israels-religion-minister-fears-jewish-divides.htm

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