Will anyone else join the 'compromise club'?

WASHINGTON—While President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner negotiate a deal to avoid a series of automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to begin next year, both camps continue to publicly tangle over whether to increase taxes on the wealthy.

But within Boehner's caucus, there is a small group of Republicans who say they are open to raising tax rates, but only for a price.

"We should have everything on the table, and we should discuss it," said Michael Mahaffey, a spokesman for Florida Republican Rep. Tom Rooney. Rooney has expressed a willingness to let taxes go up in return for a massive restructuring of the way the federal government pays for Social Security and Medicare. "If we can get a big deal that includes real entitlement reform, then we should consider ways to balance that with more revenue," Mahaffey continued.

For Rooney, the specific language outlining the entitlement overhaul would need to be written into the bill and not just promised as a future goal. It also must be immediate.

Ohio Republican Rep. Steve LaTourette, an outgoing member who is also open to tax increases as part of a grand bargain, said he won't budge for less than $4 trillion to $6 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years.

There are only a handful of other Republican members who have been willing to publicly say they agree.

LaTourette and Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho co-signed a letter with Democratic Reps. Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Jim Cooper of Tennessee that they plan to send to House and Senate leaders urging them not to keep anything off-limits, even tax increases.

"To succeed, all options for mandatory and discretionary spending and revenues must be on the the table," the bipartisan House members write in the letter. They intend to gather more signatures before sending it to congressional leaders.

Still, the Compromise Club remains small. Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, who has been a ubiquitous face on cable news of late, was one of the most recent to express an openness to compromise on tax rates.

This week, Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner reiterated that there will be no agreement without raising income tax rates on households earning more than $250,000 annually. Boehner has remained equally steadfast in his unwillingness to agree to anything that raises those rates, offering a plan to raise revenue by eliminating loopholes and deductions within the tax code instead.

Many Democrats continue to oppose any measure that would alter the entitlement reforms, and there remains staunch opposition to any tax increases among Republicans. As of this week, talks between Obama and Boehner appear to remain at a standstill.

This article has been updated since publication.

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Rupert Murdoch's mother Elisabeth dies at age 103

SYDNEY (AP) — Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, a prominent Australian philanthropist and mother of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has died at age 103.

News Ltd., the Australian media company headed by her son, confirmed her death.

She died peacefully on Wednesday surrounded by family members in her garden estate outside Melbourne. She had been hospitalized in September after a bad fall in which she broke her leg.

"We have lost the most wonderful mother but we are all grateful to have had her love and wisdom for so many years," Rupert Murdoch said in a family statement.

Rupert, 81, has said that his mother's long life was evidence that he would be able to continue leading News Corp., the global media company which he founded, for many years.

Dame Elisabeth was a patron of the arts and contributed to an estimated 100 charities annually.

"Probably the most useful contribution one can make is to forget oneself and care for others," she once said.

She was the wife of Sir Keith Murdoch, a hotshot journalist and newspaper publisher, and the mother of his four children — Rupert Murdoch, Anne Kantor, Janet Calvert-Jones, and Helen Handbury, who died in 2004.

Murdoch's philanthropic roots began during her childhood, when she started knitting woolen tops for babies at a children's hospital and volunteering at a kindergarten. As a teen, she volunteered for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In 1927, Keith Murdoch — one of Melbourne's most coveted bachelors — spotted a photo of Elisabeth in a society magazine. At 18, she was 23 years his junior, but he was intent on meeting her. They were introduced at a dance and she later said she fell instantly in love.

Her family and friends were initially panicked over the age difference, but she ignored their warnings and married him the following year. The two were married for 24 years, before Keith died in 1952.

By then, philanthropy had become the main focus of her life. She spent more than three decades on the board of Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital. Queen Elizabeth II made her a dame in 1963 in recognition of her service to the community.

Murdoch was open about the advantages wealth had granted her, particularly the opportunity to help others.

"Wealth can be very misused, but generally speaking it's a tremendous tool in here in helping community," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in 2008.

"People say to me sometimes, 'You must be very proud of Rupert,' and I know what they mean. They think he's made a lot of money and I say, 'I am very proud of him because he's a good father and a good son.' And that's what I'm proud of. Not so proud of his wealth."

She has 77 direct descendants, including 50 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren.

Her family said arrangements for a memorial service were still being decided, but that the funeral was expected to be private.

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Michael Strahan makes his Broadway debut in 'Elf'

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Strahan has tackled something few football stars have attempted — Broadway.

The gap-toothed co-host of "Live with Kelly and Michael" made three short appearances at Wednesday's matinee of "Elf" and said he has new respect for Broadway performers.

"I was surprised at how nervous you get and the adrenaline and that feedback from the audience — it really was an amazing thing," the former football player said after the show. "To see these performers who do it every day — eight or nine times a week — is really amazing. I take my hat off to them."

Fans can see a behind-the-scenes recap on Thursday's TV show.

The musical is adapted from the Will Ferrell film from 2003 about Buddy, a human raised in the North Pole who travels to New York in search of his parents.

Strahan thought making his Broadway debut would be fun and represented a new experience for a guy who holds the single season sack record. He found himself more nervous than he has been for high-stakes football games or live TV.

"It's a little nerve-wracking because so many people depend on you, you want to get your line across and you have to play to the crowd. It's a lot more intricate with everyone hitting their marks. You don't want to be the guy that messes everyone up," he said.

Strahan, 41, played both a police officer and a Salvation Army Santa in the first act and later came on as himself in a scene with the real Santa in the second act. As he waited in the wings of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, he saw the toll the musical takes on its dancers.

"Some of these performers are breathing as if they just went into a football game and played a 12-play drive," he joked. "I was tired walking up and down from my dressing room."

Strahan rehearsed for an hour in the morning with stage managers and associate director Casey Hushion. At 1 p.m., some in the cast came in early to work with him, including Jordan Gelber, who plays Buddy, and Beth Leavel, who plays Buddy's stepmother.

The audience was quiet when Strahan first appeared as an officer with another cop after Buddy gets kicked out of Macy's. But the seven-time Pro-Bowler and Super Bowl winner flashed his trademark smile and they went wild. More applause greeted him after he played a Salvation Army Santa as he and Buddy wrestled over the kettle bells.

In the second act, he waited to ask Santa for a present. Santa asked him his name, the newly minted actor said "Michael Strahan" and he then asked for a red Schwinn bicycle with a bell shaped like Miss Piggy. The crowd cheered when Strahan identified himself and he got another wide round of applause at the curtain call, where the cast gave him flowers.

Strahan was named in September as Kelly Ripa's permanent co-host aboard the morning show "Live with Kelly and Michael." A former defensive star who spent 15 years in the NFL, he is also a host of "Fox NFL Sunday."

He follows in the footsteps of Joe Namath, a quarterback nicknamed "Broadway Joe" who made an appearance on Broadway in 1983 as a replacement in a revival of "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial."

Strahan would not rule out a return to the stage. "I will take it off my bucket list, but if the opportunity came across again, I might just take it up and do it again," he said. "I had a great time."

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Online:

http://www.elfmusical.com

http://dadt.com/live

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Study could spur wider use of prenatal gene tests

A new study sets the stage for wider use of gene testing in early pregnancy. Scanning the genes of a fetus reveals far more about potential health risks than current prenatal testing does, say researchers who compared both methods in thousands of pregnancies nationwide.

A surprisingly high number — 6 percent — of certain fetuses declared normal by conventional testing were found to have genetic abnormalities by gene scans, the study found. The gene flaws can cause anything from minor defects such as a club foot to more serious ones such as mental retardation, heart problems and fatal diseases.

"This isn't done just so people can terminate pregnancies," because many choose to continue them even if a problem is found, said Dr. Ronald Wapner, reproductive genetics chief at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. "We're better able to give lots and lots of women more information about what's causing the problem and what the prognosis is and what special care their child might need."

He led the federally funded study, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

A second study in the journal found that gene testing could reveal the cause of most stillbirths, many of which remain a mystery now. That gives key information to couples agonizing over whether to try again.

The prenatal study of 4,400 women has long been awaited in the field, and could make gene testing a standard of care in cases where initial screening with an ultrasound exam suggests a structural defect in how the baby is developing, said Dr. Susan Klugman, director of reproductive genetics at New York's Montefiore Medical Center, which enrolled 300 women into the study.

"We can never guarantee the perfect baby but if they want everything done, this is a test that can tell a lot more," she said.

Many pregnant women are offered screening with an ultrasound exam or a blood test that can flag some common abnormalities such as Down syndrome, but these are not conclusive.

The next step is diagnostic testing on cells from the fetus obtained through amniocentesis, which is like a needle biopsy through the belly, or chorionic villus sampling, which snips a bit of the placenta. Doctors look at the sample under a microscope for breaks or extra copies of chromosomes that cause a dozen or so abnormalities.

The new study compared this eyeball method to scanning with gene chips that can spot hundreds of abnormalities and far smaller defects than what can be seen with a microscope. This costs $1,200 to $1,800 versus $600 to $1,000 for the visual exam.

In the study, both methods were used on fetal samples from 4,400 women around the country. Half of the moms were at higher risk because they were over 35. One-fifth had screening tests suggesting Down syndrome. One-fourth had ultrasounds suggesting structural abnormalities. Others sought screening for other reasons.

"Some did it for anxiety — they just wanted more information about their child," Wapner said.

Of women whose ultrasounds showed a possible structural defect but whose fetuses were called normal by the visual chromosome exam, gene testing found problems in 6 percent — one out of 17.

"That's a lot. That's huge," Klugman said.

Gene tests also found abnormalities in nearly 2 percent of cases where the mom was older or ultrasounds suggested a problem other than a structural defect.

Dr. Lorraine Dugoff, a University of Pennsylvania high-risk pregnancy specialist, wrote in an editorial in the journal that gene testing should become the standard of care when a structural problem is suggested by ultrasound. But its value may be incremental in other cases and offset by the 1.5 percent of cases where a gene abnormality of unknown significance is found.

In those cases, "a lot of couples might not be happy that they ordered that test" because it can't give a clear answer, she said.

Ana Zeletz, a former pediatric nurse from Hoboken, N.J., had one of those results during the study. An ultrasound suggested possible Down syndrome; gene testing ruled that out but showed an abnormality that could indicate kidney problems — or nothing.

"They give you this list of all the things that could possibly be wrong," Zeletz said. Her daughter, Jillian, now 2, had some urinary and kidney abnormalities that seem to have resolved, and has low muscle tone that caused her to start walking later than usual.

"I am very glad about it," she said of the testing, because she knows to watch her daughter for possible complications like gout. Without the testing, "we wouldn't know anything, we wouldn't know to watch for things that might come up," she said.

The other study involved 532 stillbirths — deaths of a fetus in the womb before delivery. Gene testing revealed the cause in 87 percent of cases versus 70 percent of cases analyzed by the visual chromosome inspection method. It also gave more information on specific genetic abnormalities that couples could use to estimate the odds that future pregnancies would bring those risks.

The study was led by Dr. Uma Reddy of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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Online:

Medical journal: http://www.nejm.org

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Syria loads chemical weapons, waits for green light

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attends the "Friends of Syria" confernence in Paris. (AP)U.S. officials say the Syrian military has loaded active chemical weapons into bombs and is awaiting a final order from embattled President Bashar Assad to use the deadly weapons against its own people.

NBC News reports that on Wednesday the Syrian military loaded sarin gas into aerial bombs that could be deployed from dozens of aircraft.

The last large-scale use of sarin was in 1988, when former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces killed 5,000 Kurds in a single attack.

However, U.S. officials told NBC that the sarin bombs had not yet been loaded onto planes but added if Assad gives the final order, "there's little the outside world can do to stop it."

The Syrian government has previously insisted that it would not use chemical weapons against its own people.

For months, the Obama administration has described the Assad regime as being on the verge of collapse. If the Syrian government were to be toppled from outside forces or from within, it would be the first nation possessing weapons of mass destruction to do so.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has as recently as last week warned of the possibility that Assad could use chemical weapons against his own people. After meeting other NATO foreign ministers in Brussels last week, Clinton told the gathering, "Our concerns are that an increasingly desperate Assad regime might turn to chemical weapons, or might lose control of them to one of the many groups that are now operating within Syria."

"We have sent an unmistakable message that this would cross a red line and those responsible would be held to account," she said.

At the end of the meeting, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen backed up Clinton's threat, declaring that the international community could take military action against Assad and his forces.

"The possible use of chemical weapons would be completely unacceptable for the whole international community and if anybody resorts to these terrible weapons I would expect an immediate reaction from the international community," Rasmussen told reporters.

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Powerful typhoon kills at least 74 in Philippines

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Torrential floods from a powerful typhoon engulfed emergency shelters and an army truck carrying soldiers and villagers who were fleeing their homes in the southern Philippines, raising the death toll from the storm to at least 74.

At least 43 of the victims drowned in one village. Rain accumulated atop a mountain and flooded down on Andap village in New Bataan town in hard-hit Compostela Valley province, Gov. Arturo Uy said. A school and village hall where evacuees were staying was swamped by the flash flood and an army truck carrying soldiers and villagers was washed away, according to Uy and army officials.

"They thought that they were already secure in a safe area, but they didn't know the torrents of water would go their way," Uy told DZBB radio Tuesday.

He said the town's death toll would rise because several uncounted bodies could not immediately be retrieved from floodwaters strewn with huge logs and debris.

Some 20 typhoons and storms lash the Philippines annually, but they more commonly hit the northern and central provinces of the archipelago. President Benigno Aquino III had appealed on national television for people to take storm warnings seriously.

About 60,000 people were staying in emergency shelters and more than 100 domestic flights were canceled.

Typhoon Bopha had winds of 175 kilometers per hour (109 miles per hour) and gusts of up to 210 kph (130 mph) when it made landfall around Davao Oriental province at dawn Tuesday. It knocked out power in two entire provinces, and its ferocious winds ripped roofs from homes and toppled trees.

Winds weakened to 140 kph (87 mph) with gusts up to 170 kph (106 mph) by evening. It had moved out to sea again by Wednesday morning.

Twenty-three people drowned or were pinned by fallen trees or collapsed houses in Davao Oriental province's coastal town of Cateel, which had the most deaths after New Bataan, Davao Oriental Gov. Corazon Malanyaon told the ABS-CBN TV network, citing police reports.

Some towns in the province were so battered that no roofs remained on buildings, Malanyaon said.

The other deaths included three children who were buried by a wall of mud and boulders that plunged down a mountain in Marapat village, also in Compostela Valley. Their bodies were wrapped in blankets by their grieving relatives and placed on a stage in a basketball court.

"The only thing we could do was to save ourselves. It was too late for us to rescue them," said Valentin Pabilana, who survived the landslide.

In Davao Oriental, a poor agricultural and gold-mining province about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) southeast of Manila, an elderly woman was killed when her house was struck by a falling tree, said Benito Ramos, who heads the government's disaster-response agency.

The other victims either drowned or were hit by trees, he said, adding that the death toll was expected to rise.

Bopha was the 16th tropical storm to hit the nation this year, and forecasters say one more could do so this year.

A rare storm in the southern Philippines last December killed more than 1,200 people and left many more homeless and traumatized, including in Cagayan de Oro city, where church bells pealed relentlessly on Tuesday to warn residents to scramble to safety as a major river started to swell.

In Compostela Valley, authorities halted mining operations and ordered villagers to evacuate to prevent a repeat of deadly losses from landslides and the collapse of mine tunnels in previous storms.

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Associated Press writer Teresa Cerojano contributed to this report.

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iOS users generate double the Web traffic of Android users

According to the latest numbers from Chitika Insights, iOS users generate more than twice the amount of Web traffic as Android users. The six-month study found that while the two operating systems were nearly tied when it came to smartphone Web traffic, Apple (AAPL) has a substantial lead with its iPad tablet. Despite Android’s commanding share of the overall mobile market, the Cupertino-based company’s platform totaled 67% of Web traffic measured in the past six months, compared to Android’s 35% share.

“Despite all the new Android and Apple devices that have been released over the past six months, little has changed in the overall Web traffic distribution between iOS and Android,” the research firm wrote. “iOS’s share has hovered around 65%, while Android largely has stayed around 35%, the OS hit a peak of 40% in late August thanks partially to strong Samsung Galaxy S III sales. Apple then regained some share with the release of the iPhone 5 in the September timeframe.”

To qualify for the study Chitika Insights analysed billions of ad impressions coming from iOS or Android devices from May 27th to November 27th.

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Huston's "Infrared" wins Bad Sex fiction prize

LONDON (AP) — It's the prize no author wants to win.

Award-winning novelist Nancy Huston won Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction award Tuesday for her novel "Infrared," whose tale of a photographer who takes pictures of her lovers during sex proved too revealing for the judges.

The choice was announced by "Downton Abbey" actress Samantha Bond during a ceremony at the Naval & Military Club in London.

Judges of the tongue-in-cheek prize — which is run by the Literary Review magazine — said they were struck by a description of "flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements," and by a long passage that builds to a climax of "undulating space."

Huston, who lives in Paris, was not on hand to collect her prize. In a statement read by her publicist, the 59-year-old author said she hoped her victory would "incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers' bodies in all states of array and disarray."

The Canada-born Huston, who writes in both French and English, is the author of more than a dozen novels, including "Plainsong" and "Fault Lines." She has previously won France's Prix Goncourt prize and was a finalist for Britain's Orange Prize for fiction by women.

She is only the third woman to win the annual Bad Sex prize, founded in 1993 to name and shame authors of "crude, tasteless and ... redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels."

Some critics, however, have praised the sexual passages in "Infrared." Shirley Whiteside in the Independent on Sunday newspaper said there were "none of the lazy cliches of pornography or the purple prose of modern romantic fiction" — though she conceded the book's sex scenes were "more perfunctory than erotic."

Huston beat finalists including previous winner Tom Wolfe — for his passage in "Back to Blood" describing "his big generative jockey" — and Booker Prize-nominated Nicola Barker, whose novel "The Yips" compares a woman to "a plump Bakewell pudding."

Previous recipients of the dubious honor, usually accepted with good grace, include Sebastian Faulks, the late Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a Bad Sex lifetime achievement award in 2008.

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Online: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk

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Study: Drug coverage to vary under health law

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new study says basic prescription drug coverage could vary dramatically from state to state under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

That's because states get to set benefits for private health plans that will be offered starting in 2014 through new insurance exchanges.

The study out Tuesday from the market analysis firm Avalere Health found that some states will require coverage of virtually all FDA-approved drugs, while others will only require coverage of about half of medications.

Consumers will still have access to essential medications, but some may not have as much choice.

Connecticut, Virginia and Arizona will be among the states with the most generous coverage, while California, Minnesota and North Carolina will be among states with the most limited.

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Online:

Avalere Health: http://tinyurl.com/d3b3hfv

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GOP leaders pluck conservative lawmakers, reveal growing divide

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker John Boehner's decision to take plum committee assignments away from four conservative Republican lawmakers after they bucked party leaders on key votes isn't going over well with advocacy groups that viewed them as role models.

Reps. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Justin Amash of Michigan will lose their seats on the House Budget Committee chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan next year. And Reps. Walter Jones of North Carolina and David Schweikert of Arizona are losing their seats on the House Financial Services Committee.

The move is underscoring a divide in the Republican Party between tea party-supported conservatives and the House GOP leadership.

"This is a clear attempt on the part of Republican leadership to punish those in Washington who vote the way they promised their constituents they would — on principle — instead of mindlessly rubber-stamping trillion dollar deficits and the bankrupting of America," said Matt Kibbe, president of the tea party group FreedomWorks.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, would only say Tuesday that the party's steering committee chaired by the speaker made the decision "based on a range of factors."

Groups aligned with the tea party movement were generally big supporters of Huelskamp, Amash and Schweikert. Jones is viewed more as a conservative maverick than a tea party Republican. He has frequently siding against GOP leaders on a range of issues over the years. For example, he voted against the GOP budget because he opposed the changes proposed for Medicare.

Schweikert said it was made clear to him "I should vote for the team more."

"Look, we're walking into the 113th Congress with a smaller majority," Schweikert said. "I would have though the fixation would have been family unity. This isn't the way you start a family meeting."

"The GOP leadership might think they have silenced conservatives, but removing me and others from key committees only confirms our conservative convictions," Huelskamp said in a statement Tuesday. "This is clearly a vindictive move and a sure sign that the GOP establishment cannot handle disagreement."

All four lawmakers had voted against the summer 2011 deal negotiated between Republican leaders and President Barack Obama for extending the government's ability to borrow money in exchange for $1 trillion in spending cuts and the promise of another $1 trillion in reduced deficits. Three of the four, the exception being Schweikert, voted against the Ryan-written GOP budget blueprint that the House passed last March.

Their removal from key committees with jurisdiction over the two issues was viewed by some as a signal to other Republican lawmakers to look favorably on whatever final deal Boehner and Obama put together to avert a "fiscal cliff" combination of automatic tax increases and spending cuts in January.

"It's sending a clear message to get behind the leadership no matter what the policy is, and that is contrary to what the Republicans supposedly stand for," Freedomworks' Kibbe said.

"If it was intended to be a signal, it's going to be a weak signal because the majority of conservatives are going to do what they think is right based on principle," Jones, the North Carolina congressman, said.

Amash said he has not been told specifically why he was removed, only that it was not based on his votes and that he should go talk to leadership. He said he voted with the Budget Committee's leadership 95 percent of the time. He said the move is likely to make him more independent in the future.

"Being nice to leadership and playing well with them doesn't pay off," Amash said. "They expect a near total agreement with their approach."

The changes in committee assignments could bring about more discipline from the GOP on high-priority issues next Congress, but conservatives were taking the news as an attack on their priorities.

"As the sun rises this morning we can look at John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy and know the opposition is not just across the aisle, but in charge of our own side in the House of Representatives," Erick Erickson wrote on the conservative website, RedState. "All the time and energy I would otherwise have to spend to convince conservatives that these gentlemen would be a problem for the GOP has been spared. They've proven it themselves."

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