Your medical chart could include exercise minutes

CHICAGO (AP) — Roll up a sleeve for the blood pressure cuff. Stick out a wrist for the pulse-taking. Lift your tongue for the thermometer. Report how many minutes you are active or getting exercise.

Wait, what?

If the last item isn't part of the usual drill at your doctor's office, a movement is afoot to change that. One recent national survey indicated only a third of Americans said their doctors asked about or prescribed physical activity.

Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest nonprofit health insurance plans, made a big push a few years ago to get its southern California doctors to ask patients about exercise. Since then, Kaiser has expanded the program across California and to several other states. Now almost 9 million patients are asked at every visit, and some other medical systems are doing it, too.

Here's how it works: During any routine check of vital signs, a nurse or medical assistant asks how many days a week the patient exercises and for how long. The number of minutes per week is posted along with other vitals at the top the medical chart. So it's among the first things the doctor sees.

"All we ask our physicians to do is to make a comment on it, like, 'Hey, good job,' or 'I noticed today that your blood pressure is too high and you're not doing any exercise. There's a connection there. We really need to start you walking 30 minutes a day,'" said Dr. Robert Sallis, a Kaiser family doctor. He hatched the vital sign idea as part of a larger initiative by doctors groups.

He said Kaiser doctors generally prescribe exercise first, instead of medication, and for many patients who follow through that's often all it takes.

It's a challenge to make progress. A study looking at the first year of Kaiser's effort showed more than a third of patients said they never exercise.

Sallis said some patients may not be aware that research shows physical inactivity is riskier than high blood pressure, obesity and other health risks people know they should avoid. As recently as November a government-led study concluded that people who routinely exercise live longer than others, even if they're overweight.

Zendi Solano, who works for Kaiser as a research assistant in Pasadena, Calif., says she always knew exercise was a good thing. But until about a year ago, when her Kaiser doctor started routinely measuring it, she "really didn't take it seriously."

She was obese, and in a family of diabetics, had elevated blood sugar. She sometimes did push-ups and other strength training but not anything very sustained or strenuous.

Solano, 34, decided to take up running and after a couple of months she was doing three miles. Then she began training for a half marathon — and ran that 13-mile race in May in less than three hours. She formed a running club with co-workers and now runs several miles a week. She also started eating smaller portions and buying more fruits and vegetables.

She is still overweight but has lost 30 pounds and her blood sugar is normal.

Her doctor praised the improvement at her last physical in June and Solano says the routine exercise checks are "a great reminder."

Kaiser began the program about three years ago after 2008 government guidelines recommended at least 2 1/2 hours of moderately vigorous exercise each week. That includes brisk walking, cycling, lawn-mowing — anything that gets you breathing a little harder than normal for at least 10 minutes at a time.

A recently published study of nearly 2 million people in Kaiser's southern California network found that less than a third met physical activity guidelines during the program's first year ending in March 2011. That's worse than results from national studies. But promoters of the vital signs effort think Kaiser's numbers are more realistic because people are more likely to tell their own doctors the truth.

Dr. Elizabeth Joy of Salt Lake City has created a nearly identical program and she expects 300 physicians in her Intermountain Healthcare network to be involved early this year.

"There are some real opportunities there to kind of shift patients' expectations about the value of physical activity on health," Joy said.

NorthShore University HealthSystem in Chicago's northern suburbs plans to start an exercise vital sign program this month, eventually involving about 200 primary care doctors.

Dr. Carrie Jaworski, a NorthShore family and sports medicine specialist, already asks patients about exercise. She said some of her diabetic patients have been able to cut back on their medicines after getting active.

Dr. William Dietz, an obesity expert who retired last year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said measuring a patient's exercise regardless of method is essential, but that "naming it as a vital sign kind of elevates it."

Figuring out how to get people to be more active is the important next step, he said, and could have a big effect in reducing medical costs.

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Online:

Exercise: http://1.usa.gov/b6AkMa

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

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Asian shares drift, Basel ruling supports banks

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Asian stocks drifted on Monday as investors booked profits from a New Year rally that had pushed markets to multi-month highs, but financial stocks gained after global regulators decided to relax draft plans for tough new bank liquidity rules.

Commodity prices mostly held firm, supported by data showing the U.S. economy continuing on a path of slow but steady recovery that propelled Wall Street stocks to a five-year high.

The dollar sat close to a two-and-a-half-year high against the yen as investors adjusted to the possibility of more monetary stimulus in 2013 from the Bank of Japan and less from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus>, which had reached its highest level since August 2011 on Thursday, was flat, while Tokyo's Nikkei share average <.n225> retreated after touching a 23-month high in early trade to stand down 0.2 percent. <.t/>

"Investors have been carefully waiting for the timing to take profits as they believed the market can't keep rising," said Yutaka Miura, a senior technical analyst at Mizuho Securities.

CASH BUFFERS

The MSCI benchmark's financial sector sub-index <.miapjfn00pus> gained 0.5 percent after the Basel Committee of banking supervisors agreed on Sunday to give banks four more years and greater flexibility to build up cash buffers so they can use some of their reserves to help struggling economies.

HSBC Holdings Hong Kong shares rose 1.3 percent, while Australia and New Zealand Banking Corp gained 0.6 percent. <.hk><.ax/>

Shares in Japanese exporters were supported by a weaker yen, which traded around 88.05 to the dollar, a little firmer on the day, after the U.S. currency rose as far as 88.40 yen, its highest in nearly two-and-a-half years, on Friday.

The dollar posted a gain of around 2.7 percent against the yen last week, its biggest weekly rise in more than a year. Its gains had accelerated after minutes from the Federal Reserve's December meeting showed some policymakers has mulled ending the Fed's bond-buying program as early as this year.

By contrast, many investors are now betting that Japan's new government, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will push to weaken the yen and drive through aggressive fiscal stimulus, and pressure the Bank of Japan to do the same on the monetary side.

The dollar ticked up slightly against the euro, which traded around $1.3060.

The U.S. benchmark S&P 500 index <.spx> closed at its highest level since December 2007 on Friday after data showed a steady pace of jobs growth and brisk expansion of the services sector in the world's biggest economy.

That offered support to growth-sensitive commodities, with copper edging up 0.2 percent to around $8,100 a tonne, while Brent crude oil gained 0.2 percent to around $111.50 a barrel and U.S. crude stood flat just above $93.

(Editing by Eric Meijer)

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India Takes Aim at Poverty With Cash Transfer Program

Manish Swarup/Associated Press

Poor and homeless people waited for food on Tuesday at a New Delhi temple.

NEW DELHI — India has more poor people than any nation on earth, but many of its antipoverty programs end up feeding the rich more than the needy. A new program hopes to change that.

On Jan. 1, India eliminated a raft of bureaucratic middlemen by depositing government pension and scholarship payments directly into the bank accounts of about 245,000 people in 20 of the nation’s hundreds of districts, in a bid to prevent corrupt state and local officials from diverting much of the money to their own pockets. Hundreds of thousands more people will be added to the program in the coming months.

In a country of 1.2 billion, the numbers so far are modest, but some officials and economists see the start of direct payments as revolutionary — a program intended not only to curb corruption but also to serve as a vehicle for lifting countless millions out of poverty altogether.

The nation’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, described the cash transfer program to Indian news media as a “pioneering and pathbreaking reform” that is a “game changer for governance.” He acknowledged that the initial rollout had been modest because of “practical difficulties, some quite unforeseen.” He promised that those problems would be resolved before the end of 2013, when the program is to be extended in phases to other parts of the country.

Some critics, however, said the program was intended more to buy votes among the poor than to overcome poverty. And some said that in a country where hundreds of millions have no access to banks, never mind personal bank accounts, direct electronic money transfers are only one aspect of a much broader effort necessary to build a real safety net for India’s vast population.

“An impression has been created that the government is about to launch an ambitious scheme of direct cash transfers to poor families,” Jean Drèze, an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics, wrote in an e-mail. “This is quite misleading. What the government is actually planning is an experiment to change the modalities of existing transfers — nothing more, nothing less.”

The program is based on models in Mexico and Brazil in which poor families receive stipends in exchange for meeting certain social goals, like keeping their children in school or getting regular medical checkups. International aid organizations have praised these efforts in several places; in Brazil alone, nearly 50 million people participate.

But one of India’s biggest hurdles is simply figuring out how to distinguish its 1.2 billion citizens. The country is now in the midst of another ambitious project to undertake retinal and fingerprint scans in every village and city in the hope of giving hundreds of millions who have no official identification a card with a 12-digit number that would, among other things, give them access to the modern financial world. After three years of operation, the program has issued unique numbers to 220 million people.

Bindu Ananth, the president of IFMR Trust, a financial charity, said that getting people bank accounts can be surprisingly beneficial because the poor often pay stiff fees to cash checks or get small loans, fees that are substantially reduced for account holders.

“I think this is one of the biggest things to happen to India’s financial system in a decade,” Ms. Ananth said.

Only about a third of Indian households have bank accounts. Getting a significant portion of the remaining households included in the nation’s financial system will take an enormous amount of additional effort and expense, at least part of which will fall on the government to bear, economists said.

“There are two things this cash transfer program is supposed to do: prevent leakage from corruption, and bring everybody into the system,” said Surendra L. Rao, a former director general of the National Council of Applied Economic Research. “And I don’t see either happening anytime soon.”

The great promise of the cash transfer program — as well as its greatest point of contention — would come if it tackled India’s expensive and inefficient system for handing out food and subsidized fuel through nearly 50,000 government shops.

India spends almost $14 billion annually on this system, or nearly 1 percent of its gross domestic product, but the system is poorly managed and woefully inefficient.

Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.

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Monti, in Twitter Q&A, says new voting law priority for Italy

ROME (Reuters) – Outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said on Saturday if he wins February’s parliamentary election one of his first acts would be to overhaul the voting law to improve democracy and government stability.

Monti, 69, who last week confirmed he would lead a centrist coalition in the February 24-25 vote, called himself a “bit of a pioneer” in politics during nearly 2 hours of #MontiLive tweets.

The electoral law is unpopular because party leaders select candidates and voters cannot choose their representatives. For technical reasons, it also makes forming a stable majority more difficult, leading to broad and unwieldy coalitions.

“This electoral law is not worthy of a country like Italy,” said Monti of the 2005 legislation passed when centre-right rival Silvio Berlusconi was in power.

Monti and Berlusconi trail the centre-left in opinion polls and have made multiple appearances, mainly on TV, over the past week as they seek to recoup support and motivate voters who have said they do not intend to vote.

A poll by the Tecne research institute released on SkyTG24 on Friday showed Monti’s grouping would likely attract slightly more than 12 percent of the vote.

That compared with 40 percent for the centre-left bloc led by Pier Luigi Bersani’s Democratic Party (PD); and 25 percent for the most likely centre-right coalition of Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PDL) and the Northern League.

In a separate tweet, Monti indicated he would “dialogue” with anyone after the vote whether he wins or not, as long as they are “reformists”.

BERLUSCONI BROADSIDE

Speaking at the same time in a live interview on the website of Corriere della Sera newspaper, Berlusconi said he would never again ally himself with Monti even though he offered him the leadership of the centre-right just a few weeks ago.

“All Italian citizens, in one way or another, are suffering” as a result of Monti’s 13 months in power, said Berlusconi, who says austerity has led the country into a recessionary spiral.

Monti took over in November 2011 when Italy was scrambling to avert a financial crisis and after Berlusconi, besieged by a sex scandal involving an underage prostitute, stepped down.

Berlusconi repeated on Saturday that his resignation was the result of an international plot to oust him and denied having made mistakes during his more than nine years in power.

“My only error is that I have not been able to explain what I have done for the country,” Berlusconi said.

“By now (Monti’s) image has become that of a person with whom I could not possibly collaborate,” Berlusconi said, calling the prime minister’s new alliance with two of Berlusconi’s former allies a “triple disaster”.

Berlusconi said a renewed accord with the Northern League may be finalized on Sunday. The Northern League has said the 76-year-old billionaire must not be the bloc’s prime ministerial candidate for a sixth time.

“Monti is an enemy of the north, and stopping him from returning to government is a categorical priority for us. Who is against Monti is an ally of the League,” Northern League leader Roberto Maroni tweeted on Saturday.

(Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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Bethenny Frankel Divorcing Jason Hoppy

By Sarah Michaud

01/05/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy

Albert Michael/Startraks

It's official – Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy's marriage is over.

Having announced a separation over the holidays, the reality star began the divorce process by filing earlier this week in New York, TMZ reports.

"It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating," Frankel, 42, had said in a statement Dec. 23. "This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family."

The split comes after months of rumors that the pair – who married in 2010 and are parents to daughter Bryn, 2½ – were on the rocks.

"Bethenny is devastated," a friend tells PEOPLE.

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FDA: New rules will make food safer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration says its new guidelines would make the food Americans eat safer and help prevent the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that sicken or kill thousands of consumers each year.

The rules, the most sweeping food safety guidelines in decades, would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. The new guidelines were announced Friday.

Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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"Cliff" concerns give way to earnings focus

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors' "fiscal cliff" worries are likely to give way to more fundamental concerns, like earnings, as fourth-quarter reports get under way next week.

Financial results, which begin after the market closes on Tuesday with aluminum company Alcoa , are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter's lackluster results. As a warning sign, analyst current estimates are down sharply from what they were in October.

That could set stocks up for more volatility following a week of sharp gains that put the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.spx> on Friday at the highest close since December 31, 2007. The index also registered its biggest weekly percentage gain in more than a year.

Based on a Reuters analysis, Europe ranks among the chief concerns cited by companies that warned on fourth-quarter results. Uncertainty about the region and its weak economic outlook were cited by more than half of the 25 largest S&P 500 companies that issued warnings.

In the most recent earnings conference calls, macroeconomic worries were cited by 10 companies while the U.S. "fiscal cliff" was cited by at least nine as reasons for their earnings warnings.

"The number of things that could go wrong isn't so high, but the magnitude of how wrong they could go is what's worrisome," said Kurt Winters, senior portfolio manager for Whitebox Mutual Funds in Minneapolis.

Negative-to-positive guidance by S&P 500 companies for the fourth quarter was 3.6 to 1, the second worst since the third quarter of 2001, according to Thomson Reuters data.

U.S. lawmakers narrowly averted the "fiscal cliff" by coming to a last-minute agreement on a bill to avoid steep tax hikes this weeks -- driving the rally in stocks -- but the battle over further spending cuts is expected to resume in two months.

Investors also have seen a revival of worries about Europe's sovereign debt problems, with Moody's in November downgrading France's credit rating and debt crises looming for Spain and other countries.

"You have a recession in Europe as a base case. Europe is still the biggest trading partner with a lot of U.S. companies, and it's still a big chunk of global capital spending," said Adam Parker, chief U.S. equity strategist at Morgan Stanley in New York.

Among companies citing worries about Europe was eBay , whose chief financial officer, Bob Swan, spoke of "macro pressures from Europe" in the company's October earnings conference call.

REVENUE WORRIES

One of the biggest worries voiced about earnings has been whether companies will be able to continue to boost profit growth despite relatively weak revenue growth.

S&P 500 revenue fell 0.8 percent in the third quarter for the first decline since the third quarter of 2009, Thomson Reuters data showed. Earnings growth for the quarter was a paltry 0.1 percent after briefly dipping into negative territory.

On top of that, just 40 percent of S&P 500 companies beat revenue expectations in the third quarter, while 64.2 percent beat earnings estimates, the Thomson Reuters data showed.

For the fourth quarter, estimates are slightly better but are well off estimates for the quarter from just a few months earlier. S&P 500 earnings are expected to have risen 2.8 percent while revenue is expected to have gone up 1.9 percent.

Back in October, earnings growth for the fourth quarter was forecast up 9.9 percent.

In spite of the cautious outlooks, some analysts still see a good chance for earnings beats this reporting period.

"The thinking is you need top line growth for earnings to continue to expand, and we've seen the market defy that," said Mike Jackson, founder of Denver-based investment firm T3 Equity Labs.

Based on his analysis, energy, industrials and consumer discretionary are the S&P sectors most likely to beat earnings expectations in the upcoming season, while consumer staples, materials and utilities are the least likely to beat, Jackson said.

Sounding a positive note on Friday, drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co said it expects profit in 2013 to increase by more than Wall Street had been forecasting, primarily due to cost controls and improved productivity.

(Reporting By Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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Crackdowns Make Fleeing North Korea Harder

Woohae Cho for the International Herald Tribune

The Rev. Kim Seung-eun at his church in Cheonan, a center for activists who help smuggle refugees from North Korea.

CHEONAN, South Korea — The Rev. Kim Seung-eun said he could measure the increasing difficulty of smuggling people out of North Korea by the higher cost of bribing North Korean soldiers on the Chinese border to look the other way.

“They demand not only more cash, but also all kinds of things for themselves and their superiors,” said Mr. Kim, a South Korean human rights activist who helps North Koreans flee their totalitarian homeland and resettle in the South. “They’ve developed a taste for South Korean goods, too.”

Under North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, human rights activists and South Korean officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to smuggle refugees out of the country, contributing to a sharp drop in the number of North Koreans reaching South Korea in the past year.

The number of refugees has never been particularly large, since most North Koreans are so impoverished they find it all but impossible to raise the money to attempt an escape. But the tightening of controls at the Chinese border led to a fall of about 44 percent from the previous year in the number of refugees reaching South Korea in 2012. The total was 1,509, according to South Korean government data.

Despite the relatively small number, the flow of North Koreans defecting to South Korea to escape poverty and oppression has long been a major embarrassment for the North. Lately, the Chinese also appear to have tightened their control at the river border to help protect their client government. “The crackdowns in China and North Korea came in tandem,” said Mr. Kim, who manages a network of activists and smugglers from his Caleb Mission church in Cheonan, a city about 60 miles south of Seoul. “It’s become more difficult for my people to operate in North Korea and China.”

A devastating famine in the 1990s caused many North Koreans to flee, and the number of refugees peaked at 2,917 in 2009. Today, about 24,000 people who escaped from North Korea live in South Korea.

In the last years of his rule, Kim Jong-il, the previous dictator and the current ruler’s father, added more checkpoints on the roads to the Chinese border, according to South Korean activists and researchers. North Korea built more barriers along the border and rotated patrols more frequently to discourage corruption.

Under Kim Jong-un, who took over a year ago after his father’s death, border controls have tightened further, officials and activists say. The government began to jam the Chinese cellphone signals that activists relied on to coordinate their smuggling operations with collaborators in the North. North Korea also deployed equipment to trace cellphone signals.

“That significantly narrowed the window for cross-border cellphone conversations,” said Kim Hee-tae, a leader of the International Network of North Korea Human Rights Activists. His group raises money from churches; until last year it typically arranged for 180 to 190 North Korean refugees annually to escape to the South. But this past year, he said, his organization managed to bring in only about 100 people.

“Even after the bribes are paid, there is no guarantee of success,” said Do Hee-youn, head of the Citizens’ Coalition for the Human Rights of North Korean Refugees, based in Seoul. “We have recently seen cases where border guards were not punished for having taken bribes when they turned over the refugees.” Adding to the difficulty, some of the missionaries and brokers involved in the smuggling were rounded up by the Chinese police.

“It just became impossible to use public transportation in China because these days you cannot buy a train or bus ticket without a proper ID, which the North Koreans don’t have,” said the Rev. Chun Ki-won, another veteran human rights activist, who runs the Durihana Mission, a Christian group based in Seoul.

But for all the tighter controls imposed by the North Koreans and Chinese, there are still ways of slipping through the cracks.

Landing a border assignment is seen by many North Korean soldiers as a chance to make a fortune by collecting bribes from smugglers. The police in North Korea sometimes protect families with relatives in the South so they can take a cut from cash remittances from the South.

North Koreans have also developed an appetite for outside news and entertainment. “If early defectors fled North Korea for sheer ‘survival,’ an increasing number of North Koreans reaching South Korea flee for ‘a better life’ than they had in the North,” Kim Soo-am, an expert on North Korean refugees at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, recently wrote.

A group of 15 North Koreans that the Caleb Mission team in Cheonan had smuggled out in early December included a striking example of one such defector: a 29-year-old woman who yearned to become a television celebrity. “She had watched so many South Korean soap operas that she developed an illusion about life in South Korea,” Mr. Kim said, pointing out a particularly well-dressed woman in a photograph of the 15 North Koreans. “When we smuggled her out of North Korea, she was already wearing nothing but South Korean-made clothes.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 5, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article gave the incorrect time period for a devastating famine in North Korea. The famine happened in the 1990s, not in 2009.

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New Jersey man accused of trying to hire “cannibal cop” to kidnap woman

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New Jersey man offered to pay $ 5,000 to the so-called “cannibal cop” to kidnap a woman and deliver her to be raped, U.S. officials alleged on Friday.

Federal authorities arrested Michael Vanhise, 23, and charged him with conspiracy to commit kidnapping with Gilberto Valle III, a New York police officer who was arrested in October and charged with conspiring to kidnap, torture, cook and eat women.

In a series of emails last year, Vanhise tried to bargain down the kidnapping fee and urged the police officer to “just make sure she doesn’t die before I get her,” according to a criminal complaint unsealed Friday.

“No need to worry,” Valle replied in an email, prosecutors allege. “She will be alive. It’s a short drive to you.”

Vanhise admitted to investigators he sent the emails, prosecutors said.

Valle, nicknamed the “cannibal cop” by New York media, was accused of targeting women whose names were discovered in a file on his computer.

In November, Valle pleaded not guilty and said he was merely engaged in online fantasy role play.

Vanhise was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. He was expected to appear in court Friday afternoon. His attorney, Alice Fontier, did not immediately return a call for comment.

The emails between the two men “read like a script from a bad horror film,” Manhattan federal prosecutor Preet Bharara said Friday in a statement.

Vanhise was also accused of emailing photos and the home address of a girl from his Hamilton, New Jersey neighborhood to two unnamed people, according to a criminal complaint, which said Vanhise solicited the girl’s kidnapping.

Prosecutors said Vanhise tried to bargain down the price for the kidnapping to $ 4,000.

“Could we do 4?” Vanhise asked Valle in an email last February, according to the complaint.

“I am putting my neck on the line here … $ 5,000 and you need to make sure that she is not found,” Valle responded. “She will definitely make news.”

Valle’s estranged wife tipped off authorities after she discovered a disturbing file on his computer, a law enforcement official said at the time.

The file, called “Abducting and Cooking: A Blueprint,” contained the names and pictures of at least 100 women, and the addresses and physical descriptions of some of them, according to court documents.

Authorities charged last fall that Valle had undertaken surveillance of some of the women at their places of employment and their homes.

Valle was denied bail by a judge who called the charges “profoundly disturbing.”

Both men face a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted. The case has disturbed even veteran criminal investigators.

“No effort to characterize the defendant’s actions is necessary,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos in a statement. “The factual allegations more than suffice to convey the depravity of the offense.”

(Reporting by Chris Francescani; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Alden Bentley)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Courteney Cox: I'll 'Show My Boobs' on the New Season of Cougar Town

TV Watch

01/04/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Courteney Cox is taking the term "boob tube" literally.

The Cougar Town star, 48, whose show moves from ABC to TBS on Jan. 8, eagerly anticipates more um, revealing scenes once the program makes its way to the cable network.

"You will not see one scene that I don't show my boobs," Cox joked to reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association winter tour, according to Access Hollywood.

"You know what? I'm getting older, so I've decided at this point I'm taking less focus [on] the face, and focusing here," she added, pointing to her chest. "By the time I'm much older, I will just be absolutely nude. I think it's [going to] work for me, I hope."

The show's executive producer, Bill Lawrence, backed up Cox's comments. "There is one difference [with the show going to cable]," he said Friday. "I think I'm allowed to say … Courteney did declare this the year of her cleavage."

Still, the star isn't exactly baring it all. Although there is an episode themed "naked day" for Cox's character Jules and her on-camera hubby Grayson (Josh Hopkins), there will be no actual nudity on the show.

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