Italy's Monti: I'm Heading New Electoral Coalition

ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Mario Monti announced Friday he is heading a new campaign coalition made of up centrists, business leaders and pro-Vatican forces who back his "ethical" vision of politics, aiming for a second mandate in office if his fledging reform movement wins big in parliamentary elections.

After a four-hour huddle with his supporters, Monti ended weeks of speculation at home and abroad about whether the internationally respected economist, who was appointed to head a non-elected government a year ago, would seek a new term, this time given to him by the voters.

He told a hastily convened news conference that the Feb. 24-25 ballot list would carry the banner "Monti Agenda for Italy" or a similar slogan, even if the ballot wouldn't list him per se as a candidate. "A new political formation is born," declared Monti, who, as a senator-for-life doesn't have to run for a parliamentary seat.

"Italy must have an evolution in its politics," he said, Instead of the "traditional axis that consists of right and left" Monti contended that the real axis Italy needs is one "directed at Europe and at reforms to transform our country."

Monti was appointed premier 13 months ago after his scandal-plagued predecessor Silvio Berlusconi failed to stop Italy from sliding deeper into the eurozone debt crisis. He quit earlier this month after Berlusconi pulled his party's support from Monti's government, but is now continuing in a caretaker role until the next elections.

For weeks now there has been speculation about whether Monti would run for the job in February, but he has been unwilling to officially campaign as a candidate. But he could take on the premiership if asked to by whatever party or coalition wins — including the grouping he announced Friday.

"I will watch over the creation of (parliamentary) candidate lists, and for now, I agree to carry out the role of coalition head, and I am working for the success of this operation," the 69-year-old said.

Monti along with his government of technocrats have taken credit for shoring up Italy's shaky finances by pushing through a tough austerity agenda of pension reform, new taxes and spending cuts. And Monti said he wants to "prolong and intensify the pace and extend the objectives of" his government.

Critics, however, say his reforms have stymied job creation and left Italy mired in recession.

His range of supporters is impressive. They include the president of Ferrari's Formula One racing team as well as figures in the highest Vatican echelons. Pope Benedict XVI on Christmas Day issued a call for noble values in politics that was read as a virtual endorsement for another Monti term.

But it remains to be seen if Monti's high-minded reformist alliance will garner enough backing to allow him to call the shots after the elections. Recent polls have shown that such a grouping, with Monti at the helm, would garner at most about 15 percent of the vote.

Opinion surveys show that the leading party, with about 30 percent, is the Democratic Left led by Pier Luigi Bersani, who was Monti's biggest backer in Parliament, including supporting him on pension reforms that sorely tested the left's traditional support from labor.

Berlusconi, meanwhile, hasn't said if he is running or not for a fourth term as premier. He faces legal and sexual scandals, yet still commands significant support.

After Monti's news conference, Bersani challenged the premier to clarify the new coalition's relationship with his party, the "first party. Do they see us as alternatives, competitors or are they open to an alliance?" Bersani said in a TV interview.

Reporters asked Monti if he thought he could return to the premier's office if the election results show his coalition ends up second. "Let's wait and see," was his reply.

Monti said that, thanks to his stewardship, "the financial emergency is over" in Italy but acknowledged that youth unemployment and lack of economic growth still plague the country. He said voters would have the chance in February to "legitimize" his economic and moral reform platform.

___

Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.

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NORAD Santa trackers draw record number of phone calls, social media followers

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. – NORAD says it drew a record number of phone calls and social media followers during its NORAD Tracks Santa operation on Christmas Eve.

The North American Aerospace Defence Command said Friday volunteers answered more than 114,000 calls, up 12,000 from 2011.

NORAD’s Santa Facebook page had more than 1.2 million followers, up from about 1 million last year. More than 129,000 people followed on Twitter, up from 101,000 last year.

NORAD got 11,000 emails, up from 7,700 in 2011.

More than 1,250 volunteers answered phone calls, including first lady Michelle Obama.

NORAD Tracks Santa began in 1955 when a newspaper listed the wrong number for children to call Santa. They wound up calling the Continental Air Defence Command, NORAD’s predecessor.

The operation is based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.

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Emily Maynard's Cat Gets a Haircut - Like a Lion!

People Pets

By Amy Jamieson

12/28/2012 at 04:00 PM EST

Emily Maynard and her cat Safari

Courtesy Emily Maynard; Inset:Craig Sjodin/ABC

Emily Maynard's cat Safari was named for a wilderness expedition – and now the feline looks like he could roam wild in one.

In a Twitter photo Maynard shared Thursday, the cat's fur has been fashioned into a lion's mane.

"Safari has never been happier. Really. I swear. #grumpycat," she Tweeted.

It sounds like both of the single mom's felines are sporting the new do.

"I just dropped Holly and Safari off to get their lion haircuts," she replied on Thursday to her Twitter friend, @BoMartini. "Get ready for your phone to be filled with even more cat pics."

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

___

Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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'Terminator' actor arrested for lewd conduct at adult movie store

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Afghan Police, Betrayed in Sleep, Suffer Losses

KABUL, Afghanistan — A wave of betrayal has left at least 17 Afghan policemen dead in the past 10 days — all killed in their sleep, at the hands of those close to them.

Early Thursday morning, an Afghan policeman unlocked the door of the check post where he was stationed in Oruzgan Province and let in his friends from the Taliban, who helped him attack his sleeping colleagues with knives and guns, eventually killing four and wounding eight.

On Sunday, a local police commander in a remote northern province, Jawzjan, shot to death, in their beds, five men under his command and fled to join the Taliban.

And on Dec. 18, a teenager apparently being kept for sexual purposes by an Afghan border police commander in southern Kandahar Province drugged the commander and the other 10 policemen at the post to put them to sleep, and then shot them all; eight died.

In the crisis that has risen in the past year over insider killings, in which Afghan security forces turn on their allies, the toll has been even heavier for the Afghans themselves — at least 86 in a count by The New York Times this year, and the full toll is likely to be higher — than it has been for American and other NATO forces, which have lost at least 62 so far, the latest in Kabul on Monday.

Unlike most insider attacks against foreign forces, known as “green-on-blue” killings, most of the attacks between Afghans, “green on green,” have been clear cases of either infiltration by Taliban insurgents or turncoat attacks. As with the three recent attacks, they have fallen most heavily on police units, and they have followed a familiar pattern: the Taliban either infiltrate someone into a unit, or win over someone already in a unit, who then kills his comrades in their sleep. Frequently, the victims are first poisoned or drugged at dinner.

“I tell my cook not to allow any police officer in the kitchen,” said Taaj Mohammad, a commander of a border police check post near the one in Kandahar that was attacked on Dec. 18. “This kind of incident really creates mistrust among comrades, which is not good. Now we don’t trust anyone, even those who spent years in the post.”

The most recent of the green-on-green betrayals took place on Thursday about 3 a.m., in the town of Tarin Kowt, the capital of Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan. According to Fareed Ayal, a spokesman for the provincial police chief, a police officer named Hayat Khan, who had been in regular touch with the Taliban for religious guidance, waited until the other officers at his check post fell asleep and then called Taliban fighters by cellphone and let them in. First the attackers stabbed the one officer who was on watch, but he raised the alarm in time to awaken some of the police officers.

In the ensuing firefight, four policemen were killed and eight wounded, while Mr. Khan and his Taliban confederates managed to escape, according to Mr. Ayal’s account.

In the attack on Sunday, in Jawzjan Province, the victims were all part of an Afghan Local Police unit whose commander had previous connections with the Taliban. Such local police units, strongly supported as part of American policy in Afghanistan, undergo training, and community leaders and elders offer guarantees that the units have no further insurgent ties.

Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat of the Jawzjan Provincial Police said that the commander who had killed the men in their sleep, Dur Mohammad, had fled but that his relatives and a community elder who vouched for him had been detained and were being interrogated.

In some green-on-green cases, personal grievances may drive the attackers to throw in their lot with the Taliban.

That is apparently what happened in the case of Noor Agha, a young man who the police say killed eight border security police officers in their check post on the border near Spinbaldak, the major crossing point between Kandahar and Pakistan, on Dec. 18.

The police said that Mr. Agha, whose age was unclear but whom police sources described as “still beardless,” had been the involuntary companion of the border police commander at that check post, Agha Amire, for several years. Other police commanders who knew both said there was clearly an “improper relationship” between the two.

While not saying so explicitly, they were suggesting that Mr. Amire was using Mr. Agha in the commonplace practice known as bacha baazi, in which powerful Afghan commanders frequently keep young boys as personal servants, dancers and sex slaves.

The practice was outlawed during Taliban times but has never gone away, and even some provincial governors and other top officials openly keep bacha baazi harems. The practice was noted in the latest United States State Department’s annual human rights report, but the report said “credible statistics were difficult to acquire as the subject was a source of shame.”

The night of the attack, Mr. Agha offered to make a special dinner for the police at the check post and invited two friends to attend. He and his friends put drugs in the food and then shot everyone there, including Mr. Amire, and the three attackers escaped across the border to join Taliban insurgents in Pakistan, according to a police official. Mr. Agha’s family, who lived in Arghandab District, a former Taliban stronghold near Kandahar city, fled their home, leaving behind livestock and personal possessions, according to police officials and relatives of the commander.

Although a police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity put the toll at eight dead and three wounded in that episode, officially, the Kandahar Province police chief, Gen. Abdul Raziq, said only four had been killed and three wounded. General Raziq also denied that there had been a young boy involved in drugging the food.

The wave of killings over the past year has police officers all over Afghanistan watching what they eat, and sleeping uneasily.

“We make sure that nobody gets the chance to poison the food,” said Sharif Agha, 26, a police sergeant who commands a small outpost in Khost city, in eastern Afghanistan. The ten officers there take turns helping the cook and make sure at least two people are in the kitchen at all times. At night, a third guard is assigned to watch the two guards normally on duty.

“I don’t know about the rest of the guys,” Sergeant Agha said, “but I have not slept properly over the past few months.”

Reporting was contributed by Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar from Kabul; and Enayat Najafizada from Mazar-i-Sharif.

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Jessica Simpson Posts Revealing Twitpic

By Marla Lehner

12/27/2012 at 04:55 PM EST

Jessica Simpson is pregnant and proud to show it.

The expectant star – who is vacationing in Hawaii with her fiancé Eric Johnson, their 7-month-old daughter Maxwell Drew and other family members – posted a revealing photo of herself smiling and clearly enjoying the laid back lifestyle of the islands on Thursday.

"Fun in the sun," Simpson, 32, wrote to accompany the Twitpic, which shows the star wearing her sun-kissed blonde hair loose and dressed in a red beach frock and a cowboy hat.

Simpson hasn't been shy about sharing her happiness on Twitter over the holidays. On Christmas Day, she revealed the news of her pregnancy by sharing a picture of her daughter with the words "Big Sis" written in the sand in front of her. And on Wednesday, Simpson posted a shot of herself grinning with Johnson on the beach.

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

___

Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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Numerous women sexually assaulted by taxi driver, police say

Manhattan Beach Police released the photo of a taxi driver suspected of sexually assaulting multiple women in the South Bay region.

Torrance resident Sameh Shenouda, 38, was arrested in November on charges of sexually assaulting a woman in August, according to Manhattan Beach Det. Michael Rosenberger.

“The victim did not initially report the crime until she saw a news report of a similar offense occurring in Redondo Beach,” Rosenberger said.

News of Shenouda’s arrest prompted other women to come forward with information.

Rosenberger said Shenouda would offer rides to women who were walking in the evening. He would open the front passenger door so they would sit up front with him, making it easier to assault them, he said.

The United Taxi, Shenouda’s employer, has been “very cooperative with investigators,” Rosenberger said.

Manhattan Beach police are asking that if anyone has been assaulted or touched inappropriately by a taxi driver in the South Bay in the last year to contact detectives at (310) 802-5127.

ALSO:

Submit your photos

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-- Dalina Castellanos

Photo: Sameh Shenouda. Credit: Manhattan Beach Police Department.

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Syrian General Defects in a Public Broadcast

Aref Heretani/Reuters.

Mannequins were set up to confuse snipers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the old city of Aleppo on Sunday.

Syria’s embattled leadership suffered a new setback on Wednesday with the publicly broadcast defection of its military police chief, the highest-ranking officer to abandon President Bashar al-Assad since the uprising against him began nearly two years ago.

The defector, Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Jassem al-Shallal, announced his move in a video broadcast by Al Arabiya, saying that he had taken the step because of what he called the Syrian military’s deviation from “its fundamental mission to protect the nation and transformation into gangs of killing and destruction.”

Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab broadcaster heavily critical of the Syrian government, first broadcast the video late Tuesday, and opposition figures confirmed its authenticity on Wednesday, saying the general was somewhere in Turkey.

They said General Shallal’s defection had been arranged weeks ago through tribal elders in Syria, and that the effort to smuggle him across the border, over several days, included a four-hour motorcycle ride.

Turkey has been the main destination point for Syrian military defectors, and many of them have regrouped there to join the Free Syrian Army, the main insurgent force fighting Mr. Assad.

Reading from a prepared statement while sitting at a desk, dressed in a camouflage uniform with red epaulets, the general did not specify in his message when he had decided to defect but said that he had been “waiting for the right circumstances to do so.” He also said “there are other high-ranking officers who want to defect, but the situation is not suitable for them to declare defection.”

While the general’s defection was broadly embraced by opposition figures as a major blow to the government, the general, a Sunni Muslim, was not believed to be a member of the president’s inner circle of advisers. Over the course of the conflict, despite welcoming thousands of defectors, the opposition has failed to attract figures seen as critical pillars of the government or any members of the ruling Alawite minority of President Assad, the sect regarded as the backbone of the military.  

Nonetheless the general’s harsh denunciation of the Syrian military was at the least a new embarrassment to Mr. Assad, further undermining his repeated claims that the uprising against him is basically the work of terrorists and their foreign collaborators.

General Shallal’s statement came as Syrian insurgents were claiming new territorial gains against Mr. Assad in the northern and central parts of the country and as a special envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League was visiting Damascus as part of an effort to reach a political settlement that would halt the conflict, the most violent of the Arab Spring revolutions that began in the winter of 2010-2011. More than 40,000 people have been killed since protests against Mr. Assad began in March 2011.

There has been speculation that the special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, presented Mr. Assad with proposals for relinquishing his authority and possibly leaving the country. Mr. Assad, whose Alawite minority has ruled Syria for more than four decades, has consistently said he will not leave the country, even as his control over it seems to be slipping further away.

Dozens of lower-ranking Syrian military officers and hundreds of soldiers have fled Syria over the past two years, but General Shallal, the head of the military police division of the Syrian Army, is the highest-ranking military defector so far. He outranked Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a boyhood friend of Mr. Assad’s, who fled last July. General Tlass is now believed to be living in France.

Among civilians who have abandoned Mr. Assad, the highest-ranking defector so far has been the prime minister, Riyad Farid Hijab, who fled to Jordan on Aug. 6. In the past few weeks, unconfirmed reports also have abounded about the possible defection of Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, a smooth-talking English speaker who had numerous foreign contacts and who disappeared from public view in early December. The Lebanese television channel Al Manar, which is sympathetic to Mr. Assad, said Mr. Makdissi had been fired.

The Guardian reported this week that Mr. Makdissi had fled to the United States and was cooperating with American intelligence. Patrick Ventrell, a State Department spokesman in Washington, said Wednesday that Mr. Makdissi was not in the United States, contrary to the Guardian account.

Mr. Makdissi’s whereabouts and status remain murky. American officials said they do not know where he is, and that reports earlier this month saying that Mr. Makdissi had flown to London were incorrect.

In Lebanon, Syria’s interior minister, Mohammed al-Shaar, who had been recovering at a Beirut hospital from wounds said to have been received in a Dec. 12 suicide bombing attack outside his offices in Damascus, was on his way back to the Syrian capital on Wednesday. The Associated Press quoted Beirut airport officials as saying the minister flew home on a private jet.

Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim and Hwaida Saad in Beirut, Eric Schmitt in Washington and Ellen Barry in Moscow.

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