Wall Street opens flat on "cliff" deadlock

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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Open Road Films will release Arnold Schwarzenegger's action thriller "Ten" nationwide on January 24, 2014, the company announced on Wednesday. Directed by David Ayer ("End of Watch"), the former governor leads an elite DEA task force that takes on the world's deadliest drug cartels. When the team executes a high-stakes raid on a cartel safe house, they think their work is done until, one-by-one, the 10 members start to be eliminated. ...
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Senators Say ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Torture Scenes Are Misleading

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WASHINGTON — In an unusual Congressional critique of Hollywood moviemaking, three United States senators on Wednesday lambasted “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new fictionalized film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, calling it “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location” of the terrorist leader.




In a letter to Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the senators — Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California; Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan; and John McCain, Republican of Arizona — weighed in on a public debate over how the film portrays the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of brutal interrogations against Qaeda suspects.


Ms. Feinstein leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose Democratic staff members just completed a highly critical 6,000-page study of the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program, which began after the 9/11 attacks and was ended by President Obama in 2009. The report remains classified, but Ms. Feinstein has said it showed that information derived from waterboarding and other brutal techniques did not play a significant role in locating Bin Laden, who was killed in a raid by Navy SEALs in May 2011.


Some human rights advocates have described the film as ambiguous on the question of whether torture was useful, while others believe it implies that torture produced some early clues.


The senators take the latter view and say the movie is “factually inaccurate” and “has the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.” Their letter asks Sony Pictures to “consider correcting the impression that the C.I.A.’s use of coercive interrogation techniques led to the operation” against Bin Laden, but they do not explain exactly how that could be done.


The director of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow, and its writer, Mark Boal, have said that to leave torture scenes out would have meant whitewashing history and that the film made clear that the most important break in the Bin Laden hunt did not come from a coercive interrogation.


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Best Practice Institute Introduces New Social Network that Promises ‘Future of 360′

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A new social network, skillrater.com launched today, makes it easy for members to request work performance ratings from overseers, co-workers and direct reports across a domestic and global workforce.


West Palm Beach, Fla. (PRWEB) December 20, 2012






Skillrater.com, an online social network that launched today, makes it easy for members to request work performance ratings from overseers, co-workers and direct reports across a domestic and global workforce.


“This is the future of 360-degree assessment and social learning,” said the network’s creator, Louis Carter, CEO of Best Practice Institute.


“Get rated. Get better. Get noticed,” says Skillrater.com’s website, which describes the new social network as “the world’s first rating, networking and feedback tool on a social platform.”


Executives, employees and entrepreneurs who have already been friended, linked and tweeted can now get feedback and rating on their skill sets and work at Skillrater.com. Individuals may join the Skillrater social network at no cost; corporations may purchase a premium or enterprise membership to use Skillrater as an in-house platform for feedback, talent management and social networking.


The Next Thing in 360 Assessment and Corporate Social Networking


“I want to bring a revolution to 360 so that organizations become more open and transparent, and driven by the desire for employees to request feedback on their competencies/skills and activities they execute on a daily basis” said Carter, BPI’s founder and a social-organizational psychologist.


The world of work is becoming more open and transparent. “A new IBM study of 1709 Chief Executive Officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterized the modern corporation for more than a century.”


Employees using skillrater engage in conversations and threaded discussions around improving their activities at work. Instead of hiding feedback from employees, employees may receive immediate correction of negatively reinforcing workplace habits directly from their bosses, peers, and customers. Employees may continue the feedback process in a threaded discussion to receive deeper advice and help from executive coaches or other members of the team. Repeating this process will show measurable changes in behavior and actions over time for your organization, as well as show patterns for the changes that need to me made on an individual, team, and organization level. The employee requests feedback of others directly, so that a culture of accountability and feedback is encouraged. Instead of “big brother/sister” HR forcing feedback of competencies and workplace performance, employees take ownership for creating their own culture of transparency so they may show their progress toward growth.


One study found that as many as 90 percent of all Fortune 500 companies use 360-degree feedback with their employees. In a 360 assessment, feedback is sought from all directions of an employee’s circle: overseers, peers, direct reports, and sometimes even external sources, such as customers and suppliers.


Skillrater brings several innovations to the 360-degree process to make the technique easier to use and to increase the tool’s beneficial results. Features include:


“Skillrater is a great tool. Leaders and managers are going to fall in love with it,” said the world’s leading executive coach and bestselling author Marshall Goldsmith. “There is no better way for organizational leaders to track talent data. Skillrater gives you a simple way to request receive feedback on what you are doing, while building an in-house social network to discuss the feedback. The ability to customize Skillrater around the desired competencies of your organization is brilliant.”"


Focus on Leadership Development in Globally Dispersed Workforces


Most importantly, Carter said, Skillrater provides a social network through which members can springboard from quantitative ratings to qualitative discussions that make the feedback truly transformative. This is especially beneficial for dispersed workforces where consistent face-to-face communication is costly to accomplish.”


“Our goal is to create a social network within an organization that is focused on helping employees improve their skills and improve performance,” Carter said. “Skillrater is not primarily about promotion and pay decisions, it’s about leadership development and positive behavioral change throughout a national or global workforce.”


Studies have shown 360-degree feedback is an effective way to help workers identify their strengths and weaknesses, including blind spots in which they need further development. Skillrater’s convenient online platform, along with the addition of a social networking dimension, makes Skillrater a powerful leadership development for dispersed or collective learning environments.


After corporate clients learn their way around all the bells and whistles of Skillrater’s multi-rater feedback tool, Carter said, they will move on to appreciate the richness of the in-house social network, creating a dispersed learning environment in which ongoing leadership development and action learning is cultivated within domestic or global workforces.


Skillrater Benefits for Individual Users


Individuals may join Skillrater.com for free and choose up to five skills upon which to be rated. Top executives, mid-level rising stars and lower-level workers with an eye on advancement may all use Skillrater to request feedback and map their own course of development. Requesting a Skillrater rating is an excellent way for an individual to confirm satisfaction with a completed project or identify additional steps needed to achieve satisfaction. Using Skillrater, a worker can demonstrate to higher-ups one’s desire to perform well and also document tangible improvement.


An individual who has acquired several ratings on one’s Skillrater profile and has made those ratings public may catch the attention of employers on the search for talent. Skillrater will become a go-to destination for talent recruitment. Other social networks provide an individual’s name, personal background and employment history, but Skillrater provides rubber-meets-the-road details of how an individual has been evaluated by co-workers, clients and customers on actual projects.


Skillrater Benefits for Corporate Users


Companies may purchase an enterprise membership, giving executives an unparalleled tool for talent management and leadership development. Enterprise membership enables companies to enroll 1,000 users and place them in 20 groups or divisions.


For senior talent management executives, Skillrater provides a remarkable way to track the job performance, skill sets and leadership development of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of employees spread out across a national or global workforce. For years, connecting the right employees with the right tasks has been the elusive aim of talent management. With Skillrater, when a particular skill set is needed for a particular task, a manager can search on those specific skills, and then read fresh feedback on recent projects, including not only numerical ratings but subsequent comments and discussion. That is rich, valuable talent data, which Skillrater puts at executives’ fingertips.


Managers from different divisions may customize their own groups to have specific skills or competencies that are important for success on-the-job. Users can select these group skills when requesting ratings to get targeted feedback that meets the need of the department head or head of leadership development. The ability to customize skills is critical to an organization’s success, making this a key feature of Skillrater’s enterprise membership level.


VPs of leadership development have the ability to set up action learning groups with specific action items. Group members work together online to achieve goals and get ratings on the skills that will make them most successful on the action learning project. Changes in behavior and actual project results may be tracked over time, proving the ROI of the leadership development program.


How Does Skillrater Work?


Joining Skillrater is easy and painless. An individual can create a Skillrater profile in a few moments or import one’s profile and skill set from LinkedIn.


A Skillrater member may request a rating from anybody on anything. It really is that simple. The user simply clicks the “Request Rating” button, specifies the task or activity for which one seeks a rating and the specific skills on which feedback is desired.


Then the member sends off the rating requests. If the desired rater is already a Skillrater.com member, requesting a rating is just one additional click. If not, the user enters the desired rater’s email address, and a message is sent requesting the rating and providing the necessary link.


After feedback has been received, Skillrater notifies the user. Results include a spider chart, an easy-to-understand graphical interpretation of how the feedback lines up with one’s self-assessment. Users continue to share advice and further clarification via a discussion thread to continue the social learning and coaching experience online.


ABOUT BEST PRACTICE INSTITUTE


Best Practice Institute is an award-winning leadership development center, think tank, peer network, research institute and online learning portal with more than 10,000 corporate and individual members around the world. Corporate members include Walmart, Bank of America, Pfizer, Hilton Hotels Worldwide, Scripps and many more of the world’s top corporations. BPI is based in West Palm Beach, FL, and is on the web at http://www.bestpracticeinstitute.org. BPI is ranked as one of the top ten “Best in Leadership Development” by Leadership Excellence Magazine.


Louis Carter is the founder and CEO of Best Practice Institute. Carter is a social-organizational psychologist, concept innovator, entrepreneur and a highly regarded authority on learning, talent, leadership development and change. He is the author or co-author of 11 books and a regular contributor to Fast Company, Chief Learning Officer, Talent Management, and Training Magazine.


For More Information or to schedule an interview, please contact Louis Carter: 800-718-4274; lou(at)bestpracticeinstitute.org


Louis Carter
Best Practice Institute
800-718-4274
Email Information


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Prince William and Kate Lunch with the Royal Family

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By Simon Perry





12/19/2012 at 09:30 AM EST







The Duchess and Duke of Cambridge


REX USA


It's been a busy pre-Christmas week for William and Kate.

Wednesday brought a festive lunch with Queen Elizabeth and other members of the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, following Tuesday's lunch with their household – a menu of turkey and roast vegetables, though Kate, having dealt with morning sickness, sipped soft drinks, the restaurant said.

Still, she has felt better in recent days, and made a surprise appearance to present awards at Sunday's BBC's Sports Personality of the Year show.

Meanwhile, Royal Air Force Search and Rescue helicopter pilot William spent the weekend in Anglesey, North Wales.

Per tradition, the Queen will head to Sandringham, her estate in Norfolk, in the next day or so. It is remains to be seen if William and Kate will join her and most of the royal family for the festivities, as they did last year.

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Experts: Kids are resilient in coping with trauma

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WASHINGTON (AP) — They might not want to talk about the gunshots or the screams. But their toys might start getting into imaginary shootouts.


Last week's school shooting in Connecticut raises the question: What will be the psychological fallout for the children who survived?


For people of any age, regaining a sense of security after surviving violence can take a long time. They're at risk for lingering anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder.


But after the grief and fear fades, psychiatrists say most of Newtown's young survivors probably will cope without long-term emotional problems.


"Kids do tend to be highly resilient," said Dr. Matthew Biel, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.


And one way that younger children try to make sense of trauma is through play. Youngsters may pull out action figures or stuffed animals and re-enact what they witnessed, perhaps multiple times.


"That's the way they gain mastery over a situation that's overwhelming," Biel explained, saying it becomes a concern only if the child is clearly distressed while playing.


Nor is it unusual for children to chase each other playing cops-and-robbers, but now parents might see some also pretending they're dead, added Dr. Melissa Brymer of the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.


Among the challenges will be spotting which children are struggling enough that they may need professional help.


Newtown's tragedy is particularly heart-wrenching because of what such young children grappled with — like the six first-graders who apparently had to run past their teacher's body to escape to safety.


There's little scientific research specifically on PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, in children exposed to a burst of violence, and even less to tell if a younger child will have a harder time healing than an older one.


Overall, scientists say studies of natural disasters and wars suggest most children eventually recover from traumatic experiences while a smaller proportion develop long-term disorders such as PTSD. Brymer says in her studies of school shootings, that fraction can range from 10 percent to a quarter of survivors, depending on what they actually experienced. A broader 2007 study found 13 percent of U.S. children exposed to different types of trauma reported some symptoms of PTSD, although less than 1 percent had enough for an official diagnosis.


Violence isn't all that rare in childhood. In many parts of the world — and in inner-city neighborhoods in the U.S., too — children witness it repeatedly. They don't become inured to it, Biel said, and more exposure means a greater chance of lasting psychological harm.


In Newtown, most at risk for longer-term problems are those who saw someone killed, said Dr. Carol North of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who has researched survivors of mass shootings.


Friday's shootings were mostly in two classrooms of Sandy Hook Elementary School, which has about 450 students through fourth-grade.


But those who weren't as close to the danger may be at extra risk, too, if this wasn't their first trauma or they already had problems such as anxiety disorders that increase their vulnerability, she said.


Right after a traumatic event, it's normal to have nightmares or trouble sleeping, to stick close to loved ones, and to be nervous or moody, Biel said.


To help, parents will have to follow their child's lead. Grilling a child about a traumatic experience isn't good, he stressed. Some children will ask a lot of questions, seeking reassurance, he said. Others will be quiet, thinking about the experience and maybe drawing or writing about it, or acting it out at playtime. Younger children may regress, becoming clingy or having tantrums.


Before second grade, their brains also are at a developmental stage some refer to as magical thinking, when it's difficult to distinguish reality and fantasy. Parents may have to help them understand that a friend who died isn't in pain or lonely but also isn't coming back, Brymer said.


When problem behaviors or signs of distress continue for several weeks, Brymer says it's time for an evaluation by a counselor or pediatrician.


Besides a supportive family, what helps? North advises getting children back into routines, together with their friends, and easing them back into a school setting. Studies of survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks found "the power of the support of the people who went through it with you is huge," she said.


Children as young as first-graders can benefit from cognitive-behavioral therapy, Georgetown's Biel said. They can calm themselves with breathing techniques. They also can learn to identify and label their feelings — anger, frustration, worry — and how to balance, say, a worried thought with a brave one.


Finally, avoid watching TV coverage of the shooting, as children may think it's happening all over again, Biel added. He found that children who watched the 9/11 clips of planes hitting the World Trade Center thought they were seeing dozens of separate attacks.


___


EDITOR'S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.


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Wall Street edges up, tech shares gain

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In the aftermath of Friday's Newtown school shooting, we've heard tales mostly horrifying and occasionally heroic, from surviving witnesses and mourning citizens alike, but this one lies somewhere in between, all the more unshakeable. One six-year-old Sandy Hook student played dead in her first-grade classroom, her family pastor said late Sunday, with the kind of quick thinking that ended up saving her life but now leaves her with the unshakeable memories of watching all her classmates being shot and killed. ...
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The Lede Blog: Accounts of a Siege in Syria Differ on Rebel YouTube Channels and British Television

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As my colleagues Liam Stack and Hania Mourtada reported, Syrian activists said last week that members of a pro-government militia known as the shabiha had massacred dozens of civilians this month in the village of Aqrab, northwest of the city of Homs, just outside the town of Houla.

What made the claim of a massacre in the village unusual were the accounts of witnesses, identified as survivors of the atrocity on rebel YouTube channels, who said that the victims were Alawites — members of the same minority sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, as President Bashar al-Assad and most members of the shabiha militia. In a civil war that has turned more sectarian over time, the claim that an Alawite militia had killed Alawite civilians, supposedly to keep them from being slaughtered by Sunni Muslim rebels instead, stood out.

Finding out what exactly happened in Aqrab is particularly difficult because, while the Syrian government denied that any massacre had taken place there, independent reporters have been unable to get into the town. Then too, it is hard to know how much weight to give to the extraordinary witness testimony posted on YouTube, since it appears to have been recorded under the watch of the rebel Free Syrian Army in the nearby town of Houla. A massacre in that town in May, blamed on the shabiha, brought global condemnation on the Assad government.

Shakeeb al-Jabri, a Syrian activist and journalist in neighboring Lebanon, noted on the day that the first reports of a massacre emerged there were wildly different accounts of what had taken place and how many people were killed.

Late last week, however, Alex Thomson of Britain’s Channel 4 News managed to travel to the outskirts of Aqrab, where he interviewed three people who claim to have escaped from the village to government-controlled territory. All three blamed Sunni rebels, not the pro-Assad Alawite militia, for the killing of Alawites in their village.

Restrictions on independent reporting inside Syria remain in place, but Mr. Thomson’s report, which was produced without the presence of any government minders, suggests that there might have been no massacre at all.

A video report from Syria broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4 News on Friday.

In a blog post introducing his report, Mr. Thomson acknowledges the difficulty of saying for sure who is telling the truth:

What follows is a series of eyewitness accounts which runs almost entirely against the version of what happened here which has gone global from rebel propaganda Web sites. We do not say what follows is the truth. But we can say it is the first independently observed story of Aqrab from the first outside journalist to reach this area.

We interviewed three key eyewitnesses in three separate locations. They could not have known either of our sudden arrival, nor did they know the identities of the other two eyewitnesses.

What is striking is that their accounts entirely corroborate each other, to the last detail. And their accounts are further backed up by at least a dozen conversations with other Alawites who had fled from Aqrab.

What happened, according to the witnesses who spoke to Mr. Thomson, is that hundreds of civilians from the village were trapped in one building, under siege from the rebels, for more than a week. The witnesses told Mr. Thomson, “the rebels wanted to take the women and children to al-Houla to use them as human shields against bombardment from government forces, and they believed they would kill the remaining men.”

Although negotiations to free all of the prisoners failed, the witnesses said, a number of people were released before some were killed and others were taken to Houla.

Responding to critics of his reporting on Twitter, Mr. Thomson said that his crew was not escorted by the government and stressed that none of the people he spoke with knew that the others had been interviewed. He added that all of what they said was “corroborated by more than 10 other off-camera interviews.”

He also noted that it was hard to understand, if there had been a massacre in Aqrab, why there was “not a scrap of video to back their story” on the rebel YouTube channels. “Invariably when there’s a massacre, the rebels put the bodies out on YouTube and make a song and dance about it. If the government really did massacre up to 250 people from President Assad’s own Alawite sect, YouTube would be 10 feet deep in rebel videos, of the bodies, of the funerals, of the carnage.”

As Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch told The Los Angeles Times, “”There are various narratives there, and we don’t have enough to have a conclusion yet.” He observed on Twitter that only an independent investigation could clear away the mystery, but that seems unlikely to happen while fighting is still going on in the area.

While the exact nature of the violence in Aqrab remains unclear, Hassan Hassan observed in a commentary for The National, it is striking that about 3,000 Alawites are said to remain in the village with 10,000 Sunnis, given the fierce sectarian warfare all around them. “Alawites are often portrayed as invariably sticking with the regime for survival,” Mr. Hassan wrote. “This is not accurate. Many Alawites are caught in the middle, just as are so many others in Syrian society. Twenty-one months into the violence, Alawites were still living alongside Sunnis in Aqrab — something worth considering.”

Not far from the village in northern Syria, Al Jazeera reported this week that several hundred residents of an Alawite village in northern Syria’s Idlib Province were forced to flee when a rebel brigade called Jubhat al-Nusra, which calls itself a Qaeda affiliate and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, took control.

An Al Jazeera video report on Islamist fighters taking control of a village in northern Syria this week.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donating $500 million in stock to Silicon Valley charity

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SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday he is donating nearly $ 500 million in stock to a Silicon Valley charity with the aim of funding health and education issues.


Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares, valued at $ 498.8 million based on their Tuesday closing price. The beneficiary is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a non-profit that works with donors to allocate their gifts.






This is Zuckerberg’s largest donation to date. He pledged $ 100 million in Facebook stock to Newark, New Jersey, public schools in 2010, before his company went public earlier this year. Later in 2010, he joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Warren Buffett to get the country’s richest people to donate most of their wealth. His wife, Priscilla Chan, joined with him.


In a Facebook post Tuesday, Zuckerberg, 28, said he’s “proud of the work” done by the foundation that his Newark donation launched, called Startup: Education, which has helped open charter schools, high schools and others.


With the latest contribution, he added, “we will look for areas in education and health to focus on next.” He did not give further details on what plans there may be for funds.


“Mark’s generous gift will change lives and inspire others in Silicon Valley and around the globe to give back and make the world a better place,” said Emmett D. Carson, CEO of the foundation.


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Gossip Girl's Identity Revealed in Series Finale!

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TV News






By Aaron Parsley





12/18/2012 at 09:20 AM EST



Did you figure it out?

The series finale of Gossip Girl, which aired Monday on the CW, had it all: two weddings (Blair marries Chuck; Serena marries Dan), two stunning wedding gowns (powder blue, beaded Elie Saab Couture on B, and a gold and white strapless Georges Chakra Couture on S), cameo appearances by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Rachel Bilson and Kristen Bell (as themselves, reading the roles of Blair and Serena from a script written by Dan), the return of Jenny Humphrey (briefly!) and the reveal of Gossip Girl's identity. And it's not Dorota.

The person behind the mysterious blog that has kept tabs on the Upper East Side's elite was not a girl at all – it was Brooklyn's very own Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley).

Dropping Bell's trademark voice, the real Gossip Girl explained in a typical, if more masculine, voiceover:

"The Upper East Side was like something from Fitzgerald or Thackeray – teenagers acting like adults, adults acting like teenagers, guarding secrets, spreading gossip all with the trappings of truly opulent wealth. And membership into this community was so elite you couldn't even buy your way in. It was a birthright – a birthright that I didn't have. And my greatest achievements would never earn it.

"All I had to compare it to was what I read in books. But that gave me the idea: I wasn't born into this world ... maybe I could write myself into it. I overheard enough conversations to mimic the voice of the Constance girls, but every writer needs his muse and it wasn't until that photo of Serena in the white dress that I knew I had something strong enough to actually create a legend and launch a website.

"Within weeks I was getting dozens of emails with stories about Upper East Siders, so I posted them anonymously. And then I got more. Before long it was a monster. Everyone was sending tips ... When Serena came back from boarding school, I wrote my first post about me, Lonely Boy, the outsider, the underdog. I might have been a joke but at least people were talking about me."

How did the others react? With shock and disbelief. Dorota asked for vodka.

"Gossip Girl ruined our lives," Blair (Leighton Meester) said. "He schemed and lied and spread horrible stories."

But Serena (Blake Lively) found acceptance: "What he did was ... write a love letter," she said. "And not just to me, to all of us. It made me realize that I don't want to run away, that you guys are my family. I belong here. And so does Dan."

"I guess that means it's all over now," Blair said. "That we can all grow up and move on."

"Yeah," added Dan, "Gossip Girl's dead."

Xo, xo!

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Experts: No link between Asperger's, violence

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NEW YORK (AP) — While an official has said that the 20-year-old gunman in the Connecticut school shooting had Asperger's syndrome, experts say there is no connection between the disorder and violence.


Asperger's is a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.


"There really is no clear association between Asperger's and violent behavior," said psychologist Elizabeth Laugeson, an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Little is known about Adam Lanza, identified by police as the shooter in the Friday massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school. He fatally shot his mother before going to the school and killing 20 young children, six adults and himself, authorities said.


A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation, said Lanza had been diagnosed with Asperger's.


High school classmates and others have described him as bright but painfully shy, anxious and a loner. Those kinds of symptoms are consistent with Asperger's, said psychologist Eric Butter of Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who treats autism, including Asperger's, but has no knowledge of Lanza's case.


Research suggests people with autism do have a higher rate of aggressive behavior — outbursts, shoving or pushing or angry shouting — than the general population, he said.


"But we are not talking about the kind of planned and intentional type of violence we have seen at Newtown," he said in an email.


"These types of tragedies have occurred at the hands of individuals with many different types of personalities and psychological profiles," he added.


Autism is a developmental disorder that can range from mild to severe. Asperger's generally is thought of as a mild form. Both autism and Asperger's can be characterized by poor social skills, repetitive behavior or interests and problems communicating. Unlike classic autism, Asperger's does not typically involve delays in mental development or speech.


Experts say those with autism and related disorders are sometimes diagnosed with other mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder.


"I think it's far more likely that what happened may have more to do with some other kind of mental health condition like depression or anxiety rather than Asperger's," Laugeson said.


She said those with Asperger's tend to focus on rules and be very law-abiding.


"There's something more to this," she said. "We just don't know what that is yet."


After much debate, the term Asperger's is being dropped from the diagnostic manual used by the nation's psychiatrists. In changes approved earlier this month, Asperger's will be incorporated under the umbrella term "autism spectrum disorder" for all the ranges of autism.


__


AP Writer Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.


___


Online:


Asperger's information: http://1.usa.gov/3tGSp5


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