Murder Charges Are Filed Against 5 Men in New Delhi Gang Rape

Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Indian lawyers protested on Thursday outside a court in New Delhi where charges were filed in a gang rape case.

NEW DELHI — Rape, murder and other charges were filed on Thursday against five men suspected of carrying out the gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student who later died of her injuries in a case that has prompted outrage and protests across India.

A court official announced that beyond rape and murder, the charges include destruction of evidence and the attempted murder of the woman’s companion, a list of crimes that could result in the rare imposition of the death penalty. A court official said the charges would be made public on Saturday. A sixth suspect is a juvenile and will have his case handled separately for now.

The case against the five men will be referred almost immediately to a new fast-track court set up in recent days to handle cases involving crimes against women, officials said. That court is expected to hold a trial soon in stark contrast to the apathy and years of delay that Indian rape victims often face when seeking justice.

The five are accused of luring the woman and her boyfriend onto a bus in South Delhi, beating them and abusing her so brutally with a metal rod during the rape that she sustained fatal internal injuries. The woman clung to life for two weeks but died on Saturday in a Singapore hospital, where she had been transferred for special care.

Gang rapes have become almost routine in India, a country that some surveys suggest has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. Rape complaints increased 25 percent between 2006 and 2011, although it is impossible to know whether this represents a real increase in crime or simply an increased willingness by victims to file charges and by the police to accept them.

But something about the recent crime caught the public’s attention. Among the reasons could be the randomness of the crime (most rape victims know their abusers), its brutality and the sympathetic profile of the victim.

The outpouring of anger at the crime caught the government by surprise, and there has been widespread criticism of its aggressive response to protesters, which included tear gas, water cannons and beatings by truncheon-wielding riot police officers. The government invoked a terrorism law that prohibits even small gatherings and it closed a huge portion of the capital to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which represented a punishing loss to businesses in the area.

The government’s reaction fed longtime criticism that India’s police are too often used to guard the powerful from the people rather than to protect the people from predators. India’s police are generally poorly trained, deeply corrupt and often viewed by women as predators rather than protectors — one reason that laws forbid officers from arresting a woman or even bringing her to a police station for questioning during nighttime hours.

The case has also led to a continuing discussion about the conflict between the aspirations of India’s rising middle class and a deeply conservative and patriarchal culture that views the recent educational and economic successes of Indian women with unease and even alarm. An estimated 25,000 women are murdered each year by families who view their choice of mate as inappropriate, and Indian newspapers and television news programs now feature almost daily stories about new rape cases.

Kishwar Desai, an author, wrote an opinion article in The Indian Express on Thursday that said the gang rape illustrated to some that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the work force. The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.”

Because of the intense interest prompted by the case, a vast scrum of TV cameras and reporters jostled inside and outside of the courthouse for much of Thursday. And with officials refusing to provide routine information about whether the suspects would arrive at the courthouse, rumors about the day’s events ricocheted around the media scrum like a drop of water on a hot frying pan.

Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 3, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article erroneously reported that the charges had been filed earlier on Thursday.

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Fake John le Carré Twitter Account Fakes J.K. Rowling’s Fake Twitter Death

We’ve seen “Cormac McCarthy” Tweet apocalyptic non sequiturs. “Philip Roth” promised us a bite-sized short story. Now a fake Twitter account for British spy novelist John le Carré is spreading bizarre death rumors about J.K. Rowling. After a few days of Tweeting harmless missives, the week-old handle @JLecarre dropped this would-be bombshell on its nearly 2,500 followers Wednesday morning: 

A terrible news. My publisher phones me announcing that J.K. Rowling dies by accident. Few minutes ago. No words!

— John le Carré (@JLecarre) January 2, 2013

OK, there are at least three dead-giveaways that this is a fake account. One: If J.K. Rowling had died, does anyone credibly think John le Carré would be the one breaking the news? Rowling and le Carré don’t even share a publisher—he’s with Penguin and she’s printed by Little, Brown and Company—making this story even more implausible. Two: As noted by le Carré’s literary agent Jonny Geller, the “L” in the author’s name shouldn’t be capitalized, as it is in the handle of this hoax account. Three: Phrases like “a terrible news” and “my publisher phones me” sound more like snippets from an ESL workbook than lines from an author praised for his chilly, controlled prose style. This could again be the work of Italian media troll Tommaso De Benedetti, who copped to creating a fake Philip Roth account recently. “Twitter works well for deaths,” he told The Guardian‘s Tom Kington, describing his M.O. for spreading misinformation about the deaths of public figures like Fidel Castro and Pedro Almodóvar. 

RELATED: Pippa’s Sales Figures Are Nothing to ‘Celebrate’; Salman Rushdie and John le Carré Call Truce

Too bad John le Carrè isn’t actually on Twitter, though. Imagine the flame wars he would get into with longtime adversary Salman Rushdie—who most certainly is on Twitter, and loves using it to throw literate shade. And too bad this isn’t the handiwork of someone with more imagination—someone like the unpublished Scottish novelist behind @cormaccmccarthy. Outed right here on The Atlantic Wire, Michael Crossan at least had the chops to fool Margaret Atwood and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey with dead-on spoofs of McCarthy’s writing: 

RELATED: Salman Rushdie’s Video Speech Gets Spiked; The World’s Priciest Books

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Harley Pasternak Blogs: How to Keep Your Resolution ... and Lose Weight!

Celebrity Blog

By Harley Pasternak

01/02/2013 at 10:00 AM EST

Harley Pasternak

Courtesy Harley Pasternak

As the holiday season draws to a close and we celebrate the New Year, another season begins: the season of weight loss commercials and health club promotions.

From Sensa to Alli, and Jenny Craig to Nutrisystem, we get bombarded with ads trumpeting it's "new year, new you" and "get skinny in 2013." With the staggering reality that most Americans are overweight, it should come as no surprise that the most common New Year's resolution for Americans is to lose weight. However, studies show that 60% of new gym memberships never get used, and 20% of people give up on their resolutions after only a month. So what can we do to help ourselves stay on track? How can we resolve to keep our resolutions?

1. Believe In Yourself
This one is a biggie for me. If you start out on your mission expecting to fail, you will. Give yourself some credit and tell yourself, "I can do this. I will do this." I believe in you if you can believe in you!

2. Create a Routine
You're more likely to be successful if you plan ahead and set specific goals for yourself. At the start of every week, look at your schedule and carve out 25 minutes a day, five days a week, and dedicate that time to a resistance routine. That way, you're not thrown off of your plan by anything (work, family, traffic) life throws at you. Planning ahead goes for your diet, too. Pick a shopping day(s) each week and set an alarm on your phone to stay consistent with meal and snack times.

3. Enlist the Help of Friends and Technology
Friends are a great motivator! They can encourage you to stick to your plan and can offer support and even some healthy competition. Research even shows that weight loss is contagious! If your friends are losing weight, you're far more likely to do the same.

In this day and age, your best friend may be technology. There are tons of awesome apps, tech tools and exergames that can help you stick to your goals, motivate you and track your progress.

4. Do Away with Obstacles and Excuses
The less convenient it is to exercise and eat right, the less likely you are to be successful. If you join a gym 30 minutes from your home, let's be realistic – you're probably not going to go. Don't let that be an excuse; keep moving from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep! Walk around the block a couple of times when you wake up, during lunch, coffee breaks and after dinner. If you don't have healthy food options stocked in your kitchen, then it's easier to just say it's more convenient to order a pizza. Instead, plan ahead and make sure you have healthful ingredients around. As far as cooking – all you need is five minutes. Check out my books like The 5 Factor Diet for a ton of five-minute recipes. If you're really time-crunched, try making a healthy smoothie with fresh ingredients. It only takes a minute to throw some ingredients in to a blender.

5. Focus on the Process
This is my number one tip for my clients – celebs and stay-at-home-moms alike. Ever since we were kids we've been hard-wired to be goal-oriented. While it's great to have end goals, they can actually hurt our progress if they feel too out of reach or if we judge our success on the outcome of one goal. If you focus on the processes, methods and techniques you use working toward the goal, studies show you'll be more successful. Celebrate how hard you're working and how dedicated you're being, rather than how close you've come to an end goal. This technique is a great self-motivator.

What are your New Year's resolutions? Tweet me @harleypasternak – and let me know.

Check back every Wednesday for more insider tips from celebrity trainer Harley Pasternak on Hollywood's hottest bodies – and learn how to get one yourself! Plus: follow Harley on Twitter at @harleypasternak

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Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."

___

Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

___

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

Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

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Wall Street jumps at open on fiscal deal

During an oddly jokey statement at the White House as the fiscal deadline bore down Monday afternoon, President Obama said, "I'm going to be president for the next four years. I hope." He was warning Republicans that, yes, they'd have to deal with him for a while. But it was, to be sure, a strange moment. Could he actually have been joking about assassination? About impeachment? The apocalypse? Or has everyone just had enough of these negotiations? 

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U.S. War in Afghanistan Has Echoes of Soviet Experience

WASHINGTON — The young president who ascended to office as a change agent decides to end the costly and unpopular war in Afghanistan. He seeks an exit with honor by pledging long-term financial support to allies in Kabul, while urging reconciliation with the insurgency. But some senior advisers lobby for a deliberately slow withdrawal, and propose leaving thousands of troops behind to train and support Afghan security forces.

This is a nearly exact description of the endgame conundrum facing President Obama as he prepares for a critical visit by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, planned for early January.

But the account is actually drawn from declassified Soviet archives describing Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s closed-door struggles with his Politburo and army chiefs to end the Kremlin’s intervention in Afghanistan — one that began with a commando raid, coup and modest goals during Christmas week of 1979 but became, after a decade, what Mr. Gorbachev derided as “a bleeding wound.”

What mostly is remembered about the withdrawal is the Soviet Union’s humiliation, and the ensuing factional bloodletting across Afghanistan that threw the country into a vicious civil war. It ended with Taliban control and the establishment of a safe haven for Al Qaeda before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

But scholars who have studied the Soviet archives point out another lesson for the Obama administration as it manages the pullout of American and allied combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

“The main thing the Soviets did right was that they continued large-scale military assistance to the regime they left behind after the final withdrawal in ’89,” said Mark N. Katz, a professor at George Mason University and author of “Leaving Without Losing: The War on Terror After Iraq and Afghanistan” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

“As long as the Afghan regime received the money and the weapons, they did pretty well — and held on to power for three years,” Mr. Katz said. The combat effectiveness of Kabul’s security forces increased after the Soviet withdrawal, when the fight for survival become wholly their own.

But then the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and the new Russian leader, Boris N. Yeltsin, heeded urgings of the United States and other Western powers to halt aid to the Communist leadership in Afghanistan, not just arms and money, but also food and fuel. The Kremlin-backed government in Kabul fell three months later.

To be sure, there are significant contrasts between the two interventions in Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion and occupation were condemned as illegal aggression, while the American one was embraced by the international community, including Russia, as a “just war,” one with limited goals of routing the Taliban and eliminating Al Qaeda. That war of necessity has since evolved into a war of choice, one the Obama administration is working to end as quickly as is feasible.

Despite the differences going in, both the Soviet Union and the United States soon learned that Afghanistan is a land where foreigners aspiring to create nations in their image must combat not just the Taliban but tribalism, orthodoxy, corruption and a medieval view of women. As well, Pakistan has had interests at odds with those of the neighboring government in Afghanistan, whether Kabul was an ally of Moscow or of Washington.

“The Soviet Union did not understand religious and ethnic factors sufficiently, and overestimated the capacity of Afghan society to move very fast toward a modern era, in this case socialism,” said Svetlana Savranskaya, director of Russian programs at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University.

“Here I see similarities with the approach of the United States, especially with all the discussion about trying to leave behind an Afghanistan that is democratic and respects the rights of women, ideas that simply are not accepted across the broad society there,” said Ms. Savranskaya, who has written extensively on the Soviet archives.

If the Soviet experience offers any guidance to the current American withdrawal, she said, it would be to accelerate the departure of foreign combat forces — but to leave in their place a “sustained, multiyear international involvement in military training, education and civilian infrastructure projects, and maybe not focusing on building democracy as much as improving the lives of the common people.”

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Your Snapchats aren’t safe: How to secretly save videos from Snapchat or Facebook’s ‘Poke’

Argue though its executives might, Snapchat is good for two things: sending photos and videos of yourself making stupid faces, and sending photos and videos of yourself naked. The latter, of course, is the more compelling function since that is exactly what the app was designed for. When users send pictures or videos, the recipient can only view them for a set amount of time before they “self-destruct.” Yes, a recipient can take a screenshot but the sender is automatically alerted when that occurs — then, as the saying goes, fool me once… As it turns out, however, Snapchat users (and users of “Poke,” Facebook’s (FB) Snapchat ripoff) can easily save photos and full-length videos received through the service without the sender ever knowing.

[More from BGR: Five tech resolutions for 2013]

As recently relayed by BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos, saving photos and videos from Snapchat or Poke is as easy as connecting a phone to a computer and opening a file browser. The file browser is free and the “trick” requires no jailbreak or any other kind of hack.

[More from BGR: Can Samsung survive without Android?]

Start by leaving the photos and videos you receive in Snapchat or Poke unopened; as soon as a file is viewed, the countdown to its deletion begins.

Then simply connect to a computer and open a free iPhone file explorer like i-FunBox. Open the “User Applications” folder, navigate to the “Snapchat” entry and voilà, all of the photos and videos you have received and not yet opened are available to be copied to your computer’s hard drive.

Then go back and view them normally in the app and the sender will be none the wiser.

The file path is a bit different for Facebook’s Poke app but the end result is the same.

This article was originally published by BGR

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Eric Prydz Picks a New Year's Eve Playlist

By Dahvi Shira

12/31/2012 at 06:50 PM EST

Unfortunately not everyone can be in Las Vegas when the ball drops this year, but Eric Prydz is bringing the party to PEOPLE.com readers in advance.

The DJ and producer, 36 – best known for his 2004 hit single, "Call on Me" – is playing a three-hour extended set at Surrender Nightclub on Monday, and he's sharing the tracks he's most excited to spin, including songs from his album, Eric Prydz Presents Pryda.

"I love to play on New Year's Eve because it has that special tension in the air," Prydz says. "People are so excited about the new year coming, leaving the old behind and starting fresh. It's also the perfect excuse to blow off some steam after that long Christmas with family. Let's make New Year's Eve 2013 one to remember!"

Recently scoring a Grammy nomination for his remix of M83's "Midnight City," Prydz, who is relocating to Los Angeles, already predicts 2013 "is going to be an amazing year."

As for his evening playlist, he plans to "blend a lot of the highlights from the past year with classics and brand new music set to blow up in 2013."

Check out part of his planned set below:

• Jeremy Olander – "Let Me Feel"
"This tune has spring/summer of 2013 written all over it. It's such a feel good track!"
Listen here

• Fehrplay – "I Can't Stop It"
"Fehrplay had a great year in 2012 and is set to blow up in 2013. This is his forthcoming single on my Pryda Friends imprint. The first time I heard this record, it took me somewhere really nice."
Listen here

• Rone – "Parade (Dominik Eulberg Remix)"
"Every now and then there is a track that comes along and blows your mind. This is one of those tracks. Nine minutes of pure emotion."
Listen here

• Eric Prydz – "Every Day"
"This one has been huge for me this summer and fall. Enough said."
Listen here

• Pachanga Boys – "Time"
"This was the soundtrack of my summer 2012. And I'm sure I'm not alone on that one."
Listen here

• Para One – "When the Night (Breakbot Remix)"
"I've been a fan of Para One's music for many years and this one is no exception. This song has a great retro vibe with a modern touch from Breakbot on this remix."
Listen here

• Pig & Dan – "Savage"
"This is a real club stomper. I can't wait to play this one out."
Listen here

• Pryda – "The End"
"I had to throw this one in. It's one of the biggest releases on Pryda to date."
Listen here

• Green Velvet & Harvard Bass – "Lazer Beams"
"Hit me with those laser beams!"
Listen here.

• Deetron feat. Hercules & Love Affair – "Crave (Deetron cRAVE Dub)"
"This song is a dark, big room destroyer."
Listen here

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Clinton receiving blood thinners to dissolve clot

WASHINGTON (AP) — Doctors treating Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for a blood clot in her head said blood thinners are being used to dissolve the clot and they are confident she will make a full recovery.

Clinton didn't suffer a stroke or neurological damage from the clot that formed after she suffered a concussion during a fainting spell at her home in early December, doctors said in a statement Monday.

Clinton, 65, was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday when the clot turned up on a follow-up exam on the concussion, Clinton spokesman Phillipe Reines said.

The clot is located in the vein in the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear. She will be released once the medication dose for the blood thinners has been established, the doctors said.

In their statement, Dr. Lisa Bardack of the Mount Kisco Medical Group and Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi of George Washington University said Clinton was making excellent progress and was in good spirits.

Clinton's complication "certainly isn't the most common thing to happen after a concussion" and is one of the few types of blood clots in the skull or head that are treated with blood thinners, said Dr. Larry Goldstein, a neurologist who is director of Duke University's stroke center. He is not involved in Clinton's care.

The area where Clinton's clot developed is "a drainage channel, the equivalent of a big vein inside the skull. It's how the blood gets back to the heart," Goldstein said.

Blood thinners usually are enough to treat the clot and it should have no long-term consequences if her doctors are saying she has suffered no neurological damage from it, Goldstein said.

Clinton returned to the U.S. from a trip to Europe, then fell ill with a stomach virus in early December that left her severely dehydrated and forced her to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East. Until then, she had canceled only two scheduled overseas trips, one to Europe after breaking her elbow in June 2009 and one to Asia after the February 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Her condition worsened when she fainted, fell and suffered a concussion while at home alone in mid-December as she recovered from the virus. It was announced Dec. 13.

This isn't the first time Clinton has suffered a blood clot. In 1998, midway through her husband's second term as president, Clinton was in New York fundraising for the midterm elections when a swollen right foot led her doctor to diagnose a clot in her knee requiring immediate treatment.

Clinton had planned to step down as secretary of state at the beginning of President Barack Obama's second term. Whether she will return to work before she resigns remained a question.

Democrats are privately if not publicly speculating: How might her illness affect a decision about running for president in 2016?

After decades in politics, Clinton says she plans to spend the next year resting. She has long insisted she had no intention of mounting a second campaign for the White House four years from now. But the door is not entirely closed, and she would almost certainly emerge as the Democrat to beat if she decided to give in to calls by Democratic fans and run again.

Her age — and thereby health — would probably be a factor under consideration, given that Clinton would be 69 when sworn in, if she were elected in 2016. That might become even more of an issue in the early jockeying for 2016 if what started as a bad stomach bug becomes a prolonged, public bout with more serious infirmity.

Not that Democrats are willing to talk openly about the political implications of a long illness, choosing to keep any discussions about her condition behind closed doors. Publicly, Democrats reject the notion that a blood clot could hinder her political prospects.

"Some of those concerns could be borderline sexist," said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who worked for Clinton when she was a senator. "Dick Cheney had significant heart problems when he was vice president, and people joked about it. He took the time he needed to get better, and it wasn't a problem."

It isn't uncommon for presidential candidates' health — and age — to be an issue. Both in 2000 and 2008, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had to rebut concerns he was too old to be commander in chief or that his skin cancer could resurface.

Two decades after Clinton became the first lady, signs of her popularity — and her political strength — are ubiquitous.

Obama had barely declared victory in November when Democrats started zealously plugging Clinton as their strongest White House contender four years from now, should she choose to take that leap.

"Wouldn't that be exciting?" House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared in December. "I hope she goes. Why wouldn't she?"

Even Republicans concede that were she to run, Clinton would be a force to be reckoned with.

"Trying to win that will be truly the Super Bowl," Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and 2012 GOP presidential candidate, said in December. "The Republican Party today is incapable of competing at that level."

Americans admire Clinton more than any other woman in the world, according to a Gallup poll released Monday — the 17th time in 20 years that Clinton has claimed that title. And a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 57 percent of Americans would support Clinton as a candidate for president in 2016, with just 37 percent opposed. Websites have already cropped up hawking "Clinton 2016" mugs and tote bags.

Beyond talk of future politics, Clinton's three-week absence from the State Department has raised eyebrows among some conservative commentators who questioned the seriousness of her ailment after she canceled planned Dec. 20 testimony before Congress on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton had been due to discuss with lawmakers a scathing report she had commissioned on the attack. It found serious failures of leadership and management in two State Department bureaus were to blame for insufficient security at the facility. Clinton took responsibility for the incident before the report was released, but she was not blamed. Four officials cited in the report have either resigned or been reassigned.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Thomas in Washington and AP Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

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Senate approves "fiscal cliff" deal, crisis eased

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate moved the U.S. economy back from the edge of a "fiscal cliff" on Tuesday, voting to avoid imminent tax hikes and spending cuts in a bipartisan deal that could still face stiff challenges in the House of Representatives.

In a rare New Year's session at around 2 a.m. EST (0700 GMT), senators voted 89-8 to raise some taxes on the wealthy while making permanent low tax rates on the middle class that have been in place for a decade.

But the measure did little to rein in huge annual budget deficits that have helped push the U.S. debt to $16.4 trillion.

The agreement came too late for Congress to meet its own deadline of New Year's Eve for passing laws to halt $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts which strictly speaking came into force on Tuesday.

But with the New Year's Day holiday, there was no real world impact and Congress still had time to draw up legislation, approve it and backdate it to avoid the harsh fiscal measures.

That will need the backing of the House where many of the Republicans who control the chamber complain that President Barack Obama has shown little interest in cutting government spending and is too concerned with raising taxes.

All eyes are now on the House which is to hold a session on Tuesday starting at noon (1700 GMT).

Obama called for the House to act quickly and follow the Senate's lead.

"While neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, this agreement is the right thing to do for our country and the House should pass it without delay," he said in a statement.

"There's more work to do to reduce our deficits, and I'm willing to do it. But tonight's agreement ensures that, going forward, we will continue to reduce the deficit through a combination of new spending cuts and new revenues from the wealthiest Americans," Obama said.

Members were thankful that financial markets were closed, giving them a second chance to return to try to head off the fiscal cliff.

But if lawmakers cannot pass legislation in the coming days, markets are likely to turn sour. The U.S. economy, still recovering from the 2008/2009 downturn, could stall again if Congress fails to fix the budget mess.

"If we do nothing, the threat of a recession is very real. Passing this agreement does not mean negotiations halt, far from it. We can all agree there is more work to be done," Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, told the Senate floor.

A new, informal deadline for Congress to legislate is now Wednesday when the current body expires and it is replaced by a new Congress chosen at last November's election.

The Senate bill, worked out after long negotiations on New Year's Eve between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also postpones for two months a $109 billion "sequester" of sweeping spending cuts on military and domestic programs.

It extends unemployment insurance to 2 million people for a year and makes permanent the alternative minimum tax "patch" that was set to expire, protecting middle-income Americans from being taxed as if they were rich.

'IMPERFECT SOLUTION'

The tax hikes do not sit easy with Republicans but conservative senators held their noses and voted to raise rates for the rich because not to do so would have meant increases for almost all working Americans.

"It took an imperfect solution to prevent our constituents from a very real financial pain, but in my view, it was worth the effort," McConnell said.

House Speaker John Boehner - the top Republican in Congress - said the House would consider the Senate deal. But he left open the possibility of the House amending the Senate bill, which would spark another round of legislating.

"The House will honor its commitment to consider the Senate agreement if it is passed. Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members ... have been able to review the legislation," Boehner and other House Republican leaders said in a statement.

Boehner has struggled for two years to get control over a group of several dozen Tea Party fiscal conservatives in his caucus who strongly oppose tax increases and demand that he force Obama to make savings in the Medicare and Social Security healthcare and retirement programs.

A campaign-style event held by Obama in the White House as negotiations with Senate leaders were taking place on Monday may have made it more difficult for Republicans to back the deal. In remarks to a group of supporters that resembled a victory lap, the president noted that his rivals were coming around to his way of seeing things.

"Keep in mind that just last month Republicans in Congress said they would never agree to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Obviously, the agreement that's currently being discussed would raise those rates and raise them permanently," he said to applause before the Senate deal was sealed.

Obama's words and tone annoyed Republican lawmakers who seemed to feel that the Democrat was gloating.

"That's not the way presidents should lead," said Republican Senator John McCain, Obama's rival in the 2008 election.

A deal with the House on Tuesday, while uncertain, would not mark the end of congressional budget fights. The "sequester" spending cuts will come up again in February as will the contentious "debt ceiling," which caps how much debt the federal government can hold.

Republicans may see those two issues as their best chance to try to rein in government spending and clip Obama's wings at the start of his second term.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan, Mark Felsenthal, Rachelle Younglai, Kim Dixon and Jeff Mason; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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