Madonna fan guilty in NYC resisting arrest trial

NEW YORK (AP) — A former firefighter with a crush on Madonna has been convicted of resisting arrest outside her former New York City apartment building as he spray-painted poster boards with love notes.

A jury delivered its verdict Friday in Robert Linhart's trial. He could face up to a year in jail.

Defense lawyer Lawrence LaBrew tells the New York Post (http://bit.ly/ZgI4jl) that Linhart will appeal.

Linhart was arrested in September 2010. Police say he parked his SUV outside the singer's Manhattan apartment, laid out a tarp and wrote out such messages as "Madonna, I need you."

Jurors told the Post they felt it was fine for Linhart to express himself to the Material Girl. But they said they believed police testimony that he resisted arrest by flailing his arms.

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Malaria vaccine a letdown for infants

LONDON (AP) — An experimental malaria vaccine once thought promising is turning out to be a disappointment, with a new study showing it is only about 30 percent effective at protecting infants from the killer disease.

That is a significant drop from a study last year done in slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — though that is still far below the protection provided from most vaccines. According to details released on Friday, the three-shot regimen reduced malaria cases by about 30 percent in infants aged 6 to 12 weeks, the target age for immunization.

Dr. Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders, described the vaccine's protection levels as "unacceptably low." She was not linked to the study.

Scientists have been working for decades to develop a malaria vaccine, a complicated endeavor since the disease is caused by five different species of parasites. There has never been an effective vaccine against a parasite. Worldwide, there are several dozen malaria vaccine candidates being researched.

In 2006, a group of experts led by the World Health Organization said a malaria vaccine should cut the risk of severe disease and death by at least half and should last longer than one year. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and kills more than 650,000 people every year, mostly young children and pregnant women in Africa. Without a vaccine, officials have focused on distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, spraying homes with pesticides and ensuring access to good medicines.

In the new study, scientists found babies who got three doses of the vaccine had about 30 percent fewer cases of malaria than those who didn't get immunized. The research included more than 6,500 infants in Africa. Experts also found the vaccine reduced the amount of severe malaria by about 26 percent, up to 14 months after the babies were immunized.

Scientists said they needed to analyze the data further to understand why the vaccine may be working differently in different regions. For example, babies born in areas with high levels of malaria might inherit some antibodies from their mothers which could interfere with any vaccination.

"Maybe we should be thinking of a first-generation vaccine that is targeted only for certain children," said Dr. Salim Abdulla of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, one of the study investigators.

Results were presented at a conference in South Africa on Friday and released online by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study is scheduled to continue until 2014 and is being paid for by GlaxoSmithKline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

"The results look bad now, but they will probably be worse later," said Adrian Hill of Oxford University, who is developing a competing malaria vaccine. He noted the study showed the Glaxo vaccine lost its potency after several months. Hill said the vaccine might be a hard sell, compared to other vaccines like those for meningitis and pneumococcal disease — which are both effective and cheap.

"If it turns out to have a clear 30 percent efficacy, it is probably not worth it to implement this in Africa on a large scale," said Genton Blaise, a malaria expert at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, who also sits on a WHO advisory board.

Eleanor Riley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the vaccine might be useful if used together with other strategies, like bed nets. She was involved in an earlier study of the vaccine and had hoped for better results. "We're all a bit frustrated that it has proven so hard to make a malaria vaccine," she said. "The question is how much money are the funders willing to keep throwing at it."

Glaxo first developed the vaccine in 1987 and has invested $300 million in it so far.

WHO said it couldn't comment on the incomplete results and would wait until the trial was finished before drawing any conclusions.

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Was Petraeus affair linked to lax Libya response?

CIA Director David Petraeus abruptly resigned Friday, citing an extramarital affair and the need to sort out the “personal and professional issues” involved.

The former commander of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had built a stellar and nearly unassailable reputation – but mounting criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency’s response to the Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attack in September was beginning to tarnish that reputation.

Word of Mr. Petraeus’s resignation sent ripples of stunned surprise through both the intelligence and military communities, raising questions that revolved around how long the affair had been going on and how an officer known for his rigorous self-discipline – and attention to his reputation within the media — could have made such a lapse in judgment.

RECOMMENDED: 5 ways events overseas could shape Obama's second term

In a letter of resignation accepted by the White House, Petraeus said he had been married 37 years but had exercised “very poor judgment” in choosing to enter into an extramarital affair.

Petraeus, who was widely celebrated as a military commander and even occasionally mentioned as a potential presidential candidate, was sworn in as head of the CIA in September 2011 – and had kept a low profile since. Now speculation is sure to proliferate over whether that low profile resulted from Petraeus focusing on America’s intelligence gathering or on personal matters.

In particular, members of Congress and other officials demanding answers about the Benghazi attack on the US consulate that resulted in the deaths of four Americans – including the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stephens, and two CIA agents – will want to know if there was any link between Petraeus’s extramarital activities and what has been increasingly criticized as the CIA’s weak performance on the night of the Benghazi attack.

More broadly, the reason for Petraeus’s departure will raise questions about any compromising of US covert operations and intelligence. The potential for blackmail of intelligence officers is always a concern about the spy corps, but the involvement of the nation’s top spy in an extramarital affair takes the concern to a new level.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been probing Petraeus and the potential security risks posed by his affair, CNN reported late Friday afternoon.

In the weeks since the Benghazi attack, officials have leaked information, including how Petraeus kept information on the CIA’s role in Benghazi so private that even Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was left to call Petraeus as the attack unfolded to try to get intelligence information from him.

Last week, CIA officials revealed that in fact, the intelligence agency’s operations in Benghazi dwarfed diplomatic operations at the consulate and that the CIA maintained what was described as an “annex,” about a mile from the diplomatic mission.

State Department officials have said there was an informal understanding that the annex and its agents would come to the assistance of the consulate (which had private contractors providing security) if a need arose. CIA officials insist their agents responded to the consulate’s distress calls within a half-hour.

In a statement released Friday afternoon, President Obama praised Petraeus for his “extraordinary service” to the country, adding, “By any measure, through his lifetime of service, David Petraeus has made our country safer and stronger.”

In a statement, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona highlighted Petraeus’s role in Iraq, saying that his “inspirational leadership and his genius were directly responsible – after years of failure – for the success of the surge in Iraq.”

But Petraeus’s success in Iraq and Afghanistan was a result to a certain extent of his focus on a counterinsurgency strategy that involved large numbers of troops fighting the enemy by incorporating nation-building into the battle. When Mr. Obama named Petraeus to head the CIA, it was widely interpreted as the president’s signal that he intended to wind down America’s wars and shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to counterterrorism.

Obama did not cite Petraeus’s reason for resigning but did say, “Going forward, my thoughts and prayers are with Dave and Holly Petraeus, who has done so much to help military families through her own work. I wish them the very best at this difficult time.”

Mrs. Petraeus is the assistant director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she supports veterans and troops facing difficulties as a result of the financial crisis.

Obama initially tried to convince Petraeus not to resign, according to some souces. “I am told that President Obama tried to talk Petraeus out of resigning, but Petraeus took the samurai route and insisted that he had done a dishonorable thing and now had to try to balance it by doing the honorable thing and stepping down as CIA director,” Tom Ricks reports in his blog “The Best Defense.”

Such a move is in keeping with the military culture in which Petraeus rose to the rank of four-star general.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is a punishable offense for soldiers if the conduct is shown to be detrimental “to good order and discipline in the armed forces or was of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.”

Obama said that Michael Morell, deputy director of the CIA, would take over as acting director. Mr. Morell served briefly as acting director after Leon Panetta left the agency last year to become Defense secretary.

Petraeus was set to testify Thursday at a closed-door session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Benghazi attack, but it was unclear if his resignation would alter that schedule.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California, the Intelligence Committee chair, told NBC News that Petraeus’s personal mistake should not have led to his resignation.

“I would have stood up for him,” she said. “I wanted him to continue. He was good, he loved the work, and he had a command of intelligence issues second to none.”

Obama, after winning reelection Tuesday, was already expected to make some changes in his national security team for a second term, but early speculation had been that Petraeus would stay on at the CIA. Now the job of spy chief will be added to the new-team mix.

RECOMMENDED: 5 ways events overseas could shape Obama's second term

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Exclusive: Google Ventures beefs up fund size to $300 million a year

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google will increase the cash it allocates to its venture-capital arm to up to $300 million a year from $200 million, catapulting Google Ventures into the top echelon of corporate venture-capital funds.

Access to that sizeable checkbook means Google Ventures will be able to invest in more later-stage financing rounds, which tend to be in the tens of millions of dollars or more per investor.

It puts the firm on the same footing as more established corporate venture funds such as Intel's Intel Capital, which typically invests $300-$500 million a year.

"It puts a lot more wood behind the arrow if we need it," said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures.

Part of the rationale behind the increase is that Google Ventures is a relatively young firm, founded in 2009. Some of the companies it backed two or three years ago are now at later stages, potentially requiring larger cash infusions to grow further.

Google Ventures has taken an eclectic approach, investing in a broad spectrum of companies ranging from medicine to clean power to coupon companies.

Every year, it typically funds 40-50 "seed-stage" deals where it invests $250,000 or less in a company, and perhaps around 15 deals where it invests up to $10 million, Maris said. It aims to complete one or two deals annually in the $20-$50 million range, Maris said.

LACKING SUPERSTARS

Some of its investments include Nest, a smart-thermostat company; Foundation Medicine, which applies genomic analysis to cancer care; Relay Rides, a carsharing service; and smart-grid company Silver Spring Networks. Last year, its portfolio company HomeAway raised $216 million in an initial public offering.

Still, Google Ventures lacks superstar companies such as microblogging service Twitter or online bulletin-board company Pinterest. The firm's recent hiring of high-profile entrepreneur Kevin Rose as a partner could help attract higher-profile deals.

Soon it could have even more cash to play around with. "Larry has repeatedly asked me: 'What do you think you could do with a billion a year?'" said Maris, referring to Google chief executive Larry Page.

(Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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China opens power transfer by keeping it off-stage

BEIJING (AP) — China's ruling communists opened a pivotal congress to initiate a power handover by giving a nod to their revolutionary past and broadly promising cleaner government while keeping off-stage the main event — the bargaining over seats in the new leadership.

All the main players were arrayed on the stage in the Great Hall of the People: President Hu Jintao, his successor Xi Jinping and a collection of retired party insiders. A golden hammer and sickle, the Communist Party's symbol, hung on the back wall. Yet in a nearly two-hour opening ceremony Thursday, scant mention was made of the transition or that in a week Hu will step down as party chief in favor of Xi in what would be only the second orderly transfer of power in 63 years of communist rule.

The congress is writ small the state of Chinese politics today. It's a largely ceremonial gathering of 2,200-plus delegates who meet while the real deal-making is done behind-the-scenes by the true power-holders.

The centerpiece event of the opening of the weeklong congress — a 90-minute speech by Hu — served politics, allowing him to define his legacy after a decade in office, while marshaling his clout to install his allies in the collective leadership that Xi will head.

"An important thing for him is to make sure that there's no critical, no negative summary judgment of the past 10 years," said Ding Xueliang, a Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Still, Ding said, "90 percent of the effort is on putting your people in place."

The party's public silence on a leadership transition that everyone knows is taking place and that politically minded Chinese have been discussing has deepened a palpable sense of public unease. Many Chinese feel the country is at a turning point, in need of new ideas to handle a slowing economy, growing piles of debt and rising public demands for more accountable, transparent government, if not democracy.

In signs of the public disquiet, at least five ethnic Tibetans in western China set themselves on fire Wednesday or Thursday in protests against Chinese rule of Tibetan areas, according to overseas Tibet support groups and the Tibetan government-in-exile in India.

At dawn in Tiananmen Square, next to the congress venue, a woman in her 30s threw pieces of torn paper into the air and shouted "bandits and robbers!" — a curse often leveled at corrupt local officials. She was taken away by the security forces, which have smothered all of Beijing for the congress.

In his speech, Hu cited many of the challenges China faces — a rich-poor gap, environmentally ruinous growth and imbalanced development between prosperous cities and a struggling countryside. Yet he offered little fresh thinking to address them and said restoring a relatively high growth would be the best way to deal with public expectations.

Only on tackling rampant corruption did Hu sound the alarm. He called on party members to be ethical and rein in their family members whose often showy displays of wealth have stoked public anger.

"Nobody is above the law," Hu said to the applause of the 2,309 delegates and invited guests, with Xi and other party notables on the dais behind him. He later said, "If we fail to handle this issue well, it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state."

Always an occasion for divisive bargaining, the leadership transition has been made more fraught by scandals that have fueled already high public cynicism that Chinese leaders are more concerned with power and wealth than government.

In recent months, one top leader, Bo Xilai, has been purged after his wife murdered a British businessman; a top aide to Hu was sidelined after his son crashed a Ferrari he shouldn't have been able to afford and foreign media reported that relatives of Xi and outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao had traded on their proximity to power to amass vast fortunes.

Public image aside, the scandals have especially weakened Hu, on whose watch they occurred, in the power-broking over the next leadership. In recent decades, the leadership line-ups have sought to balance different factions within the party. Who has prevailed won't be apparent until next Thursday, a day after the congress, when the members of the Politburo Standing Committee appear before the media.

On stage with Hu appeared one of his nemeses, his predecessor Jiang Zemin, who has supported Xi and is angling to fill many of the seats in the leadership with his allies. Nearby, dressed in a Mao jacket, sat 95-year-old Song Ping, a veteran of the revolution and party insider who was Hu's earliest political mentor.

Hu drew the line on political reform, a catchphrase for everything from greater transparency to democracy, even though retired party members, media commentators and government think tanks have called it an urgent need.

Hu's signature policy — a grab-bag of ideas meant to promote more balanced growth and stronger party rule that goes under the clunky phrase "the Scientific Outlook on Development" — has already been adopted in the party constitution. Hu's report to the congress called it "a powerful theoretical weapon" to guide the party.

"Even though this congress is about rejuvenation, passing the power to the young, what we see is the opposite," said Willy Lam of Chinese University of Hong Kong.

___

Associated Press writers Gillian Wong, Christopher Bodeen, Didi Tang and Louise Watt contributed to this report.

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Mark Wahlberg to star in next 'Transformers' movie

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mark Wahlberg, roll out.

"Transformers" director Michael Bay says the 41-year-old actor will star in the franchise's fourth film.

Bay called Wahlberg the "perfect guy to re-invigorate the franchise and carry on the Transformers' legacy" in a post on his blog Thursday. He previously squashed rumors that Wahlberg was joining the film franchise about warring robots.

Bay worked with Wahlberg on his upcoming film, "Pain and Gain."

"Transformers 4" is scheduled to be released by Paramount Pictures on June 27, 2014.

Bay has said the next film will take a new direction in the series. The first three movies starred Shia LaBeouf and featured Peter Cullen as the voice of Autobot general Optimus Prime.

The third "Transformers" film, "Dark of the Moon," was the second highest-grossing film of 2011.

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Calif. city plans to provide transgender surgeries

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco is preparing to become the first U.S. city to provide and cover the cost of sex reassignment surgeries for uninsured transgender residents.

The city's Health Commission voted Tuesday to create a comprehensive program for treating transgender people experiencing mental distress because of the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities. San Francisco already provides transgender residents with hormones, counseling and routine health services, but has stopped short of offering surgical interventions, Public Health Director Barbara Garcia said Thursday after the vote was announced.

The idea for a new program that included surgeries came out of conversations between public health officials and transgender rights advocates who wanted mastectomies, genital reconstructions and other surgeries that are recommended for some transgender people covered under San Francisco's 5-year-old universal health care plan.

At the urging of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center, the commission agreed this week to drop sex reassignment surgery from the list of procedures specifically excluded from the Healthy San Francisco plan.

But Garcia described the move as "a symbolic process" for now because the city currently does not have the expertise, capacity or protocols in place to provide the surgeries through its clinics and public hospital.

"The community felt the exclusion on Healthy San Francisco was discriminatory and we wanted to change that as the first step," she said.

Instead of expanding the existing plan, the Health Commission approved the establishment of a separate program that covers all aspects of transgender health, including gender transition. Garcia hopes to have it running by late next year, but said her department first needs to study how many people it would serve, how much it would cost, who would perform the surgeries and where they would be performed.

"Sex reassignment surgery is not the end all. It's one service that some transgender people want and some don't," she said. "We can probably manage this over the next three years without much of a budget increase because we already have these (other) services covered."

San Francisco in 2001 became the first city in the country to cover sex reassignment surgeries for government employees. Last year, Portland, Ore. did the same. The number of major U.S. companies covering the cost of gender reassignment surgery for transgender workers also doubled last year, reflecting a decades-long push by transgender activists to get insurance companies to treat such surgeries as medically necessary instead of elective procedures.

Kathryn Steuerman, a member of a transgender health advocacy group in San Francisco, said the city's latest move would help residents avoid going into debt to finance operations related to gender transition, as she did.

"I am filled with hope and gratitude that we are achieving this level of support for the well-being of the transgender community," Steuerman said.

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Obama breaks down while speaking to staff, volunteers

The morning after he won re-election, an emotional President Barack Obama credited his youthful staff of several hundred with running a campaign that will "go on in the annals of history."

"What you guys have accomplished will go on in the annals of history and they will read about it and they'll marvel about it," said Obama told his team Wednesday morning inside the Chicago campaign headquarters, tears streaming down his face.

"The most important thing you need to know is that your journey's just beginning. You're just starting. And whatever good we do over the next four years will pale in comparison to whatever you guys end up accomplishing in the years and years to come," he said.

The moment, captured by the Obama campaign's cameras and posted online, offers a rare glimpse at the president unplugged and emotional. During the first four years of his presidency, Obama has never been seen publicly crying.

He first came to Chicago, he told the campaign staff, "knowing that somehow I wanted to make sure that my life attached itself to helping kids get a great education or helping people living in poverty to get decent jobs and be able to work and have dignity. And to make sure that people didn't have to go to the emergency room to get health care."

"The work that I did in those communities changed me much more than I changed those communities because it taught me the hopes and aspirations and the grit and resilience of ordinary people," he said, as senior strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager Jim Messina looked on. "And it taught me the fact that under the surface differences, we all have common hopes and we all have common dreams. And it taught me something about how I handle disappointment and what it meant to work hard on a common endeavor, and I grew up."

"So when I come here and I look at all of you, what comes to mind is, it's not that you guys remind me of myself, it's the fact that you are so much better than I was in so many ways. You're smarter, you're so better organized, you're more effective," he said.

Obama said he expected many of those who helped to re-elect him will assume new roles in progressive politics, calling that prospect a "source of my strength and inspiration."

Senior campaign officials said Thursday that the Obama campaign infrastructure - the field offices and network of hundreds of thousands of volunteers - would undergo a period of transition in the coming weeks to determine how to remain sustainable and influential.

"We have remarkable staff, and the campaign that Jim [Messina] put together, you know, is the best in history," said senior Obama adviser David Plouffe. "But the reason those people got involved was because they believed in Barack Obama. It was the relationship between them and our candidate."

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Apple slides to five-month low, uncertainty grows

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China's Hu urges firm party control, curb on graft

BEIJING (AP) — Preparing to hand over power after a decade in office, China's President Hu Jintao called Thursday for sterner measures to combat official corruption that has stoked public anger while urging the Communist Party to maintain firm political control.

In a 90-minute speech opening a weeklong party congress to usher in new leaders for the coming decade, Hu cited many of the challenges China faces — a rich-poor gap, environmentally ruinous growth and the imbalanced development between prosperous cities and a struggling countryside.

Yet he offered little evidence of fresh thinking to address ways to reinvigorate a flagging economy and meet public demands for a more open government. Instead he outlined more of the piecemeal policy-making that has been the hallmark of his 10 years in power.

Only in addressing the rampant graft did he sound the alarm. Hu singled out party members, calling on them to be ethical and to rein in their family members, whose trading on their connections for money and lavish displays of wealth have deepened public cynicism about the party.

"Nobody is above the law," Hu said to the applause of the 2,309 delegates and invited guests gathered in the Great Hall of the People, with his successor, Vice President Xi Jinping, and other party notables on the dais behind him.

He later said, "If we fail to handle this issue well, it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state."

The tough appeal on corruption follows months of scandal that have further battered the party's image in the public eye and made the power transfer more divisive. A senior politician, Bo Xilai, was purged for involvement in covering up his wife's murder of a British businessman, but only after rumors, trials and media reports that portrayed party leaders as more interested in power than in governing.

The congress, held once every five years, initiates a carefully choreographed but still fraught political transition in which Hu and most of the senior leadership in the 60s begin to relinquish office to Xi and his 50-something colleagues over the next five months.

Scandal aside, the transition always invites tough bargaining, as exiting leaders and still-powerful retired party elders try to place protégés and allies in the leadership.

Stakes have seemed higher still this year for the party and the public, with China seemingly facing a turning point. The old model of heavily state-directed growth that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and made China an economic powerhouse is faltering in the face of rising domestic debt and a weak global economy. Meanwhile, the government has to contend with the public's continued expectations of higher living standards and for less corruption and greater accountability, if not outright democracy.

In a sign of the public disquiet, four ethnic Tibetans in Sichuan and Qinghai provinces set themselves on fire on the eve of the congress in protests against Chinese rule of Tibetan areas, London-based rights group Free Tibet said, adding that it was the most such self-immolations in a single day.

At dawn in Tiananmen Square, next to the congress venue, a woman in her 30s threw pieces of torn paper into the air and shouted "bandits and robbers!" — a curse often leveled at corrupt local officials. She was taken away by the security forces which have smothered all of Beijing for the congress.

Taxi drivers have even been told to remove window handles to block any drive-by sloganeering.

The congress itself often seems from a different era. Most of the delegates are drawn from the ranks of the 82 million-member party to make the event appear broadly representative while the real deal-making is done by a few dozen power-brokers behind the scenes.

After the delegates stood for the national anthem, the congress paused for a moment of silence to remember Mao Zedong and other revolutionary leaders. A golden hammer and sickle, the party's symbol, hung on the wall behind Hu. On the rostrum, dressed in a Mao jacket, sat 95-year-old Song Ping, a veteran revolutionary and party insider.

Coming so soon after President Barack Obama's re-election in the United States, the congress has drawn unfavorable comparisons from politically minded Chinese who have bemoaned how little direct influence they have in choosing their leaders.

"I am doing nothing but staring at the television before Obama gets re-elected. As for China's party congress, there is no need for me to worry. On the contrary, it would be a waste of my time," Xu Xiaoping, a celebrity entrepreneur who co-founded a successful chain of English language cram schools, said on a Chinese version of Twitter where he has 6 million followers.

Hu's speech was part swansong, part consensus platform meant to impose policy continuity on Xi and the new leadership.

Hu set a target for doubling the size of the country's economy and per capita income from 2010 to 2020, implying an 8 percent annual growth rate that economists say may saddle China with higher debt and more waste and prevent a rebalancing away from state companies to private companies and households.

"Only development counts," Hu said.

Hu also turned aside calls from retired party members and government think tanks to answer public demands for more transparency and accountability by moving toward a more democratic system. He said the party must remain in charge while learning to be more responsive to public needs.

"We must ensure the unity of the leadership of the party," Hu said. He later added: "We will never copy a Western political system."

___

Associated Press writers Gillian Wong, Christopher Bodeen, Didi Tang and Louise Watt contributed to this report.

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