Soprano Bartoli: My voice has more colors, shadow

LONDON (Reuters) – Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has released a year-end blockbuster that is part mystery story, part research project and shows off a voice which only seems to improve with age.

Bartoli’s latest deluxe-packaged album “Mission” (Decca) is devoted to the music of the late 17th-century Italian composer, diplomat and perhaps spy, Agostino Steffani.

Steffani may have been a bit overlooked as a result of his appearance at the end of the Renaissance and at the beginning of the Baroque periods – until Bartoli’s interest alighted on him.

“The variety is amazing in the music of Steffani, the slow arias have very beautiful melodic lines, they are unbelievable, it’s quite hypnotic music,” Bartoli said in a telephone interview from Paris.

Since she burst upon the world in the 1990s, specializing mostly in Mozart and Rossini, Bartoli has gone from strength to strength, not only in digging up unusual repertoires, including another deluxe compilation in 2009 devoted to music sung by castrati, but also vocally.

Here’s what else Bartoli had to say about Steffani and his possible career as a spy, why she goes for the anti-diva look on her recent album covers, and what she calls a Fellini-esque experience at La Scala with conductor Daniel Barenboim:

Q: Is it true, then, that the voice improves with time?

A: “I think this is a very good time because of the maturity of the technique. When you are young, of course, you have to have a beautiful voice. This is a gift you receive, but you don’t have enough technique or experience. So this is a very good time because I can really paint with my voice with so many colors, like a painter. I love painting with the voice and I’m of an age when I do this definitely better than 20 years ago.”

Q: So this bit about Steffani being a spy, surely that was dreamt up by the Decca marketing department?

A: “He had an incredible life as a priest, a missionary and a diplomatic mission to arranging weddings between the royal princes of that period. And also he was a kind of spy, in fact he was a Catholic priest in the north of Germany, in the Protestant area, and he spent lots of years in that area – it was very unusual, very strange. Maybe he also had the mission to convert (people) to Catholicism, who knows? We have lots of speculation about him, all the mysterious things about this man. There’s still mystery.”

Q: There’s no mystery though that the cover for this album, showing you bald-headed and wielding a crucifix, is “non-diva” – like the cover on the “Sacrificium” album of castrati music, with your head superimposed on the torso of a male statue.

A: “The idea was to have a cover related to the project and it was a bit against the cliche of a diva who has to look beautiful all the time. In a project like ‘Sacrificium’, when at the beginning of the 18th century 3,000-4,000 boys were castrated every year in Italy…how can I make a CD project about this and make a cover with a beautiful, glamorous Vanity Fair picture? This would be more embarrassing…People realize there is a real story here to tell, it’s not a compilation of arias which you do for Christmas. And ‘Sacrificium’ was a huge success.”

Q: Your concert recital earlier this month singing Handel, Rossini and Mozart with Daniel Barenboim conducting at La Scala in Milan, with a chorus of boos and whistles in the second half, was perhaps less of a success?

A: “This story is repeating what happened to Carlos Kleiber, one of the greatest conductors of our lives, also to (Maria) Callas, (Luciano) Pavarotti. The concert was magnificent – Handel, Mozart, Rossini – and then I believe at the very end there was a very Fellinian situation. You think these things don’t happen anymore, that they only happen in the movies of (Federico) Fellini but actually, no, this is happening. And it seemed like a parody but the next morning I opened the newspaper and (Silvio) Berlusconi is back (in Italian politics). And so I said, ‘Yes, of course.’

I think living in Italy is difficult but living without Italy is impossible.”

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

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No fewer side effects for prostate proton therapy

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – An expensive prostate cancer radiation treatment known as proton beam therapy has just as many side effects as a more common and cheaper radiation method, according to a new study.

In terms of side effects, “In the long term, there’s really no difference in outcomes between proton radiation and IMRT for men with prostate cancer,” said lead author Dr. James Yu, a radiation oncologist at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

Proton therapy advocates argue that protons blast radiation directly to the tumor and therefore avoid side effects. The more common “intensity-modulated” radiotherapy (IMRT) exposes some healthy tissue to radiation that researchers hypothesized would increase side effects and even additional cancers.

After a year, however, the study found the same number of side effects among men who’d had both treatments.

Prostate cancer, the most common cancer in men, kills about 28,000 Americans each year. However, many men don’t die of the disease, because many tumors grow very slowly.

Treatments include chemotherapy, hormone therapy, surgery, and frequent surveillance – aka “watchful waiting.”

Although researchers are at odds over which treatment – proton therapy or IMRT – is the better option for men who choose radiation, that hasn’t stopped the growth of proton beam centers. There are ten such centers in the U.S., according to the National Association for Proton Therapy, with eight more under development or being built.

Each one can cost more than $ 125 million, and Medicare pays doctors about twice as much for proton therapy.

For the study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers tracked Medicare claims in 2008 and 2009 for treatment-related complications in nearly 28,000 men with prostate cancer for up to a year. Only two percent of the prostate cancer patients underwent proton therapy and the remainder had IMRT.

After six months, nearly 10 percent of IMRT-treated patients, and six percent of proton therapy patients, had side effects including incontinence, a burning sensation while urinating or difficulty getting an erection. However, the difference disappeared a year after treatment, when nearly one in five patients suffered side effects regardless of which radiation treatment they had.

Yu and colleagues found that proton therapy costs nearly twice as much: $ 32,428 per course of treatment, versus $ 18,575 for IMRT. That difference was consistent with that found in other studies.

“The ball is in the court of the proton folks in terms of proving a benefit,” Yu told Reuters Health.

The study only looked at side effects, and did not compare the effectiveness of the treatments, which proton therapy advocates said was a significant weakness.

If Yu is “willing to make recommendation or clinical judgments based on this sort of data, I think he’s at risk to doing a disservice to his patients,” said Dr. Andrew Lee, director of the Proton Therapy Center at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “It’s like trying to read a license plate from 30 thousand feet up in the air.”

Lee, who was not involved in the new work, said that the study’s length – a year – wasn’t enough time to look at the full scope of side effects from either treatment. The study also failed to include side effects that didn’t require a hospital visit, and couldn’t say how long treatments lasted.

Proton therapy isn’t for everyone, both noted. Lee said the treatment was best for young healthy patients, while Yu said it is most useful for cancers in children or in sensitive areas where minimizing the radiation is critical.

Yu would not recommend it for prostate cancer.

“The cancer center next door or the radiation oncologist in the community will likely do just as good a job at treating prostate cancer with IMRT as a proton center three times out of the way,” Yu said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/V6PkLT Journal of the National Cancer Institute, online December 14, 2012.

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The Unemployment Rate Is Dropping, Which Is Not as Good as It Sounds

As long as inflation remains in check, the Federal Reserve has promised not to raise interest rates until unemployment hits 6.5 percent. So how long until that happens? A few estimates are worth noting for the contradictions they reveal in the labor market.

According to calculations by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, at the current pace of job growth, about 155,000 jobs per month over the past two years, we won’t see 6.5 percent unemployment until 2018. That would mean a decade of zero percent interest rates. It has been four years since the Fed lowered rates to near zero. Imagine another six.

But don’t worry. Most economists think we’ll hit 6.5 percent way sooner than 2018. The average prediction of 75 economists surveyed by Bloomberg is that unemployment will be down to 7.3 percent by the second quarter of 2014. Both Joe Lavorgna, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, and Jacob Oubina, senior economist at RBC Capital Markets, think we’ll be at 6.5 percent by then. That’s not because they feel better about the economy. It’s actually because they’re more pessimistic about it.

The researchers at the Hamilton Project based their projections off the Congressional Budget Office’s 2011 estimates (PDF) of labor force participation over the next decade. The CBO assumes that for the next 10 years, the size of the work force will grow at the same pace it did over the previous decade, 0.8 percent a year. Right now, the labor force is expanding at less than half that pace. As people give up looking for a job, the labor force is growing much slower than anticipated.

The smaller the labor force, the fewer jobs you need to push down the unemployment rate. This is the dark cloud behind the steady decline in the jobless rate we’ve seen over the last year. Much of  the drop has been due to people fading from the labor force, rather than robust job gains. If you factor in the 2.5 million people who want a job but have stopped looking, and therefore aren’t counted as unemployed, the jobless rate jumps to 14.4 percent.

This the trouble with tying monetary policy to the unemployment rate: It’s murky as a signal for the health of the economy. James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, thinks that continued shrinkage of the labor force will lower the rate faster than a strong economy that encourages people to start looking again. “A stronger economy might actually hold it up longer,” says Galbraith.

And that’s the irony of the current labor market. The slow pace of job growth has actually hastened the decline in the unemployment rate. Once the economy starts adding more jobs and people are compelled to restart their job search, the unemployment rate may stagnate, if not rise. This is what Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, thinks is going to happen in 2013. “I’m surprised at how quickly the participation rate declined this year,” says Hatzius. “Our models say it should stabilize, if not rise, next year.” Which is why he foresees a slowdown in the decline in the unemployment rate through 2013. Not because the economy will be worse off, but because it will be better.

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China tightening controls on Internet

BEIJING (AP) — China‘s new communist leaders are increasing already tight controls on Internet use and electronic publishing following a spate of embarrassing online reports about official abuses.

The measures suggest China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, and others who took power in November share their predecessors’ anxiety about the Internet’s potential to spread opposition to one-party rule and their insistence on controlling information despite promises of more economic reforms.

“They are still very paranoid about the potentially destabilizing effect of the Internet,” said Willy Lam, a politics specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They are on the point of losing a monopoly on information, but they still are very eager to control the dissemination of views.”

This week, China’s legislature took up a measure to require Internet users to register their real names, a move that would curtail the Web’s status as a freewheeling forum to complain, often anonymously, about corruption and official abuses. The legislature scheduled a news conference Friday to discuss the measure, suggesting it was expected to be approved.

That comes amid reports Beijing might be disrupting use of software that allows Web surfers to see sites abroad that are blocked by its extensive Internet filters. At the same time, regulators have proposed rules that would bar foreign companies from distributing books, news, music and other material online in China.

Beijing promotes Internet use for business and education but bans material deemed subversive or obscene and blocks access to foreign websites run by human rights and Tibet activists and some news outlets. Controls were tightened after social media played a role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia.

In a reminder of the Web’s role as a political forum, a group of 70 prominent Chinese scholars and lawyers circulated an online petition this week appealing for free speech, independent courts and for the ruling party to encourage private enterprise.

Xi and others on the party’s ruling seven-member Standing Committee have tried to promote an image of themselves as men of the people who care about China’s poor majority. They have promised to press ahead with market-oriented reforms and to support entrepreneurs but have given no sign of support for political reform.

Communist leaders who see the Internet as a source of economic growth and better-paid jobs were slow to enforce the same level of control they impose on movies, books and other media, apparently for fear of hurting fledgling entertainment, shopping and other online businesses.

Until recently, Web surfers could post comments online or on microblog services without leaving their names.

That gave ordinary Chinese a unique opportunity to express themselves to a public audience in a society where newspapers, television and other media are state-controlled. The most popular microblog services say they have more than 300 million users and some users have millions of followers reading their comments.

The Internet also has given the public an unusual opportunity to publicize accusations of official misconduct.

A local party official in China’s southwest was fired in November after scenes from a videotape of him having sex with a young woman spread quickly on the Internet. Screenshots were uploaded by a former journalist in Beijing, Zhu Ruifeng, to his Hong Kong website, an online clearing house for corruption allegations.

Some industry analysts suggest allowing Web surfers in a controlled setting to vent helps communist leaders stay abreast of public sentiment in their fast-changing society. Still, microblog services and online bulletin boards are required to employ censors to enforce content restrictions. Researchers say they delete millions of postings a day.

The government says the latest Internet regulation before the National People’s Congress is aimed at protecting Web surfers’ personal information and cracking down on abuses such as junk e-mail. It would require users to report their real names to Internet service and telecom providers.

The main ruling party newspaper, People’s Daily, has called in recent weeks for tighter Internet controls, saying rumors spread online have harmed the public. In one case, it said stories about a chemical plant explosion resulted in the deaths of four people in a car accident as they fled the area.

Proposed rules released this month by the General Administration of Press and Publications would bar Chinese-foreign joint ventures from publishing books, music, movies and other material online in China. Publishers would be required to locate their servers in China and have a Chinese citizen as their local legal representative.

That is in line with rules that already bar most foreign access to China’s media market, but the decision to group the restrictions together and publicize them might indicate official attitudes are hardening.

That comes after the party was rattled by foreign news reports about official wealth and misconduct.

In June, Bloomberg News reported that Xi’s extended family has amassed assets totaling $ 376 million, though it said none was traced to Xi. The government has blocked access to Bloomberg’s website since then.

In October, The New York Times reported that Premier Wen Jiabao’s relatives had amassed $ 2.7 billion since he rose to national office in 2002. Access to the Times’ Chinese-language site has been blocked since then.

Previous efforts to tighten controls have struggled with technical challenges in a country with more than 500 million Internet users.

Microblog operators such as Sina Corp. and Tencent Ltd. were ordered in late 2011 to confirm users’ names but have yet to finish the daunting task.

Web surfers can circumvent government filters by using virtual private networks — software that encrypts Web traffic and is used by companies to transfer financial data and other sensitive information. But VPN users say disruptions that began in 2011 are increasing, suggesting Chinese regulators are trying to block encrypted traffic.

Curbs on access to foreign sites have prompted complaints by companies and Chinese scientists and other researchers.

In July, the American Chamber of Commerce in China said 74 percent of companies that responded to a survey said unstable Internet access “impedes their ability to do business.”

Chinese leaders “realize there are detrimental impacts on business, especially foreign business, but they have counted the cost and think it is still worthwhile,” said Lam. “There is no compromise about the political imperative of controlling the Internet.”

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Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon‘s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc‘s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.

Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.

Evers said the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing center in Virginia and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.

The event marks the latest in a series of outages from Amazon Web Services, with one occurring in April of last year that knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare.

“We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented,” Evers of Netflix said.

“We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night,” he added.

Officials at Amazon Web Services were not available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company’s contracts with Amazon.

(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and Matt Driskill)

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Ticket rush: Film fans hand Hollywood record cash

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The big deal for Hollywood is not the record $ 10.8 billion that studios took in domestically in 2012. It’s the fact that the number of tickets sold went up for the first time in three years.

Thanks to inflation, revenue generally rises in Hollywood as admission prices climb each year. The real story is told in tickets, whose sales have been on a general decline for a decade, bottoming out in 2011 at 1.29 billion, their lowest level since 1995.

The industry rebounded this year, with ticket sales projected to rise 5.6 percent to 1.36 billion by Dec. 31, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. That’s still well below the modern peak of 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, but in an age of cozy home theater setups and endless entertainment gadgets, studio executives consider it a triumph that they were able to put more butts in cinema seats this year than last.

“It is a victory, ultimately,” said Don Harris, head of distribution at Paramount Pictures. “If we deliver the product as an industry that people want, they will want to get out there. Even though you can sit at home and watch something on your large screen in high-def, people want to get out.”

Domestic revenue should finish up nearly 6 percent from 2011′s $ 10.2 billion and top Hollywood‘s previous high of $ 10.6 billion set in 2009.

The year was led by a pair of superhero sagas, Disney’s “The Avengers” with $ 623 million domestically and $ 1.5 billion worldwide and the Warner Bros. Batman finale “The Dark Knight Rises” with $ 448 million domestically and $ 1.1 billion worldwide. Sony’s James Bond adventure “Skyfall” is closing in on the $ 1 billion mark globally, and the list of action and family-film blockbusters includes “The Hunger Games,” ”The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part Two,” ”Ice Age: Continental Drift,” ”Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” ”The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Brave.”

Before television, movies were the biggest thing going, with ticket sales estimated as high as 4 billion a year domestically in the 1930s and ’40s.

Movie-going eroded steadily through the 1970s as people stayed home with their small screens. The rise of videotape in the 1980s further cut into business, followed by DVDs in the ’90s and big, cheap flat-screen TVs in recent years. Today’s video games, mobile phones and other portable devices also offer easy options to tramping out to a movie theater.

It’s all been a continual drain on cinema business, and cynics repeatedly predict the eventual demise of movie theaters. Yet Hollywood fights back with new technology of its own, from digital 3-D to booming surround-sound to the clarity of images projected at high-frame rates, which is being tested now with “The Lord of the Rings” prelude “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” shown in select theaters at 48 frames a second, double the standard speed.

For all of the annoyances of theaters — parking, pricy concessions, sitting next to strangers texting on their iPhones — cinemas still offer the biggest and best way to see a movie.

“Every home has a kitchen, but you can’t get into a good restaurant on Saturday night,” said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros. “People want to escape. That’s the nature of society. The adult population just is not going to sit home seven days a week, even though they have technology in their home that’s certainly an improvement over what it was 10 years ago. People want to get out of the house, and no matter what they throw in the face of theatrical exhibition, it continues to perform at a strong level.”

Even real-life violence at the movie theater didn’t turn audiences away. Some moviegoers thought twice about heading to the cinema after a gunman killed 12 people and injured 58 at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Colorado last summer, but if there was any lull in attendance, it was slight and temporary. Ticket sales went on a tear for most of the fall.

While domestic revenues inch upward most years largely because of inflation, the real growth areas have been overseas, where more and more fans are eager for the next Hollywood blockbuster.

Rentrak, which compiles international box office data, expects 2012′s foreign gross to be about $ 23 billion, 3 percent higher than in 2011. No data was yet available on the number of tickets sold overseas this past year.

International business generally used to account for less than half of a studio film’s overall receipts. Films now often do two or even three times as much business overseas as they do domestically. Some movies that were duds with U.S. audiences, such as “Battleship” and “John Carter,” can wind up being $ 200 million hits with overseas crowds.

Whether finishing a good year or a bad one, Hollywood executives always look ahead to better days, insisting that the next crop of blockbusters will be bigger than ever. The same goes this time as studio bosses hype their 2013 lineup, which includes the latest “Iron Man,” ”Star Trek,” ”Hunger Games” and “Thor” installments, the Superman tale “Man of Steel” and the second chapter in “The Hobbit” trilogy.

Twelve months from now, they hope to be talking about another revenue record topping this year’s $ 10.8 billion.

“I’ve been saying we’re going to hit that $ 11 billion level for about three years now,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. “Next year I think is the year we actually do it.”

___

Online:

http://www.hollywood.com

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Condom Dispensers in Philly Schools

Philadelphia is installing condom dispensers in 22 city high schools where students as young as 14 will be able to receive condoms for free in an effort to combat an “epidemic” of sexually transmitted disease among the city’s teenagers.

Students returning to school from Christmas break will find clear plastic dispensers filled with condoms in the offices of nurses whose schools have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases.

“We believe distributing condoms is part of our obligation to keep students healthy and to remain healthy,” said school district spokesman Fernando Gallard. “The health department has described this as a continued epidemic of STDs among teenagers in Philadelphia.”

Condoms have in the past been provided to students in Philadelphia as part of wider program in which the teenagers are provided “free, voluntary and confidential” testing for sexual diseases in their schools, Gallard said.

It was the results of those tests that led officials to launch the current program to distribute condoms regularly in schools instead of once a year when the tests are administered.

Of the 130,000 student who have received testing in the last five years, some 6,500 or 5 percent of them have tested positive for diseases including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Parents were made aware of the distribution program in October and were given the chance to opt their children out of receiving the prophylactics.

Gallard said the school district has not received “specific calls” from parents objecting to the program. The total number of parents who chose to disallow their children from receiving condoms, however, is unknown.

According to Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit organization that advocates for sexual health among young people, there are at least 418 schools nationwide providing condoms.

In August, despite outrage from some parents, the school board in Springfield, Mass., approved a plan to distribute condoms in public high schools, as well as middle schools, providing free contraception to students as young as 11.

Philadelphia has plans to expand condom distribution to more schools, but has no plans to introduce prophylactics to middle schoolers, Gallard told ABCNews.com.

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Say Hello to Higher Taxes: Why Neither Party Wants a Deal

With five days to go until the fiscal cliff, Republicans and Democrats are displaying as much effort as New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez in the latter stages of a typical four-interception blowout—which is to say, none whatsoever. They can barely bestir themselves to maintain the pretense that they’re working to avoid the $ 600 billion of tax hikes and spending cuts due to arrive next week.

President Obama is flying back from Hawaii tonight to keep up appearances. But almost nobody expects a deal before Jan. 1. Negotiations essentially ended after John Boehner’s Plan B fell apart last week. As the Wall Street Journal put it this morning, “the parties are engaged in a political staring contest.” Sounds productive.

One reason nothing is happening could be that, at this point, both parties secretly want to go over the cliff. As the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein noted:

[N]ot only do liberals believe that the expiration of Bush-era tax rates gives them a bargaining advantage, but many Republicans may well prefer that outcome as well. I think if there was any information generated by the Plan B fiasco, it might have been just that: some Republicans really would prefer an eventual outcome that involves relatively higher tax rates as long as they don’t have to make an affirmative vote for it.

That strikes me as exactly right, although I’d characterize the Republican motivation slightly differently. I’m not sure how many Republicans actively wish for taxes to go up. But I’m sure they all recognize that taxes will rise on Tuesday, when rates automatically revert to their Clinton-era levels. That’s why Plan B was such a heavy lift: It called on House Republicans to cast a career-threatening vote to raise taxes, when everyone knew full well that such a vote was entirely unnecessary, since the cliff would do the dirty business of raising taxes for them if they just waited a week.

Best of all, once rates reset, Republicans (and Democrats, too) would find themselves in the much more comfortable position of negotiating tax cuts for the vast majority of Americans. Given this reality, the question to ask in the days and hours leading up to the fiscal cliff is not whether the two parties will strike a deal, but why they would want to.

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Afghan bomber attacks near major US base

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A vehicle driven by a suicide bomber exploded at the gate of a major U.S. military base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing the attacker and three Afghans, Afghan police said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

Police Gen. Abdul Qayum Baqizai said a local guard who questioned the vehicle driver at the gate of Camp Chapman was killed along with two civilians and the assailant. The camp is located adjacent to the airport of the capital of Khost province, which borders Pakistan. Chapman and nearby Camp Salerno had been frequently targeted by militants in the past, but violent incidents have decreased considerably in recent months.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in an email that the bomber targeted Afghan police manning the gate and Afghans working for the Americans entering the base. He claimed high casualties were inflicted.

NATO operates with more than 100,000 troops in the country, including some 66,000 American forces. It is handing most combat operations over to the Afghans in preparation for a pullout from Afghanistan in 2014. Militant groups, including the Taliban, rarely face NATO troops head-on and rely mainly on roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

NATO forces and foreign civilians have also been increasingly attacked by rogue Afghan military and police, eroding trust between the allies.

On Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said a policewoman who killed an American contractor in Kabul a day earlier was a native Iranian who came to Afghanistan and displayed “unstable behavior” but had no known links to militants.

The policewoman, identified as Sgt. Nargas, shot 49-year-old Joseph Griffin, of Mansfield, Georgia, on Monday, in the first such shooting by a woman in the spate of insider attacks. Nargas walked into a heavily-guarded compound in the heart of Kabul, confronted Griffin and shot him once with her pistol.

The U.S-based security firm DynCorp International said on its website that Griffin was a U.S. military veteran who earlier worked with law enforcement agencies in the United States. In Kabul, he was under contract to the NATO military command to advise the Afghan police force.

The ministry spokesman, Sediq Sediqi, told a news conference that Nargas, who uses one name like many in the country, was born in Tehran, where she married an Afghan. She moved to the country 10 years ago, after her husband obtained fake documents enabling her to live and work there.

A mother of four in her early 30s, she joined the police five years ago, held various positions and had a clean record, he said. Sediqi produced an Iranian passport that he said was found at her home.

No militant group has claimed responsibility for the killing.

The chief investigator of the case, Police Gen. Mohammad Zahir, said that during interrogation, the policewoman said she had plans to kill either the Kabul governor, city police chief or Zahir himself, but when she realized that penetrating the last security cordons to reach them would be too difficult, she saw “a foreigner” and turned her weapon on him.

There have been 60 insider attacks this year against foreign military and civilian personnel, compared to 21 in 2011. This surge presents another looming security issue as NATO prepares to pull out almost all of its forces by 2014, putting the war against the Taliban and other militant groups largely in the hands of the Afghans.

More than 50 Afghan members of the government’s security forces also have died this year in attacks by their own colleagues. The Taliban claims such incidents reflect a growing popular opposition to the foreign military presence and the Kabul government.

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10 Talented Dogs Playing the Piano

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