Hillary Clinton discharged from hospital

WASHINGTONSecretary of State Hillary Clinton was discharged from a New York hospital Wednesday, after spending 72 hours under observation following the discovery of a blood clot in her head, the State Department said.

In a statement, spokesperson Philippe Reines said: "Her medical team advised her that she is making good progress on all fronts, and they are confident she will make a full recovery. She's eager to get back to the office."

Clinton and her family thanked her medical team "for the excellent care she received," Reines said.

Earlier Wednesday, Clinton had been seen in public for the first time in three weeks when she walked out of the Harkness Eye Institute in New York City and into a secure van along with a smiling Bill and Chelsea Clinton and accompanied by a security detail, reports CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan.

The State Department had said Secretary Clinton was active in speaking with staff and reviewing paperwork while she continued to recover at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Clinton was admitted to a New York hospital Sunday and was treated with blood thinners to dissolve a clot in the vein behind the right ear. Doctors found the clot during a follow-up exam stemming from a concussion she suffered in early December. She has been hospitalized for around 72 hours, which is a window of time during which it is possible to establish the proper blood thinner dosage that would be required prior to discharge according to doctors.

Clinton's doctors say there was no neurological damage.

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Tax Deal Done - but How Can Obama Sign It?

Jan 2, 2013 6:29pm

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Congress officially delivered the bill to avert the fiscal cliff to the White House this afternoon, House Speaker John Boehner’s office told ABC News.

Now the question is when will the President sign it?

The bill, passed late on New Year’s Day, expires tomorrow at 11:59 a.m. when the current session of Congress concludes. If President Obama doesn’t sign it by then, constitutionally the bill is dead.

But this evening, eighteen hours before the deadline, the President is on a golf course in Hawaii.  And the bill is in Washington at the White House.

Administration officials won’t say what they will do despite repeated inquiries from ABC News.

There seem to be two options:  1) An Air Force jet can deliver the bill to Hawaii (better leave quickly!) in time for the President to sign it before 11:59 Eastern Standard Time; or, 2) The White House can use a presidential “auto-pen.”

The simple mechanical device uses a template of the presidential signature to scrawl it on paper if activated by the White House at Obama’s direction.

But would an auto-pen – usually used to sign insignificant correspondence and photographs – pass constitutional muster?  We don’t know.  The question has never been tested by the courts.

A 2005 legal study commissioned by former President George W. Bush determined that use of the autopen is constitutional but acknowledged the possibility that its use could be challenged.  Bush never used the autopen, officials from his administration told ABC.

President Obama is only believed to have used the autopen once to sign a piece of major legislation — the 2011 extension of the Patriot Act — which reached his desk while he was on a diplomatic trip to Europe. Officials invoked national security concerns to justify the move.

Use of the autopen has been controversial.  Conservative groups alleged last summer that Obama used an autopen to sign condolence letters to the families of Navy SEALs killed in a Chinook crash in Afghanistan — a charge the White House disputed flatly as false.

In 2004, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was criticized for using an autopen to sign condolence letters to the families of fallen troops.

And in 1992 then-Vice President Dan Quayle even got into some hot water over his use of the autopen on official correspondence during an appearance on “This Week with David Brinkley.” More HERE.

ABC News’ Ann Compton and Devin Dwyer contributed reporting.

SHOWS: World News

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At least 61 crushed to death in Ivory Coast stampede

ABIDJAN (Reuters) - At least 61 people were crushed to death in a stampede after a New Year's Eve fireworks display at a stadium in Ivory Coast's main city Abidjan early on Tuesday, officials said.

Witnesses said police had tried to control crowds around the Felix Houphouet-Boigny Stadium following the celebrations, triggering a panic in which scores were trampled.

"The estimate we can give right now is 49 people hospitalized ... and 61 people dead," said the chief of staff of Abidjan's fire department Issa Sacko.

Crying women searched for missing family members outside the stadium on Tuesday morning. The area was covered in patches of dried blood and abandoned shoes.

"My two children came here yesterday. I told them not to come but they didn't listen. They came when I was sleeping. What will I do?" said Assetou Toure, a cleaner.

Sanata Zoure, a market vendor injured in the incident, said New Year's revelers going home after watching the fireworks had been stopped by police near the stadium.

"We were walking with our children and we came upon barricades, and people started falling into each other. We were trampled with our children," she said.

Another witness said police arrived to control the crowd after a mob began chasing a pickpocket.

President Alassane Ouattara called the deaths a national tragedy and said an investigation was under way to find out what happened.

"I hope that we can determine what caused this drama so that we can ensure it never happens again," he said after visiting the injured in hospital.

The country, once a stable economic hub for West Africa, is struggling to recover from a 2011 civil war in which more than 3,000 people were killed.

Ivory Coast's security forces once were among the best trained in the region, but a decade of political turmoil and the 2011 war has left them in disarray.

At least 18 people were killed in another stampede during a football match in an Abidjan stadium in 2009.

(Reporting by Loucoumane Coulibaly and Alain Amontchi; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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US House to vote to avert fiscal cliff

WASHINGTON: After a day of twisting political drama, the US Congress was Tuesday expected to finally endorse a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" budget crisis that had threatened to unleash a new recession.

Hours before many major global financial markets make their 2013 debut, the House of Representatives was to vote on a bid to raise taxes on the rich and put off a $109 billion dollar program of spending cuts for two months.

The deal passed the Senate early on Tuesday, but its fate hung in the balance for hours as House conservatives sought to amend it to include big spending cuts, which would likely have killed its chance of passage.

Had the deal splintered, all Americans would have been hit by tax increases and the spending cuts would have kicked in across the government, in a combined $500 billion shock that could have rocked the fragile recovery.

The House was due to vote within hours on an up or down vote on the deal agreed between Senate Republicans and President Barack Obama's White House.

A majority of 217 votes was seen as a certainty given that Obama's Democrats were certain to back the pact along with some of the Republican majority.

The vote will take place after a conservative rebellion fizzled when it became clear there were not sufficient votes in the restive Republican caucus to send an amended version of the bill with spending cuts back to the Senate.

Republican party leaders ultimately feared they would carry the can if the deal collapsed, leaving Americans enraged by higher taxes and the prospect of that an economy still slowly bouncing back from the worst crisis in decades could be plunged back into recession.

"There's a growing sense that, you know... you do have to know when to hold them and when to fold them. We've been beaten in this fight," retiring Ohio Republican Congressman Steve LaTourette told CNN.

Earlier, Boehner's coalition vented fury that the deal negotiated by the White House and top Senate Republicans had not contained significant spending cuts to eat into national debt that is worth more than $16 trillion.

"We have to in some way address spending," Republican congressman Spencer Bachus said.

Another House Republican, Tim Huelskamp, said that the powerful number two Republican in the chamber Eric Cantor told a high-stakes meeting of the party caucus that he was opposed to the bill.

"The principal reason is there are no spending cuts," said Huelskamp.

At the turn of the year, every American became liable to a tax hike with the expiry of rate cuts first passed under former president George W. Bush.

The deal to avert the fiscal cliff agreed on Monday raised income taxes only on households earning $450,000 a year and exempted anyone else.

It put off the spending cuts -- known as the sequester -- for two months, setting up another bitter political cliffhanger at the end of February.

If the legislation does pass the House unamended, it will represent a win for Obama as it raises taxes on the richest Americans in line with a re-election campaign promise -- albeit above an income threshold higher than he and other Democrats had wanted.

Obama issued a statement shortly after the 2:00 am (0700 GMT) Senate vote, urging House lawmakers to pass the bill "without delay."

The White House said the tax agreement was "a victory for middle-class families and the economy," and laid out the raft of measures contained in the legislation.

"For the first time in 20 years, Congress will have acted on a bipartisan basis to vote for significant new revenue," it said.

The deal also includes an end to a temporary two percent cut to payroll taxes for Social Security retirement savings -- meaning all Americans will pay a little more -- and changes to inheritance and investment taxes.

-AFP/ac

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Anonymous: 'Expect us 2013'

The hacking collective Anonymous has clarified that it has no plans to fade away in the New Year. It issued a statement over the weekend that warned the world to "Expect us 2013."

Along with the statement, the group created a video that boasts of its campaigns and exploits carried out in 2012. The video details the group's temporary shutdown of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music, and the Motion Picture Association of America's Web sites in protest of the U.S. government's indictment of the operators of popular file-hosting site MegaUpload.

The video also shows newsreels of Anonymous' campaign against Syrian government Web sites because of that government's alleged shutdown of the Internet, along with Anonymous' "cyberwar" against the Israeli government in protest of government attacks on Gaza. The group also recounts its hack into the Web site of the Westboro Baptist Church in response to plans by the controversial church to picket the funerals of those massacred at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

"The operations which are listed in the video are only examples, there are far more operations," Anonymous wrote in the statement. "Some of them still running, like Operation Syria. We are still here."

Despite the hacking group's threats, some believe that the collective may not actually make a big impact in the online world in the coming year. Security firm McAfee Labs released its "2013 Threat Predictions" last week and claimed the decline of Anonymous.

The firm argued that a lack of structure and organization, false claims, and hacking for the simple joy of it has affected the group's reputation. McAfee also said, however, that higher-level professional hacking groups may take up the slack, and promote a rise in military, religious, political, and "extreme" campaign attacks.

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61 killed in post-celebration stampede in Ivory Coast

ABIDJAN, Ivory CoastA crowd stampeded after leaving a New Year's fireworks show early Tuesday in Ivory Coast's main city, killing 61 people — many of them children and teenagers — and injuring more than 200, rescue workers said.

Thousands had gathered at the Felix Houphouet Boigny Stadium in Abidjan's Plateau district to see the fireworks. It was only the second New Year's Eve fireworks display since peace returned to this West African nation after a bloody upheaval over presidential elections put the nation on the brink of civil war and turned this city into a battle zone.

With 2013 showing greater promise, people were in the mood to celebrate on New Year's Eve. Families brought children and they watched the rockets burst in the nighttime sky. But only an hour into the new year, as the crowds poured onto the Boulevard de la Republic after the show, something caused a stampede, said Col. Issa Sako of the fire department rescue team. How so many deaths occurred on the broad boulevard and how the tragedy started is likely to be the subject of an investigation.

Many of the younger ones in the crowd went down, trampled underfoot. Most of those killed were between 8 and 15 years old

"The flood of people leaving the stadium became a stampede which led to the deaths of more than 60 and injured more than 200," Sako told Ivory Coast state TV.

Desperate parents went to the city morgue, the hospital and to the stadium to try to find missing children. Mamadou Sanogo was searching for his 9-year-old son, Sayed.

"I have just seen all the bodies, but I cannot find my son," said a tearful Sanogo. "I don't know what to do."

State TV showed a woman sobbing in the back of an ambulance; another was bent over on the side of the street, apparently in pain; and another, barely conscious and wearing only a bra on her upper body, was hoisted by rescuers. There were also scenes of small children being treated in a hospital. One boy grimaced in pain and a girl with colored braids in her hair lay under a blanket with one hand bandaged. The death toll could rise, officials said.

After the sun came up, soldiers were patrolling the site that was littered with victims' clothes, shoes, torn sandals and other belongings. President Alassane Ouattara and his wife Dominique visited some of the injured in the hospital. Mrs. Ouattara leaned over one child who was on a bed in a crowded hospital ward and tried to console the youngster. The president pledged that the government would pay for their treatment, his office said.

The government organized the fireworks to celebrate Ivory Coast's peace, after several months of political violence in early 2011 following disputed elections.

This is not Ivory Coast's first stadium tragedy. In 2009, 22 people died and over 130 were injured in a stampede at a World Cup qualifying match at the Houphouet Boigny Stadium, prompting FIFA, soccer's global governing body, to impose a fine of tens of thousands of dollars on Ivory Coast's soccer federation. The stadium, which officially holds 35,000, was overcrowded at the time of the disaster.

A year later, two people were killed and 30 wounded in a stampede at a municipal stadium during a reggae concert in Bouake, the country's second-largest city. The concert was organized in the city, held by rebels at the time, to promote peace and reconciliation.

Ivory Coast is the world's largest cocoa producer, growing more than 37 percent of the world's annual crop of cocoa beans, which are used to make chocolate.

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House Plans Up-or-Down Vote on 'Cliff' Deal

House Republicans have agreed to have an up-or-down vote on the bipartisan Senate deal to avert the "fiscal cliff," rather than trying to amend the Senate bill with more spending cuts before voting, according to a senior GOP leadership aide.

The vote will likely come tonight despite top House Republicans' earlier opposition to the deal, which the Senate passed in the wee hours of New Year's Day, because of concerns about the cost of the deal's spending provisions.

If House Republicans had tweaked the legislation, there would have been no clear path for its return to the Senate before a new Congress is sworn in Thursday.

The Republican-controlled House was expected to launch into procedural steps leading up to a vote, which was possible late this evening.

Before deciding on the up-or-down vote, GOP leaders had emerged from a morning conference meeting disenchanted by the legislative package devised by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Mo., and Vice President Biden early this morning, with several insisting they could not vote on it as it stood.

"I do not support the bill," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said as he left the meeting. "We're looking for the best path forward. No decisions have been made yet."

Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images

'Fiscal Cliff' Negotiations: Congress Reaches Agreement Watch Video

Fiscal Cliff Countdown: Missing the Deadline Watch Video

House Speaker John Boehner refused to comment on the meeting, but his spokesman said, "the lack of spending cuts in the Senate bill was a universal concern amongst members in today's meeting."

"Conversations with members will continue throughout the afternoon on the path forward," Brendan Buck said in a statement.

As lawmakers wrestled with the legislation, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill's added spending combined with the cost of extending tax cuts for those making under $400,000 would actually add $3.9 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. The Joint Committee on Taxation reached a similar conclusion.

The impasse once again raised the specter of sweeping tax hikes on all Americans and deep spending cuts' taking effect later this week.

"This is all about time, and it's about time that we brought this to the floor," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said after emerging from a meeting with Democrats.

"It was a bill that was passed in the U.S. Senate 89-8. Tell me when you've had that on a measure as controversial as this?" she said of the overwhelming vote.

Pelosi could not say, however, whether the measure had the backing of most House Democrats.

"Our members are making their decisions now," she said.

Biden, who brokered the deal with McConnell, joined Democrats for a midday meeting on Capitol Hill seeking to shore up support for the plan.

While Congress technically missed the midnight Dec. 31 deadline to avert the so-called cliff, both sides have expressed eagerness to enact a post-facto fix before Americans go back to work and the stock market opens Wednesday.

"This may take a little while but, honestly, I would argue we should vote on it today," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who sits on the Budget Committee. "We know the essential details and I think putting this thing to bed before the markets is important.

"We ought to take this deal right now and we'll live to fight another day, and it is coming very soon on the spending front."

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Bombs kill 23 across Iraq as sectarian strife grows

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - At least 23 people were killed and 87 wounded in attacks across Iraq on Monday, police said, underlining sectarian and ethnic divisions that threaten to further destabilize the country a year after U.S. troops left.

Tensions between Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni factions in Iraq's power-sharing government have been on the rise this year. Militants strike almost daily and have staged at least one big attack a month.

The latest violence followed more than a week of protests against Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki by thousands of people from the minority Sunni community.

No group claimed responsibility for any of Monday's attacks, which targeted government officials, police patrols and members of both the Sunni and Shi'ite communities.

Seven people from the same Sunni family were killed by a bomb planted near their home in the town of Mussayab, south of Baghdad.

In the Shi'ite majority city of Hilla, also in the south, a parked car bomb went off near the convoy of the governor of Babil province, missing him but killing two other people, police said.

"We heard the sound of a big explosion and the windows of our office shattered. We immediately lay on the ground," said 28-year-old Mohammed Ahmed, who works at a hospital near the site of the explosion.

"After a few minutes I stood up and went to the windows to see what happened. I saw flames and people lying on the ground."

In the capital Baghdad, five people were killed by a parked car bomb targeting pilgrims before a Shi'ite religious rite this week, police and hospital sources said.

Although violence is far lower than during the sectarian slaughter of 2006-2007, about 2,000 people have been killed in Iraq this year following the withdrawal last December of U.S. troops, who led an invasion in 2003 to overthrow Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.

SUNNIS PROTEST

Violence also hit Iraq's disputed territories, over which both the central government and the autonomous Kurdish region claim jurisdiction.

Three militants and one Kurdish guard were killed in the oil-producing, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, where militants driving a car packed with explosives tried to break into a Kurdish security office.

Earlier on Monday, two policemen were killed in Kirkuk when a bomb they were trying to detonate exploded prematurely. An army official and his bodyguard were also killed in a drive-by shooting in the south of the city.

Kirkuk lies at the heart of a feud between Baghdad and Kurdistan over land and oil rights, which escalated last month when both sides deployed their respective armies to the swath of territory along their contested internal boundary.

Efforts to ease the standoff stalled when President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd seen as a steadying influence, suffered a stroke and was flown abroad for medical care in December.

Maliki then detained the bodyguards of his Sunni finance minister, which ignited anti-government protests in the western province of Anbar, a Sunni stronghold on the border with Syria.

A lecturer in law at Baghdad University said the protests could help create the conditions for militant Islamist groups like al Qaeda to thrive.

"Raising tension in Anbar and other provinces with mainly Sunni populations is definitely playing into the hands of al Qaeda and other insurgent groups," Ahmed Younis said.

More than 1,000 people protested in the city of Samarra on Monday and rallies continued in Ramadi, center of the protests, and in Mosul, where about 500 people took to the streets.

In the city of Falluja, where protesters have also staged large rallies and blocked a major highway over the past week, gunmen attacked an army checkpoint, killing one soldier.

Protesters are demanding an end to what they see as the marginalization of Sunnis, who dominated the country until the U.S.-led invasion. They want Maliki to abolish anti-terrorism laws they say are used to persecute them.

On Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, himself a Sunni, was forced to flee a protest in Ramadi when demonstrators pelted him with stones and bottles.

The civil war in neighboring Syria, where majority Sunnis are fighting to topple a ruler backed by Shi'ite Iran, is also whipping up sectarian sentiment in Iraq.

"The toppling of President Bashar al-Assad and empowerment of Sunnis (in Syria) will definitely encourage al Qaeda to regain ground," Younis said.

(Reporting by Ali al-Rubaie in Hilla, Mustafa Mahmoud and Omar Mohammed in Kirkuk, Ali Mohammed in Baquba and Ahmed Rasheed and Aseel Kami in Baghdad; Writing by Isabel Coles; Editing by Alison Williams)

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Despite emerging deal, US to miss fiscal cliff deadline

WASHINGTON: US lawmakers missed a deadline to avoid the "fiscal cliff" budget crunch Monday but inched towards a deal to ease the worst impact of the crisis by heading off economy-busting tax hikes.

In dramatic New Year's Eve brinkmanship, Republicans and the White House reached an agreement that means only the richest Americans will pay more tax, but were still deadlocked on how to avert $109 billion in automatic government spending cuts.

Despite the emerging deal, the economy will technically go over the cliff at midnight after aides to Republican leaders in the House of Representatives said no vote on a pact could be scheduled in time on Monday.

Senators meanwhile were still hoping for a late-night vote if a deal is finalized. The legislation would then go to a House vote on Tuesday.

While automatic spending cuts and tax hikes will come into force on January 1, global stock markets will be closed on New Year's Day, giving lawmakers a few more hours of breathing room before panic over the US economy sets in.

"If a deal is reached, there's little difference between a vote tonight or tomorrow to give members a chance to review," a House Republican source said.

President Barack Obama earlier said a deal was close though not done and the top Senate Republican negotiator Mitch McConnell, who thrashed out a compromise with Vice President Joe Biden, agreed.

"It appears that an agreement to prevent this New Year's tax hike is within sight. It's not done. There are still issues left to resolve, but we're hopeful that Congress can get it done," Obama said at the White House.

Sources said the deal would include a two-month postponement of the sequester, the sweeping package of automatic government spending cuts that is feared, especially by the Pentagon.

It would also mean a return to Bill Clinton-era tax rates for top earners to 39.6 percent, starting at a threshold of annual household earnings of $450,000 and above.

Obama had originally campaigned for tax hikes to kick in for those making $250,000 and above and his acceptance of a higher threshold has already angered liberals, though still represents a political victory.

As he tried to sell the emerging deal to his Democratic Party's liberal base, he said it would extend tax credits for clean energy firms and also unemployment insurance for two million people due to expire later Monday.

It was also expected to include an end to a temporary two percent cut to payroll taxes for Social Security retirement savings and Medicare health care programs for seniors and changes to inheritance and investment taxes.

The president angered Republicans in remarks in which he warned -- in what is certain to be a bitter fight over cutting the deficit -- that he was not done with seeking higher taxes for the rich.

"Now, if Republicans think that I will finish the job of deficit reduction through spending cuts alone... then they've another thing coming," Obama said, and also poked fun at the glacial pace of Congressional deliberations.

Republicans immediately took to the floor of the Senate to complain.

Senator John McCain accused Obama of ridiculing Republicans and of needlessly antagonizing House of Representatives' members who will be required to vote for an eventual deal.

Republican Senator Bob Corker said his heart was pounding with disappointment at Obama's remarks.

"I know the president has fun heckling Congress. I think he lost probably numbers of votes with what he did," he said.

"It's unfortunate he doesn't spend as much time solving problems as he does with campaigns and pep rallies."

Signs that a deal could be close cheered investors Friday as US markets rose before closing for the year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 166.03 points (1.28 percent) at 13,104.14.

Even as a deal neared, both sides were gearing up for the next legislative showdown over the need to lift the government's statutory borrowing limit of $16.4 trillion, which was reached Monday.

The Treasury will now take extraordinary measures to keep the government afloat for an undisclosed period of time until the ceiling is raised. Republicans are already demanding spending cuts in return.

"I think there is going to be a pretty big showdown next time when we go to the debt limit," McCain told CNN.

-AFP/ac

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Pirated iOS app store Installous shutters

Another one bites the dust.

(Credit:
TorrentFreak)

A wee bit of bad news for Apple's jailbreak community right on the eve of the New Year: Installous, a major portal for pirated paid apps from Apple's App Store, won't be around anymore.

Development team Hackulous today announced the closure of Installous on their official Web site. As of today, the pirated app store no longer works, and only shows these errors: "Outdated version. Installous will now terminate" or "API Error. API unavailable."

For many years, Installous offered complete access to thousands of paid iOS apps for free for anyone with a jailbroken iPhone,
iPad, and
iPod Touch. Think of it as being able to walk into a fancy department store, steal anything you want, and never get caught.

In my personal experiences with the app, I could often download the latest iOS applications and games for free from a variety of sources within mere seconds. After downloading, you could then install the app on your iDevice as if you purchased it from Apple's App Store. Additionally, during its prime, it wasn't unrealistic to expect expensive App Store apps hitting Installous mere hours after release.

Hackulous composed a short swan song on its Web site titled "Goodnight, sweet prince" about the closure of the pirate app store:

We are very sad to announce that Hackulous is shutting down. After many years, our community has become stagnant and our forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the devotion of our staff. We're incredibly thankful for the support we've had over the years and hope that new, greater communities blossom out of our absence.

It seems odd for Installous to close on its own for such simplistic reasons, considering its large user base and a possible moderate revenue stream from built-in ads. Regardless of the reason for Installous shuttering, Apple can't breathe easy just yet -- hackers can still download pirated apps quite easily through a number of methods and outlets (such as Appcake on Cydia).

(Via TorrentFreak)

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