Supporters Back Strike at Newspaper in China

James Pomfret/Reuters

Protesters gathered on Monday outside the headquarters of the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend in Guangzhou, China.

BEIJING — Hundreds of people gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China on Monday, intensifying a battle over media censorship that poses a test of the willingness of China’s new leadership to tolerate calls for change.

The demonstration was an outpouring of support for journalists at the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend, who erupted in fury late last week over what they called overbearing interference by local propaganda officials.

At the same time, the embattled newsroom received backing on the Internet from celebrities and other prominent commentators that turned what began as a local censorship dispute into a national display of solidarity.

“Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter,” Li Bingbing, an actress, said to her 19 million followers on a microblog account. Yao Chen, an actress with more than 31 million followers, quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Disputes between media organizations and local party leaders over the limits of reporting and expressions of opinion are common in China, but rarely emerge into public view. This time, calls to support the frustrated journalists spread quickly in Chinese online forums over the weekend, and those who showed up on Monday outside the media offices in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, ran the gamut from high school and university students to retirees.

Many carried banners scrawled with slogans and white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning. One banner read: “Get rid of censorship. The Chinese people want freedom.” Police officers watched, but did not interfere.

The journalists at Southern Weekend have been calling for the ouster of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, who took up his post last May.

They blame him for overseeing a change in a New Year’s editorial that originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights under the headline “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism.”

The editorial went through layers of changes and ultimately became one praising the direction of the current political system, in which the Communist Party continues to exercise authority over all aspects of governance.

A well-known entrepreneur, Hung Huang, said online that the actions of Mr. Tuo had “destroyed, overnight, all the credibility the country’s top leadership had labored to re-establish since the 18th Party Congress,” the November gathering in Beijing that was the climax of the leadership transition installing Xi Jinping as Communist Party chief. Mr. Xi, who is also scheduled to assume the nation’s presidency in March, has raised expectations that he might pursue a more open-minded approach to molding China’s economic and political models during his planned decade-long tenure.

But more recently, he has said China must respect its socialist roots, which appeared to be a move to placate conservatives in the party.

One journalist for Southern Weekend said Monday night that talks between the various parties had taken place that afternoon, but there were no results to announce. “The negotiations did not go well at all,” the journalist said in a telephone interview.

Signs had emerged earlier that central propaganda officials were moving to dismantle support for the protest. A fiery editorial by Global Times, a populist newspaper, attacked the rebels at Southern Weekend and essentially accused them of conspiring against the government. Xinhua, the state news agency, and other prominent news sites published the editorial online, apparently at the orders of propaganda officials.

“Propaganda is still on the old road,” said an editor at a party media organization.

But by Tuesday morning, the news portals run by large Internet companies like Sina and Sohu rather than by the state had posted disclaimers with the Global Times editorial, saying the opinions did not reflect those of the companies.

It was on the Internet where the campaign to support the beleaguered journalists was reaching full bloom. Bloggers with large readerships, Han Han and Li Chengpeng, urged defiance of press censorship, and calls spread on microblogs for more rallies outside the newspaper offices on Tuesday.

It was unclear how many employees in the Southern Weekend newsroom had heeded calls by reporters for a strike to display their determination to resist censorship. A local journalist who went by the newspaper’s Beijing office on Monday said the building appeared to be open, but quiet. One employee at the site, where about 30 people work, told the journalist that the office was not on strike.

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting from Beijing. Mia Li contributed research from Guangzhou, China, and Shi Da from Beijing.

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Justin Bartha Is Dating Trainer Lia Smith

01/07/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Lia and Justin in Hawaii New Years Day

Pacific Coast News

Justin Bartha's "mystery woman" is in fact his girlfriend, trainer Lia Smith, a source reveals to PEOPLE.

The pair recently enjoyed a cozy trip to Smith's native Hawaii and were snapped basking in the sun on Maui on New Year's Day, which got people buzzing about her identity.

"They were very cute with each other," says an eyewitness. "They had their arms around each other and were kissing."

The couple also spent time with Smith's parents on Oahu. Bartha, who currently stars on The New Normal, was previously linked to Scarlett Johansson and dated Ashley Olsen for two years before breaking up in 2011.

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Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.

Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.

"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.

But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.

Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.

The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.

Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.

Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.

But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.

Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.

Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.

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Wall Street edges off five-year high, awaits earnings

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks lost ground on Monday, as investors drew back from recent gains that lifted the S&P 500 to a five-year high, in anticipation of sluggish growth in corporate profits.

Shares of financial companies dipped after a group of major U.S. banks agreed to pay a total of $8.5 billion to end a government inquiry into faulty mortgage foreclosures. The KBW bank index <.bkx>, a gauge of U.S. bank stocks, was down 0.3 percent.

Other sectors were hit as well, most notably energy and utilities. The S&P 500 energy sector index <.gspe> fell 0.8 percent and the utilities sector <.gspu> was off 1.1 percent.

The day's decline came a session after the S&P 500 finished at a five-year high, boosted by a budget deal and strong economic data. The S&P 500 rose 4.6 percent last week, the best weekly gain in more than a year.

"It's a little bit of taking some risk off the table ahead of profit season, you're not going to see anything all that great" on earnings, said Larry Peruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets Inc in Boston.

Earnings are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter's lackluster results, and analysts' current estimates are down sharply from where they were in October. Fourth-quarter earnings growth is expected to come in at 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Aluminum company Alcoa Inc begins the reporting season by announcing its results after Tuesday's market close. Alcoa shares fell 1.7 percent at $9.10.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> dropped 50.92 points, or 0.38 percent, to 13,384.29. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 4.58 points, or 0.31 percent, to 1,461.89. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> lost 2.84 points, or 0.09 percent, to 3,098.81.

Ten mortgage servicers - including Bank of America , Citigroup , JPMorgan , and Wells Fargo - agreed on Monday to pay $8.5 billion to end a case-by-case review of foreclosures required by U.S. regulators.

In a separate case, Bank of America also announced roughly $11.6 billion of settlements with mortgage finance company Fannie Mae and a $1.8 billion sale of collection rights on home loans.

The bank also entered into agreements with Nationstar Mortgage Holdings and Walter Investment Management to sell about $306 billion of residential mortgage servicing rights.

Bank of America shares lost 0.2 percent at $12.09 while Nationstar Mortgage Holdings jumped 16.8 percent to $38.83.

Citigroup shares were up 0.09 percent to $42.47, and Wells Fargo shares fell 0.5 percent to $34.77.

"The financials probably have the wind behind them now with a lot of the regulations coming out ... the market has to absorb a lot of the gains, and for that reason there's a pullback from this level," said Warren West, principal at Greentree Brokerage Services in Philadelphia.

Shares of U.S. jet maker Boeing Co dropped 2 percent after a Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft with no passengers on board caught fire at Boston's Logan International Airport on Monday morning.

Amazon.com shares hit their highest price ever at $269.22 after Morgan Stanley raised is rating on the stock. Shares were up 3.6 percent at $268.46.

Video-streaming service Netflix Inc shares gained 3.4 percent to $99.20 after it said it will carry previous seasons of some popular shows produced by Time Warner's Warner Bros Television.

Walt Disney Co stock fell 2.3 percent to $50.97. The company started an internal cost-cutting review several weeks ago that may include layoffs at its studio and other units, three people with knowledge of the effort told Reuters.

Volume was lower than average, as 4.78 billion shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq. This is well below the 2012 average of 6.42 billion per session.

Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 1,629 to 1,363, while on the Nasdaq decliners beat advancers 1,438 to 1,066.

(Reporting By Gabriel Debenedetti; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

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Syria President’s Defiant Words Dash Hopes for a Quick Peace

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In a battered neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, residents propped up a masked and uniformed effigy of President Bashar al-Assad.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Sounding defiant, confident and, to critics, out of touch with his people’s grievances, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used his first public address in six months to justify his harsh crackdown, rally his supporters to fight against his opponents and inform on them — and leave in tatters recent efforts toward a political resolution to the country’s bloody civil war.

Mr. Assad offered what he called a peace plan, including a new cabinet, a new constitution to replace the one adopted just last year in a widely dismissed reform package, and talks with officially tolerated opposition groups. But he ruled out any negotiations with the armed Syrian opposition, and pointedly ignored its demands that he step down, making his proposal a nonstarter for most of his opponents.

He sounded much as he did at the start of the uprising 21 months ago, dictating which opposition groups were worthy and labeling the rest terrorists and traitors. He gave no acknowledgment that the rebels have come to control large parts of the north and east of the country, nor that many ordinary Syrians continue to demand change in the face of a crackdown that has laid waste to neighborhoods and killed tens of thousands, nor that even longtime allies like Russia have signaled that Mr. Assad may be unable to defeat the insurgency.

He even dismissed as foreign interference the mediation efforts of the United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, the senior Algerian diplomat who visited Damascus on Dec. 24, warning of national disintegration if the two sides did not negotiate a solution.

“Everyone who comes to Syria knows that Syria accepts advice but not orders,” Mr. Assad told a cheering, chanting crowd at the Damascus Opera House, on Umayyad Square in the center of the capital, where residents said the security forces were deployed heavily starting the night before.

“He doesn’t seem to have moved an inch since summer 2011,” said Yezid Sayigh, an analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, noting that Mr. Assad gave “barely the slightest nod” to Mr. Brahimi’s proposals.

Coming after days of hints that Mr. Assad might at last be ready to negotiate, his defiant speech on Sunday promised trouble for both his friends and his enemies. Russia may find it harder to stave off international action against Syria, which it has done so far using its veto at the United Nations Security Council, as the chances for a political solution seem to recede.

Moreover, Mr. Assad’s defiance may prompt Mr. Brahimi to decline to continue his mission. That would present the “Friends of Syria,” the group of nations supporting the opposition — the United States and its Western allies, Turkey and some Arab countries — with an unpalatable choice: intervene more aggressively or risk allowing the conflict to drag on indefinitely.

“Assad is not letting the Friends of Syria off the hook by making it easy for them to declare victory and close the Syria file,” Mr. Sayigh said. “Now what will they do?”

The United Nations estimates that more than 60,000 people have died in the civil war, which began as a peaceful protest movement and turned into an armed struggle after security forces fired on demonstrators. Rebels have made gains in the north and east and in the Damascus suburbs, but Mr. Assad’s government has pushed back with deadly air and artillery strikes, and appears to be confident that it can hold the capital. Neither side appears ready to give up the prospect of military victory, though analysts say neither side is close to achieving it.

Mr. Assad’s defiant stance on Sunday “means we’re in for a long fight,” said Joshua Landis, a scholar on Syria and Mr. Assad’s minority sect, the Alawites, at the University of Oklahoma. “This is a dark, dark tunnel. There is no good ending to this. Assad believes he is winning.”

Victoria Nuland, the spokeswoman for the State Department, said in a statement that Mr. Assad’s speech was “yet another attempt by the regime to cling to power, and does nothing to advance the Syrian people’s goal of a political transition.” She said that even as Mr. Assad “speaks of dialogue, the regime is deliberately stoking sectarian tensions and continuing to kill its own people.”

Reporting was contributed by Hania Mourtada from Beirut; an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Ellen Barry from Moscow.

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Jordana Brewster Is 'Enamored' with the Idea of Having Twins

01/06/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Jordana Brewster has babies on the brain – yes, you read that right: plural.

The Dallas star, 32, who has been married to movie producer Andrew Form since 2007, tells Latina she "definitely" wants two kids and is "enamored" by the idea of having twins.

"My dad was a twin, so it runs in the family," she explains. "Fingers crossed. We're thinking about having kids but I don't know when it'll happen. I feel very ready now."

When the couple does eventually expand their family, the children will be raised in a loving home.

"We FaceTime all of the time," Brewster says, of keeping the romance alive long distance. "We love that. There are times when I just say, 'I need to see you now.' And so we FaceTime a lot, or I surprise him and visit him or he does the same. It's super important … Couples shouldn't be apart for too long. We've been married for five years now and we know how important that is because otherwise you just lose touch with each other."

A big part of their bond has come from the way Form inspires his wife on a professional level.

"It's so amazing to have a husband in the business who can challenge me and we can talk about his work and my work and understand each other in that way," Brewster says. "I love getting his feedback and he likes getting mine. And of course, that has pushed me more to consider producing in the future."

And she's not just talking about babies!

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Your medical chart could include exercise minutes

CHICAGO (AP) — Roll up a sleeve for the blood pressure cuff. Stick out a wrist for the pulse-taking. Lift your tongue for the thermometer. Report how many minutes you are active or getting exercise.

Wait, what?

If the last item isn't part of the usual drill at your doctor's office, a movement is afoot to change that. One recent national survey indicated only a third of Americans said their doctors asked about or prescribed physical activity.

Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest nonprofit health insurance plans, made a big push a few years ago to get its southern California doctors to ask patients about exercise. Since then, Kaiser has expanded the program across California and to several other states. Now almost 9 million patients are asked at every visit, and some other medical systems are doing it, too.

Here's how it works: During any routine check of vital signs, a nurse or medical assistant asks how many days a week the patient exercises and for how long. The number of minutes per week is posted along with other vitals at the top the medical chart. So it's among the first things the doctor sees.

"All we ask our physicians to do is to make a comment on it, like, 'Hey, good job,' or 'I noticed today that your blood pressure is too high and you're not doing any exercise. There's a connection there. We really need to start you walking 30 minutes a day,'" said Dr. Robert Sallis, a Kaiser family doctor. He hatched the vital sign idea as part of a larger initiative by doctors groups.

He said Kaiser doctors generally prescribe exercise first, instead of medication, and for many patients who follow through that's often all it takes.

It's a challenge to make progress. A study looking at the first year of Kaiser's effort showed more than a third of patients said they never exercise.

Sallis said some patients may not be aware that research shows physical inactivity is riskier than high blood pressure, obesity and other health risks people know they should avoid. As recently as November a government-led study concluded that people who routinely exercise live longer than others, even if they're overweight.

Zendi Solano, who works for Kaiser as a research assistant in Pasadena, Calif., says she always knew exercise was a good thing. But until about a year ago, when her Kaiser doctor started routinely measuring it, she "really didn't take it seriously."

She was obese, and in a family of diabetics, had elevated blood sugar. She sometimes did push-ups and other strength training but not anything very sustained or strenuous.

Solano, 34, decided to take up running and after a couple of months she was doing three miles. Then she began training for a half marathon — and ran that 13-mile race in May in less than three hours. She formed a running club with co-workers and now runs several miles a week. She also started eating smaller portions and buying more fruits and vegetables.

She is still overweight but has lost 30 pounds and her blood sugar is normal.

Her doctor praised the improvement at her last physical in June and Solano says the routine exercise checks are "a great reminder."

Kaiser began the program about three years ago after 2008 government guidelines recommended at least 2 1/2 hours of moderately vigorous exercise each week. That includes brisk walking, cycling, lawn-mowing — anything that gets you breathing a little harder than normal for at least 10 minutes at a time.

A recently published study of nearly 2 million people in Kaiser's southern California network found that less than a third met physical activity guidelines during the program's first year ending in March 2011. That's worse than results from national studies. But promoters of the vital signs effort think Kaiser's numbers are more realistic because people are more likely to tell their own doctors the truth.

Dr. Elizabeth Joy of Salt Lake City has created a nearly identical program and she expects 300 physicians in her Intermountain Healthcare network to be involved early this year.

"There are some real opportunities there to kind of shift patients' expectations about the value of physical activity on health," Joy said.

NorthShore University HealthSystem in Chicago's northern suburbs plans to start an exercise vital sign program this month, eventually involving about 200 primary care doctors.

Dr. Carrie Jaworski, a NorthShore family and sports medicine specialist, already asks patients about exercise. She said some of her diabetic patients have been able to cut back on their medicines after getting active.

Dr. William Dietz, an obesity expert who retired last year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said measuring a patient's exercise regardless of method is essential, but that "naming it as a vital sign kind of elevates it."

Figuring out how to get people to be more active is the important next step, he said, and could have a big effect in reducing medical costs.

___

Online:

Exercise: http://1.usa.gov/b6AkMa

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

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Alleged Ohio rapists may not get fair trial: defendant’s lawyer

(Reuters) – Two Ohio high-school football players accused of raping a teenage girl may not get a fair trial after a photo and video allegedly associated with the case were posted on the Internet by the computer hacking group Anonymous, a lawyer for one of the accused said on Friday.

Ma’lik Richmond and Trenton Mays, both 16 and members of the Steubenville High School football team, are charged with raping a 16-year-old fellow student last August, according to statements from their attorneys to local and national media.

Their juvenile court trial is scheduled for February in Steubenville, a city of 19,000 about 40 miles west of Pittsburgh.

The case shot to national prominence this week when Anonymous activists made public a picture allegedly of the rape victim, being carried by her wrists and ankles by two young men, and of a video that showed several other young men joking about an alleged assault.

Richmond’s lawyer, Walter Madison, said on CNN that his client was one of the young men in the photograph, but does not appear in the video.

But the picture “is out of context,” Madison said. “That young lady is not unconscious,” as has been widely reported.

“A right to a fair trial for these young men has been hijacked,” Madison said, adding that social media episodes such as this have become a major threat to a criminal defendant’s right to a fair trial.

“It’s very, very serious and fairness is essential to getting the right decision here,” he said.

Mays’ attorney Adam Nemann could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday. In an interview on Thursday with Columbus, Ohio, broadcaster WBNS-10TV, Nemann raised concerns about the effect the Anonymous postings could have on potential witnesses in the case.

“This media has become so astronomically ingrained on the Internet and within that society, I am concerned witnesses might not want to come forward at this point. I would be surprised now, if there weren’t witnesses now who might want to start taking the Fifth Amendment,” Nemann told the station.

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution offers protection against self-incrimination in criminal proceedings.

The case has also been a challenge for local officials because of conflicts of interest. Both the local prosecutor and police have close ties to the school that the defendants attend.

As a result, the case is being investigated and prosecuted by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office.

Interviewed on CNN on Friday, DeWine said it was not unusual for his office to prosecute or investigate cases in small towns where close ties within the community caused conflicts of interest to arise.

He also voiced concern about how social media may affect the case.

“This case needs to be tried not in the media, not in social media,” DeWine said.

He said Anonymous’ attempt to shame the alleged attackers had actually harmed the victim.

Not only is the victim hurt by the initial crime, but “every time something goes up on the Internet, the victim is victimized again,” DeWine said.

(Reporting by Dan Burns and Peter Rudegeair; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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Memo From London: Argentina’s Call for Return of Falkland Islands Causes a Stir

LONDON — They have barely 3,000 inhabitants and far more sheep than people. They are more than 8,700 miles from London. For much of the year, they are bitterly cold and wind-swept, with only open sea and ice between them and Antarctica. President Ronald Reagan, who tussled with Margaret Thatcher over them as he rarely did on any other issue that engaged the two leaders, described them once as “that little ice-cold bunch of land down there.”

But the Falkland Islands, the focus of a short war between Britain and Argentina in 1982, have been in the headlines again recently.

Politicians, newspapers and military leaders in both countries have been back at the barricades making the old arguments about who is the islands’ rightful owner. Their arguments suggest what has long been evident: nothing lasting was settled by the conflict that killed 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as 3 civilians on the islands.

The British newspaper The Guardian heralded the latest outburst in an editorial on Friday that struck an exhausted note. “Here we go again,” it said, tacitly acknowledging that the paper has been stuck in something of a rut of its own on the issue for years in its calls for a negotiated settlement.

As it was in 1982, few British politicians, and only a minority of mostly left-of-center opinion in Britain, have been ready to deviate from the unyielding stance that Mrs. Thatcher adopted. She sent a British naval task force to recapture the islands after the Argentine military dictatorship of Leopoldo Galtieri dispatched troops to overrun the meager British garrison there.

To many on the British left, there is little to be served by rehashing the old arguments that were set off when President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina wrote an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain on Thursday. It was published as an advertisement in The Guardian and another left-of-center British daily, The Independent.

The letter appeared on the 180th anniversary of Jan. 3, 1833, when an armed clash between the two nations took place on the islands. The episode has been settled on by Argentina as a watershed moment in a convoluted colonial story that goes back to the 16th century and involves competing claims to sovereignty by Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, which was the colonial power in Argentina until the country gained independence in 1816. In the statement that ran in the British papers, Mrs. Kirchner asserted that “Argentina was forcibly stripped of the Malvinas Islands” — Argentina’s name for the territory — in the murky 1833 episode. The clash involved a British sloop, an outgunned Argentine vessel and an Argentine commander’s submission to a British demand that he remove the remnants of a mutinous Argentine garrison from the islands.

Britain has always rebutted Argentine claims that the people who were expelled included Argentine civilians, and it contends that British sovereignty was established by a much earlier settlement, dating to the mid-18th century.

The Guardian, in its editorial, dismissed this as political window dressing, ultimately irrelevant to the present dispute. Mrs. Kirchner’s letter, it said, had more to do with a populist bid to revive her slumping popularity in Argentina than “anything a British brig-sloop did 180 years ago.” The newspaper added, “Any objective reader of the history of these islands would more likely conclude that this history is mixed, to say the least, and that the rival sovereignty claims are finely balanced.” The editorial urged the two countries to grapple with the issue diplomatically and to aim, initially, for an agreement on sharing in the bounty of fisheries and in recently discovered offshore oil reserves that some economists believe could turn into a 21st-century bonanza for the islands.

Mr. Cameron, though, is having none of it. Within hours of Mrs. Kirchner’s statement, he went before television cameras, saying that the future of the islands would be determined by the Falkland Islanders and that they would make their feelings known in a referendum to be held in March on the islands’ political status.

That was the expedient Britain adopted last year when Mrs. Kirchner campaigned in Argentina, and at the United Nations in New York, for a reopening of the sovereignty issue on the 30th anniversary of the 1982 war.

“As long as they choose to stay with the United Kingdom, they have my 100 percent backing,” Mr. Cameron said.

For the British leader, it is a safe bet. About 70 percent of the islanders are of British descent, and visitors there say there is no more than a scattering of support for an Argentine takeover. Tying the Falklands’ future to the islanders’ choice leaves Britain essentially where it was under Mrs. Thatcher. She remains a revered figure for Mr. Cameron, not only for her conservative stewardship at 10 Downing Street but also for her success in turning the Falklands issue into her second general-election victory, in 1983. It is a precedent unlikely to be lost on the current prime minister as he contemplates the general election he must face in 2015.

If there is a worry for Mr. Cameron, it lies in the possibility that Argentina, with popular passions heightened by Mrs. Kirchner, may make another attempt to seize the islands by force. British military commanders say they consider that highly unlikely, since Argentina’s armed forces have been barely modernized since the military junta there collapsed in the wake of the 1982 conflict, and they lack the power they had then to project air and naval power.

British forces on the islands have been expensively upgraded, with 800 troops, a new military airfield equipped to take heavy transport jets, a squadron of Typhoon fighter-bombers and, at times of tension, a nuclear attack submarine prowling the South Atlantic.

But Britain miscalculated before, in 1982, when Mrs. Thatcher’s government brushed aside diplomatic warnings of an invasion.

“I never, never expected the Argentines to invade the Falklands head-on,” she told an inquiry after the war, according to secret cabinet papers from the period that were released in late December. “It was such a stupid thing to do, as events happened, such a stupid thing even to contemplate doing.”

The papers included another kind of warning. Little noticed among the newly published documents was the last dispatch of Britain’s ambassador to Argentina when the Falklands invasion took place.

The envoy, Anthony Williams, who was never assigned as an ambassador again, argued eloquently that Britain had been wrong to regard the Argentine invasion as “a simple act of brigandage.” He said that although the country had “its share of vandals, hooligans and roughs,” it also had a case that the ambassador suggested could be compared to the seizure of the Suez Canal from its British and French owners in 1956 by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

“If our rightness is not so absolute as it now seems to us, no more is Argentine wrongness,” he said.

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Bethenny Frankel Divorcing Jason Hoppy

By Sarah Michaud

01/05/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy

Albert Michael/Startraks

It's official – Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy's marriage is over.

Having announced a separation over the holidays, the reality star began the divorce process by filing earlier this week in New York, TMZ reports.

"It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating," Frankel, 42, had said in a statement Dec. 23. "This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family."

The split comes after months of rumors that the pair – who married in 2010 and are parents to daughter Bryn, 2½ – were on the rocks.

"Bethenny is devastated," a friend tells PEOPLE.

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