Analysis: Amazon’s Christmas faux pas shows risks in the cloud

(Reuters) – A Christmas Eve glitch traced to Amazon.com Inc that shuttered Netflix for users from Canada to South America highlights the risks that companies take when they move their datacenter operations to the cloud.

While the high-profile failure – at least the third this year – may cause some Amazon Web Services customers to consider alternatives, it is unlikely to severely hurt a fast-growing business for the cloud-computing pioneer that got into the sector in 2006 and has historically experienced few outages.

“The benefits still outweigh the risks,” said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.

“When it comes to the cloud, Amazon has got it right.”

The latest service failure comes at a critical time for Amazon, which is betting that AWS can become a significant profit generator even if the economy continues to stagnate. Moreover, it is increasingly targeting larger corporate clients that have traditionally shied away from moving critical applications onto AWS.

AWS, which Amazon started more than six years ago, provides data storage, computing power and other technology services from remote locations that group thousands of servers across areas than can span whole football fields. Their early investment made it a pioneer in what is now known as cloud computing.

Executives said last month at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas they could envision the division, which lists Pinterest, Shazam and Spotify among its fast-growing clients, becoming its biggest business, outpacing even its online retail juggernaut. Evercore analyst Ken Sena expects AWS revenue to jump 45 percent a year, from about $ 2 billion this year to $ 20 billion in 2018.

The service has boomed because it is cheap, relatively easy to use, and can be shut off, scaled back or ramped up quickly depending on companies’ needs. As the longest-running player in the game, Amazon now boasts the widest array of datacenter products and services, plus a broader stable of clients than rivals like Google Inc, Rackspace Inc and Salesforce.com Inc.

Outages such as the one that took down Netflix and other websites on the eve of one of the biggest U.S. holidays are part and parcel of the nascent business, analysts say. Moreover, outages have been a problem long before the age of cloud computing, with glitches within corporate datacenters and telecommunications hubs triggering myriad service disruptions.

COMING SOON: POST-MORTEM

Amazon’s latest service failure comes months after two high-profile outages that hit Netflix and other popular websites such as photo-sharing service Instagram and Pinterest. Industry executives, however, say its downtimes tend to attract more attention because of its outsized market footprint.

Netflix – which CEO Reed Hastings said relies on AWS for 95 percent of its datacenter needs – would not comment on whether they were pondering alternatives. Analysts say the video streaming giant is unlikely to try a large-scale switch, partly because all cloud providers experience outages.

“Despite a steady stream of these service outages, the demand for cloud services offered by AWS, Google, etc. continues to escalate because these services are still reliable enough to satisfy customer expectations,” said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of consultancy ThinkStrategies Inc.

“They offer cost-savings and elasticities that are too attractive for companies to ignore.”

But “Netflix and other organizations which rely on AWS will have to reexamine how they configure their services and allocate their service requirements across multiple providers to mitigate over-dependency and risks.”

AWS spokeswoman Rena Lunak said the outage was traced to a problem affecting customers at its oldest data center, run out of northern Virginia, which was linked also to the June failure.

The latest glitch involved a service known as Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically allocates incoming Web traffic across multiple servers in order to boost the performance of a website. She declined to provide further details about the outage, saying the company would be publishing a full post-mortem within days.

AWS has traditionally been used by start-up tech companies and smaller businesses that anticipate rapid growth in online traffic but are unwilling or unable to shell out on IT equipment and management upfront.

The company has more recently started winning more and more business from larger corporations. It has also set up a unit that caters to government agencies.

Regardless, Amazon’s clientele would do well not to put all their eggs in one basket, analysts say.

“Service outages do occur, but they are not common enough to cause users of these services to abandon today’s Cloud service providers at significant rates. In fact, every major Cloud service provider has experienced outages,” Kaplan said.

“Therefore, organizations that rely on these services are putting backup and recovery systems and protocols in place to mitigate the risks of future outages.”

(Additional reporting; editing by Edwin Chan and Richard Chang)

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DC police investigating ‘Meet the Press’ incident

WASHINGTON (AP) — District of Columbia police say they are investigating an incident in which NBC News journalist David Gregory displayed what he described as a high-capacity ammunition magazine on “Meet the Press.”

Gun laws in the nation’s capital generally restrict the possession of high-capacity magazines, regardless of whether the device is attached to a firearm. Gregory held up the magazine as a prop for Sunday’s segment, apparently to make a point during an interview, even though D.C. police say NBC had already been advised not to use it in the show.

“NBC contacted (the Metropolitan Police Department) inquiring if they could utilize a high capacity magazine for their segment. NBC was informed that possession of a high capacity magazine is not permissible and their request was denied. This matter is currently being investigated,” police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump said in a written statement. She declined to comment further.

While interviewing National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre for Sunday’s program, Gregory held up an object that he said was a magazine that could hold 30 rounds.

“Here is a magazine for ammunition that carries 30 bullets. Now, isn’t it possible that if we got rid of these, if we replaced them and said, ‘Well, you can only have a magazine that carries five bullets or ten bullets,’ isn’t it just possible that we could reduce the carnage in a situation like Newtown?’” Gregory asked, referring to the December 14 shooting in which a gunman massacred 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

LaPierre replied: “I don’t believe that’s going to make one difference. There are so many different ways to evade that even if you had that” ban.

It was not clear how or where Gregory obtained the magazine, and an NBC News spokeswoman declined to comment Wednesday.

“Meet the Press” is generally taped in Washington.

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British Frozen Dinners Beat TV Chefs’ Recipes For Nutrition

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Former President George H.W. Bush in intensive care

HOUSTON (AP) — Former President George H.W. Bush has been admitted to the intensive care unit at a Houston hospital "following a series of setbacks including a persistent fever," but he is alert and talking to medical staff, his spokesman said Wednesday.

Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston, said in a brief email that Bush was admitted to the ICU at Methodist Hospital on Sunday. He said doctors are cautiously optimistic about his treatment and that the former president "remains in guarded condition."

No other details were released about his medical condition, but McGrath said Bush is surrounded by family.

The 88-year-old has been hospitalized since Nov. 23, when he was admitted for a lingering cough related to bronchitis after having been in and out of the hospital for complications related to the illness.

Earlier Wednesday, McGrath said a fever that kept Bush in the hospital over Christmas had gotten worse and that doctors had put him on a liquids-only diet.

"It's an elevated fever, so it's actually gone up in the last day or two," McGrath told The Associated Press. "It's a stubborn fever that won't go away."

But he said the cough that initially brought Bush to the hospital has improved.

Bush, the oldest former U.S. president, was visited on Christmas by his wife, Barbara, his son, Neil, and Neil's wife, Maria, and a grandson, McGrath said. Bush's daughter, Dorothy, was expected to arrive Wednesday in Houston from Bethesda, Md. The 41st president has also been visited twice by his sons, George W. Bush, the 43rd president, and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida.

Bush and his wife live in Houston during the winter and spend their summers at a home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

The former president was a naval aviator in World War II — at one point the youngest in the Navy — and was shot down over the Pacific. He achieved notoriety in retirement for skydiving on at least three of his birthdays since leaving the White House in 1992.

___

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Toronto reaches skyward, but how dark the clouds?

TORONTO (Reuters) – Barry Fenton walked to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows in his 30th-floor uptown Toronto penthouse suite and declared, “This is the best view of the city.”

To the south, a mass of steel-and-glass skyscrapers glinted in the bright autumn sun. Several cranes were in motion on unfinished buildings, a common sight in a city in the midst of a residential building boom.

“If you look around the core, every building you look at has a different look to it, a different ambience,” said the energetic co-founder of Lanterra Developments, one of the city’s most active builders. “That’s important.”

Fenton, 56, says he is confident the city’s condominium market will remain strong — despite warnings that it is all moving too far, too fast — and has an ambitious lineup for future development. And he is not alone in his optimism.

Toronto‘s seams are bursting with new condo and hotel towers designed by star architects like Frank Gehry and built by famed developers like Donald Trump.

But Fenton and others who see Toronto emerging from its “pokey” past — as a columnist in the Globe and Mail recently described it — face some formidable obstacles: an infrastructure buckling under soaring density rates, the laws of supply and demand and preservationists who say too many new towers are destroying the city’s character.

Canada’s central bank drew a bead on the city of 2.6 million this month in its weighty “Financial System Review,” warning of “potential future supply imbalances” in the condo market.

The Bank of Canada noted that the number of unsold condominiums in pre-construction has doubled, to 14,000, over the past year.

Greater Toronto home sales have slowed after years of steady increases. Sales fell 16 percent in November from the same month a year ago, according to the Toronto Real East Board. So far, however, prices are flattening, not falling, as some analysts have predicted.

In defiance of warnings by the central bank and economists, two mega-projects were unveiled within days of each other in October — a three-tower condo complex to be designed by Gehry and a multi-tower office project that includes a massive casino.

RACE TO THE TOP

More skyscrapers — 147 of them — are being built in Toronto than anywhere in North America, according to Emporis, the German data provider. That is twice as many as in New York, a city with about three times the population.

Toronto is getting taller fast. Fifteen buildings that will be more than 150 meters (492 feet) high are under construction, more than anywhere in the western hemisphere.

The recently completed Trump International Hotel topped out at 277 meters, just shy of Toronto’s tallest skyscraper, the 72-story First Canadian Place, which is 298 meters. That height could be exceeded by a couple of major projects on the drawing boards, including the Mirvish project.

(The city’s tallest freestanding structure, however, is the CN Tower, which soars over Toronto at 553 meters.)

“Toronto is creating a very sustainable future by building condos downtown,” said Daniel Libeskind, the American architect, who was in Toronto in October for a ceremony for one of his latest projects, the 57-story L Tower, with its sweeping, curvaceous, design that rises above the city’s modernist Sony Center for Performing Arts.

“It fights urban sprawl and brings people into the heart of the city.”

While building in big American cities and in Western Europe cratered following the financial crisis four years ago, Toronto never stopped booming. Demand for residential space has been strong, and while the office market has also been healthy, most of the new developments have been for condo projects.

Lanterra’s Fenton said his company has built some 9,000 condominium units in Toronto over the past 10 years and now has “in the hopper” up to 6 million square feet of property in downtown Toronto that is being rezoned for new projects.

Lanterra gained prominence over the past five years for the development of Maple Leaf Square, which included two condo towers, a hotel and office space, near the city’s hockey shrine, Air Canada Center, on land that had sat vacant for years.

Now it is “one of the hottest places to be,” said Fenton.

“ONE TOWER LEADS TO ANOTHER”

Some worry that Toronto can’t handle much more development.

“We have accumulated a serious infrastructure deficit,” wrote Ken Greenberg, a Toronto architect, in the Globe and Mail in October. “We have failed to make the investments in public transit that are urgently needed. Our narrow sidewalks and poorly designed streets are already jammed.”

He criticized the city officials and developers for a lack of coordinated planning. “One tower leads to another,” he said.

Despite decades of debate about transportation policy, Toronto has just two subway lines, a fleet of charming but lumbering streetcar lines and crumbling roadways.

Commuters in Toronto spend at least 80 minutes in traffic a day, on average — worse than what commuters face in London or Los Angeles — according to the Toronto Board of Trade.

Toronto’s City Planning Department did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

There is also concern about soaring neighborhood density rates. The city’s waterfront area has seen the most growth. Its population has soared 134 percent in a decade and is up 66 percent in the past five years, to 43,295, according to city data.

Toronto’s aging energy grid is strained. In July, downtown Toronto endured an eight-hour blackout after a transformer blew due to high demand. There was a similar outage last January.

THE MEGA-PROJECTS

Now two of the most ambitious projects the city has ever seen are being floated.

First out of the gate was theater impresario David Mirvish, who with his father, the late Ed Mirvish, helped create Toronto’s vibrant arts and theater scene.

In early October, Mirvish unveiled a plan for three condominium towers, with up to 85 floors each, that would be the city’s tallest buildings.

A podium at the buildings’ base would house two museums, including one for the Mirvish family’s contemporary art collection.

The Mirvish buildings would be designed by Gehry, the celebrated Canadian-born architect whose 76-story 8 Spruce Street residential tower was just completed in New York.

“These towers can become a symbol of what Toronto can be,” the 83-year-old Gehry said at project’s unveiling. “I am not building condominiums, I am building three sculptures for people to live in.”

Two weeks later, Oxford Properties Group, a Canadian developer with a $ 20 billion global real estate portfolio, announced a $ 3 billion makeover of the downtown convention center, just south of the Mirvish and Gehry project. It envisions a casino, two hotel towers and two office towers that would be among the tallest in the city.

Adam Vaughan, a city councilor whose district would encompass both projects, said a lot more planning is needed. He had kinder words for the Mirvish proposal — “it’s a transformative and astonishing proposal” — than for Oxford’s project, which he called “all out of proportion.”

“It’s time to have a really smart conversation about how we are building this neighborhood because there is a hell of lot of density arriving not just with this project but with all the projects that have been approved,” he said in an interview.

AT THE KIT KAT

Al Carbone, owner for the past three decades of the Kit Kat restaurant, doesn’t think people like Vaughan are listening to him, as the councilor and other politicians are not heeding the growing concerns about the rapid pace of development.

He said buildings are springing up too close to lot lines, creating jammed sidewalks and alleyways. And the sun does not shine on the streets like it once did.

He supports the Mirvish project, which would preserve his street, known as Restaurant Row. But he is battling a separate 47-story building that would go up steps away from his restaurant.

The plan, which still must be approved, would retain the historic facades of buildings on the street, which Carbone believes will destroy the character of the row.

“It’s a tough battle,” said Carbone, who launched the website SaveRestaurantrow.com to drum up support in opposition to the project. “You can’t have a condo on every corner.”

WHERE IS TORONTO HEADED?

Some believe Toronto is at a crossroads as developers, politicians and citizens debate the rapid changes the city’s urban landscape.

The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee dismissed the idea that the development was somehow bad for the city in a column in October, saying the condo boom “has transformed our once-pokey downtown into a vibrant, around-the-clock urban community.”

David Lieberman, an architect who also teaches at the University of Toronto’s architectural school, agrees the new developments have been good for the city, but he is not sure the city’s citizens are ready for it.

“We have such an excellent opportunity to get things right, but there is the Canadian conservatism,” Lieberman said, sipping coffee in his studio in an old downtown Toronto house. “Canadians in their city building are not risk takers.”

(Reporting By Russ Blinch. Editing by Janet Guttsman and Douglas Royalty)

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NORAD says record number of calls to track Santa

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (AP) — Most of the thousands of children who call the annual Santa-tracking operation at a Colorado Air Force Base on Christmas Eve ask the usual questions: “Where’s Santa, and when will he get here?”

So volunteer Sara Berghoff was caught off-guard Monday when a child called to see if Santa could be especially kind this year to the families affected by the Connecticut school shooting.

“I’m from Newtown, Connecticut, where the shooting was,” she remembers the child asking. “Is it possible that Santa can bring extra presents so I can deliver them to the families that lost kids?”

Sara, just 13 herself, was surprised but gathered her thoughts quickly. “If I can get ahold of him, I’ll try to get the message to him,” she told the child.

Sara was one of hundreds of volunteers at NORAD Tracks Santa who answered thousands of calls, program spokeswoman Marisa Novobilski said. Spokeswoman 1st Lt. Stacey Fenton said that as of midnight Tuesday, trackers answered more than 111,000 calls, breaking last year’s record of 107,000.

First lady Michelle Obama, who is spending the holidays with her family in Hawaii, also joined in answering calls as she has in recent years. She spent about 30 minutes talking with children from across the country, telling some who asked that her favorite toys growing up were Barbie dolls and an Easy Bake oven.

She also received an invitation to visit an 11-year-old boy in Fort Worth, Texas, and a request to put her husband on the phone. “He’s not here right now. But you know what, I will tell him you asked about him. OK?” she replied.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint U.S.-Canada command responsible for protecting the skies over both nations, tracks Santa from its home at Peterson Air Force Base.

NORAD and its predecessor have been fielding Christmas Eve phone calls from children — and a few adults — since 1955. That’s when a newspaper ad listed the wrong phone number for kids to call Santa. Callers ended up getting the Continental Air Defense Command, which later became NORAD. CONAD commanders played along, and the ritual has been repeated every year since.

After 57 years, NORAD can predict what most kids will ask. Its 11-page playbook for volunteers includes a list of nearly 20 questions and answers, including how old is Santa (at least 16 centuries) and has Santa ever crashed into anything (no).

But kids still manage to ask the unexpected, including, “Does Santa leave presents for dogs?”

A sampling of anecdotes from the program this year:

___

THE REAL DEAL: A young boy called to ask if Santa was real.

Air Force Maj. Jamie Humphries, who took the call, said, “I’m 37 years old, and I believe in Santa, and if you believe in him as well, then he must be real.”

The boy turned from the phone and yelled to others in the room, “I told you guys he was real!”

___

DON’T WORRY, HE’LL FIND YOU: Glenn Barr took a call from a 10-year-old who wasn’t sure if he would be sleeping at his mom’s house or his dad’s and was worried about whether Santa would find him.

“I told him Santa would know where he was and not to worry,” Barr said.

Another child asked if he was on the nice list or the naughty list.

“That’s a closely guarded secret, and only Santa knows,” Barr replied.

___

TOYS IN HEAVEN: A boy who called from Missouri asked when Santa would drop off toys in heaven.

His mother got on the line and explained to Jennifer Eckels, who took the call, that the boy’s younger sister died this year.

“He kept saying ‘in heaven,’” Eckels said. She told him, “I think Santa headed there first thing.”

___

BEST OF: Choice questions and comments wound up posted on a flip chart.

“Big sister wanted to add her 3-year-old brother to the naughty list,” one read.

“Are there police elves?” said another.

“How much to adopt one of Santa’s reindeer?”

“What’s the best way to booby-trap the living room to trap Santa?”

“When you see Santa, tell him hello for me, I never see him.”

“How does Santa make iPads?”

____

INTERNATIONAL FLAVOR: NORAD got calls from 220 countries and territories last year, and non-English-speakers called this year as well.

Volunteers who speak other languages get green Santa hats and a placard listing their languages so organizers can find them quickly.

“Need a Spanish speaker!” one organizer called as he rushed out of one of three phone rooms.

___

HE KNOWS WHEN YOU’RE AWAKE: At NORAD’s suggestion, volunteers often tell callers that Santa won’t drop off the presents until all the kids in the home are asleep.

“Ohhhhhhh,” said an 8-year-old from Illinois, as if trying to digest a brand-new fact.

“I’m going to be asleep by 4 o’clock,” said a child from Virginia.

“Thank you so much for that information,” said a grateful mom from Michigan.

___

CHRISTMAS EVE IN AFGHANISTAN: Five U.S. service personnel answered calls from Afghanistan for about 90 minutes through a conferencing hookup.

“They had a great time,” said Novobilski, the program spokeswoman.

NORAD wanted to set up a call center in Afghanistan but that proved too complex, she said.

___

HEY, MR. ELF: “Mr. Elf,” said one caller, “This is Adam, and I’ve been really good this year.”

___

FOR GEARHEADS: For people who want to know the specs of Santa’s sleigh, NORAD offers a trove of tidbits, including:

Weight at takeoff: 75,000 GD (gumdrops).

Propulsion: 9 RP (reindeer power).

Fuel: Hay, oats and carrots (for reindeer).

Emissions: Classified.

___

Online:

Track Santa online at http://www.noradsanta.org

___

Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP

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Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide

About one in three children in the U.S. are now overweight, and since the 1980s the number of children who are obese has more than tripled. But a new study of 26.7 million young children from low-income families shows that in this group of kids, the tidal wave of obesity might finally be receding.Being obese as a child not only increases the risk of early-life health problems, such as joint problems, pre-diabetes and social stigmatization, but it also dramatically increases the likelihood of being obese later in life, which can lead to chronic diseases, including cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Children as young as 2 years of age can be obese–and even extremely obese. Early childhood obesity rates, which bring higher health care costs throughout a kid’s life, have been especially high among lower-income families.”This is the first national study to show that the prevalence of obesity and extreme obesity among young U.S. children may have begun to decline,” the researchers noted in a brief report published online December 25 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. (Reports earlier this year suggested that childhood obesity rates were dropping in several U.S. cities.)The study examined rates of obesity (body mass index calculated by age and gender to be in the 95th percentile or higher–for example, a BMI above 20 for a 2-year-old male–compared with reference growth charts) and extreme obesity (BMI of more than 120 percent above that of the 95th percentile of the reference populations) in children ages 2 to 4 in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The researchers, led by Liping Pan, of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, combed through 12 years of data (1998 to 2010) from the Pediatric Nutritional Surveillance System, which includes information on roughly half of all children on the U.S. who are eligible for federal health care and nutrition assistance.A subtle but important shift in early childhood obesity rates in this low-income population seems to have begun in 2003. Obesity rates increased from 13.05 percent in 1998 to 15.21 percent in 2003. Soon, however, obesity rates began decreasing, reaching 14.94 percent by 2010. Extreme obesity followed a similar pattern, increasing from 1.75 percent to 2.22 percent from 1998 to 2003, but declining to 2.07 percent by 2010.Although these changes might seem small, the number of children involved makes for huge health implications. For example, each drop of just one tenth of a percentage point represents some 26,700 children in the study population alone who are no longer obese or extremely obese. And if these trends are occurring in the rest of the population, the long-term health and cost implications are massive.Public health agencies and the Obama Administration have made battling childhood obesity a priority, although these findings suggest that early childhood obesity rates, at least, were already beginning to decline nearly a decade ago. Some popular prevention strategies include encouraging healthier eating (by reducing intake of highly processed and high-sugar foods and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption) and increased physical activity (both at school and at home).The newly revealed trends “indicate modest recent progress of obesity prevention among young children,” the authors noted. “These finding may have important health implications because of the lifelong health risks of obesity and extreme obesity in early childhood.”

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Newtown celebrates Christmas amid signs of mourning

NEWTOWN, Conn. - Newtown celebrated Christmas amid piles of snow-covered teddy bears and heaps of flowers as volunteers manned a 24-hour candlelight vigil in memory of the 20 children and six adults shot to death in the second-largest school shooting in U.S. history.

Well-wishers from around the country showed up Tuesday morning to hang ornaments on memorial Christmas trees, while police officers from around Connecticut took extra shifts to give local police a day off.

"It's a nice thing that they can use us this way," Ted Latiak, a police detective from Greenwich, Connecticut, said as he and a fellow detective came out of a store with bagels and coffee for other officers.

A steady stream of residents, some in pyjamas, relit candles that had been extinguished in an overnight snowstorm. Others dropped off toys and fought back tears at a huge sidewalk memorial filled with stuffed animals, poems, flowers, posters and cards.

In the morning, resident Joanne Brunetti watched over 26 candles that had been lit at midnight in honour of those slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She and her husband, Bill, signed up for a three-hour shift and erected a tent to ensure that the flames never went out throughout the day.

"You have to do something and you don't know what to do, you know? You really feel very helpless in this situation," she said. "My thought is if we were all this nice to each other all the time maybe things like this wouldn't happen."

Julian Revie played "Silent Night" on a piano on the sidewalk at the downtown memorial. Revie, from Ottawa, Canada, was visiting the area at the time of the shootings. He found a piano online and chose to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day playing for the people of Newtown.

"It was such a mood of respectful silence," said Revie. "But yesterday being Christmas Eve and today being Christmas Day, I thought now it's time for some Christmas carols for the children."

At a town hall memorial, Faith Leonard waved to people driving by and handed out Christmas cookies and children's gifts. She had driven from Arizona, at almost the other end of the country, to volunteer on Christmas morning alone.

"I guess my thought was if I could be here helping out, maybe one person would be able to spend more time with their family or grieve in the way they needed to," Leonard said.

Many residents attended Christmas Eve services and spent Tuesday morning at home with their families. Others attended church services in search of a new beginning.

At St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, which eight of the child victims of the massacre attended, the pastor told parishioners that "today is the day we begin everything all over again."

Recalling the events of Dec. 14, the Rev. Robert Weiss said: "The moment the first responder broke through the doors, we knew good always overcomes evil."

"We know Christmas in a way we never ever thought we would know it," Weiss said. "We need a little Christmas and we've been given it."

Police have yet to offer a theory about a possible motive for gunman Adam Lanza's rampage. The 20-year-old resident killed his mother in her bed before carrying out the massacre and killing himself.

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Bolivia’s Morales visits Cuba after Chavez surgery

HAVANA (AP) — Bolivian President Evo Morales has made a lightning trip to Havana where key ally Hugo Chavez is convalescing after cancer surgery.

Morales did not speak to foreign journalists during his weekend visit. Cuban state-run media didn’t confirm that he visited Chavez, but said he came “to express his support” for the Venezuelan president. The Cuban government had invited media to cover Morales’ arrival Saturday and departure Sunday but withdrew the invitation with no explanation.

Photos released by Cuban media showed President Raul Castro greeting Morales at the airport in Havana.

Morales aides said Monday he planned to make a statement later about Chavez.

Chavez underwent on Dec. 11 his fourth cancer-related operation since last year, two months after winning reelection to a six-year term. Venezuelan officials say his condition is stable.

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Instagram furor triggers first class action lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook‘s Instagram photo sharing service has been hit with what appears to be the first civil lawsuit to result from changed service terms that prompted howls of protest last week.

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court on Friday, a California Instagram user leveled breach of contract and other claims against the company.

“We believe this complaint is without merit and we will fight it vigorously,” Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an e-mail.

Instagram, which allows people to add filters and effects to photos and share them easily on the Internet, was acquired by Facebook earlier this year for $ 715 million.

In announcing revised terms of service last week, Instagram spurred suspicions that it would sell user photos without compensation. It also announced a mandatory arbitration clause, forcing users to waive their rights to participate in a class action lawsuit except under very limited circumstances.

The current terms of service, in effect through mid-January, contain no such liability shield.

The backlash prompted Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom to retreat partially a few days later, deleting language about displaying photos without compensation.

However, Instagram kept language that gave it the ability to place ads in conjunction with user content, and saying “that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such.” It also kept the mandatory arbitration clause.

The lawsuit, filed by San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk, says customers who do not agree with Instagram’s terms can cancel their profile but then forfeit rights to photos they had previously shared on the service.

“In short, Instagram declares that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law and if you don’t like it, you can’t stop us,’” the lawsuit says.

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who had criticized Instagram, said he was pleased that the company rolled back some of the advertising terms and agreed to better explain their plans in the future.

However, he said the new terms no longer contain language which had explicitly promised that private photos would remain private. Facebook had engendered criticism in the past, Opsahl said, for changing settings so that the ability to keep some information private was no longer available.

“Hopefully, Instagram will learn from that experience and refrain from removing privacy settings,” Opsahl said.

The civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Lucy Funes, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated vs. Instagram Inc., 12-cv-6482.

(Reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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