Lady Gaga Cancels Born This Way Ball Tour Due to Severe Injury

02/13/2013 at 08:50 PM EST

It's a somber week for Lady Gaga – and her Little Monsters.

Following Tuesday's Facebook announcement that she was "devastated and sad" because she couldn't walk and had to postpone several Born This Way Ball concerts, the pop star, 26, has officially canceled the remaining dates of her world tour.

"After additional tests this morning to review the severity of the issue, it has been determined that Lady Gaga has a labral tear of the right hip," the singer's rep told PEOPLE Wednesday in a statement. "She will need surgery to repair the problem, followed by strict down time to recover. This unfortunately, will force her to cancel the tour, so she can heal."

Refunds for the cancelled performances will be available at point of purchase starting on Thursday.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," she wrote the previous day of postponing the dates. "I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

Get well, Gaga!

•Reporting by CHUCK ARNOLD

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Clues to why most survived China melamine scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists wondering why some children and not others survived one of China's worst food safety scandals have uncovered a suspect: germs that live in the gut.

In 2008, at least six babies died and 300,000 became sick after being fed infant formula that had been deliberately and illegally tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. There were some lingering puzzles: How did it cause kidney failure, and why wasn't everyone equally at risk?

A team of researchers from the U.S. and China re-examined those questions in a series of studies in rats. In findings released Wednesday, they reported that certain intestinal bacteria play a crucial role in how the body handles melamine.

The intestines of all mammals teem with different species of bacteria that perform different jobs. To see if one of those activities involves processing melamine, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Shanghai Jiao Tong University gave lab rats antibiotics to kill off some of the germs — and then fed them melamine.

The antibiotic-treated rats excreted twice as much of the melamine as rats that didn't get antibiotics, and they experienced fewer kidney stones and other damage.

A closer look identified why: A particular intestinal germ — named Klebsiella terrigena — was metabolizing melamine to create a more toxic byproduct, the team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Previous studies have estimated that fewer than 1 percent of healthy people harbor that bacteria species. A similar fraction of melamine-exposed children in China got sick, the researchers wrote. But proving that link would require studying stool samples preserved from affected children, they cautioned.

Still, the research is pretty strong, said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the new study.

More importantly, "this paper adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that microbes in the body play a significant role in our response to toxicity and in our health in general," Gilbert said.

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Christopher Dorner hid in plain sight

To track Christopher Dorner, police from dozens of agencies chased tips across multiple states and into Mexico. But it appears now that he found a hiding place where searchers were thickest.

It is unclear how long Dorner, 33, was hunkered down in the cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive, in the snowy mountains near Big Bear. But the cabin was so close to the manhunt command post and to an adjacent press area that countless police and reporters would have fallen in his line of vision.

Questions abounded Wednesday about how Dorner managed to evade capture at the very center of the manhunt, a day after he apparently died in another cabin nearby during a police siege.

Authorities are trying to confirm whether charred remains found in the cabin, which caught fire after police lobbed incendiary tear gas inside, belonged to Dorner.

Authorities declared the manhunt over Wednesday. And the Los Angeles Police Department, which had been on frequent tactical alerts, has resumed normal operations. Most of the protective details have been called off the 50 or so families who were threatened in an online manifesto police say Dorner wrote.

Dorner, an ex-LAPD officer embittered by his firing, killed the daughter of a retired LAPD captain, her fiance and two law officers during a nine-day rampage that began in Irvine, police say.

On Feb. 7, authorities found the smoking wreckage of Dorner's Nissan Titan in the Big Bear area, triggering a massive search. Could Dorner, who reportedly bragged about his military and survivalist skills, survive on the cold mountain? Could he have staged the burning truck as a diversion, and already be hundreds of miles away? Was he dead?

San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department officials said the search included more than 600 cabins over eight square miles in the Big Bear area, where many of the structures are empty vacation homes. But Jeanne Kelly, who lives blocks from where Dorner was apparently holed up, said searchers never knocked on her door.

"I think if they searched every house, they probably would've found him," said Kelly, 61. "I hate to knock them."

Jim Rose lives half a mile from the command center, and said searchers never knocked on his door either. "One friend said 'OK, so much for the inspection,' " said Rose, 78.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, sheriff's officials defended the search. They said deputies checked the general area extensively and said they did not identify signs of forced entry at that particular cabin.

Officials said the cabin was last rented Feb. 6, a day before Dorner's truck was found burning nearby.

Jack Gaston and his wife, Donna, said they are happy the search is over and hope life will return to normal on the mountain, where roads were closed and residents passed through multiple police checkpoints over the last week.

They said they were shocked that Dorner had still been in the area. "We figured he was five states away from here," Donna Gaston said.

The mayhem began Feb. 3, when Monica Quan, daughter of a retired LAPD captain, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, were found shot to death in an Irvine parking garage.

Police soon found a Facebook manifesto believed to be Dorner's, which vowed "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against police and their families for what he called his unfair firing from the LAPD.

On Feb. 7, hours after apparently trying to steal a boat in Point Loma, Dorner opened fire on two Riverside officers, killing one of them, Michael Crain. In Torrance, police mistakenly shot at two trucks wrongly believed to be Dorner's, hitting a 71-year-old woman in the back.

Then police found Dorner's burning pickup truck and converged en masse on the Big Bear area. On Tuesday morning, two housecleaners entered the condominium on Club View Drive where Dorner was hiding. Police say Dorner tied them up, then stole a purple Nissan.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Andrew Hughan said game wardens spotted Dorner tailgating a school bus on Highway 38, apparently as protection against spike-strips police might deploy.

He said Dorner lost the wardens in the ensuing chase, then crashed into a snow berm.

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Taking Guns to Holy Ground in Mexico City

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Mexican soldiers evaluated guns last month in Mexico City. The city has largely been spared the violence of other areas.

MEXICO CITY — A young woman cradling a large crucifix left Mexico’s holiest shrine, the Basilica of St. Mary of Guadalupe, on a recent afternoon and stopped at a tent outside, where soldiers were piling up pistols and rifles on a table, part of a citywide cash-for-guns program.

The woman had brought the crucifix to be blessed, but the sight of the tent reminded her father, who was with her, that he could finally get rid of the .22-caliber pistol and the .38-caliber revolver he kept at home.

“I have had them for 40 years, and I have never used them or will use them,” said the 67-year-old man, who declined to give his name, citing the gun plan’s anonymity. “So I might as well exchange them.”

Mexico City officials have invited residents to drop off their antique pistols, rusted rifles, Saturday night specials, air guns, even their grenades — no names, no questions — hoping to put a dent in the number of weapons they believe are hidden in people’s homes, avoid accidents and maybe even reduce violent crime.

They chose the basilica in the belief that people would feel more confident turning over their weapons on holy ground.

“It’s neutral territory,” said Rosa Icela Rodríguez, the city’s secretary of social development. People may not trust the police or the government, she said, but “who doesn’t know the basilica?”

The capital has largely been spared the gun violence that has ravaged much of the country. The city of nearly nine million had an average of slightly more than two killings a day last year, a rate lower than that of many large cities in the United States.

But in November, a 10-year-old boy at the movies was killed when a stray bullet fired into the air outside pierced the cinema’s roof. The killing struck a nerve here, leading to calls for action.

City officials responded by shifting the desultory and poorly publicized efforts of the past into overdrive.

They are sending social workers door to door to remind residents that it is illegal to have a gun without a permit and that a gun at home does not guarantee protection. The workers have been spreading the word about the exchange and compiling an informal census on attitudes about guns. The buyback program, which began in December, has so far collected almost 3,500 guns, as well as ammunition and grenades.

Unlike the United States, where proposals for stricter gun laws are driving a heated political debate, Mexico has strict gun laws and little formal opposition to them. Mexico’s Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but that right has been severely restricted.

It is virtually impossible to buy a gun legally; there is only one gun shop in the country, and it is run by the army. The kinds of guns people can buy are sharply limited and require a permit first. Private gun sales also require a permit, and carrying a gun outside one’s home requires a separate document.

The Small Arms Survey, a research project at the Graduate Institute of Research and Development in Geneva, estimates that Mexico has 15.5 million civilian-owned guns, about 15 guns for every 100 residents, compared with 99 per 100 in the United States.

But the number of legal guns in Mexico is even lower: only 2.8 million are registered, according to the Organization of American States.

The vast majority of guns here come from the United States, either smuggled in by criminal gangs or diverted from legal purchases by corrupt officials, according to Magda Coss, who has written about Mexico’s gun trade. Mexican leaders have blamed lax gun laws north of the border for the gun violence here, which the government says has taken about 50,000 lives in the past six years.

Long before the drug wars, Mexicans had an ambivalent relationship with guns. The history of insurrection and revolution created a popular mythology studded with armed folk heroes like Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary depicted in a famous photograph with a rifle and bandoleers across his chest.

Village festivals to celebrate the patron saint often end with drunken men lumbering down starlit country roads shooting their weapons into the air. Mexico’s fast-forward urbanization has simply moved the festivals and their shooting into densely populated working-class streets.

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Lady Gaga: I Can't Walk Due to Injury

02/12/2013 at 06:45 PM EST

Lady Gaga is feeling like a little monster for postponing concerts because of an injury.

"I barely know what to say," she writes on her Facebook page, Tuesday. "I've been hiding a show injury and chronic pain for some time now, [and] over the past month it has worsened. I've been praying it would heal. I hid it from my staff. I didn't want to disappoint my amazing fans. However, after last night's performance I could not walk and still can't."

The pop star, 26 – whose Twitter page explains that she has a case of synovitis, which is severe inflammation of the joints – was forced to postpone two concerts in Chicago, one in Detroit and one in Hamilton, Ontario.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," the rest of her Facebook post says. "I'm devastated & sad. It will hopefully heal as soon as possible. I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

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Study questions kidney cancer treatment in elderly

In a stunning example of when treatment might be worse than the disease, a large review of Medicare records finds that older people with small kidney tumors were much less likely to die over the next five years if doctors monitored them instead of operating right away.

Even though nearly all of these tumors turned out to be cancer, they rarely proved fatal. And surgery roughly doubled patients' risk of developing heart problems or dying of other causes, doctors found.

After five years, 24 percent of those who had surgery had died, compared to only 13 percent of those who chose monitoring. Just 3 percent of people in each group died of kidney cancer.

The study only involved people 66 and older, but half of all kidney cancers occur in this age group. Younger people with longer life expectancies should still be offered surgery, doctors stressed.

The study also was observational — not an experiment where some people were given surgery and others were monitored, so it cannot prove which approach is best. Yet it offers a real-world look at how more than 7,000 Medicare patients with kidney tumors fared. Surgery is the standard treatment now.

"I think it should change care" and that older patients should be told "that they don't necessarily need to have the kidney tumor removed," said Dr. William Huang of New York University Langone Medical Center. "If the treatment doesn't improve cancer outcomes, then we should consider leaving them alone."

He led the study and will give results at a medical meeting in Orlando, Fla., later this week. The research was discussed Tuesday in a telephone news conference sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and two other cancer groups.

In the United States, about 65,000 new cases of kidney cancer and 13,700 deaths from the disease are expected this year. Two-thirds of cases are diagnosed at the local stage, when five-year survival is more than 90 percent.

However, most kidney tumors these days are found not because they cause symptoms, but are spotted by accident when people are having an X-ray or other imaging test for something else, like back trouble or chest pain.

Cancer experts increasingly question the need to treat certain slow-growing cancers that are not causing symptoms — prostate cancer in particular. Researchers wanted to know how life-threatening small kidney tumors were, especially in older people most likely to suffer complications from surgery.

They used federal cancer registries and Medicare records from 2000 to 2007 to find 8,317 people 66 and older with kidney tumors less than 1.5 inches wide.

Cancer was confirmed in 7,148 of them. About three-quarters of them had surgery and the rest chose to be monitored with periodic imaging tests.

After five years, 1,536 had died, including 191 of kidney cancer. For every 100 patients who chose monitoring, 11 more were alive at the five-year mark compared to the surgery group. Only 6 percent of those who chose monitoring eventually had surgery.

Furthermore, 27 percent of the surgery group but only 13 percent of the monitoring group developed a cardiovascular problem such as a heart attack, heart disease or stroke. These problems were more likely if doctors removed the entire kidney instead of just a part of it.

The results may help doctors persuade more patients to give monitoring a chance, said a cancer specialist with no role in the research, Dr. Bruce Roth of Washington University in St. Louis.

Some patients with any abnormality "can't sleep at night until something's done about it," he said. Doctors need to say, "We're not sticking our head in the sand, we're going to follow this" and can operate if it gets worse.

One of Huang's patients — 81-year-old Rhona Landorf, who lives in New York City — needed little persuasion.

"I was very happy not to have to be operated on," she said. "He said it's very slow growing and that having an operation would be worse for me than the cancer."

Landorf said her father had been a doctor, and she trusts her doctors' advice. Does she think about her tumor? "Not at all," she said.

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Online:

Kidney cancer info: http://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/kidney-cancer

and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/kidney

Study: http://gucasym.org

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Deaths of endangered fish curtail water exports

In a step that has become more routine over the last decade, water exports to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California have been reduced to avoid killing endangered delta smelt.

State and federal water managers said Tuesday that early winter pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has been curtailed because too many of the native fish were dying at the delta's export pumps.

At this point it is difficult to say what effect the pumping cutbacks could have on water deliveries. December storms have left crucial Northern California reservoirs with slightly more water than usual for this time of year, although after a dry January, statewide snowpack is below normal for the date.

Proponents of a controversial proposal to change the way water supplies are conveyed through the delta immediately cited the export reductions, arguing that the cuts could have been avoided with the new system.

"This is all too familiar a story," said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources. "This conflict will continue to play out year after year until we make fundamental changes in the way we manage the delta."

State and federal water officials — along with the biggest urban water and irrigation districts in California — are advocating the construction of two massive tunnels that would carry supplies beneath the delta to southbound aqueducts from a new diversion point on the Sacramento River. That would mean less water is pumped directly from the south delta, avoiding harm to the smelt and, backers hope, the accompanying pumping restrictions.

Cowin said computer modeling shows an additional 700,000 acre-feet of water could have been sent south and to the Bay Area since Nov. 1 if the new diversion had been in place, enough to irrigate more than 200,000 acres or supply 1.4 million homes.

Opponents of that plan warn that taking large volumes of water from the Sacramento River could create problems for another fish, the endangered salmon that migrate up the river to their spawning grounds. Delta farmers also worry that with less fresh water flowing through the delta, their irrigation supplies could grow saltier, hurting crops.

State and federal officials also acknowledge that even with the tunnel system, they will not be able to guarantee a certain level of water deliveries to farms and cities south of the delta.

It was probably the big December storms that drew smelt in the direction of the pumps. The finger-sized fish likes muddy water. When winter rains flush runoff into the delta, the increased turbidity acts as a signal to the smelt to swim to the interior — closer to the pumps — as they prepare to spawn.

At the same time state officials were discussing the water cutbacks, Southern California environmentalists who oppose the $14-billion tunnel project announced an advertising campaign in which they portray the proposal as a costly boondoggle that would drive up water rates.

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

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Militant Threats Test Pentagon’s Role in Africa

Pool photo by

Gen. William E. Ward, left, departed as Africa Command leader under a cloud, succeeded by Gen. Carter F. Ham in 2011.

NIAMEY, Niger — Created five years ago to focus on training the armed forces of dozens of African nations and strengthening social, political and economic programs, the Pentagon’s Africa Command now finds itself on a more urgent mission: confronting a new generation of Islamist militants who are testing the United States’ resolve to fight terrorism without being drawn into a major conflict.

Some military and Congressional critics question whether the command is up to dealing with its dual mission, and some influential lawmakers warn that Africom, with its headquarters in Germany, is understaffed and poorly financed for challenges that include countering Al Qaeda’s fighters in Mali, Islamic extremists in Libya, drug traffickers in West Africa and armed rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The leader of the command, Gen. Carter F. Ham, must straddle the new and the old missions, as he demonstrated one day last month when he flew to the northern reaches of this largely desert nation to watch United States troops train Niger’s fledgling border corps in basic skills to help combat Al Qaeda’s branch in North and West Africa. Then, within hours, he was back here in the capital for an urgent secure phone call from Washington to weigh what kind of advanced military support or surveillance the Pentagon could provide a French-led operation to blunt an Islamist offensive in neighboring Mali.

“The command is searching to find the right balance between the press of current military operations and the vision of longer-term engagement, helping Africans develop greater capacity for themselves,” said Christopher W. Dell, a former United States ambassador to Angola and Zimbabwe, who is General Ham’s deputy for civil-military activities.

Africom has an annual budget of about $300 million and 2,000 employees worldwide — an operation that Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, calls “an ‘economy of force’ effort.” By comparison, the military’s Central Command, which oversees Afghanistan and the Middle East, has a yearly budget of about $800 million and 5,000 employees.

With no assigned forces in the region except for those at a base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, the command was caught napping last Sept. 11, critics contend, when it had no military forces poised to respond to the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. An independent review of the attack concluded that events had unfolded too quickly for any American forces to make a difference.

Still, controversy has dogged the command since its creation in 2008. Initial statements about its mission and scope of activity alarmed some African leaders and State Department officials, who feared that the Pentagon was trying to militarize diplomacy and development on the continent. These concerns led the command to set up its headquarters in Stuttgart.

The command’s first boss, Gen. William E. Ward, left two years ago under a cloud. Pentagon investigators later found that General Ward had lavishly overspent on official trips. He was ordered to repay the government $82,000 and was forced to retire as a lieutenant general, a one-rank demotion.

Enter General Ham, who turns 61 this week and is the rare Army officer to have risen from private to four-star commander in a 40-year career. He has led troops in northern Iraq, overseen military operations at the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and helped lead reviews into the Defense Department’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the fatal shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.

His combat mettle was tested almost immediately. Within days of assuming command in March 2011, General Ham was leading the initial phase of the Libya air campaign, for which he earned high marks from his civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the White House.

But the general, who will retire this spring, acknowledged in one of three interviews during his recent trip to Niger that the command’s ability to address the terrorist threat in Africa had been “mixed.”

His grades? “Pretty good” in Somalia, where the Shabab, Islamist militants, have been dealt several setbacks in the past year. “Less good” in Libya, Mali and other parts of North and West Africa, where the United States is hunting Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader who claimed responsibility for the attack on a gas field in Algeria last month. And lacking in Nigeria, where an Islamist extremist group, Boko Haram, poses a major threat.

“Frankly, the intelligence community has not focused a lot on this part of the world,” General Ham said. “But we are starting to, out of necessity.”

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It's a Girl for John Cho

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/11/2013 at 06:30 PM ET

Paul Drinkwater/NBC

Surprise: Actor John Cho is a dad again!

The Go On star and his wife welcomed a daughter recently, Cho’s rep confirms to PEOPLE exclusively.

Baby girl is the second child for the couple, who are also parents to a son. No further details are available.

Cho currently stars alongside Jason Bateman in Identity Thief and will reprise his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek Into Darkness in May.

He is also well known for his roles in American Pie and the Harold and Kumar films.

– Anya Leon with reporting by Julie Jordan

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Pope shows lifetime jobs aren't always for life

The world seems surprised that an 85-year-old globe-trotting pope who just started tweeting wants to resign, but should it be? Maybe what should be surprising is that more leaders his age do not, considering the toll aging takes on bodies and minds amid a culture of constant communication and change.

There may be more behind the story of why Pope Benedict XVI decided to leave a job normally held for life. But the pontiff made it about age. He said the job called for "both strength of mind and body" and said his was deteriorating. He spoke of "today's world, subject to so many rapid changes," implying a difficulty keeping up despite his recent debut on Twitter.

"This seemed to me a very brave, courageous decision," especially because older people often don't recognize their own decline, said Dr. Seth Landefeld, an expert on aging and chairman of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Age has driven many leaders from jobs that used to be for life — Supreme Court justices, monarchs and other heads of state. As lifetimes expand, the woes of old age are catching up with more in seats of power. Some are choosing to step down rather than suffer long declines and disabilities as the pope's last predecessor did.

Since 1955, only one U.S. Supreme Court justice — Chief Justice William Rehnquist — has died in office. Twenty-one others chose to retire, the most recent being John Paul Stevens, who stepped down in 2010 at age 90.

When Thurgood Marshall stepped down in 1991 at the age of 82, citing health reasons, the Supreme Court justice's answer was blunt: "What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and falling apart."

One in 5 U.S. senators is 70 or older, and some have retired rather than seek new terms, such as Hawaii's Daniel Akaka, who left office in January at age 88.

The Netherlands' Queen Beatrix, who just turned 75, recently said she will pass the crown to a son and put the country "in the hands of a new generation."

In Germany, where the pope was born, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 58, said the pope's decision that he was no longer fit for the job "earns my very highest respect."

"In our time of ever-lengthening life, many people will be able to understand how the pope as well has to deal with the burdens of aging," she told reporters in Berlin.

Experts on aging agreed.

"People's mental capacities in their 80s and 90s aren't what they were in their 40s and 50s. Their short-term memory is often not as good, their ability to think quickly on their feet, to execute decisions is often not as good," Landefeld said. Change is tougher to handle with age, and leaders like popes and presidents face "extraordinary demands that would tax anybody's physical and mental stamina."

Dr. Barbara Messinger-Rapport, geriatrics chief at the Cleveland Clinic, noted that half of people 85 and older in developed countries have some dementia, usually Alzheimer's. Even without such a disease, "it takes longer to make decisions, it takes longer to learn new things," she said.

But that's far from universal, said Dr. Thomas Perls, an expert on aging at Boston University and director of the New England Centenarians Study.

"Usually a man who is entirely healthy in his early 80s has demonstrated his survival prowess" and can live much longer, he said. People of privilege have better odds because they have access to good food and health care, and tend to lead clean lives.

"Even in the 1500s and 1600s there were popes in their 80s. It's remarkable. That would be today's centenarians," Perls said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain turned 71 while running for president in 2007. Had he won, he would have been the oldest person elected to a first term as president. Ronald Reagan was days away from turning 70 when he started his first term as president in 1981; he won re-election in 1984. Vice President Joe Biden just turned 70.

In the U.S. Senate, where seniority is rewarded and revered, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond didn't retire until age 100 in 2002. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia was the longest-serving senator when he died in office at 92 in 2010.

Now the oldest U.S. senator is 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. The oldest congressman is Ralph Hall of Texas who turns 90 in May.

The legendary Alan Greenspan was about to turn 80 when he retired as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006; he still works as a consultant.

Elsewhere around the world, Cuba's Fidel Castro — one of the world's longest serving heads of state — stepped down in 2006 at age 79 due to an intestinal illness that nearly killed him, handing power to his younger brother Raul. But the island is an example of aged leaders pushing on well into their dotage. Raul Castro now is 81 and his two top lieutenants are also octogenarians. Later this month, he is expected to be named to a new, five-year term as president.

Other leaders who are still working:

—England's Queen Elizabeth, 86.

—Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, 88.

—Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, emir of Kuwait, 83.

—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, 79.

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Associated Press writers Paul Haven in Havana, Cuba; David Rising in Berlin; Seth Borenstein, Mark Sherman and Matt Yancey in Washington, and researcher Judy Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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