NFL-Kansas City Chiefs murder/suicide key may never be unlocked

* Player’s death adds to recent NFL suicides

* Player head injuries seen as ongoing problem

* Experts wonder if drugs such as steroids involved

Dec 3 (Reuters) – The murder/suicide committed on Saturday by Kansas City Chiefs football player Jovan Belcher left the National Football League, its fans and health professionals struggling to understand what drove him to do it.

Belcher, 25, shot and killed his 22-year-old girlfriend Kasandra Perkins, the mother of his three-month-old daughter, in front of his own mother at home before driving to Arrowhead Stadium where he shot himself dead in the parking lot after thanking team officials for all they had done for him.

For the NFL, arguably the most popular U.S. professional sport, the tragic shootings cast the league in a frightfully brutal light as Belcher became the fourth player this year to die of a self-inflicted gunshot.

Former players Junior Seau in May, Ray Easterling in April and Michael Current in January all committed suicide.

A fifth suicide victim, former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson killed himself by gunshot less than two years ago, leaving a note requesting that his brain be examined for a post-concussive disease that might have led to his severe depression.

An brain analysis showed that Duerson had a degenerative brain disease, as he had believed.

Details on Belcher’s health have been slow to emerge.

Dr. Alan Hilfer, Director of Psychology at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, said just why Belcher suddenly snapped could remain a mystery.

“We may never know the reasons,” Hilfer told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday. “Something was terribly wrong.”

The league has come under fire from former players who have joined to sue the NFL, claiming league officials looked the other way while the players were absorbing concussions that have led to long-term disabilities.

LOOKING FOR AN EDGE

Others suspect that the high-speed, muscular contact game leads players to look for a doping edge despite drug testing, and that can lead to psychological instability.

Chiefs Chairman Clark Hunt said Sunday that doctors and coaches told him they knew of no physical or emotional issues bothering Belcher, who reached the NFL as a free agent after going to the University of Maine.

“What do you look for? It’s a very hard question to answer,” Hilfer said. “Certainly you look for mood changes. Certainly you look for increased levels of impulsively and anger.

“These things sometimes occur so suddenly. Sometimes there is just no way you could possibly know that someone is going to perpetrate an act of violence of this magnitude.”

Don Hooton, who founded the Taylor Hooton Foundation to promote steroids education in 2004, seven months after his son, Taylor, committed suicide following his use of anabolic steroids, suspects doping.

“Every time I hear a story like this, my mind runs immediately to anabolic steroids,” Hooton said. “Not necessarily to the exclusion of anything else, but because anabolic steroids can affect the mind in these crazy ways.

“I hope when they do the autopsy on this young man, that they look for these substances because it’s possible that what we saw was ‘Roid Rage’” – a label given to the exhibition of anger among steroid users.

Hooton said that despite efforts in professional leagues to stem the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PED), recent studies showed that steroids use was on the rise among U.S. school children.

“It’s not getting better – it’s getting worse,” said Hooton. “We better wake up, America.”

LARGER SOCIETAL PROBLEMS

Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, said he saw the Belcher tragedy as something that speaks to societal problems transcending sports.

“This is an issue of men’s violence against women, not just football players being too violent,” Lebowitz said.

“When I look at it, I try to take it out of the realm of sport. I just think about the way we acculturate young boys in this country and our whole view of manhood.”

Lebowitz’s group has worked for the NFL on a 2010 training program aimed at gender equality and respect in the workplace, and ran a training project at the soccer World Cup in South Africa on preventing gender violence.

“If you look at how many NFL players commit gender violence in proportion to the overall population, the percentage falls in line with the general population, three to five percent.

“From what I hear she came home from a concert late and he reacted horrifically. We don’t have a healthy concept of what manhood is and how certain things that we see as an affront to manhood probably aren’t that at all.”

Lebowitz said the awful incident could spawn an opportunity to educate others.

“Nothing happens in a bubble. This is the fifth NFL player to commit suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot … this one was (preceded) by a murder. Right now there is an absolute heightened spotlight on all the issues around sports in general.

“How do we make a healthier sport, and how do we make a healthier man? How do we engage in a real conversation about respect for women’s rights and freedoms?”

Dr. Hilfer said athletes were often reluctant to seek help.

“They can benefit from additional help, especially considering the rash of suicides from concussive syndromes,” he said. “I would have loved to get this guy into some form of counseling therapy.

“It would have been wonderful if they could ask for help but athletes are often reluctant because their image is that of a tough guy who can handle things. They are as a rule some of the people who are least likely to access mental health services.”

Mike Paul, who runs a New York public relations business specializing in reputation management, said the incident would challenge NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

“This is a big one for him,” Paul told Reuters. “The helmet (safety) issue and the steroids and PED issue, continue. Now it is right back in his face again and he has two choices.

“He can confront it head on and say it is time for further examination as we go into 2013 … or he can try to slide it under the rug by saying it’s a one-off.

“I think it would be a big mistake to say it was a one-off.” (Editing by Philip Barbara)

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Gunmen assassinate peasant leader in Paraguay

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — Gunmen murdered one of the surviving leaders of a peasant movement whose land dispute with a powerful politician prompted the end of Fernando Lugo‘s presidency last June.

Vidal Vega, 48, was hit four times early Saturday by bullets from a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver fired by two unidentified men who sped away on a motorcycle, according to an official report prepared at the police headquarters in the provincial capital of Curuguaty.

A friend, Mario Espinola, told The Associated Press that Vega was shot down when he stepped outside to feed his farm animals.

Vega was among the public faces of a commission of landless peasants from the settlement of Yby Pyta, which means Red Dirt in their native Guarani language.

He had lobbied the government for many years to redistribute some of the ranchland that Colorado Party Sen. Blas Riquelme began occupying in the 1960s.

By last May, the peasants finally lost patience and moved onto the land. A firefight during their eviction on June 15 killed 11 peasants and six police officers, prompting the Colorado Party and other leading parties to vote Lugo out of office for allegedly mismanaging the dispute.

Twelve suspects, nearly all of them peasants from Yby Pyta, have been jailed without formal charges since then on suspicion of murdering the officers, seizing property and resisting authority. The prosecutor had six months to develop the case and will present his findings Dec. 16.

Vega was expected to be a witness at the criminal trial, since he was among the few leaders who weren’t killed in the clash or jailed afterward.

He wasn’t charged because he was away getting supplies when the violence erupted at the settlement erected by the peasants inside Riquelme’s ranch, the Naranjaty Commission’s secretary, Martina Paredes, told the AP.

“We think he was assassinated by hit men who were sent, we don’t know by whom, perhaps to frighten us and frustrate our fight to recover the state lands that were illegally taken by Riquelme,” she said.

Riquelme, who died of natural causes about a month after the battle in June, occupied the land during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, whose government gave away land for free to anyone willing to put it to productive use.

A local court in Curuguaty upheld Riquelme’s claim to the land years later. Lugo’s government later sought to overturn the decision, but the case remains tied up in court.

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Specs surface for alleged low-end $99 Nexus 7

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Olly Murs tops UK single and album charts

LONDON (Reuters) – Singer Olly Murs‘s single “Troublemaker“, featuring U.S. rapper Flo Rida, retained the No. 1 spot in Britain’s pop charts for a second week in a row on Sunday, the Official Charts Company said.

“Troublemaker” is Murs’s fourth No. 1 single in the British charts.

The former contestant on the British version of television talent show ‘The X Factor’ also nabbed the top spot in the album charts with ‘Right Place Right Time’, leaving popular boy band One Direction in second place.

(Reporting by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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Novo Nordisk insulin Ryzodeg passes Japan review

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark‘s Novo Nordisk, the world’s biggest insulin producer, said on Monday its Ryzodeg insulin had passed the first review by an advisory committee to the health ministry in Japan.

Novo Nordisk said in a statement it expected to receive marketing authorization for the treatment from the Ministry within a few months.

Price negotiations for another insulin, degludec, continued and were expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2013, the company said in the statement, adding the exact launch timing for Ryzodeg would be decided after a price listing for degludec.

(Reporting by Copenhagen Newsroom; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)

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Boehner 'flabbergasted' at 'fiscal cliff' talks

President Obama and his White House team appear to have drawn a line in the sand in talks with House Republicans on the "fiscal cliff."

Tax rates on the wealthy are going up, the only question is how much?

"Those rates are going to have to go up," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner flatly stated on ABC's "This Week." "There's no responsible way we can govern this country at a time of enormous threat, and risk, and challenge ... with those low rates in place for future generations."

But the president's plan, which Geithner delivered last week, has left the two sides far apart.

In recounting his response today on "Fox News Sunday," House Speaker John Boehner said: "I was flabbergasted. I looked at him and said, 'You can't be serious.'

"The president's idea of negotiation is: Roll over and do what I ask," Boehner added.

The president has never asked for so much additional tax revenue. He wants another $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years, including returning the tax rate on income above $250,000 a year to 39.6 percent.

Boehner is offering half that, $800 billion.

In exchange, the president suggests $600 billion in cuts to Medicare and other programs. House Republicans say that is not enough, but they have not publicly listed what they would cut.

Geithner said the ball is now in the Republicans' court, and the White House is seemingly content to sit and wait for Republicans to come around.

"They have to come to us and tell us what they think they need. What we can't do is to keep guessing," he said.

The president is also calling for more stimulus spending totaling $200 billion for unemployment benefits, training, and infrastructure projects.

"All of this stimulus spending would literally be more than the spending cuts that he was willing to put on the table," Boehner said.

Boehner also voiced some derision over the president's proposal to strip Congress of power over the country's debt level, and whether it should be raised.

"Congress is not going to give up this power," he said. "It's the only way to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would if left alone."

The so-called fiscal cliff, a mixture of automatic tax increases and spending cuts, is triggered on Jan. 1 if Congress and the White House do not come up with a deficit-cutting deal first.

The tax increases would cost the average family between $2,000 and $2,400 a year, which, coupled with the $500 billion in spending cuts, will most likely put the country back into recession, economists say.

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Italy votes for center-left candidate for premier

ROME (AP) — Italians are choosing a center-left candidate for premier for elections early next year, an important primary runoff given the main party is ahead in the polls against a center-right camp in utter chaos over whether Silvio Berlusconi will run again.

Sunday’s runoff pits a veteran center-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who has campaigned on an Obama-style “Let’s change Italy now” mantra.

Nearly all polls show Bersani winning the primary, after he won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote. Since he didn’t get an absolute majority, he was forced into a runoff with Renzi, who garnered 35.5 percent.

After battling all week to get more voters to the polling stations for round two, Renzi seemed almost resigned to a Bersani win by Sunday, saying he hoped that by Monday “we can all work together.”

Bersani, a former transport and industry minister, seemed confident of victory as well, joking about Berlusconi’s flip-flopping political ambitions by asking “What time did he say it?” when told that the media mogul had purportedly decided against running.

Next year’s general election will largely decide how and whether Italy continues on the path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis.

The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-Premier Berlusconi’s ability to reign in Italy’s public debt and push through sorely needed structural reforms.

Berlusconi has largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year, but he returned with force in recent weeks, announcing he was thinking about running again, then changing his mind, then threatening to bring down Monti’s government, and most recently staying silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray and disrupted its own plans for a primary — all of which has only seemed to bolster the impression of order, stability and organization within the center-left camp.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with some 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo, and Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.36 percentage points.

It’s quite a turnabout for Berlusconi’s once-dominant movement, and a similarly remarkable shift in fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi’s professional and personal failings while he was premier.

But Berlusconi’s 2011 downfall and a series of recent political party funding scandals that have targeted mostly center-right politicians have contributed to the party’s rise as Italy struggles through a grinding recession and near-record high unemployment.

Angelino Alfano, Berlusconi’s hand-picked political heir, seemed again exasperated Sunday after a long meeting with his patron over Berlusconi’s plans. News reports have suggested Berlusconi might split the party in two and re-launch the Forza Italia party that brought him to political power for the first time in 1994.

“We have to work to reconstruct the center-right, and reconstructing it means having a big center-right party,” not a divided one, Alfano said.

He added that Berlusconi didn’t say one way or another if he would run himself. “It’s his choice,” he said. “If there are any decisions in this regard, he’ll be the one to say so.”

___

Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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Strauss-Kahn in preliminary deal to settle case with maid

NEW YORK/PARIS (Reuters) – Former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn has reached a preliminary agreement to settle a civil lawsuit brought against him by a hotel maid who accused him of sexual assault last year, sources familiar with the case said.

U.S. and France-based lawyers for Strauss-Kahn, who was once tipped to become French president, on Friday acknowledged a deal was under discussion, but said it had not yet been finalized.

They also denied as “flatly false” and “fanciful” a report that he agreed on a $ 6 million settlement.

“The parties have discussed a resolution but there has been no settlement. Mr. Strauss-Kahn will continue to defend the charges if no resolution can be reached,” Strauss-Kahn’s U.S. lawyers, William Taylor and Amit Mehta, said in a statement.

“Media reports that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has agreed to pay six million dollars to settle the civil case are flatly false.”

French daily Le Monde, citing people close to Strauss-Kahn, said he and the maid Nafissatou Diallo would meet a judge in New York on December 7 to sign a $ 6 million settlement and close an affair that ended the Frenchman’s International Monetary Fund career and wrecked his presidential ambitions.

“The discussions have been going on for weeks, months. The agreement should be confirmed at the start of next week,” Michele Saban, a friend of Strauss-Kahn who saw him recently, told Reuters in Paris. She could not confirm the sum involved.

“We are moving towards the end of a tragedy,” she said, adding that Diallo had always been open to negotiating a settlement despite reticence from her lawyers.

Le Monde said 63-year-old Strauss-Kahn planned to take out a bank loan for $ 3 million and would be lent the other $ 3 million by his wife Anne Sinclair, despite the fact the couple separated in the summer and now live on different sides of Paris.

Strauss-Kahn’s Paris-based legal team declined to comment on whether a deal had been reached with Diallo, but denied Le Monde’s report of the sum involved.

“Neither Dominique Strauss-Kahn nor his lawyers will comment on proceedings in the United States. That said, however, they strenuously deny the erroneous and fanciful information relayed by Le Monde,” said a statement from the Paris lawyers.

The New York Times, which first reported the development, also said the pair would appear before a judge in New York next week. It said the settlement sum could not be determined.

END OF THE AFFAIR

News of the U.S. deal comes as Strauss-Kahn is awaiting a decision by a French court on December 19 on whether to call off a sex offence inquiry involving parties in Lille attended by prostitutes, where he risks trial on a charge of “aggravated pimping”.

If that case is dropped and Diallo ends her civil case, Strauss-Kahn would have a freer rein to pursue his consultancy work and could even consider a tentative return to public life in France, where he has been shunned since the Diallo scandal.

Images of the then IMF chief paraded before TV cameras in handcuffs before being charged with attempted rape shocked the world and led to French media raking over smutty details of the former finance minister’s private life.

“That’s the end, not only of this affair, but of any potential affair because one of the reasons for signing this kind of agreement is that both parties agree that they will never again bring a lawsuit,” Christopher Mesnooh, a U.S. lawyer who practices in France, said of the Diallo agreement.

“There will always be people who wonder about what happened in New York and in Lille, but from a legal standpoint if he gets all this behind him, he’s a free man,” he added.

Diallo alleged that Strauss-Kahn forced her to perform oral sex on May 14, 2011, in his suite at the Manhattan Sofitel.

The criminal prosecution fell apart after doubts emerged concerning Diallo’s credibility as a witness and the attempted rape charges against Strauss-Kahn were eventually dropped.

Strauss-Kahn, who in May 2011 was days from entering this year’s French presidential election, has maintained that the sexual encounter was consensual, although he said in a TV interview after his return to France that he regretted his “moral error”.

He filed his own countersuit against the maid earlier this year, claiming that Diallo’s accusations had destroyed his career and harmed his reputation.

In recent months, Strauss-Kahn has been making a comeback under-the-radar with a handful of speaking engagements at private conferences and by setting up a business consultancy firm in Paris.

(Reporting by Noeleen Walder in New York and Emmanuel Jarry, Johnny Cotton and Thierry Leveque in Paris; Writing by Catherine Bremer and Brian Love; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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Asperger’s dropped from revised diagnosis manual

CHICAGO (AP) — The now familiar term “Asperger‘s disorder” is being dropped. And abnormally bad and frequent temper tantrums will be given a scientific-sounding diagnosis called DMDD. But “dyslexia” and other learning disorders remain.

The revisions come in the first major rewrite in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic guide used by the nation’s psychiatrists. Changes were approved Saturday.

Full details of all the revisions will come next May when the American Psychiatric Association‘s new diagnostic manual is published, but the impact will be huge, affecting millions of children and adults worldwide. The manual also is important for the insurance industry in deciding what treatment to pay for, and it helps schools decide how to allot special education.

This diagnostic guide “defines what constellations of symptoms” doctors recognize as mental disorders, said Dr. Mark Olfson, a Columbia University psychiatry professor. More important, he said, it “shapes who will receive what treatment. Even seemingly subtle changes to the criteria can have substantial effects on patterns of care.”

Olfson was not involved in the revision process. The changes were approved Saturday in suburban Washington, D.C., by the psychiatric association’s board of trustees.

The aim is not to expand the number of people diagnosed with mental illness, but to ensure that affected children and adults are more accurately diagnosed so they can get the most appropriate treatment, said Dr. David Kupfer. He chaired the task force in charge of revising the manual and is a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

One of the most hotly argued changes was how to define the various ranges of autism. Some advocates opposed the idea of dropping the specific diagnosis for Asperger’s disorder. People with that disorder often have high intelligence and vast knowledge on narrow subjects but lack social skills. Some who have the condition embrace their quirkiness and vow to continue to use the label.

And some Asperger’s families opposed any change, fearing their kids would lose a diagnosis and no longer be eligible for special services.

But the revision will not affect their education services, experts say.

The new manual adds the term “autism spectrum disorder,” which already is used by many experts in the field. Asperger’s disorder will be dropped and incorporated under that umbrella diagnosis. The new category will include kids with severe autism, who often don’t talk or interact, as well as those with milder forms.

Kelli Gibson of Battle Creek, Mich., who has four sons with various forms of autism, said Saturday she welcomes the change. Her boys all had different labels in the old diagnostic manual, including a 14-year-old with Asperger’s.

“To give it separate names never made sense to me,” Gibson said. “To me, my children all had autism.”

Three of her boys receive special education services in public school; the fourth is enrolled in a school for disabled children. The new autism diagnosis won’t affect those services, Gibson said. She also has a 3-year-old daughter without autism.

People with dyslexia also were closely watching for the new updated doctors’ guide. Many with the reading disorder did not want their diagnosis to be dropped. And it won’t be. Instead, the new manual will have a broader learning disorder category to cover several conditions including dyslexia, which causes difficulty understanding letters and recognizing written words.

The trustees on Saturday made the final decision on what proposals made the cut; recommendations came from experts in several work groups assigned to evaluate different mental illnesses.

The revised guidebook “represents a significant step forward for the field. It will improve our ability to accurately diagnose psychiatric disorders,” Dr. David Fassler, the group’s treasurer and a University of Vermont psychiatry professor, said after the vote.

The shorthand name for the new edition, the organization’s fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is DSM-5. Group leaders said specifics won’t be disclosed until the manual is published but they confirmed some changes. A 2000 edition of the manual made minor changes but the last major edition was published in 1994.

Olfson said the manual “seeks to capture the current state of knowledge of psychiatric disorders. Since 2000 … there have been important advances in our understanding of the nature of psychiatric disorders.”

Catherine Lord, an autism expert at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York who was on the psychiatric group’s autism task force, said anyone who met criteria for Asperger’s in the old manual would be included in the new diagnosis.

One reason for the change is that some states and school systems don’t provide services for children and adults with Asperger’s, or provide fewer services than those given an autism diagnosis, she said.

Autism researcher Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said small studies have suggested the new criteria will be effective. But she said it will be crucial to monitor so that children don’t lose services.

Other changes include:

—A new diagnosis for severe recurrent temper tantrums — disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. Critics say it will medicalize kids’ who have normal tantrums. Supporters say it will address concerns about too many kids being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with powerful psychiatric drugs. Bipolar disorder involves sharp mood swings and affected children are sometimes very irritable or have explosive tantrums.

—Eliminating the term “gender identity disorder.” It has been used for children or adults who strongly believe that they were born the wrong gender. But many activists believe the condition isn’t a disorder and say calling it one is stigmatizing. The term would be replaced with “gender dysphoria,” which means emotional distress over one’s gender. Supporters equated the change with removing homosexuality as a mental illness in the diagnostic manual, which happened decades ago.

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

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Cars trapped in tunnel collapse outside Tokyo

TOKYO (AP) — Parts of a tunnel collapsed Sunday on a highway west of Tokyo, trapping an unknown number of vehicles as smoke from a fire inside initially prevented rescuers from approaching.

Video footage from cameras inside the tunnel, after the fire was apparently extinguished, showed firefighters picking their way through cement roof panels that collapsed onto vehicles inside the Sasago Tunnel, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) outside the city.

About 25 vehicles were inside the (2.5 mile) 4.3 kilometer-long tunnel, some of them trucks stopped by the tunnel's collapse.

Police spokesman Yoshihiro Fukutani said they were still seeking details about the situation inside the tunnel.

Police vehicles, fire trucks and ambulances were massed outside the tunnel's entrance. A man who said he saw the collapse and alerted authorities to the emergency told NHK television he managed to escape after he was ordered to flee. The roof and windows of another vehicle parked on the roadside outside the tunnel were crushed, and the injured occupants reportedly taken to a hospital.

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