Ryan throws 3 TD passes, Falcons rout Giants 34-0


ATLANTA (AP) — Matt Ryan threw three touchdowns passes and the Atlanta Falcons handed the New York Giants their first regular-season shutout since 1996, blowing out the defending Super Bowl champions 34-0 on Sunday.


Julio Jones caught a couple of scoring throws from Ryan, who broke his own franchise records for completions and passing yards in a season. He finished 23 of 28 for 270 yards.


The Falcons (12-2), who have already clinched the NFC South, moved a step closer to locking up home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs. One more win would lock it up.


Eli Manning threw two interceptions for New York (8-6), which came into the game with a one-game lead over Washington and Dallas in the NFC East. The Giants also went 0-for-3 on fourth down.


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Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL


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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies





Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.




The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.


Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.


Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.


Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.


Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.


Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.


More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”


One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”


But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.


Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.


But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.


Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”


After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.


He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.


In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”


William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.


Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.


When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.


Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.


She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.


The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.


But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.


Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.


Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”


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Nickelodeon and PBS Pursue Preschool Apps Alongside TV Shows


In 2014, the preschool cable network Nick Jr. plans to introduce a television show featuring a little boy, his miniature pet dragon and a magic stick.


But the show, “Wallykazam,” will not be new to users of smartphones and tablets. Educational applications built around it will start appearing in app stores late next year, making “Wallykazam” Nickelodeon’s first major show to be introduced as a mobile product first, said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president and general manager for digital media.


Driving the change, at Nickelodeon and other preschool television brands, are parents who are increasingly putting mobile devices into preschoolers’ hands and laps.


According to new research commissioned by Sesame Workshop, producer of PBS’s “Sesame Street,” mobile device ownership is booming as TV set ownership declines. Eighty-eight percent of the parents surveyed said they owned a television, down from 95 percent in 2010.


Twenty-one percent said their children first interacted with “Sesame Street” someplace other than television, with YouTube and PBS.org the top alternative sources. (PBS said separately that its free PBS Kids Video app, which has been downloaded 2.4 million times, reached 120 million streams of PBS Kids shows in November, surpassing 100 million for the first time.)


“On-air does still drive digital,” said Diana Polvere, Sesame Workshop’s vice president for market research, citing the 79 percent of viewers who still come to television first. But given the rapid changes, she said, Sesame’s research will now be conducted every six months instead of every two years.


Nickelodeon’s research, done in April and updated in October, shows striking growth in educational app use. In October, 27 percent of United States households with children ages 3 to 5 had an iPad, up from 22 percent in April. In those households, 40 percent of preschoolers used the iPad for educational apps, up from 27 percent in April.


The study also found that Apple device users were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for educational apps than for general apps.


“Parents want to feel good about what they are purchasing and downloading for their kids,” said Scott Chambers, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for digital worldwide distribution. Adding an educational element to an entertaining app, he said, “makes everybody feel better.”


Parents’ feelings aside, apps are strong educational tools, said Lesli Rotenberg, who oversees PBS’s children’s programming, including its more than two dozen apps.


While television “is somewhat of a passive experience” for children, she said, interactive apps give them immediate feedback and tailored experiences that become more difficult as they gain skills.


Though numerous producers are entering the app business, three of the top 10 paid educational apps in the iTunes store last week were Nickelodeon’s. They included the $1.99 Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, already profitable six weeks after its introduction, Nickelodeon said. A Team Umizoomi math app was still in the top 10 after a year on the market.


Originally scheduled for August release, the Bubble Guppies app, filled with the same silly jokes as the show, was revised after focus group testing with preschoolers showed, among other things, that their small fingers had a hard time maneuvering a virtual latch and that the children wanted more control over their exploration.


“We were hearing kids say in testing: ‘I want to play with the dolphin. I want to play with the penguin,’ ” said Jordana Drell, Nickelodeon’s senior director of preschool games.


Nickelodeon’s educational apps normally take six to eight months to create and, even with lush graphics like the shimmery underwater background in Bubble Guppies, cost about half as much as a single episode of one of the company’s preschool shows, officials said.


The Bubble Guppies creators, Jonny Belt and Robert Scull, said they approached the app as they would a television episode, reading the 90-page game document aloud, technical material and all. “That really brings it to life, and you know what you’re getting,” Mr. Scull said.


A Nickelodeon rival, Disney Junior, has taken a less integrated approach to apps, developing television shows first and apps later to expand on the content, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney/ABC Television Group.


The free Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally Appisode, released in May, is a repurposed version of an episode of the “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” television program, reconfigured to be highly interactive.


It proved so popular that “we definitely feel there’s something here we want to invest in,” Mr. Cheng said.


Although the app had educational elements, it was not intended as such. The sprawling Walt Disney Company has published educational apps through other units, however.


Since releasing its first app three years ago, Sesame Workshop has added more than three dozen, including Elmo Loves 123s, which was introduced Dec. 10 and draws on new research for developers and parents that Sesame plans to release this week. App users, Mr. Chambers said, tend to come back regularly, a loyalty that executives have noted as they consider future expansion in the category.


The rush to apps is changing the development process for PBS, which will no longer develop television-only shows, Ms. Rotenberg said. PBS’s newest property, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” came out as an app — already the company’s third best-selling — the day of the television premiere in September.


Ms. Rotenberg said her team had “sent away” a number of producers who came to PBS with ideas for television shows with no thought-out mobile component, telling them, “ ‘Come back when you have a plan.’ ”


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Foreign Minister Blames Sanctions for Syria’s Troubles





BEIRUT, Lebanon — Receiving a high-level United Nations delegation on Saturday in Damascus, Syria’s foreign minister blamed international sanctions for his country’s problems and called on the United Nations to help lift the measures, which were imposed to punish the government for its crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that spiraled into armed conflict.




Government forces continued airstrikes and artillery barrages in the suburbs of Damascus, the capital, as a top United Nations official, Valerie Amos, visited the city to investigate the needs of Syrians during a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people and led more than a half-million to flee the country, with many more displaced inside Syria.


The civil war set off by the brutal crackdown on peaceful protests has devastated many cities and suburbs as the government levels rebellious neighborhoods and some rebels set off bombs.


But Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and other officials placed the blame elsewhere, according to Syrian and foreign news reports, saying, “The sanctions imposed by the United States and countries of the European Union on Syria are responsible for the suffering of the Syrian people.”


In the northern city of Aleppo, rebels claimed to have taken another important military installation, the region’s infantry school, though some reports said that fighting continued on Saturday.


There was an outpouring of grief from antigovernment activists and fighters after a commander of a rebel group, the Tawhid, or Unification, Brigade, was reported to have died in the fighting. It was an unusual moment of focus on an individual in an uprising with few widely known leaders or public faces.


The commander, Yousef al-Jader, also known as Abu Furat, had earlier recorded a statement, posted online on Saturday, that resonated with many Syrians.


“I feel very sad whenever I see a dead man, whether from our side or their side,” he said.


Speaking about President Bashar al-Assad, who has resisted calls to step down, he asked: “Why did he have to hold on to his seat? If he had resigned, we would have the best country in the world.”


Opposition members were distraught over the death of Mr. Jader, considered a skilled and respected officer by others in the loose-knit Free Syrian Army.


“A man has left our world, and men are few,” Samar Yazbek, a prizewinning novelist, wrote on Facebook, adding that Mr. Jader’s statement had made her cry. “His quavering and humanitarian voice represented, for me, the lovely and difficult future of Syria,” she wrote. “He barely lighted a star in the sky of our pain!”


The commander was one of many fighters to die in the fighting at the infantry school, which is north of Aleppo, in Muslimiyah.


A Syrian activist in the region, reached by phone, said rebels, who had breached the school’s compound several days ago and had been fighting for it building by building, had lost as many as 25 fighters there on Saturday. “It was a big victory for us, but very costly,” said the activist, Yasser al-Haji.


It is unclear whether the rebels will keep control of the base. In many cases, rebels have quickly taken ammunition from captured bases and then abandoned them, wary of government attacks.


In Jordan, officials who defected from the Syrian government announced that they had formed a new opposition group led by Mr. Assad’s former prime minister, Riyad Farid Hijab, one of the highest-ranking officials to desert during the conflict.


The group, called the National Free Coalition of the Workers of Syrian Government Institutions, aims to keep state structures intact if Mr. Assad’s government falls, Reuters reported.


The group includes Abdu Hussameldin, the former deputy oil minister, and others, who, at a news conference in Amman, expressed support for the Free Syrian Army and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, recently recognized by the United States and others as the legitimate representative of Syrians.


Fighting continued east of Damascus; activists reported airstrikes in Beit Saham, near the Damascus airport. The government claims to have pushed rebels out of some southern suburbs after heavy shelling, and is now focusing attacks in the east in an effort to seal off the capital.


While rebels appeared to make many some gains in a semicircle of suburbs around the capital in recent weeks, those were followed by a fearsome government counterattack, and some analysts have suggested that what began as a victory for the rebels has become, as has happened several times before, a defeat.


The government may have led rebels into a trap, reported the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, a left-leaning publication that often supports the pro-Assad Lebanese group Hezbollah. Citing informed sources, the newspaper said that the government intentionally withdrew forces from some Damascus suburbs to draw rebels in, stretch their supply lines and later wipe them out.


Syrian state news media reported that Leila Zerrougui, a United Nations special representative, visited camps for families displaced by the fighting and called on all sides to protect children affected by the conflict.


Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and C. J. Chivers from Antakya, Turkey. Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut.



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Hamilton, Angels finalize $125M, 5-year deal


ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Outfielder Josh Hamilton and the Los Angeles Angels have finalized their $125 million, five-year contract.


The five-time All-Star appeared at a news conference Saturday, two days after agreeing to a deal.


Hamilton, the 2010 AL MVP, joins a batting order that already includes Albert Pujols and Mike Trout. The 31-year-old Hamilton hit a career-high 43 home runs last season and batted .285 with 128 RBIs in 148 games.


Dozens of red-clad Angels fans lined up outside a restaurant where the news conference was held.


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School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians


T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times


Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination. More Photos »







ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.




Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.


“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”


Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.


A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.


After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.


Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.


“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”


Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.


Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.


Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.


“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.


“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.


The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.


The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.


The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.


Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.


The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.


“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”


Ms. Eady is not convinced.


“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”


Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.


“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”


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Europe Court Finds Violation in C.I.A. Rendition





BERLIN — A German man who was mistaken for a terrorist and abducted nine years ago won a measure of redress on Thursday when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that his rights had been violated and confirmed his account that he had been seized by Macedonia, handed over to the C.I.A., brutalized and detained for months in Afghanistan.




In a unanimous ruling, the 17-judge panel, based in Strasbourg, France, found that Macedonia had violated the European Convention on Human Rights’ prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, and ordered it to pay the man about $78,000 in damages. It was the first time a court had ruled in favor of the man, Khaled el-Masri, 49, in a case that focused attention on the C.I.A.’s clandestine rendition program, in which terrorism suspects were transported to third countries for interrogation.


The decision, which Amnesty International hailed as “a historic moment and a milestone in the fight against impunity,” is final and cannot be appealed. The C.I.A. declined to comment. A lawsuit against the United States filed on Mr. Masri’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union was dismissed in 2006 on the grounds that it would expose state secrets. The group filed a petition in 2008 at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2008; the United States government has yet to respond.


Mr. Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was pulled off a bus at the Macedonian border on New Year’s Eve in 2003 after guards confused him with an operative of Al Qaeda who had a similar name. He was taken to a hotel in the capital, Skopje, and locked in a room there for 23 days. His detention, along with the threat that he would be shot if he left the hotel room, “amounted on various counts to inhuman and degrading treatment,” the ruling said.


When he was handed over to the C.I.A. rendition team at the Skopje airport, he was “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded” in the presence of Macedonian officials, the ruling said, a treatment that “amounted to torture.” He was then flown to Afghanistan, where he spent more than four months in captivity before being flown to Albania and dropped on the side of a road.


His German lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said his mental state had suffered not only from the abuse but also from the “nine years of constantly fighting, being called a liar, a terrorist, an Islamist, a hard-liner.” Mr. Masri has broken off contact with his lawyers while serving a prison sentence on unrelated charges involving a 2009 assault on the mayor of Neu-Ulm in Bavaria.


Mr. Gnjidic said he had written to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany asking the government to appeal to Washington on Mr. Masri’s behalf. “Macedonia was only the henchman of the great powers,” Mr. Gnjidic said. “The question is: What is with the big fish, with Germany, with the U.S.A.? All he ever wanted was to know why this was done to him and an apology.”


Jamil Dakwar, the head of the A.C.L.U.’s human rights program, said that it had been “an uphill battle” to persuade the Obama administration to hold officials accountable under international law for Mr. Masri’s mistreatment, but that the case before the commission “gives the Obama administration the opportunity to acknowledge the egregious violations against Khaled, offer an official apology and reparation.” He called the European court’s ruling “historic” and said it “sends the message to European nations that they have a heightened obligation to investigate their complicity and cooperation with the illegal C.I.A. extraordinary rendition program.”


Kostadin Bogdanov, a lawyer who represents Macedonia before the court, said Macedonia would pay the damages and perhaps take other actions in light of the ruling. They include reopening the Masri investigation and amending laws regarding criminal procedures or their implementation, he said. James A. Goldston, executive director at the Open Society Justice Initiative, who argued the case before the court, called the ruling “a comprehensive condemnation of the worst aspects of the post-9/11 war-on-terror tactics that were employed by the C.I.A. and governments who cooperated with them.”


In another rendition case on Thursday, lawyers for a former Libyan dissident said he and his family had accepted a $3.5 million settlement from the British government, according to The Associated Press. The dissident, Sami al-Saadi, had sued the British government and its spy agency, MI6, saying that he had been abducted in Hong Kong in 2004 and sent to Libya, where he spent years in prison and was tortured. The rest of his family — his wife and four children — were also sent to Libya against their will.


Chris Cottrell contributed reporting from Berlin, and Scott Shane from Washington.



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Hamilton agrees to $125M, 5-year deal with Angels


LOS ANGELES (AP) — Josh Hamilton is heading to the Los Angeles Angels, lured with a $125 million, five-year contract that steps up the migration of high-profile stars to Southern California.


The Angels persuaded the free-agent outfielder to leave the Texas Rangers with their third big-money offseason signing in as many years. Hamilton heads to Anaheim after first baseman Albert Pujols came West for $240 million last December along with pitcher C.J. Wilson — Hamilton's Texas teammate — for $77.5 million.


Still, the Angels failed to make the playoffs for the third straight year.


They had bulked up their pitching staff earlier in the offseason with the additions of pitchers Joe Blanton and Tommy Hanson, along with relievers Sean Burnett and Ryan Madson.


General manager Jerry Dipoto had said Wednesday that he didn't think a major move was "imminent or required."


But owner Arte Moreno pulled off another coup by getting Hamilton. The 2010 AL MVP, Pujols and AL Rookie of the Year Mike Trout combined for 103 home runs and 316 RBIs last season.


"It's a great day to be an Angel/Angel fan!" Wilson said on his Twitter account.


Rangers general manager Jon Daniels said Hamilton had reached a deal with the AL West rival Angels. Two people familiar with the talks disclosed the amount and length of the contract, speaking on condition of anonymity because the agreement was not yet final.


Hamilton's $25 million average salary matches Philadelphia first baseman Ryan Howard for the second-highest in baseball, trailing only Alex Rodriguez's $27.5 million average with the New York Yankees.


Since the contract wasn't final, the Angels didn't comment publicly. The team said in a statement, "We continue to look for ways to improve our team. As soon as we have something formal to announce, we will do so."


Moreno and manager Mike Scioscia didn't immediately respond to phone messages.


The Angels allowed free agent outfielder Torii Hunter to sign with Detroit, and he reacted to his former team's latest move on his Twitter account.


"I was told money was tight but I guess the Arte had money hidden under a Mattress. Business is business but don't lie," Hunter wrote.


He followed up with the comment, "Great signing for the Angels. One of the best players in baseball."


Texas had hoped to re-sign Hamilton, who led the Rangers to consecutive World Series appearances in 2010 and 2011. They made a $13.3 million qualifying offer at the Nov. 2 deadline, ensuring the team draft-pick compensation if Hamilton signed elsewhere. The Rangers will receive an extra selection immediately following the first round of June's amateur draft. The deal cost the Angels a first-round selection in the draft.


Speaking Thursday after a Rangers' holiday luncheon, Daniels said he had just been informed of the decision by Hamilton's agent, Michael Moye.


Daniels said he was disappointed "to some degree," especially since the Rangers never got a chance to match any offer during the process, as they had expected. Or at least get contacted before Hamilton agreed with another team.


"I never expected that he was going to tell us to the dollar what they had, and a chance to offer it. Our full expectation, the phone call was going to be before he signed, and certainly not after," Daniels said. "Everybody's got to make their own calls.


"He's a tremendous talent and I think that they've shown they're going to be in on a lot of the best players out there. No sugarcoating it, we wanted the player back. And he signed with the Angels. They're better," Daniels said.


The agreement came days after the Los Angeles Dodgers added pitchers Zack Greinke and Ryu Hyun-jin, boosting their payroll over $200 million. Greinke, another offseason target, said he chose the Dodgers over the Rangers.


Hamilton's addition to the Angels outfield means Mark Trumbo could be moved to third base or traded. Peter Bourjos and Vernon Wells also are among the outfielders competing for time unless a trade is made.


Scioscia will have an interesting decision to make on where in the batting order to slot in Pujols, Trout and Hamilton, a five-time All-Star. He has a .260 career average at Angel Stadium with five home runs and 19 RBIs in 150 at-bats.


Daniels met with Moye last week at the winter meetings in Nashville, Tenn., and had talked about the parameters of a new contract along with numbers. While Daniels wouldn't get into any specifics, he said his understanding is the deal with the Angels "is certainly more guaranteed money."


The move keeps Hamilton in the same division with plenty of opportunities to play against his team — the first one coming fast next season. After the Rangers open with three games at new division foe Houston, they play their first home series April 5-7 against the Angels.


The 31-year-old slugger was considered a risk by some teams because of his history of alcohol and substance abuse, which derailed his career before his surge with the Rangers over the past five seasons.


"Josh has done a lot for the organization, the organization has done a lot for Josh, a lot of things that aren't public and things of that nature," Daniels said. "I'm a little disappointed how it was handled, but he had a decision to make and he made it."


Hamilton had a career-high 43 home runs with 128 RBIs in 148 games last season, when the Rangers struggled down the stretch and lost the division to Oakland on the final day of the regular season.


Texas then lost in the winner-take-all wild-card game against Baltimore, and Hamilton was lustily booed by Rangers fans while going 0-for-4 — twice striking out on three pitches, including an inning-ending out in the eighth with a runner in scoring position when it was still a 3-1 game.


That came two days after Hamilton dropped a routine popup in the regular-season finale, a two-out tiebreaking miscue that allowed the A's to score two runs and go ahead to stay. He missed five games on a September trip because of a cornea problem he said was caused by too much caffeine and energy drinks — and had one homer with 18 strikeouts in the final 10 regular-season games after returning.


Hamilton hit .304 with 161 homers in his six major league seasons, the first with Cincinnati. In May against Baltimore, he became only the 16th major league with a four-homer game as part of a 5-for-5 night that included a double.


"Josh had indicated recently ... told us that he felt it might be time to move on, but that we were still talking," said Daniels, who wouldn't elaborate on the reasons. "We had additional conversations this week that I thought had moved it along in a positive direction, but apparently not."


___


AP Sports Writers Stephen Hawkins in Fort Worth, Texas, and Ronald Blum in New York contributed to this report.


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Paper Links Nerve Agents in ’91 Gulf War and Ailments





Reviving a 20-year debate over illnesses of veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, a new scientific paper presents evidence that nerve agents released by the bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons depots just before the ground war began could have carried downwind and fallen on American troops staged in Saudi Arabia.




The paper, published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, tries to rebut the longstanding Pentagon position, supported by many scientists, that neurotoxins, particularly sarin gas, could not have carried far enough to sicken American forces.


The authors are James J. Tuite and Dr. Robert Haley, who has written several papers asserting links between chemical exposures and gulf war illnesses. They assembled data from meteorological and intelligence reports to support their thesis that American bombs were powerful enough to propel sarin from depots in Muthanna and Falluja high into the atmosphere, where winds whisked it hundreds of miles south to the Saudi border.


Once over the American encampments, the toxic plume could have stalled and fallen back to the surface because of weather conditions, the paper says. Though troops would have been exposed to low levels of the agent, the authors assert that the exposures may have continued for several days, increasing their impact.


Though chemical weapons detectors sounded alarms in those encampments in the days after the January 1991 bombing raids, they were viewed as false by many troops, the authors report.


But a significant number of medical experts have cast doubts on the sarin gas theory over the years, and several said Thursday that the new paper did little to change their minds.


Dr. John Bailar, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago who led a group that studied gulf war illnesses in 1996, said there was still no clear evidence that troops might have been exposed to levels of sarin significant enough to have a biological effect.


Dr. Bailar said that the stress of war rather than chemical agents might be a more likely cause of the veterans’ problems. “Gulf war syndrome is real,” he said, using the term for a constellation of symptoms. “And the veterans who have it deserve appropriate medical care. But we should not kid ourselves about its causes or about the most effective means of treatment.”


Nearly half of the 700,000 service members who were deployed in 1990 and 1991 for the gulf war have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and more than 85 percent of those have been granted benefits, the department has reported.


Many of those veterans have reported long-lasting problems, including chronic pain, memory loss, persistent fatigue and diarrhea, some of which had no clear causes. Many veterans insist that their problems are not the result of stress but have a biological basis.


Paul Sullivan, a gulf war veteran who has advocated for more research into the illnesses, said the new paper provided “overwhelming scientific evidence” that exposure to chemical agents sickened those troops and that the Department of Veterans Affairs should ensure that all receive health care and benefits.


Panels of medical experts have come down on both sides of the issue, with one group in 2000 questioning whether low levels of sarin could cause long-term health problems and another in 2004 concluding that toxic chemicals had caused neurological damage in many troops.


The Pentagon has acknowledged that the postwar demolition of a chemical weapons depot at Kamisiya, in southern Iraq, may have exposed 100,000 troops to nerve gas. But the military has said it was unlikely that nerve gas caused long-term illnesses in troops, a position it reiterated on Thursday.


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Avigdor Lieberman of Israel Charged With Breach of Trust








JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's powerful foreign minister was charged Thursday with breach of trust for actions that allegedly compromised a criminal investigation into his business dealings, throwing the country's election campaign into disarray just weeks before the vote.




While Avigdor Lieberman was cleared of more serious allegations against him, the indictment sparked immediate calls for the controversial politician to step down. He declined to do so at a news conference but said he would consult with his lawyers on what to do next. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also rallied behind his close ally.


Lieberman denied any wrongdoing, calling the investigation against him a witch hunt.


"According to my legal counsel, I do not have to resign," Lieberman told cheering supporters at a campaign rally. "At the end of the day I will make a final decision together with my lawyers."


Lieberman, a native of Moldova, is head of Yisrael Beitenu, an ultranationalist party that is especially popular with fellow immigrants from the former Soviet Union. With a tough-talking message that has questioned the loyalty of Israel's Arab minority, criticized the Palestinians and confronted Israel's foreign critics, he has become an influential voice in Israeli politics even while sometimes alienating Israel's allies.


Yisrael Beitenu and Netanyahu's Likud Party recently joined forces and are running together on a joint list in the Jan. 22 parliamentary elections. Opinion polls have predicted they would form the largest bloc in parliament and lead a new coalition government.


But Thursday's decision threatened to become a distraction during the campaign. Three leading opposition politicians all called for his dismissal.


Lieberman gave no timeframe for deciding on his political future but said he would consider whether the indictment was harming support for his party in the election.


Lieberman's departure could have negative consequences for Netanyahu. Lieberman is Yisrael Beitenu's founder and main attraction to voters. If he were forced to step aside, Netanyahu would be stuck with a list of leftovers with little appeal to the general public.


Perhaps with this in mind, Netanyahu appeared to come to Lieberman's defense. In a statement, Netanyahu congratulated Lieberman for fending off the "main accusations" and said he was entitled to his day in court.


"I believe in the Israeli justice system and I respect it. The right it gives every citizen in Israel to defend himself is extended to Minister Lieberman and I hope he proves his innocence in the one issue remaining," Netanyahu said.


Thursday's decision was a reversal for Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, who last year notified Lieberman that he intended to indict him on charges that included fraud and money laundering.


Prosecutors have long suspected that Lieberman illicitly received millions of dollars from businessmen and laundered the cash through straw companies in eastern Europe while he was a lawmaker and Cabinet minister. In his decision Thursday, Weinstein said the case was not strong enough.


"I am convinced that there is no reasonable chance of a conviction in the offenses Lieberman is suspected of and that the case should be closed," Weinstein wrote.


Instead, Lieberman was charged with the lesser offense of receiving official material from the investigation against him from the former Israeli ambassador to Belarus, Zeev Ben-Aryeh, who reached a plea bargain in the case earlier this year.


The envoy had received the documents from the foreign ministry, which sought additional information on Lieberman from Belarus authorities.


At his news conference, Lieberman described the investigation as a witch hunt that stretched back as far as 1996, when he worked as an aide to Netanyahu.


He denied all the allegations, and said that when he received information about the investigation from his ambassador, he immediately ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet because he knew it was wrong.


Lieberman has said in the past that he would resign if indicted. But he told his supporters that he was only referring to the more serious case against him.


Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said Lieberman would have to determine whether the indictment is hurting his party's electoral chances before deciding his future.


"He'll make a calculation. But every move will be coordinated with Bibi. We can be sure of that," he said, using Netanyahu's nickname.


Israeli law is unclear about whether Lieberman must resign. There is a legal precedent for politicians to step down when they face charges that compromise public trust in them.


Analysts said the pressure for him to step down will be great and Weinstein, or even the Supreme Court, could become involved if he refuses.


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