Ben Affleck Finally Comes Clean - and Shaves His Beard!









02/26/2013 at 12:40 PM EST







Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck


David Livingston/Getty


And what did Ben Affleck do after his Argo won Best Picture on Sunday night? He took it all off – his facial hair, that is.

A friend of the actor-filmmaker's confirms to PEOPLE that following the Oscars ceremony Affleck, 40, shaved his beard at Craig's restaurant in Hollywood, – where wife Jennifer Garner and pal and Argo co-producer George Clooney were celebrating with him.

"The whole family was tired of [his] beard," says the friend.

Sure enough: "Jen brought clippers!" he added.

According to TMZ.com, the shave took place in the middle of the restaurant's hallway.
Shakthi Jothianandan

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C. Everett Koop, 'rock star' surgeon general, dies


NEW YORK (AP) — Dr. C. Everett Koop has long been regarded as the nation's doctor— even though it has been nearly a quarter-century since he was surgeon general.


Koop, who died Monday at his home in Hanover, N.H., at age 96, was by far the best known and most influential person to carry that title. Koop, a 6-foot-1 evangelical Presbyterian with a biblical prophet's beard, donned a public health uniform in the early 1980s and became an enduring, science-based national spokesman on health issues.


He served for eight years during the Reagan administration and was a breed apart from his political bosses. He thundered about the evils of tobacco companies during a multiyear campaign to drive down smoking rates, and he became the government's spokesman on AIDS when it was still considered a "gay disease" by much of the public.


"He really changed the national conversation, and he showed real courage in pursuing the duties of his job," said Chris Collins, a vice president of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.


Even before that, he had been a leading figure in medicine. He was one of the first U.S. doctors to specialize in pediatric surgery at a time when children with complicated conditions were often simply written off as untreatable. In the 1950s, he drew national headlines for innovative surgeries such as separating conjoined twins.


His medical heroics are well noted, but he may be better remembered for transforming from a pariah in the eyes of the public health community into a remarkable servant who elevated the influence of the surgeon general — if only temporarily.


"He set the bar high for all who followed in his footsteps," said Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as surgeon general a decade later under President George W. Bush.


Koop's religious beliefs grew after the 1968 death of his son David in a mountain-climbing accident, and he became an outspoken opponent of abortion. His activism is what brought him to the attention of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who decided to nominate him for surgeon general in 1981. Though once a position with real power, surgeon generals had been stripped of most of their responsibilities in the 1960s.


By the time Koop got the job, the position was kind of a glorified health educator.


But Koop ran with it. One of his early steps involved the admiral's uniform that is bestowed to the surgeon general but that Koop's predecessors had worn only on ceremonial occasions. In his first year in the post, Koop stopped wearing his trademark bowties and suit jackets and instead began wearing the uniform, seeing it as a way to raise the visual prestige of the office.


In those military suits, he surprised the officials who had appointed him by setting aside his religious beliefs and feelings about abortion and instead waging a series of science-based public health crusades.


He was arguably most effective on smoking. He issued a series of reports that detailed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and in speeches began calling for a smoke-free society by the year 2000. He didn't get his wish, but smoking rates did drop from 38 percent to 27 percent while he was in office — a huge decline.


Koop led other groundbreaking initiatives, but perhaps none is better remembered than his work on AIDS.


The disease was first identified in 1981, before Koop was officially in office, and it changed U.S. society. It destroyed the body's immune system and led to ghastly death, but initially was identified in gay men, and many people thought of it as something most heterosexuals didn't have to worry about.


U.S. scientists worked hard to identify the virus and work on ways to fight it, but the government's health education and policy efforts moved far more slowly. Reagan for years was silent on the issue. Following mounting criticism, Reagan in 1986 asked Koop to prepare a report on AIDS for the American public.


His report, released later that year, stressed that AIDS was a threat to all Americans and called for wider use of condoms and more comprehensive sex education, as early as the third grade. He went on to speak frankly about AIDS in an HBO special and engineered the mailing of an educational pamphlet on AIDS to more than 100 million U.S. households in 1988.


Koop personally opposed homosexuality and believed sex should be saved for marriage. But he insisted that Americans, especially young people, must not die because they were deprived of explicit information about how HIV was transmitted.


Koop's speeches and empathetic approach made him a hero to a wide swath of America, including public health workers, gay activists and journalists. Some called him a "scientific Bruce Springsteen." AIDS activists chanted "Koop, Koop" at his appearances and booed other officials.


"I was walking down the street with him one time" about five years ago, recalled Dr. George Wohlreich, director of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a medical society with which Koop had longstanding ties. "People were yelling out, 'There goes Dr. Koop!' You'd have thought he was a rock star."


Koop angered conservatives by refusing to issue a report requested by the Reagan White House, saying he could not find enough scientific evidence to determine whether abortion has harmful psychological effects on women.


He got static from some staff at the White House for his actions, but Reagan himself never tried to silence Koop. At a congressional hearing in 2007, Koop spoke about political pressure on the surgeon general post. He said Reagan was pressed to fire him every day.


After his death was reported Monday, the tributes poured forth, including a statement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made smoking restrictions a hallmark of his tenure.


"The nation has lost a visionary public health leader today with the passing of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who was born and raised in Brooklyn," Bloomberg said. "Outspoken on the dangers of smoking, his leadership led to stronger warning labels on cigarettes and increased awareness about second-hand smoke, creating an environment that helped millions of Americans to stop smoking — and setting the stage for the dramatic changes in smoking laws that have occurred over the past decade."


Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health taught Koop what was known about AIDS during quiet after-hours talks in the early 1980s and became a close friend.


"A less strong person would have bent under the pressure," Fauci said. "He was driven by what's the right thing to do."


Carmona, a surgeon general years later, said Koop was a mentor who preached the importance of staying true to the science in speeches and reports — even when it made certain politicians uncomfortable.


"We remember him for the example he set for all of us," Carmona said.


Koop's nomination originally was met with staunch opposition. Women's groups and liberal politicians complained Reagan had selected him only because of his conservative views, especially his staunch opposition to abortion.


Foes noted that Koop traveled the country in 1979 and 1980 giving speeches that predicted a progression "from liberalized abortion to infanticide to passive euthanasia to active euthanasia, indeed to the very beginnings of the political climate that led to Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen."


But Koop, a devout Presbyterian, was confirmed as surgeon general after he told a Senate panel he would not use the post to promote his religious ideology. He kept his word and eventually won wide respect with his blend of old-fashioned values, pragmatism and empathy.


Koop was modest about his accomplishments, saying before leaving office in 1989, "My only influence was through moral suasion."


The office declined after that. Few of his successors had his speaking ability or stage presence. Fewer still were able to secure the support of key political bosses and overcome the meddling of everyone else. The office gradually lost prestige and visibility, and now has come to a point where most people can't name the current surgeon general. (It's Dr. Regina Benjamin.)


Even after leaving office, Koop continued to promote public health causes, from preventing childhood accidents to better training for doctors.


"I will use the written word, the spoken word and whatever I can in the electronic media to deliver health messages to this country as long as people will listen," he promised.


In 1996, he rapped Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole for suggesting that tobacco was not invariably addictive, saying Dole's comments "either exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge of nicotine addiction or his blind support of the tobacco industry."


He maintained his personal opposition to abortion. After he left office, he told medical students it violated their Hippocratic oath. In 2009, he wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urging that health care legislation include a provision to ensure doctors and medical students would not be forced to perform abortions. The letter briefly set off a security scare because it was hand delivered.


Koop served as chairman of the National Safe Kids Campaign and as an adviser to President Bill Clinton's health care reform plan.


Worried that medicine had lost old-fashioned caring and personal relationships between doctors and patients, Koop opened an institute at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to teach medical students basic values and ethics. He also was a part-owner of a short-lived venture, drkoop.com, to provide consumer health care information via the Internet.


Koop was the only son of a Manhattan banker and the nephew of a doctor. He said by age 5 he knew he wanted to be a surgeon and at age 13 he practiced his skills on neighborhood cats. He attended Dartmouth, where he received the nickname Chick, short for "chicken Koop." It stuck for life.


He received his medical degree at Cornell Medical College, choosing pediatric surgery because so few surgeons practiced it. In 1938, he married Elizabeth Flanagan, the daughter of a Connecticut doctor. They had four children. Koop's wife died in 2007, and he married Cora Hogue in 2010.


He was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He pioneered surgery on newborns and successfully separated three sets of conjoined twins. He won national acclaim by reconstructing the chest of a baby born with the heart outside the body.


Although raised as a Baptist, he was drawn to a Presbyterian church near the hospital, where he developed an abiding faith. He began praying at the bedside of his young patients — ignoring the snickers of some of his colleagues.


___


Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Wilson Ring in Montpelier, Vt.; Jeff McMillan in Philadelphia; and AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard in Washington.


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Dow, S&P rise as Bernanke defends policy, warns on cuts

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks mostly rose on Tuesday after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke defended the Fed's bond-buying stimulus before Congress, but warned forced spending cuts that could be triggered this week represented a headwind for the economy.


Gains in homebuilders and other consumer stocks, following strong economic data, kept the S&P 500 nearly unchanged, while a 5 percent jump in Home Depot lifted the Dow industrials. The PHLX housing sector index <.hgx> rose 2 percent.


Stocks hit session highs shortly after Bernanke, in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, strongly defended the Fed's bond-buying stimulus program that has been essential for the stock market's recovery.


However, he also urged lawmakers to avoid sharp spending cuts set to go into effect on Friday, which he warned could combine with earlier tax increases to create a "significant headwind" for the economic recovery.


"He really came down foursquare on the bearish camp with respect to the potential economic impact of these cuts. That's a surprise, and that's probably why the market's a little nervous right now," said Michael Jones, chief investment officer of Riverfront Investment Group in Richmond, Virginia.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> rose 74.64 points or 0.54 percent to 13,858.81. The S&P 500 <.spx> gained 1.78 points or 0.12 percent to 1,489.63. The Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> dropped 5.84 points or 0.19 percent to 3,110.41.


The S&P 500 failed to move above 1,500, a closely watched level that was technical support until recently, but could now become a hurdle.


Cable network AMC Networks was the Nasdaq's biggest percentage decliner after the home of popular shows such as "The Walking Dead" and "Mad Men" reported a quarterly profit way below analysts' estimates. Its stock fell 7.4 percent to $53.77.


Equities continued to be weighed by concerns about a stalemate in Italy after a general election failed to give any party a parliamentary majority, posing the threat of prolonged instability and European financial crisis.


The FTSEurofirst-300 index of top European shares <.fteu3> unofficially closed down 1.3 percent at 1,150.58. The benchmark Italian index <.ftmib> tumbled 4.9 percent.


Dow component Home Depot Inc was the top gainer in both the Dow and the S&P 500 after the world's largest home improvement chain reported adjusted earnings and sales that beat expectations. Home Depot's shares jumped 5.5 percent to $67.46.


Macy's Inc shares climbed 2.8 percent to $39.60 after the department-store chain stated it expects full-year earnings to be above analysts' forecasts because of strong holiday sales.


Economic reports that showed strength in housing and consumer confidence also supported stocks.


U.S. home prices rose more than expected in December, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Consumer confidence rebounded in February, jumping more than expected, and new-home sales rose to their highest in 4-1/2 years.


(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Additional reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Jan Paschal)



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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 26

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Ben Affleck, Channing Tatum & More of PEOPLE's Sexiest Men Alive Step Out at the Oscars





Years have passed for some of our favorite Sexiest Men Alive, but that didn't stop them from looking stunning at the Oscars








Credit: George Pimentel/Getty



Updated: Monday Feb 25, 2013 | 01:00 PM EST




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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug


WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.


The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.


Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.


"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."


Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.


The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.


The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.


Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.


FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.


Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.


FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer


Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.


Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.


Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.


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Dow, S&P slip after uncertain Italian election

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks mostly fell on Monday on fears that a divided parliament in Italy would get in the way of the country's reforms and hamper the euro zone's stability.


Election projections showed the center-right coalition led by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was leading in the race for the Italian Senate, contradicting initial exit polls and raising the specter of deadlock in parliament.


Earlier polls pointing to a center-left victory lifted stocks in Milan and other European markets on investors' belief that they would continue the path to pay down Italian debt, said Art Hogan, managing director of Lazard Capital Markets in New York.


"What we don't want to hear is a renewed fear about a euro- zone fracture," he said.


Last week, the benchmark S&P 500 closed below its 14-day moving average on Wednesday for the first time this year. At midday, the S&P 500 was trading just below that level, now near 1,515.


The index was, nonetheless, still near highs not seen in five years, as bets on a strong U.S. economy have given equities support. The S&P 500's slight fall last week was the first weekly drop after a seven-week string of gains.


Banks and other financial stocks led Monday's decline on concern about the sector's exposure to Italy's massive debt. The KBW Bank Index <.bkx> fell 0.7 percent.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> slipped 18.58 points or 0.13 percent, to 13,981.99. The Standard & Poor's 500 <.spx> shed 2.30 points or 0.15 percent, to 1,513.30. But the Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> rose 3.03 points or 0.10 percent, to 3,164.85.


Barnes & Noble Inc shares climbed 11.9 percent to $15.12 after the bookseller's chairman offered to buy its declining retail business.


The Nasdaq received support from Amgen Inc , up 4.2 percent at $90.47, after a rival issued a voluntary recall of its only drug, an anemia treatment that competes with Amgen's top-selling red blood cell booster, Epogen.


The FTSEurofirst-300 index of top European shares <.fteu3> unofficially closed up 0.1 percent and Italy's main FTSE MIB <.ftmib> ended up 0.7 percent after earlier gaining near 4 percent.


U.S. equities will face a test with the looming debate over the so-called sequestration, U.S. government budget cuts that will take effect starting on Friday if lawmakers fail to reach an agreement over spending and taxes. The White House issued warnings about the harm the cuts are likely to inflict on the economy if enacted.


With 83 percent of the S&P 500 companies having reported results so far, 69 percent beat profit expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 6 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.


(Editing by Kenneth Barry and Jan Paschal)



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South Korea’s Park Geun-hye Warns North Against Nuclear Pursuits


Park Jin-Hee/Getty Images


Park Geun-Hye, South Korea's president, salutes during her inauguration ceremony in front of the National Assembly building on Monday in Seoul.







SEOUL, South Korea — The country’s new president, Park Geun-hye, was sworn into office on Monday, facing far more complicated fissures both within South Korea and with North Korea than her father did during his Cold War dictatorship, which ended with his assassination 33 years ago.




Ms. Park, 61, is the first child of a former president to take power here, as well as the first woman, a remarkable turn for a country where Parliament, the cabinet and corporate board rooms are predominantly male and the gender income gap is the widest among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.


In her address, Ms. Park called for the revival of an economic boom her father, Park Chung-hee, had once overseen and urged North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.


After the ceremony, in front of the National Assembly, her motorcade moved through a downtown Seoul packed with well-wishers. Her return to the presidential Blue House, her childhood home, was a triumphant moment for her and old South Koreans loyal to her father. His quashing of dissent and censorship of the press in his 18-years of iron-fisted rulewere much maligned among South Koreans during the country’s struggle for democracy.


She was elected Dec. 19, thanks largely to the support of South Koreans in their 50s and older who grew disenchanted with fractured politics and recalled how, South Korea under the dictatorship had begun its evolution from a country where per-capita income was just $100 a year into what is now a global economic powerhouse whose smartphones, cars and ships are exported around the world.


But while her father, Ms. Park begins a single, five-year term facing sharp criticism from younger and liberal South Koreans who have no fear of speaking out. When she named Queen Elizabeth I of Britain as her role model, they filled blogswith derision for her sense of entitlement. They openly called her election a return to the past, arguing that the seeds of some of the country’s biggest problems, such as the unruly influence of family controlled conglomerates, were sown under her father and accused her of glorifying his rule.


South Korea’s political rivalries are freewheeling, evidenced most recently by the arrest of a 76-year-old Christian pastor last week who claimed that Ms. Park had sex with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il during her visit to Pyongyang in 2002. His videotaped allegations were circulated widely through the Internet.


Meanwhile, two weeks before Ms. Park’s inauguration, North Korea detonated an underground nuclear device, testing her campaign promise to reach out to the North to help end five years of diplomatic silence and high tension on the divided Korean Peninsula under her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, a fellow conservative.


In her inaugural address, “North Korea’s recent nuclear test is a challenge to the survival and future of the Korean people, and there should be no mistake that the biggest victim will be none other than North Korea itself.”


Speaking before a large crowd that was entertained by the rapper Psy of “Gangnam Style” fame on the lawn in front of the National Assembly, she urged North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions without delay, “instead of wasting its resources on nuclear and missile development and continuing to turn its back to the world in self-imposed isolation.”


Ms. Park invoked her father’s era, calling for a “second miracle on the Han River.” The first was the transformation under him of Seoul, the capital city, which straddles the river, from the rubble of the 1950-53 Korean War into an industrialized metropolis. He nurtured a handful of family controlled companies, such as Samsung and Hyundai, as engines of an export-driven economy. These companies have grown into globally recognized conglomerates.


Now, decades later, his daughter vowed to bring South Korea’s slowing economy “rejuvenation” and “revival,” terms favored under her father. But she nodded to the biggest complaints of ordinary South Koreans — widening economic inequality and the conglomerates’ overpowering expansion at the cost of smaller businesses — grievances, saying the second Han River miracle should be based on “economic democratization.”


Ms. Park promised to end unfair practices by big businesses and strengthen small and medium-sized enterprises so that “such businesses can prosper alongside large companies.”


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App connects users around the globe to personal trainers via video






(Reuters) – For fitness enthusiasts who can’t make it to the gym a web-based app will bring group video classes, and some friends for motivation, to them.


Wello, an app that connects users with personal trainers for video-based workouts, has launched group classes for a range of activities, including yoga, Taekwondo and high-intensity interval training. Classes are led by certified trainers and are accessible to anyone around the globe with a webcam and an Internet connection.






“It’s that ability to join in on something last-minute and also to explore something new,” said Ann Scott Plante, co-founder of San Francisco-based company Wello.


Like traditional classes, the instructors in the video classes, which have three to five students, offer motivation and feedback. Users can join an existing class, or organize a new one with friends.


Students can see a video feed of each other in the app, along with a feed of the instructor, who can provide feedback to them during the class.


“Instead of watching a static video that could get boring, or isn’t necessarily built for you, we thought we would give people the opportunity to meet with a real person who would spend the whole workout with you and correct your form,” Plante said.


Trainers on the platform are professionally certified in the United States and their experience and reviews can be viewed online before booking a class.


Plante said that by comparison to a traditional in-person class, trainers in the video class give more verbal instructions to make it easier to follow along and because they cannot physically adjust the students.


Although trainers can offer personal fitness classes with a video calling service such as Skype, Plante said the scheduling, payment and review features of Wello make it appealing for both instructors and users looking for a workout.


Wello, is available on the web with classes starting at under $ 10 per class. The company, which launched in July 2012, is working on iPad and television apps.


(Reporting by Natasha Baker in Toronto; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Eric Beech)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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