Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants

ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.

The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.

To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.

But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.

When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.

In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."

The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.

Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.

Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.

A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.

California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.

And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.

If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.

Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.

The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.

"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."

Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.

There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.

Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.

For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.

"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."

___

Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .

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Bellflower High theater program gets a boost from star alumni

Edgar Bullington stood with a slight hunch on the stage of Bellflower High School's Robert Newman Theater, slivers of gray hair peeking from under his top hat, and sneered, "Bah, humbug!"

His portrayal of Dickens' famous crotchety old man was all the more convincing for his graying beard.

But the beard was no prop. Bullington's drama career spans more than 50 years and started right here, at Bellflower High.

Bullington and other Bellflower alumni have returned this month to put their own spin on "A Christmas Carol." Their rendition features Bullington as Ebenezer Scrooge, with other former students making up the cast. The goal is to raise money for the school's arts programs.

The production is the brainchild of Harry Cason, a 1974 Bellflower graduate who was dismayed when he saw the theater's condition earlier this year.

"It's all aged out," the Juilliard-trained actor said of the facility, built in 1959. "The lights don't work, and they don't have a sound system. The school never had the funds to replace them."

Cason enlisted the support of former classmates, including Don Hahn, now an executive producer at Disney, and pulled their former drama teacher, Robert Newman, out of retirement. Newman gave up teaching drama a few years before retiring in 1982 because he was "burned out." But he said he could not pass up the opportunity to help the theater that bears his name.

The group produced H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" earlier this year and raised nearly $5,000. Cason said the effort went so well that they decided to follow it with "A Christmas Carol," this time with students performing too.

"When I hear that they are cutting out music and drama, I get really disgusted," said Newman, 90, after a recent rehearsal. "We need creativity. Providing kids with an outlet is important."

Cason, Bullington and Hahn all spoke of the director's influence on their lives.

Hahn, once a shy, introverted student, went on to produce Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King" and "Frankenweenie," among others.

"There was a sense of enthusiasm and a culture that showed us it was fun," Hahn said about Bellflower's drama program. "Teachers and parents would pack the theater. It showed us that it was important for us to be there."

This time around, "We're here to show kids, 'We were you,'" Hahn said.

The generationally diverse cast members read their lines and took direction from Newman and Eleanor Packwood, the school's current drama teacher.

Newman once ran four to five plays a year in the theater. Now, Packwood struggles for enough funds to produce three plays a year, she said.

What money she can scrape together "goes to everything not falling apart around me," she said.

Light bulbs are expensive, so some stage lights have not been replaced and spotlights are locked in storage until performances.

When she first got to Bellflower High 21 years ago, "We had the money to have a musical with musicians," Packwood said. "Now my kids have to raise the money for it."

Saturday's performance is at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 for adults and $5 for students.

Cason said the actors plan to give the performance their all, aiming to show Bellflower students that they, too, can succeed in the entertainment industry. "I want to give them an equal footing," he said. "At least let the lights work."

dalina.castellanos@latimes.com

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Panetta Orders Deployment of U.S. Anti-Missile Units in Turkey

INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta signed an official deployment order on Friday to send 400 American military personnel and two Patriot air defense batteries to Turkey as cross-border tensions with Syria intensify.

The American batteries will be part of a broader push to beef up Turkey’s defenses that will also include the deployment of four other Patriot batteries — two from Germany and two from the Netherlands.

All six units will be under NATO’s command and are scheduled to be operational by the end of January, according to officials in Washington.

George Little, the Pentagon spokesman, said Mr. Panetta signed the order as he flew from Afghanistan to this air base in southern Turkey, close to the border with Syria.

“The United States has been supporting Turkey in its efforts to defend itself,” Mr. Little said.

The order “will deploy some 400 U.S. personnel to Turkey to support two Patriot missile batteries,” Mr. Little added, and the personnel and Patriot batteries will arrive in Turkey “in coming weeks.” He did not disclose where the Patriots would be located.

After landing at Incirlik Friday, Mr. Panetta told a gathering of American Air Force personnel of his decision to deploy the Patriots.

He said the United States was working with Turkey, Jordan and Israel to monitor Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, and warned of “serious consequences” if Syria used them, but he did not offer any specifics.

“We have drawn up plans for presenting to the president,” Mr. Panetta said. “We have to be ready.”

Turkey, which has been supporting the Syrian opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, has been worried it is vulnerable to Syrian missiles, including Scuds that might be tipped with chemical weapons. Those concerns were heightened by reports of increased activity at some of Syria’s chemical sites, though Mr. Panetta said this week that intelligence about chemical weapons activity in Syria had “leveled off.”

The recent Scud missile attacks mounted by forces loyal to Mr. Assad against rebels in northern Syria have only added to Turkey’s concerns. The Scud missiles fired at the rebels were armed with conventional warheads, but the attacks showed that the Assad government is prepared to use missiles as it struggles to slow rebel gains.

Syria denied Thursday that it had fired Scud missiles this week. But NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said that the intelligence gathered by the alliance indicated that they were Scud-type missiles. “In general, I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse,” he said. “I think now it’s only a question of time.”

NATO foreign ministers last week endorsed the decision to send Patriot batteries to Turkey. The details of how many each nation would send were not worked out until this week, officials said.

In preparation for the deployment, allied officials had conducted surveys of 10 potential sites, mostly in southeastern Turkey, that could be defended by one or more Patriot batteries.

But NATO nations do not have enough batteries to cover all of the sites. With tensions building with Iran and North Korea defying the United States and its Asian allies by launching a long-range rocket, American officials did not want to send more than a few Patriot batteries to Turkey, especially since it is not clear how long they will be needed.

But NATO diplomats said that the goal was to show enough of a commitment to Turkey’s defense to deter a Syrian attack.

It will take three weeks to ship and deploy the two American Patriot batteries, a Defense Department official said.

One allied official said it might be possible to speed up the deployment of the German and Dutch batteries if necessary. Each of those nations will also send up to 400 troops.

The United States, Germany and the Netherlands are the only NATO members that have the advanced PAC-3 Patriot system.

The Patriot batteries in Turkey will be linked to NATO’s air-defense system. The response by the missile batteries would be nearly automatic, firing interceptor missiles to destroy the target by ramming into it, a tactic the military calls “hit to kill.”

Thom Shanker reported from Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, and Eric Schmitt and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

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Online gambling companies struggle to clear EU hurdles

LONDON (Reuters) – A partnership stuck on Friday between bwin.party Digital Entertainment and a Belgian casino group has defused one of many disputes pitting online gambling companies against governments across Europe.

The agreement came a month after bwin.party’s co-CEO was questioned by Belgian authorities in an escalating license dispute the company said was costing it 700,000 euros ($ 916,000) in monthly revenue.

By joining forces with Belcasinos, a unit of local casino owner Group Partouche, bwin.party neatly met a requirement to have a presence in Belgium to win a license for online poker, casino and sports betting.

The agreement is a rare bright spot in a tough regulatory environment for online gambling companies across the continent.

Betting online on sports events or playing poker on the Internet are increasingly popular pastimes in Europe, where operators say they are held back by unfair and discriminatory rules in many European Union countries.

“It is not a European Union in any way, it is a patchwork of different countries who happen to be in the EU,” said Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams, director of the betting research unit at Nottingham Business School in central England.

“Different countries have different vested interests and different ideas they are trying to promote. Are they trying to protect consumers or to maximize their tax take?” he said.

The 27 EU member states retain the right to regulate their gambling sectors as they see fit, but rules must comply with EU law, broadly meaning they must be consistent and proportionate.

Some companies are scaling back activities in European markets where, they say, regulatory risks are too high or tax rates are punitive.

Betting exchange operator Betfair for instance said this week it was halting marketing and investment in unregulated markets, including EU members Cyprus, Germany and Greece.

William Hill, Britain‘s largest bookmaker, has joined Betfair in pulling out of Greece and has also stopped offering sports betting to German residents because of a 5 percent turnover tax.

STAKES RISE

The stakes are high. Online gambling is growing at an annual rate of almost 15 percent in the EU and will be worth an estimated 13 billion euros ($ 17 billion) by 2015, according to EU figures.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive, stepped in to the debate in October when it published a medium-term plan to clarify regulations and promote cooperation between member states, ruling out EU-wide legislation for the time being.

“All citizens must be adequately protected, money laundering and fraud must be prevented, sport must be safeguarded against betting-related match-fixing and national rules must comply with EU law,” Internal Market and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier said, setting out his approach.

The online operators accuse the European Commission of failing to follow through properly on complaints lodged about regulation in no fewer than 20 or the 27 EU member states.

Barnier has written to member states accused of breaching EU law in the way they handle gambling, seeking an update on the situation by the end of the year.

However, the industry questions whether the EU will go into battle over gambling when it is facing so many other problems.

“They will chip away at some of the most blatant ones,” said Clive Hawkswood, chief executive of trade body the Remote Gambling Association. “What we really need is for them to take some to the European Court and take enforcement action.”

BRITISH TAXES

Gambling companies themselves have taken advantage of different tax regimes where they work in their favor.

This is illustrated in Britain, historically the biggest betting market in Europe and a place with a well-developed gambling culture where bookmakers have operated in town centers for 50 years.

In recent years, most betting companies have moved their British online betting operations to Britain’s overseas territory of Gibraltar. There they are sheltered from a 15 percent tax on gross profit faced by operators based in Britain.

New legislation will close off that loophole after 2014. The shift to a taxation model based on the location of the consumer was expected to cost gambling companies as much as 270 million pounds ($ 435 million) by 2016-17.

Analyst Nick Batram at brokerage Peel Hunt said smaller players would likely be picked off because of the impact of higher tax and regulatory burdens across Europe.

“It is getting more complicated and more expensive. There is more change afoot but it should ultimately play into the hands of the better-capitalized companies.”

In that vein, William Hill has provisionally agreed a 485 million pound takeover of smaller rival Sportingbet, keen to get its hands on the company’s regulated Australian betting business.

“I think there is a lot more M&A activity to come,” said Batram.

(Additional reporting by Rosalba O’Brien; Editing by David Holmes)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Jane Krakowski: Santa Made My Son Scream

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

12/13/2012 at 04:00 PM ET

Neilson Barnard/Getty

Not everyone finds Santa Claus so jolly — namely, Jane Krakowski‘s 20-month-old son, Bennett Robert.

“We went and saw Santa for the first time last weekend,” the actress told PEOPLE at a Bank of America charity event on Wednesday. “We have the classic screaming by the Santa Claus photo. I love it.”

But with Bennett’s latest craze over clothes, St. Nick has it easy when it comes to the toddler’s wish list.

“I don’t know if it’s just his age or because of his parents, but he enjoys getting clothes as gifts,” Krakowski, 44, explains. “Maybe he doesn’t realize that toys are more fun! When he gets a new sweater, he hugs it.”

It’s a busy time of year for the star — who finishes filming the final season of 30 Rock on Dec. 17 — as she prepares to host Christmas dinner at her home for the first time.

But the ending of an era is bittersweet for Krakowski. While she’ll now have extra time with Bennett, the first-time mom found the balance of her professional and personal lives doable during the show’s run.

“It’s been great because I work with other working moms, and Tina Fey is a great example of a multitasking working mom,” she says. “[When 30 Rock is over], I’ll be what they call a stay-at-home actress.”

One thing’s for sure: Krakowski certainly has a lot of love at home to return to.

“The other day [Bennett] grabbed my face and gave me a kiss for the first time,” she shares. “Like he understood what a kiss was. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s it! That’s the whole thing!’”

– Shakthi Jothianandan

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Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants

ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.

The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.

To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.

But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.

When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.

In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."

The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.

Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.

Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.

A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.

California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.

And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.

If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.

Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.

The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.

"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."

Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.

There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.

Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.

For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.

"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."

___

Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .

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The last call for a skid row era at King Eddy Saloon

Wire-thin and slumped like a question mark, James Maley nurses a watered-down whiskey at the battered bar inside the King Eddy Saloon. Around him a boisterous crowd presses in. Maley taps a cracked fingernail nervously on his glass and stares warily at the newcomers.

They've come to see novelist John Fante's son, Dan Fante, read at the bar that inspired his father's 1939 classic "Ask the Dust." They're also here to experience skid row's last dive bar before it shuts down for renovations on Sunday.

"If this happened every day, I would never show up," says Maley, who lives in transitional housing a few blocks away.

Other time-worn regulars, many with leathery skin, bad teeth and watchful eyes, nod in agreement. The bar provides home and family for those who have neither. They come for community and to spend what little money they have on plastic pitchers of beer and $2.50 gin and tonics.

PHOTOS: Last Call at King Eddy Saloon

When the Fante reading ends, the interlopers quickly disperse.

"There go the slummers," says John Tottenham, a poet who has been coming to the King Eddy since the 1980s.

Chances are the crowds will be back when the bar reopens under new management. The owners plan to use old photos to restore the bar's Midcentury look. They hope to renovate the abandoned speak-easy in the basement and open the bar's windows that are covered by stucco, letting natural light into the place for the first time in decades.

They haven't finalized their plans, but one thing is for sure. Drinks won't come cheap at the new King Eddy.

The bar is located on the corner of 5th and Los Angeles streets in the King Edward Hotel, which was built in 1906 and was a tony destination for visitors to what was once a thriving commercial district. The hotel now provides low-income housing for many of King Eddy's regulars.

The pre-Prohibition era King Eddy is painted black. With neon beer signs providing most of its light, the room is dim and gloomy. Its black-and-white checkered floor is grimy. Plastic beer flags hang from the ceiling and the place smells of stale smoke and disinfectant.

The bar itself, shaped in a square, commands the center of the room, with cracked vinyl banquettes lining the perimeter. A glassed-in smoking space is set off to the side. Behind the bar is a tiny fluorescent-lighted kitchen where prepackaged burgers, pizza and sandwiches are heated in a microwave. A beer and burrito would set a person back only $4.

Next week, Maley and the other dislodged drinkers will have to find another bar, but they face a new downtown landscape of high-end mixology bars, restaurants and Brazilian waxing salons.

"I haven't the faintest idea where they'll go," says bar manager Bill Roller, 75, who has worked at the King Eddy for more than 30 years.

King Eddy opened in 1933 and has one of the oldest liquor licenses in the city. It was favored not only by Fante, but also by writers such as Charles Bukowski and James M. Cain for its lack of pretension and colorful clientele.

PHOTOS: Last Call at King Eddy Saloon

"The King Eddy Saloon is the last stand in a world that's completely lost to us — and that's skid row in the 1950s sense, a place where itinerant and semi-skilled laborers could find work seasonally," says downtown historian Richard Schave, who founded the Los Angeles Visionaries Assn., which staged the Fante event.

The bar has been owned by the same family for three generations. Dustin Croick took over in 2008 after his father, Rob, was badly injured in a car accident on his way home from the bar one night. Rob Croick, who has since died, managed the King Eddy for his father, Babe, who bought the bar in the 1960s with money he earned running downtown parking lots.

"This place has been a dive bar since I've been coming here as a kid with my dad, ordering milk and sitting on that stool," says Dustin Croick, 27.

In recent years, Croick has been trying to attract a more mainstream clientele. He started a website that played up the bar's hard-luck roots and featured a catchphrase he coined: "Where nobody gives a … about your name." He tried to lure the producers of the television show "Bar Rescue" to shoot a segment there, but the building's previous owners would not allow the filming.

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IHT Rendezvous: 'Secret' Arms Deals Provoke Germans

LONDON — There is at least one European export sector that continues to find a ready market around the world — weapons.

In the week in which the European Union received the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, protestors in the Norwegian capital were not alone in pointing out the irony that its member states account for a third of global arms exports.

It is an irony that has a particular resonance in Germany right now, where the government’s decisions on a series of weapons deals have created unease among parliamentarians who complain they were kept in the dark.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was among the European leaders in Oslo for Monday’s Nobel award ceremony, has been described as the architect of a new doctrine to boost the country’s weapon sales.

“Germany used to be extremely careful about where it exported its weapons,” wrote Der Spiegel, the German magazine, which has been at the forefront of revelations about Berlin’s weapons policy. “In recent years, however, Chancellor Angela Merkel has shown a preference for sending high-tech armaments abroad rather than German soldiers — even if that means doing business with questionable regimes.”

Legislators and German media have seized on the magazine’s reporting of a secretive federal security committee, chaired by Ms. Merkel, allegedly involved in discussions of high-tech arms sales to countries that include Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.

The latest is the possible sale of state-of-the-art Boxer armored vehicles to the Saudi Royal Guard, which is responsible for protecting the royal family.

Berlin has already approved the sale of up to 270 Leopard 2 tanks to the kingdom in a deal that provoked a fierce debate in Germany.

“Merkel wants to bolster countries that — at least from the German point of view — can provide for stability in their regions,” according to Der Spiegel, which warned it was a risky policy.

But the argument for boosting German weapons exports is economic as much as it is strategic.

“At the end of the day, it’s elementary budgeting,” according to Ben Knight of Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster.

“Germany, along with most European countries, is in the middle of making drastic cuts in order to bring down its national debt,” he wrote last week. “So instead of costly military operations in the world’s many conflict zones, it has apparently decided to sell more weapons to ‘partner countries’ in those regions. What was once hefty expenditure suddenly becomes vast revenue.”

The so-called Merkel Doctrine has prompted an inevitable backlash from peace advocates and others concerned that German weapons could be used to suppress civil unrest.

Jürgen Grässlin, spokesman for a campaign that opposes arms exports, told Deutsche Welle, “The German government is essentially abetting mass murder in various conflict zones in the world.”

Legislators have also expressed concern that potentially far-reaching decisions are being taken by an inner circle of government without the benefit of parliamentary oversight.

In its latest report on what it described as the secret weapons deals, Der Spiegel this week quoted Markus Löning, the government’s human rights commissioner, as saying, “Citizens have a justified interest in being informed earlier on about arms sales.”

Germany is not alone, of course, in wanting to maximize its weapons sales.

Mark Bromley, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told Deutsche Welle, “A number of countries in western Europe are seeing declines in defense spending, which is having an impact on both defense acquisitions and production.”

“In an attempt to counter that, several governments — including Germany’s — are getting more focused on the promotion of arms exports to regions where budgets haven’t been cut, including parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America.”

As my colleague Judy Dempsey wrote from Berlin earlier this year, not all these markets are in stable, conflict-free, democratic countries.

“This raises the question,” she wrote, “of how Europe can square its commitment to defending human rights with selling weapons to such countries.”

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iPad mini deemed a ‘game changer,’ outgrew Kindle Fire by nearly 50%

Smaller tablets in the 7-inch range have been on the market for more than two years now, but it looks like it took Apple (AAPL) just one month to vault to the top of the category. Mobile advertising firm Millennial Media recently published the findings of a study pitting the iPad mini against Amazon’s (AMZN) popular Kindle Fire, which has been an extremely popular iPad alternative since it first launched last year. According to Millennial, iPad mini usage grew about 50% faster during early November than the Kindle Fire did immediately following its successful launch last year, as measured by ad impressions served by the firm’s network.

Millennial found that impressions served to the iPad mini in early November grew at an average daily rate of 28%. In the weeks following the Kindle Fire’s launch last year, usage of Amazon’s tablet grew roughly 19% each day.

“In the first weeks after the iPad mini went on sale, we saw an average daily growth in impressions of 28 percent. Last holiday season, Amazon launched the Kindle Fire to much anticipation, Millennial Media’s Matt Mills wrote on the company’s blog. “As a comparison, we saw Kindle Fire impressions grow at an average daily rate of 19 percent in the first two weeks after it went on sale last year. So, by our math it looks like Apple could have itself another massive holiday season.”

Mills called the iPad mini a “game changer” and said he expects “a massive amount” of iPad mini tablets to be given as gifts this holiday season.

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John McAfee Deported from Guatemala, Back in U.S.

By Tim Nudd

12/13/2012 at 07:50 AM EST

John McAfee in Guatemala

Guatemala's National Police/AP

The latest chapter in the John McAfee saga was written Wednesday, as the anti-virus software pioneer was released from Guatemalan custody and flown to Miami, where he was met by federal officials.

"It was the most gracious expulsion I've ever experienced," McAfee, 67, told ABC News. "Compared to my past two wives that expelled me, this isn't a terrible trip."

He added: "They took me out of my cell and put me on a freaking airplane. I had no choice in the matter."

McAfee is wanted for questioning in the November gunshot murder of a neighbor in Belize. He has denied any wrongdoing, yet fled Belize – going undercover in disguise for several weeks – and sought asylum in Guatemala.

Authorities there arrested him for entering the country illegally. But after an eventful detention, in which McAfee was briefly hospitalized after suffering a nervous collapse, the country evidently felt it prudent to return McAfee to his home soil.

It was not clear Wednesday whether authorities in Miami escorted McAfee away to shield him from the media or because they wanted to question him.

McAfee said he has retained a lawyer in the U.S. and plans to seek a visa for his 20-year-old Belizean girlfriend.

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