Asperger’s dropped from revised diagnosis manual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other changes include:

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

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

___

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

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Talking Turkey at the Butterball Hot Line

On Thanksgiving morning, real estate agent Marty Van Ness woke up at 4 a.m. By 6 a.m. she was at the Butterball company test kitchen and offices in Naperville, Ill., where for the next eight hours she sat at a desk in a large, brightly lit room and, with the help of 59 other trained Butterball cooks, answered as many of the 12,000 calls to Butterball’s toll-free hot line as she could. Van Ness flipped through a four-inch-thick binder full of turkey tips and tricks and spoke in a cheerful, Midwestern voice to frantic would-be chefs wondering how to defrost, deep-fry, cook, baste, brine, or carve their holiday birds.

“Last year a man called me on Thanksgiving Day and said, ‘OK, I’ve got my frozen turkey ready to thaw and I have one question: What number should I set the dial to on my electric blanket?’ ” Says Van Ness, “I haven’t been stumped by a question in years, but that one—that one we had to get creative.”

Ever since its founding in 1940, Butterball has been at the top of the turkey game. Today it sells more than 1.3 billion pounds of turkey meat annually. If you cooked a turkey this holiday season, there’s a one in five chance the bird you bought was a Butterball. These days, the company isn’t focused so much on gaining new customers as cultivating loyalty among those it has.

So in 1981, Butterball experimented with the relatively new concept of a 1-800 number. It set up a toll-free hot line and staffed it with a handful of home economists. The company put the number on the little instruction packet that comes with each bird. “Toll-free numbers were just becoming popular, and they had no idea how many people would call,” says Linda Compton, Butterball’s director of consumer affairs. More than 11,000 customers did that first year, and the company has continued the practice ever since. Others have followed suit: Today you can ask Perdue or Foster Farms for help—Crisco even has a year-round pie hot line.

This year, Butterball’s Turkey Talk-Line is open from early November through Christmas Eve and is expected to serve more than 1 million people. Although most cooks still call, Butterball also answers e-mail and, beginning this year, questions on Facebook and Twitter. (This may prove to be a mixed blessing: On Butterball’s Facebook page there are about as many queries about cooking as there are screeds against eating meat and accusations of mistreatment of animals.)

Van Ness has been answering the Turkey Talk-Line since 1984, which means she has a wealth of both recipe tips (you can cook a frozen turkey without thawing it; it just takes two to three hours longer) and sociological insights, such as her observation that more men are calling than ever before.

She especially likes dealing with college kids cooking their first Thanksgiving dinners. “They’ll call me from the grocery store aisle and say, ‘OK, we have a turkey. What else do we need?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, do you have a pan?’ ” A few years ago, Butterball made all its Turkey Talk-Line experts take a deep-frying course after customers kept accidentally setting their turkeys—and themselves—on fire.

Thanksgiving is understandably the busiest time for the Turkey Talk-Line, but Van Ness says more and more people are hosting their gatherings at unusual times of the month. “Family members live all over the country and almost everybody works, so they can’t always get together on the right day,” she says. Van Ness herself always eats her turkey on the correct day. After her eight-hour shift at Butterball ends, she drives home and takes a short nap before sitting down to a dinner her husband has prepared. “He has my direct number at work to call if he has any questions,” she says, “but after so many years, he’s gotten pretty good. These days, the only questions he asks are things like, ‘Where are the oven mitts?’ ”

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Cargo plane crashes in Brazzaville, 3 dead

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (AP) — A cargo plane owned by a private company crashed Friday near the airport in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, killing at least three people, officials said.

The Soviet-made Ilyushin-76 belonged to Trans Air Congo and appeared to be transporting merchandise, not people, said an aviation official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The plane was coming from Congo‘s second-largest city, Pointe Noire, and tried to land during heavy rain, he said.

Ambulances rushed to the scene in the Makazou neighborhood, located near the airport, but emergency workers were hampered by the lack of light in this capital, which like so many in Africa has a chronic shortage of electricity.

“At the moment, my team is having a hard time searching for survivors in order to find the victims of the crash because there is no light and also because of the rain,” Congolese Red Cross head Albert Mberi said.

He said that realistically, they will only be able to launch a proper search Saturday, when the sun comes up.

Reporters at the scene fought through a wall of smoke. Despite the darkness, they could make out the smoldering remains of the plane, including what looked like the left wing of the aircraft. A little bit further on, emergency workers identified the body of the plane’s Ukrainian pilot, and covered the corpse in a blanket.

Firefighters were trying to extinguish the blaze of a part of the plane that had fallen into a ravine. They were using their truck lights to try to illuminate the scene of the crash. Although the plane was carrying merchandise, emergency workers fear that there could be more people on board.

Because of the state of the road connecting Pointe Noire to Brazzaville, many traders prefer to fly the roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Africa has some of the worst air safety records in the world. In June, a commercial jetliner crashed in Lagos, Nigeria, killing 153 people, just a few days after a cargo plane clipped a bus in neighboring Ghana, killing 10.

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Putin aide denies Russian president has health problems

TOKYO/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin is in good health, his chief of staff said on Friday after Japanese media said Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had postponed a visit to Moscow next month because the Russian president had a health problem.

A former KGB officer who enjoys vast authority in Russia, Putin has long cultivated a tough-guy image, and health issues could damage that. His condition though has been questioned in some media since he was seen limping at a summit in September.

Three Russian government sources told Reuters late in October that Putin, who began a six-year term in May and turned 60 last month, was suffering from back trouble, but the Kremlin has dismissed talk that he had a serious back problem.

Putin’s health troubles stem from a recent judo bout, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said this week.

Then on Friday Japanese news agencies Kyodo and Jiji reported that Prime Minister Noda talked about the delay of a visit planned for December in a meeting with municipal officials on the northern island of Hokkaido.

“It’s about (President Putin’s) health problem. This is not something that can easily be made public,” Jiji cited one of the officials as quoting Noda as saying.

But Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov denied there was any problem.

“Please don’t worry, don’t be concerned. Everything is in order with his health,” Putin’s said in Vienna, according to state-run Russian news agency RIA.

In an interview published on Friday in the popular Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said rumors about a spine problem were “strongly exaggerated”.

“He is working as he has before and intends to continue working at the same pace,” Peskov said.

“He also does not plan to give up his sports activities and for this reason, like any athlete, his back, his arm, his leg might sometimes hurt a little – this has never gotten in the way of his ability to work.”

Putin had been expected to make several foreign trips in late October or November, but they did not take place.

Putin is however due to visit Turkey on Monday and Turkmenistan on Wednesday.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, made amply clear the Kremlin was displeased by the public discussion of scheduling by Japanese officials and denied that Noda’s visit had been postponed, saying no date had been set.

“It is just unethical to name the dates that were discussed. There were several: at first it was October, November, December, January … then we even shifted to February,” Ushakov said, adding that the sides eventually agreed tentatively on January.

He said the diplomatic process of agreeing dates for the visit should have been “hermetically sealed”.

Putin’s image as a fit, healthy man helped bring him popularity when he rose to power 13 years ago because of the stark contrast with his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who was sometimes drunk in public and had heart surgery when president.

He has used activities like scuba diving and horseback riding to maintain that image.

On Friday, Putin met leaders of parliamentary factions in his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. He appeared in good health and was walking without any sign of a limp.

Likely to be on the agenda in talks between Russian and Japanese officials are energy cooperation and a decades-old dispute over islands north of Hokkaido known as the Southern Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan.

(Additional reporting by Darya Korsunskaya; Writing by Tomasz Janowski and Steve Gutterman; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jon Hemming)

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The Economy of Surgery

When I was twelve, my sister and I accompanied my grandparents to their annual yoga retreat in the hilly ranges of southern India. We had never been before, but the summer heat was particularly blistering that year, so we persuaded our grandparents to take us along. I envisioned a blissful two-week vacation in a photogenic little hamlet, nestled among tea plantations, in temperatures that were thirty degrees cooler than on the mainland. It was just that, and yet, it was even less complicated than that.The mean age of folk at the retreat was 67. Bells sounded every morning at 3:30am, and everyone filed out of their cabins and to a little gymnasium in the center of the dwelling, where we all meditated for two hours to the sounds of sitar music and transcendental humming. Meals were served at strict hours three times a day, and consisted of boiled vegetables and grains, with not a lick of salt or spice. The library in the middle of this utopian dwelling held only spiritual and philosophical texts, not the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys I hoped for. In the afternoons, there were a variety of classes offered – cooking lessons, devotional classes, music and instrumental classes, and yoga. My sister and I stopped by the latter occasionally, and were always put to shame by octogenarians holding themselves up in impossible poses, such as balancing their entire habitus on the tips of their fingers. I journaled in the evenings, writing each day about a new facet of human life that I’d observed. In the absence of stimulus, my dreams grew vivid and exceedingly detailed.Over the course of the two weeks, my sister and I grew quiet and reflective. It was then that we began an important switch in our minds, something that has lasted to this day. We began to see value in living leanly, economically, functionally. We began to separate needs from wants, and to discard the ornamentation.*Third year of medical school has finally brought me around to my surgery rotation: three months of waking up at 4am, stuffing my white coat pockets to the brim with gauze and tape, retracting skin and fat during long abdominal surgeries, and practicing suturing techniques on pig’s feet procured at the local Stop&Shop grocery market. It’s fast and exhilarating, and deeply satisfying. I was skeptical when I first heard that my preceptor’s favorite procedure of all time was draining a deep-seated abscess. But when I saw it being done in clinic, how a single stab of the thing blade led to the gushing of what felt like liters of pus, I couldn’t help but agree. What a joy to just go in and fix a problem so dramatically, reconstruct a failing human body in a matter of hours!During orientation on the first day of the rotation, two residents sat down and gave my classmates and me some hard advice. Surgery is a demanding rotation, they said, and it reflects the demanding residency ahead that awaits the select few. We could expect to go in while it is still dark out, and leave after the sun had set, almost every day. Residents and attendings can be rough around the edges, and may be gruff with you, even kick you out of their operating room if they feel like it, but it’s not personal. Or even if it is, we’ve got to shrug it off and keep it moving. Gone are the days of noon conferences and luxurious afternoon didactics, with their promise of free lunches and coffee. We were to eat when we can, sit when we can, sleep when we can.After an hour of such grim prognostications, my classmates and I took a break and debriefed our feelings with each other outside the bathrooms. Some were giggling nervously with panicked eyes, but most looked inspired. I too felt like I had voluntarily signed up for a warrior training program, and was feeling pretty zen about it. I saw it as a character-building experience: surgery was the time to cut out the silly frills, and embrace a leaner, meaner way of living. It was time to lose the pretty business casual outfits and fancy footwear of internal medicine, and trade them in for utilitarian scrubs and clogs. It promised to be a time of talking less and getting things done.*During a recent health management class, my classmates and I discussed the case of a medical center based in Seattle that benefited from industry principles gleaned from, of all places, the Toyota car manufacturing company. Toyota’s revolution as a manufacturing miracle began in the supply-scarce post-WWII Japan, when management was confronted with the challenge of meeting customer needs in the face of little spare capital to hold inventory as a buffer to fluctuating demand. The company then developed a set of principles focused on cutting muda or waste, while pursuing kaizen, or continuous self -improvement by way of complete intolerance for redundancy. Toyota integrated these principles into every step of production and management.For instance, Toyota emphasizes innovation on the shop floor by frontline workers to solve problems in production in real time. If a problem is discovered that cannot be fixed within the production cycle time, workers pull a cord that halts the entire assembly line and brings a senior supervisor to the scene. The management aggressively seeks ideas for improvement from employees, resulting in an average yield of close to a million ideas annually, 90% of which go on to be implemented.Analysts attribute Toyota’s success to its emphatic optimization of flow – information flow, physical flow of parts, and overall production flow, via standardized processes and continuous improvement. Standardized processes are ones that are streamlined to eliminate aberrations and unplanned redundancies. Waste, measured even in the seconds, is simply not tolerated, forcing a redesign of processes, again and again, which any employee can take on.In 2004, Toyota surpassed Ford Motors to become the world’s second-largest manufacturer of cars and trucks, surpassing the latter consistently in quality, dependability and value assessments. In turn, Ford began to take cues from Toyota, transforming its assembly-line system to similarly cut out waste.*There are two kinds of people in the world: surgeons, and everyone else.Really, what does it mean to live leanly? I rediscovered it in this rotation. A life in surgery isn’t for everyone, but such an experience is something I truly feel everyone should have. These past 6 weeks have been teaching me to think fast, move fast. They’ve been teaching me to suffice with less, be it food, sleep, or words of appreciation. They’ve been teaching me to appreciate the vulnerabilities of the human body – for no matter how exhausted or sleep-deprived I may feel, actually laying hands on the more tangible deficits of another’s is always startling and humbling. The end result is a beautiful dance, for surgeons and their assistants, working with their hands, rediscovering the grace of human movement, bring art back into medicine.I never leave the OR thinking that more is better. I watch instruments fly, I watch the players push and pull, cut and stitch, wash and dry, and I think about things like symmetry, precision, and above all, the beauty of economy.

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs.Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
© 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.
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News Corp to name Thomson as Publishing Co CEO next week: sources

(Reuters) – News Corp is expected to name Robert Thomson, a close confidant of Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, to lead its new publishing company by the end of next week, according to sources familiar with News Corp’s plans.

Thomson is currently managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and editor in chief of its publisher Dow Jones & Co, which News Corp acquired in 2007. Gerard Baker, currently the deputy editor of the Journal, is expected to succeed Thomson, according to these sources.

Murdoch will be relying on his trusted lieutenant to steer the new company – whose main assets apart from Dow Jones include its British and Australian newspapers and HarperCollins book publishing business – at a difficult time. Newspapers in many developed markets are suffering from a severe drop in advertising revenue and circulation is being hit as readers are choosing to get their news on smartphones and tablets.

Among the key decisions Thomson will have to make include what to do about the financially struggling New York Post and whether the new company will go on an acquisition spree for other U.S. newspapers that could come on the market, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Thomson and Baker were not immediately available for comment. Representatives for Dow Jones and News Corp were also not immediately available.

In June, News Corp said it was separating its publishing and entertainment assets in response to shareholders who had pressed News Corp to get rid of its troubled newspapers business after a phone hacking scandal tainted its British newspapers and forced the company to drop its proposed acquisition of pay-TV group BSkyB.

News Corp is still finalizing the details of other executive appointments within the new company – a decision that could delay the announcement of the appointments of Thomson and Baker, one of the sources said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the role of Dow Jones CEO Lex Fenwick will change in any way.

Murdoch will hold the chairman title at the publishing company after its split from the entertainment side, which will include most of the group’s TV and movie studio assets and where he will remain chairman and CEO.

The confirmation of Thomson’s long-rumored appointment to CEO of the publishing company appears to have sidelined any plans Murdoch may have had to bring his eldest son, Lachlan, back into the family business fold. News Corp watchers and industry experts had assumed that Murdoch would push hard to recruit Lachlan given his son previously had some success as publisher of the New York Post.

The Australian-born Thomson was appointed to oversee the newsroom of the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires shortly after News Corp’s $ 5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones from the Bancroft family in 2007. Thomson was editor of News Corp’s Times of London and before that he was at the Financial Times where he led that paper’s expansion in the U.S.

He recruited Baker in 2008 from the Times of London where he was heading up its coverage in the U.S.

While the newspaper industry is facing stiff challenges, News Corp has invested in the Wall Street Journal, adding new sections – including one that covers New York and one that focuses on real estate, while other papers have retrenched by slashing pages and frequency of publication. The Journal has risen to become the No. 1 daily newspaper in the U.S. and has broadened out its coverage beyond Wall Street to include more political and general news in an effort to compete with the New York Times.

The splitting of News Corp into two publicly traded companies will likely be completed by the end of June.

New Corp’s film and television businesses include the 20th Century Fox film studio, Fox broadcasting network and Fox News channel. The entertainment business, which generated revenues of $ 24.7 billion in the year ending June 2012, would dwarf the publishing unit, which posted $ 8.2 billion in revenue.

(Reporting By Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Peter Lauria and Martin Howell)

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African Union asks UN for immediate action on Mali

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — In an open letter Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the president of the African Union urged the U.N. to take immediate military action in northern Mali, which was seized by al-Qaida-linked rebels earlier this year.

Yayi Boni, the president of Benin who is also head of the African Union, said any reticence on the part of the U.N. will be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the terrorists now operating in Mali. The AU is waiting for the U.N. to sign off on a military plan to take back the occupied territory, and the Security Council is expected to discuss it in coming days.

In a report to the Security Council late Wednesday, Ban said the AU plan “needs to be developed further” because fundamental questions on how the force will be led, trained and equipped. Ban acknowledged that with each day, al-Qaida-linked fighters were becoming further entrenched in northern Mali, but he cautioned that a botched military operation could result in human rights abuses.

The sprawling African nation of Mali, once an example of a stable democracy, fell apart in March following a coup by junior officers. In the uncertainty that ensued, rebels including at least three groups with ties to al-Qaida, grabbed control of the nation’s distant north. The Islamists now control an area the size of France or Texas, an enormous triangle of land that includes borders with Mauritania, Algeria and Niger.

Two weeks ago, the African Union asked the U.N. to endorse a military intervention to free northern Mali, calling for 3,300 African soldiers to be deployed for one year. A U.S.-based counterterrorism official who saw the military plan said it was “amateurish” and had “huge, gaping holes.” The official insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter.

Boni, in his letter, said Africa was counting on the U.N. to take decisive action.

“I need to tell you with how much impatience the African continent is awaiting a strong message from the international community regarding the resolution of the crisis in Mali. … What we need to avoid is the impression that we are lacking in resolve in the face of these determined terrorists,” he said.

The most feared group in northern Mali is al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, al-Qaida’s North African branch, which is holding at least seven French hostages, including a 61-year-old man kidnapped last week.

On Thursday, SITE Intelligence published a transcript of a recently released interview with AQIM leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, in which he urges Malians to reject any foreign intervention in their country. He warned French President Francois Hollande that he was “digging the graves” of the French hostages by pushing for an intervention.

Also on Thursday, Islamists meted out the latest Shariah punishment in northern city of Timbuktu. Six young men and women were each given 100 lashes for having talked to each other on city streets, witnesses said.

___

Associated Press writer Virgile Ahissou in Cotonou, Benin and Baba Ahmed in Bamako, Mali contributed to this report.

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Apple overcomes last hurdle, iPhone 5 cleared for sale in China as Android continues to dominate

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Gotye wins big at Australia’s Aria music awards

SYDNEY (AP) — Gotye has taken home album of the year at Australia‘s Aria music awards for his internationally acclaimed “Making Mirrors.”

The album features the Belgian-born, Australian-raised singer’s multiplatinum hit “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which was the top song of the year on digital music service Spotify.

Gotye won three other awards at Thursday night’s Arias, including best pop release, best Australian live act and best male artist.

The annual awards show is Australia’s version of the Grammys. This year’s gala featured appearances by Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj and Russell Brand.

Fans shrieked with glee when British pop group One Direction was dubbed best international artist. The quintet thanked their Aussie supporters via video link.

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AIDS drug roll-out boosts South African life expectancy

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa has achieved a “stunning” increase in life expectancy in the last three years due to a government push to roll out antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to people with HIV/AIDS, researchers said on Thursday.

The average South African is now likely to live to the age of 60, a study in the Lancet medical journal said, compared with just 56.5 in 2009 when President Jacob Zuma came to power with promises of a new approach to the country’s HIV/AIDS burden.

Africa’s biggest economy is home to 6 million HIV/AIDS sufferers but under Zuma’s predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, the government was reluctant to provide the life-prolonging drugs, the study said.

Nearly 2 million people are now taking ARVs daily in what is the world’s largest ARV programme. That total compares with 912,000 in 2009 and just 235,000 three years before that.

Although overall infection rates have stayed constant at around 10 percent since 2006, the study’s authors said such a dramatic increase in life expectancy was unheard-of.

“There are many factors that contribute to life expectancy but the single most important one was the expansion of the ARV treatment programme,” said Professor Salim Abdool Karim, director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa and a member of the Lancet South Africa team.

“That increase in life expectancy is nothing short of stunning. You don’t see those kinds of increases in the real world.”

Lead researcher Bongani Mayosi from the University of Cape Town singled out Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi for praise in reversing the policies of Mbeki, whose health minister outraged activists by questioning the effectiveness of ARVs and championing the benefits of garlic and beetroot instead.

“We have no doubt that the new administration that came in 2009 was eager to make an improvement on the disastrous record of the first 15 years of the ANC government,” Mayosi said.

South Africa still faced formidable challenges however, particularly in reducing huge racial disparities in housing, employment and access to health services, Mayosi said.

Just 10.3 percent of black South Africans, who make up 80 percent of the population, have medical insurance, compared with 70.9 percent for whites, who make up just 10 percent of the overall 52 million population, the study showed.

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