Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Is Linked to Petraeus Scandal

PERTH, Australia — Gen. John Allen, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has become ensnared in the scandal over an extramarital affair acknowledged by David H. Petreaus, a former general. General Allen is being investigated for what a senior defense official said early Tuesday was “inappropriate communication” with Jill Kelley, the woman in Tampa, Fla., who was seen by General Petreaus’s former lover as a rival for his attentions. 

In a statement released to reporters on his plane en route to Australia early Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said that the F.B.I. on Sunday had referred “a matter involving” General Allen to the Pentagon.

Mr. Panetta turned the matter over to the Pentagon’s inspector general to conduct an investigation into what a defense official said were 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents, many of them e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley.

A senior law enforcement official in Washington said on Tuesday that F.B.I. investigators looking into Ms. Kelley’s complaint about anonymous e-mails she had received examined all of her e-mails as a routine step.

“When you get involved in a cybercase like this, you have to look at everything,” the official said, suggesting that Ms. Kelley may not have considered that possibility when she filed the complaint. “The real question is why someone decided to open this can of worms.”

The official would not describe the content of the e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley or say specifically why F.B.I. officials decided to pass them on to the Defense Department. “Generally, the nature of the e-mails warranted providing them to D.O.D.,” he said.

Under military law, adultery can be a crime.

The defense official on Mr. Panetta’s plane said that General Allen, who is also married, told Pentagon officials he had done nothing wrong. Neither he nor Ms. Kelley could be reached for comment early Tuesday. Mr. Panetta’s statement praised General Allen for his leadership in Afghanistan and said that “he is entitled to due process in this matter.”

But the Pentagon inspector general’s investigation opens up what could be a widening scandal into two of the most prominent generals of their generation: Mr. Petraeus, who was the top commander in Iraq and Afghanistan before he retired from the military and became director of the C.I.A., only to resign on Friday because of the affair, and General Allen, who also served in Iraq and now commands 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

Although General Allen will remain the commander in Afghanistan, Mr. Panetta said that he had asked President Obama to delay the general’s nomination to be the commander of American forces in Europe and the supreme allied commander of NATO, two positions he was to move into after what was expected to be easy confirmation by the Senate. Mr. Panetta said in his statement that Mr. Obama agreed with his request.

Gen. Joseph A. Dunford, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps who was nominated last month by Mr. Obama to succeed General Allen in Afghanistan, will proceed as planned with his confirmation hearing. In his statement, Mr. Panetta urged the Senate to act promptly on his nomination.

The National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Obama also believes that the Senate should swiftly confirm General Dunford.

The defense official said that the e-mails between Ms. Kelley and General Allen spanned the years 2010 to 2012. The official could not explain why there were so many pages of e-mails and did not specify their content. The official said he could not explain how the e-mails between Ms. Kelley and General Allen were related to the e-mails between Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell and e-mails between Ms. Broadwell and Ms. Kelley.

In what is known so far, Ms. Kelley went to the F.B.I. last summer after she was disturbed by harassing e-mails. The F.B.I. began an investigation and learned that the e-mails were from Ms. Broadwell. In the course of looking into Ms. Broadwell’s e-mails, the F.B.I. discovered e-mails between Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Petraeus that indicated they were having an extramarital affair. Ms. Broadwell, officials say, saw Ms. Kelley as a rival for her affections with Mr. Petraeus.

The defense official said he did not know how General Allen and Ms. Kelley knew each other. General Allen has been in Afghanistan as the top American commander since July 2011, although before that he lived in Tampa as the deputy commander for Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

The defense official said that the Pentagon had received the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents from the F.B.I. and was currently reviewing them.

The defense official said that at 5 p.m. Washington time on Sunday Mr. Panetta was informed by the Pentagon’s general counsel that the F.B.I. had the thousands of pages of e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley. Mr. Panetta was at the time on his plane en route from San Francisco to Honolulu, his first stop on a weeklong trip to the Pacific and Asia. Mr. Panetta notified the White House and then the leaders of the Senate and House armed services committees.

General Allen is now in Washington for what was to be his confirmation hearing as commander in Europe. That hearing, the official said, will now be delayed.

After arriving in Perth Mr. Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia for a United States-Australian security and diplomatic conference. Asked by a reporter while pausing for photos with Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Gillard if General Allen could remain an effective commander while under investigation, Mr. Panetta said nothing.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also in Perth for the defense meetings and had no comment on the investigation of General Allen. "I do know him well and I can’t say," General Dempsey said of General Allen late on Tuesday after returning from an official dinner with the Australian officials, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Panetta.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

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At Mao-style conclave, China embraces Twitter age

BEIJING (AP) — During China’s last party congress, the cadres in charge of the world’s most populous nation didn’t know a hashtag from a hyperlink. But five years on, there’s a new message from Beijing: The political transition will be microblogged.

Party officials have this fall embraced social media with unprecedented enthusiasm, hoping it can help guide public opinion and stir up excitement about the staid and scripted party meeting taking place this week in Beijing that kicks off a transition to a new, younger set of top leaders.

Dozens of the more than 2,000 party delegates, among them Chairman Mao‘s grandson, are using social media to wax rhapsodic about China’s rise and Party General Secretary Hu Jintao’s live 90-minute reading of highlights from this year’s party work report. Typical posts include pictures of grinning delegates on Tiananmen Square and mobile snapshots of poinsettia arrangements and chandeliers from inside the Great Hall of the People, where the congress is meeting.

Guo Mingyi, a miner from the frigid northeast who was making his debut as a party delegate, tweeted: “On this land with great affections, how can I not sing, how can I not tear up, I love this piece of land, the people and the great Chinese Communist Party!”

State media also are posting microblog interviews with officials and shooting out updates about the congress schedule via Twitter-like accounts.

But apart from being a tool to deliver Beijing’s approved policy messages to the mobile phones of ordinary Chinese, the Internet is a two-way street that’s also being used by the public to poke fun at and critique the propaganda. Online commentators have compared the gushy crying and clapping of some delegates over Hu’s speech to North Korean style mass hysteria.

Responding to state media report about how a female delegate, Li Jian, cried five times at Hu’s work report, a Sina microblog user writing under the name ‘Buying Soysauce’ wrote: “I sobbed uncontrollably too, at the thought that these people were my compatriots.”

Wang Keqin, the assistant to the editor in chief of Beijing’s Economic Observer magazine, wrote about the tears of another delegate, He Guiqin: “It’s back to North Korea overnight!”

Other critics have dredged up old headlines from 1987 about the scourge of bribe-seeking and posted them online to highlight how little party rhetoric, and party problems, have changed despite major social change over the last three decades.

The clash of ideas underscores just how important the Internet has become in China’s campaign to guide public opinion — a major shift from just a few years ago.

At the last party conclave in October 2007, Twitter was a little over a year old and hashtags had only just been introduced. China’s leading homegrown Twitter-like microblog service, Sina Weibo, was still two years from launch.

But as elsewhere, China’s Internet population has exploded over the last five years, jumping from 170 million to more than 500 million today. Social media has boomed with it and now plays a huge part in everyday Chinese life, particularly for urban residents who use it to find restaurants, jobs and mates.

Beijing’s initial reaction to social media was to block and censor, to limit conversations by banning access to Twitter and Facebook and to limit mention of anything considered sensitive or destabilizing with keyword filters. Though authorities still use those tactics, the government is increasingly proactive and working to wrest control of the online conversation by flooding the zone with its own content.

David Bandurski, a researcher with the China Media Project at Hong Kong University, says Chinese officials have learned that simply banning or blocking reports is no longer effective in the porous Internet sphere and that stifling information can backfire by fanning more interest in scandals and crises and sparking online rumors.

“You can’t just stuff the genie back into the bottle,” said Bandurski. “You have also to channel public opinion … officially, they are seeing social media as the best way to send out their authoritative information and kind of drive the agenda.”

But the government remains yoked to its party-ese, which can seem hopelessly out of date in the Twitter age.

A dispatch on the trend by the official Xinhua News Agency gives a hint to the flavor of Beijing’s rhetoric.

“The Internet has been unprecedentedly embedded into the ongoing National Congress of the Communist Party of China,” the news agency trumpeted over the weekend. “Not only can contents on the Internet be found in the congress report, but online media practitioners are attending the congress in person.”

On Saturday, Chairman Mao’s grandson Mao Xinyu tweeted this to his 105,943 followers on Renmin Weibo, the microblog of the official party paper, the People’s Daily: “Mao Zedong thought will always be the guiding ideology of the party.”

It got 155 retweets, a mediocre showing in China‘s lively web sphere.

___

Follow Alexa Olesen on Twitter: http://twitter.com/alobeijing

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Catherine Zeta-Jones Wants to Remove Stigma from Bipolar Diagnosis

By Maggie Coughlan

11/13/2012 at 01:15 PM EST

Since going public with her bipolar II disorder diagnosis in 2011, Catherine Zeta-Jones has taken a little time to reflect.

"It's been an intense time, in good ways and bad," she says in the December issue of InStyle. "You find out who you really are and who you're married to. You find things inside yourself you never imagined were there."

As for being so forthcoming about her battle with depression, Zeta-Jones, 43, whose next movie Broken City is out in January, admits it hasn't been easy.

"You can't escape what people say, and if you're human it can be painful," the actress says. "The smartest thing I did was to stop going online. I'm the sort of person who will just look for the negative."

Continues Zeta-Jones: "[My husband] Michael [Douglas] can't really understand it, but that is the way I am. With my bipolar thing, that's poison. So I just stopped. Cold turkey. And it's so liberating."

"I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow suffers will know it is completely controllable," she says. "I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who didn't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it."

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British medical journal slams Roche on Tamiflu

LONDON (AP) — A leading British medical journal is asking the drug maker Roche to release all its data on Tamiflu, claiming there is no evidence the drug can actually stop the flu.

The drug has been stockpiled by dozens of governments worldwide in case of a global flu outbreak and was widely used during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

On Monday, one of the researchers linked to the BMJ journal called for European governments to sue Roche.

"I suggest we boycott Roche's products until they publish missing Tamiflu data," wrote Peter Gotzsche, leader of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. He said governments should take legal action against Roche to get the money back that was "needlessly" spent on stockpiling Tamiflu.

Last year, Tamiflu was included in a list of "essential medicines" by the World Health Organization, a list that often prompts governments or donor agencies to buy the drug.

Tamiflu is used to treat both seasonal flu and new flu viruses like bird flu or swine flu. WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said the agency had enough proof to warrant its use for unusual influenza viruses, like bird flu.

"We do have substantive evidence it can stop or hinder progression to severe disease like pneumonia," he said.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends Tamiflu as one of two medications for treating regular flu. The other is GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza. The CDC says such antivirals can shorten the duration of symptoms and reduce the risk of complications and hospitalization.

In 2009, the BMJ and researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre asked Roche to make all its Tamiflu data available. At the time, Cochrane Centre scientists were commissioned by Britain to evaluate flu drugs. They found no proof that Tamiflu reduced the number of complications in people with influenza.

"Despite a public promise to release (internal company reports) for each (Tamiflu) trial...Roche has stonewalled," BMJ editor Fiona Godlee wrote in an editorial last month.

In a statement, Roche said it had complied with all legal requirements on publishing data and provided Gotzsche and his colleagues with 3,200 pages of information to answer their questions.

"Roche has made full clinical study data ... available to national health authorities according to their various requirements, so they can conduct their own analyses," the company said.

Roche says it doesn't usually release patient-level data available due to legal or confidentiality constraints. It said it did not provide the requested data to the scientists because they refused to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Roche is also being investigated by the European Medicines Agency for not properly reporting side effects, including possible deaths, for 19 drugs including Tamiflu that were used in about 80,000 patients in the U.S.

____

Online:

www.bmj.com.tamiflu/

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Teen bitten 6 times by rattlesnakes while searching for cell signal

A 16-year-old El Cajon girl is lucky to be alive after being bitten at least six times by rattlesnakes.

"On a scale from 1 to 10 the pain was 45," Vera Oliphant recalled.

The young woman was visiting her uncle in Jamul, Calif., east of San Diego about two weeks ago when she decided to walk up a hill, searching for cell phone reception.

"I heard them all over, I heard the rattles, then I ran," said Oliphant.

In her attempt to run back to her uncle's, she stepped right into a rattlesnake's nest.

"My entire body started swelling," said the teen.

She hobbled back to her uncle who was able to get her to the emergency room at Sharp Grossmont Hospital.

"The doctors told me I was lucky to be alive," said Oliphant, who spent four days in intensive care.

"If you get bitten by a snake, the first thing to remember, is that you have more time than you think you do," said Dr. Jordan Cohen of Sharp Grossmont.

Cohen, who said he's seen his share of snakebites, explained that when it comes to this type of injury, many of the well-known first aid techniques often used in the wilderness don't apply. He advised to get to the emergency room as soon as possible and try to stay immobile. Tourniquets and suction are not advised, he said.

Oliphant said her complete recovery will take several more weeks. In the meantime, she said, "I'll never go out in the desert by myself, and I'll be sure to wear boots."

ALSO:

Off-duty Marine fatally shot by Palm Springs police

Man in wheelchair shot waiting to buy 'Call of Duty' game

P.I. says woman was sent to bar to flirt with Costa Mesa councilman

-- Fox 5 San Diego

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Syrian Jet Strikes Close to Border With Turkey

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Syria pulled both Turkey and Israel closer to military entanglements in its civil war on Monday, bombing a rebel-held Syrian village a few yards from the Turkish border in a deadly aerial assault and provoking Israeli tank commanders in the disputed Golan Heights into blasting mobile Syrian artillery units across their own armistice line.

The escalations, which threatened once again to draw in two of Syria’s most powerful neighbors, came hours after the fractious Syrian opposition announced a broad new unity pact that elicited praise from the big foreign powers backing their effort to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

“It is a big day for the Syrian opposition,” wrote Joshua Landis, an expert on Syrian political history and the author of the widely followed Syria Comment blog. Mr. Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, wrote that the “Assad regime must be worried, as it has survived for 42 years thanks to Syria’s fragmentation.”

There has been speculation that Mr. Assad, feeling increasingly threatened, may deliberately seek to widen the conflict that has consumed much of his own country for the past 20 months and left roughly 40,000 people dead. Although there is no indication that Mr. Assad has decided to try to lure Israel into the fight, any Israeli involvement could rally his failing support and frustrate the efforts of his Arab adversaries.

The attack on the Turkish border, by what Syrian witnesses identified as a Syrian MIG-25 warplane, demolished at least 15 buildings and killed at least 20 people in the town of Ras al-Ain, the scene of heavy fighting for days and an impromptu crossing point for thousands of Syrian refugees clambering for safety into Turkey.

“The plane appeared in seconds, dropped a bomb and killed children,” said Nezir Alan, a doctor who witnessed the bombing. “Here is total chaos.” In a telephone interview from Ras al-Ain, he said the bombing wounded at least 70 people, 50 of them critically. Turkish television stations reported that ambulances were rushing victims into Ceylanpinar, Turkey, just across the border.

Windows of shops and houses in Ceylanpinar were shattered by the force of the bombing, and Turkish television showed people on both sides of the border running in panic, while military vehicles raced down streets as a huge cloud of smoke hung over the area.

There were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries in Ceylanpinar. But the Turkish authorities, increasingly angered by what they view as Syrian provocations, have deployed troops and artillery units along the 550-mile border with Syria and have raised the idea of installing Patriot missile batteries that could deter Syrian military aircraft.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, sent a diplomatic note to Syria on Monday to protest the Ras al-Ain bombing, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported.

Civilians in southern Turkey’s provinces of Hatay, Sanliurfa and Gaziantep, where the government has erected camps for Syrian refugees, have been advised not to travel close to the border.

In Israel, the military said Israeli tanks that are deployed in the Golan Heights, which the Israelis seized from Syria in the 1967 war, had made a direct hit on Syrian artillery units on Monday after consecutive days of erratic mortar fire coming from the Syrian side of the armistice line. The Syrian mortar shells caused no damage or casualties, the military said.

Military officials and analysts in Israel said that they viewed the Syrian shelling as unintentional spillover from the civil war and that Israel has no desire to get involved in the Syria conflict. But the Israelis have expressed increasing concern that after four decades of relative stability in the Golan area, the Assad government may be trying to push them into a fight that could galvanize Arab hostility toward Israel and distract attention from its own problems.

If an errant Syrian shell hit a school filled with children on the Israeli side, said Prof. Moshe Maoz at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a strong Israeli response would be all but guaranteed. “Assad knows very well that Israel does not have a sense of humor here and can retaliate very heavily.”

The United Nations, which monitors an armistice agreement between Israel and Syria in force since the 1973 war, has said it fears that Golan violence could jeopardize the cease-fire.

In Doha, Qatar, where Syrian opposition figures had been meeting since last week, the agreement reached Sunday on forming a new umbrella organization, which could become the basis for a provisional government, was welcomed by participants and the effort’s foreign backers, including Turkey, the United States, the European Union and the Arab League. There were expectations that the new group, called the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, would be permitted to take Syria’s seat at the Arab League, which had expelled Mr. Assad’s representative.

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry released a statement saying that the agreement “would add momentum to efforts in completing the democratic transition process in line with the legitimate expectations of the people.”

In the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, a focal point of the conflict since this summer, civilians who have been living under the threat of constant shelling by the Syrian Army welcomed the opposition unity agreement and expressed hope that it signaled a turning point.

“We have been waiting for this for a very very long time,” said Abu al-Hasan, an anti-Assad activist in Aleppo who was reached by telephone. “Even if it is not perfect yet, it will save us.” But he also warned that “people do not believe this will stop the shelling like a miracle.”

There was no sign that the violence was abating elsewhere inside Syria. Activist groups said warplanes were dropping bombs in Damascus suburbs and that army snipers had taken up positions in areas where bombs had been dropped. The mayhem surrounding central Damascus made residents in that part of the capital feel increasingly isolated.

“The inside of the city is like a big prison now,” said Alexia Jade, a media activist contacted inside Damascus. “The checkpoints have increased and the lines of cars waiting to be searched are getting longer.”

Sebnem Arsu reported from Gaziantep, Turkey, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem, and Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon.

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Carrie Underwood Donates Proceeds from Atlantic City Show to Sandy Relief

By Shakthi Jothianandan

11/12/2012 at 01:30 PM EST

Carrie Underwood's heart might be as big as her famous singing voice.

On Friday at her sold-out show at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall she announced that she would donate all proceeds from that night's performance to New Jersey communities devastated by superstorm Sandy.

"I wouldn't feel right making any money off of tonight's show," she said, "So anything I make is going right back into the community here."

Underwood joins numerous celebrities who have donated time or money in the storm's wake.

The country star's show was the first major concert following the superstorm, and the Oklahoma native initially questioned whether she should perform at all. Sandy battered parts of Atlantic City's historic boardwalk.

"You know, after something like this, you wonder whether the show should go on," she told the crowd. "We thought, this building was still here, so it must be here for a reason."

Underwood had already been giving to charity through her "Blown Away" tour: Since September, $1 of every ticket sold was donated to the Red Cross.

After the show, she Tweeted, "Thank you beautiful Atlantic City! You all made my year! You have been through so much and still rocked the house! I leave in awe!"

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British medical journal slams Roche on Tamiflu

LONDON (AP) — A leading British medical journal is asking the drug maker Roche to release all its data on Tamiflu, claiming there is no evidence the drug can actually stop the flu.

The drug has been stockpiled by dozens of governments worldwide in case of a global flu outbreak and was widely used during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

On Monday, one of the researchers linked to the BMJ journal called for European governments to sue Roche.

"I suggest we boycott Roche's products until they publish missing Tamiflu data," wrote Peter Gotzsche, leader of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. He said governments should take legal action against Roche to get the money back that was "needlessly" spent on stockpiling Tamiflu.

Last year, Tamiflu was included in a list of "essential medicines" by the World Health Organization, a list that often prompts governments or donor agencies to buy the drug.

Tamiflu is used to treat both seasonal flu and new flu viruses like bird flu or swine flu. WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said the agency had enough proof to warrant its use for unusual influenza viruses, like bird flu.

"We do have substantive evidence it can stop or hinder progression to severe disease like pneumonia," he said.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends Tamiflu as one of two medications for treating regular flu. The other is GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza. The CDC says such antivirals can shorten the duration of symptoms and reduce the risk of complications and hospitalization.

In 2009, the BMJ and researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre asked Roche to make all its Tamiflu data available. At the time, Cochrane Centre scientists were commissioned by Britain to evaluate flu drugs. They found no proof that Tamiflu reduced the number of complications in people with influenza.

"Despite a public promise to release (internal company reports) for each (Tamiflu) trial...Roche has stonewalled," BMJ editor Fiona Godlee wrote in an editorial last month.

In a statement, Roche said it had complied with all legal requirements on publishing data and provided Gotzsche and his colleagues with 3,200 pages of information to answer their questions.

"Roche has made full clinical study data ... available to national health authorities according to their various requirements, so they can conduct their own analyses," the company said.

Roche says it doesn't usually release patient-level data available due to legal or confidentiality constraints. It said it did not provide the requested data to the scientists because they refused to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Roche is also being investigated by the European Medicines Agency for not properly reporting side effects, including possible deaths, for 19 drugs including Tamiflu that were used in about 80,000 patients in the U.S.

____

Online:

www.bmj.com.tamiflu/

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Mother charges 'Modern Family' star had unlawful sex in home

Authorities are investigating an allegation by the mother of "Modern Family" star Ariel Winter that her daughter's 18-year-old boyfriend had unlawful sex with the 14-year-old actress, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

The L.A. County Sheriff''s Department's Special Victims Unit also is separately examining whether Winter's mother, Chrisoula Workman, physically abused the teenage actress.

So far, detectives have not gathered any specific evidence to substantiate the allegations in either investigation involving Ariel, otherwise  known to millions as Alex Dunphy, the brainy member of "Modern Family's"  Dunphy family.

The investigations began last month after a judge awarded temporary guardianship of Ariel, whose real name is Ariel Workman, to her adult sister, Shanelle Gray, also an actress. Ariel, through her sister's attorney, alleged in a court filing that she was subject to ongoing physical and mental abuse by her mother. 

Three days after Ariel took legal action to split from her mother, Chrisoula Workman reported on Oct. 6 to the sheriff's Crescenta Valley station that her daughter's 18-year-old boyfriend had unlawful sex with the underage actress.

Chrisoula Workman contends she discovered her daughter in the guest bedroom of her Montrose home on Sept. 24 in bed with a young man, believed to be 18, according to sources not authorized to discuss the investigation.

The young man was described as the teenage actress' boyfriend of several months, according to the sources. According to sources, both the teenagers have denied doing anything unlawful.

Detectives also have been unable to substantiate Ariel's abuse allegations, but the investigation remains ongoing.

"It's all untrue, it's all untrue," Chrisoula Workman told People magazine. "I have
my doctor's letter that my daughter's never been abused. ... I have
stylists' letters that she's never been abused."

She added in an interview with E!: "I would never abuse her in any way, and I have always tried my best to
always protect her and do what is right for her. My daughter is in a
business that requires you to grow up fast. It's hard enough being a
teenage girl, but it's even harder when you are in the public eye. 
However, because you are in the public eye, it doesn't mean you are no
longer in need of good parenting."

A judge last month ordered the actress' mother to
stay away from Ariel and have no contact with the minor, pending a Nov.
20 hearing on the guardianship and control of at least $500,000 in
assets.

"Minor Ariel Workman has been a victim of on-going physical abuse
(slapping, hitting, pushing) and emotional abuse (vile name-calling,
personal insults about minor and minor's weight, attempts to sexualize
minor, deprivation of food etc.) for an extended period of time by the
minor’s mother, Chrisoula Workman. ...," her attorneys said in a petition for guardianship.

As is standard practice in such cases, an attorney is representing
the interests of the young actress. To protect her earnings and existing
assets, lawyers are seeking to move her money to accounts off-limits
to her mother.

-- Richard Winton and Andrew Blankstein

Photo: Actress Ariel Winter in September. Credit: Richard Shotwell / Invision / Associated Press

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Changing of the Guard: Chinese Communist Party Faces Calls for Democracy

BEIJING — As the Communist Party’s 18th Congress approached, Li Weidong, a scholar of politics, made plans to observe a historic leadership battle in one of the world’s great nations.

Instead of staying in Beijing to monitor China’s once-a-decade transfer of power, Mr. Li boarded a plane.

“I’m going to the United States to study the elections,” Mr. Li said in a telephone interview during a stopover in Paris. After witnessing the American presidential election on Tuesday, Mr. Li went on the radio for another interview. “I still think China’s politics remain prehistoric,” he said. “I often joke that the Chinese civilization is the last prehistoric civilization left in the world.”

With China at a critical juncture, there is a rising chorus within the elite expressing doubt that the 91-year-old Communist Party’s authoritarian system can deal with the stresses bearing down on the nation and its 1.3 billion people. Policies introduced after 1978 by Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and transformed the country into the world’s second-largest economy. But the way party leaders have managed decades of growth has created towering problems that critics say can no longer be avoided.

Many of those critics have benefited from China’s stunning economic gains, and their ranks include billionaires, intellectuals and children of the party’s revolutionary founders. But they say the party’s agenda, as it stands today, is not visionary enough to set China on the path to stability. What is needed, they say, is a comprehensive strategy to gradually extricate the Communist Party, which has more than 80 million members, from its heavy-handed control of the economy, the courts, the news media, the military, educational institutions, civic life and just the plain day-to-day affairs of citizens.

Only then, the critics argue, can the government start to address the array of issues facing China, including rampant corruption, environmental degradation, and an aging population whose demographics have been skewed because of the one-child policy.

“In order to build a real market economy, we have to have real political reform,” said Yang Jisheng, a veteran journalist and a leading historian of the Mao era. “In the next years, we should have a constitutional democracy plus a market economy.”

For now, however, party leaders have given no indication that they intend to curb their role in government in a meaningful way.

“We will never copy a Western political system,” Hu Jintao, the departing party chief, said in a speech on Thursday opening the weeklong congress.

The party’s public agenda, which Mr. Hu described in detail in his 100-minute address, was laid out in a 64-page report that is in part intended to highlight priorities for the new leaders, who will be announced later this month. Much of the document had retrograde language that emphasized ideology stretching back to Mao and had little in the way of bold or creative thinking, said Qian Gang, the director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

Most telling, there was no language signaling that the incoming Politburo Standing Committee, the group that rules China by consensus, would support major changes in the political system, whose perversions many now say are driving the nation toward crisis.

While Chinese who are critical of the current system generally do not expect a wholesale adoption of a Western model, they do favor at least an openness to bolder experimentation.

“To break one-party rule right now is probably not realistic, but we can have factions within the party made public and legalized, so they can campaign against each other,” said Mr. Yang, who added that there was no other way at the moment to ensure political accountability.

Only in the last few years has the idea of liberalizing the political system gained currency, and urgency, among a broad cross-section of elites. Before that, as the West foundered at the onset of the global financial crisis, many here pointed to the triumph of a “China model” or “Beijing consensus” — a mix of authoritarian politics, a command economy and quasi-market policies.

But the way in which China weathered the crisis — with the injection of $588 billion of stimulus money into the economy and an explosion of lending from state banks — led to a spate of large infrastructure projects that may never justify their cost. As a result, many economists now say that China’s investment-driven, export-oriented economic model is unsustainable and needs to shift toward greater reliance on Chinese consumers.

Constant lip-service is paid to that goal, and on Saturday, Zhang Ping, a senior official, reiterated that stance. But it will not be easy for the new leaders to carry it out. At the root of the current economic model is the political system, in which party officials and state-owned enterprises work closely together, reaping enormous profits from the party’s control of the economy. Under Mr. Hu’s decade-long tenure, these relationships and the dominance of state enterprises have only strengthened.

“What happens in this kind of economy is that wealth concentrates where power is,” said Mr. Yang, the journalist.

The 400 or so incoming members of the party’s Central Committee, Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee, as well as their friends and families, have close ties to the most powerful of China’s 145,000 state-owned enterprises. The growing presence of princelings — the children of notable Communist officials — in the party, the government and corporations could mean an even more closely meshed web of nepotism. It is a system that Xi Jinping, anointed to be the next party chief and president and himself a member of the “red nobility,” would find hard to unravel, even if he wanted to.

Mia Li contributed research.

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