In hurricane, Twitter proves a lifeline despite pranksters

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As Hurricane Sandy pounded the U.S. Atlantic coast on Monday night, knocking out electricity and Internet connections, millions of residents turned to Twitter as a part-newswire, part-911 hotline that hummed through the night even as some websites failed and swathes of Manhattan fell dark.


But the social network also became a fertile ground for pranksters who seized the moment to disseminate rumors and Photoshopped images, including a false tweet Monday night that the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange was submerged under several feet of water.


The exchange issued a denial, but not before the tweet was circulated by countless users and reported on-air by CNN, illustrating how Twitter had become the essential - but deeply fallible - spine of information coursing through real-time, major media events.


But a year after Twitter gained attention for its role in the rescue efforts in tsunami-stricken Japan, the network seemed to solidify its mainstream foothold as government agencies, news outlets and residents in need turned to it at the most critical hour.


Beginning late Sunday, government agencies and officials, from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo(@NYGovCuomo) to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (@FEMA) to @NotifyNYC, an account handled by New York City's emergency management officials, issued evacuation orders and updates.


As the storm battered New York Monday night, residents encountering clogged 9-1-1 dispatch lines flooded the Fire Department's @fdny Twitter account with appeals for information and help for trapped relatives and friends.


One elderly resident needed rescue in a building in Manhattan Beach. Another user sent @fdny an Instagram photo of four insulin shots that she needed refrigerated immediately. Yet another sought a portable generator for a friend on a ventilator living downtown.


Emily Rahimi, who manages the @fdny account by herself, according to a department spokesman, coolly fielded dozens of requests, while answering questions about whether to call 311, New York's non-emergency help line, or Consolidated Edison.


At the Red Cross of America's Washington D.C. headquarters, in a small room called the Digital Operations Center, six wall-mounted monitors display a stream of updates from Twitter and Facebook and a visual "heat map" of where posts seeking help are coming from.


The heat map informed how the Red Cross's aid workers deployed their resources, said Wendy Harman, the Red Cross director of social strategy.


The Red Cross was also using Radian6, a social media monitoring tool sold by Salesforce.com, to spot people seeking help and answer their questions.


"We found out we can carry out the mission of the Red Cross from the social Web," said Harman, who hosted a brief visit from President Barack Obama on Tuesday.


SPREADING INFORMATION


Twitter, which in the past year has heavily ramped up its advertising offerings and features to suit large brand marketers like Pepsico Inc and Procter & Gamble, suddenly found itself offering its tools to new kind of client on Monday: public agencies that wanted help spreading information.


For the first time, the company created a "#Sandy" event page - a format once reserved for large ad-friendly media events like the Olympics or Nascar races - that served as a hub where visitors could see aggregated information. The page displayed manually- and algorithmically-selected tweets plucked from official accounts like those of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was particularly active on the network.


Agencies like the Maryland Emergency Management Agency and the New York Mayor's Office also used Twitter's promoted tweets - an ad product used by advertisers to reach a broader consumer base - to get out the word.


The company said offering such services for free to government agencies was one of several initiatives, including a service that broadcasts location-specific alerts and public announcements based on a Twitter user's postal code.


"We learned from the storm and tsunami in Japan that Twitter can often be a lifeline," said Rachael Horwitz, a Twitter spokeswoman.


Jeannette Sutton, a sociologist at the University of Colorado who has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security to study social media uses in disaster management, said government agencies have been skeptical until recently about using social media during natural disasters.


"There's a big problem with whether it's valid, accurate information out there," Sutton said. "But if you're not part of the conversation, you're going to be missing out."


As the hurricane hit one of the most wired regions in the country, news outlets also took advantage of the smartphone users who chronicled rising tides on every flooded block. On Instagram, the photo-sharing website, witnesses shared color-filtered snapshots of floating cars, submerged gas stations and a building shorn of its facade at a rate of more than 10 pictures per second, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told Poynter.org on Tuesday.


Many of the images were republished in the live coverage by news websites and aired on television broadcasts.


LIES SLAPPED DOWN


But by late Monday, fake images began to circulate widely, including a picture of a storm cloud gathering dramatically over the Statue of Liberty and a photoshopped job of a shark lurking in a submerged residential neighborhood. The latter image even surfaced on social networks in China.


Then there was the slew of fabricated message from @comfortablysmug, the Twitter account that claimed the NYSE was underwater. The account is owned by Shashank Tripathi, the hedge fund investor and campaign manager for Christopher Wight, the Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.


Tripathi, who did not return emails by Reuters seeking comment, apologized Tuesday night for making a "series of irresponsible and inaccurate tweets" and resigned from Wight's campaign.


His identity was first reported by Jack Stuef of BuzzFeed.


Around 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Tripathi began deleting many of his Hurricane Sandy tweets. Tripathi's friend, @theAshok, defended Tripathi, telling Reuters on Twitter: "People shouldn't be taking "news" from an anonymous twitter account seriously."


Tripathi's @comfortablysmug's Twitter stream, which is followed by business journalists, bloggers and various New York personalities, had been a well-known voice in digital circles, but mostly for his 140-character-or-less criticisms of the Obama administration, often accompanied by the hashtag, #ObamaIsn'tWorking.


On Tuesday, New York City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. appeared to threaten Tripathi with prosecution when he tweeted that he hoped Tripathi was "less smug and comfortable cuz I'm talking to Cy," presumably referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.


For its part, Twitter said that it would not have considered suspending the account unless it received a request from a law enforcement agency.


"We don't moderate content, and we certainly don't want to be in a position of deciding what speech is OK and what speech is not," said Horwitz, Twitter's spokeswoman.


But Ben Smith, the editor at Buzzfeed, which outed Tripathi, said Twitter's credibility would not be affected by rumormongers because netizens often self-correct and identify falsehoods.


"They used to say a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes on, but in the Twitter world, that's not true anymore," Smith said. "The lies get slapped down really fast."


For Smith, the ability to disseminate information via Twitter and Facebook on Monday night became perhaps even more important than his Web publication, which enjoyed one of its better nights in readership but went dark when the blackout crippled the site's servers in downtown Manhattan.


Buzzfeed's staff quickly began publishing on Tumblr instead, and Smith personally took over Buzzfeed's Twitter account to stay in the thick of the conversation.


"Our view of the world is that social distribution is the key thing," Smith said. "We're in the business of creating content that people want to share, more than the business of maintaining a website."


(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco and Jennifer Ablan and Felix Salmon in New York; Editing by Robert Birsel)


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Hosts Underwood, Paisley ready for 5th CMA Awards

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Spend a lot of time with a guy over five years and you get to know him pretty well. In the time Carrie Underwood has spent co-hosting the Country Music Association Awards with Brad Paisley, she's learned there's nothing fake about the man with the white hat.

Paisley's not projecting the family first, fun-loving, good-guy persona that's made him one of country music's most popular stars. That's who he is, and he's found an uncommon balance Underwood really didn't believe existed in show business.

"He's not a different person in front of the camera and a whole different person away from the cameras," Underwood said in a recent interview. "He is the way you think he is. It's really great to see how somebody has balanced family life and doing this, you know, being in our crazy world. Because a few years ago I was wondering how on Earth anybody could make that work. And seeing him and (wife) Kimberly (Williams-Paisley) — she's superbusy, too — being able to juggle that is very encouraging."

That doesn't mean Underwood's ready to start a family just yet.

She and husband Mike Fisher, a star player for the NHL's Nashville Predators, are at the peak of their respective careers. The former "American Idol" winner's latest album, "Blown Away," was a multiweek No. 1 on the country albums chart. She's in the midst of an arena tour and also is up for female vocalist of the year at Thursday night's awards, airing live on ABC at 8 p.m. EDT from Nashville's Bridgestone Arena.

Children are in the plan "eventually," though.

"It's so funny, I still think of myself I guess being much younger than I actually am," Underwood said. "I'm like, I'm too young to have kids when I'm 29 years old, so I'm really not. My mom had a couple in her early 20s and a lot of people do. I don't know, I guess it's a sign of my immaturity in that area. I've only been married two years. I really want to enjoy that and really figure that out a little better before we start throwing so much responsibility into that."

___

ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co.

___

For the latest country music news from the Associated Press: http://twitter.com/AP_Country. Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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Man with bionic leg to climb Chicago skyscraper

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CHICAGO (AP) — Zac Vawter considers himself a test pilot. After losing his right leg in a motorcycle accident, the 31-year-old software engineer signed up to become a research subject, helping to test a trailblazing prosthetic leg that's controlled by his thoughts.

He will put this groundbreaking bionic leg to the ultimate test Sunday when he attempts to climb 103 flights of stairs to the top of Chicago's Willis Tower, one of the world's tallest skyscrapers.

If all goes well, he'll make history with the bionic leg's public debut. His whirring, robotic leg will respond to electrical impulses from muscles in his hamstring. Vawter will think, "Climb stairs," and the motors, belts and chains in his leg will synchronize the movements of its ankle and knee. Vawter hopes to make it to the top in an hour, longer than it would've taken before his amputation, less time than it would take with his normal prosthetic leg — or, as he calls it, his "dumb" leg.

A team of researchers will be cheering him on and noting the smart leg's performance. When Vawter goes home to Yelm, Wash., where he lives with his wife and two children, the experimental leg will stay behind in Chicago. Researchers will continue to refine its steering. Taking it to the market is still years away.

"Somewhere down the road, it will benefit me and I hope it will benefit a lot of other people as well," Vawter said about the research at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Bionic — or thought-controlled — prosthetic arms have been available for a few years, thanks to pioneering work done at the Rehabilitation Institute. With leg amputees outnumbering people who've lost arms and hands, the Chicago researchers are focusing more on lower limbs. Safety is important. If a bionic hand fails, a person drops a glass of water. If a bionic leg fails, a person falls down stairs.

The Willis Tower climb will be the bionic leg's first test in the public eye, said lead researcher Levi Hargrove of the institute's Center for Bionic Medicine. The climb, called "SkyRise Chicago," is a fundraiser for the institute with about 2,700 people climbing. This is the first time the climb has played a role in the facility's research.

To prepare, Vawter and the scientists have spent hours adjusting the leg's movements. On one recent day, 11 electrodes placed on the skin of Vawter's thigh fed data to the bionic leg's microcomputer. The researchers turned over the "steering" to Vawter.

He kicked a soccer ball, walked around the room and climbed stairs. The researchers beamed.

Vawter likes the bionic leg. Compared to his regular prosthetic, it's more responsive and more fluid. As an engineer, he enjoys learning how the leg works.

It started with surgery in 2009. When Vawter's leg was amputated, a surgeon repositioned the residual spaghetti-like nerves that normally would carry signals to the lower leg and sewed them to new spots on his hamstring. That would allow Vawter one day to be able to use a bionic leg, even though the technology was years away.

The surgery is called "targeted muscle reinnervation" and it's like "rewiring the patient," Hargrove said. "And now when he just thinks about moving his ankle, his hamstring moves and we're able to tell the prosthesis how to move appropriately."

To one generation it sounds like "The Six Million Dollar Man," a 1970s TV show featuring a rebuilt hero. A younger generation may think of Luke Skywalker's bionic hand.

But Hargrove's inspiration came not from fiction, but from his fellow Canadian Terry Fox, who attempted a cross-country run on a regular artificial leg to raise money for cancer research in 1980.

"I've run marathons, and when you're in pain, you just think about Terry Fox who did it with a wooden leg and made it halfway across Canada before cancer returned," Hargrove said.

Experts not involved in the project say the Chicago research is on the leading edge. Most artificial legs are passive. "They're basically fancy wooden legs," said Daniel Ferris of the University of Michigan. Others have motorized or mechanical components but don't respond to the electrical impulses caused by thought.

"This is a step beyond the state of the art," Ferris said. "If they can achieve it, it's very noteworthy and suggests in the next 10 years or so there will be good commercial devices out there."

The $8 million project is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and involves Vanderbilt University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Rhode Island and the University of New Brunswick.

Vawter and the Chicago researchers recently took the elevator to the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower to see the view after an afternoon of work in the lab. Hargrove and Vawter bantered in the elevator in anticipation of Sunday's event.

Hargrove: "Am I allowed to trash talk you?"

"It's fine," Vawter shot back. "I'll just defer it all to the leg that you built."

At the top, Vawter stood on a glass balcony overlooking the city. The next time he heads to the top, he and the bionic leg will take the stairs.

___

AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/CarlaKJohnson.

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Northeast struggling to get back to normal

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NEW YORK (AP) — Two major airports reopened and the floor of the New York Stock Exchange came back to life Wednesday, while across the river in New Jersey, National Guardsmen rushed to rescue flood victims and fires still raged two days after Superstorm Sandy.


For the first time since the storm battered the Northeast, killing at least 59 people and doing billions of dollars in damage, brilliant sunshine washed over the nation's largest city — a striking sight after days of gray skies, rain and wind.


At the stock exchange, running on generator power, Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave a thumbs-up and rang the opening bell to whoops from traders on the floor. Trading resumed after the first two-day weather shutdown since the Blizzard of 1888.


Kennedy and Newark Liberty airports reopened with limited service just after 7 a.m. New York's LaGuardia Airport, which suffered far worse damage and where water covered parts of runways, remained closed.


It was clear that restoring the region to its ordinarily frenetic pace could take days — and that rebuilding the hardest-hit communities and the transportation networks that link them together could take considerably longer.


About 6.5 million homes and businesses were still without power, including 4 million in New York and New Jersey. Electricity was out as far west as Wisconsin and as far south as the Carolinas.


The scale of the challenge could be seen across the Hudson River in New Jersey, where National Guard troops arrived in the heavily flooded city of Hoboken to help evacuate thousands still stuck in their homes and deliver ready-to-eat meals. Live wires dangled in floodwaters that Mayor Dawn Zimmer said were rapidly mixing with sewage.


Thousands of people were still holed up in their brownstones, condos, and other homes in the mile-square city is across the Hudson River from New York.


And new problems arose when firefighters were unable to reach blazes rekindled by natural gas leaks in the heavily hit shore town of Mantoloking. More than a dozen homes were destroyed.


President Barack Obama planned to visit Atlantic City, N.J., which was directly in the storm's path Monday night and where part of the historic boardwalk washed away.


Gov. Chris Christie said he plans to ask the president to assign the Army Corps of Engineers to work on how to rebuild beaches and find "the best way to rebuild the beach to protect these towns."


Outages in the state's two largest cities, Newark and Jersey City, left traffic signals dark, resulting in fender-benders at intersections where police were not directing traffic. At one Jersey City supermarket, there were long lines to get bread and use an electrical outlet to charge cellphones.


Amid the despair, talk of recovery was already beginning.


"It's heartbreaking after being here 37 years," Barry Prezioso of Point Pleasant, N.J., said as he returned to his house in the beachfront community to survey the damage. "You see your home demolished like this, it's tough. But nobody got hurt and the upstairs is still livable, so we can still live upstairs and clean this out. I'm sure there's people that had worse. I feel kind of lucky."

 

As New York began its second day after the megastorm, morning rush-hour traffic was heavy as people started returning to work. There was even a sign of normalcy: commuters waiting at bus stops. School was out for a third day.


The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan, and the Holland Tunnel, between New York and New Jersey, remained closed. But bridges into the city were open, and city buses were running, free of charge.


On the Brooklyn Bridge, closed earlier because of high winds, joggers and bikers made their way across before sunrise. One cyclist carried a flashlight. Car traffic on the bridge was busy.


Bloomberg said it could be the weekend before the subway, which suffered the worst damage in its 108-year history, is running again. High water prevented inspectors from immediately assessing damage to key equipment.


The chairman of the state agency that runs the subway, Joseph Lhota, said service might have to resume piecemeal, and experts said the cost of the repairs could be staggering.


Power company Consolidated Edison said it could also be the weekend before power is restored to Manhattan and Brooklyn, perhaps longer for other New York boroughs and the New York suburbs.


The recovery and rebuilding will take far longer.


When Christie stopped in Belmar, N.J., during a tour of the devastation, one woman wept, and 42-year-old Walter Patrickis told him, "Governor, I lost everything."


Christie, who called the shore damage "unthinkable," said a full recovery would take months, at least, and it would probably be a week or more before power is restored to everyone who lost it.


"Now we've got a big task ahead of us that we have to do together. This is the kind of thing New Jerseyans are built for," he said.


Amtrak laid out plans to resume runs in the Northeast on Wednesday, with modified service between Newark, N.J., and points south. But flooding continued to prevent service to and from New York's Penn Station. Amtrak said the water in train tunnels under the Hudson and East rivers was unprecedented.


There was no Northeast Regional service between New York and Boston and no Acela Express service for the entire length of the Northeast Corridor. No date was set for when it might resume.


In Connecticut, some residents of Fairfield returned home in kayaks and canoes to inspect widespread damage left by retreating floodwaters that kept other homeowners at bay.


"The uncertainty is the worst," said Jessica Levitt, who was told it could be a week before she can enter her house. "Even if we had damage, you just want to be able to do something. We can't even get started."


The storm caused irreparable damage to homes in East Haven, Milford and other shore towns. Still, many were grateful the storm did not deliver a bigger blow, considering the havoc wrought in New York City and New Jersey.


"I feel like we are blessed," said Bertha Weismann, whose garage was flooded in Bridgeport. "It could have been worse."


And in New York, residents of the flooded beachfront neighborhood of Breezy Point in returned home to find fire had taken everything the water had not. A huge blaze destroyed perhaps 100 homes in the close-knit community where many had stayed behind despite being told to evacuate.


John Frawley acknowledged the mistake. Frawley, who lived about five houses from the fire's edge, said he spent the night terrified "not knowing if the fire was going to jump the boulevard and come up to my house."


"I stayed up all night," he said. "The screams. The fire. It was horrifying."


There were still only hints of the economic impact of the storm.


Forecasting firm IHS Global Insight predicted it would cause $20 billion in damage and $10 billion to $30 billion in lost business. Another firm, AIR Worldwide, estimated losses up to $15 billion.


"The biggest problem is not the first few days but the coming months," said Alan Rubin, an expert in natural disaster recovery.


Some of those who lost homes and businesses to Sandy were promising to return and rebuild, but many sounded chastened by their encounter with nature's fury. They included Tom Shalvey of Warwick, R.I., whose cottage on the beach in South Kingstown was washed away by raging surf, leaving a utility pipe as the only marker of where it once sat.


"We love the beach. We had many great times here," Shalvey said. "We will be back. But it will not be on the front row."


___


Contributors to this report included Associated Press writers Angela Delli Santi in Belmar, N.J.; Geoff Mulvihill and Larry Rosenthal in Trenton, N.J.; Katie Zezima in Atlantic City, N.J.; Samantha Henry in Jersey City, N.J.; Pat Eaton-Robb and Michael Melia in Hartford, Conn.; Susan Haigh in New London, Conn.; John Christoffersen in Bridgeport, Conn.; Alicia Caldwell and Martin Crutsinger in Washington; David Klepper in South Kingstown, R.I.; David B. Caruso, Colleen Long, Jennifer Peltz, Tom Hays, Larry Neumeister, Ralph Russo and Scott Mayerowitz in New York.

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Poll: Australians split over PM's sexism judgment

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CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australians appear to be split over Prime Minister Julia Gillard's judgment that her main political rival is sexist.

In a fiery speech to Parliament on Oct. 9, Gillard branded opposition leader Tony Abbott a misogynist for a string of allegedly sexist comments. Her commentary has been lauded by feminists around the world, but a poll published Tuesday showed Australians are divided.

Abbott apologized last week for suggesting that Gillard's government was inexperienced in family policy — a criticism some saw as a cheap shot at Gillard, who has no children.

The poll by Sydney market researcher Newspoll published in The Australian newspaper found that 45 percent of respondents said Abbott had behaved in a sexist way toward Gillard recently and 39 percent said he had not. There was no clear majority view, with 16 percent of respondents undecided.

How Abbott was judged on the sexism charge closely correlated with how respondents intend to vote at general elections next year.

Of those who said Abbott is sexist, 66 percent support Gillard's center-left Labor Party. Of those who said he is not, 76 percent back his conservative coalition.

Women were more likely than men to condemn Abbott for sexism.

Of those who said he was sexist, 43 percent were women and 35 percent were men. Of those who responded that he was not sexist, 48 percent were men and 41 percent were women.

Despite the divide, Gillard's public stance against sexism has gained solid support.

Gillard has said she stands by every word of her blistering attack on Abbott and has vowed to speak out against sexism in the future whenever she sees it.

More than three in four respondents (78 percent) said Gillard's response to the sexism issue had been "about right," including 83 percent of women and 72 percent of men.

Another 16 percent accused her of overreacting (22 percent of men and 12 percent of women), while 5 percent said she had underreacted (5 percent of men and 4 percent of women).

The poll was based on a random telephone survey of 1,218 voters nationwide at the weekend. It had a 3 percentage point margin of error.

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Nokia says shipping new Lumia smartphones this week

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Daniel Day-Lewis gives poet dad's work to Oxford

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LONDON (AP) — Actor Daniel Day-Lewis is donating papers belonging to his father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, to Oxford University.

The archive, which fills 54 boxes, includes early drafts of the poet's work, as well as letters from actor John Gielgud and famous literary figures such as W.H. Auden, Robert Graves and Philip Larkin.

Daniel Day-Lewis stars this year in the much-anticipated film "Lincoln," about the assassinated U.S. president. He and his sister, Tamasin, said Tuesday they are thrilled that their father's papers will be housed at Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and become accessible to students and researchers.

Cecil Day-Lewis, who studied classics and became poetry professor at Oxford, was appointed the U.K. poet laureate in 1968. He also wrote mystery novels and stories under the name of Nicholas Blake. He died in 1972.

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China passes law to curb abuse of mental hospitals

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BEIJING (AP) — China's legislature on Friday passed a long-awaited mental health law that aims to prevent people from being involuntarily held and unnecessarily treated in psychiatric facilities — abuses that have been used against government critics and triggered public outrage.

The law standardizes mental health care services, requiring general hospitals to set up special outpatient clinics or provide counseling, and calls for the training of more doctors.

Debated for years, the law attempts to address an imbalance in Chinese society — a lack of mental health care services for a population that has grown more prosperous but also more aware of modern-day stresses and the need for treatment. Psychiatrists who helped draft and improve the legislation welcomed its passage.

"The law will protect the rights of mental patients and prevent those who don't need treatment from being forced to receive it," said Dr. Liu Xiehe, an 85-year-old psychiatrist based in the southwestern city of Chengdu, who drafted the first version of the law in 1985.

"Our mental health law is in line with international standards. This shows the government pays attention to the development of mental health and the protection of people's rights in this area," Liu told The Associated Press by phone.

Pressure has grown on the government in recent years after state media and rights activists reported cases of people forced into mental hospitals when they did not require treatment. Some were placed there by employers with whom they had wage disputes, some by their family members in fights over money, and others — usually people with grievances against officials — by police who wanted to silence them.

Yang Yamei, of the Inner Mongolian city of Hulunbuir, has been locked up at a local mental hospital for the last eight months in what her daughter says is retaliation for her attempts to seek compensation from the government for a court ruling that unfairly sentenced her to three years in a labor camp.

This is the third time in four years that she has been forcibly committed, her daughter Guo Dandan said by phone.

"It's because my mother has been petitioning for help, but the authorities don't want to solve her problems, so they put her in there," Guo said. "I have tried many times to persuade her doctors to release her, but they refuse."

Guo's claim could not be independently verified. Local government offices and the mental hospital could not immediately be reached for comment.

"I only hope that the law will be stricter," Guo said. "In the cases of petitioners, when the authorities can use their personal relationships with doctors to fake medical records, hospitals should not be allowed to accept such cases."

The law states for the first time that mental health examinations and treatment must be conducted on a voluntary basis, unless a person is considered a danger to himself or others. Only psychiatrists have the authority to commit people to hospitals for treatment, and treatment may be compulsory for patients diagnosed with a severe mental illness, according to the law.

Significantly, the law gives people who feel they have been unnecessarily admitted into mental health facilities the right to appeal.

But it will likely be a challenge for people to exercise that right once they are in the system, said Huang Xuetao, a lawyer who runs an organization in the southern city of Shenzhen that assists people who have been committed against their will.

Though questions remain over how the law will be enforced and whether sufficient government funding will be provided to enable the expansion of services, psychiatrists said the passage of the legislation marked a milestone.

"It's very exciting. I honestly believe this will start a new trajectory," said Dr. Michael Phillips, a Canadian psychiatrist who has worked in China for nearly three decades and now heads a suicide research center in Shanghai.

Phillips said the biggest change for the psychiatric system is the curb on involuntary admissions. At least 80 percent of hospital admissions are compulsory, he said.

___

Associated Press researcher Flora Ji contributed to this report.

Follow Gillian Wong on Twitter: http://twitter.com/gillianwong

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'One for the record books': Sandy leaves death and destruction in wake

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NEW YORK (AP) — Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas awoke Tuesday without power, and an eerily quiet New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air as superstorm Sandy steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain.

The full extent of the damage in New Jersey, where the storm roared ashore Monday night with hurricane force, was unclear. Police and fire officials, some with their own departments flooded, fanned out to rescue hundreds.

"We are in the midst of urban search and rescue. Our teams are moving as fast as they can," Gov. Chris Christie said. "The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of the worst we've ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this point."

The death toll from Sandy in the U.S. climbed to 20, including seven in New York, four in Pennsylvania and three in New Jersey, with many of the victims killed by falling trees. Sandy also killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up the Eastern Seaboard.

At least 7.4 million people across the East were without electricity. Airlines canceled more than 12,000 flights.

Lower Manhattan, which includes Wall Street, was among the hardest-hit areas after the storm sent a nearly 14-foot surge of seawater, a record, coursing over its seawalls and highways and into low-lying streets.

Water cascaded into the gaping, unfinished construction pit at the World Trade Center, and the New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day, the first time that has happened because of weather in more than a century.

A huge fire destroyed as many as 100 houses in a flooded beachfront neighborhood in Queens on Tuesday, forcing firefighters to undertake daring rescues. Three people were injured.

A downtown hospital, New York University's Tisch, evacuated 200 patients after its backup generator failed. About 20 babies from the neonatal intensive care unit were carried down staircases and on battery-powered respirators.

And a construction crane that collapsed in the high winds on Monday still dangled precariously 74 floors above the streets of midtown Manhattan. And on Staten Island, a tanker ship wound up beached on the shore.

With water standing in two major commuter tunnels and seven subway tunnels under the East River, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it was unclear when the nation's largest transit system would be rolling again. It shut down Sunday night ahead of the storm.

Joseph Lhota, chairman of the regional Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the damage was the worst in the 108-year history of the New York subway.

The saltwater surge inundated subway signals, switches and electrified third rails and covered tracks with sludge. Workers began pumping the water out and will ultimately have to walk all of the hundreds of miles of track to inspect it.

Millions of more fortunate New Yorkers surveyed damage as dawn broke, their city brought to an extraordinary standstill.

"Oh, Jesus. Oh, no," Faye Schwartz said she looked over damage in neighborhood in Brooklyn, where cars were scattered like leaves.

Reggie Thomas, a maintenance supervisor at a prison near the overflowing Hudson River, emerged from an overnight shift there, a toothbrush in his front pocket, to find his Honda with its windows down and a foot of water inside. The windows automatically go down when the car is submerged to free drivers.

"It's totaled," Thomas said with a shrug. "You would have needed a boat last night."

Besides the subway and the stock exchange, most major tunnels and bridges in New York were closed, as were schools, Broadway theaters and the metropolitan area's three main airports, LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark.

"This will be one for the record books," said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Consolidated Edison, which had more than 670,000 customers without power in and around New York City.

In New Jersey, a huge swell of water swept over the small town of Moonachie, near the Hackensack River, and authorities struggled to rescue about 800 people, some of them living in a trailer park.

And in neighboring Little Ferry, water suddenly started gushing out of storm drains overnight, submerging a road under 4 feet of water and swamping houses.

Police and fire officials used boats and trucks to reach the stranded.

"I looked out and the next thing you know, the water just came up through the grates. It came up so quickly you couldn't do anything about it. If you wanted to move your car to higher ground you didn't have enough time," said Little Ferry resident Leo Quigley, who with his wife was taken to higher ground by boat.

Jersey City was closed to cars because traffic lights were out, and Hoboken, just over the Hudson River from Manhattan, dealt with major flooding. In Atlantic City, most of the world-famous boardwalk was intact, but pieces washed away Monday night.

Remnants of the hurricane were forecast to head across Pennsylvania before taking another sharp turn into western New York by Wednesday morning. Although weakening as it goes, the storm will continue to bring heavy rain and flooding, said Daniel Brown of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

As Hurricane Sandy closed in on the Northeast, it converged with a cold-weather system that turned it into a monstrous hybrid of rain, high wind — and even snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas inland.

In a measure of how big the storm was, high winds spinning off the edge of Sandy clobbered the Cleveland area early Tuesday, uprooting trees, cutting power to hundreds of thousands, closing schools and flooding major roads along Lake Erie.

Hundreds of miles from the storm's center, gusts topping 60 mph prompted officials to close the port of Portland, Maine, and scared away several cruise ships.

Just before it made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, N.J., forecasters stripped Sandy of hurricane status, but the distinction was purely technical, based on its shape and internal temperature.

While the hurricane's 80 mph winds registered as only a Category 1 on a scale of five, it packed the lowest barometric pressure on record in the Northeast, giving it terrific energy to push water inland.

President Barack Obama declared a major disaster in the city and Long Island. The storm brought the presidential campaign to a halt with a week to go before Election Day.

In New York, the construction crane atop a 1,000-foot, $1.5 billion luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan dangled for a second day while authorities tried to figure out how to secure it. Thousands were ordered to leave nearby buildings as a precaution, including 900 guests at the ultramodern Le Parker Meridien hotel.

Alice Goldberg, 15, a tourist from Paris, was watching television in the hotel — whose slogan is "Uptown, Not Uptight" — when a voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone to leave.

"They said to take only what we needed, and leave the rest, because we'll come back in two or three days," she said as she and hundreds of others gathered in the luggage-strewn marble lobby. "I hope so."

An explosion Monday night at a substation for Consolidated Edison, the main utility service New York City, knocked out power to about 310,000 customers in Manhattan.

"It sounded like the Fourth of July," Stephen Weisbrot said from his 10th-floor apartment.

In Baltimore, fire officials said four unoccupied rowhouses collapsed in the storm, sending debris into the street but causing no injuries. A blizzard in western Maryland caused a pileup of tractor-trailers that blocked part of Interstate 68 on slippery Big Savage Mountain.

"It's like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs up here," said Bill Wiltson, a Maryland State Police dispatcher.

___

Hays reported from New York and Breed reported from Raleigh, N.C.; AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington. Associated Press writers David Dishneau in Delaware City, Del., Katie Zezima in Atlantic City, Emery P. Dalesio in Elizabeth City, N.C., and Erika Niedowski in Cranston, R.I., also contributed.

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China wants to stop profiteering at temple sites

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BEIJING (AP) — China is telling tourist-favored Buddhist temples: Don't let money be your mantra.

Authorities announced a ban this week on temples selling shares to investors after leaders of several popular temples planned to pursue stock market listings for them as commercial entities. Even the Shaolin Temple of kung fu movie fame was once rumored to be planning a stock market debut — and critics have slammed such plans as a step too far in China's already unrestrained commercial culture.

"Everywhere in China now is about developing the economy," complained Beijing resident Fu Runxing, a 40-year-old accountant who said he recently went to a temple where incense was priced at 300 yuan ($50) a stick.

"It's too excessive. It's looting," she said.

Centuries-old Buddhist pilgrimage sites Mount Wutai in Shanxi province, Mount Putuo in Zhejiang and Mount Jiuhua in Anhui all were moving toward listing on stock markets in recent months to finance expansions, according to state media.

The government's religious affairs office called on local authorities to ban profiteering related to religious activity and told them not to allow religious venues to be run as business ventures or listed as corporate assets.

Companies that manage temple sites may be able to bypass the prohibition on listing shares simply by excluding the temples themselves from their lists of assets. A Buddhist site at Mount Emei in Sichuan already has been on the Shenzhen stock exchange since 1997 but its listed assets include a hotel, cable car company and ticket booths — not the temples, which date back several hundred years. Shanghai lawyer Wang Yun said the new prohibition wouldn't likely affect Emei, but might make additional companies think twice before listing.

Turning religious sites into profit-making enterprises is certainly not limited to China, but it illustrates just how commercialized this communist country has become in the past couple of decades, with entrepreneurs seizing on every opportunity to make money. One businessman has started selling canned "fresh air" in polluted Beijing.

No one could have anticipated that the poor and egalitarian China of Mao Zedong's time would become a "Wild West" of commercialism, said Mary Bergstrom, founder of The Bergstrom Group, a marketing consultancy in Shanghai.

"There aren't the established checks and balances in China that exist in other countries ,so people are more willing and able to test the boundaries of what is acceptable, especially if the end result of these tests is potential profit," she said.

The Chinese government has strict controls on religion, with temples, churches and mosques run by state-controlled groups. Even so, religion is booming, along with tourism, giving some places a chance to cash in.

The ban on profiteering from religious activity is "just a reflection of the terrible reality of the over-commercialization in recent years of temples and other places," the Southern Metropolis Daily said in an editorial Wednesday. "People who have been to famous religious places should be familiar with expensive ticket prices and donations for all kinds of things."

Chinese entities from nature parks to religious sites are increasingly turning to commercial activities to pay expenses as government support dwindles in a society with little charitable giving. Temples face heavy costs to maintain centuries-old buildings and gardens.

But the State Administration for Religious Affairs says some local governments, businesses and individuals have built religious sites for profit, hired fake monks and tricked visitors into handing over money.

A notice on its website Monday, issued jointly with the police ministry and other authorities, warned of serious punishment for officials found to be involved in religious profiteering.

The new rules leave open when commercialism crosses the line to profiteering. No matter where the line might be, entrepreneurial officials and religious groups may not heed it.

An employee of the Wutai Scenic District Administration's propaganda office confirmed Wednesday that the local government was planning to pursue a stock market listing but said he couldn't give details. The man, who would give only his surname, Bai, said he didn't know whether the latest notice would affect that plan.

The notion that some temples were becoming more about dollars than dharma first came to the fore in 2009 with reports that the legendary Shaolin monastery and martial arts center might sell shares to investors on a mainland or Hong Kong stock market.

The 1,500-year-old temple has become a lucrative business enterprise and holds registered trademarks, but its managers have denied rumors of floating shares and reiterated that denial Wednesday.

___

Associated Press researcher Flora Ji contributed to this report.

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